Bourdieusian Concepts Research Articles

‘The Person God Made Me to Be’: Navigating Working-Class and Christian Identities in English Evangelical Christianity

This article explores the lived experience of class in relation to English evangelical Christianity. It examines how the subjective, affective impacts of class are felt, navigated and negotiated by working-class evangelical church leaders in the context of everyday ministry. Recent class analysis ( Abrahams and Ingram 2013 ; Friedman 2016 ; Reay 2015 ) has mobilized and developed the Bourdieusian concept of ‘cleft’ or divided habitus ( Bourdieu 2000 ) in empirical study of the emotional impact of movement across class fields. Examining data produced in interviews with evangelical leaders, this article draws on this work, exploring how working-class evangelical leaders experience cleft habitus as they engage with different class fields in the course of their work in ministry. It is argued that, whilst often overlooked in research on classed subjectivities, religious identity plays a critical role in provoking distinctive responses to the everyday experience of class. The accounts suggest that, in the negotiation of feelings of cleft habitus, interviewees’ Christian subjectivity prompts a proactive seeking of an integrated identity that is both evangelical and working-class.

DAS²-Theory of Personality: A Cognitive Approach to the Enneagram

The Enneagram is a typology of personality that scopes at the level of ego-personality. Despite the vast amount of attention, it has accumulated since its modern emergence in the 20th century from the Sufi tradition, it is still in need of grounding into current scientific work to disperse some of its much criticized mystical language. The DAS2-theory aims at reconstructing the Enneagram based on cognitive concepts by first establishing the Dynamic Social Field Theory (DSoFT) that expands the Bourdieusian concept of social fields (Bourdieu, 1984), and then proposing the ethological trilogy of Dominance, Aversion, Submission (the DAS-triad)—three distinct stances towards power that have evolved under the pressure of violence, as described by Lorenz (1998). DSoFT posits that the mind is constantly challenged to find the social field that most appeals to the ego in order to react to people and events. To this end—described by using the Buddhist concept of Monkey Mind—the mind jumps from scenario to scenario (field to field) creating micro-contests until it finds a proper reframing of the challenge where it can have a strategy that appeals to the ego. To understand how a DAS-type is formed, three iterative levels have to be built. At the bottom is the DAS-triad, or stances. Because each stance can be applied from a position of superiority or inferiority—that the mind evaluates from the field’s rules—, each of the three stances can branch into two styles, yielding six potential DAS-styles. DAS-styles explain behaviors clearly, distinctly, and ethologically, and form the basis for the application of the DAS2-theory. Lastly, a DAS-type is the selection of a style from the superior triad, as well as one from the inferior triad. Therefore nine types are possible, which correspond to the nine Enneatypes. The DAS2-theory typology can be applied to interpret not only the individuals but also the supra-individual entities’ behaviors without having to resort to metaphors that vaguely describe intentions and actions. It offers new innovative ways to analyze political events, power scenarios, market perception of brands, and other social dynamics, and can greatly influence the academic or social communities of the Enneagram and Power Studies. Further developments in neuropsychoendocrinology and other fields may prove the DAS2-theory assumptions.

Understanding Compliance Dynamics in Community Justice Settings

This article seeks to expand the existing literature on compliance in community justice settings by highlighting the importance of service user participation in efforts to achieve compliance. The article’s central argument is that although co-productive strategies can enhance service user participation, the degree to which co-production is achievable in penal supervision is perhaps uncertain, and has received insufficient theoretical or empirical attention. To address the gap in knowledge, the article draws on the data generated from a study of compliance in Wales, United Kingdom, and employs the Bourdieusian concepts of habitus, field, and capital to argue that the convergence of two key factors undermines the viability of co-productive strategies in penal settings. One factor is the service users’ habitus of powerlessness which may breed passivity rather than active participation. The second also relates to the power dynamics that characterize penal supervision contexts. Within these contexts, practitioners are statutorily empowered to implement and enforce the requirements of community orders. In the current target-focused policy climate in England and Wales, practitioners may prioritize measurable compliance over forms of compliance that stem from service user participation and engagement perhaps because these are not readily quantifiable.

Hysteresis: Understanding the Housing Aspirations Gap

Drawing on qualitative research on housing aspirations in Scotland, the objectives of this article are threefold. Firstly, this article will contextualise the subject of housing aspirations within relevant research literature and situate it within wider debates which revolve around the relationship between housing and social class. Secondly, in order to understand the implications of the research, this article uses Bourdieu’s notion of ‘sociodicy’ to help explain the ‘social’ reasons which incline people to have housing aspirations. Thirdly, the data will be analysed to understand the differences in ‘aspirations’ between groups, concluding that the generational differences, which correspond to the epochal changes in the economy, are more important than class differences when understanding the uneven distribution of housing outcomes and housing wealth in developed societies. The article concludes that the Bourdieusian concept of hysteresis explains the gap between the subjective expectations of young ‘professionals’ and the objective chances of their realisation.

The Lebanese diasporic field: the impact of sending and receiving states

What is a diaspora? Can it be distinguished from a ‘transnational community’? This paper discusses the Lebanese migrants abroad and their relationships with Lebanon by deploying the Bourdieusian concept of ‘field’. It argues that Bourdieu’s concept of field helps to capture the dynamic character of diasporic relations and the power relations that underpin them. It also enables the researcher to better delineate the boundary of a diasporic community and at the same time to treat this boundary as flexible enough to identify the specific terms for entering and exiting the ‘diasporic field’. It also argues that at a time when diasporic relations are cross-national, that specifically revolve around a real or imaginary ‘homeland’, they encompass individual, group and institutional actors that belong with varying degrees to the country of origin and the countries of settlement. Finally, the paper concludes that the ‘diasporic field’ is a useful analytical tool to capture the complexities of increasingly ubiquitous diasporic relations.

Taken in by the Numbers Game: The Globalization of a Religious ‘Illusio’ and ‘Doxa’ in Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Missions to India

While the Bourdieusian concepts of capital and relational configurations of positions and position-takings have recently been fruitfully employed to theorize global fields, this paper argues that the concepts of illusio and doxa are especially conducive to analyzing the globalization of a field as an expansion into and transformation of formerly independent national arenas. In deploying the concept of illusio as a (quasi-libidinous) investment in the game, globalization is here first and foremost framed as a process in which more and more actors in various contexts ‘succumb’ to specific field logics that orient them to transnational structures. By emphasizing the concept of doxa as the taken-for-granted fundamentals of a field, the paper furthermore calls attention to the mechanisms that help forge and globalize the tacit presuppositions and shared ontologies on which such logics build. Focusing on a field of global Christian missions that emerged during the nineteenth century, the paper illustrates how its competitive logic of proselytization was introduced into the religious arena of India. It highlights how Western notions of religion gained ground among local traditions and pulled them into a game in which numerical relations of adherents mattered.

Bourdieu, Hysteresis, and Shame

This article offers a consideration of the gendered emotion of “shame” within the context of the lived experiences of spinal cord injured men, using “found life histories” as a source material. Drawing upon the Bourdieusian concept of “hysteresis,” I theorize the emergence of a gendered disjuncture between incorporated expectations, values and assumptions, and the substantive enactments of masculinity socially available in the aftermath of spinal cord injury. Shame was often experienced within contexts characterized by “dangerous” social proximity to pathologized “others” (namely, disabled people and children) against which hegemonic masculinity is defined. I conclude the article by highlighting the particular limitations that Bourdieusian social theory can be used to identify in relation to individualized therapeutic interventions designed to encourage spinal cord injured men to adopt new understandings of masculinity.

Taken in by the numbers game: the globalization of a religious ‘illusio’ and ‘doxa’ in nineteenth-century evangelical missions to India

While the Bourdieusian concepts of capital and relational configurations of positions and position-takings have recently been fruitfully employed to theorize global fields, this paper argues that t...

From Bourdieu to Lahire: Social determinism and pluralist consumer practices

This article sets out to introduce Bernard Lahire’s recent reiterations of the Bourdieusian approach to the body of consumer research. Lahire’s work accounts for dissonant cultural practices at an individual level. He questions the singularity of the habitus, the relative autonomy of fields, and the homology of the social practices proposed by Bourdieu. His work could make a significant contribution to consumer research in three ways: (1) it reiterates the Bourdieusian concepts in a way that better addresses the problems of a society made up of pluralist yet multi-determined individuals, (2) it reasserts the importance of individual-scale analysis of the social forces that more subjectivist approaches would be at risk of masking and (3) it sets out a way to understand socialisation by combining contexts through the incorporation of certain dispositions. Based on these contributions, this article sets out a research programme with a view to better linking contexts, dispositions and pluralist consumer practices on an individual scale.

Mathematics capital in the educational field: Bourdieu and beyond

ABSTRACTMathematics education needs a better appreciation of the dominant power structures in the educational field: Bourdieu's theory of capital provides a good starting point. We argue from Bourdieu's perspective that school mathematics provides capital that is finely tuned to generationally reproduce the social structures that serve to keep the powerful in power, while ensuring that less powerful groups are led to accept their own failure in mathematics. Bourdieu's perspective thereby highlights theoretical inadequacies in much mathematics education research, insofar as it presumes a consensus about a ‘what works agenda’ for improving achievement for all. Drawing on one case where we manufactured awkward facts, we illustrate a Bourdieusian interpretation of mathematics capital as reproductive, and the crucial role of its cultural arbitrary. We then criticise the Bourdieusian concept of ‘mathematical capital’ as the value of mathematical competence in practice and propose to extend his tools to include the contradictory ‘use’ and ‘exchange’ values of mathematics instead: we will show how this conceptualisation goes ‘beyond Bourdieu’ and helps explain how teaching-learning might (ideally) produce ‘cultural use value’ in mathematical competence, while still recognising the contradictions teachers and learners face. Finally, we suggest how critical education research generally can benefit from this theoretical framework: (1) in exposing the interest of the dominant classes; but also (2) in researching critical pedagogic alternatives that challenge orthodoxy in educational policy and practice both in mathematics education and more generally.

The Other Spaces of La Moustache

The Other Spaces of La Moustache François Kiper (bio) Emmanuel Carrère’s novel La Moustache crystallizes the profoundly unnerving horror of being engulfed by the disorienting normlessness of a posthumanist world whose truths belong to a palimpsest that is arbitrarily scraped clean and reinscribed before one can settle on their existence. Carrère plumbs the depths of this nerve-racking reality—of finding that one despairs of any means whatsoever of anchoring memory and perception in truth—and, in so doing, evokes the psychological atmosphere of unappeasable anxiety that is characteristic of Franz Kafka’s novels and short stories. La Moustache mercilessly vivisects the crumbling psyche of its protagonist, Marc Thiriez, subverting each of the pillars of certitude upon which his sanity rests—family, friends, and above all, faith in his capacity to experience and recall his own life—and ultimately leaves Marc no alternative but to surrender to the entropic exhaustion of an existence bereft of any subjective certainty, in the teeth of a trap whose illogical perversity admits of no escape. As Carrère delves into the tortured contortions of Marc’s unravelling mind, he is also laying bare the equally harrowing, invisible Bourdieusan universe which informs the “trivial but consuming activities” of a staggeringly nondescript bourgeois young professional Everyman. Underlying its gripping portrayal of mental illness, La Moustache dramatizes the seminal revelations of Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice: namely, that the modern psyche, which is ostensibly freely self-determining and untrammeled by institutionalized discourse, is in fact systematically prescribed by the unwritten protocols of doxa—Bourdieu’s term for the cultural phenomenon whereby a commonplace (for example, the notion that change is synonymous with progress) is formulated as an article of faith and endowed with the authority of being self-evident and objective—which in turn implants the false consciousness of conventionality into the individual’s subjective consciousness, thereby rendering him unquestioningly obeisant to unwritten dictates of society whereof he remains unawares, and collectively forming “the orchestration of [the] habitus…[t]he production of a commonsense world endowed with the objectivity secured by consensus on the meaning of practices of the world” (Bourdieu 1977, 129). This insidious centripetal-centrifugal process of subject formation culminates by shaping the axiomatic truths which serve as the foundation of individual agency. Therefore, [End Page 411] beneath its veneer of a raw, jarring Kafkaesque character study that unflinchingly probes the recesses of the human mind in the throes of being severed from the moorings of sanity, La Moustache treats its protagonist’s mental breakdown as the excruciatingly piecemeal disintegration of modern man as a socius, powerfully melding psychopathology with sociology, and echoing Michel Foucault’s famous declaration that “the madman is an avatar of our capitalist societies.” In La Moustache, the machinery of modern urban centers that so comfortably synchronizes our professional selves, our intimate relationships and, worst of all, our inner lives becomes terrifyingly dehiscent. Marc Thiriez’s existence was once irredeemably—and quite happily—bureaucratized and spatialized. However, starting with the absurdist premise that none of his Parisian friends and family recognize that he has just-shorn the moustache that he had worn nearly all his adult life, everything that Marc takes for granted about himself will explode and disintegrate against the backdrop of centrifugally “open” urban spaces. Each spatialized locus of certainty that anchors Marc’s life is thus turned outwards into so many confounding lacunae of ontological (self-)doubt. La Moustache’s nightmarish nexus between space and identity calls to mind the interrelated body of thought of Bourdieu and Foucault, and specifically underscores their common emphasis on the implacable human need to demarcate one’s own mental and physical “space” in spite of our terrible powerlessness to do so. Therefore, bringing the Bourdieusian concepts of doxa and habitus and the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia into dialogue with Carrère’s novel can enrich our understanding of the intersections between these two seminal thinkers, who share an imperative to chart the territory of the “unthought” in social and cultural reproduction (Bourdieu) as “a knower straying far afield of himself” (Foucault 1986), while also underlining the timeliness of continuing to grapple with the “enigmatic...

Raising Successful Offspring by Chinese Middle-Class Parents

This article analyses the intergenerational mobility of the Chinese “new middle class” in Shanghai, China. Building on the Bourdieusian concept of social capital, it puts forward a sociocultural approach to explaining the reproduction of the middle class in contemporary urban China. It explores why cultural capital and marketable professional qualification are not enough for younger members of this class to secure their class status and upward mobility. It also discusses how and why the pre-reform socialist social institutions of danwei (work unit) and hukou (household registration) continue to play decisive roles in consolidating the middle class’ life status in post-reform China. This study finds that middle-class parents capitalise on their accrued and privileged guanxi (interpersonal relationship), built on the socialist social institutions, to help their children find good jobs to maintain their own upward intergenerational mobility.

The Other Spaces of <em>La Moustache</em>

The Other Spaces of La Moustache François Kiper (bio) Emmanuel Carrère’s novel La Moustache crystallizes the profoundly unnerving horror of being engulfed by the disorienting normlessness of a posthumanist world whose truths belong to a palimpsest that is arbitrarily scraped clean and reinscribed before one can settle on their existence. Carrère plumbs the depths of this nerve-racking reality—of finding that one despairs of any means whatsoever of anchoring memory and perception in truth—and, in so doing, evokes the psychological atmosphere of unappeasable anxiety that is characteristic of Franz Kafka’s novels and short stories. La Moustache mercilessly vivisects the crumbling psyche of its protagonist, Marc Thiriez, subverting each of the pillars of certitude upon which his sanity rests—family, friends, and above all, faith in his capacity to experience and recall his own life—and ultimately leaves Marc no alternative but to surrender to the entropic exhaustion of an existence bereft of any subjective certainty, in the teeth of a trap whose illogical perversity admits of no escape. As Carrère delves into the tortured contortions of Marc’s unravelling mind, he is also laying bare the equally harrowing, invisible Bourdieusan universe which informs the “trivial but consuming activities” of a staggeringly nondescript bourgeois young professional Everyman. Underlying its gripping portrayal of mental illness, La Moustache dramatizes the seminal revelations of Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice: namely, that the modern psyche, which is ostensibly freely self-determining and untrammeled by institutionalized discourse, is in fact systematically prescribed by the unwritten protocols of doxa—Bourdieu’s term for the cultural phenomenon whereby a commonplace (for example, the notion that change is synonymous with progress) is formulated as an article of faith and endowed with the authority of being self-evident and objective—which in turn implants the false consciousness of conventionality into the individual’s subjective consciousness, thereby rendering him unquestioningly obeisant to unwritten dictates of society whereof he remains unawares, and collectively forming “the orchestration of [the] habitus…[t]he production of a commonsense world endowed with the objectivity secured by consensus on the meaning of practices of the world” (Bourdieu 1977, 129). This insidious centripetal-centrifugal process of subject formation culminates by shaping the axiomatic truths which serve as the foundation of individual agency. Therefore, [End Page 411] beneath its veneer of a raw, jarring Kafkaesque character study that unflinchingly probes the recesses of the human mind in the throes of being severed from the moorings of sanity, La Moustache treats its protagonist’s mental breakdown as the excruciatingly piecemeal disintegration of modern man as a socius, powerfully melding psychopathology with sociology, and echoing Michel Foucault’s famous declaration that “the madman is an avatar of our capitalist societies.” In La Moustache, the machinery of modern urban centers that so comfortably synchronizes our professional selves, our intimate relationships and, worst of all, our inner lives becomes terrifyingly dehiscent. Marc Thiriez’s existence was once irredeemably—and quite happily—bureaucratized and spatialized. However, starting with the absurdist premise that none of his Parisian friends and family recognize that he has just-shorn the moustache that he had worn nearly all his adult life, everything that Marc takes for granted about himself will explode and disintegrate against the backdrop of centrifugally “open” urban spaces. Each spatialized locus of certainty that anchors Marc’s life is thus turned outwards into so many confounding lacunae of ontological (self-)doubt. La Moustache’s nightmarish nexus between space and identity calls to mind the interrelated body of thought of Bourdieu and Foucault, and specifically underscores their common emphasis on the implacable human need to demarcate one’s own mental and physical “space” in spite of our terrible powerlessness to do so. Therefore, bringing the Bourdieusian concepts of doxa and habitus and the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia into dialogue with Carrère’s novel can enrich our understanding of the intersections between these two seminal thinkers, who share an imperative to chart the territory of the “unthought” in social and cultural reproduction (Bourdieu) as “a knower straying far afield of himself” (Foucault 1986), while also underlining the timeliness of continuing to grapple with the “enigmatic...

The maternal gift: mothers’ investment in their daughters’ higher education

This article explores the degree to which mothers participate in decisions surrounding their daughters’ university choices in the English higher education sector, based on a gendered PhD study involving mother and adult daughter pairings in southern England. Examples are given of how extended middle-class mothering practices are enabling their daughters to gain greater access to higher education. Mothers cite the burden of the debt as a key factor for their continued inclusion during the time of their daughters’ undergraduate study. Bourdieusian concepts, including gift exchange, are used to consider the explicit provision of the investment of mothers’ capital beyond compulsory education that I term ‘the maternal gift’. The maternal gift of mothers’ involvement and investment maintains social divisions for those less able to provide on such a high economic level and creates the possibility of socially divisive outcomes.

Illusio and overwork: playing the game in the accounting field

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand: how and why do experienced professionals, who perceive themselves as autonomous, comply with organizational pressures to overwork? Unlike previous studies of professionals and overwork, the authors focus on experienced professionals who have achieved relatively high status within their firms and the considerable economic rewards that go with it. Drawing on the little used Bourdieusian concept of illusio, which describes the phenomenon whereby individuals are “taken in and by the game” (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992), the authors help to explain the “autonomy paradox” in professional service firms. Design/methodology/approach – This research is based on 36 semi-structured interviews primarily with experienced male and female accounting professionals in France. Findings – The authors find that, in spite of their levels of experience, success, and seniority, these professionals describe themselves as feeling helpless and trapped, and experience bodily subju...

Impression management as symbolic capital: an intercultural comparison of presentations by CEOs on social network sites

Social Network Sites (SNS) play an increasingly important role in the European business world, especially with respect to cross-cultural impression management. Departing from the Bourdieusian concept of “capital,” this paper analyzes the differences in the use of two popular business SNS: XING in Germany and LinkedIn in Denmark. We summarize those differences and relate them to different cultural contexts and impression management practices. Our sample consists of Danish Higher Executives (HEs)/managers (e.g., CEOs) and companies that have profiles on both SNS, thus reaching out to both the German and the Danish markets. It is apparent that even business experts operating in both markets could better adapt to the standards and possibilities offered by the German SNS with respect to impression management. We introduce a set of recommendations to foster SNS-related and culture-sensitive impression management.

How Bourdieu bites back: recognising misrecognition in education and educational research

Having noted that some use of Bourdieusian concepts in educational research is superficial, this paper offers a view of the distinctiveness of Bourdieu’s concepts via the example of misrecognition, which is differentiated from the concept with the same name in Fraser’s work. An account is given of a recent research project on white middle-class identity and school choice, which suggests that whilst parents avoided a common misrecognition (regarding school quality), they were nevertheless reliant on other forms of misrecognition (regarding the qualities of their children) that are equally important in the relationship between social class and educational inequalities. Finally, the paper suggests that educational understandings, including some educational research, are predisposed to misrecognise Bourdieusian concepts, and four areas of tension are identified. The paper argues against ‘light usage’ of Bourdieu whilst acknowledging that the approach can produce a pessimistic account that is at odds with some educational values.

Perceptions of the ‘Occupational Other’: Interpreters, Social Workers and Intercultures

This article investigates occupational intercultures generated between interpreters and social workers, and is informed by research in Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Bourdieusian concepts of field, habitus and zones of uncertainty are used to illuminate the particular status of interpreter mediation within the interculture as a backdrop to theorising about the impact of interpreter mediation on the nature of social workers? change agency and reflexive approaches to practice. The article reports on an exploratory and mixed-methods qualitative study in which interpreters and social workers in statutory and non-statutory services were interviewed about their perceptions of the ?occupational Other?, and in which a discourse-analytical approach to the data helped take account of the researcher?s position as an insider of the interpreting community in the final analytic write-up. The findings suggest that the interculture can often be weakened due to poor understandings of the structural weaknesses in the constitution of public service interpreting and the ?recontextualising? practices that occur in interaction; furthermore, interpreter mediation appears to challenge communicative practices in social work in ways that practitioners do not always have the resources to address effectively. The article ends with a call for more research at the micro level of interaction.

Responsible leadership development – crucible experiences and power relationships in a global professional services firm

There is increasing consensus that Human Resource Development (HRD) has a central role to play in promoting the principles and practices of corporate responsibility (CR). An important HRD intervention involves developing responsible leaders able to attract support for CR throughout the organisation, but empirical research is lacking in this area. This article contributes to the theoretical and practical knowledge of responsible leadership development (RLD) by addressing two questions: first, how does RLD engender learning that goes beyond basic cognitive awareness? Second, what affects participants’ abilities to manifest this learning in the workplace? A review of the RLD literature reveals a ‘knowing-doing gap’, which, it is posited, may be linked to a lack of theorisation around power. This issue is investigated by means of a case study on a responsible leadership development programme run by a professional services firm. Drawing on Bourdieusian concepts of language and power, the study reveals some of the mechanisms that inspired new socially responsible values whilst also demonstrating some of the contextual barriers inhibiting their manifestation in the workplace. It is argued that HRD professionals need to engage with Bourdieusian ideas of language and power to promote deeper learning around responsible leadership, which can more easily be embedded into the workplace.

The Limits of Local Accommodation: Why Contentious Events Remain Prone to Conflict in Northern Ireland

This article examines the difficulties of finding local solutions to the problem of contentious events in contemporary Northern Ireland. In so doing, it offers a sociological perspective on fundamental divisions in Northern Ireland: between classes and between communities. It shows how its chosen case study—parades and associated protests in north Belfast—exemplifies the most fundamental problem that endures in post-Agreement Northern Ireland, namely that political authority is not derived from a common civic culture (as is the norm in Western liberal democracy) but rather that legitimacy is still founded on the basis of the culture of either one or the other community. Haugaard's reflections on authority and legitimacy are used to explore Northern Ireland's atypical experience of political conflict vis-à-vis the Western liberal democratic model. The Bourdieusian concepts of field illusio and doxa help to explain why it is that parading remains such an important political and symbolic touchstone in this society.