Abstract
This article argues that while elements of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology are increasingly employed in American sociology, it is rare to find all three of Bourdieu’s master concepts—habitus, capital, and field—incorporated into a single study. Moreover, these concepts are seldom deployed within a relational perspective that was fundamental to Bourdieu’s thinking. The article “Bourdieu and Organizational Analysis” by Mustafa Emirbayer and Victoria Johnson is a welcomed exception, for it draws on all three of Bourdieu’s pillar concepts to propose a relational approach to the study of organizations. It both reframes existing thinking about organizations, particularly from the neo-institutional and resource dependence schools, and indicates new directions for research in organizations to move. This paper evaluates their contribution calling attention to its many strengths and suggesting a few points that need future clarification and elaboration.
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Notes
Although capital, habitus, and field are widely recognized today as Bourdieu’s master concepts, there is a broader list of concepts, such as symbolic power and violence, doxa, classification struggles, and reflexivity that characterize Bourdieu’s work. The authors use sparingly the Bourdieusian language of symbolic power and violence but do call attention to the importance of symbolic struggle in organizational life. From a Bourdieusian perspective, the capacity to impose meanings as legitimate would be an important part of organizational life. Yet, except to say that the view of action as dispositional is stronger than intentionalist and rational action theory that seem so prominent in much organizational theorizing, the authors do not explore in depth how symbolic domination may be a central characteristic of organizational life. And, as we note below, the theme of reflexivity is one central concern of Bourdieu that does not find much echo in Emirbayer and Johnson’s article.
Emirbayer (1997) draws some of his inspiration for relational analysis from similar sources to that of Bourdieu, notably from Ernst Cassirer. Both also see relational thinking in Marx. Where they differ is that Emirbayer also draws from the American pragmatist tradition, notably from John Dewey, whereas that was not part of Bourdieu’s early intellectual formation. Some (Kestenbaum 1977; Ostrow 1987; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 122) have suggested there are important parallels between Bourdieu’s thinking and that of Dewey notably on the importance of habit in human action.
Reflexivity is an enduring theme throughout Bourdieu’s work that one finds from The Craft of Sociology (Bourdieu et al. 1991[1968]) to Pascalian Meditations (Bourdieu 2000[1997]).
The piecemeal approach to Bourdieu’s work is most notable in the case of his concept of cultural capital, undoubtedly the most widely known and most applied of Bourdieu’s conceptual language, particularly in the sociology of education and culture. Yet, Bourdieu did not offer a theory of cultural capital per se. Cultural capital is a concept Bourdieu invented to identify the importance of cultural resources in modern stratified societies, but it was always just one—albeit a very important one—among a variety of types of power resources—capitals—that individuals and groups accumulate and exchange in order to enhance their positions in modern stratified societies. The concept helped sensitize a generation of researchers to the more subtle but important cultural facts shaping educational outcomes. Lareau’s (1987, 1989; Lareau and Horvat 1999) work is one excellent example of research taking Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital in new and interesting directions including in the organizational context of education. Yet even Lareau and Weinninger (2004), in their insightful analysis of two mothers negotiating advantages for their children with their teachers, attempt to capture more with the concept of cultural capital than Bourdieu himself would have tried (he would have also used the concept of habitus to identify dispositional features such as expectations for what individuals can or cannot do in specific interactional situations such as with school authorities like teachers.) and give no explicit attention to field.
Hallett (2003) is one important study that does bring habitus into organizational analysis. Yet, while this study links the dispositional character of practices to a meso-level of organizational culture as a negotiated order that includes the struggle to define situations (symbolic power) in organizational life, it remains anchored in an interactionist perspective that does not move as far in connecting interactions in organizations to larger macro structures (struggles over economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital in the field of power and statist capital in the state) as Bourdieu’s field perspective would call for.
There are a couple of references in the article to Victoria Johnson’s work on opera houses, but her study of the Paris opera does not serve as an illustrative constructed object of research in Emirbayer and Johnson’s article here.
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Swartz, D.L. Bringing Bourdieu’s master concepts into organizational analysis. Theor Soc 37, 45–52 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9053-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9053-x