Diego Thompson
An invitation to Reflexive Sociology-The Practice of Reflexive Sociology
Pierre Bourdieu
Bourdieu´s why question: How social scientists should apply their knowledge based on the
reflection of its construction and the construction of the object?
Answer: It is necessary to constantly reflect about the idea of social phenomenon and
importance such as both subjective and objective result of the social researcher perception of
reality and academic context.
Bourdieu’s motivational mechanism: The deconstruction and analysis of the epistemological,
theoretical, and empirical work of social scientist. The base of his motivational mechanism is the
reflection of subjectivity/objectivity and the epistemological paradigms.
Key concepts:
Handing down a trade - (…) “to apprehend research as a rational endeavor”- (p. 218)
The translation of abstract problems into thoroughly practical scientific operations is carried out
by the exposition of the investigator. Practicing the theoretical knowledge is “kind of guide or
coach who provides assurance and reassurance, who sets an example and who corrects you by
putting forth, in situation, precepts applied directly to the particular case at hand” (p. 221). The
scientific habitus is a rule “mad man,” an embodied rule or, better, a scientific modus operandi
that functions in a practical state and within the academic game (p. 223).
Thinking Relationally (between theory and methodology). The division between theory and
methodology establishes as an epistemological opposition of scientific labor at a certain time so
that division into two separate instances must be completely rejected (p. 225). Substance and
function must think relationally in order to interrupt the rupture between them. Some “common”
indicated steps operated upon the “fields”:
 Building a model (within the epistemological rules but not taken for granted the fact)
 The construction of the object may be based on the reasoned intuition of homologies.
 Generalization (which science itself) through a comparative method.
 Transmission practically.
A Radical Doubt is based on the argument that “the preconstructed is everywhere.” The
scholarship notions and their self-evident character arise from the fit between objective structures
and subjective structures which shield them from questioning (p. 235). “The scientific practice
that fails to question itself doesn’t know itself” (p. 236). “For a sociologist more than any other
thinker, to leave one’s thought in a state of unthought (impense) is to condemn oneself to be
nothing more than the instrument of that which one claims to think” (p. 238).
Double Bind and Conversion: it is the whole scholarly tradition of sociology that we must
constantly question and methodological distrust that creates the double blind in which every
sociologist seems to be a “little more than an amateur” (p. 248). Sociologists have “to break
within the instruments of rupture which negate the very experience against which they have been
constructed” (p. 251). The epistemological rupture of ordinary pre-constructions and of the
ordinarily at work in the elaboration of these constructions, often presupposes a rupture of mode
of thinking, concepts, methods that usually appears as common sense, of ordinary sense, or good
scientific sense. Social scientists must apply the conversion of thought, breaking the scientific or
epistemological order and creating: the sociology of sociology (pp. 251-253).
Participation objectivation: “is the most difficult but also the most necessary exercise” (p.
253). It is the double truth constituted by the objective and subjective in the creation of the social
objects of study that constitutes the whole truth of the social world (p. 255). Sociologists play the
game of academic neutralization of the enunciates and the resultant of all these objective
relations are relations of symbolic power which express themselves in the interaction and in the
form of rhetorical strategies (pp. 258-259) “Only the sociology of sociology- and of the
sociologist-can give us a definite mastery of the social aims that can be pursued via the scientific
goals we immediately seek” (p. 259).
Sociology of sociology
Epistemological
models
Theory
Scientist
Subjectivation
Methodology
Results and
academic
approval
Practice
and
society