Bourdieusian Concepts Research Articles

Becoming Politically Active: Life Courses and the Formation of Capitals among Young People of Migrant Origin in Finland

This article focuses on the life courses of young people of migrant origin who are active in civic and political fields in Finland. The aim is to analyse, from the micro-level life course perspective, the issues in their lives that have helped them to become active. The article draws on empirical data collected using participatory methods. Four young people of migrant origin participated in the research process and contributed to the data analysis. The theoretical framework consists of Bourdieusian concepts of political habitus and emotional, cultural and social capital. The article shows that participants gained strong emotional capital during their childhood, which laid the groundwork for the formation of their cultural capital–referring here to an ability to navigate between diverse cultures. This, in turn, helped them to network widely across ethnic and linguistic lines, not only in Finland but also transnationally. Different capitals have been significant in the formation of the young people’s political habitus, which is transnational in nature. Although they belong to a minority in Finnish society and face discrimination, they have made good use of the opportunities in Finland to become active in civic and political fields.

The Worldmaking Agency of the Sri Lankan Travel Blogger

This article presents a scrutiny of the powerful "worldmaking" role performed by English language travel writers in the context of Sri Lanka. It critically positions travel representations as a crucial means of knowledge production that shapes the way Sri Lanka is known and experienced. In that, it examines an emerging version of the country produced by young Sri Lankan travel bloggers through their employment of an "activist gaze" alongside the use of a "promotional gaze" by professional tourism writers. The article illuminates each of these distinctive worldmaking roles; the latter engaging the authority of tourism in constructing/perpetuating a particular favored version of the country to persuade the global tourist, and the former's "aware" agency in constructing a potential or alternative representation distinctive from the first. However, surpassing an exploration of representations and their worldmaking power, the article sheds light on the way writers are inculcated into certain standpoints and their negotiation of these through the employment of the Bourdieusian concepts of habitus, capital, and field. As such, it innovatively combines structure and agency in the study of tourism representations, unveiling the social implications underlying worldmaking and thereby elucidating the critical link between the English language, travel writing and social class in an understudied postcolonial context of South Asia.

‘Social health’, ‘physical health’, and well-being: Analysing with bourdieusian concepts the interplay between the practices of heavy drinking and exercise among young people

BackgroundThe article examines the interplay between the practices of heavy drinking and exercise among young people. The comparison helps to clarify why young people are currently drinking less than earlier and how the health-related discourses and activities are modifying young people's heavy drinking practices. MethodsThe data is based on interviews (n = 56) in Sweden among 15–17-year-olds and 18–19-year-olds. By drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field, and capital, we examine what kinds of resources young people accumulate in the fields of heavy drinking and exercise, how these resources carry symbolic value for distinction, and what kind of health-related habitus they imply. ResultsThe analysis shows that young people's practices in the social spaces of intoxication and exercise are patterned around the ‘social health’ and ‘physical health’ approaches and shaped by gendered binaries of masculine dominance. The ‘physical health’ approach values capable, high-performative, and attractive bodies, whereas the ‘social health’ approach is oriented towards accumulating social capital. The analysis demonstrates that these approaches affect the interviewees’ everyday life practices so that the ‘physical health’ approach has more power over the ‘social health’ approach in transforming them. ConclusionAs the ‘physical health’ approach appears to modify young people's practices of drinking to be less oriented to intoxication or away from drinking, this may partly explain why young people are drinking less today than earlier. Compared to drinking, the physical health-related social spaces also seem to provide more powerful arenas within which to bolster one's masculine and feminine habitus. This further suggests that intoxication may have lost its symbolic power among young people as a cool activity signalling autonomy, maturity, and transgression of norms.

Health capital: toward a conceptual framework for understanding the construction of individual health

Emerging perspectives of health as individualized and privatized capital seem promising to shed light on the construction of individual health in the face of the growing individualization of healthcare. This article reviews extant perspectives of health as capital, reflecting upon how a conceptualization of health capital might be conceived by two of the main contrasting traditions: human capital theory affiliated with the Chicago School of Economics and Bourdieusian concepts of social field and capital. Arguing that a Bourdieusian perspective is potentially more fruitful to capture the importance of social and cultural dimensions in the construction of individual health, this article arrives at a conceptualization of health capital as the aggregate of the actual or potential resources possessed by a given agent that have the capacity to affect the position of agents in the social field of health. Drawing on Bourdieu’s conceptualization of forms of capital, this article discusses the efficacy, the legitimation, and the positioning of health capital, uncovering its potential for understanding contemporary trends in health practices and health discourse.

Unruly bodies: resistance, (in)action and hysteresis in a public health intervention

Schools have long been sites of public health intervention on the bodies of children. Increasingly, these interventions also act on the bodies of educators. Our case study is an intervention focused on the future health of children’s bodies (‘The Daily Mile’), which, we argue, also resulted in the surveillance of educators’ bodies. We draw on Bourdieu’s concept of hysteresis to explore how those bodies can become ‘unruly’ during implementation, in both resisting and being positioned as reluctant. Hysteresis, an under-utilised Bourdieusian concept, proved useful for exploring embodiment at a point when there were mismatches between habitus and the changing field of primary education. We show how the non-participation of some actors (e.g. teachers) was positioned as part of a broader resistance to health as a dominant value, whereas non-participation of less-privileged social actors (e.g. Teaching Assistants) was problematised in different ways. We argue that attending to moments of hysteresis, in which the changing symbolic values of physical capital become explicit, surfaces not just how dominant discourses (e.g. healthism) become reproduced in fields, but also how they change and are resisted, and with what effects.

Transnational Habitus and Sociability in the City: Zimbabwean Migrants’ Experiences in Johannesburg, South Africa

Drawing on field research and a survey of 150 Zimbabwean migrants in Johannesburg, this paper explores the dimensions of migrants’ transnational experiences in the urban space. I discuss the use of communication platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook as well as other means such as telephone calls in fostering the embedding of transnational migrants within both the Johannesburg and the Zimbabwean socio-economic environments. I engage this migrant-embedding using Bourdieusian concepts of “transnational habitus” and “transnational social field,” which are migration specific variations of Bourdieu’s original concepts of “habitus” and “social field.” In deploying these Bourdieusian conceptual tools, I observe that the dynamics of South–South migration as observed in the Zimbabwean migrants are different to those in the South–North migration streams and it is important to move away from using the same lens in interpreting different realities. For Johannesburg-based migrants to operate within the socio-economic networks produced in South Africa and in Zimbabwe, they need to actively acquire a transnational habitus. I argue that migrants’ cultivation of networks in Johannesburg is instrumental, purposive, and geared towards achieving specific and immediate goals, and latently leads to the development and sustenance of flexible forms of permanency in the transnational urban space.

Capital, habitus, and education in contemporary China: Understanding motivations of middle-class families in pursuing studying abroad in the United States

The growing Chinese middle class and their accumulation of wealth and economic capital have seen an increasing number of Chinese students pursuing their education in the West. Due to this growing number, motivations behind their decision to study abroad warrant scholarly treatment. This article discusses the motives of Chinese middle-class families and their children in seeking studying abroad. The paper reports on a recent study of 166 students on American campuses from 2017 to 2018. It uses Bourdieusian concepts of capital, habitus, and the idea of social mobility and social reproduction, to understand Chinese middle-class families’ strategic decisions around studying overseas in relation to employability, labour market competitiveness, and family support. Studying abroad, therefore, is construed by Chinese middle class families as a way of pursuing and preserving their social status and social mobility.

Different Caregiver, Different Collaboration

The quality of the collaboration between health professionals and caregivers is of great significance to outcome and recovery. Severe brain injuries after a stroke can leave patients unable to communicate their needs and wishes with health professionals, in which case the role of the caregiver(s) becomes even more important. This position is highly differentiated, and there are substantial variations in how caregivers participate in the collaboration. Using the Bourdieusian concept of cultural health capital, we aimed to develop a broader understanding of the role played by the patient’s caregiver and how inequality is produced in the encounter with professionals. This qualitative study was conducted from 2014 to 2018. We observed the meetings and interactions between caregivers and health professionals during patients’ neurorehabilitation after a stroke, and we interviewed caregivers and health professionals on their experiences during this period. Constructing three different caregiver types—the proactive, the persistent, and the deferential—we discovered different ways of interacting and different attitudes related to cultural health capital, which provided the caregiver with more or fewer opportunities to participate in a dialogue and negotiation on behalf of the patient.

Att bli och att vara framgångsrik musiker – socialisation och sortering genom livet

This article concerns learning, socialization and social sorting among successful musicians. The aim is to understand and problematize not only what it means to become a classical musician but also what it entails to be a successful classical musician. In what ways are musicians socialized through life? What approaches are formed among musicians, and what is the meaning of these when it comes to performance of work? Are their specific arenas and rituals of particular importance, when it comes to socializing and sorting among musicians? Interviews and documents about twelve musicians have been analyzed with the aid of Bourdieusian concepts, for example, practical sense and habitus, and research on elitist practices within music, arts and sports. The results indicate that there is a typical and similar career path for successful musicians, where young musicians are socialized into considering their careers in music as natural and given. The musicians are recognized as talented or wonder children at an early age, and they are accepted as students of a master teacher. Their careers are built by merits, such as a spectacular debut leading to an international career. These career steps function as both merits and as an opening of doors. Further, they contribute by strengthening the musicians´ identities and their roles as successful musicians and role models within the field.

Art Rebels: Race, Class, and Gender in the Art of Miles Davis and Martin Scorsese

In Art Rebels: Race, Class, and Gender in the Art of Miles Davis and Martin Scorsese, Paul Lopes digs deep into what he calls the “public stories” of two artists to illuminate an analysis of the Bourdieusian concept of the Heroic Age of art. Lopes argues that the Heroic Age of American Art, a time when independent entrepreneurial artists became a permanent fixture of the American art world, emerged in the 1940s–1970s. By focusing on artists’ autonomy, innovation, and the interplay of the artist’s identity in society, Lopes examines how the Heroic Age is exemplified in the careers of jazz musician Miles Davis and film director Martin Scorsese. The book is a strong example of a Millsian analysis of the interplay of biography and history within the creative industries. Lopes introduces the concept of a public story as collective narratives crafted by critics, journalists, and artists themselves that contribute to the structured meanings of artists and their work in society. Ultimately, such public stories unfold over time and shape the production and reception of artists’ work. He simultaneously uses the concept of biographical legend, the joining of an artist’s career with personal biographical details, to answer the question of what such public stories and biographical legends tell us about the Heroic Age of American Art. The ambitious empirical approach that Lopes employs led him to collect and inductively code over 3,000 documents and artistic works from the 1940s to the present that make up the public stories of both Miles Davis and Martin Scorsese.

Critiquing – and Rescuing – ‘Character’

The article looks at how sociology might regard the concept of ‘character’, both in terms of the way it is used in public discourse and in its own accounts of social life. In the former, the concept is likely to be regarded with suspicion, especially where it is used to explain individuals’ life outcomes in a way that ignores social structures and depoliticizes inequalities. Such usages are to be found in political discourse on welfare and in the character education movement as a solution to problems of ‘social mobility’. Yet if character refers to individuals’ settled dispositions to act in certain ways, then it has some affinities with the Bourdieusian concept of habitus. The article argues both for developing the critique of ideological uses of the concept and for considering how it might be used in ways that do not misrepresent its explanatory and normative significance.

OS CAPITAIS BOURDIEUSIANOS E SUAS INFLUÊNCIAS NO ENSINO E NA APRENDIZAGEM DOS ALUNOS DE MATEMÁTICA

The research work is theoretically structured in the Bourdieusian concepts, specifically on the work The writings of Education. In this sense, the discussion is based on a hermeneutical incursion into Bourdieu's work in order to investigate whether cultural capital influences the performance of students in basic education, especially in Mathematics. Thereunto, through qualitative research supported by quantitative data and collected from questions answered firstly by students of High School, and with Elementary School secondly, especially in the Mathematics subject in a countryside town in Parana, it intends to verify if the concepts by Bourdieu, above all of habitus, are still determinants for teaching and learning process in the formal spaces of education. Therefore, from the data collected through these questionnaires, the relationship between the capitals of the family habitus and the performance of the Mathematics subject is presented under the light of the concepts by Bourdieu.

The doxa about sustainability: a path constructed by narratives from an organisational field

Using Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, it sought to analyse the doxa about sustainability in the field which is represented by an internationalised organisation. The research strategy used was the case study and it is configured as a qualitative research of exploratory and descriptive character. The data collection occurred by means of semi-structured interviews with workers from the investigated organisation, organisation's document reading and news about the organisation in different mediatic sources reading. The data was analysed by an interrelation between the narrative analysis and the Bourdieusian sociology concepts. The results showed that the field's doxa: presents elements that do not corroborate to the sustainable development and that even denounce a symbolic domination within the field; and, is organised and structured by elements related to the weak sustainability, which pillars are the exploitation maintenance and the economic development continuity.

Policing the Olympic gang: the rise and fall of the Portuguese Mafia

ABSTRACT Against a backdrop of rising youth violence in the UK, the issue of gang policing has once more risen to prominence. Intense debates surrounding police cuts have led to renewed calls for a ‘war on gangs’, echoing earlier responses to England’s summer of violent disorder in 2011. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic study of policing in the London Borough of Newham, this paper reports on a case-study of gang policing during a similarly fraught political moment. In the run-up to the 2012 London Olympics, a street-based group of minority ethnic youth – the so-called Portuguese Mafia (PGM) – became the primary focus for gang policing in the Borough. Though the group did not self-identify as a gang, their activities were inflated and became the subject of a targeted enforcement initiative. These distortions, we argue, resulted from the influence of political decision-making on the working practices of front-line police officers, amplified in a climate of austerity. Through the reconstruction of this ‘natural history’, we seek to contribute an empirical account of the ambiguities inherent in police definitions of gangs, and the discriminatory consequences of categorisation. Theoretically, the paper seeks to contribute a critical sociological account of gangs and gang policing that bridges extant objectivist and constructivist readings of gangs through engagement with the Bourdieusian concept of ‘field’.

Combining Microhistorical and Field Theory Approaches

Abstract The purpose of this article is to explore the frictions and potentials endemic in combining microhistorical and field theory approaches, using popular religion in England in the long fifteenth century as an example. In two case studies, concerning basic catechetical texts and the last wills and testaments created by a wide spectrum of the population, the article analyzes how micro- and macro-historical investigation can be tied together. Crucially, micro examples do not simply illustrate but rather add to our knowledge of the general picture. Where micro examples offer a corrective to a general picture there is potential for friction. However, the article also proposes that it is valuable to use Bourdieusian concepts of the cultural field to inventorize the micro evidence in the process of understanding historical situations and transitions more broadly.

STEM outcomes of second-generation immigrant students with high-skilled parental backgrounds

ABSTRACTThis large-scale study (N=173,636) examines between-group differences in Israeli high school STEM enrolment and average grades between five groups of Israeli-born Jews. Four of them comprise second-generation immigrant students with high-skilled parents, from North America (NA), South America (SA), France, and the Former Soviet Union (FSU). The fifth group comprises non-immigrant students. The study's conceptual framework combines expanded Segmented Assimilation Theory and Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and cultural capital. NA students had the highest family educational and economic levels, while the FSU students had the highest percentage of high-skilled parents, albeit with the lowest economic background. We found that the non-immigrant students did not have an advantage in STEM enrolment in high school as compared to the second-generation immigrants. The FSU students had the highest STEM enrolment. The average STEM grades among the NA, SA, and French students were similar compared to the non-immigrant students, while the FSU students' average STEM grades were the lowest. Our findings suggest that both Segmented Assimilation Theory and Bourdieusian concepts of habitus and cultural capital should be considered to account for the educational STEM outcomes of immigrant children. These findings may inform educational policy and intervention programmes aimed at increasing high school STEM enrolment.

Migrating capital and habitus: the extended space of female transnational migrants

ABSTRACTAdopting the Bourdieusian concept of capital, this study explores capital transformation and habitus recalibration among professional migrant women in Hong Kong. This study shows the fluidity and plurality of capital conversion within the interplay between gender, power relations, and broader social and neoliberal discourse. The findings indicate that the smooth conversion of different forms of capital requires the resources and capital acquired and accumulated in other places to be locally validated, and that the extent to which linguistic and cultural resources can be validated depends on migrants' social-economic ability, and how they define the boundaries of migration-specific capital. It is also found that classed power relations play a part in constituting networks, which in turn influence habitus recalibration. This study shows the process of capital conversion and new habitus establishment cannot be simply reduced to individual agency, and that wider historical, institutional, social, and political factors play a shaping role.

Positive dispositions and close alignment: Using Bourdieusian concepts to understand parents' and teachers' perceptions of homework

ABSTRACT This paper presents findings about teachers’ and parents’ perceptions of homework in a middle-class, primary school setting in Ireland, from a qualitative study that aimed to provide an insight into the neglected area of homework from the perspectives of two of the main stakeholders in the process. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with six parents and six teachers of fifth-class pupils from adjoining boys’ and girls’ urban primary schools. Bourdieusian concepts of habitus, capitals, field, and practice were used as a theoretical framework and an interpretive lens. Homework perceptions are explored against the backdrop of a global phenomenon of education commodification, whereby parents are viewed as consumers of education, and in the context of parents and teachers as partners in children’s education. An overriding positive disposition towards homework by parents and teachers was evident in perceptions of its necessity and importance, indicating an alignment of their homework habitus.

Urban masculinity, contested spaces, and classed subcultures: young homeless men navigating downtown Ottawa, Canada

This article seeks to address the lacuna in many academic and non-academic accounts of male homeless youth, which consistently overlook and thus fail to theorize the degree to which young homeless men’s experiences are shaped by gendered and classed youth subcultures. The theoretical contribution that this article seeks to make is to bring together culturally-infused analyses with a geographic focus on space and masculinity, in order to expand the repertoire of conceptual tools with which to understand young men’s experiences of homelessness in urban spaces. It does so through an empirical investigation of urban spatial navigations of young homeless and precariously housed men in Ottawa, Canada. Mobilizing the concept of territoriality, as developed by Phil Cohen of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, alongside the Bourdieusian concept of classification struggles, the article ultimately seeks to demonstrate that there is an internal logic of practice to young men’s navigations of urban space under conditions of extreme inequality, one that seeks to reconcile the deep contradictions of neoliberalism. Simultaneously, such logics may also serve to reinscribe and reinforce their marginal positions in the city, by exposing them to extreme violence by rival urban groups, and leaving them more vulnerable to expanded criminalization by the state.

Magicians at Work: Modellers as Institutional Entrepreneurs in the Global Governance of Agriculture and Food Security

Global models of agriculture act as the epistemic basis for quantitative foresight, which guides international policymaking and research on agriculture. With the new political sociology of science as a backdrop, this article studies the actors who develop and use these models through the lens of field theory. Contributing to the dialogue between the neo-institutionalist field theory and its Bourdieusian version, it describes the structure and the dynamics of the strategic action field of modelling organizations, using the Bourdieusian notions of “succession” and “subversion” to refine the characterization of challengers. It also discusses the insights of the Bourdieusian concept of “homology” to analyse the relations between the field of model producers and the field of model users. Whereas Bourdieu provides a primarily descriptive account of homologies, which are close to a “social magic without magicians” for Roueff, the present text describes magicians doing the work of producing homologies. Some modellers use intercomparison to reduce competition and to have their models used in the field of global governance, thus strategically producing homologies, while resolving the main modelling conflict of the field. These actors benefit from the recent change in the modelling field under the influence of climate change, to behave as what Fligstein and McAdam have called “institutional entrepreneurs”. The article concludes that this amended version of field theory makes it possible to describe the co-construction of a range of models developed by competing organizations and the controversial making of global agricultural governance. Doing so, it complements the co-production framework, which often focuses on a given site of expertise production and a site of global governance.