Bourdieu: Preface

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Agency as the Acquisition of Capital: the role of one-on-one tutoring and mentoring in changing a refugee student's educational trajectory

Current research into the experiences of refugee students in mainstream secondary schools in Australia indicates that for these students, schools are places of social and academic isolation and failure. This article introduces one such student, Lian, who came to Australia as a refugee from Burma, and whom the author tutored and mentored intensively during his final year of schooling. The article provides an empirically derived understanding of how one-on-one tutoring and mentoring became a platform through which this student was able to succeed in a structure which systematically tried to exclude him. Here, agency is conceptualised in terms of Bourdieu's concept of capital. The analysis highlights the ways in which one-on-one tutoring and mentoring provided the necessary platform by which this refugee student was able to acquire the necessary capital that effected a positive change in his educational trajectory

Introduction: preliminary reflections on the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu

Book synopsis: Pierre Bourdieu is widely regarded as one of the most influential sociologists of his generation, and yet the reception of his work in different cultural contexts and academic disciplines has been varied and uneven. This volume maps out the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in contemporary social and political thought from the standpoint of classical European sociology and from the broader perspective of transatlantic social science. It brings together contributions from prominent scholars in the field, providing a range of perspectives on the continuing relevance of Bourdieu’s oeuvre to substantive problems in social and political analysis

Bourdieu and Postcommunist Class Formation

This article suggests that Bourdieu's model of class, framed in terms of cultural capital and habitus, is particularly valuable in understanding the restoration of capitalism under postcommunist conditions. Following the analyses of Szel�nyi and his collaborators, it is suggested that post-communist managerialism is still strikingly more pronounced than in the West. This and the notion of habitus in particular are perhaps the main elements of Bourdieu's thinking on which we can draw in theorizing postcommunist transition.Bourdieu, Class, Postcommunism

Who is she and who are we? A critical essay on reflexivity in research into the rarity of women executives in accountancy

This paper proposes a critical stance on research into the rarity of women at the highest levels of accountancy. The authors aim to unravel the discourses produced on this topic in the accounting literature and question their own experience and perception as scholars building on Bourdieu’s work on reflexivity (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Bourdieu, 2001, 2003).Gender; accounting profession; methodology; reflexivity

Epilogue: Bourdieu's legacy?

Assessing the main points of impact of the work of Bourdieu in contemporary academic scholarship

Social theory and the analysis of transactions

Este artículo analiza una seria objeción a las teorías sociales que apoyan los mecanismos apagados y las fuerzas escondidas que, a su vez, influyen en los actores sociales: ellas destacan la necesidad teórica de confirmar sus presuposiciones tanto si ellas son demostradas como si son desmentidas por los fenómenos en los que ellas mismas se centran. En primer lugar, el autor examina cómo Latour ha puesto en evidencia decididamente este problema. Se trata, pues, de uno de los objetivos polémicos principales de Latour, la teoría social de Bourdieu, para demostrar que, en realidad, Bourdieu compartió las preocupaciones de Latour. Este artículo lleva a cabo este objetivo deteniéndose en la relación entre la noción de rule-following de Wittgenstein y la de habitus de Bourdieu. En la base de este análisis, el autor profundiza el concepto de transactions, que atañe a las interpretaciones discursivas de los actores y al contexto semiótico en los que se insertan. Este análisis finaliza con las consecuencias teóricopolíticas de este tipo de metodología.This article discusses a serious objection to social theories that claim opaque mechanisms and hidden forces operate over social actors’ head: they bespeak the theorists’ need to confirm their presuppositions whether they are proven or disproven by the phenomena they focus on. The author first explores the way in which Latour has convincingly unearthed this problem. He then analyzes one of Latour’s primary polemical targets, Bourdieu’s social theory, to show that in reality Bourdieu shared Latour’s concerns. The article does so by exploring the nexus between Wittgenstein’s notion of rule-following and notion of Bourdieu’s habitus. Based on this analysis, the author elaborates on the concept of “transactions”, which draws attention to both the actors’ discursive performances and the semiotic context where they take place. The article concludes by illustrating the theoretical-political consequences of this methodological commitment

Bourdieu and the dead end of reflexivity: on the impossible task of locating the subject

This article examines recent attempts by IR scholars to flesh out a reflexive approach inspired by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The French sociologist pioneered the idea of turning the tools of sociology onto oneself in order to apply the same grid of social analysis to the object and subject of scholarship. This represents the culmination of a long tradition of seeking to understand from where one speaks and grasp our subjective biases through reflexive means. But as I argue Bourdieu – like most reflexive scholars – largely overestimated his ability to grasp his own subject position. For he assumed he could be objective about the very thing he had the least reasons to be objective about: himself. Instead of bending over backwards in this way and directly take the subject into account, I then propose to rearticulate the problematic of reflexivity by going back to a more classic concern with the question of alienation. Through a detailed critique of Bourdieu's reflexive approach and the ways in which it was received in IR, I set out a series of principles to reconfigure the agenda of reflexivity and offer a platform for a proper methodological alternative to positivism

Habitus and Reflexivity: Restructuring Bourdieu's Theory of Practice

Contrary to Bourdieu\'s thesis, it is not only when a subject\'s habitus does not fit a field\'s positions that s/he becomes more reflexive. Reflexivity is also enhanced by intra-habitus tensions, by more general incongruences between dispositions, positions, and interactive/figurational structures, as well as by situations unrelated to them. Because of his ambitious but unsuccessful attempt to transcend the objectivist-subjectivist divide in the social sciences, Bourdieu underemphasizes the interactive dimension of social games, and this creates serious problems for his conceptualization of the linkages between habitus, reflexivity, and practices. The way to make Bourdieu\'s theory of practice less functionalist and/or deterministic is to restructure it so that it seriously takes into account not only the dispositional and positional but also the interactive dimension of social games. It then becomes obvious that reflexive accounting, conscious strategizing, and rational calculation are not exceptional but routine, constitutive elements of human action.Reflexivity, Dispositions, Positions, Figurations, Practices

Managing the Tensions of Essentialism: Purity and Impurity

This article proposes a new interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu, as a theorist of purity and impurity. Bourdieu’s writings indicate that through the adjudication of things or people as relatively impure or pure an image is constructed of their essential truth. Building from Bourdieu, we will show how themes of purity and impurity can be used to manage the tensions associated with attempts to impute an essence to human nature or to reality, ensuring that the moral and epistemological significance of complexity is masked. This is the reason why themes of purity and impurity so often attend polarized world views, and why they are frequently mobilized for justifying and operating biopolitical processes of social stratification and regulation