Bernard Lahire

Bio: Bernard Lahire is an academic researcher from École normale supérieure de Lyon. The author has contributed to research in topics: Social group & Social class. The author has an hindex of 31, co-authored 87 publications receiving 3808 citations. Previous affiliations of Bernard Lahire include Centre national de la recherche scientifique & École Normale Supérieure.

L'Homme pluriel. Les ressorts de l'action

Abstract: L'homme que les sciences humaines et sociales prennent pour objet est le plus souvent etudie dans un seul contexte ou a partir d'une seule dimension. On l'analyse en tant qu'eleve, travailleur, consommateur, conjoint, lecteur, pratiquant d'un sport, electeur, etc. Or, dans des societes ou les hommes vivent souvent simultanement et successivement des experiences socialisatrices heterogenes et parfois contradictoires, chacun est inevitablement porteur d'une pluralite de dispositions, de facons de voir, de sentir et d'agir. S'interroger sur les manieres dont la pluralite des mondes et des experiences s'incorpore au sein de chaque individu, observer son action sur une diversite de scenes, voila l'horizon scientifique vers lequel tend cet ouvrage. Sociologue, l'auteur noue un dialogue avec une partie de la psychologie, de l'histoire, de l'anthropologie et de la philosophie. Ses reflexions debouchent sur le programme d'une sociologie psychologique et s'attachent a mettre en evidence les plis les plus singuliers du social.

La culture des individus : dissonances culturelles et distinction de soi

Abstract: Publication dans la collection (La Decouverte-poche ; 230) de l'ouvrage paru en 2004 On prete au philosophe Ludwig Wittgenstein un gout quasi enfantin pour les histoires policieres et les baraques foraines et l'on sait que Jean-Paul Sartre aimait regarder des westerns a la television et preferait les romans de la "Serie noire" aux ouvrages de Wittgenstein. Simples coquetteries de philosophes ? Rien n'est moins sur. Ce qui etonne dans ces histoires, c'est le decalage entre les portraits que l'on dresse d'eux en philosophes et ce que l'on apprend par ailleurs de leurs pratiques et de leurs gouts culturels. Mais on se tromperait en considerant qu'il s'agit d'exceptions statistiques qui confirment la regle generale de "coherence culturelle". De caricatures en vulgarisations schematiques des travaux sociologiques, on a fini par penser que nos societes, marquees par le maintien de grandes inegalites sociales d'acces a la culture, etaient reductibles a un tableau assez simple : des classes dominantes cultivees, des classes dominees tenues a distance de la culture. Dans ce livre qui combine solidite argumentative et ampleur du materiau empirique (donnees statistiques, plus de cent entretiens, etc.), Bernard Lahire propose de transformer notre vision ordinaire des rapports a la culture. Il met ainsi en lumiere un fait fondamental : la frontiere entre la "haute culture" et la "sous-culture" ou le "simple divertissement" ne separe pas seulement les classes sociales, mais partage les differentes pratiques et preferences culturelles des memes individus, dans toutes les classes de la societe. Bernard Lahire montre qu'une majorite d'individus presentent des profils dissonants qui associent des pratiques culturelles allant des plus legitimes aux moins legitimes. Si le monde social est un champ de luttes, les individus sont souvent eux-memes les arenes d'une lutte des classements, d'une lutte de soi contre soi. Une nouvelle image du monde social apparait alors, qui ne neglige pas les singularites individuelles et evite la caricature culturelle des groupes

The Plural Actor

Abstract: Prologue. Act I: Sketch of a Theory of the Plural Actor. Scene I: The Plural Actor. On Singleness. The single self: a commonplace illusion, but socially well-founded. The sociohistorical conditions of singleness and plurality. The plurality of social contexts and repertoires of habits. The Proustian model of the plural actor. Splitting of the self and mental conflict: crossings of social space. Scene II. The Wellsprings of Action. Presence of the past, present of action. The many occasions for maladjustment and crisis. The plurality of the actor and the openings of the present. Conditional dispositions. The negative power of the context: inhibition and latency. 'Code switching' and 'code mixing' within the same context. Actors uncertainly swinging. Scene III. Analogy and Transfer. Practical analogy and the triggers of action and memory. Involuntary action and memory. The role of habits. From analytic transfer to the interview relationship. A relative transferability. From general to partial schemas. From generalized transfer to limited and conditional transfer. Scene IV: Literary Experience: Reading, Daydreams and Parapraxes. Act II. Reflexivities and Logics of Action. Scene I: School, Action, and Language. The scholastic break with practical reason. Saussure, or the pure theory of scholastic practices on language. The social conditions of departure from practical reason. Scene II. The Everyday Practices of Writing in Action. Embodied memory, objectified memory. Everyday breaks with practical reason. 'Doing it like that'. Memory for the unusual. The longer term and preparing the future. Managing complex practices. The official, the formal, and tense situations. The presence of the absent. Temporary disturbances of practical reason. The use of plans: lists of all kinds. The relative pertinence of practical reason. Scene III. The Plural Logics of Action. The ambiguity of a singular practice. The sporting model of practical reason and its limitations. Intentionality and the levels of context. Plurality of times and logics of action. Act III. Forms of Embodiment. Scene I. The Place of Language. The world of silence. The punctuation of action and its theorization. Language and the forms of social life. The mysterious inside. Scene II. What Exactly Is Embodied? Processes of embodimentDinternalization. The polymorphic embodiment of written culture in the world of the family. Negative identifications and the force of implicit injunctions. Act IV. Workshops and Debates. Scene I. Psychological Sociology. An exit from sociology? The objectivity of the 'subjective'. The singular folds of the social. Multideterminism and the sense of freedom. New methodological requirements. Scene II. Pertinent Fields. On excessive generalization. The varying scale of context in the social sciences. Experimental variation and loss of illusions. The historicizing of universal theories and fields of pertinence.

Charlot Bernard, Bautier Elisabeth, Rochex Jean-Yves), Ecole et savoir dans les banlieues... et ailleurs.

Abstract: Comment l'ecole est-elle vecue par les enfants des banlieues ? Quels rapports l'eleve etablit-il avec le savoir ? Pourquoi seulement 37 des 71 collegiens d'une ZEP de Saint-Denis accedent-ils a la classe de seconde ? C'est sur ces questions que s'ouvre une longue enquete de Bernard Charlot, professeur des sciences de l'education, et de son equipe de Paris VIII. Suivis sur plusieurs annees, 300 adolescents de Saint-Denis, La Courneuve et Massy livrent un "bilan de savoir" et nous disent la cite, l'ecole, les pratiques des enseignants. Ces histoires scolaires remettent en cause la fatalite de l'echec ou de la reussite, chere aux theories du handicap socioculturel. Une synthese a mediter pour les futurs enseignants, les acteurs de la formation continue et de l'action sociale.

Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation

Abstract: This review discusses North American and European research from the sociology of valuation and evaluation (SVE), a research topic that has attracted considerable attention in recent years. The goal is to bring various bodies of work into conversation with one another in order to stimulate more cumulative theory building. This is accomplished by focusing on (a) subprocesses such as categorization and legitimation, (b) the conditions that sustain heterarchies, and (c) valuation and evaluative practices. The article reviews these literatures and provides directions for a future research agenda.

The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity

Abstract: This book completes Margaret Archer's trilogy investigating the role of reflexivity in mediating between structure and agency. What do young people want from life? Using analysis of family experiences and life histories, her argument respects the properties and powers of both structures and agents and presents the 'internal conversation' as the site of their interplay. In unpacking what 'social conditioning' means, Archer demonstrates the usefulness of 'relational realism'. She advances a new theory of relational socialisation, appropriate to the 'mixed messages' conveyed in families that are rarely normatively consensual and thus cannot provide clear guidelines for action. Life-histories are analysed to explain the making and breaking of the various modes of reflexivity. Different modalities have been dominant from early societies to the present and the author argues that modernity is slowly ceding place to a 'morphogenetic society' as meta-reflexivity now begins to predominate, at least amongst educated young people.

Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education

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The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu's Habitus

Abstract: This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them (Bourdieu, 1996b[1989], p. 1).