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Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu

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This is a great way to get acquainted with Bourdieu's work on culture and power. Swartz provides an excellent overview of key concepts such as "symbolic capital", "habitus", "field" and "symbolic violence". This work definitely makes Bourdieu more readable, but it is no mere Cliff Notes -- there is a critical and analytical component to Swartz' treatise that invites the reader to not just take the given theories at face value but examine past criticisms these theories have drawn.

This is essential reading for sociology grad students and anyone looking for a comprehensive and comprehensible introduction to Bourdieu's scholarship. Bourdieu's own work is brilliant but is not easy reading. Swartz eases the reader into Bourdieu's world of thought, and once you are hooked, reading Bourdieu himself becomes worth the trouble.

If you need to learn about Pierre Bourdieu, this book is fantastic! I had to read this book for a class, but it was one of the most clear, thought-provoking, and understandable syntheses of a theorist's works that I've ever read. If only such a book existed for Foucault or any of the other theorists and philosophers that I've had to struggle through, only understanding half of it! After reading this book, I feel that I actually, clearly understand the theory of Bourdieu.

Swartz has done a masterful job in bringing Bourdieu's complicated thought and style to an Anglo-American readership. But he has gone even further in demonstrating the ways in which Bourdieu's work is problematic and/or falls short. Truly, a remarkable work of sythesis, scholarship, and critique.

Swartz's book is permits the researcher access to Bourdieu's elaborated thinking. Bourdieu's work is largely misunderstood. His theories and terms possess a considerate amount of linguistic and cultural subtleties that make his concepts elusive to even the most experienced sociologists. Bourdieu utilized complicated ontology and definitions. He liked to play with words and sentences, for instance: "The structuring structures and the structured structures." Bourdieu's terminology struggles to be specific enough to be used empirically but is abstract enough to lose nothing out of its context. Swartz presents Bourdieu's work in an empirical manner that permits context and specificity.

In general, a goal of sociology is to clarify the meaning of actions of people to people. This thought is always present in Bourdieu's sociological research. Bourdieu's framework explicitly acknowledges complexities resulting from the interactions of individuals and societies, rather than focusing on the individual as an autonomous actor in detextualized environments. Early in the book, Swartz establishes Bourdieu's central question: "How stratified social systems of hierarchy and domination persist and reproduce inter-generationally without powerful resistance and without the conscious recognition of its members" (p. 6).

Bourdieu could be considered a critical structuralist. He recognized the premise of structuralism, that independent structures in the social world may delimit in a specific way the behavior of the social actor. However, in Bourdieu's structuralism, individuals are able to build and adapt social phenomena through their thinking and their actions. So in the end he leads his own position away from the path of structuralism and towards constructedness. Although Bourdieu' reinforces structures as an autonomous realities, he does not view subjective agents as passive holders of forces that form structures. Bourdieu promotes an interactive model where the structures influence the agent, but the structures are composed by human will. The social world is constantly constructed by agents with their own practices in the normal daily life. Society is the product of human actions: choice, judgment, meanings attributed to the lived world of individual agents.

The school is one of the critical sites where forms of cultural capital are produced, transmitted and accumulated and where dominant systems of classification and evaluation are inculcated. Although the sociology of Bourdieu is very French orientated, I found it applicable to the U.S. In the U.S., the presumed ideology is that schools are the ladder to success and that school is the great equalizer. However, despite legal mandates, egalitarian goals seem elusive. For Bourdieu, the real success of educational institutions, although often implicit, is in how many students the system sorts out with the effect of establishing and maintaining distinctions as cultural capital. Therefore, for Bourdieu, educational research should examine the role that cultural capital plays in sorting students. Schools adopt sorting and ranking mechanisms, often relying on powerful binaries to make distinctions between students, and apply the official taxonomies with quasi-legal authority.

Bourdieu's framework assumes that social agents do not have innate knowledge of what they are and what they do; more precisely, they do not necessarily have access to the reason for the discontent or their distress. Much of what underlies the behavior of actors is not conscious but is unconscious. Not all of Bourdieu's concepts can be manifested verbally or overtly. Therefore, empirical study using a Bourdesian framework requires the sociologist to rebuild the reality of the interaction among actors and their structures. Through socialization, dispositions and belief systems (judgments) have been incorporated as practical instruments that actors employ without conscious reflection. Yet, these judgments are also social judgments that ratify and reproduce social class distinctions.

David Schwatrz's (1997) book Culture and Power is a well written, sympathetic, but thoroughly evaluative introduction to the conceptual framework and body of research produced by the influential French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Schwartz's book is far more accessible than most accounts of the oeuvre of a prolific cultural theorist who has an unusually complex, deeply embedded prose style. Still, Culture and Power may be a bit slow going for someone not accustomed to thinking in sociological terms and who does not have at least a passing familiarity with the classical theorists who have most influenced Bourdieu: Marx, Weber, and Durkheim.

For those with a fairly strong background in sociology, however, one understandable response to Bourdieu's sometimes vague, sometimes internally contradictory, and perhaps mystifying presentation may be bemusement, as in "what is all the fuss about?" Could it be that Schwartz has done his job as interpreter and critic too well, unintentionally reducing Bourdieu's work to a variegated collection of borrowings from his classical forebearers and from established textbook sociology?

In some instances, as with the concept cultural capital, one might be justified in suggesting that Bourdieu has simply given a name to something that social scientists have long unself-consciously taken for granted. Nevertheless, once it is has been given a name and explicitly viewed as a form of power that may be used in a struggle over socially contested terrain, cultural capital is readily construed as a variable and has given rise to a growing body of seemingly novel empirical research. In the U.S., instructive book-length examples of research in which cultural capital figures conspicuously can be found in the the work of sociologists Annette Lareau and George Farkas.

Other applications of Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital among American sociologists are commonplace, but a comparable, much more widely used concept in the U.S. is social capital. This refers to membership in academically useful social networks, such as being an officer of a Parent Teacher Organization, playing golf from time to time with the school principal, or being socially linked to like-minded and ambitious parents who can be of value in assisting one's children in doing well in school. Bourdieu subsumes social capital under cultural capital, and the meaning of social capital for Bourdieu is much the same as its meaning in sociology in the U.S.

Bourdieu, in fact, seems to find cultural capital by some other name in a nearly endless list of manifestations, including religious capital, family capital, symbolic capital, occupational capital, regional capital, state capital, and many others. This makes a bit more sense than it might at first seem when one realizes that, for Bourdieu, there are just two fundamental forms of capital: cultural capital and economic capital. Given the breadth of these categories, it seems likely that each, especially the broader notion of cultural capital, will take many forms. This, of course, raises the possibility that the two basic forms of capital are defined so inclusively that they become meaningless, a possibililty that Schwartz acknowledges and discusses.

In Bourdieu's conceptual framework the locus of cultural capital at the level of the individual is a concept he has given the name habitus. Habitus consists of norms, values, and predispositions or strategies that the individual, in largely unself-conscious fashion, uses to make sense of the world in an effort to make best use of available opportunities and to legitimate his or her activities. At first blush, habitus seems static and largely incapable of adjusting to markedly changed opportunity structures and other unstable aspects of the specific field or social location in which it is situated. However, though the most fundamental components of habitus are formed in one's formative years, secondary socialization, though of lesser influence, does occur, meaning that ongoing experience inevitably results in at least minor modifications in the way habitus is constituted.

In addition, the socialized dispositions that contribute to structuring the habitus can be conceived of as distributions of responses clustering around a midpoint, but still exhibiting variability that can be purposefully used to adjust to changed circumstances, in other words a changed field. In the case of an extreme mismatch between habitus and its social context, however, fatalistic resignation or rebellion born of frustration may occur.

As with the concept cultural capital, habitus, as rendered by Schwartz's interpretation of Bourdieu, seems to be little more than a name given to structures and processes that have a long history of research and theorizing in sociology and closely related disciplines. After all, the idea of socialization as the internalization of norms, values, and ways of responding to the contexts or fields in which we find ourselves has been taken for granted as a scoiological staple for more than a century. One of the best treatments, including an explanation of internalization itself, is offered by George Herbert Mead in Mind, Self, and Society, first published in the U.S. in 1934.

Fields, as Bourdieu uses that term, are venues of conflict and struggle such as labor markets or education as a socially pervasive institution. Habitus is activated and functions in the social and cultural terrain constituted by fields.

In the case of labor markets, the field would be a locus of struggle whereby participants use their cultural capital and symbolic wherewithal in a variety of pertinent forms in conflict over making best use of attractive occupational opportunities. The fact that symbol systems are used in conflict over scarce attainments gives rise to Bourdieu's graphically suggestive concept of symbolic violence.

In the case of education, the field would be the locus of struggle whereby participants use cultural captial and pertinent symbolic wherewithal in conflict over making best use of attractive educational opportunities.

Clearly, these two process would be linked, with educational attainment providing the knowledge and legitimacy needed to gain access to occupatons of greater and lesser remuneration and prestige.

Discussing fields, the locus of conflictual engagement of habitus, as described above raises questions that need clarification. First, what is the difference between a field and the convential notion of an institution? Bourdieu would answer that the traditional concept of an institution is unduly static, not acknowledging the prevalence of internal struggle and conflict of a broad range of actors with simialr and differently endowed habitus. Perhaps so. Schwartz acknowledges this question and clarifies Bourdieu's response but seems not to be entirely persuaded that field and institution are not really coterminous. After all, Bourdieu's early work, especially Reproduction in Education, Culture, and Society (Bourdieu and Paseron, 1971) led to his identification as a social reproduction theorist, one who documents stability in social organization over time and explains why consequntial change does not occur.

A second question raised incidentally in our discussion of fields concerns reference to both cultural capital and symbol systems. This seems redundant, with no hint as to how to distinguish between the two, though we might guess accurately that cultural capital is the more inclusive idea.

Schwartz does not address this redundancy, but I suspect that Bourdieu uses symbols and symbol systems to highlight the real-world efficacy of non-material resources, especially insofar as they serve as legitimating factors that are effective precisely because they are not recognized for what they are. Economic capital may very well be dominant in the last instance, but ideas count, too, and in ways that a materialist conception of the social world might not acknowledge.

A third and crucial question concerns the relationship between fields and the ubiquitous and very important notion of social class. Bourdieu conceives of society as divided into three classes with obvious names: upper class, middle class, and working class. One's position both among and within classes is determined by the relative amount of economic capital and cultural capital one possesses. Economic capital -- cash, stocks, bonds, property -- takes priority over cultural capital in its manifold forms, but for Bourdieu the class to which one belongs is, in effect, a summary evaluation of both kinds of capital. For example, some members of the upper class have large quantities of economic capital but little cultural capital. For others, the quantities are reversed.

The middle class consists of the old petit bourgeoisie, such as shop keepers and independent artisans, and the new petit bourgeoisie, such as white collar clerks and technicians. As with the upper class, members of the middle class vary with regard to possession of different quantities of economic capital and cultural capital.

Members of the lower class are construed largely as Marx construed them: people who survive by selling their labor power. They may symbolically valorize their positon by persuading themselves that they are the ones who do the real work, the kind that can't be delegated to a "pencil neck." In this way they may be inflicting symbolic violence upon themselves.

An idefinitely large multiplicity of fields locate people with regard to class positon. The examples we have already used, labor markets and education, are useful in understanding how these assignments are made. Labor markets assign people to occupatonal positions that vary with regard to the amount of economic capital accrued. Education assigns people to positions that manifest varying amounts of cultrual capital. Social class membership, then, is a product of variable quantities of economic and social capital accrued through conflict and struggle across a variety of fields.

Bourdieu, according to Schwartz, regards social classes as both fundamental and relational in any social system. By emphasizing the relational, non-reified nature of social class, Bourdieu claims that he parts company with Marxist economistic renderings of social class. In truth, however, Marx also regarded class as a relational phenomenon, meaning that there can be no capitalist class without a working class and no working class without a capitalist class. In effect, the two classes define each other. A first-rate account of this way of construing class can be found in Paul Willis' (1977) book Learning to Labor.

There are many other issues raised by Bourieu's research and theorizing, and Schwartz's analysis seems nearly exhaustive, making the book difficult to grasp as a unified whole and accounting for the excessive length of this review. While I am sure it is not his intention, Schwartz invites deconstruction of Bourdieu's work such that it may seem essentially derivative, borrowing liberally from the work of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, and also from numerous others who are now safely insulated in textbook sociology.

Whatever the merit of the claim that there may be less to Bourdieu than meets the eye, Schwarz's account makes Bourdieu much more accessible, and it informatively acknowledges difficulties with his theoretical point of view.