GARANCE MARECHAL MA SOCIOLOGICAL RESEARCH SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT, LANCASTER UNIVERSITY
ASSIGNMENT: CONTEMPORARY DEBATES IN SOCIOLOGY
(SOCL 921)
ACADEMIC YEAR: 2007/2008
Word count (without bibliography and boxed quotes): 7426
“It is very difficult to work in a rich empirical way with class categories. You can onlydevelop them in an objective income basis, or on structures of work and employment. Youcan’t relate them to how people live and think, eat, how they dress, love, organize theirlives and so on. If you are interested in what is going on in people’s minds, and the kinds oflife they are leading, you have to get away from the old categories. Then, you can draw apicture of a differentiated society with different cultures of individualisation and differentreactions to it. It is possible to identify a variety of what I will call collective life situations– not classes – and all of these have a different political meaning [emphasis added]”.
Ulrich Beck, Zombie Categories, in: The Art of Life, 2005, p43.
Pierre Bourdieu is a leading sociological contributor to the development of a complex,practical and nuanced understanding of class. Through his concept of habitus, Bourdieuexplored how social positions permeate the everyday day life of agents and can influencethe way they ‘live and think, eat, how they dress, love and organize their lives’. In thatsense, the concept of habitus seems to offer a theoretical line which could be thought ofas addressing Beck’s above critiques, even though Bourdieu does not fully assimilatehabitus to class (Sayer, 2005).Beck’s critique of the concept of class as a useful sociological analytic emerges in thecontext of his social theory of individualization and reflexive modernization. Archer
(2007: 37) critiques Beck’s analysis of individualization as the ‘antithesis of collectiveclass experience’ which she contrasts with Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, without being
fully satisfied with the latter on the grounds of its ahistoricity, and its exaggeration ofcontinuity, homogeneity and reproduction over discontinuity, difference and change.
Habitus also downplays the significance of human intentionality and his agents do notconfront their circumstances but are part of them.
Is Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and interpretation of social conditioning still useful in acontext of social transformation towards contextually discontinuous forms of modernity?
In her attempt to offer an alternative analysis, Archer (2007: 48) stresses how both the
theorization of reflexive modernity and Bourdieu’s usage of habitus contain
“unacceptable assumptions about the history of routinization and reflexivity”. In brief,
Beck et al. (2003) only recognize reflexivity as a recent effect of second (or late)
modernity, whilst Bourdieu tends to ignore the possibility of lay reflexivity. Beck et al.’s#p#分頁標題#e#
arguments about individualization and reflexive modernization overemphasize change,
fluidity, fragmentation, individualisation and the collapse of social structures (contextual
discontinuity) when Bourdieu mainly gives pre-eminence to historical continuity,
habituation and reproduction.
For Archer (2007:42), “the difference between actively making our way through the
world or passively bearing the weight of the world pivots upon the presence of absence of
[lay] reflexivity”. Bourdieu et al.’s (1999) accounts, in The Weight of the World, offer a
rich picture of ‘ordinary suffering’ in a selection of ‘collective life situations’. The
difficult trajectories of actors, their contradictory constraints, dilemmas and
contradictions are explored through interviews and interpreted. The book carries a critical
intent in presenting the effects of habitus on individual lived lives, but it is questionable
how far the accounts as presented demonstrate the potential for effective resistance. This
assignment undertakes an analysis of some of these accounts in the light of critical
commentaries by Sayer (2005) and Archer (2003, 2007). Archer (2003, 2007)'s threestage
conceptualization of the mediation of structure to agency is used to investigate how
‘agential subjectivity’ can contribute to shaping agents’ reactions to constraining social
influences and position (as well as their choice to resist).
The structure of the argument stands as follows: In the first section, I critically consider
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and point out some of his limitations, as identified by
Sayer (2005) and Archer (2007), in particular. In a second section, I summarize Archer
(2003, 2007)’s alternative theoretical framework to reconsider the analysis of interviews
in Bourdieu et al. (1999). In a third section, I critically analyze 3 accounts from this
alternative viewpoint. The conclusion offers a final discussion of Bourdieu's critical
intent and of the potential limitations of his theory of habitus.
Critical discussion of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus
Bourdieu developed the concept of habitus from his early anthropological fieldwork in
Kabylie (Algeria), which he further details in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) and
Distinction (1979). The concept of habitus is part of Bourdieu’s attempt to theorize the
logics of practice which constitute the principles of production (and reproduction) of the
observed social order (Wolfreys, 2000). Such theory aimed to account for the relationship
between objective social structures and subjective social experience, in exploring
reciprocal processes of “incorporation and objectification, whereby individuals produce
the objective environment which they internalize” (op.cit.: 4). Bourdieu’s analytical#p#分頁標題#e#
project stems from a ‘structuralist-constructivist’ perspective which aims to transcend
traditional sociological dialectical forms of thinking in terms of opposed and
incompatible positions: objectivism vs. subjectivism, physicalism vs. psychologism or
structure vs. agency (Bourdieu, 1989). Referring to structuralism, Bourdieu posits the
existence of objective structures “within the social world and not only symbolic systems
(language, myths, etc.)” independently from “the consciousness and will of agents, which
are capable of guiding and constraining their practices or their representations” (op. cit:
14). The ‘constructivist’ dimension of his theory relates to his twofold conception of
social genesis: “on the one hand of the schemes of perception, thought and action which
are constitutive of what I call habitus, and on the other hand of social structures, and
particularly what I call fields and of groups, notably those we ordinarily call social
classes” (op. cit: 14). The relationships between subjective perception of social relations
and objective categories, structures and possibilities are central to his theorizing.
In Outline of a Theory of Practice, the habitus is defined as “the durably installed
generative principle of regulated improvisations” which tend to reproduce regularities
and differences in social structure (Bourdieu, 1977: 78). The concept of habitus is
Bourdieu’s attempt to explain the way in which some of the objective possibilities of
social practice become translated and assimilated into subjective expectations of the
probable outcomes of situated and socially structured action. Habitus is tantamount to
agents’ senses of play in social contexts, the way in which they internalize not just the
rules of the social game, but how to play the game itself from definite/specific social
positions. It is the product of the internalization of the structures of the social world into
dispositions that generate: 1. meaning-giving perceptions and thought which involve
classifying and generative schemes to interpret social experience and the rules of the
social game 2. meaningful practices (structured patterns of behaviour or embodied skills)
that are adjusted to the particular social conditions of their application (Bourdieu, 1984).
Embodied skills (and behaviours)
The concept of habitus figures how subjective perceptions of possibilities and constraints
become inscribed into structured and stable patterns of behaviours and ‘incarnated in
bodies’. Habitual dispositions stand at a sub-conscious level, which makes them almost
instinctual or second-nature. Habitus can manifest through varied forms of individual and
social behaviours, from simple actions such as holding a door or a fork, to more complex#p#分頁標題#e#
forms of interactions in specific social occasions and contexts: the ‘proper handshake in a
particular social situation’, general ways of identifying and solving problems at university
or in the workplace, or expectations and ideals about “what happiness or the good life
means and entails”, for instance (Pickel, 2005: 439). Bourdieu’s habitus particularly
stresses the instantiation of practical beliefs and knowledge into bodies, in bodily
postures that “immediately recall thoughts and feelings” (bowing, etc…) and which
“conscious representation will never capture” (Hoy, 1999: 40). For Bourdieu, bodily
hexus and the habitus are two sides of the same coin, as arms and legs are “full of
imperatives”: they embody a “political mythology” and the whole social order “imposes
itself at the deepest level of body dispositions” (Hoy, 1999: 14). Habitus is therefore
embodied. In this respect, Sayer (2005: 36) stresses the value-laden character of
emotions, their relationality: emotions are always “commentaries which relate to our
concerns and evaluation of the import of things”, and often culturally mediated (some
emotions, like shame, may depend on specific cultural understandings and dispositions).
The structure of habitual dispositions is assumed to reflect “that of the corresponding
habitat in which they were formed”: different conditions of existence produce different
habitus (Sayer, 2005). Indeed, dispositions acquired in the context of specific social
positions occupied by agents imply “an adjustment to this position” (Bourdieu, 1989: 17).
The modes of behaviour produced by the habitus can be acquired very early on through
communication, imitation [or accommodation to] in the context of social transmission, or
of a change of habitat (Hoy, 1999; Sayer, 2005). Habitus aims to explain how
dispositions and perceptions get ‘taken for granted’ and contribute to get ‘a sense of one’s
place’ in a social space which has become familiar: “the habitus itself can be thought of
as like an old house – its order or logic has an aesthetic resemblance to a well lived-in,
much adapted interior” (Fowley, 1999: 4; Bourdieu, 1989). As Sayer (2005: 27) notes,
“the structure of dispositions seems to arise through a process of osmosis and shaping,
through accommodation to material circumstances and social relations, like living in a
crowed housing or being accustomed to hard manual labor or serving others”. As a result,
Bourdieu is said to assume an “ontological complicity between habitus and field” and as
well as an obvious compliance of agents with their particular dispositions and social
position (Sayer, 2005). Agents in similar social conditions are assumed to display#p#分頁標題#e#
homogeneous systematic sets of practices that are the product of “the application of
identical (or interchangeable) schemes, and [are] systematically distinct from the
practices constituting another life-style” (Bourdieu, 1984: 170).
Classifying scheme
Habitus underlies perception, and acts as a lens through which subsequent perceptions
are filtered as perceptions vary according to agent’s objective social position: “the
[subjective] representation of agents vary with their position (and with the interest
associated with it) and with their habitus, as a system of schemes of perception and
appreciation of practices, cognitive and evaluative structures which are acquired through
the lasting experience of a social position” (Bourdieu, 1989). It also creates systems of
differences and distinctions (systems of distinctive signs) which pair up typical life-styles
and particular economic and social conditions.
Class habitus is sometimes identified with habitus (Fowley, 1999; Sayer, 2005). Their
differences have been extensively discussed in Sayer (2005). Bourdieu’s understanding
of class as ‘social spaces’ and social groups in-the making and historical artefacts whose
continued existence is subject to reproduction in practice, departs from Marxist and
overall realist understandings (Bourdieu, 1989). In Distinction, Bourdieu (1984,
1989:16) explores the role of symbolic systems in their interplay with social geography
and ‘fields of power’: lifestyles contribute to objectify social positions while
dissimulating social distance and differences of locations “in the space of positions of
power”. For Bourdieu (1989: 16), the ‘truth’ of interactions cannot be found “within
interactions as it avails itself for observation”. Interactions tend to mask “the structures
that have realized them” as well as institutionalized distinctions and objective categories
hide the structuring practices which contribute to their reproduction (ibid.).
The habitus is not only a structuring structure, which organizes practices and the perception
of practices, but also a structured structure: the principle of division into logical classes
which organizes the perception of the social world is itself the product of internalization of
the division into social classes. Each class condition is defined, simultaneously, by its
intrinsic properties and by relational properties which it derives from its position in the
system if class conditions, which is also a system of differences, differential positions, i.e.,
by everything which distinguishes it from what it is not and especially from everything it is
opposed to; social identity is defined and asserted through difference. ” Pierre Bourdieu,
Distinction, 1984: 171.
Systems of differences are objectified by the differential relations between positions with#p#分頁標題#e#
regard to the distribution of resources (or forms of capital). The distribution of agents into
social positions depends on the overall volume of capital that they possess as well as the
structure of this capital. Social positions bind specific forms of capital (economic, social,
cultural or symbolic) together or prioritize some over others. Systems of meanings and
value are defined and reproduced through ordering, classifying and prioritizing things,
behaviours, ideas or ideals. Doxa, the deeply embedded ‘taken-for-granted assumptions
or orthodoxies of an epoch’, are productive of conscious and unconscious struggles
associated with the symbolic domination of the ruling classes (Fowley, 1999). When reembedded
into their social geography, the universality of values, ideas and ideals of doxa
can be reconsidered as hegemonic practices of categorisation which both express and
conceal ‘strategies of condescension’: “those strategies by which agents who occupy a
higher position in one of the hierarchies of objective space symbolically deny the social
distance between themselves and others” (Bourdieu, 1989:16).
Social judgements and interpretations reveal the social positions from which they
originate and subjective valuations carry an awareness of the relations between practices
or representations and objective positions in social space (Bourdieu, 1989). Differences
in embodied practices (ways of behaving), accent, opinions or expressions of taste (in
clothes, home interior design or hobbies) function as distinctive signs and as signs of
distinction (ibid.). To summarize, Bourdieu (1984, 1989:20) conceptualizes the social
world as a symbolic space/system, organized into “status groups characterized by
different lifestyles” and according to a “logic of difference or differential distance”
embedded in the objective distribution of properties (or capital), and in the subjective
internalization of and adjustments to these objective possibilities and constraints
(habitus). As a result, he considers the social world to be the product of a double
structuring: objectively through the distribution and combination of different forms of
capital and subjectively “because of the schemes of perception and appreciation,
especially those inscribed in language itself, express the state of relations of symbolic
power” (Bourdieu, 1989: 20). Bourdieu sees economic and cultural factors as having the
greatest power of social differentiation or division, even though he does not exclude other
factors. In Distinction, he particularly outlines a discussion of the habitus in relation to
the concept of class, as follows:
“The division into class performed by sociology leads to the common root of the
classifiable practices which agents produce and of the classificatory judgements they make#p#分頁標題#e#
of other agents’ practices and their own. The habitus is both the generative principle of
objectively classifiable judgments and the system of classification (principium divisionis) of
these practices. It is the relationship between the two capacities which define the habitus,
the capacity to produce classifiable practices and works, and the capacity to differentiate
and appreciate these practices and products (taste), that the represented social world, i.e.,
the space of life-styles, is constituted”. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, 1984: 170.
Reproduction vs. improvisation
Habitus paradoxically conveys both structured and structuring, durable and transposable
sets of practices, and carries out “a systematic, universal application” (Bourdieu, 1984:
170). In others words, it is constrained by circumstance yet generates patterns of action;
and it is adaptable enough to meld itself to changing circumstances and to reproduce
itself in new forms without changing fundamentally (Hoy 1999: 13). Indeed, its
conceptualization of habitus is flexible enough to account for certain degree of
indeterminacy and the “objective element of uncertainty” of relations between practices
and positions contributes to produce “the plurality of visions of the world which is itself
linked to the plurality of points of views” (Bourdieu, 1989: 20). Semantic elasticity (the
same word covering different practices) or the still ambiguous social meaning or
legitimacy systems of signs [and their displacement] in specific contexts contribute to
‘symbolic struggles’, which can be partly manipulated through conscious behavioural
strategies of self-presentation or attempts to alter categories of perception and evaluation
(social representations)1. As Sayer (2005) stresses, habitus is both productive and
economical.
It is also more generative and flexible than mere habit, as habitual dispositions are always
subject to improvisation and modification in practice (Wolfreys, 2000; Sayer, 2005).
Habit is generally understood in contradistinction to deliberations and decisions
attributable to the operations of the will. Indeed, conscious intentionality might set itself
the target of achieving the same effects as habitus (as for example in cultural engineering
initiatives) but habitus acts as a more powerful and urgent force precisely because it is
absorbed as “second-nature” and, at a common-sense level, “excludes all deliberation”
(Hoy, 1999: 11). It is neither fully unconscious nor rationally calculative, falling
somewhere on a continuum between the two, with the effect of rendering the agent a
carrier of external meaning2:
“Each agent, wittingly or unwittingly, willy nilly is a producer and reproducer of objective
meaning. Because his actions and works are the product of a modus operandi of which he is#p#分頁標題#e#
not the producer and has no conscious mastery, they contain an objective intention, as the
Scholastics put it, which always outruns his conscious intentions”. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline
of a logic of practice, 1977: 79
The production of objective meaning through [habitus generates] ‘distinctive dispositions
and interpretations’ (positive or negative signs of distinction) unintentionally (Bourdieu,
1989: 20). Habitus, although intelligible and coherent, does not emerge from “an
intention of coherence and a deliberate decision" (Hoy 1999:12). Bourdieu’s formulation
attempts to account for the diversity and creativity of individual social practices but
apparently remains contradictory. Refusing to think in economic terms of the hazards of
the combination of capital or atomized individual practice, Bourdieu stresses the uneven
cultural distribution of symbolic power among groups and the resulting stability of
objective meaning-making processes by those groups that hold privileged positions: “in
the determination of the objective classification and of the hierarchy of values granted to
individuals, not all the judgements have the same weight” (Bourdieu, 1989: 21). But at
the same time, he mentions the relative autonomy of symbolic struggles from objective
and legitimate social structures: “conflicts between symbolic powers that aim at imposing
the vision of legitimate divisions” are never fully solved and contribute to the on-going
character of world-making and its continued differentiation into structured social groups
(ibid.).
1 Here, Bourdieu attempts to refine Goffman’s contribution on self-presentation and Moscovici’s
formulation of social representations.
2 Hoy (1999: 11) provocatively argues that Bourdieu can be read as “deepening Foucault’s account of how
subjectivity is constructed through power relations” as he provides a much more detailed sociological
version of the processes by which what Foucauldians calls “intentionality without a subject” achieves its
effects.
“The source of historical action, that of the artist, the scientist, or the member of
government just as much as that of the worker or the pretty civil servant, is not an active
subject confronting society as if that society were an object constituted externally. The
source resides neither in consciousness nor in things but in the relationship between two
stages of the social, that is, between the history objectified in things, in the form of
institutions, and in the history incarnated in bodies, in the form of that system of enduring
dispositions which I call habitus”. Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words, 1990: 190.
Sayer (2005: 25) proposes a critical realist interpretation of Bourdieu’s habitus which
aims to be non-deterministic and [reasonably] dynamic. He views the ‘powers and#p#分頁標題#e#
susceptibilities of the habitus’ as dispositions as real but they may or may not be
activated, depending on situations. In the continuity of Bourdieu’s original formulation,
other mediating factors are considered in his analysis which can ‘facilitate, block or
override’ the “causal powers of constraint and enablement” of habitual dispositions and
influence the outcome of agents’ courses of action, such as: gender, age, race, etc…
(Sayer, 2005; Archer, 2003: 134). Consciousness is also invoked as a possible mediator
of change: “a habitus can undergo modification in the face of different fields or even due
to an awakening of consciousness and social analysis” (Sayer, 2005: 25; citing Bourdieu).
Sayer (2005), after discussing the differences between habitus and class, nevertheless
tends to assimilate habitus to class habitus, in line with Bourdieu for whom “struggles
over classifications [and values] is a fundamental dimension of class struggle” (Bourdieu:
1989: 21, 23). His view slightly contrasts with Archer (2003, 2007) who seeks to explore
mediating processes of structure to agency further and sees habitus’ subconscious nature
as being heavily problematic with regard to change, awareness and reflexivity. Habitus
encompasses processes of both reproduction and change. It does not merely incarnate
sedimented history and practices into bodies and institutions but emphasizes the
prevalence of past (structures and practices) over ongoing processes. The unconscious
and second-nature of habitus is the product of the forgetting of history (“history turned
into nature, but denied as such”) resulting from subjective incorporation of objective
structures (Bourdieu, 1977: 78). The ‘relevance’ and ‘continued applicability’ of the
concept is challenged by Archer (2007: 28), for whom recent decline of routine action as
a result of social macro transformations would stretch the concept too far: “the new array
of shifting, temporary and precarious positions is too fluid to be consolidated into
correlated dispositions, which are inherited and shared by those similarly positioned”.
Reflexivity and internal conversation as necessary mediators of agency and
structure
In creating his own constructivist (and very Saussurian) version of structuralism,
Bourdieu’s aimed to distance himself from the two dominant intellectual currents in postwar
France: structuralism and existentialism3. It thus rejected approaches in which
individual subjects were the by-products of social structures, as well as those in which
social structures were the by-products of cumulative decisions of [Angst-ridden]
individual actors. For Bourdieu (1989: 19), firstly the construction of social reality “is not
carried out in a social vacuum but subjected to structural constraints”, secondly,#p#分頁標題#e#
“structuring structures, cognitive structures, are themselves socially constructed because
they have a social genesis”; thirdly, the construction of social reality is not only “an
individual enterprise” but “a collective enterprise”, as agents’ representations and
dispositions vary with their social position.
It is Bourdieu’s intention that the concept of habitus should not be encompassed by “the
usual antinomies of free will and determinism, or conscious and unconscious agency, and
even the individual and society”, as Hoy (1999: 12) observes. Sayer (2005: 50) stresses
the “heavy explanatory burden” carried by the concept of habitus which still uniquely
fills a void to understand “the embodied character of dispositions, their generative power
and their relation to the wider social field”. It also offers a unique relational mode of
thinking about relative positions and how objective structures and subjective perceptions
are dialectically reproduced though practice. It exemplifies a relational understanding of
‘social reality’ as a system of relations (or social space) to be analyzed in terms of
objective relations between these positions and subjective perceptions of practices related
to these positions: “no doubt agents do have an active apprehension of the world. No
doubt that they do construct their vision of the world. But this construction is carried out
under structural constraints” (Bourdieu, 1989). For Archer (2007), habitus consequently
conflates agency and structure in his account of the interdependence of social positions
and dispositions. As part of the semi-conscious, habitus is not therefore available to
awareness for conscious reflective deliberation. This has the effect of depleting the agents
overall personal powers for creative improvisation, decision-making and intentional
action.
Archer (2007) stresses how the ‘workability of tradition’ and social reproduction itself
depends on reflexive practice. If one considers societies as open systems, inherent
contradictions, gaps, inconsistencies, frictions or conflicts will be encountered as part of
their activities which will require improvisation or decision-making which she considers
as reflexive activities. For Archer (2007: 28), the workability and maintenance of
traditional forms of social life also depends upon more than ‘positional’ prescriptions and
3 Bourdieu’s theory of social order production (and reproduction) departs from Levi-Straussian
structuralism, which subsumed social agency to the acting out of the fundamental and universal principles
of structure such as kinship, or Althusserian structuralism in which human subjects were called into being
(or interpellated) by social structures, including ideological state apparatuses. It contrasts with#p#分頁標題#e#
existentialism in which the individual subject’s being-in-the-moment is the source of all social and ethical
choice.
expectations, on the one hand and a ‘dispositional’ readiness to act on the other. There
are interactive processes to be accomplished that are unscripted and situations in which
interaction itself places the script into the actors’ hand” (Archer, 2007: 28)
Reflexive self-consciousness (and more often than not double reflexivity or ‘reflexivity
twice over’) is thought of by Archer (2003, 2007) as the transcendental condition of the
possibility of 1. any society and 2. objective structural influence on agents in the form of
socio-cultural conditioning.
Archer’s consideration of agential reflexivity
Considering how agential reflexivity mediates between “structurally shaped
circumstances”, the realization of personal projects and deliberate courses of action,
Archer (2003: 130) offers a three-stage model of the process of mediation between
structure and agency:
(i) Structural and cultural properties objectively shape the situations which agents confront
unvoluntarily, and possess generative powers of constraint and enablement in relation
to
(ii) Agents’ own configurations of concerns, as subjectively defined in relation to the three
orders of natural reality – nature, practice and society.
(iii) Courses of action are produced through the reflexive deliberations of agents who
subjectively determine their practical projects in relation to their objective
circumstances
In a first-stage, social structure and conditioning operate “by shaping our situations such
that they have the capacity to operate as constraints and enablements” (Archer, 2003:
132). This stage encompasses the transmission of structural and cultural properties to
agents and how “they potentially work as conditional influences upon them”. Processes
relating to this stage have been widely studied, as with Bourdieu’s theory of social space:
the situations encountered by agents are influenced by their objective positions “in
different sections of society with different vested interests” (Archer, 2003: 136). The
uneven distribution of ‘priviledges, rewards, or facilitation’ was specifically explored by
Bourdieu (1984) in his consideration of different forms of capital and his study of
symbolic power (cf. previous section). Nevertheless, the way agents receive and respond
to these influences in the context of socially contextualized situations still remain
unconsidered (Archer, 2003). Indeed, for Archer (2003: 132), cultural and structural
properties “only become causally efficacious in relation to human projects in society”. It
is in the context of “pursuing a project” that emerges “an encounter with social powers”#p#分頁標題#e#
(stage 2; ibid.). Of particular interest in this essay are projects endorsed by agents which
do not comply with the vested interests and habitus of a particular social position.
Investigating what she calls contextual discontinuity, Archer (2003: 136-137, 2007)
offers to considers the objectives and differential costs of definite courses of action as
they are subjectively experienced, reflected upon and evaluated from specific situational
environments (in terms of opportunity/cost, bonus/penalty incentives/disincentives, or
reasons and motives…) and their mediated influence on the conduct of [and commitment
to] strategic action.
Archer (2003:139) posits that “situations do not directly impact on us” but on our
concerns (or projects) in three orders: nature, practice and society. Projects are what
structural and cultural factors exert powers on, e.g. the expression of agents’ subjective,
reflexive and emergent mental powers to formulate objectives that are socially situated
(Archer, 2003: 133). They are the expression of subjects’ intentionality and personal
identity and mediate agential social autonomy and engagement. In this stage (stage 2),
agents deliberate “about their circumstances, in relation to their own concerns” and
reflect upon societal reflexivity (ibid.). Constraints and enablements are also “reflexively
mediated via our own concerns and according to how well we know our circumstances,
under own descriptions” (op.cit: 139).
‘Enablements require intelligent co-operation which can only be supplied by agents drawing
upon their own powers of creative deliberation. Similarly, constraints need considered
compliance in order to be effective, because their own powers are jeopardised once agents
consider circumvention instead. In short, the reflexive agent is an indispensable character
when accounting for either successful socio-cultural conditioning, or for its repudiation, or
for its contravention.” Margaret Archer. Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation,
2003: 140.
The third stage of the model, “which completes the mediatory process” is fully reflexive
and involves internal conversation. In stage 3, constraints and enablements are
subjectively scrutinized “under our own descriptions (which is the only way we can know
anything); we consult our projects which were deliberately defines to realise our
concerns; and we strategically adjust them into those practices which we conclude
internally (and always faillibly) will enable us to do (or be) what we care most in society”
(Archer, 2003: 133). Figure 1, extracted from Archer (2007: 89) summarizes the model
as it has been described.
Figure 1: Archer’s three-stage model: internal conversation and the pursuit of good life
Defining and Developing concrete Establishing satisfying#p#分頁標題#e#
dovetailing one’s courses of action sustainable
CONCERNS >>> PROJECTS >>> PRACTICES
(Internal goods) (Micro-politics) (Modus vivendi)
For Archer (2007: 88), “what we seek to do is reflexively defined by reference to the
concerns that we wish to realise”. Commitment to or deliberations about projects
(definition, priority or choice of concerns) contribute to the realization of a “satisfying
and sustainable modus vivendi” (op.cit.: 87). Archer (2007: 88; 2003: 149) considers “the
definition of a modus vivendi as a major preoccupation of internal conversation”: “a set of
practices which, in combination, both respects that which is ineluctable but also
priviledges that which matters most to the person concerned”. She also stresses the
precarious stability of any modus vivendi, which seeks to articulate a plurality of
successful practices, sometimes heterogeneous. A condition of diversity in agential
practices, such fragility stems from objective differences in positions but also the
faillibility of personal evaluation of situations and of commitments.
Ultimately, that realization means becoming who we want to be within the social order by
personifying selected social roles in a manner expressive of our personal concerns. That
means establishing practices, ones which are both satisfying to and sustainable by the
subject, in an appropriate social environment. Through such a modus vivendi a subject’s
personal identity is aligned with her social identity. Arriving at this alignment is a
dialectical process, generally requiring adjustment and accommodation between the
personal and the social. It is rarely optimal, it is frequently revisable, but it is always
reflexive in nature.” (Archer, 2007: 88)
Habitus, choice and resistance
Due to methodological constraints, this essay will mostly consider the two first stages of
the model for its analysis of a selection of accounts from The Weight of the World. The
possibilities for reinterpreting the accounts were constrained by the relative
methodological impossibilities of investigating internal conversations (Archer 2003) as
well as different theoretical assumptions made in the original presentation of the
accounts. Despite agreeing with Archer (2003:134) that agential mediation and
reflexivity shape “concerns, projects and actual doings”, the transitivity of constraints and
enablements (something determinate being required to constrain or enable) was a difficult
to establish in accounts and interviews shaped by contrasting theoretical concerns.
Indeed, Archer (2003, 2007) does not attempt to “transcend the difference between
objectivism and subjectivism” when Bourdieu (1977, 1984, 1989) does. Archer
(2003:135) “respects the independent causal powers possessed by both structures and#p#分頁標題#e#
agents” which interplay with one another when Bourdieu ‘conflates them’ (Archer,
2007). Advantages and disadvantages appear intransitive for Bourdieu when Archer
(2003) considers that their causal powers to shape agents’ projects and courses of action
are subjectively mediated by their positive or negative evaluations. Both authors
acknowledge that objective structures have their own ‘reality’ but their interpretations of
their effects and the mediating role of agents in the process differ. From a critical realist
viewpoint, Bourdieu’s conflation of agency and structure, resulting from his
‘conceptualization of habitus, as the subjective, historical (but forgotten and denied)
product of the internalization of objective structures is considered problematic with
regard to agential resistance and social mobility. As a result, agential resistance seems
“doomed to failure” (Sayer, 2005). In order to examine the possibility of resistance, Sayer
(2005: 32) offers to reconsider “the process of the shaping of the individual that the
formation of habitus presupposes”. His formulation of resistance is not limited to its
‘progressive forms’. Resistance is considered as being part of (and intrinsic to) any form
of ‘structured or shaped’ process of formation: “the dialectic of resistances and
susceptibilities is presupposed in any process of formation; resistance is presupposed by
shaping but also limits shaping. Thus, provided we do not arbitrarily limit
acknowledgement of resistance to cases where it seems progressive, we can see that
resistance is intrinsic to the formation of the habitus rather than extrinsic and
exceptional” (op.cit.: 32-33). From this formulation, distinguishing between compliance
and resistance in particular social contexts becomes more difficult.
Considering lay reflexivity in relation with agential autonomy, Archer (2003, 2007)
considers how internal conversation contributes to create a private and personal space for
agents to anticipate social practice, deliberate and rehearse in the context of the
realization of personal projects. Archer (2007) also investigates the broader implications
of the context-dependency of reflexive conversations (which tend to rely on ‘incomplete’
but taken for granted assumptions and contextual or idiomatic meaning) in situations of
contextual continuity or discontinuity. In situations of contextual continuity, internal
conversations of agents are context-dependent but “much of their respective dependency
has the same contextual referents” or a “commonality of landmarks” (common history,
geography, acquaintances, familiarity with the same institutions, same way of
speaking…), an “experiential overlap” which facilitates the sharing of internal#p#分頁標題#e#
conversation to others, or a specific community (op.cit.: 84). One would, of course, think
of habitus as contributing to generate such homogenous and continuous contextual
referents.
In situations of contextual discontinuity, agents lack ‘similars and familiars’ with others,
including relatives or members of the same geographical space. Contextual discontinuity
can stem from several forms of differences (age, gender, class, culture, language…) but
the situations of interest in this essay will be mostly generated as a result of social
mobility (Archer, 2007).
“Because these subjects have undergone particularistic experiences and also confront novel
situations, their reflexive deliberations become more difficult to communicate. They are not
only context dependent but this dependency is also specific to each of them. Their problems
with competent communication can be expressed in terms of their confronting a much more
intransigent problem of ‘decentring’ [de-centring the self by adapting to the listener’s
perspective]” than in the case of common contextual reference. “For those people who
gradually learn that their internal conversations do indeed ‘make sense only to themselves’,
this discovery has far-reaching consequences. Attempts at spoken interchange about one’s
internal deliberations are rebuffed by incomprehension and misunderstanding”. Margaret
Archer. Making our Way through the World, 2007: 85-86.
Examples of opportunistic agential strategies, as well as personal projects and identity
negotiation, and their relevant social trajectories in situations of contextual discontinuity,
will be analyzed in the next section. Opportunism, objective enablements and constraints,
subjective perceptions, decisions or practice, and commitments to specific courses of
action shaping personal projects will particularly be explored.
To conclude, Archer (2003, 2007) and Sayer (2005) both offer to reconsider Bourdieu’s
formulation of the habitus in different ways. Archer is the most radical who criticizes
Bourdieu’s dispositional determinism and invites to ‘remediate’ for Bourdieu’s conflation
of agency and structure with a broader cure, supported with an alternative
conceptualization of agent-structure mediation through agential reflexivity. Dispositions
and reflexivity are conceptualised as being contemporary and interactive (Archer, 2007:
90). Sayer (2005: 31), obviously uncomfortable with Bourdieu’s “ontological complicity
between habitus and field” and his “pessimistic view of the struggles of the social field”
attempts to reformulate the ‘working’ of habitus in a way which would allow resistance.
Alternative reading of a selection of interviews from the Weight of the World#p#分頁標題#e#
“Personal identity is an emergent property whose powers include the designation and
design of specific projects in society, their strategic pursuit through self-monitoring and a
commitment to the successful establishment of practices which express a particular overriding
concern. Self-knowledge and self-commitment are the two factors conducive to
suspending the causal powers of constraints through strategic circumvention and subversion
based upon willingness to pay the price. They are also the factors responsible for enlarging
the scope of enablements, through the reflexive elastication of projects, which enlarge the
range of enterprises upon which propitious circumstances can be brought to bear”. Margaret
Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, 2003: 139.
For Archer (2007: 34), “reflexivity depends upon a subject who has sufficient personal
identity to know what he or she cares about and to design the ‘projects’ that they hope
(fallibly) will realize their concerns within society”. In Bourdieu et. al (1999)’s, such
sense of subjective identity and agential power is unequally conveyed. As Sayer (2005:
31) notes, there is a tendency for agents to be described as being deprived of agential
power and to have to “accept and rationalize their domination [as fate] rather than
challenge it” which may render The Weight of the World a book documenting people
‘complaining and resisting’ unintelligible. Bourdieu et. al. (1999)’s portrayal of everyday
struggles (economic and symbolic, sometimes political) only includes a few number of
accounts which stress individual projects with regard to the weight of constraints or
disillusions. As a result, a small number of accounts were chosen: ‘The order of Things’
(60-77), Academic Destiny (514-528) and A Paradise Lost (441-454). Bourdieu et al.
(1999)’s selected accounts have been investigated from the perspective of what Archer
(2003, 2007) calls contextual discontinuity with the aim to explore how agents negotiate
the course of their human projects and their overall social trajectories. These accounts
relate experiences from the same broad cultural context (French society) about the
struggles and disillusionment of committing to an academic project from heterogeneous
social positions.
Mo, Sébastien, Claire, Muriel and Nadine’s reflections on their academic struggles
The first three accounts have been grouped together as different viewpoints, experiences
and projects related to academic trajectories in the French academic system, both in high
school and at university.
A quick comparison of difficulties encountered by ‘the young beur’ (one of the good
cases of "The Order of Things", described pp60-61, who we will call ‘Mo’) and Sébastien#p#分頁標題#e#
(in "Academic Destiny") in their academic trajectory shows similarities of subjective
experience in high school. Both carry a project initiated (or at least heavily supported) by
the family who believe that an appropriate academic trajectory will heavily contribute to
improving their ‘life/social chances’ for moving up the social ladder (social mobility).
Mo is waiting for a decision of the appeal committee to know if he will be able move into
the next class (Terminale D). This would give him potential access to a ‘science track’
baccalauréat with a major in biology-maths-physics (A-level). The presence of his case at
this committee suggests that he did not get satisfactory academic results for straight
acceptance. Depending on the decision of the committee, he will be able to move his
academic project forward more or less smoothly. If he cannot pass, he will have to find
another school to apply to and he knows that he won’t be able to join another state
school4. Mo has to handle both the responsibility of his academic trajectory and the
weight of his parents’ expectations. He is in contextual discontinuity with his family
background (his academic efforts are valued and he is encouraged in his studies but he is
left on his own, as his parents lack the academic experience to provide him with concrete
day-to-day advice or help). His academic trajectory is also disconnected from his
immediate, everyday-life social surroundings: he experiences a ‘cultural’ gap between the
concerns that he experiences at school and those in his neighbourhood. Such contextual
discontinuity means that he cannot share his academic experiences and concerns outside
of the school’s setting with his immediate relatives. This contributes to a disconnect
between ‘school’ and ‘real’ life and his paradoxical feelings, depending on his basis of
comparison: his performance is as much felt as a miracle (when evaluated in the context
of the community with whom he shares everyday life) as a failure (with regard to his
dreams, his parents expectations or more ‘objective’ academic criteria, when he considers
that his academic career is over). His inability to bridge different aspects of his life
appears to create a block, presumably due to conflicting expectations, ambivalence with
regard to choices he should make and a feeling of isolation. His ability to stabilize a
satisfactory modus vivendi seems very dependent on the committee’s decision. The
account ends with his case not resolved and his feelings of frustration, isolation and clear
discouragement. Difficult potential courses of action (having to find another school) are
possibly contemplated with guilt and felt as heavy. His ability and motivation to sustain
his academic commitment seems shaken: he does not trust his parent’s advice and#p#分頁標題#e#
encouragements because “they don’t understand” and he does not appear to think that he
has the appropriate resources to succeed: “maybe if it came from other people who’d tell
me really, who would tell me in a way I would understand, maybe then things would
change” (Bourdieu et al., 1999: 61).
Sébastien experienced similar doubts and dilemmas to Mo but his struggle found a
satisfactory resolution after a non-typical trajectory. Sébastien has become an ‘established
and respected’ journalist but like Mo, he had to carry the heavy weight of his parents’
expectations: “Sébastien, from an early age, has found himself committed by parental
decree to the promotion of the entire family group through the anticipated academic
success” (op.cit.: 514). Sébastien comes from a family of Spanish immigrants who ‘did
well’ thanks to a ‘disposition to social mobility’ and ‘exemplary sacrifices” (ibid.). His
parents were actively dedicated to supporting their children’s academic success and
partly organized their own life around this project: with no television, his mother took
cleaning jobs to help pay for school tuition (and private maths lessons) and his father
would engage with his schooling. Having no education, the school system was unknown
territory for his father, who would never miss parent-teacher meetings but sometimes had
to face some “put-downs from the academic world” (op.cit.: 515). But whatever
4 Bourdieu seems here to hint that Mo may still theoretically be able to join a private institution but that his
social background may not allow him to make this choice, if his parents cannot support it financially. His
father is presented as making a “pretty good living as a technician but his mother appears to be without
profession.
confrontations he encountered, they did not deter him from his ambitions and goals for
his son, to the point that he even opposed academic decisions or advice with regard to
Sébastien’s orientation when it departed from his own project. Sébastien’s good primary
school results supported his parents’ ambitions: “my parents both regretted having
dropped out of school, there was an immense frustration, and so their obsession, but truly
their obsession was therefore that their son go on and pursue studies and I think on this
point, I owe them a lot, even if it was hard” (op.cit.: 519).
Sébastien’s reflections on his parents’ legacy, and how he makes sense of it, are positive
overall: [my parents putting their hopes on me was] difficult to live with at times, but
that’s what explains how I’ve almost made it, that’s it, because otherwise I wouldn’t have
made it, I am virtually convinced” (op.cit.: 519). Are these reflections the product of expost#p#分頁標題#e#
rationalisation of ambivalent feelings, now that he has come to terms with a
professional orientation with which he feels comfortable? Sébastien had to put up with
the ‘vision of grandeur’ of his father who wanted ‘the best for his son’ during most of his
years at college and high school, after it was decided that he would join the M. Lycée
“against the opinion of the teachers at the time” (op.cit.: 519). That decision enacted a
‘forced move’ to favour social mobility but it generated contextual discontinuity which
proved dysfunctional for Sébastien, who did not fit in the school’s environment: “M.
Lycée was a disaster. Right away it was a disaster. The memory, the recollection that I
have of it is the teachers… They were monsters…” (ibid.). He was predicted ‘a dark
future’ and repeatedly told that ‘he did not really belong at M.’. His results went downhill
and he ended up bruised and humiliated by the experience, which partly embodied his
teachers’ harsh reactions to his father’s “socially misplaced – because excessiveambitions”
(op. cit.: 516). Placed in a “reorientation class” at the end of cinquieme class,
Sébastien changed college but was not able to break out of the cycle of academic failure,
repeating classes, meaning he had to finally choose a technical orientation in the less
prestigious class (F1 track), while he ‘hated workshop’ and wished to leave the technical
line. He managed to pass his bac (A-level) with a little help after which he decided to
dramatically change orientation.
After a long and unpredictable trajectory, Sébastien eventually managed progressively to
regain autonomy over his own academic and professional projects. It nevertheless took
him a series of inter-related decisions, courses of action ‘and a bit of luck’ to get there.
Having gained some militant experience in 1968, he decided to apply for a degree in
journalism but was deterred because he did not fit the profile of typical candidates for the
profession: due to his family’s social position and background, he did not have the
appropriate social connections. He chose a 2-year technical sales university degree
instead, in which he performed very well. He worked for a while before joining a
journalism school, an environment which he hated. From his own testimony, his HE
academic trajectory seems to have been partly the result of [constrained] deliberate
choices, of his ability “to seize opportunities” but also of a strong underlying
commitment to social mobility driven by his parents’ support:
“After a while, I told myself: “you are going to have to do something, you can’t spend the rest#p#分頁標題#e#
of your life like that!” and then I went by the journalism school because a buddy (…) had
gone to journalism school before me. So that gave me the impetus again to do that and so
there it is, that’s how I started to find my path. So what got me there? Well, the explanation is
that it’s my parents who kept me on life support all along. If they hadn’t been there, I mean in
the neighbourhood where I lived, there isn’t a single person who’s got the bac” (op.cit.: 521).
Sébastien finally describes his present modus vivendi on a positive note. The following
extract reveals how he managed to make sense of his struggle and stabilize a satisfactory
modus vivendi which relates his personal, social and professional identities harmoniously.
“Well, what we most lack is weapons, knowledge. It’s a job where you have to have a lot
more culture than you do have, we don’t have enough. (…) [It is an education problem] but
that’s where I no longer have any complexes, because, it’s true, this lack of academic culture,
well, I, it’s true, in part by the, by a social curiosity, I caught up on that also in a certain way,
meaning I have a better knowledge of the real world than people who have academic or
university knowledge, who have a better cultural background than I do. And it’s true that in
this job, it’s useful to know how things work” (op.cit.: 527)
Sébastien’s troubling experience of the M. Lycée can be related to Claire, Muriel and
Nadine’s difficult time at Lycée Verlaine, which will only be briefly alluded to. All three
girls used to be good students in their college of origin where they were recognized and
valued by the academic staff. At the time of the interview, they are experiencing painful
struggles in their own personal identity as a result of a dramatic drop in performance after
they changed schooling system and joined the Verlaine Lycée. The account shows them
having to make difficult choices as a result, and realizing the implications of these
choices in terms of future academic chances. The three girls have failed to maintain good
average grades in seconde, in sciences particularly. Claire has “categorically excluded in
advance the track towards a science baccalauréat even though she is aware of the
negative character of this choice” (op.cit.: 443). After she has dropped a full grade in
math and biology, Muriel chooses to orient herself in a literature track, a choice which
she tries to present as a free decision. Nadine, “on her parents’ advice and because it is
difficult for her to give up career plans” (op.cit: 445), has decided to do a year over to get
better chances to do a science track. Unfortunately, “during this repeat year, even more#p#分頁標題#e#英國留學生社會學dissertation
stressful than the previous one, her results in science classes remain inadequate and bring
her down from her dream world” (ibid.).
Overall comments
All the accounts feature college and high-school environments as contributing to an
overall system of reproduction where symbolic power is denied to those who lack
appropriate forms of capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990). Re-enforcing Bourdieu and
Passeron’s main argument: “Education, supposedly the means par excellence of social
mobility, instead reproduced social inequality” (Wolfreys, 2002). All the boys and girls
appear to have distanced themselves from what they consider to be a hostile environment,
in which they could not maintain a fulfilling academic project. In the last account, the
national institutional policy of delaying selection processes until high school is
mentioned as a possible influential factor to explain “the frequency and importance of
failure in seconde” (op.cit.: 448).
As is the hierarchical nature, anonymity or competition and valuation of students on the
only basis of their performance in science. Nevertheless, identity struggles permeate all
accounts in addition to a sense of misplacement.
Despite their differences, Mo, Sébastien, Claire, Muriel and Nadine bear the overall
responsibility for their academic success, which is sometimes additionally burdened by
parental expectations. Claire, Muriel and Nadine give the impression to benefit from
more agential autonomy in their academic choices than Mo and Sébastien. Except for
Sébastien who was actively supported in his family circle, Mo and the girls are portrayed
as fairly lonely and somewhat isolated in their academic trajectory.
Conclusion
Jude Fawley, a stonemason who studies the classics, has ambitions to become a scholar and
moves to the University city of Christminster to seek entrance to a college. Realising that he
knows the texts but not the rules of the academic game, he requests tutelage, but the
colleges will not consider him because of his background as a working man. Reduced to the
humiliation of reciting the Nicene Creed in Latin in a public house, in return for drinks
from undergraduates, he realises that although his scholarship is superior to theirs, he does
not share any common experience nor social bond with them. Without social significance,
he is treated as a curiosity like a talking parrot by the superficial and narrow-minded
Christminster scholars. An illustration of habitus as it appears in Thomas Hardy’s novel
Jude the Obscure, 1895.
Jude’s habitus is not appropriate for such an academic context, and he is ridiculed for his
aspirations by academic scholars, whose own habitus renders them less than able to
embrace an intellect from a background so different to their own. Jude’s reflections on#p#分頁標題#e#英國社會學dissertation
events illustrate Bourdieu’s argument: “When we are in a familiar context, (…) the
working of the habitus tends not to be noticed; its experience is clearer when we
experience the discomfort of finding ourselves out of place, in an unfamiliar setting, in
which we lack a feel for the game” (Sayer, 2005: 25).
Were Sébastien’s years of struggles at high school ‘lost years’ and his father’s ambitions
‘ridiculous’? Or have they been, in Sayer’s (2005)’s terms, years of shaping and as such,
years of resistance? Jude is unable to make his way in this setting, and is forced to suffer
the weight of his own world. Archer (2003:140) also notes how Jude mainly considered
the powers of his own commitment and miscalculated the disadvantageous impact of
“his circumstances and his own staying power”, when he considered his project to break
into university.
Mouzelis (2007) claims that because habitus is second nature, reflexivity only occurs,
following Bourdieu, when habitus clashes with external circumstances (or a competing
habitus), or when dispositions, positions and interactions are incongruent. But like Archer
(2007), he also points out that “Bourdieu’s emphasis on the predominantly pre-reflexive
nature of the habitus, and his underemphasis of the interactive dimension of social
games” has led him to overlook lay reflexivity. Such reflexivity does not only happen in
crisis situation, when conflicts between social positions and dispositions emerge, for
instance. Social routine interactions, and most of everyday life situations, require
“constant ‘reflexive accounting’: “about what to do, on the part of those with the power
to act decisively, and about how to justify their actions” (Archer, 2007: 29; Mouzelis,
2007).
Taking this a little further, Archer's (2003, 2007) reference to contextual discontinuity
and agential reflexivity is interesting for assessing the relevance of the concept of habitus
for contemporary analysis. In her examination of the demise of routinisation’ in
contemporary society, Archer (2007: 39) stresses how “dispositional durability derives
from social stability”. Serving to reproduce “the social circumstances from which the
habitus itself originated, (…) the habitus ensures the continued appropriatedness of its
own embodied practices by prolonging contextual continuity”. The cases of social
mobility considered in the previous section (as with Jude the Obscure’s case), are
characterised by contextual discontinuity. If habitus appears as a unique and relevant
concept in settings characterized by contextual continuity and the prevalence of
reproduction vs. change, its formulation is problematic in situations of contextual#p#分頁標題#e#
discontinuity where routine action is less dominant and the concept is stretched too far
(Archer, 2007). In such cases, Archer’s emphasis on agential autonomy and reflexivity,
as well as her overall model, appear to be more appropriate than Bourdieu's
conceptualisation in accounting for the creativity, heterogeneity and intentionality of
agents’ social practice.
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