Bourdieu's Concept Research Articles

Where is community during COVID-19? The experiences of families living in housing insecurity.

This article explores the understanding of community to families living in insecure housing in one Australian state during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Five female‐headed families were interviewed during the pandemic and asked to identify what community meant to them. All participants were referred by an agency caring for families experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. Community was defined using Bourdieu's concept of social capital, allowing for both bonding and bridging relationships to be explored. Bonding relationships refer to close emotional ties with family and friends, while bridging ties establish networks that provide individuals with access to resources. Two themes emerged that shed light on how community is understood during times of crisis: The first suggests that for families experiencing housing insecurity, particularly women escaping family violence, their links with community were primarily maintained by welfare and church agencies. These organisations provided bridging social capital during the pandemic that allowed the women and their children to cope with the isolation and to maximise opportunities. The second themes point to traditional notions of community as family and geographical space. Here the findings are mixed. Resources provided by government, and mediated through the welfare agency, allowed these families to create a safe and comfortable space. However, for First Nations women, the lockdown meant that it was difficult to maintain community obligations, while children who appeared to identify community with attendance at school found the lockdown confusing because of the disruption to their normal social space.

An Evaluation on Habitus in Visual Arts Education

It is necessary to consider an examination that causes our interests, attitudes and behaviors towards art and makes the creation and consumption of art meaningful and understandable from different perspectives. The interaction between the elements of social structure and art is one of the areas that can be addressed in this sense. This situation requires a shift to a sociological point of view because it contains theoretical bases that will enable the examination. One of the theoretical structures that will enable a sociological examination is Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus. The concept of habitus represents our habits, tendencies, appreciations, etc. While thinking about our artistic tendencies, appreciations, behaviors and predispositions, the role and decisiveness of habitus emerge as an approach that we can use in theory. This study aims to try to explain the concept of habitus, which is mentioned with sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in the context of Visual Arts Education. The research was created based on the literature review. Within the scope of the literature, the theoretical foundations of the concept of habitus have been explained and summarized, and the basic characteristics of habitus have been interpreted through art and visual arts education. Based on the findings of the research, the concept of habitus has emerged as a theoretical approach that will help art education researchers to make sense of artistic and educational behaviors and encourage them to think deeper about the subject.

Field-specific cultural capital and persistence in college majors

We investigate the possibility that Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital, ways of being that facilitate assimilation to the dominant culture, is field-specific in its manifestation and intergenerational transmission. We focus on a field of central economic and academic interest: STEM. Data on around 13,000 undergraduates from the large nationally representative High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 indicate that parents' STEM-specific cultural capital positively contributes to youth's selection of and persistence in STEM majors in the form of parents' STEM education. We find that transmission is enacted through youths' field-specific institutionalized cultural capital (e.g., STEM grades and test scores), field-specific embodied cultural capital (e.g., STEM attitudes), and characteristics of their educational institutions (e.g., four-year rather than two-year college). This study contributes to the theory of cultural capital by examining cultural capital through a field-specific lens, and then specifically elucidating how it is expressed and transmitted within that field.

International Academic Affiliations: Destination or Journey? An Oman-Based Study of Policy, Practice and Potential

National policy requires private colleges in Oman to have an academic affiliation with a foreign university. How this policy is received and acted on was investigated through an interview-based study involving colleges with affiliates based in England, Scotland, India, Malaysia and Jordan. The study draws on social practice theory, Bourdieu's concept of capital and ecological systems theory and finds examples of affiliate partnerships that are evolving constructively in response to the ongoing development of the local institutions, the accumulation of capital and the agency of local actors, and the dynamics of the environment. These partnerships are perceived and experienced by local HE colleges as an ongoing journey. This evolution of partnerships, which is facilitated by historically loose policy requirements, offers a promising and contrasting narrative to that of relatively static transnational education (TNE) arrangements in which receiving nations and institutions are perceived as likely victims of educational and cultural imperialism.

Hope, habitus and social recognition: A Bourdieusian proposal

AbstractThis paper provides a conceptual account of Pierre Bourdieu's operational concept of habitus through the lens of social recognition. More precisely, a ‘habitus of recognition’, or ‘recognitive habitus’, is defined as a set of perceptive patterns and expectations whose main function is to actualize social behaviour that allows reciprocal recognition among social agents. In this respect, this paper explains why, thanks to the recognition paradigm, we can better grasp how habitus works as a pre‐reflective common sense capable of producing coordinated collective actions and social reproduction.

Constructing a white mask through English: the misrecognized self in Orientalism

AbstractBy examining relationships between language and race within Bourdieu's theoretical concept of “misrecognition”, this article highlights distinctive ways in which the mental structure of a minority individual becomes Orientalized in relation to a racialized identity construction. Specifically, it examines how English becomes misrecognized asthekey to a desired white identity in the case of one prominent Korean intellectual of the 19th century, Yun Chi-Ho (1864–1945). To this end, this article analyses the English diaries written by Yun, which began during his sojourn in the United States (1888–1893). The analysis of the diaries illustrates how Yun subjected himself to an Orientalized gaze in 19th century America, a society marked by racial and language boundaries and how his inferiority complex led him to pursue a white identity with English as a primary tool. While Self-Orientalism is regarded as both a cause and outcome of Asian participation in the construction of the Orient, this article reconceptualizes Self-Orientalism as a process of misrecognition born out of the colonial context of superior-inferior distinction characterized by the boundedness of language and race. The article concludes by broadening out from the case of Yun to illustrate the impact of misrecognition on the continued covert operation of Self-Orientalism in contemporary times.

Health workers and Sub Saharan African women's understanding of equal access to healthcare in Norway.

This article describes and analyzes conceptions of equal access to healthcare by health workers and Sub Saharan African women living in Norway. The main objective of the study was to find out if there is equal access to healthcare as understood by both the provider and receiver side of healthcare. The two sides have different positions from where to observe and judge the services given, which can give a broader understanding of the healthcare system. Do Sub Saharan African women find healthcare services unjust and discriminating? Do health workers share conceptions of access held by these women? This study used a qualitative fieldwork research design. One hundred interviews were done with health workers and 55 interviews were done with Somali, Gambian and Eritrean women who all had experienced female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C). The study found a mismatch in the conceptions of access to healthcare between health workers and the women. Health workers did not believe there was equal access to healthcare and were critical of how the system functioned, whereas the women trusted the system and believed there was equal access. However, both sides had corresponding views on the following challenges facing the healthcare system: little time available to identify symptoms, difficulties in navigating the system, difficulties in getting referrals, and some negative adjudication by some health workers. Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus and hysteresis, and candidacy theory were used to analyze the collected data. It was concluded that health workers and the women based their experiences of healthcare on differing cultural frames and expectations. The women seemed to base their assessments of healthcare on previous experiences from their home country, while health workers based their understanding from experiences within the system.

Who you gonna call? Theorising everyday security practices in urban spaces with multiple security actors – The case of Beirut's Southern Suburbs

Who do urban residents turn to in everyday security incidents? Why do some go to the police in certain locations, others to armed nonstate actors or kinship networks? We explore the ways in which residents and security actors – state and nonstate – negotiate everyday (in)security in contested urban spaces with multiple security actors. We consider how hybrid security assemblages are shaped by physical and social space and how everyday security practices shape space. We use Beirut's Southern Suburbs (Dahiyeh) as a site of theorisation, bringing local vernacular experiences into dialogue with Bourdieu's concepts of capital, habitus, doxa and field to develop a spatially dynamic analytical framework. Using this framework, we map security actors' different types and sizes of capital and how this capital is affected by residents' habitus and doxa within the everyday security field. We introduce the notion of ‘translocal habitus’ to capture the impact of families' origins outside Dahiyeh on everyday security dynamics. The framework we develop contributes to the spatialisation, vernacularisation and pluralisation of everyday security studies, furthers the spatialisation of Bourdieu and adds to the literature on hybrid forms of governance. Our analysis is based on extensive fieldwork, including over 150 interviews and ‘street chats’ with residents and security actors in and around Dahiyeh.

Malign and covert nationalism within British newspapers reporting of Eddie Jones’ appointment as head coach of the men's England national rugby union team

The appointment of Eddie Jones as the England men's rugby union head coach in 2015 was significant because he was the first foreign-born individual to occupy this role. After sourcing 136 British newspaper articles published one week either side of Jones’ official announcement for his appointment on 20th November 2015, this study identified three overarching themes for how narratives of this event were framed: (a) negativity and the loss of national identity; (b) positivity and need for cultural change underscored with conditional acceptance; and (c) declinism with the need for succession planning. Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus, embodied cultural and symbolic capital were drawn upon to theorise how much of the media initially rejected Jones’ appointment. The results indicated an overt and xenophobic ‘Little Englander’ narrative was first presented by some journalists based on Jones’ perceived Australian habitus and capital not reflecting the cultural values attached to English rugby union. Even when reports were positive, binary ‘one of our own/us’ and ‘outsider/them’ narratives represented symbolic violence through a malign ‘Little Englander’ attitude, albeit one that is a more covert form of discrimination than has previously been reported. Recommendations for continued analyses that acknowledge temporality within this discipline are finally presented.

Habitus and climate change: Exploring support and resistance to sustainable welfare and social-ecological transformations in Sweden.

We explore peoples' dispositions and practices with regard to social-ecological transformations based on a sustainable welfare policy strategy in Sweden. We draw on Bourdieu's concept of habitus to highlight the relations between social positions, dispositions, and position-takings. Using data from an own survey, we identify habitus types and place these in the space of social positions. We apply principal component analysis to a large set of questions about social, ecological, and climate change related topics and identify eight underlying eco-social dispositions. These are used for cluster analyses that find typical constellations of eco-social dispositions within the Swedish population: variants of eco-social habitus. We find seven habitus types and describe their social characteristics, political preferences, and practices. Finally, the seven habitus are plotted onto the map of social positions, the Bourdieusian social space, highlighting their relations-proximities, tensions, and contestations-to each other. We find evidence that political struggles around social-ecological transformations reproduce existing social structures but are also connected to new "eco-social" divisions that appear between groups in similar positions. In the conclusion we discuss the implications for social-ecological transformations based on sustainable welfare.

Learning language and gaining employment: problems for refugee migrants in Australia

PurposeMuslim refugee migrants are a growing ethno-religious disadvantaged minority group in several Western societies, and host-country language proficiency and employment are essential factors in reducing this disadvantage. This paper thus explores the efficacy of English training programs in facilitating the settlement and employment of a group of male Muslim refugees in Australia.Design/methodology/approachThis study is qualitative in nature, with data collected using semi-structured, in-depth interviews with the eight participants in the study. Analysis was conducted using Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital and habitus.FindingsEnglish training programs offered to Australian Muslim men are problematic in their aim of linking them to employment. Areas of concern are identified in respect to the training hours offered, their learning environment, their content and pedagogy, their lack of focus on employment and their failure to recognise the existing work skills of the migrants.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is conducted with a small sample of male Muslim migrants: while the findings may be similar for other refugee groups, further research is necessary to confirm this.Practical implicationsThere is a need to restructure the current English training programs offered to refugee migrants in Australia, Muslim or otherwise. This study identifies several areas where such restructuring might occur, both at the policy and pedagogical levels.Originality/valueFew studies focus on Australian male Muslim migrants. This study enhances understanding of this under-researched group and their struggles to learn English, find employment and rise above their disadvantaged societal position.

MEMAKNAI IMPLEMENTASI CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY MENUJU SUSTAINABILITY DALAM PERSPEKTIF SOCIAL PRACTICE BOURDIEU

This study aims to interpret the implementation of CSR in achieving corporate sustainability studied with Bourdieu's social practice theory. This study uses an interpretive paradigm with a phenomenological approach. The research location is PT. Tirta Investama - Pasuruan Keboncandi Factory. Data collection was carried out by conducting in-depth interviews with key informants who took turns to obtain data triangulation.The results showed that the implementation of CSR on the research site was well organized and structured and became a permanent and incidental program. CSR is implemented based on the principle of "dual commitment", which is the belief that if a company wants to be successful in business, the company must be successful socially. The process of defining and understanding CSR towards corporate sustainability is pursued by forming a habitus, maintaining the existence of capital and mastering the field, this is in line with Bourdieu's concept of social practice.

Re-examining the gap: A critical realist analysis of eye health inequity among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians

The prevalence of diabetes among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (hereafter ‘Aboriginal’) Australians is three times greater than non-Aboriginal Australians, contributing to a greater risk of blindness from treatable and preventable ocular conditions, most prominently cataract and diabetic retinopathy. In rural and remote Aboriginal communities, blindness prevalence is higher, and ocular treatment coverage and uptake are lower. In collaboration with Aboriginal Community Based Researchers (CBRs), this study explored complex contingent factors that shape access to eye health services among rural and remote Aboriginal Australians living with diabetes. Interviews (n = 126) and focus groups (n = 12) were conducted with patients, primary care clinicians, and CBRs, in four rural communities in the Northern Territory and New South Wales. Factors internal and external to health systems were examined, drawing on Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, and doxa to understand agency and decision-making among patients and clinicians. The study used the ontology of critical realism, categorising contingent factors as underlying structures (generative mechanisms), and applying a decolonising approach that centred causal relationships and tensions between dominant (Western biomedical neoliberalism) and non-dominant (Aboriginal) value systems. Three forms of marginalisation; linguistic, economic, and cultural, were identified as the generative mechanisms that inhibit equitable eye health outcomes. Marginality is linked to structural factors that position Aboriginal culture as a barrier, and is reinforced through biomedical health systems, and the agents who operate in and influence them. In order to address eye health inequity, a shift in how Aboriginal cultural sovereignty is understood within health systems is needed, to position it as a strength that can facilitate eye care accessibility, and to support enhanced cultural responsivity among clinicians and service providers.

The impact of social class on top managers’ attitudes towards employee downsizing

In this paper, we examine the impact of top managers' social class on their attitude towards employee downsizing. Mobilizing Bourdieu's concepts of social class as a unique social position defined by the combination of economic, cultural, and social capital, we develop hypotheses about the effects of different capital endowments, which we test with unique data on more than 2500 top managers in Germany. We find that both higher economic and higher social capital increase openness towards employee dismissals, while higher cultural capital reduces it. We also find that the overall effect of a top manager's social position is an aggregate of the effects of the individual types of capital: Managers with high cultural, low social and low economic capital are least open to employee dismissals, while those with low cultural, high social and high economic capital are most open – with the other combinations lying somewhere between the two extremes.

Like a fish in water: Habitus adaptation mechanisms of informal tourism entrepreneurs in Thailand

This article investigates possible pathways of habitus change by informal tourism entrepreneurs in Thailand. Bourdieu's concept of habitus is depicted as a person's understanding of the world. Do people adapt their worldview in response to only external stimuli? Through ethnographic fieldwork including participant observations and active semi-structured interviews with 53 participants, this paper identifies a classification of four modes of habitus adaptation: (1) Understanding and appreciating the field and its conditions, (2) Challenging core beliefs systems, (3) Applying a practical sense to ‘objective possibilities’, and, (4) Challenging non-reflective dispositions. We argue that charting the modes of habitus adaptation could help policymakers understand the change processes of informal entrepreneurs in the tourism sector and their willingness to change.

No place like home: Sociocultural drivers of return migration among Israeli academic families

AbstractResearch on return migration of the highly skilled is dominated by economic reasoning, whereas nonmaterial drivers of their repatriation are poorly understood. This study explored the journeys of 22 Israeli academic families who returned home after 3–7 years of (post)doctoral training in the United States/Canada. The migration narratives of these families, belonging to Israeli Ashkenazi elites, were interpreted using Bourdieu's concepts of cultural and social capital. Feeing alienated as immigrants in the American academia and society, most returnees reckoned that their professional potential could be maximised only at home. They manifested strong national identities, cultural and filial attachments and wanted their children to grow up Israeli. However, facing precarious Israeli realities, the informants described their return as second migration. Within 2 years, most scientists landed academic or research positions at home and were satisfied with their work lives. Their ‘trailing wives’ have typically paid a higher career tax for their American sojourn, yet no couples in the sample regretted their return decision. Thus, purely economic explanations of mobility among academics and other professionals may overlook salient sociocultural forces shaping family‐based return decisions.

Understanding the cultural potential of rural festivals: A conceptual framework of cultural capital development

This study examines the under-investigated cultural outcomes of small-scale festivals. Specifically, it uses Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital to explore the cultural outcomes of festival participation in rural locations, investigating if and how small-scale festivals are arenas for displaying, reinforcing, and acquiring culture. The aims were to investigate whether attendees enhance their cultural capital by participating in literary festivals and to identify the elements that play a role in this process. Interviews and observations were undertaken at two small-scale literary festivals: Listowel Writers' Week located in a rural village in the west of Ireland, and Pordenonelegge located in a small town in the north of Italy. Findings reveal that cultural capital can be reinforced, stimulated, and acquired in a process that is shaped by both internal and external elements. A new conceptual model capturing this process is presented. The model characterises the internal elements as: demographic features, behavioural dimension, enjoyment, involvement, and pre-existing capitals; and the external elements as: festival features, social context, spatial and temporal dimensions. The empirical findings show how rural literary festivals can be rewarding and fulfilling experiences that lead to individual cultural capital development. Further research is needed to examine whether the model portraying the development of cultural capital associated with literary festival participation can be applied to other types of festivals.

Young women’s recovery from problematic alcohol use: a critical realist reconceptualization

ABSTRACT Interventions for problematic alcohol use typically focus on clients as individuals even when these clients continue interacting with their social networks. This paper reports a study about young women's help seeking for problematic alcohol use, examining Alcohol and other Drug outreach service staff perceptions of social network interactions among young women receiving support. We argue that critical realism enables analysis into underlying mechanisms influencing young women's recovery. Pierre Bourdieu's concepts within his theory of capital, and Margaret Archer's concept of conscious reflexivity, assisted in analysing social interactions which helped or hindered recovery. A causal mechanism of legitimacy was associated with social networks that hindered young women's recovery. A sociological approach to problematic alcohol use that combines support for individuals along with their social networks is necessary. More effective promotion of alcohol harms could aid conscious reflexivity, that may help change the habitus of excessive alcohol use.

Inclusive Education in the Illusio Space. A Proposal to Research the School FIeld

This article describes planned research on the practice of inclusive education in Poland in the context of Pierre Bourdieu's [3] concept of society, in which field is one of the basic concepts. In using this term, the author intends to describe the social space of the school, the social space’s organization, and the state of the school’s social position; as well as to answer the question: What is the reality of inclusive education, as analyzed using the illusio category? It is necessary to analyze the state of the implementation of the assumptions made by inclusive education in primary schools, and to find out the opinions of teachers working with students covered by this type of education. In P. Bourdieu’s [3] concept of society, the field is the source of what is social, it shapes it in those who are within its area of influence. This “attitude” is called illusio [11, p. 188]. Illusio is a state of engrossment in a game that the participant is unaware of. This is the result of direct recognition of the field's requirements. Everyday educational life in the context of P. Bourdieu's concept falls within the field of activities of the Ministry of National Education. The teacher takes part in a game whose rules are set by the Ministry of National Education. In the context of the proposed research within the scope of the field, apart from teachers, there are also the parents of the children covered by inclusive education.

Class conditioning and class positioning in young people's everyday life with digital media: Exploring new forms of class-making in the Swedish media welfare state

Abstract In this article, I explore how social class shapes the conditions and configurations of digital media practice in the everyday life of young people in Sweden. Drawing on Bourdieusian theory and qualitative interview data from two research projects, I complicate the notion of Sweden as a universally wired media welfare state by showing how economic and cultural forces are structuring Internet access and digital media practice along the lines of preexisting social divisions. Invoking Bourdieu's conceptualisation of social classes as defined both intrinsically and relationally, I identify and exemplify two different but interrelated processes whereby class makes a difference in young people's everyday relationship to digital media: class conditioning and class positioning. I conclude the article by arguing that distinguishing between these processes might offer a better understanding of the relationship between class and everyday media practice. The complexities of advancing a welfare-oriented media policy in the age of digital media are also discussed.