Bourdieusian Concepts Research Articles

How practical is tactical? Political sociology, militarization, and police tactical teams in Canada

Emergency Response Teams (ERT), commonly referred to as Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) teams, are the specialized police unit responsible for mitigating violent and dangerous conflict beyond the capacity of general duty to handle effectively. Debates surrounding the application and effectiveness of ERTs in policing highlight a need to keep ERT members safe due to adequacy and occupational health and safety standards while concurrently managing the expectations of community groups. These groups include those calling for defunding or de-militarization. Explored in the current article, is a thematic analysis of popularized media to unpack the arguments that police, government officials and community activist groups make to help shift opinions on police militarization. However, we frame these media account within Bourdieusian concepts of symbolic power, habitus or field struggle to provide insight into, arguably conflicting, interpretations of police militarization.

Misrecognition and labor market inclusion of refugee mothers

AbstractOne lakh eighty five thousand refugees from Ukraine have started working in Poland since the Russian war began. Drawing on Bourdieusian concepts of capitals, misrecognition, habitus, and the field, the paper theorizes the subjective and objective terms of inclusion across intersectional interplay of motherhood, ethnicity, and refugee status. In particular, we explore how intersectional marginalized identities of individuals shape their negotiation power over terms of their labor market inclusion. Using qualitative interview data from 10 Ukrainian working mothers in Poland who became refugees following the Russian war in Ukraine in 2022, we demonstrate that misrecognition leads to uneven relations of power curtailing working refugee mothers' agency to negotiate the terms of their inclusion.

Why do business leaders, senior politicians and civil servants move to leading positions in EU civil society? Exploring capital gains through boundary crossing

ABSTRACT Why do business leaders, senior politicians and civil servants move to leading positions in EU civil society? The article addresses this question through thirteen unique life-work history interviews with leaders of some of the most prominent EU civil society organisations (CSOs). Inspired by sociological approaches in EU civil society research, the article combines insights from the literature on EU lobbying and CSO professionalisation with the Bourdieusian concept of capital to explore the specific social resources that EU civil society and individual elite actors gain through the process of boundary crossing. It shows how EU civil society gains predominantly cultural capital (organisational and procedural knowledge), social capital (professional and personal networks), and symbolic capital (status and publicity), while individual elite actors gain primarily a form of civil society-specific symbolic capital that is associated with the alleged goodness of civil society and the act of ‘doing good’ that might facilitate policy influence. The article provides original, first-hand insights into how the civil society sector seeks to strike a balance between passion and professionalism and raises important normative questions about the integration of elites across economic, political, and civil society fields in Brussels.

Rethinking Community Cultural Wealth

In this essay David Shuang Song uses Bourdieusian theory and its contemporary reapplications to address theoretical problems in Tara Yosso's concept of community cultural wealth and to propose a rethinking of the influential model. He argues for redirecting attention to how agents both make exchangeable and exchange the legitimized practices and objects in a marginalized ethnic/racial community with those of the formal education system. Song illustrates this reconceptualization through a sketch of his ethnographic research on a community school in one large city's Chinatown. His approach emphasizes key Bourdieusian concepts that are sometimes missing in education research and sociology of education, resituates Bourdieusian theory as capable of offering insights into racialization and racial oppression in the United States, and offers insights for the study of community-based education projects among people of color.

A Human-Centric Approach towards Equity and Inclusion in AI Education

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become pervasive in modern lives, with AI generative tools driving further transformation. However, a notable issue persists: the underrepresentation of females and individuals from ethnic and racial minorities in the tech industry. Despite generally positive attitudes toward technology among young students, this enthusiasm often does not extend to aspirations for careers in the field. To address this disparity, many schools in the United States are now offering computer science and AI courses at the high school level. Nevertheless, students from underrepresented groups often feel disconnected from these subjects, leading to low enrollment rates. Research underscores that students' career aspirations are solidified between the ages of 10-14 yrs, highlighting the importance of engaging them with computer science and computing skills during this formative period. Leveraging the Bourdieusian concept of social capital, this paper proposes educational interventions tailored for elementary schools. By nurturing students' technical social capital, these interventions aim to foster an inclusive ecosystem from an early age, when aspirations are taking shape. Ultimately, the goal is to enhance the accessibility of computer science education and related skills, empowering young students from underrepresented groups to pursue higher studies and careers in computer science and AI fields.

Beyond subcultures: A literature review of gaming communities and sociological analysis

This article is a critical review of studies on gaming communities. In particular, it analyses the use of subcultural, post-subcultural and postmodern subcultural theorists in relation to video games players. Academic use of sociological concepts to study gaming communities, such as neo-tribe, subculture, lifestyle, and scene, is not always explained and almost all sociological instruments show limits in engaging the complex and changing phenomena of video gaming cultures. The article focuses on the misleading use of the term subculture and, therefore, analyses effective applications of post-subcultural and post-modern subcultural approaches to specific case studies. Eventually, the relation between gamers and video games cultures is analysed. In this sense, I argue that the complexity of gaming communities is difficult to be framed and I suggest the use of the Bourdieusian concept of champ.

Disentangling the intersectional field of education and housing in China: Genesis, strategies and discontents

Drawing on the Bourdieusian concept of ‘field’ and the theorization of ‘intersectionality’, this paper proposes a concept ‘intersectional field’ to disentangle the complex interrelations between housing and education in China, where they mutually constitute and co-produce yet trouble and counteract with each other, whereby exerting simultaneous exclusion in cultural and economic (re)production. Drawing on policy documents and 38 in-depth interviews with various stakeholders in China, we first delineate the genesis and evolvement of this intersectional field. We then demonstrate how middle-class parents rationalize and strategize their heavy investment in cultural and economic reproduction against the most recent policies that seemingly aim to de-intersect/decouple these two fields. We show that the intersectional field of housing and education in China emerges from state-imposed rules while being increasingly self-reinforced. It was also temporarily counteracted and suspended responding to the escalated crises of housing unaffordability and over-competition over quality schooling opportunities, through policies like franchising key schools from the city centre to the suburb and random allotting enrolment. These changes in the ‘rules of the game’ indeed bring uncertainties to the intersectional field. However, while discontent to this intersectional field abound, these actions are self-constrained by the internal logic of the intersectional field and thus unable to bring fundamental changes. Those with limited socio-economic capacities remain extremely disadvantageous in both fields. The policy intervention turns out to be merely a spatial reordering that relocates and expands the fierce competition from the city centre to the suburbs while repositioning the suburbs to be the focal point for strategic investment in the intersectional field.

How Person-Centred Is Cardiac Rehabilitation in England? Using Bourdieu to Explore Socio-Cultural Influences and Personalisation.

The National Health Service (NHS) cardiac rehabilitation patient care pathway has remained largely unchanged for many years despite, on average, half of all eligible patients declining to engage. To investigate reasons for non-engagement, we explored the experiences of ten cardiac patients who participated in cardiac rehabilitation, dropped out, or declined, as well as experiences of seven people deemed significant others by participants. Our ethnographic study involved participant observations, repeat in-depth semi-structured interviews, and reflexive journaling. Reflexive thematic analysis was conducted, focusing on participants' lived experiences. Utilising Bourdieusian concepts of habitus, capital, and field, this article highlights how personal biography, material conditions, and dispositional inclinations combine to make cardiac health care decision-making individual and complex. Despite this, health professionals were not always attuned to specific circumstances arising from differences in patients' experiences and lifeworlds. By considering service improvement recommendations that acknowledge socio-cultural influences, cardiac rehabilitation can work towards providing patients and their significant others with more appropriate, personalised, and person-centred support.

The making of problematic tax regulation: A Bourdieusian perspective

The implementation of thorny or problematic regulation is challenging for both regulators and regulatees. The reasons for the existence of problematic regulation are not to be found in the regulation itself, but rather in the policy-making process that creates it. This paper examines the process by which a problematic tax rule, the transfer pricing rule, was created in Chile in 1997. Based empirically on documents and semi-structured interviews with relevant elite rule-makers and other informants, and theoretically inspired by Bourdieusian concepts, this paper illustrates how powerful rule-makers in various spheres of activity confront each other in the definition of the final content of the rule. On the one hand, how bureaucratic, professional and scholarly rule-makers drafted the bill of law depended on their relevant technical capital, administrative capacity, and political concern that the rule would make it through the parliamentary process in the hands of political adversaries. On the other hand, this paper shows that once the rule entered the political sphere, political adversaries’ views about the role of the State, the mobilisation of silence and other explicit techniques were used to curtail the State’s power. Eventually, these power struggles gave rise to a problematic tax regulation. This paper broadly illustrates the role of powerful agents in favouring or constraining the creation of fairer tax systems and the factual operation of democracy and politics.

Informal arts engagement programs in disadvantaged schools: student aspirations and creative limits

ABSTRACT It is widely argued that the arts have a range of cultural, economic, and educational benefits. However, under state austerity arts curricula are devalued in favour of industry skills. To address this gap in arts education, a new type of student focussed informal arts engagement program has emerged. This article draws on a qualitative study of disadvantaged Australian secondary students’ experience of an arts engagement program and explores their experiences through Bourdieusian concepts. We observe how students’ homologous position allowed an immediate appreciation of the arts and note how their habitus frame the arts as ‘work’ and as a technical accomplishment. An illusio in the arts as career emerged from these understandings. We suggest informal arts programs act as a collective gift within a weak cycle of reciprocity, but without expanded in-school opportunities fall short in offering students new ways of understanding the place and value of the arts.

Historical role preparedness: A Bourdieusian analysis of the differential positions of professional staff and academics in an Australian managerialised university

This study examines the historical role preparation experiences of professional staff and academics in a managerialised university field. Semi-structured interviews were used to identify the impact of these experiences on the individual's ability to ‘play the game’ of the managerialised university field. The Bourdieusian concepts of habitus, doxa and illusio were used to analyse the data. The results showed that professional staff had a more advantageous position in the managerialised university field due to their pre-existing mastery of the rules of the game, which was attributed to their similarly structured educative role preparation experiences. Conversely, academics had a less advantageous position due to their lack of understanding of the managerialised nature of the university administrative field. This manifests as a heterodoxy, in which academics feel abandoned, disregarded and subordinated by managerial orthodoxy. The results of this case study reveal that managerialised universities in the Anglosphere are in crisis. It is argued that recognising academic heterodoxy could pave the way for their situation to alter and improve.

Compliance and the social space of cities: Variations in compliance with Covid-19 regulations and capital forms in urban communities

Cities' planned and built environments are key to healthier communities. The Covid-19 pandemic challenged this relationship, when the issue of communities' compliance with government restrictions to mitigate the spread of the pandemic became apparent. Despite the growing literature on the relationship between communities' characteristics and Covid-19 throughout the pandemic, little attention has been paid to the drivers of compliance at the city and community levels. Our paper addresses this lack through the Bourdieusian concept of communities' capital resources. Using Israel as a test case, we explore how the economic, social and cultural capital of urban communities affected compliance with Covid-19 related restrictions. The analysis reveals how the spatial dispersion of the components of these forms of capital explains the likelihood of communities' level of compliance. In particular, it shows how the accumulation of various forms of capital increased compliance with health regulations. The study highlights the explanatory power of local resources in collective spatial behavior patterns, as well as the possibility of exacerbating existing injustices.

Nathan Meyer-Rothschild’s Reproduction of Business Masculinity in the Portrait A View from the Royal Exchange. A Historical, Bourdieusian and Visual Semiotic Exploration

Abstract Business Masculinity represents a distinctly English configuration of masculinity that was hegemonic in the City of London’s banking and finance industry until recently. This work uses visual semiotic analysis, historical analysis and Bourdieusian concepts to show how Rothschild reproduced the aesthetics of Business Masculinity in the portrait A View from the Royal Exchange (1817) by using clothing and other symbolic cultural capital. To secure his trajectory, Rothschild needed to align his identity with Business Masculinity and thus Englishness – and disassociate himself from Jewish masculinity – in a culture of antisemitism, as well as deal with the repercussions arising from his alleged manipulation of information about the Battle of Waterloo (1815). In this context, the portrait played a significant part in Rothschild’s public identity-management. Shortly after the portrait’s publication, Rothschild was trusted with key information and opportunities which were conducive to his enterprise growing exponentially. It is suggested that the portrait played a hitherto underacknowledged part in Rothschild’s trajectory, by disassociating Rothschild from Jewish masculinity and associating Rothschild with Business Masculinity.

The Court of Justice of the European Union as a legal field

AbstractReflexive sociology can contribute to a more holistic understanding of the role of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU/Court) as a relational actor. This article draws on the Bourdieusian concept of (legal) field as an analytical framework to trace the power relations between the Court and its interlocutors. The analysis develops around four distinct conceptualisations of the Court as a legal field, ranging from its institutional architecture to the three mainstream judicial routes for a case to reach its docket (preliminary reference procedure, action for annulment and infringement procedure). These showcase the varied interactions among the different actors that either shape the Court as an institution or engage with it in the course of its adjudicative function. According to field theory, these interactions take the form of power struggles between the actors comprising a legal field in order to take control of the determination of the law. The actors of a legal field enjoy different positions that formulate their objective relations, and which are contingent on their disposition and capital. Each of the conceptualisations of the Court as a legal field in this article points to distinct power struggles and relations among a similar set of actors. Consequently, using field theory can be a very useful tool to contextualise the role of the Court and to systematically study its judgments, modus operandi and position in the European legal field under a reflexive lens that accentuates the significance of social space and power relations, and pushes for socio-legal and empirical insights.

Understanding How They Work: The Agents’ Strategies in Producing Indonesian-English Literary Translation

This article contains a study on Yogyakarta literary agents’ strategies in producing a translated work from Indonesian into English (Indonesian-English literary work) entitled “Pilgrimage in the Land of Java”. Due to the development of literary studies based on the practice of its agents, this study aims to understand more the pattern and vision of agents in producing translated literary work in a particular context. In this case, the agents are a poet Iman Budhi Santosa, an indie publisher Interlude, and a translator Chrysogonus Siddha Malilang. This study adopts the Bourdieusian concept of strategy in cultural production as the framework of thought. Meanwhile, interview and document selection are two primary techniques to collect data for this qualitative research. This study reveals the strategies implemented by the three primary agents during the production of “Pilgrimage in the Land of Java”. Although running on the same track, it turns out that each of them had specific strategies based on the role that they possessed during the production. This study also discloses the significance of social capital in translation practice.

The promised capitals of international high school programmes and the global field of higher education: The case of Shenzhen, China

The term ‘international school’ encompasses a broad array of institutions offering a range of different programmes. However, the differences between these programmes have scarcely been explored in the existing literature. This article focuses on three popular international high school programmes (Advanced Levels, Advanced Placement, and International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme) by drawing upon in-depth interviews with international school counsellors, teachers, parents, and students in Shenzhen, China. We employed the Bourdieusian concepts of ‘promised capitals’ and the ‘global field of higher education’ to delineate differences amongst these international programmes. We argue that each international programme promises the accumulation of distinct combinations of capitals associated with different global circuits of mobility for higher education. At the same time, we also suggest that the extent to which the promised capitals are conferred is complicated by the ‘localisation’ of schools: this impacted the delivery of promises related to embodied cultural and social capital forms.

Science capital

This paper presents a qualitative review of research on science capital considering 51 studies with topics related to this concept, between 2015 and 2021. In addition to the increase in research evidenced by the number of publications on the topic during this period, and the dominance of the United Kingdom in leading research in the area, we observed that topics associated to science capital vary from choosing careers in science, identifying with science and promoting a science culture, to the role of school in developing science capital and the ways to evaluate it. It is common for science engagement, associated to science capital, to be seen through the alignment of three important Bourdieusian concepts: capital, habitus and field. In this sense, due to the relevance that the topic has had in science research, we assert the importance of a systematic review that can provide an overview of current investigations involving science capital.

Fish‐out‐of‐office: How managerialised university conditions make administrative knowledge inaccessible to academics

AbstractAcademics report feeling unable to cope in the managerialised university. To confirm these feelings are symptoms of managerialism's tightening grip, we use Bourdieusian concepts of field and capital to compare academics and professional staff experiential statements in an Australian university. We compare their field conditions and examine how their differences enable or hinder the accumulation of capital that defines their field. Findings show that managerialism requires professional staff to share work tasks and be on‐campus, which enables them to accumulate the capital they require. Managerialism also permits and resources academics to working out‐of‐office to accumulate their required capital. Consequentially though, university operational knowledge becomes informal and only accessible to professional staff who accumulate the required social capital to access it. Professional staff are thus fish‐in‐water; easily accumulating social capital through day‐to‐day activities. But academics become fish‐out‐of‐water (office); they flounder to access operational knowledge, which leads to feelings of not coping.

Looking through the Lens of Bourdieu: A Corpus-based Study of English Romance Fiction Translation Concerning the Translation Strategies of CSIs

Translatorial habitus is a key term incorporated Bourdieusian sociological concept of habitus and Translation Studies’ translation norms. In light of Bourdieu’s theoretical model of sociology, this study sought to address the translatorial behaviour of the Iranian translators of English romance novels in terms of the translation strategies of Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) before and after the Cultural Revolution of 1980 in Iran. 4282 sentences containing CSIs were obtained from Rebecca, Sense and Sensibility, the Great Gatsby, and their two Persian translations. Based on how each CSI was translated, they were grouped under one of Liang's proposed categorization. The frequency and percentages of each procedure were calculated using SPSS software. Moreover, the results were cross-checked with a qualitative analysis of some archived interviews printed in Motarjem [the translator] journal, newspapers, and WebPages. The evidence from this study suggests that there was a clear foreignizing trend among Iranian translators of the English romance novels when translating CSIs not only in the Pre-Cultural Revolution era but also in the Post-Cultural Revolution era. Also, a significant difference between various strategies utilized in the two eras was detected.

Intermediaries in the criminal justice system and the ‘neutrality paradox’

AbstractThe intermediary special measure was introduced by the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 (YJCEA) to assist vulnerable witnesses to give evidence in court. This article focuses on the role's relationship with its underpinning value of neutrality. Findings from 31 interviews with intermediaries in England and Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as judges in Northern Ireland, suggest that this aspect of the role is problematic and deserves critical examination. Though there is a broad commitment to neutrality among intermediaries, the role's practice reveals latent tensions and contradictions that contribute towards what I term the ‘neutrality paradox’. This article uses the Bourdieusian concept of ‘illusio’ as an explanatory tool to examine deviations from the normative expectation of neutrality. It focuses on how intermediaries experience and conceptualize their own neutrality and explores how this can aid understanding of the role's scope and position within the criminal justice system.