Lecture 10
Bourdieu on class and culture.
Notices
• Hand in your essays either directly to
Helen in person, or else put them in my
locked box in the Sociology corridor
opposite room 320.
• Ian Sutherland is organising a revision
session for the first term – he will supply
details of time and place.
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How does class work?
• Bourdieu on cultural capital, habitus;
• Do middle class older women treat their
bodies differently to working class ones?
• Why do middle class kids do well at
school?
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Reading: Jenkins, Richard (1992) Pierre Bourdieu. London: Routledge.
Chapter 3. 301.01 Bou/Jen
Theory texts:
Bourdieu, Pierre 1989 Distinction : a social critique of the judgment of taste
London : Routledge, 301.44 BOU
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990 Reproduction in education, society and culture
London : Sage, 370.1 BOU
Bourdieu, P. “Structures, Habitus, Practices” .chapter 20 in Calhoun, C. et al
(2002) Contemporary Sociological Theory, Oxford: Blackwell.
Examples of attempts to use / operationalise his ideas
A. Sullivan (2001) “Cultural Capital and Educational Attainment” Sociology,
Volume 35, (4):893 - 912
Alex Dumas, Suzanne Laberge, Silvia M, Straka (2005) “Older women's
relations to bodily appearance: the embodiment of social and biological
conditions of existence,” Ageing and Society 25(6):883-902
http://ejournals.ebsco.com/Article.asp?ContributionID=7959823
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How does class work
• Classics
– Marx, social relationship to means of production
– Weber, relationship to market, contrast with status
• This term
– Hidden injuries of class, social psychology of
inequality – work does things to people
– End of class, social construction rather than social
ascription, post-modern plastic identity
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Bourdieu
• Intellectual problems Bourdieu sets out to solve.
• Structure and agency, how to incorporate social
institutions without presenting people as cultural
dupes – rule following robots.
• Role of class in modern France and in particular
education and culture
• Key concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘cultural capital’.
[social capital]
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Theory of practice: habitus
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“Bourdieu’s reputation as a sociological thinker is underpinned by his
application of what he calls a ‘theory of practice’. In which he attempts to
theorise human sociality as the outcome of the strategic action of individuals
operating within a constraining, but nonetheless not absolutely determining,
context of values.
The term Bourdieu coins to describe this is ‘the habitus’ (Bourdieu, Outline
of a Theory 72-95): ‘an acquired system of generative schemes objectively
adjusted to the particular condition in which it is constituted’ (95). Habitus is
the mechanism by which cultural norms or models of behaviour and action
particular to a group or class fraction are unconsciously internalised or
incorporated in the formation of the self during the socialization process.
These ‘dispositions’ amount to a form of social understanding and function
as a pre-reflective background or cultural conditioning … Habitus, [is a form
of] ‘symbolic domination’, that which situates us either the submissive or the
dominant social hierarchies, radically limit our practical capacity as agents
to transform the social world. These culturally conditioned predispositions to
act in certain ways should considered more as ‘unreflective practical habits’,
which shape the way we act and think in different social contexts, or ‘fields’.”
(Browitt 2004:1)
Jeff Browitt, (2004) “Pierre Bourdieu: Homo Sociologicus” in eds. Jeff Browitt and Brian Nelson
Practicing Theory: Pierre Bourdieu and the field of cultural reproduction. University of Delaware
Press pp. 1-12
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Habitus
• “Habitus refers to socially acquired, embodied systems of schemes
of disposition, perceptions and evaluation that orient and give
meaning to practices (Bourdieu 1984: 17).
• The internalisation of the social and material ‘conditions of
existence’ is central to Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory of practice.
The conditions of existence shared by a particular class of agents
generate a habitus, comprising ‘schemes of dispositions,
perceptions, and appreciations [evaluations] ’ (Bourdieu 1984: 197).
The habitus, in turn, orients social practices and lifestyles. In other
words, people’s social conditions of existence produce classificatory
schemes that constitute the principles of their vision and division of
the world and that shape their perceptions and desires (Bourdieu
1998: 8; Laberge and Kay 2002: 247–50). “(Dumas et al 2005:885)
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Theory of practice: cultural capital
• “Crucial to Bourdieu’s analyses of social structure is the
concept of ‘cultural capital’. Bourdieu expands Marx’s
idea of ‘economic capital’ to encompass all forms of
power that enable individuals, groups or classes to
cement or reproduce their position in the social
hierarchy. Thus he speaks of ‘cultural capital’ (money
and property), ‘social capital’ (networks of social
influence), and ‘symbolic capital’ (classificatory
categories of understanding and social differentiation at
the service of legitimation), which represent forms of
power and domination.” (Browitt 2004:2)
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Jeff Browitt, (2004) “Pierre Bourdieu: Homo Sociologicus” in eds. Jeff
Browitt and Brian Nelson Practicing Theory: Pierre Bourdieu and the field of
cultural reproduction. University of Delaware Press pp. 1-12
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Mirror carried the story
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KATE HAS MORE CLASS THAN SNOBBY ROYALS
Sue Carroll 18/04/2007
More Sue Carroll
This week is no different. Prince William and Kate Middleton's split appeared, on the
face of it, to be an amicable parting of the ways without rancour or bitterness.
For a spurned woman who deserves, after five years of unstinting loyalty, to feel more
than a little let down Kate has emerged calm, smiling and a picture of grace.
She continues never to put a dainty LK Bennett-clad foot out of place yet her reward
is to see her family rubbished, their reputation as honest hard-working people belittled
and her mother portrayed as a schemer who makes Princess Pushy look like a
shrinking violet.
Unable to resist the urge to stir it, the vipers' nest of royal aides have let it be known
that Carole Middleton's nickname was "Mrs Meddleton".
Tongues dripping with poison, they salivate over stories that she said "toilet" instead
of "lavatory" and "pardon" rather than "what".
Her fate was sealed when, at William's passing out parade, she chewed gum
throughout, causing royal hangers-on to mutter "common".
Others, whisper it, called her too "middle-class" and a 'social climber" whose family
were trade people from County Durham. A distant relative was a miner - imagine it?
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Others including broadsheets took
it up
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From The Times
April 17, 2007
Pardon! How the class struggle still rules in royal press coverage
Alan Hamilton
An unpleasant element has crept into news coverage of Prince William’s parting from Kate
Middleton. It’s the old British bogeyman of class.
The target is Ms Middleton’s mother, Carole, and the clear implication is that a former air
stewardess would be an unsuitable mother for the next queen but one. She is, it is suggested, far
too nouveau to be linked by marriage with the oldest money in the land.
She reportedly betrays her humble background by saying “toilet” when she should say “lavatory”,
and “pardon?” or even “what?” when she means “I beg your pardon?”. The very mention of her
name is said to trigger the chorus “Doors To Manual” among the Prince’s more hoorayish friends,
who refer to her as “Mrs Meddleton” for her scheming to get her daughter married into the
country’s first family. She is said to have responded “Pleased to meet you” instead of the expected
“Hello ma’am” when introduced to the Queen.
When the Middletons attended Prince William’s passing-out parade at Sandhurst, Mrs Middleton
was upbraided by the tabloids for chewing gum.The apogee of her ambition is said to have been
renting a Perth-shire holiday home for £5,000 to entice the Prince for Christmas. He didn’t come.
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Habitus and bodies
• “The notion of habitus also appealed because of the centrality of the
body in Bourdieu’s theory. In Distinction, Bourdieu (1984: 190)
argued that:
– the body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste, which it
manifests in several ways. It does this first in the seemingly most natural
features of the body, the dimension … and shapes … of its visible
forms, which express in countless ways a whole relation to the body, i.e.
a way of treating it, caring for it, feeding it, maintaining it, which reveals
the deepest dispositions of the habitus.
• The quotation encapsulates the multiple references and meanings of
the phrase ‘ (a person’s) relations to bodily appearance’, as coined
by Bourdieu and used in this paper. Other authors have drawn on
the concept of habitus and provided useful information about how
women relate to bodily appearance. Boltanski (1971) and Bourdieu
(1984), using late-1960s data from France, argued that people’s
relations to their body are deeply anchored in their social and
material conditions of existence – which are fashioned by their
economic and cultural capital.” (Dumas et al 2005:884)
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Alex Dumas, Suzanne Laberge, Silvia M, Straka (2005) “Older women's relations to
bodily appearance: the embodiment of social and biological conditions of existence,”
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Ageing and Society 25(6):883-902
Habitus and bodies
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“These studies suggested that women’s tastes and practices vary markedly
according to their positions in the social structure. Bourdieu (1984: 202)
stated that for women: the interest the different classes have in selfpresentation, the attention they devote to it, their awareness of the profits it
gives and the investment of time, effort, sacrifice and care which they
actually put into it are proportionate to the chances of material or symbolic
profit they can reasonably expect from it. Bourdieu illustrated this point by
describing how women of different social classes varied in their valuations
of the body, beauty and body care. His research showed that working-class
women were less inclined to value and invest in bodily appearance than
women from the upper class, who placed a greater value on beauty and
expended greater efforts to enhance it. Upper-class women attributed moral
value to a well-groomed appearance, which created distance between them
and women whose appearance they perceived as neglectful.” (Dumas et al
2004:884)
Dumas, Laberge, and Straka tested out these ideas by examining through
in depth qualitative interviews with older women from different class
backgrounds how class and age intersect in the ways they treat their
bodies.
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Dumas, Laberge, and Straka: findings
• “There was a strong contrast between the disadvantaged and the
privileged women’s relations to their bodily appearance, which
corroborated earlier findings from a few studies that mentioned
peripherally the differentiation among older women (Boltanski 1971;
Bourdieu 1984; Featherstone 1987). In Bourdieusian terms,
women’s social positions and their social conditions of existence
shape their habitus and engender social differentials in relations to
bodily appearance. Because working-class older women are not far
removed from economic hardship, the value that those in our
sample placed on beauty and cosmetic care was moderated by
other priorities. For most, the rewards that they might have gained
from their appearance were negligible in relation to their negative
wellbeing for other reasons. Although they were very aware of the
gap between their appearance and social norms of beauty, they
were generally satisfied with their appearance, given the constraints
imposed by their conditions of existence. Their lives of hardship
required them to internalise the tastes imposed by their social
conditions. As Bourdieu pointed out, such tastes can be explained
by processes that make a virtue out of necessity (1984: 175). “
(Dumas et al 2005:897)
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Dumas, Laberge, and Straka: findings
• “Conversely, older women from the intellectual-bourgeoisie had
more economic and cultural capital, which gave them the freedom to
engage in various bodily appearance practices without
compromising their wellbeing. Furthermore, their superior economic
and cultural capital also gave them the temporal freedom to value
and engage in autoplastic and behavioural practices, which
corroborates Boltanski’s (1971) conclusion that, in comparison to
others, the upper classes have a longer time horizon for the
maintenance of the body, and subscribe to preventive attitudes and
behaviour. Many of the intellectual-bourgeoisie participants
accorded a high value to bodily appearance practices that had innerbody aims, and they believed that their future-oriented outlook would
be rewarded late in life.” (Dumas et at 2005:898)
• However the study also showed that in later life for the oldest
women class differentiation was diminished as it was overshadowed
by an age habitus.
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Cultural capital
• “Cultural capital is widely recognized as one of the late Pierre
Bourdieu’s signature concepts… The concept of “capital” has
enabled researchers to view culture as a resource – one that
provides access to scarce rewards, is subject to monopolization,
and, under certain conditions may be transmitted from one
generation to the next. As a result, emphasis on cultural capital has
enabled researchers in diverse fields to place culture and cultural
processes at the center of analyses of various aspects of
stratification.” (Lareau and Weininger 2004:105 )
• “Bourdieu developed the concept of cultural capital in the context of
his educational research, and it is in the sociology of education that
it has had its most sustained impact on English-language
audiences.” (Lareau and Weininger 2004:106)
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Annette Lareau and Elliot B. Weininger (2004) “Cultural Capital in
Educational Research: A critical assessment”. pp. 105 – 144 in D. L. Swartz
and Vera L. Zolberg (eds) (2004) After Bourdieu. Kluwer: Netherlands
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Cultural capital and the sociology of
eduction
• Lareau and Weininger suggest “…that a dominant interpretation,
resting on two crucial premises, has emerged concerning cultural
capital. First, the concept of cultural capital is assumed to denote
knowledge of or competence with “highbrow” aesthetic culture (such
as fine art and classical music), Second, researchers assume that
the effects of cultural capital must be partitioned from those of
properly education “skills,” “ability,” or “achievement.” Together,
these premises result in studies in which the salience of cultural
capital is tested by assessing whether measures of “highbrow”
cultural participation predict educational outcomes (such as grades)
independently of various “ability” measures (such as standardized
test scores). We find this approach inadequate, both in terms of
Bourdieu’s own use of the concept and, more importantly, we
respect to what we see as its inherent potential.” (Lareau and
Weininger 2004:106)
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Researching the theory
• “Bourdieu states that cultural capital consists of familiarity with the
dominant culture in a society, and especially the ability to
understand and use ‘educated’ language. He argues that the
possession of cultural capital varies with social class, yet the
education system assumes the possession of cultural capital. This
makes it very difficult for lower-class pupils to succeed in the
educational system.” (Sullivan 2001:893)
• “In sum, Bourdieu’s view is that cultural capital is inculcated in the
higher-class home, and enables the higher-class student to gain
higher educational credentials than the lower-class student. This
enables higher-class individuals to maintain their class positions,
and legitmates the dominant positions that they typically go on to
hold. Of course, some lower-class individuals will succeed in the
educational system, but, rather than challenging the system this will
strengthen it by contributing to the appearance of meritocracy.”
P.(Sullivan 2001: 895)
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Operationalisation
Operationalisation – turning a theoretical concept into a measurable
variable.
Sullivan measures parents class and cultural activities by pupils reports
or parents occupations and activities
“I surveyed pupils on a broad range of possible component of cultural
capital.
1. Activities
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Reading: type and amount of books read, library use, newspapers read.
Television: types of programmes watcher.
Music: type of music listened to, playing an instrument.
Participation in ‘public’ or ‘formal’ culture: art gallery, theatre and concert
attendance
2. Cultural Knowledge
– Tested knowledge of famous cultural figures
3. Language
– Active and passive vocabulary test scores…” (Sullivan 2001:899)
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• “Both classic books and contemporary books of the sort
that receive reviews in the quality press were
categorised as having cultural capital content….
• Having asked pupils to list the television programmes
they watched regularly, I categorised these programmes
according to their cultural capital content…
• The test of cultural knowledge consisted of asking pupils
to categorise twenty-five famous cultural figures
according to whether these figures are associated with
politics, music, novel, art or science. …
• The test of active vocabulary demanded that pupils
provide several synonyms for each of five words given.”
[c.f. last week Labov] (Sullivan 2001:900)
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findings
(Sullivan 2000:910)
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