Alongside theoretical understandings of specifi c social cases, Bourdieu developed a set of what Wacquant (1989) described as ‘thinking tools’. Each of these tools was adapted from other scholarship, from philosophy, sociology and anthropology, but reworked to have a specifi c location and purpose in Bourdieu’s work. We separate these theoretical resources from Bourdieu’s theorisation of specifi c empirical cases to illustrate the development of a cumulative framework of specifi c tools to understand the social. Hence, while some scholars may disagree with specifi c theorisations of social cases offered in Bourdieu’s work, the thinking tools themselves may have some utility in broader applications to research. The extensibility of this framework was tested in a variety of different research projects, and over the course of Bourdieu’s writing there were shifts in the emphasis and use of these tools to suit specifi c research purposes. These tools serve multiple purposes and help to create a break with the pre-conceived objects of the social world,7 and to create a distancing that allowed the examination of specifi c kinds
of relationships that are often overlooked.
While we have previously suggested that these tools form a ‘theoretical triad’ (Rawolle and Lingard 2008), here we group two conceptual couplet from Bourdieu’s thinking tools, namely habitus/practice and forms of capital/social fi elds. These are grouped primarily for theoretical congruence and the reasonableness of their combination. We arrange these families largely according to their chronological emergence in Bourdieu’s work, as the specifi c couplets discussed are supplemented by subsequent thinking tools, rather than being completely replaced. Theory of practice: practice and habitus
The fi rst couplet important to Bourdieu as a way of breaking with common-sense views of activity was that of practice and habitus. These two concepts were
developed as part of a project of developing a coherent yet open theory of practice, exemplifi ed in two major works, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1977) and Logic of Practice (Bourdieu 1990), both based on anthropological research in Algeria. The broad theory of practice was developed as a way to understand a number of specifi c anthropological research interests in Algeria (Bourdieu 1977). Bourdieu refused to approach research in France in ways that completely differed from his research in Algeria and this led to the gradual adaptation of his (broadly) anthropological theory to sociological studies in later works (Bourdieu 1984). Consequently, practice/habitus is an important couplet in Bourdieu’s work, in that it signifi es one of the fundamental conceptual breaks that led to a distinctive approach to sociology, noting an ontological complicity between the two.
Marked by a sharp refusal to offer a defi nition of practice,8 Bourdieu’s account
of practice was characterised by attentiveness to the logic, fl ow and contest of practical activities and their connections in time. Practice was, in many respects, the core element of social life that required explanation, and it was in the process and carrying out of practice that other aspects of social life, such as the exclusions and exclusivities, classifi cations and struggles, were located. Within practice, Bourdieu saw the patterned development and fl ow of social energy, associated with patterns of meaning, and in their carrying out, a reinforcement of selections of those meanings. The other part of this couplet, habitus, was a collection of the sets of dispositions that allowed individual agents and groups of agents to engage with and make meaningful contributions to practice. Elsewhere we have described this as a kind of socio-genetic relationship: that habitus is required as a prior condition for producing practice, and for consuming practice. However, the contribution to practice is dependent on other things in the environment, as well as considerations of strategy and tactics.
The concept of habitus was borrowed by Bourdieu from philosophical thought that can be traced to Aristotle. However, Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of habitus was an original contribution, which he defended against multiple charges.9
Perhaps the most urgent task that Bourdieu saw for the development and application of habitus in both his earliest and late works lay in a reconciliation of two separated features of social science: that of explanations in sociology and economics. In a posthumously published book on the construction of a housing market, The Social Structures of the Economy (Bourdieu 2005b), this application was located specifi cally as an alternative account to the abstractions of homo economicus, the human being as rational utility maximiser. There Bourdieu argued for a specifi cally considered economic habitus, stating that:
[i]nsofar as he or she is endowed with a habitus, the social agent is a collective individual or a collective individuated by the fact of embodying objective structures. The individual, the subjective, is social and collective. The habitus is socialised subjectivity, a historical transcendental, whose schemes of perception and appreciation (systems of appreciation, tastes, etc.) are the
product of collective and individual history. Reason (or rationality) is ‘bounded’ not only, as Herbert Simon believes, because the human mind is generically bounded . . . but because it is socially structured and determined, and, as a consequence, limited.
(Bourdieu 2005b, 211) Habitus then is the basis for apprehending practice, for noticing differences and being aware of the subtleties of practice, through an alignment borne of collective experiences and histories that are carried in the body. Habitus also provides the basis for mis-matches between practice moves and the fl ow of practice in a fi eld, where collective individuals have moved or been taken out of the collective and individual histories that provided an innate feel for the fl ow and logic of practice, a ‘feel for the game’. The symbolic violence of such mis-matches between the habitus of collective individuals and changes in objective conditions was also the focus of one of the fi rst contributions that Bourdieu made from his research in Algeria, in the sustained focus on the imposition of a market economy on traditional agricultural workers (Bourdieu 1958/1962, 2004b). Such an explanation could also be tested in relation to the effects of rapid education policy changes.
Bourdieu’s approach to field theory: forms of capital, social fields
As intimated in the discussion of the practice/habitus couplet, for Bourdieu the major locations in which practice is produced in capitalist societies are different social fi elds. Bourdieu thought of the social arrangement as consisting of multiple fi elds with varying degrees of autonomy (more or less autonomous or heteronomous) from an overarching fi eld of power (and in his later work Masculine Domination (Bourdieu 2001) an overarching fi eld of gender). In some ways, in this social conception Bourdieu was working across Marxist and Weberian approaches. When Bourdieu returned to France and continued research, an additional conceptual couplet was added as a way to explain different kinds of social arrangements. This couplet drew on the concept of fi eld, borrowed primarily through the application of relations between elements evident in fi eld theory in physics (although versions of the concept of social fi elds can be found in the much earlier and unconnected work of Kurt Lewin (1939): see Martin 2003 and Rawolle 2007 for discussion). For Bourdieu, social fi elds are spaces of competition, in which there are inequities in access to the stakes (capitals) of that competition, and the form in which this competition is carried out is through practice.10 As a non-substantialist concept, social fi elds comprise an organisation
of social forces, with the producers of these fi eld forces being individual agents and collections of agents, located in the relations between these agents. It is through the movement and practice of agents that such fi elds continue and change. What is crucial to fi eld analysis is locating specifi c properties that allow
the description of relations between agents, and the locating of groups of agents relative to one another. This is the relationality central to Bourdieu’s social theorising.
In order to understand the structuring of social fi elds, and the stakes around which fi elds were oriented, Bourdieu developed a multi-dimensional view of capital, which provided a variety of different forms of capital with which to discuss the stakes of competition within fi elds, and differences between various kinds of fi elds. There were two overlapping ways that Bourdieu theorised capital. On the one hand, Bourdieu argued that each distinct fi eld provides a unique form of capital located within the fi eld, and that practice was largely oriented as a kind of competition for this unique form of capital. Hence, Bourdieu would argue for scientifi c capital (2004d), educational capital (Bourdieu 2005b), and journalistic capital (1998), as ways to point to the specifi c forms located in particular corresponding fi elds that were irreducible to the stakes of other fi elds.
Such fi eld-specifi c capital was accumulated through an investment in the fi eld, and its distinctive forms of practice, with some agents being more successful in their strategies of accumulation and understanding of the rules of the games associated with these practices. On the other hand, Bourdieu (1986) would argue that these kinds of fi eld-specifi c capital could be analysed into a number of elementary forms, which were described as social capital, cultural capital, economic capital and symbolic capital.11 Each fi eld-specifi c capital could then be
described according to its composition of a ratio of social, cultural, economic and symbolic capital. Hence, as these forms of capital were a kind of trans- substantiated bundle of social energy, there were elementary and compound forms of this energy with the potential to be converted to economic capital. These different forms of capital could be converted by specifi cally located agents under specifi c circumstances, and with different exchange rates, dependent on the relations between the relevant social fi elds and the gatekeepers and dominant agents located within each fi eld (Bourdieu 1984). Though the language used in relation to this couplet held a specifi c heritage from the physical sciences and from economics, Bourdieu’s was not a mechanistic account of the social world.
An unfinished project: a general theory of fields
Bourdieu’s successive studies of different kinds of social fi elds raised a broader question about how different fi elds relate. In short, this raised the possibility of a general theory of fi elds that would help to understand the patterns of relations between fi elds, movements of fi elds relative to one another, points of overlap or disconnect between fi elds, or whether parts of social space exist within which fi eld-like relations are not present. While there has been some exploration of this incomplete theory of fi elds elsewhere (Couldry 2003a, 2003b; Kauppi 2002; Lingard et al. 2005; Rawolle 2005), at this point we will emphasise some of the kinds of linkages that Bourdieu raised about this meta-theorising of fi elds. This
general theory of fi elds was explicitly discussed in one major location (‘Some properties of fi elds’, in Bourdieu 1993), and discussed intermittently in other locations, as a way to understand the effects of specifi c fi elds on other fi elds, the relations between fi elds or the emergence of fi elds. The fi rst aspect of interest in this general theory of fi elds explored by Bourdieu related to a question: what quasi-taxonomic differences could be stated about different fi elds? While there were a number of different divisions offered, one key division expressed was between fi elds associated primarily with different kinds of social production and those fi elds associated primarily with different kinds of social consumption. One of the later points of exploration of Bourdieu related to a systematic understanding of ways in which specifi c fi elds, such as journalism and the economic fi eld, have come to threaten the autonomy and logic of practice of different fi elds. In this point of exploration, Bourdieu directly dealt with processes such as globalisation and mediatisation, processes in which some fi elds gradually come to infl uence the patterns and functioning of other fi elds, and the principles of hierarchisation of these fi elds. In this process, these affected fi elds become less autonomous and more heteronomous in character.
The incompleteness of this general theory of fi elds presents a number of points for further exploration for researchers. Questions remain about how to understand the time-frames over which fi eld-like relations develop and continue, and ways in which practice leads to the accumulation of different kinds of capital (see Rawolle’s (2005) account of temporary social fi elds), or ways to group and connect different kinds of effects between fi elds. Thus, homologies between fi elds present one kind of explanation, but there may be other kinds of effects that deserve further attention (see Lingard and Rawolle 2004, and Rawolle and Lingard 2008 for a conceptual and empirical elaboration of ‘cross-fi eld effects’). Such effects may be based, for example, on the connections or interactions between practices, or the products of practice, such as policy texts or performance on specifi c indicators (Rawolle 2010). Such effects may also relate to the kinds of autonomy available within a fi eld, and how positions of domination within a fi eld are established (see Maton 2005 in relation to higher education). Bourdieu’s inchoate outlines of global fi elds also present an opportunity for further development and exploration (see Lingard and Rawolle 2010, 2011; Lingard et al. 2005; Marginson 2010). Fields in Bourdieu’s work refer to social relations, not necessarily geographic and spatial ones. This is productive for consideration of fi elds and globalisation. We have written about an ‘emergent global education policy fi eld’, for example, which has effects (cross-fi eld effects) in national education policy fi elds and how these effects to some extent are borne by the habitus of international and national policy makers (Lingard and Rawolle 2010, 2011). This brings us to the major point we would want to make about Bourdieu and educational research. His thinking tools that we have considered briefl y here are generative ones, which can be refl exively utilised to research various topics in education. We turn in the next section to consider the necessary research habitus, according to Bourdieu, for utilising his work in education.