Anthony Giddens: structuration and the practical routines of social life
Giddens on modernity and the self
Pierre Bourdieu: habitus and practical social life
Contents
Anthony Giddens: structuration and the practical routines of social life
Giddens on modernity and the self
Pierre Bourdieu: habitus and practical social life
In the dreamy routines of daily life, we seldom think of ourselves as accomplished individuals using various skills to negotiate the social things about us. We seldom think of ourselves in this way partly because most of us, most of the time, adopt a ‘natural attitude’ to the world and to others around us, and partly because daily life does indeed exhibit various dream-like qualities. To say that daily life is oftentimes dreamy is to say that much of what we do, as well as why we do what we do, is mysterious. One of the mysteries of our daily or habitual behaviors is that our skills or accomplishments seem to be governed by forces out of the immediate reach of consciousness. Perhaps nowhere is this dreamy not-quite-consciousness of everyday life better dramatized than in the routines we all follow first thing in the morning, after rising from our dream-filled slumbers.
Like every household throughout cities of the West, my own family has developed its own internal rhythms – a richly crafted tapestry of routines – which comprise our morning happenings. If it is a weekday, I rise to skim the morning newspapers, check my email, get ready for work at university, and otherwise attend to helping my kids prepare for the day ahead at school. If my own morning routine has a degree of unremarkable consistency to it, this is easily countered by the intricate routines followed by my young children. My eldest daughter, who is in the early years of primary school, starts the day gently – requiring much encouragement to get out of bed. Breakfast is her favorite meal of the day, and she prefers to take her time, sampling from a range of breakfast cereals and other foods. My five-year-old son, by contrast, tends to scoff his breakfast – in order to get on with the demanding ritual of staging dinosaur battles. Meanwhile, my youngest daughter at only six months enjoys the attentions of her mother for an hour or so and then her routine dictates that she returns to bed for further sleep.
Routines of this kind are, as I say, unremarkable and yet run deep throughout society. Routines are very often considered by people as merely private – expressive of only individual preference. Routines are surely this – a central part of our private make-up as individuals – but they are also something else. From a sociological perspective, routines might be regarded as the ‘social glue’ that holds together the regular flow of daily life. How routines become established over time and well-sedimented in daily life has long attracted the attention of social theorists. From this angle, if routine emerges as a sociological concept and not simply a psychological disposition, this is because the term is fundamental to the question of the relation between the individual and society, selfhood and culture. Social theorists are thus preoccupied, among other things, with the issue of how the mundane routines of our daily life affect, and are affected by, the organization of whole societies.
Recent social theory has moved center stage the question of how our daily routines, habits and competencies serve to shape our social worlds. This chapter introduces the work of two famous social theorists – England’s Anthony Giddens and France’s Pierre Bourdieu.
Anthony Giddens: structuration and the practical routines of social life
Very broadly speaking, there have been two major approaches to explaining the relationship between the individual and society (see, for example, the Frankfurt School). In what we might call society-dominated accounts, a view is advanced that common culture, socialization and general social structure generates individual practices. There also exist what can be described as individual-dominated accounts, in which it is individuals who are treated as the source of broader social relations. By contrast to each of these approaches, Anthony Giddens is more concerned with coming to grasp how individual action is structured within the mundane practices of social life, while simultaneously recognizing that the structural and organizational features of contemporary societies are reproduced by individual action. This way of phrasing things may at first appear simply academic, but Giddens insists it is a fundamental advance for social theory to break from the individual/society dualism. For to continue to define the relation between the individual and society in strictly oppositional terms is to misunderstand what goes on within the intricacies of practical social life. To approach the issue differently, therefore, Giddens develops in his book The Constitution of Society (1984) the concept of structuration, by which he means to account for the production of habitual practices as simultaneously the force of systemic structures and the individual accomplishments of agents. The starting point of his analysis is not society as fixed and given, but rather the active flow of social life.
Like various structuralists, Giddens’s argument is that we fashion ourselves as individuals and societies in and through language. Society, according to this view, is therefore clearly ‘structured’ in some sense or other by language. Yet Giddens is also very critical of structuralism and post-structuralism. He rejects, for instance, the structuralist argument that ‘society is like a language;’ his reasons for holding to this view will be examined in some detail later in the chapter. The point to note at the outset is that, in contrast to the structuralist standpoint, Giddens contends that social action is similar to language primarily in the sense that it is ‘rule-following.’ As we go about our daily activities – thinking and talking about our worlds and, thus, in some sense helping to make and remake these very worlds – we use all sorts of ‘rules’ to do so. These rules are sometimes explicit or formal, as when someone driving a car follows traffic rules and stops at a red light. More often than not, however, the ‘rules’ we draw from to do the myriad things we do in social life derive from common sense – the ‘taken-for-granted’ knowledge of a society. But the crucial point for Giddens, as we will see, is that whilst social action is rule-governed it is not preset by such rules. There are many ways of following and applying rules to social situations – many of which are appropriate, some less so. When Giddens talks of social practices as ‘rule-governed,’ then, he means to emphasize the creativity of human action – the capacity of actors to apply rules in transformative, perhaps even novel, ways. Rules at once serve to shape social doing and action and also contain the possibility of acting otherwise.
Action, according to Giddens, cannot be adequately sociologically understood by looking at the discrete ‘acts’ of individuals. Rather than dissolve action into individual particles – intentions, motivations, reasons – Giddens contends that human action is a continuous flow. Whereas acts are discrete segments of individual doing, action refers to the ongoing flow of social practices, as people monitor or reflect on the social world of which they are part. On a general plane, Giddens advances a ‘stratification model’ of the human subject comprising three levels of knowledge or motivation: discursive consciousness, practical consciousness and the unconscious. He explains this stratification model of agency in The Constitution of Society as follows:
Human agents or actors – I use these terms interchangeably – have, as an inherent aspect of what they do, the capacity to understand what they do while they do it. The reflexive capacities of the human actor are characteristically involved in a continuous manner with the flow of day-to-day conduct in the contexts of social activity. But reflexivity operates only partly on a discursive level. What agents know about what they do, and why they do it – their knowledgeability as agents – is largely carried in practical consciousness. Practical consciousness consists of all the things which actors know tacitly about how to ‘go on’ in the contexts of social life without being able to give them direct discursive expression. The significance of practical consciousness is a leading theme of the book, and it has to be distinguished from both consciousness (discursive consciousness) and the unconscious.
(1984: xxii–xxiii)
Discursive consciousness thus refers to what agents are able to say, both to themselves and to others, about their own action; as Giddens repeatedly emphasizes, agents are knowledgeable about what they are doing, and this awareness often has a highly discursive component. Practical consciousness also refers to what actors know about their own actions, beliefs and motivations, but it is practical in the sense that it cannot be expressed discursively; what cannot be put into words, Giddens says following Wittgenstein, is what has to be done. Human beings know about their activities and the world in a sense that cannot be readily articulated; such practical stocks of knowledge are central, according to Giddens, to the project of social scientific research. Finally, the unconscious, says Giddens, is also a crucial feature of human motivation, and is differentiated from discursive and practical consciousness by the barrier of repression.
Giddens, as I’ve mentioned, repeatedly emphasizes ‘what people know’ is important – both to social action itself and to social analysis. This underscoring of individuals as knowledgeable agents refers, in the broadest sense, to the capacity of people to explain – both to themselves and to others – why they act as they do. Discursive consciousness is the ability of people to put things into words – articulation of the reasons for social action. But Giddens also recognizes the limits of language: talk takes us so far, but it is not all. Much of what people know about the social world, and of their reasons for acting in the ways that they do, cannot be articulated. To refer to some part of our human capacities as ‘preconscious’ or ‘practical consciousness’ is simply to say there are some things we cannot put into words. Much of human conduct, in other words, is practically guided or steered.
Practical social life, especially the rules we follow (whether we know it or not) as we go about our everyday activities, might thus be recast as the terrain of mysterious accomplishments. Consider, for example, the morning routine of which I wrote at the beginning of this chapter. Accessing email in the morning seems a relatively straightforward affair, provided all is fine with my computer. But, if asked to recite the technical specifications of the computer to explain how I am able to retrieve email from the network, I would very quickly exhaust my working knowledge of the topic. That is to say, I can operate the computer program to a certain level of skilled accomplishment, but have next to no idea of how to explain the technical aspects of electronic communication. The same holds true, for that matter, of language – in this case, the talk I engage in with my children and wife as we conduct our morning routine. Whilst we are engaged easily in talking, I would still be hard pressed to explain the finer rules of grammar which govern our linguistic exchanges in the morning. Of course, if I were a professional linguist and not a sociologist, I would presumably be able to detail more about the grammatical rules governing our conversation. But even then that is a matter of degree and not kind, and the point is that our conscious understandings of the world around us continually fluctuate between discursive articulations and practical accomplishments.
Structure … refers, in social analysis, to the structuring properties allowing the ‘binding’ of time-space in social systems, the properties which make it possible for discernibly similar social practices to exist across varying spans of time and space and which lend them ‘systemic’ form. To say that structure is a ‘virtual order’ of transformative relations means that social systems, as reproduced social practices, do not have ‘structures’ but rather exhibit ‘structural properties’ and that structure exists, as time-space presence, only in its instantiations in such practices and as memory traces orienting the conduct of knowledgeable human agents.
Anthony Giddens (1984) The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, page 17.
But what of social structure? What of social power, political authority, common culture? The first thing to emphasize about Giddens’s social theory, in this respect, is that ‘social structure’ is not something that exists externally. Society is certainly ‘structured’ or ‘textured’ for Giddens, but not as a result of the intrusion of ‘out there’ social forces such as capitalism or bureaucracy into the inner realms of our lives. Rejecting the sharp division between the individual and society in social theory, Giddens instead argues that social structure, or ‘society,’ is a constant product of our social activities – of our talk, our practices, our doings. Such a conception of social structure contrasts powerfully with more mainstream sociological accounts. Sociologists have tended to conceptualize structure in terms of institutional constraint, often in a quasi-hydraulical or mechanical fashion, such that structure is likened to the biological workings of the body or the girders of a building. Giddens strongly rejects functionalist, biological and empiricist analyses of structure. Following the ‘linguistic turn’ in twentieth century social theory, Giddens critically draws upon structuralist and post-structuralist theory, specifically the relationship posited between language and speech in linguistics. He does this, not because society is structured like a language (as structuralists have argued), but because he believes that language can be taken as exemplifying core aspects of social life. Language, according to Giddens, has a virtual existence; it ‘exists’ outside of time and space, and is only present in its instantiations as speech or writing. By contrast, speech presupposes a subject and exists in time/space intersections. In Giddens’s reading of structural linguistics, the subject draws from the rules of language in order to produce a phrase or sentence, and in so doing contributes to the reproduction of that language as a whole. Giddens draws extensively from such a conception of the structures of language in order to account for structures of action. His theorem is that agents draw from structures in order to perform and carry out social interactions, and in so doing contribute to the reproduction of institutions and structures. This analysis leads to a very specific conception of structure and social systems. ‘Structure,’ writes Giddens (1984: 26), ‘has no existence independent of the knowledge that agents have about what they do in their day-to-day activity.’
Giddens’s theoretical approach emphasizes that structures should be conceptualized as ‘rules and resources’: the application of rules which comprise structure may be regarded as generating differential access to social, economic, cultural and political resources. In The Constitution of Society Giddens argues that the sense of ‘rule’ most relevant to understanding social life is that which pertains to a mathematical formulae – for instance, if the sequence is 2,4,6,8, the formula is x = n+2. Understanding a formula, says Giddens, enables an agent to carry on in social life in a routine manner, to apply the rule in a range of different contexts. The same is true of bureaucratic rules, traffic rules, rules of football, rules of grammar, rules of social etiquette: to know a rule does not necessarily mean that one is able to explicitly formulate the principle, but it does mean that one can use the rule ‘to go on’ in social life. ‘The rules and resources of social action,’ writes Giddens, ‘are at the same time the means of systems reproduction’ (1984: 19). Systems reproduction, as Giddens conceives it, is complex and contradictory, involving structures, systems, and institutions. Social systems, for Giddens, are not equivalent with structures. Social systems are regularized patterns of interaction; such systems are in turn structured by rules and resources. Institutions are understood by Giddens as involving different modalities in and through which structuration occurs. Political institutions, for example, involve the generation of commands over people in relation to issues of authorization, signification, and legitimation; economic institutions, by contrast, involve the allocation of resources through processes of signification and legitimation.
Routines and rules are different to be sure. But for Giddens they both enable and guide the practical conduct of social life. Social rules and routines, amazingly, are learned and nurtured by us in a largely semiconscious way. We know how to apply countless rules to the conduct of our social life – we know ‘how to go on,’ as Giddens says – even though we may not be able to explicitly formulate those rules. Taking my kids to school, for instance, involves me in all sorts of conversational exchanges with other parents. For the most part, these exchanges are of a routine nature – mostly involving talk about our respective kids, organizing play-dates and such like. Following the school run, I then drive to university to give some lectures or seminars in my area of expertise – social theory. What is curious, when viewing this routine through the lens of Giddens’s structuration theory, is that things work well enough when I apply the ‘rules’ of social interaction – not that I am often aware of doing so – to these practical situations. Parents talk to me at school about matters to do with my children; students talk to me at university about matters to do with social theory. But try imagining what might happen if I got mixed up in this routine, and applied the wrong rules. Talking about the social theory of ‘structuration’ itself in the school grounds is something unlikely to win me many friends, and certainly not the approval of my children. If I were to keep talking the abstract language of social theory in the school grounds, as opposed to the university classroom, it is likely something that would have the school headmaster contact the local authorities and report me as a nuisance. Fortunately, social rules are usually applied to the appropriate social situation. Rules, remember, form part of our practical consciousness – and that for Giddens involves knowing ‘how to go on,’ how to apply the right rules to particular social contexts.
The constitution of agents and structures are not two independently given sets of phenomena, a dualism, but represent a duality. According to the notion of the duality of structure, the structural properties of social systems are both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organize. Structure is not ‘external’ to individuals: as memory traces, and as instantiated in social practices, it is in a certain sense more ‘internal’ than exterior to their activities in a Durkheimian sense. Structure is not to be equated with constraint but is always both constraining and enabling. This, of course, does not prevent the structured properties of social systems from stretching away, in time and space, beyond the control of any individual actors.
Anthony Giddens (1984) The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, page 25.
Giddens’s structuration theory, which powerfully distinguishes practical from discursive consciousness, thus yokes a sociological appreciation of the generative power of structures (albeit, ‘virtual’) to a phenomenological conception of common-sense, taken-for-granted knowledge. When we talk about, or act on, the world, we do so by mixing together rational accounts of our actions (the discursive) and a general awareness of taken-for-granted knowledge without being aware of it at any particular moment (the practical). From this angle, practical consciousness is the capability of actors to use a range of rules and methods that are taken for granted – which means, roughly, that in our heads we are not usually conscious of them. We speak language to varying levels of grammatical proficiency, and yet for the most part are unable to detail the grammatical rules we use. Many of the practical codes governing daily life operate in a similar manner. Men may, depending on when and where they were brought up, accord priority to women in entering and exiting social gatherings – without knowing exactly why.
Another way of putting this point is to say that social theory trades equally with that which we know on the one hand, and that which we intuitively grasp (but cannot explicitly formulate) on the other. However, there are other, subterranean forces at work within people’s lives – although these are not readily accessible within the language of sociology. To that end, Giddens turns to psychoanalysis in order to account for more primitive elements of human agency. Drawing from a range of psychoanalytic perspectives, and most notably from Lacan’s Freud in some of his earlier writings, Giddens argues that there are some things of which we will never know – due primarily to the ‘barrier of repression’ which is imprinted upon the unconscious mind during childhood. This is an important insight into the emotional dimensions of our lives as human agents acting in the world, although it is not one that Giddens focuses upon in any particular detail. Rather than thinking through the repressed unconscious for an account of human action, Giddens for the most part limits the disruptive force of the unconscious to that which erupts only at crisis moments. Except for the ‘critical moments’ of social upheaval or political crisis, Giddens contends that unconscious anxiety is – by and large – held in check by our habitual routines. The routine, he says, brings emotional security. From this angle, he draws especially from psychoanalyst Erik Erikson’s account of ‘ego-identity’ to understand how early childhood routines help to establish a sense of emotional security and faith in the durability of the social world.
In the last few paragraphs I have noted how Giddens approaches issues of human action, agency and subjectivity. It is important to link these more subjective aspects of his social theory back to issues of social practices and structures in order to grasp his emphasis upon duality in structuration theory. Agents, according to Giddens, draw on the rules and resources of structures, and in so doing contribute to the systemic reproduction of institutions, systems, and structures. In studying social life, says Giddens, it is important to recognize the role of ‘methodological bracketing.’ Giddens argues that the social sciences simultaneously pursue institutional analysis, in which the structural features of society are analyzed, and the analysis of strategic conduct, in which the manner in which actors carry on social interaction is studied. These different levels of analysis are central to social scientific research, and both are crucial to structuration theory. Connected to this, Giddens argues that the subjects of study of the social sciences are concept-using agents, individuals whose concepts enter into the manner in which their actions are constituted. He calls this intersection of the social world as constituted by lay actors on the one hand, and the metalanguages created by social scientists on the other, the ‘double hermeneutic.’
Giddens on modernity and the self
None of the outline of structuration theory so far casts specific light on the sociological issue of what may be distinctively new to our own age of, amongst others, intensive globalization, hi-tech finance and new information technologies. It was not until the early 1990s that Giddens turned his sociological attention to consider this acceleration of social change, most notably in his books The Consequences of Modernity (1990) and Modernity and Self Identity (1991). Here Giddens set out a powerful account of the tensions and contradictions of contemporary societies – ranging from current anxieties affecting identity and intimacy to high-intensity global risks, such as nuclear war. His basic thesis is that modernity heralds dramatic social transformations – the kind which social theory today stands unable to adequately confront. Rejecting Marx’s equation of modernity with corrosive capitalism, and wary of Weber’s portrait of the modern age as a bureaucratic iron cage, Giddens instead presents an image of modernity as juggernaut. Giddens’s juggernaut is a world certainly beyond control, but one which nonetheless offers immense personal opportunities and political possibilities, even though its menacing dark side – the high-consequence risks of ecological catastrophe, political totalitarianism or nuclear destruction – threatens to bring all this undone. He argues that our experience of the modern world is one always divided – split between security and risk, intimacy and impersonality, reassuring expert knowledge and disorientating cultural relativism. As with the stress on the open-ended nature of social relations in his earlier work, Giddens sees modernity as unpredictable. To live in the “world” produced by high modernity,’ writes Giddens (1991: 28), ‘has the feeling of riding a juggernaut. It is not just that more or less continuous and profound processes of change occur; rather, change does not consistently conform either to human expectation or to human control.’
A fundamental feature of modernity for Giddens is the reflexivity of social life. Reflexivity, as we have seen, is regarded by Giddens as an essential aspect of all human activity. How people think about, monitor and reflect on what they do, according to Giddens, is crucial to how society constitutes itself. In our own age, however, there is a radical intensification of reflexivity, such that self-monitoring and social relations become increasingly interwoven. Giddens (1990: 38) defines this intensification thus: ‘The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character’. In current times, we can see a clear acceleration in processes of social reflexivity. This is obvious, for example, in the expansion of communications media and new information technologies. Recent changes in mass media and information technology have arguably made the globe more interconnected than was previously the case, and this, in turn, has led to increasing reflexivity of social things happening across the world. What happens on one side of the planet can now be relayed worldwide virtually instantly thanks to advances in media technology. In this sense, our ‘social eyes’ have dramatically expanded. And as our ‘social eyes’ take in these distant happenings, so we come to incorporate such knowledge into how we talk about, and act upon, our more local worlds.
Consider, for example, what we know of the changing social landscape of marriage and divorce. Ours is a high divorce and remarriage society. Divorce statistics in the UK and across Europe indicate that over a third of marriages entered into today will end in divorce; in some states of the United States, the figures rise as high as fifty percent or more. Giddens’s thesis of accelerated social reflexivity emphasizes that such statistics are not merely incidental to marriage today, but influence and reshape people’s understandings of what marriage actually is. When a couple walks down the aisle in these early days of the 2000s, they do so ‘knowing’ (in a blend of the discursive and practical) the general chances for marriage longevity. The shift from marriage till-death-do-us-part to marriage until-further-notice is, from the vantage point of Giddens’s theory of modernity, the result of people reflecting on the changing cultural norms governing identity, intimacy, marriage and divorce.
Reflexivity for Giddens means a world of self-monitoring – of our own lives, the lives of others (both proximate and distant), and wider social happenings. Reflexivity here doesn’t equate with reflective control or predictability, since much of what unfolds in daily life involves reflex-like actions and knee-jerk responses. Nor is it accurate to view reflexivity as merely personal. Whilst reflexivity goes to the heart of how we perform the most basic tasks of our personal routines (such as catching a train or emailing a friend), it also is deeply inscribed in social processes and organizations in the broadest sense. Microsoft, British Petroleum and Calvin Klein are all companies with global reach, but the point is that these organizations could not operate in the global economy if not organizationally structured in reasonably reflexive ways. For this reason, Giddens distinguishes between individual reflexivity and institutional reflexivity. If the former is to do with self-monitoring and the ongoing observation and retracing of personal life, the latter is to do organizational tracking, administrative surveillance as well as broader economic and market forces. His emphasis on institutional reflexivity connects closely with science and expert knowledge too. In a world of dramatic scientific advances, for instance, there is – as a result of intensive reflexivity – a rise in the questioning of science. Paths of action and scenarios of choice are undertaken against a reflexive backdrop of a variety of other ways of doing things. Giddens offers the following overview, for example, in relation to global warming:
Many experts consider that global warming is occurring and they may be right. The hypothesis is disputed by some, however, and it has even been suggested that the real trend, if there is one at all, is in the opposite direction, towards the cooling of the global climate. Probably the most that can be said with some surety is that we cannot be certain that global warming is not occurring. Yet such a conditional conclusion will yield not a precise calculation of risks but rather an array of ‘scenarios’ – whose plausibility will be influenced, among other things, by how many people become convinced of the thesis of global warming and take action on that basis. In the social world, where institutional reflexivity has become a central constituent, the complexity of ‘scenarios’ is even more marked.
(1994: 59)
Written in 1994, this overview of scientific and lay opinion on global warming already looks quaint. However Giddens’s reasoning remains convincing: it is because so many people across the planet have become deeply concerned about the potential risks of climate change, and have pressed their governments to take important policy initiatives in this respect, that global warming has become the debate of our times. Giddens’s argument – that the complexity of ‘scenarios’ is central to our reflexive engagement with the wider world – speaks directly to the global pathways we face in the early twenty-first century.
The experiential character of contemporary daily life is well grasped by two of Giddens’s key concepts: trust and risk as interwoven with abstract systems. For Giddens, the relation between individual subjectivity and social contexts of action is a highly mobile one; and it is something that we make sense of and utilize through ‘abstract systems’. Abstract systems are institutional domains of technical and social knowledge: they include systems of expertise of all kinds, from local forms of knowledge to science, technology and mass communications. Giddens is underscoring much more than simply the impact of expertise on people’s lives, far-reaching though that is. Rather, Giddens extends the notion of expertise to cover ‘trust relations’ – the personal and collective investment of active trust in social life. The psychological investment of trust contributes to the power of specialized, expert knowledge – indeed it lies at the bedrock of our Age of Experts – and also plays a key role in the forging of a sense of security in day-to-day social life. Trust and security are thus both a condition and an outcome of social reflexivity. Giddens sees the reflexive appropriation of expert knowledge as fundamental in a globalizing, culturally cosmopolitan society. While a key aim may be the regularization of stability and order in our identities and in society, reflexive modernity is radically experimental however, and is constantly producing new types of incalculable risk and insecurity. This means that, whether we like it or not, we must recognize the ambivalence of a social universe of expanded reflexivity: there are no preordained, or even clear, pathways for individual or social development today.
In The Transformation of Intimacy (1992), Giddens connects the notion of reflexivity to sexuality, gender, and intimate relationships. With modernization and the decline of tradition, says Giddens, the sexual life of the human subject becomes a ‘project’ that has to be managed and defined against the backdrop of new opportunities and risks – including, for example, artificial insemination, experiments in ectogenesis (the creation of human life without pregnancy), AIDS, sexual harassment, and the like. Linking gender to new technologies, Giddens argues we live in an era of ‘plastic sexuality.’ ‘Plastic sexuality’ (1992: 2), writes Giddens, ‘is decentered sexuality, freed from the needs of reproduction … and from the rule of the phallus, from the overweening importance of male sexual experience.’ Sexuality thus becomes open-ended, elaborated not through pre-given roles, but through reflexively forged relationships. The self today, as the rise of therapy testifies, is faced with profound dilemmas in respect of sexuality. ‘Who am I?,’ ‘What do I desire?,’ ‘What satisfactions do I want from sexual relations?’ – these are core issues for the self, according to Giddens. This does not mean that sexual experience occurs without institutional constraint, however. Giddens contends that the development of modern institutions produces a ‘sequestration of experience’ – sexual, existential and moral – which squeezes to the sidelines core problems relating to sexuality, intimacy, mortality and death (see Elliott 1992).
Giddens, in other words, adopts an idealist language of autonomy, stressing as he does the creativity of action and the modernist drive to absolute self-realization, while remaining suspicious of intellectual traditions that prioritize subjects over objects, or actors over structures. This comes out very clearly in his work on the changing connections between marriage, the family and self-identity. According to Giddens, individuals today actively engage with novel opportunities and dangers that arise as a consequence of dramatic transformations affecting self-identity, sexuality and intimacy. For Giddens, divorce is undeniably a personal crisis, involving significant pain, loss and grief. Yet many people, he argues, take positive steps to work through the emotional dilemmas generated by marriage breakdown. In addition to dealing with financial issues and matters affecting how children should be brought up, separation and divorce also call into play a reflexive emotional engagement with the self. Charting territory from the past (where things went wrong, missed opportunities, etc.) and for the future (alternative possibilities, chances for self-actualization, etc.) necessarily involves experimenting with a new sense of self. This can lead to emotional growth, new understandings of self, and strengthened intimacies. Against the conservative critique of marriage breakdown, Giddens sees the self opening out to constructive renewal. Remarriage and the changing nature of family life are crucial in this respect. As he develops this point:
Many people, adults and children, now live in stepfamilies – not usually, as in previous eras, as a consequence of the death of a spouse, but because of the re-forming of marriage ties after divorce. A child in a stepfamily may have two mothers and fathers, two sets of brothers and sisters, together with other complex kin connections resulting from the multiple marriages of parents. Even the terminology is difficult: should a stepmother be called ‘mother’ by the child, or called by her name? Negotiating such problems might be arduous and psychologically costly for all parties; yet opportunities for novel kinds of fulfilling social relations plainly also exist. One thing we can be sure of is that the changes involved here are not just external to the individual. These new forms of extended family ties have to be established by the very persons who find themselves most directly caught up in them.
(1991: 13)
Marital separation, as portrayed by Giddens, implicates the self in an open project: tracing over the past, imagining the future, dealing with complex family problems and experimenting with a new sense of identity. Further experimentation with marriage and intimate relationships will necessarily involve anxieties, risks and opportunities. But, as Giddens emphasizes, the relation between self and society is a highly fluid one, involving negotiation, change and development.
The manner in which current social practices shape future life outcomes is nowhere more in evidence than in the conjunction of divorce statistics, the reckoning of probability ratios for success or failure in intimate relationships, and the decision to get married. As Giddens rightly points out, statistics about marriage and divorce do not exist in a social vacuum; everyone, he says, is in some sense aware of how present gender uncertainties affect long-term relationships. When people marry or remarry today, according to Giddens, they do so against a societal backdrop of high divorce statistics, knowledge of which alters a person’s understanding and conception of what marriage actually is. It is precisely this reflexive monitoring of relationships that, in turn, transforms expectations about, and aspirations for, marriage and intimacy. The relationship between self, society and reflexivity is thus a highly dynamic one, involving the continual overturning of traditional ways of doing things.
Giddens’s work is a brilliant conjuncture of social theory and modern sociology, involving a provocative account which examines the very constitution of society through recurrent social practices. It is not, however, without its difficulties. For one thing, some critics think Giddens gravely mistaken in his project to overcome the individual/society opposition. Sociologist Margaret Archer (1982, 1990) argues that not only is Giddens wrong to amalgamate agency with structure, but that he fails to grasp the necessity of treating structure and agency as analytically distinct in order to deal with both methodological and substantive problems in the social sciences. At the core of Archer’s critique there lies anxiety about Giddens’s strong argument that structures only exist in and through the social practices of human agents. If any society were to eliminate time in the manner that Giddens’s model of virtual structures actually does, according to Archer, then it would be radically impoverished in terms of its understanding of history. That is to say, structures need to be identified historically, across time, in order for sociologists to analyze how agents have acted to both reproduce and change the structures of social life. A similar point has been made by Nicos Mouzelis (1989), who questions the applicability of structuration theory to collective actors such as social movements. According to Mouzelis, Giddens’s notion of structuration is more or less appropriate to our immediate, routine lives – where agents carry out their actions without undue levels of reflection. But the model is less well suited, he argues, to situations where actors consciously and conceptually reflect on the power of structures in shaping the world. Where workers take a principled stand against unfair working conditions, or where women collectively act against entrenched forms of gender discrimination, these are situations that demand taking a highly reflective attitude to the world. They are situations, according to Mouzelis, that involve separating agency from structure – in order for actors to understand the power of structures in their lives and, subsequently, to try to change such determination. The contestation of economic or gender power, on this view, is not something that can be left to the routine actions of reflexive individuals.
Perhaps the most critical voice among commentators on Giddens has been John B. Thompson, who worked very closely with Giddens during the 1980s and 1990s at Cambridge University. Thompson clearly admires the scope and ambition of Giddens’s social theory, but questions the adequacy of his notion of rules and resources for grasping social structure. According to Thompson, Giddens’s account of rules and resources is vague and misleading. The study of the rules used to speak a language, he points out, are not the same thing as the study of social structure. Linguistic and grammatical rules, says Thompson, are important forms of constraint upon human action; however, they are not the only forms of constraint in social life. Taxation laws requiring that I pay a portion of my income to the government each year are clearly more socially important than my own imposed rule that I try to exercise three times a week. Yet to grasp that importance requires some concept of social structure. Social structures are, thus, very much about the practical ways in which individuals come to reproduce, challenge, question and transform the realities of the world. In this connection, Thompson questions Giddens’s account of the transformational properties of structures, and suggests there is inadequate differentiation between the structural and institutional features of social life in his approach. A worker at the Ford Motor Company, notes Thompson, might be said to contribute to the reproduction of that institution, and thus also said to contribute to the reproduction of capitalism as a structure, to the extent that the worker pursues their everyday employment activities. However it is also possible that the worker along with others might undertake activities that threaten the smooth running of Ford as an institution, but without similarly threatening to bring capitalism down.
Every act of production and reproduction may also be a potential act of transformation, as Giddens rightly insists; but the extent to which an action transforms an institution does not coincide with the extent to which social structure is thereby transformed.
(1989: 70)
Giddens is a social theorist who has done perhaps more than anyone to draw our attention to the virtual feel of structures in everyday life. Yet even in his scrupulous attention to the power of invisible structures, he always reminds us of the activities of individuals. Let us recall his formulation of structuration theory: structures only exist in and through the social practices of human agents. If there has been criticism of Giddens’s reformulation of the concept of structure in social theory, however, there has equally been disagreement with his account of the individual or identity. The routine nature of our daily lives is a powerful sociological idea that helps account for the astonishing fact that, despite the immense complexity of social organization, there is a kind of order or regularity to the world. This may seem to be only a surface phenomenon. For whilst most of us know ‘how to go on’ in social situations, the actual detail of what goes on in social life is complex and contradictory. Many people are able to ‘give off’ the impression of things running smoothly, whilst in fact they may feel their lives to be running out of control. But even so, such personal confusion does not seem to be problematic to Giddens’s social theory – at least as long as the individual is able to maintain ‘role-taking’ in social interaction and carry on ‘business-as-usual’ with the micro-situations of daily life. Certainly, Giddens makes it clear that he regards routines as essential to both the production of identity and society. ‘Routine,’ writes Giddens (1984: 60), ‘is integral both to the continuity of the personality of the agent, as he or she moves along the paths of daily activities, and to the institutions of society, which are such only through their continued reproduction.’ This is not an expression of sociological determinism (in the sense that identity is pre-programmed) or political conservatism: there is no logical reason why social reproduction demands an acceptance of particular habitual practices. Moreover, Giddens’s more recent political writings advancing a ‘third way’ for social democracy plainly indicate his discontent with neo-liberalism and neo-conservativism. Rather, Giddens’s stress on routinization suggests that existing, alternative and oppositional forms of life demand some sort of motivational commitment to the integration of habitual practices across space and time.
And yet it is precisely here that Giddens pushes the routinized nature of social life to breaking point – or so argue some critics. If the structured nature of social interaction is the ability of individuals to do what they do in a routine fashion, then what is it exactly that provides the sense of organizing consistency to such routines? How do the organized routines of daily life come into existence – from the imagination of individuals, or the complex social things of society? Suddenly, the duality proposed by structuration theory returns us to a familiar sociological opposition. But still there are other concerns. There is the question, for example, of how far down routines really go in private life – of whether they actually create identity through providing social consistency from situation to situation, or whether they instead provide a social framework for an already established emotional complexity of the self. And if routines are, in some sense, tied up with the making of identity, how might we come to understand the structured realities of individuals living their routine lives? What, in other words, makes for the social differences between routines in, say, China and North America? How might the notion of routine apply to the Third World? Is the term, as Giddens uses it, a sociologically neutral account of social interaction, or a normative image of Western living?
Finally, we may note that this account of the relation between society and the individual, for all its claims of transcending the dualism of subject and object, betrays a sociologically impoverished grasp of the emotional lives of people. At the center of this criticism is Giddens’s use of psychoanalysis. We have seen earlier that Giddens draws on Freud’s account of the unconscious to supplement his notion of practical consciousness: like practical consciousness, the unconscious is a sector of human experience that is non-discursive; unlike practical consciousness, there is much in the unconscious that cannot be brought into language due to the barrier of repression established in early infancy. The effects of the repressed unconscious, to be sure, are disabling at moments of societal stress or crisis; but there is for Giddens a certain kind of stability to the unconscious, which is regulated by the force of daily habits and routines. Predictable routines, says Giddens, keep the unconscious at bay. It is worth pausing to ask of this standpoint, however, whether the unconscious is really ‘bracketed’ by routines? What of the narcissistic routines promoted by consumer capitalism, in which individuals are encouraged to obsess about their bodies, or constantly measure their physical appearance against the standards of celebrity culture? Is it meaningful to speak of a routine limiting of the unconscious within these parameters of popular culture? Similarly, some critics think that Giddens closes off the radical implications of psychoanalysis for social theory through the bulk of vocabulary of self-organization – ‘bracketing anxiety,’ ‘ontological security,’ and ‘emotional inoculation.’ All of these terms seem to suggest an individual serenely inserted into the social order; but this is a far cry from the split and fractured individual subject of psychoanalysis.
Pierre Bourdieu: habitus and practical social life
Giddens’s theory of structuration operates on a reasonably grand scale, revolving on such general sociological concepts as system, structure and subject, whereas the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu is more concerned to analyze the surreptitious forms by which power inculcates itself within our personal and bodily dispositions as expressed in daily life. Like Giddens, Bourdieu is interested in the habits of whole societies – so much so that he has invented a sociological concept, habitus, to account for how well-practiced habits bridge individuals and the wider social things of which they are part. Also like Giddens he holds that social actors exhibit intricate complex understandings of the social conditions which influence, and are in turn influenced by, their personal decisions and private lives. It may be hard to judge the exact differences between Bourdieu and Giddens on this point – for both of them are at pains to emphasize the semiconscious reflexiveness of social actors. Bordieu’s formulation is that actors possess a ‘sense of the game,’ which is the basis from which people deploy a kind of semi-automatic grasp of what is appropriate to differing social situations. Where Bourdieu and Giddens certainly depart company however, and this is a point that will be examined subsequently in the chapter, concerns the extent to which power goes all the way down – for Bourdieu, to the inculcation of bodily dispositions as well as the dramatization of personal style.
Studying how society generates particular practices in individuals is Bourdieu’s way of rethinking the relation between identity and social structure in social theory. Like Giddens’s blending of social structure and human action, Bourdieu wants to develop a sophisticated social theory that will neither reduce actors to mere ‘supports’ of social processes nor elevate them to the source of all social things. In this connection, he was attempting to steer a new direction in French intellectual culture in the early part of his career, one beyond the liberationist existentialism of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (arguably France’s most famous public intellectual at the time) and also the equally problematic structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, Barthes and Foucault (see Chapter 5). His ambition, simply put, was the puzzle of how seemingly spontaneous individual action comes to dovetail with society’s expectation that people perform appropriate practices in specific situations.
To address this puzzle, Bourdieu outlines in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) his concept of habitus, by which he means the molding of a set of individual dispositions interlocking with the specific cultural characteristics of the society concerned. Here is how Bourdieu develops, in his typically dense style, the concept of habitus:
The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment … produce the habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuration of practices and representations which can be objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goal without presupposing the conscious orientation towards ends and the express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all that, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor.
(1977: 72)
It is because individuals inculcate particular cultural dispositions that their actions are, by and large, carried out in a fashion that appears spontaneous yet structured, unregulated yet regular. You decide you want to travel somewhere new in town, but then find yourself queueing at the railway station; you decide to express the ‘inner self’ by painting, but first you need to visit the local arts store to stock up on paints and brushes. It is as if the very ‘spontaneity’ of our daily behavior is always overwritten, as it were, with some kind of social unconscious which serves to harmonize our practices with those deeply tacit norms and values of the wider society. This is not to suggest, Bourdieu stresses, that social structures actually determine individual action. On the contrary, habitus is a flexible, open-ended structuring system, one which enables social actors to have numerous creative strategies at their disposal and thus to cope with unforeseen social structures.
As an acquired system of generative schemes, the habitus makes possible the free production of all the thoughts, perceptions and actions inherent in the particular conditions of its production – and only those …. Because the habitus is an infinite capacity for generating products – thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions – whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditionings.
Pierre Bourdieu (1990) The Logic of Practice. Stanford (CA): Stanford University Press, page 55.
Bourdieu developed his concept of habitus from his anthropological studies of the Kabyle tribes people and, in particular, from close sociological analysis of gift exchanges in Kabyle society. Bourdieu considers that structuralism is correct in its initial diagnosis that society possesses a reality that precedes the individual. This is the point, for example, that language preexists us as speaking agents, and will subsequently continue as a social institution longafterwe have left the planet. Ifthis is so, Bourdieu supposes, then structuralism is right to claim that language has the power to regulate, even shape, our individual speech-acts – whether we realize it or not. But where structuralism is palpably insufficient, according to Bourdieu, lies in its reduction of social action to a mechanical system of rules which imposes itself upon individuals. Studying the intricacies of gift exchange in Kabyle society, Bourdieu finds that men’s sense of honor is facilitated less by an application of pre-established rules than by carrying out a whole range of practices – such as ‘playing with the tempo’ of response and acknowledgment of a gift. An actor’s response to the receipt of a gift is not therefore socially determined by the application of mechanical rules, and nor is it a matter of mere private judgment. It rather involves the creative artistry of the recipient, experimenting within a fluid structuring structure, one marked by group norms of acceptable practice, obligation, reciprocity and honor.
Habitus, in the sense of deeply ingrained dispositions, is a structuring feature of social practices, but it is more than just that. If our practical, or habitual, behaviors have a degree of consistency to them, this is because our bodies are literally molded into certain forms that interlock with existing social arrangements. One way of thinking about how habitus reaches all the way down into bodily needs and dispositions is to consider the process that sociologists call ‘socialization.’ The notion of socialization refers, broadly speaking, to the training or regulation of children within the structure of bigger social things. The learning of good manners at home, or respect for figures of authority at school, are examples of the socialization process. Bourdieu’s account of how habitus penetrates the body – what he calls the ‘corporeal hexis’ – is similar to the idea of socialization, but is much broader in scope. Socialization conveys too much the sense of active or conscious learning, and this is not how Bourdieu thinks we come to act in the world. Instead, he is interested in getting at the subtle ways in which messages are relayed to people overtime, such that cultural norms become routine patterns of behavior and, thus, withdrawn from consciousness. The parent who routinely tells their son or daughter to ‘sit up straight’ at dinner, or who instructs to ‘always say thank you’ when offered food at the home of a fellow class-mate, is thus going about the business of reproducing the habitus of modern society. This is the sense, too, in which habitus bites deeply into the very bodies of individuals – structuring the ways in which people come to talk, walk, act and eat. Habitus, thus, is deeply interwoven with the stylization of bodies.
What has been discussed so far about social practices and bodies is central to the analysis of human action, and yet it hardly needs saying that-for regular social life to get up and running – such practices must be anchored in wider institutional contexts. Bourdieu seeks to do this by introducing the notion of ‘field,’ by which he means the structured space of positions in which an individual is located. For Bourdieu, there are various kinds of fields – educational, economic, cultural – which contain different kinds of social properties and characteristics. A field, says Bourdieu, pre-exists the individual. It ascribes an objective place to individuals within the broader scheme of social things, and thereby serves as a relation of force between individuals and groups engaged in struggles within certain fields. As John Thompson explains this social reach of the field in Bourdieu’s work:
A field may be seen synchronically as a structured space of positions, such that the properties of these positions depend on their location within the space and not upon the personal attributes of their occupants. However different the fields may be – whether, for example, it is a pedagogical space in which teachers transmit a form of ‘knowledge’ or a cultural space in which literary works are offered for consumption – there are certain general laws which commonly obtain. Thus, in every field, one may struggle between the nouveaux entrants who try to jump over the rights of entry and to alter the structure in their favor, and those established agents or groups who try to defend their monopoly and to exclude competition.
(1984: 49)
Questions of Taste: Bourdieu’s Distinction
Cultural tastes and social preferences are habitus, in Bourdieu’s terminology, but they are also an outwardly expression of power and social class. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984), Bourdieu developed a brilliant analysis of the habits and tastes of French society – which he divided into the working class, the lower middle class and the upper middle class. His argument, broadly speaking, was that whilst economics is the baseline of social order, the struggle for social distinction is played out with other forms of capital too – notably, cultural capital and symbolic capital.
In Bourdieu’s view, the struggle for capital is more a matter of practices than ideas, which in turn brings us to core distinctions between poverty and affluence in the realm of culture as well as lifestyle practices. As Bourdieu (1984: 77) writes:
If a group’s lifestyle can be read off from the style it adopts in furnishing or clothing, this is not only because these properties are the object of the economic and cultural necessity which determines their selection, but also because the social relations objectified in familiar objects in their luxury or poverty, their ‘distinction’ or vulgarity, their ‘beauty’ or their ‘ugliness’ impress themselves through bodily experiences which may be as profoundly unconscious as the quiet caress of beige carpets or the thin clamminess of tattered garish linoleum, the harsh smell of bleach.
Culture then is the sense of fine living, manners, refinement or an elegant ease of social interaction that lies at the center of how individuals demonstrate social sophistication. Such social sophistication requires certain economic capital – for example, expensive private schools. But social struggles for distinction have a cultural dimension too: cultivation of the self is also a matter of learning, aesthetics, the arts.
Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital directs our attention to the means whereby social inequalities are generated through the classifying power of taste as expressed in the consumption of culture. Bourdieu found that the possession of specific forms of cultural capital – of intellectuals and artists, for example – is used to maintain social dominance over those who do not possess such competences. This valuable sociological perspective can also be extended to the analysis of popular culture and the media. In ‘reality television,’ for example, new forms of symbolic violence are arguably evident as regards the public humiliation of people and their relegation to an inferior social standing within the social order. Analyzing the UK television program What Not To Wear (similar format to How Do I Look?), media theorist Angela McRobbie has used Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital to focus on practices of symbolic violence and forms of domination. As McRobbie (2005: 147–8) writes:
Bourdieu’s writing allows us to re-examine symbolic violence as a vehicle for social reproduction …. The victim of the make-over television programme presents his or her class habitus for analysis and critique by the experts. The programmes comprise a series of encounters where cultural intermediaries impart guidance and advice to individuals ostensibly as a means of self-improvement …. These programmes would not work if the victim did not come forward and offer herself as someone in need of expert help. On the basis of her own subordinate class habitus, the individual will have a ‘feel for the game,’ a ‘practical sense for social reality’ which means in the context of the programmes, she will instinctively, and unconsciously, know her place in regard to the experts, hence the tears, the gratitude and the deference to those who know so much better than she does.
Bourdieu’s ideas help us understand why people adopt certain kinds of cultural practices, and how – through habitus adjustment to dominant social classes – conformity with the requirements of consumer culture are maintained.
Appropriately enough for a social theorist whose writings are arrestingly original, Bourdieu’s work has been subjected to many – and sometimes vehement – criticisms. Critics have questioned, for example, the adequacy of the concept of habitus to address the complexity of social experience. The criticism here is that habitus overemphasizes the containment of cultural dispositions within social structures – thereby downgrading the capacity of individuals to negotiate or transform existing social systems through their creative actions. There may be some truth to this charge, but the criticism needs more precision. Bourdieu’s habitus emerged as a theoretical innovation in the aftermath of structuralism and post-structuralism; it fitted well enough with a political and intellectual climate in which dissent was still possible, but now conceptualized in a fashion that fully broke with individualistic ways of understanding the world. Society for Bourdieu was less the outcome of individual acts and choices than a structuring, structured field of dispositions in which individuals mobilize themselves and act to exclude others on the base of relevant cultural capital. The habitus, in other words, refers to an objectivity (‘society’) that inscribes itself within identity. There is something about social production which is both enabling and coercive. What is most dynamic about habitus for Bourdieu is its status as the condition of sociality: the habitus prescribes the kinds of agency demanded by culture. Yet whilst this viewpoint was in some general sense radical, it seemed on the whole to have little of interest to say about specific issues of identity (the concrete negotiations of the self in relation to social relations), even if Bourdieu had provided a whole range of sociological enquiries, from education to aesthetics. Part of the difficulty in this respect is that Bourdieu might be said not to have broken with structuralism thoroughly enough, in the sense that structures in his work continue to confer on us our agency – to such a degree that we misrecognize our fate as our choice. In doing so, Bourdieu’s habitus neglects the creativity of action which individuals bring to all encounters with social and cultural processes – a matter of profound significance to the question of social change. Ultimately, as Charles Lemert (1995: 146) writes, ‘habitus cannot account for change in habitus.’
The debate over Bourdieu’s contributions to social theory has also addressed many other issues. One central criticism concerns certain assumptions about society Bourdieu appears to make in his various sociological analyses. Some critics contend, for example, that he takes the economy for granted, leaving unanalyzed the role of economic forces upon social life. Whilst Bourdieu was widely seen as sympathetic to the political left, the politics of his social theory was somewhat oblique; he certainly distanced himself from Marx and Marxism. Against this backdrop, some have argued that he elevated cultural capital over economic capital, thus tending to skirt issues of economic oppression. A more interesting line of criticism, in my view, is that his account of symbolic violence assumes a certain kind of consensus with respect to the norms and values that are central in society. This is less a matter of assuming that people openly agree with one another about societal values than a presupposition that those who exercise cultural and symbolic capital are perceived by others as ‘legitimate’ bearers of social authority. That is to say, Bourdieu can be criticized for conceptualizing social practice in terms of how social stability is sustained. Such an approach allows him to develop powerful insights into how symbolic domination is wielded in contemporary societies, and yet these insights arguably come at the sociological cost of understanding how social structures – or ways of acting with cultural capital – can be changed. In short, habitus might not be so overwhelmingly rigid.
Finally, it is now widely agreed that Bourdieu’s commitment to the political notion of resistance led him to overestimate the constraints of social domination operating within specific power structures of advanced capitalism on the one hand, whilst underestimating the degree to which the world really had changed as a result of the impacts of globalization on the other hand. Certainly, there can be little doubt that Bourdieu’s attacks on globalization and the neo-liberalism promoted by various French conservative governments were provocative. Notwithstanding his commitment to stand shoulder to shoulder with struggling workers, immigrants and others dispossessed from the contemporary French political system, however, Bourdieu failed to develop an outline of what a progressive politics might actually look like in our own time of accelerated globalization. French social theory has often turned on a contrast between some utopian moment of resistance to power as such and the contaminated terrain of reformist social policy, and Bourdieu is no exception in this respect. However, his disquisitions on resistance in general – when coupled to the sociological diagnosis of people’s cultural habitus – can easily be misinterpreted as a form of defeatist politics. Here comparison between Bourdieu and Giddens is, once again, instructive. Notwithstanding the various criticisms of Giddens’s theory of a radical center or ‘third way’ in contemporary politics, Giddens’s work powerfully acknowledges the extent to which the political landscape of modern societies has changed in recent decades – primarily as a result of globalization and the information technology revolution. Certainly Giddens’s late political writings have significantly influenced the direction of various center-left governments – in Britain, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and even France. Bourdieu’s political tracts did not exert this kind of policy impact, and it is interesting to consider why this was the case. Whereas Bourdieu pitched his political critique at the level of blue skies resistance to power in general, Giddens’s ‘third way’ constituted a new political path, one designed in response to the realities of the global electronic economy. A dynamic economy for Giddens is essential not only to the creation of wealth but for social solidarity and social justice too. Whereas Bourdieu tended to dismiss globalization processes as intrinsically anti-democratic, Giddens recognized that globalism is a much more complex political phenomenon – one that opens out to ‘depoliticized global space’ and is central to the economic and political problems of our time. By contrast, globalization for Bourdieu appears as a remorseless totalization, one to which the only political counterweight is ‘anti-globalization.’
1 Giddens distinguishes two key types of social knowledge: practical and discursive consciousness. What do you understand to be their differences?
2 How is it that our individual actions – daily habits, routines and competencies – help to ‘reproduce’ the structures of society?
3 Giddens says that social structures are both ‘medium and outcome’ of a social system? What he is getting at?
4 How does the modern reflexive monitoring of individual action come to alter social structures?
5 Habitus is both enabling and coercive. How so?
6 From clothing to musical taste, Bourdieu asserts that ‘cultural capital’ is at play. Make a reading of cultural capital in your own life.
Anthony Giddens
Central Problems in Social Theory (London: Macmillan; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979)
The Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge: Polity Press; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)
The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press; Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990)
Modernity and Self Identity. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991)
The Transformation of Intimacy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992)
Beyond Left and Right (Cambridge: Polity Press; Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994)
(with Ulrich Beck and Scott Lash) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1994)
Pierre Bourdieu
Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1977)
Distinction (London: Routledge, 1984)
Homo Academicus (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988)
Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991)
The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993)
The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1995)
The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996)
Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2000)
(with Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson) On Television (New Press, 1999)