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

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: the importance of Bourdieu

An overview of the development of Bourdieu's work and of how it has been taken up in France and elsewhere. The importance of his work in vast areas of academic knowledge is assessed and the contributions in the book are outlined in terms of the legacy of his work

Epilogue: Bourdieu's legacy?

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

Cultural omnivores or culturally homeless? Exploring the shifting cultural identities of the upwardly mobile

The concept of the cultural omnivore has become increasingly influential in cultural sociology. Its proponents argue that it has now become a badge of honour to be eclectic and omnivorous in one’s cultural preferences and explicitly not be seen as an exclusivist cultural ‘snob’. It is even argued that omnivorousness represents a new source of social and cultural capital, enhancing one’s ability to communicate with diverse groups and nurturing greater cultural and political tolerance. Drawing on a large-scale survey of British comedy taste and 24 follow-up interviews, this paper strongly challenges existing representations of the cultural omnivore. Among comedy consumers, I only find omnivorousness among one social group; the upwardly mobile. However, notably, the culture switching of these respondents does not seem to yield the social benefits assumed by other omnivore studies. In contrast, the life histories of these respondents reveals that omnivorousness is more a bi-product of life trajectories - whereby lowbrow comedy taste is established during childhood but then highbrow taste is added as cultural capital resources grow. Significantly, though, this combination of tastes has more negative than positive implications, leaving socially mobile respondents largely uncertain of their cultural identities. While they lack the ‘natural’ confidence to communicate new, more legitimate, tastes as embodied cultural capital, their upwardly mobile trajectory means they are also acutely aware that the tastes of their youth are socially unacceptable and aesthetically inferior. In short, these comedy consumers are more accurately described as culturally homeless, caught with one foot in two different taste cultures

Introduction : Bourdieu and the literary field

Pierre Bourdieu’s range as a thinker was extremely wide, and it would be misleading to present him primarily as a literary theorist. Trained as a philosopher, he became the leading French sociologist of his generation, and brought under the spotlight of his ‘critical sociology’ a whole series of institutional and discursive universes (education, art, linguistics, public administration, politics, philosophy, journalism, economics and others). Far from representing an intellectual dispersal, these manifold objects of enquiry allowed him to develop and refine a comprehensive theory of social process and power-relations based on distinctive concepts such as ‘field’, ‘habitus’, variously conceived notions of ‘capital’, and ‘illusio’ (all these concepts and others will be explicated and assessed in this issue). Yet Bourdieu’s analyses were scarcely ever received as neutral descriptions within the fields which he analysed. Bourdieu’s abiding agenda was to show how the discursive presuppositions and institutional logics at work in such fields carried but also masked certain social logics that a ‘critical sociology’ could disclose. Coupled with the inveterately combative drive seldom absent from Bourdieu’s objectifying analyses—and even setting aside the misprisions to which an external analyst is inevitably subject—this helps explain the resistance which his work recurrently provoked. In this respect, Bourdieu’s forays into the world of literary studies and his reception therein can be seen as part of a wider pattern

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