Showing papers in "Theory and Society in 2003"

Cultural capital in educational research: A critical assessment

Abstract: In this article, we assess how the concept of cultural capital has been imported into the English language, focusing on educational research. We argue that a dominant interpretation of cultural capital has coalesced with two central premises. First, cultural capital denotes knowledge of or facility with “highbrow” aesthetic culture. Secondly, cultural capital is analytically and causally distinct from other important forms of knowledge or competence (termed “technical skills,” “human capital,” etc.). We then review Bourdieu’s educational writings to demonstrate that neither of these premises is essential to his understanding of cultural capital. In the third section, we discuss a set of English-language studies that draw on the concept of cultural capital, but eschew the dominant interpretation. These serve as the point of departure for an alternative definition. Our definition emphasizes Bourdieu’s reference to the capacity of a social class to “impose” advantageous standards of evaluation on the educational institution. We discuss the empirical requirements that adherence to such a definition entails for researchers, and provide a brief illustration of the intersection of institutionalized evaluative standards and the educational practices of families belonging to different social classes. Using ethnographic data from a study of social class differences in family-school relationships, we show how an African-American middle-class family exhibits cultural capital in a way that an African-American family below the poverty level does not.

Karl Polanyi and the writing of The Great Transformation

Abstract: Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, The Great Transformation, has been recognized as central for the field of economic sociology, but it has not been subject to the same theoretical scrutiny as other classic works in the field. This is a particular problem in that there are central tensions and complexities in Polanyi's argument. This article suggests that these tensions can be understood as a consequence of Polanyi's changing theoretical orientation. The basic outline of the book was developed in England in the late 1930s when Polanyi was working within a specific type of Marxist framework. However, as he was writing the book, he developed several new concepts, including fictitious commodities and the embedded economy, that led in new directions. Because circumstances did not give him the time to revise his manuscript, the book is marked by a tension between these different moments in his own theoretical development. The result is that Polanyi glimpses the concept of the always embedded market economy, but he does not name it or elaborate it.

Crafting authenticity: The validation of identity in self-taught art

Abstract: The desire for authenticity now occupies a central position in contemporary culture. Whether in our search for selfhood, leisure experience, or in our material purchases, we search for the real, the genuine. These terms are not, however, descriptive, but must be situated and defined by audiences. In this analysis, I examine the development of the market for self-taught art, an artistic domain in which the authentic is a central defining feature, conferring value on objects and creators. Self-taught art is a form of identity artin which the characteristics of the artists and their life stories are as important as the formal features of the created objects. The article examines the justifications for this emphasis and the battles over the construction of biography. My examination of self-taught art is grounded in five years of ethnographic observation, interviews, and analyses of texts.

Media meta-capital: Extending the range of Bourdieu’s field theory

Abstract: This article addresses a general problem in media sociology – how to understand the media both as an internal production process and as a general frame for categorizing the social world, with specific reference to a version of this problem in recent work on media within Bourdieu’s field-based tradition of research (work previously reviewed by Rodney Benson in Theory and Society28). It argues that certain problems arise in reconciling this work’s detailed explanations of the media field’s internal workings (and the interrelations of that field’s workings to the workings of other fields) and general claims made about the “symbolic power” of media in a broader sense. These problems can be solved, the author argues, by adopting the concept of meta-capital developed by Bourdieu himself in his late work on the state, and returning to the wider framework of symbolic system and symbolic power that was important in Bourdieu’s social theory before it became dominated by field theory. Media, it is proposed, have meta-capital over the rules of play, and the definition of capital (especially symbolic capital), that operate within a wide range of contemporary fields of production. This level of explanation needs to be added to specific accounts of the detailed workings of the media field. The conclusion points to questions for further work, including on the state’s relative strength and the media’s meta-capital that must be carried out through detailed empirical work on a global comparative basis.

The Modern World-System as environmental history?: Ecology and the rise of capitalism

Abstract: This article considers the emergence of world environmental history as a rapidly growing but undertheorized research field. Taking as its central problematic the gap between the fertile theorizations of environmentally-oriented social scientists and the empirically rich studies of world environmental historians, the article argues for a synthesis of theory and history in the study of longue dureesocio-ecological change. This argument proceeds in three steps. First, I offer an ecological reading of Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World-System. Wallerstein's handling of the ecological dimensions of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is suggestive of a new approach to world environmental history. Second, I contend that Wallerstein's theoretical insights may be effectively complemented by drawing on Marxist notions of value and above all the concept of “metabolic rift,” which emphasize the importance of productive processes and regional divisions of labor within the modern world-system. Finally, I develop these theoretical discussions in a short environmental history of the two great “commodity frontiers” of early capitalism – the sugar plantation and the silver mining complex.

Symbolic meanings of prices: Constructing the value of contemporary art in Amsterdam and New York galleries

Abstract: This article develops a sociological analysis of the price mechanism on the market for contemporary art. On the basis of in-depth interviews with art dealers in New York and Amsterdam, I address two pricing norms: one norm inhibits art dealers from decreasing prices; the other induces them to set prices according to size. To account for these pricing norms, I argue that price setting is not just an economic but also a signifying act: despite their impersonal, businesslike connotations, actors on markets manage to express a range of cognitive and cultural meanings through prices. Previously, meanings of prices have been recognized in signaling theories within economics. However, these meanings are restricted to profit opportunities. Within the humanities, by contrast, meanings of prices are restricted to contaminating or corrosive meanings. The sociological perspective I develop claims that prices, price differences, and price changes convey multiple meanings related to the reputation of artists, the social status of dealers, and the quality of the artworks that are traded.

Welfare reform and the subject of the working mother: “Get a job, a better job, then a career”

Abstract: Until 1996, poor single mothers in the United States could claim welfare benefits for themselves and their children under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program if they had no other source of income. With the 1996 passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), paid work and work-related activities became a mandatory condition for receiving aid. At the same time, the law promotes marriage as a route out of poverty. Using a feminist reinterpretation of Althusser’s concept of interpellation, I turn to Job Clubs, mandatory week-long workshops that teach job search skills, to analyze the citizen-subject generated by front-line representatives of the state in the context of this new legislation. Based on participant-observation, I conclude that while PRWORA ostensibly promotes both marriage and paid employment, Job Club trainers enforced a masculine worker-citizen subject through the deployment of three discursive strategies. These discursive strategies 1) promoted paid work over welfare-receipt as both a pragmatic and moral choice, 2) posited an individual-psychological account of women’s welfare receipt, and 3) portrayed parenting skills as marketable skills. In the conclusion, I speculate that current welfare reform efforts require the generation of a self-reproducing worker-citizen and that workshops like Job Club become a site in which the existence of this autonomous citizen is affirmed.

Bourdieu’s political sociology and the politics of European integration

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to explore what Bourdieu’s political sociology could bring to the study of European integration. I first present, very briefly, some of the traditional approaches in European integration studies. Then I move to my interpretation of Bourdieu’s structural constructivist theory of politics through a discussion of political capital and political field, drawing parallels between these concepts and some of Max Weber’s ideas. In the third part, while discussing the works of some scholars inspired by Bourdieu’s theory, I present some structural constructivist studies of European integration. Structural constructivism provides theoretical tools for a critical analysis of European integration.

On the wealth of nations: Bourdieuconomics and social capital

Abstract: Why are some countries richer than others? We suggest in the line of political economy theory that traditional production factors cannot explain the observed differences. Rather, differences in the quality of formal institutions are crucial to economic wealth. However, this type of political economy theory accentuating the role of formal institutions cannot stand on its own. This implies a socio-economic approach in the study where we supplement the formal institutional thesis with Bourdieu’s idea of material and non-material forms of capital. Such new socio-economics – which might be termed a “Bourdieuconomics” – implies the usage of a capital theory that, methodologically, operates with material and non-material forms of capital at the same level. Here, we stress the particular importance of a non-material form of capital, namely social capital, which facilitates informal human exchange, thereby “lubricating” civic society and the voluntary provision of collective goods such as trust and predictable behavior. In this way, social capital reduces transaction costs in society, thereby enhancing economic growth and the creation of differences in the wealth of nations. Future research should therefore be directed towards analyses of a new and formerly disregarded production factor, socialcapital, within a new field of socio-economics, namely “Bourdieuconomics.”

Solidarity in the age of globalization: Lessons from the anti-MAI and Zapatista struggles

Abstract: While the Battle of Seattle immortalized a certain image of anti-globalization resistance, processes and agents of contestation remain sociologically underdeveloped. Even with the time-space compression afforded by new information technologies, how can a global civil society emerge among multi-cultured, multi-tongued peoples divided by miles of space and oceans of inequality? This article examines two cases that confronted the U.S. model of global corporate rule: the defeat of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), and the Zapatista challenge to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Evaluating cross-border solidarity in these cases encourages critical evaluation of claims about global civil society, the role of the Internet, and the eclipse of traditional politics in a supposedly post-national age. Contrary to orthodox globalization narratives, our analysis suggests that states, nations, and nationalisms remain key elements in contestation processes, at least in the kinds of cases examined. At the same time, transnational networks played an important role in bypassing unfavorable political opportunity structures at the domestic level, and nurtured incipient processes of framing resistance to neo-liberal globalism across national boundaries.

Economics invents the economy: Mathematics, statistics, and models in the work of Irving Fisher and Wesley Mitchell

Abstract: The “embeddedness” of economic life in social relations has become a productive analytical principle and the basis of a penetrating critique of economic orthodoxy. But this critique raises another important, social and historical question, of how the economy became “disembedded” in the first place – how the multitude of transactions designated (somewhat arbitrarily) as economic were abstracted from the rest of social life and reconstituted as an object, the economy, which behaves according to its own logic. This article investigates the social sources of some innovations in economic thought that contributed to the emergence of the economy, particularly statistical indicators and mechanical models. By examining the redefinitions of the object of economic research developed by Irving Fisher and Wesley Mitchell in the 1890s and the first decades of the twentieth century, I argue that the abstraction of the economy from the remainder of social life was a strategy linked to the position of these innovators within the field of economics, conceived as a social structure. Possessing a specialized scientific cultural capital, but lacking upper class background, contacts, and dispositions that characterized the founders of academic economics, Fisher and Mitchell elaborated new definitions of their discipline's object of study, and a new type of economic expertise.

The case for an economic sociology of law

Abstract: Dans cet article, l'A fait part de ses reflexions concernant l'etablissement d'une sociologie economique du droit. L'A definit ici les sujets possibles d'attention d'une telle science, comme la propriete, l'heritage, les contrats et les institutions capitalistes, et se penche sur la fonction de regulation de l'economie et de la societe par le droit en se basant sur le travail theorique de Max Weber

Pierre Bourdieu: Economic models against economism

Abstract: The use of economic analogies by Bourdieu has often been the object of much criticism. For some scholars, it reveals an “economistic” vision of the social world too much inspired by neoclassical economics. For others, it is a kind of mechanical metaphor transposed to cultural phenomena in a determinist way, as in the holistic (Marxist) tradition. To understand this usage and to refute these contradictory criticisms, we return to and focus on the very first occurrences in the 1958–1966 period – the focus of our article – of what Bourdieu would call a “general economy of practices” in his book Esquisse d’une theorie de la pratique. Two central aspects, often forgotten by critics, are presented here: first, the close but very particular link between his work and economics as a growing scientific discipline during these years; second, the criticisms Bourdieu makes of the economic model as a general scientific tool for the social sciences. If one insists only on one of the two sides of the coin, one risks misunderstanding Bourdieu’s original scientific habitusand intellectual project. By contrast, this “double” position opens the possibility of an “integrated” vision of social and economic factors of practices, thanks to the introduction of the “cultural” and above all the “symbolic” dimensions of social life.

Positive feedback in collective mobilization: The American strike wave of 1886

Abstract: Waves of collective mobilization, when participation increases rapidly and expectations shift dramatically, pose an important puzzle for social science. Such waves, I argue, can only be explained by an endogenous process of “positive feedback.” This article identifies two distinct mechanisms – interdependence and inspiration – that generate positive feedback in collective mobilization. It also provides a detailed analysis of one episode: the wave of strikes that swept American cities in May 1886. Although historians and sociologists have suggested various precipitants, these do not account for the magnitude of the upsurge. Focusing on events in Chicago during the months before May, the article provides quantitative and qualitative evidence for positive feedback.

Political authority in a mediated age

Abstract: The nature and impact of authority have been central to social theory since antiquity, and most students of politics, culture and organizations have – in one manner or another – visited the topic. Theorists recognize that the exercise of authority is conditioned by the environment, but their work has not always integrated fundamental changes in communication infrastructure, and in particular the diffusion of mass media. With the daily evolution of telecommunications, this is a good historical moment to re-evaluate the notion of authority. My goal is to assess ways to both preserve extraordinarily useful categories from the past, and at the same time, make those typologies more sensitive to contemporary mediated communication. Here I synthesize American research on media and political communication with recent theoretical approaches to authority, expanding current views of coercion and submission.

Flesh and the free market: (On taking Bourdieu to the options exchange)

Abstract: On the options trading floor at the Pacific Exchange in San Francisco, traders spend their days “making markets” in option contracts, a mentally and bodily intense practice that requires the acquisition of a series of embodied knowledges specific to the occupation. In this article, I report on field research conducted at the exchange, during which I explored the cultural turn of practice theory to the body. Taking direction from Pierre Bourdieu’s changing descriptions of habitus, field, and practical action, I argue that the logic of trading does proceed to some extent beneath the level of reflexive application of the rules of the game; but my encounter with traders’ talk, their cultural production, and their gendered performance led my interpretation of this unconscious dimension beyond the limits of cognitivist metaphors for knowledgeable bodies toward an identificatory logic of practice. Whereas Bourdieu stopped short of taking practice theory all the way in to psychoanalysis, I found the imaginary order it brings into the picture decisive in shaping the experience of trading.

From critical sociology to public intellectual: Pierre Bourdieu and politics

Abstract: By the late 1990s, Pierre Bourdieu had become the primary public intellectual of major social scientific status at the head of the anti-globalization movement that emerged in France and in other Western European countries. This article discusses how Bourdieu became a leading public intellectual, a role that seems to contrast with his early years as a professional sociologist. It explores what seemed to change in Bourdieu’s activities and outlook as sociologist and what seems to have remained constant. It identifies several institutional conditions that seemed necessary for Bourdieu to be able to play the kind of public intellectual role he did in his later years. Bourdieu’s movement from a peripheral position to a central location in the French intellectual field, the changing character of the field itself, the growing influence of the mass media in French political and cultural life, the failures of the French Socialists in power, a cultural legacy of leading critical intellectuals in France, a unifying national issue of globalization, and the political conjuncture in 1995 all intersected in ways that opened a path for Bourdieu to choose new and more frequent forms of political action. His responses to that combination of factors at different moments reveal both a striking continuity in desire to preserve the autonomy of intellectual life and a change in view and strategy on how best to do that. The article concludes with a brief evaluation of Bourdieu’s public intellectual role.

Forms of politicization in the French literary field

Abstract: Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of “fields,” this article proposes a model of analysis of the forms of politicization in the literary field based on the French case. In France, during the first half of the twentieth century, the writer has embodied the figure of the “Intellectual.” The first claim is that the politicization of the French literary field resulted from three factors: the autonomy it gained in the nineteenth century, its lack of professional development, and the competition with the newly emerging professions. These factors, joined to the specific features of the literary activity, account for the writers’ most typical mode of politicization: prophesying. This analysis adapts the Weberian concepts of “charismatic power” and of “prophetism” to the intellectual field, in the way suggested by Pierre Bourdieu’s interpretation of Max Weber’s theory of religion. The second claim is that the forms of politicization of writers depend on the position they occupy in the literary field: the way of being a writer conditions the way one engages in the political sphere. Four figures of committed writers are distinguished: the “notabilities,” the “aesthetes,” the “avant-garde,” and the “writer-journalists.”

Richard Rorty's pragmatism: A case study in the sociology of ideas

Abstract: Dans cet article, l'A evoque la carriere intellectuelle et la pensee de Richard Rorty. L'A se penche ici sur l'evolution de l'engagement epistemologique de Rorty vers la pragmatique et la pensee analytique en tant que citoyen americain de gauche

Haunted by the specter of communism: Collective identity and resource mobilization in the demise of the Workers Alliance of America

Abstract: This article seeks to integrate identity-oriented and strategic models of collective action better by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of classification struggles. On the one hand, the article extends culture to the realm of interest by highlighting the role collective identity plays in one of the key processes that strategic models of collective action foreground: the mobilization of resources. The article extends culture to the realm of interest in another way as well: by challenging the notion that labor movements are fundamentally different from or antithetical to the identity-oriented new social movements. On the other hand, the article also extends the idea of interest to culture. Rather than viewing collective identity as something formed prior to political struggle and according to a different logic, I show that collective identity is constructed in and through struggles over classificatory schemes. These include struggles between movements and their opponents as well as struggles within movements. The article provides empirical evidence for these theoretical claims with a study of the demise of the Workers Alliance of America, a powerful, nation-wide movement of the unemployed formed in the United States in 1935 and dissolved in 1941.

Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of religion: A central and peripheral concern

Abstract: Although some of Bourdieu’s most basic concepts have their roots in the sociology of religion, religion itself has, in appearance, only a marginalized status within his work. This article focuses on the genesis of religious field and how the theories of Durkheim, Mauss, and Weber fold into the notion of field defined by Bourdieu. Religious field must be understood within the symbolic economy as well; divisions of symbolic labor are therefore discussed in relation to segmented and non-segmented societies. Finally, Bourdieu’s analysis of institutions, in particular the Catholic Church, further help us understand the use and evolution of religious field in his work and shed light on the sociologist’s understanding of the movement from religious beliefs toward aesthetic ones.

Foreign investors, flying geese, and the limits to export-led industrialization in the Dominican Republic

Abstract: The United States' failed effort to impose an East Asian-style, export-led industrial development regime on the Dominican Republic in the aftermath of the 1965 “Dominican crisis” poses two related empirical puzzles. First, why did the Dominicans reject the widely praised and ultimately rather successful East Asian model? And, second, how did the Dominicans overrule their erstwhile North American overlords? I answer the first question by underscoring the incompatibility of export-led industrialization and the island nation’s prevailing system of patrimonial rule. I answer the second question by illuminating the patrimonial regime's “asymmetrical” desire for independence. And I thereby suggest that the social and political underpinnings of successful export-led industrialization are decidedly more restrictive than the mainstream social science literature would have us believe.

Drawing inspiration from Bourdieu’s sociology of symbolic power

Abstract: Paying homage to a great sociologist comes in many forms, that of disciple on the one hand and critic on the other. Disciples carry and propagate the faith, transmitting it to new generations.Whereas some o¡er valuable insights into the practices and thoughts of the great social scientist, there can be costs to discipleship. Defense of conceptual and methodological orthodoxy can sti£e further intellectual development and lead to sectarian allegiance.

The economic sociology of markets, industries, and firms

Abstract: Economic sociology is quickly evolving as an ‘‘umbrella’’ theoretical enterprise seeking to integrate various insights drawn from organizational, cultural, and political sociology. Its focus of attention is on what makes markets, industries, and ¢rms stable arrangements for organizing economic exchange. At its core, economic sociology is concerned with the social organization of the economy, or, if one prefers, with the social foundations of economic life. While the greatest sociological minds made important, if extremely diverse, contributions to this area ^ from Max Weber to Karl Polanyi and Talcott Parsons ^ few sociologists have attempted to provide this re-emerging ¢eld with a solid theoretical underpinning. Neil Fligstein is perhaps the one who has most successfully formulated a theoretical agenda for economic sociology, and pursued it in a variety of empirical papers. The Architecture of Markets is one of those books that no sociologist ^ economic or not ^ can aiord to ignore because it speaks to fundamental debates in sociology, including the origins of institutions, the shared understandings that underlie action, and the complex relationship between society and the state. In a diierent way, the essays in TheTwenty-FirstCentury Firm, edited by Paul DiMaggio, a very prominent organizational and cultural sociologist, address similar issues. In combination, the two volumes oier a stimulating set of concepts, ideas, and perspectives ^ and no shortage of unresolved questions and puzzles.