http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/201/4359/899.2.full.pdf

Phenomenology of perception.

Social Network Analysis

After virtue, a study in moral theory

Poverty in the United Kingdom

In Art as Experience, Dewey brings together the deep and enduring connection between art and human experience. Art is understood not as a commodity or solitary object but as an intensely meaningful...

Art as experience

In rejecting both arguments of the ‘death of class’, and the increasingly minimalist positions of class traditionalists, a newer generation of class theorists have transformed the scope and analytical framework of class analysis: inflating ‘class’ to include social and cultural formations, reconfiguring the causal model that has underpinned class analysis, and abandoning the notion of distinct class identities or groups, focusing instead on individualized hierarchical differentiation. There are problems with transforming ‘class’ in this fashion, although the difficulty lies not in the departures from traditional class theory, but rather in what is retained. The uneasy relationship between older and newer aspects of ‘class’ within renewed class theory means the wider implications of inequality considered as individualized hierarchy (rather than as ‘class’) have not been fully explored.The debate on class identities (an important example of this new form of class analysis) illustrates these difficulties, and shows that issues of hierarchy extend well beyond issues of ‘class’.

/pdf/class-identities-and-the-identity-of-class-1f8wvlvvqg.pdf

Class Identities and the Identity of Class

This paper reflects upon Bourdieu’s concept of cultural fields, Becker’s concept of ‘art worlds’ and the concept of networks as developed in social network analysis. We challenge the distinction that Bourdieu makes between the objective ‘relations’ and ‘positions’ constitutive of ‘social space’ and visible social relationships. In contrast, we maintain that interaction is generative of social spaces and positions and should be integral to any account of them. Becker’s position is better from this perspective, but while Becker refers repeatedly to social networks, he fails to develop the concept or exploit its potential as a means of exploring social structures. Both Becker and Bourdieu have an underdeveloped conception of social connection which weakens their respective conceptions of the space of cultural production. Our proposed remedy is to use social network analysis to derive ‘positions’ and ‘relations’ between ‘positions’, as prioritized by Bourdieu, from data on concrete interactions and relations....

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Worlds, Fields and Networks: Becker, Bourdieu and the Structures of Social Relations

Offering a fresh and exciting new perspective on differentiation and inequality, this absorbing book investigates how our most personal choices (of sexual partners, friends, consumption items and lifestyle) are influenced by hierarchy and social difference. Exploring the topics of assortative mating; social capital; friendship networks and cultural identity; the book examines how hierarchy affects our tastes and leisure time activities, and who we choose (and hang on to) as our friends and partners. This book:
* introduces debates on stratification by exploring its effect on everyday social relations* relates class inequalities to broader processes of social division and cultural differentiation, exploring the associational and cultural aspects of hierarchy* explores how groups draw on social, economic and cultural resources, using cultural 'cues', to admit some and exclude others from their social circle* explores new theoretical approaches to stratification: drawing on cultural theories of class, social interaction approaches, and research on differential association
The book has a novel and fresh new way of looking at a well-established area in sociology - social stratification.

Stratification: Social Division and Inequality

Bourdieu’s emphasis on the socialized subjectivity of habitus is increasingly used in discussions of ‘identity’ to indicate the limits to reflexivity, situating ‘identity’ in tacit practice. In emphasizing the dispositional nature of ‘identity’, analysts also acknowledge more explicitly reflexive and self-consciously mobilized aspects; however, Bourdieu’s restrictive treatment of reflexivity makes it difficult to theorize the relations between these different aspects. The ‘problem of reflexivity’ is more properly a question of the intersubjective nature of practice, and the different aspects of ‘identity’ are better theorized as features of situated intersubjectivity. With practice the negotiated outcome of intersubjective coordination, then ‘calls to order from the group’, the routine monitoring of conduct, agents’ reflexive accounts of their activity, and the mobilization of agents into collectivities can be explored as features of the collective accomplishment of practices, by networks of variously dis...

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Intersubjectivity and Bourdieusian Approaches to ‘Identity’

There have been calls from several sources recently for a renewal of class analysis that would encompass social and cultural, as well as economic elements. This paper explores a tradition in stratification that is founded on this idea: relational or social distance approaches to mapping hierarchy and inequality which theorize stratification as a social space. The idea of 'social space' is not treated as a metaphor of hierarchy nor is the nature of the structure determined a priori. Rather, the space is identified by mapping social interactions. Exploring the nature of social space involves mapping the network of social interaction--patterns of friendship, partnership and cultural similarity--which gives rise to relations of social closeness and distance. Differential association has long been seen as the basis of hierarchy, but the usual approach is first to define a structure composed of a set of groups and then to investigate social interaction between them. Social distance approaches reverse this, using patterns of interaction to determine the nature of the structure. Differential association can be seen as a way of defining proximity within a social space, from the distances between social groups, or between social groups and social objects (such as lifestyle items). The paper demonstrates how the very different starting point of social distance approaches also leads to strikingly different theoretical conclusions about the nature of stratification and inequality.

/pdf/social-interaction-distance-and-stratification-3xesjoft68.pdf

Wendy Bottero

Papers

Class Identities and the Identity of Class

Worlds, Fields and Networks: Becker, Bourdieu and the Structures of Social Relations

Stratification: Social Division and Inequality

Intersubjectivity and Bourdieusian Approaches to ‘Identity’

Social interaction distance and stratification