Showing papers on "Field (Bourdieu) published in 2001"

The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field

Abstract: Pierre Bourdieu holds the Chair in Sociology at the prestigious College de France, Paris. He is Directeur d'Etudes at l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, where he is also Director of the Center for European Sociology, and Editor of the influential journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Professor Bourdieu is the author or coauthor of approximately twenty books. A number of these have been published in English translation: The Algerians, 1962; Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (with Jean-Claude Passeron), 1977; Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977; Algeria I960, 1979; The Inheritors: French Students and their Relations to Culture, 1979; Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, 1984. The essay below analyzes what Bourdieu terms the "juridical field." In Bourdieu's conception, a "field" is an area of structured, socially patterned activity or "practice," in this case disciplinarily and professionally defined. The "field" and its "practices" have special senses in

Understanding social closure in its cultural context: accounting practitioners in France (1920-1939)

Abstract: This article tries to show how the result of a process of social closure and the achievement of a professional project are heavily dependent on the cultural context in which they are embedded. The concepts of field and of capital developed by Pierre Bourdieu help to understand the failure, before the Second World War, of the project to institutionalise the accounting profession in France. The accountants’ inability to solidify hierarchies internal to the professional field and the unfavourable insertion of this field in the overall hierarchy of social fields will be used as key-arguments to account for this failure.

Bourdieu, rational action and the time‐space strategy of gentrification

Abstract: This paper proposes gentrification as an example of class habitus adjusting to a new field via a time-space strategy that involves conscious rational coordination of class agents on a new aesthetic ‘focal point’. This approach suggests: (1) a much greater role for conscious rational processes in both the intentional and intuitive processes of class reproduction; (2) an understanding via gentrification of the symbolic significance of time-space in class processes; (3) the significance of individual class agents in the process of gentrification; (4) a view of gentrification that gives greater prominence to working-class taste and habitus.

The field as here and now, not there and then*

Abstract: ********** I would emphasize in all of this, the success of the fieldwork hinged not so much on a determination to ferret out "the facts" as on a willingness to leave some stones unturned, to listen to what my informants deemed important, and to demonstrate my trustworthiness by not prying where I was not wanted. ... It may be precisely by giving up the scientific detective's urge to know "everything" that we gain access to those very partial vistas that our informants may desire or think to share with us. Liisa H. Malkki, 1995 Fieldwork is at once a political, personal, and professional undertaking. It provides crucial reference points and evidence upon which knowledge claims are made. Careful consideration, though, is required of one's own assumptions about the field, especially boundaries between here and there. I make three related arguments: that, as a researcher, one is always in the field; that by being in the field one changes it and is changed by it; and that field experience does not automatically authorize knowledge, but rather allows us to generate analyses and tell specific kinds of stories. I underscore the importance of field research as a basis for developing accountable analyses and theory with the caveat that the field is separate from the everyday spaces of home. In this essay I first examine essentialized notions of the field as bounded by time and place, drawing on the work of feminist geographers. With a clearer understanding of how the field may be conceptualized, I draw on my fieldwork to illustrate political and practical considerations. Finally, I illustrate howl have become part of the fields I purport to study and contend that, as field-workers, we are always in the field. INTERROGATING THE FIELD Gillian Rose has argued that fieldwork represents geographical masculinities in action (1993). Although the masculinist biases in geographical method and the production of geographical knowledge are well exposed, argument that fieldwork is inevitably a masculinist exercise is problematic (Moss 1993; D. Rose 1993; G. Rose 1993; Nast 1994; Sparke 1996; McDowell 1997). Insights from fieldwork provide a basis for constructing accounts of processes, places, and social relations. Fieldwork is a site "to critique, deconstruct, and reconstruct a more responsible, if partial, account of what is happening in the world" (Hyndman 1995, 200). As Margaret Walton-Roberts commented after reading an earlier draft of this essay, "It is important to consider the return to the empirical after the excesses of the cultural turn [in geography] where arguably there was no truth.... It is arguably a more masculinist practice to pontificate from on high than to plant oneself in the field and wring one's hands about the politics of doi ng so at the same time" (personal communication, 29 September 2000). Fieldwork potentially offers grounds for a more accountable theory, but it does not automatically generate geographical knowledge. There is no question that fieldwork embodies a politics of representation. It also serves to ground theory in power relations and political, economic, and cultural locations other than our own (Nast 1994). What constitutes "the field" is contentious: Is it merely a physical location, conveniently cordoned off from the life of the researcher? That conception is insufficient. "The 'field' is not naturalized in terms of 'a place' or 'a people'; it is instead located and defined in terms of specific political objectives that (as such) cut across time and space" (Nast 1994, 57). My own research recasts the field as a network of power relations in which I am a small link. My focus in the project I analyze here is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its humanitarian operations at its headquarters in Geneva, one branch office in Nairobi, and one suboffice in Dadaab, which administers three refugee camps in northeastern Kenya. …

The Impact of Subordinate Disability on Leader-Member Exchange Relationships

Abstract: An organizational simulation (n = 85) and a field study (41 supervisors and 220 subordinates) were conducted to investigate the impact of subordinates' disability status on leader-member exchange (...

Rerum cognoscere causas: Part I — How do the ideas of system dynamics relate to traditional social theories and the voluntarism/determinism debate?

Abstract: This is the first half of a two-part paper which deals with the social theoretic assumptions underlying system dynamics. The motivation is that clarification in this area can help mainstream social scientists to understand how our field relates to their literature, methods and concerns. Part I has two main sections. The aim of the first is to answer the question: How do the ideas of system dynamics relate to traditional social theories? The theoretic assumptions of the field are seldom explicit but rather are implicit in its practice. The range of system dynamics practice is therefore considered and related to a framework - widely used in both operational research (OR) and systems science - that organises the assumptions behind traditional social theoretic paradigms. Distinct and surprisingly varied groupings of practice are identified, making it difficult to place system dynamics in any one paradigm with any certainty. The difficulties of establishing a social theoretic home for system dynamics are exemplified in the second main section. This is done by considering the question: Is system dynamics deterministic? An analysis shows that attempts to relate system dynamics to strict notions of voluntarism or determinism quickly indicate that the field does not fit with either pole of this dichotomous, and strictly paradigmatic, view. Part I therefore concludes that definitively placing system dynamics with respect to traditional social theories is highly problematic. The scene is therefore set for Part II of the paper, which proposes an innovative and potentially fruitful resolution to this problem.

Institutionalizing Civic Engagement: Shifting Logics and the Cultural Repackaging of Service-Learning in US Higher Education

Abstract: Institutionalists in organizational sociology have developed a good deal of evidence about the role of field logics in shaping the practices of organizations. In this paper, we extend this imagery to multiple fields, highlighting how shifting logics in a superordinate field enable the infrastructural development of a subordinate field. In particular, we track how initially marginal, anti-institutional service-learning practices became a legitimate component of mainstream curricula in the field of US higher education. While service-learning proponents have always made claims about the importance of generating knowledge and insight by helping others in the community, service-learning entrepreneurs had to build a field infrastructure to support their claims and culturally repackage the aims of service-learning in a way that articulated with broader logics in the field of higher education. We argue that the shift from an unarticulated closed-system logic to a situation of contending closed-system and open-sys...

Symbolic control: Issues of empirical description of agencies and agents

Abstract: This paper arose out of the empirical requirements to describe and position agents and agencies of symbolic control concerned with the regulation of social relationships, consciousness, disposition and desire. These requirements led to a differentiation of agents in terms of their function and discourse and their segmentation through their specialized fields of activity and their stratification according to hierarchical position in a given field. This model generated a sensitive differentiation and segmentation which provides the social basis for expected differences in interests, motivations and identifications of functionally similar agents operating in different fields of activity. The model raises general issues of social class allocation and the relation between theory and methods.

As apropriações da obra de Pierre Bourdieu no campo educacional brasileiro, através de periódicos da área

Abstract: Based on research carried out in 20 specialised educational periodicals, published between 1971 and 2000, the present text analyses the forms of appropriation from Pierre Bourdieu's work in the field of Brazilian education. The set of 355 articles published in those periodicals that make reference to the sociologist constitutes the basic corpus for the analysis of the peculiarities of the Brazilian interpretations of this author.

Negotiating the Field: New Observations on the Making of Police Officers:

Abstract: This paper draws on the findings of a longitudinal study of police socialisation to refine and expand on the Bourdieuian framework of police culture developed in Chan (1997). The research supports ...

Power: Critical Concepts

Abstract: The concept of power is at the centre of social science. It is surrounded with controversy and disputes however about what it really means. This collection, edited by one of the leading commentators in the field, brings together the indispensable secondary literature. It includes a major introduction which explains why power is a key concept in the social sciences and guides the reader through the contrasting attempts to understand it.

Para uma reflexão epistemológica acerca da Ciência da Informação

Abstract: In the contemporary world, Information Science is part of a discursive field about knowledge and information that we can name as social formation of meta-knowledge. Their knowledge possibilities are, at the same time, object of epistemological reflections and a symptom of change of status of epistemology itself.

Political elites and the pragmatic paradigm: Notes from a feminist researcher - in the field and out to lunch

Abstract: This essay seeks to offer some reflections on doing research with political elites where those elites also happen to be women. It tries to show some of the excitements and frustrations of doing research with elite subjects in elite settings, when the researcher is always the stranger and the person with the least power in an otherwise very powerful and intimidating environment. It addresses some of the tensions in 'doing' feminist research with women with whom the researcher does not empathize and discusses the extent to which those differences actually matter when ranged against the much bigger considerations of gender and patriarchal relations.

Business Ethics: Facing Up To the Issues

Abstract: This book is special for business ethics field, to highlight how important it is for companies to address ethical issue and how firms can in practice go about addressing those issues.

Social navigation research agenda

Abstract: Social navigation (SN) emerged as a marriage between one-user-one-system scenarios and CSCW. It is a design approach based on either visualizing traces of other users' activities or on direct or indirect communication between users, with the goal to facilitate locating and evaluating information. Social Navigation has wide-ranging benefits, from social filtering over improving trust in eCommerce all the way to improving the user experience in general. However, as it is a new field many design issues are not properly researched yet. In this paper we outline a possible research agenda for the social navigation field, pointing out areas of social navigation in need of research initiatives.

(O)likhetens geografier : Marknaden, forskningen och de Andra

Abstract: The dissertation examines representations and discourses of the Others in the field of immigration and labour market studies from a critical discourse analysis perspective. The theoretical discussi ...

Steven Chaffee and the Future of Political Communication Research

Abstract: This article discusses four basic characteristics of Steven Chaffee's research: going beyond the "common research wisdom," careful explication of concepts, avoiding unsubstantiated charges against the media, and investigation of the social aspects of communication. The evolution of political socialization research is used as an example of how these characteristics have strengthened Chaffee's contribution to that area and to the larger field of political communication. It is argued that the future of this field would benefit from emulation of these characteristics. Continuing problems of political communication research are noted, and various emerging problems are discussed.