Pierre Bourdieu: structure and agency

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Pierre Bourdieu structure and agency

• Genetic structuralism
• Reflexive Sociology (method)
• Cultural Capital

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Linguistic Structuralism (revisiting lecture 1)

• Concerned with the underlying structure of
  meaning in language (and human thought)
• Ferdinand de Saussure (1924) 'Course in General
  Linguistics'
• "language is above all a system of signs and
  therefore we must have recourse to the science of
  signs if we are to define it properly'?
• Semiology (Gr. Semeion - signs) - the science of
  systems of signs
•  Signs includes noises, gestures, conventions,
  practices, belief systems, images, 'symbolic
  rituals, etiquette, military signals' etc.

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Structuralism (2)

• the meanings of 'signs' is not natural nor do
  they have an intrinsic meaning. Rather they are
  'arbitrary', and signs are assigned meaning
• This leads one to think about the functional
  rules and conventions which govern the assignment
  of meaning to signs e.g. why gestures are given
  their meaning.
• The 'arbitrariness' of signs differs according to
  their role/status as sytems of communication -
  i.e. traffic lights vs literary texts and
  advertisements.
• Each sign constitutes a 'signifier' and
  signified'. Semiology concerned with the causal
  link between them (what causes them to be linked,
  seeing as meaning is arbitrary).

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Structuralism (3) Application to social sciences

• Claude Levi-Strauss (anthropologist)
  1961. Trying to make explicit the implicit
  knowledge that enables people to communicate,
  interpret and understand one another's behaviour.
• Application of the construction of meaning in
  relation to power and ideology (Roland Barthes -
  Myth Today).
• Application of the construction of meaning in
  relation to social practice, cultural
  signification, class status (Bourdieu).
• How do signs become status symbols? What do
  these meanings and processes say about the
  organisation of class, status and hierarchy in
  capitalist society?  

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Three aspects of Bourdieus work

• Influence of Structuralism on Bourdieus idea of
  genetic structuralism. Power relations are
  embedded in the tissue of everyday life. See
  Bourdieu, P. (1993) Language and Symbolic Power.
  Harvard University Press. Mass
• Reflexive Sociology (method)
• - theory must grow out of empirical research
• - participant observation
• - reflexive sociology
• See Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice
  and Bourdieu, P. (1977/1972) Outline of a Theory
  of Practice.
• 3. The symbolic capital of lifestyles in the
  field of cultural production
• - class, commodities, power and culture
• - habitus, field and capital (economic, social
  and cultural capital)
• See Bourdieu, P (19741979) Distinction A
  Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,
  Routledge, London

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Key concepts

• Field
• Habitus
• Cultural capital
• Practice
• Distinctions and class

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Reflexive Sociology (method)

• 'Outline of a Theory of Practice' (19771972)
•  Bourdieus hermeneutic (relating to the whole)
  understanding of the way people read, understand,
  interpret and live their everyday lives
• an objective analysis of the structures which
  frame, limit, control and influence social life.
• links the objective with the subjective social
  spheres.  
• Breaking down the traditional sociological
  dualisms
• Argued for complexity of people's activities as
  simultaneously shaping and being shaped by the
  social world.

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Objectivism and subjectivism the problems

• Objectivism(reproduction of the world via
  structures) erroneously searched for grand
  explanations
• Critical of structural theories of the left
  (Althusserian Marxism) and right (Parsons)
• Objectivism erroneously adopts a mechanistic
  view of human conduct, ignoring the extent to
  which social life is a practical achievement by
  skilful actors (Bourdieu, 1977 22-23)
• Subjectivism (reproduction of the world by
  individuals)
• Critical of phenomenology and SI For assuming
  that social relations and values emerged
  automatically from social situations but were
  untouched by social structures, influences or
  forces.

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Agency

• individuals exercised agency but within existing
  social conventions, values and sanctions
• Individuals do not create the world anew
• Behaviour is socially constrained
• our social interactions are already influenced by
  social predispositions, conventions, rules etc.

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and Structure

• Structure (the field) social relations were not
  reproduced in a vacuum, but as an outcome of
  power relations.
• The 'field' of social relations refers to the
  areas of social life where strategies are used in
  the struggle for resources.
• Therefore, he viewed the relations between
  practice (what we do in our immediate
  environment) and the field (the larger parameters
  of power relations) as being intrinsically linked
• that sociological methods had to observe both of
  these dynamics together.

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Sociological method

• B adopted two sociological methods and rules
  which would be attentive to the complex
  interactions between social groups and social
  structures.
• Participant observation in which the researcher
• should be concerned with the different power
  relations shaping social life, and the most
  receptive way to observe these was by closely
  observing social practices
• Takes account of the way people skilfully
  improvise their social roles or practices

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Practice continued reflexive sociology

• Reflexive sociology
• B concerned with the different power relations
  between researcher and the researched
• Rejected researcher/researched divide
• Researcher is part of the social world and must
  adopt a critical attitude to own practice

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Practice

• Is neither unconscious or conscious - people know
  how to act in daily activities
• People draw from doxa (doxic experience) - i.e.
  their 'taken for granted world beyond reflection'
  (1977).
• The social world into which we are born and in
  which we operate in everyday life is already
  structured
• Each area of social life has its own social order
  
• We need unpack the nature of social rules,
  practices and strategies and the intuitive,
  automatic way people read and understand the
  social world in which they operate.

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Practice (2)

• we engage in the social world using a combination
  of our 'practical sense' and 'doxa'
• agency involves individuals strategically
  engaging in and manipulating the rules of the
  social situations - playing a game
• going to university and studying for a degree can
  be seen as a game with very definite rules
• Students students develop a 'feel for the game',
  I.e what are inappropriate, good and bad moves.
  They develop skills to play the game intuitively

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This is an example of habitus at work

• the second-nature, understanding of what is
  happening, is crucial to understanding social
  life.
• B refers to it as habitus.
• Habitus a set of dispositions resulting in
  particular practices, improvisations, bodily
  attitude, gestures, etc. which provide the
  'feeling for the game'.
• Like Blumer and Giddens, but Bourdieu has a
  deeper analysis of the meaning of cultural sings
  and meaning, strategic action and class power.

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Cultural capital

• Classical Marxism - the accumulation of profit
  widens the division between those who own and
  control the means of production, and those who
  rely on waged labour.
• B extends the analysis to everyday cultural
  reproduction and to a notion of cultural power as
  a key sphere for reproducing class domination.
• Access to higher education is a good example
• The cultural goods with which students play the
  game of University life
• University life overlaps with other social fields
  and other areas of social privilege (private
  education or a good state school family
  situation social aspirations access to funding
  'ability' and government policy).

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Cultural capital (2)

• Getting a place at your chosen University is
  based on strategic struggle to attain different
  forms of capital (the struggle to get to
  University starts years before you sit your
  matriculations).
• Educational awards (degrees) are a form of
  cultural capital which are traded for
  money,good jobs, social prestige.
• Symbolic capital is one of the most significant
  forms of capital.
• Possessors of symbolic capital are not only able
  to justify their possession of other forms of
  capital but are able to change the structure and
  rules by which the field operates.
• Thus higher education can be seen as a valued
  commodity which reproduces the three different
  elements of capital (economic, cultural and
  social)

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Class and the social sieve - Distinction

• Pierre Bourdieu's attempts to understand social
  inequality and why it is that people acquiesce to
  power and being dominated without resisting.
• He did not find the answer primarily in economic
  classes or the state, but in culture and
  ideology.
• And how social classes are reproduced through
  symbolic domination and the education system
• Bourdieu, P (19741979)) Distinction A Social
  Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Routledge,
  London
•  The relations between taste and class in
  French society. Survey between 1963-8, 1217
  subjects.
• People asked to specify their personal tastes in
  music, art, theatre, home decor, social pastimes,
  literature etc.

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Distinctions (2)

• B held that there still was a dominant valuation
  in favour of 'high-culture' which is still used
  to express social distinction.
• Good taste is dependent on a separation from
  the necessities of daily labour.
• This distance is produced by the status of the
  bourgeois classes as being separate from manual
  productive labour.
• class power and social inequality are reproduced
  at athe cultural and social level.
• This occurred apparently without resistance or
  social conflict,
• Is class elitism evident in recent controversies
  about the BBC dumbing down, complaints about
  the 'illiteracy' of younger generations and the
  establishment of 'Mickey-Mouse degrees?

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Bourdieus contribution

• Linked the construction of taste and cultural
  practice to class distinctions
• It advances Marxist sociology. 
• Develops the concept of economic, cultural,
  educational and social capital within a unified
  framework.  Through this, a better understanding
  of the reproduction of class and status
• Furthermore, it also advances Bourdieu's general
  theory of society and social agency