This book is about people in the workplace and how value is attached to certain identities through class and gender. Knowing what kind of person has value at work is explored here, and how people use their knowledge and âfeel for the gameâ (Bourdieu 1990, p. 67) to try to fit in with expectations of desirable identities. I am interested in the lives of everyday people and how it is we all find ways to fit in at work. The practice of trying to fit in is intricately bound up with feelingsâit can be a painful thing to do, to fit in, and so this theme too is considered within this book. These discussions are based on a study situated in a Higher Education workplace,1 and the employees who took part in this research work in jobs ranging from lecturers and cleaners, to managers and electricians.
This book provides an interpretation of why people act the way they do at work as an expression of game-playing, and an insight into how people try to adapt and fit in at work. Acquiring cultural capital and learning the ârightâ way to be at work are crucial to being able to fit in or not. The argument I make here is that knowledge of class and gender codes, and their symbolic meanings and value, are an important component of game-playing, and playing the game well. Game-playing reflects the legitimate culture of the workplace and how things ought to be done to secure inclusion and belonging. This book then points to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion of certain kinds of people in the workplace through game-playing, where the ârightâ identity fits, and the wrong identity is stigmatized. This has wider policy implications regarding equality and diversity at work. I look at certain people who specifically experience the stigma of particular classed and gendered distinctions, and how they feel the pain of being out of place, which they then have to try and manage through emotion work. What I hope is distinctive about this book is that it considers how class and gender practices are important at work, and how differences of class and gender are managed through emotion work. The location of my research in a Higher Education setting also adds to this by providing an insight into what it is like to work in a sector that is currently undergoing significant changes within the UK (see also Lynch 2006; Chapelo 2010; Watson 2011).
In writing this book, I acknowledge from the outset that by focusing on how identities are valued, or not, via class and gender, that this is also part of the making of identities of value. Hacking (2004) discusses this pertaining to wider processes of classifications; people come into view the more we attempt to understand various ways people are classified. He writes that people âcome into being by a dialectic between classification and who is classified. Naming has real effects on people, and changes in people have real effects on subsequent classificationsâ (2004: 280). Relating this to my own research, I am conscious then that by making class and gender my focus I necessarily locate other ways of understanding the making of identities of value to a more marginal position. This is done with a commitment to supporting other research related to identities of value.
In the following section, I begin by firstly outlining what my research is about, and I also discuss my motivations for doing this work. I also outline the theoretical framework that I use in this studyâI adopt elements of Bourdieuâs conceptual toolkit, particularly habitus, capital, and field, and I also draw on Bourdieuâs ideas about distinctions and taste. I look at Bourdieuâs idea of social games and how this has shaped the direction of my own research. This is coupled with a short discussion of Bourdieuâs concept of hysteresis. I also bring to bear some of the key concepts from Arlie Hochschildâs highly acclaimed research The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983). I draw on her concept of emotion work, transmutation, and feeling rules.2
Motivations, Methods, and Aims
The motivation for this book arises out of a growing collection of work that looks at identity and people in the workplace. The workplace is not a âneutralâ space (Du Gay 1996; Bradley 1989; Cockburn 1991; Adkins 1995; McDowell 1997) and constructions of the âworkerâ are culturally and socially complex (Du Gay 1996; Pettinger et al. 2005; Kirk and Wall 2011; Bolton and Laaser 2013; Ray and Sayer 1999). These particular studies and theoretical approaches reveal to various extents that the workplace is a space in which workersâ embodied identities can work for and against them in the new economy.
My own experiences of working in a Higher Education Institution are suffused with feelings of being âout of placeâ. Here was a world where colleagues not only dressed and talked differently to me, but were also intimidatingly qualified. Fitting in here and learning how to play the game takes enormous amounts of emotional and physical effort in the beginning. Over time, I have got better at knowing how the game is played, like some of the people I interviewed in my study. I too then have felt the ârecognitions of othersâ (Skeggs 1997, p. 4) as value judgements, as they are read off my own embodiment. From speaking to others about their experiences in the workplace it seems I am not alone in feeling uncomfortable at times, and out of place, for reasons that appear to be located in class and gender.
Theoretical Framework: Bourdieu and Hochschild
Bourdieu
In this section I explain the conceptual framework I use in my study. Bourdieu offers a theory of practice, which is grounded in empirical research, that promises to overcome the antimony between the social and personal âthrough an understanding of the relational properties of social phenomenaâ (Ăzbilgin and Tatli 2005, p. 857). Bourdieuâs approach provides a way of making sense of the world that takes into account how the social and the personal, the subjective and objective, are inter-related and reproduce power dynamics. He has a rich repertoire of analytical tools that have excellent explanatory power that can be used in organizational research.
Habitus, Capital, and Field
Habitus is an embodied history that disposes each person to act, think, and feel in certain ways relative to their âconditions of existenceâ (Bourdieu 1990, p. 52). Put another way, these conditions produce a personâs habitus, as Bourdieu puts it: âsystems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structuresâ (1990, p. 53). The habitus is a matrix of âgenerative principlesâ (1990, p. 53) that provide a practical logic that an individual draws upon with no active conscious intent. The habitus then is a useful concept because it helps to explain how a person is not only a âproduct of historyâ but also making history. When a person speaks, dresses, thinks, or feels, then that person is doing so with the âactive presence of past experiencesâ, and these are structuring âschemes of perception, thought and actionâ (Bourdieu 1990, p. 54). This means that practices and schemes of perception are shaped by history and âinternalized as a second nature and so forgotten as historyâ (Bourdieu 1990, p. 56). By a person reproducing these schemes of perception and action, which Bourdieu saw as performative magic, the continuity of social and embodied structures is ensured over time.
Bourdieu is often criticized for producing a model of the habitus that does not allow for change (see, e.g., Mouzelis 2007; King 2000; Burawoy 2012). However this is, arguably, not a justified criticism. For although a personâs schemes of perception, action, and thoughts are structured by history, these durable structures are also shaped by the tiny adaptations a person makes during interactions with other people. Being disposed to act in a certain way never generates the same exact action the next time because small changes are made based on the experiences from the previous time. The effect is cumulative and a personâs whole past acts upon their present. Bourdieu suggests then that we have an âinfinite capacity for generating productsâthoughts, perceptions, expressions and actionsâwhose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedomâ (1990, p. 55). In addition, we should be mindful that the habitus is a system of principles, not rules or laws. A person is disposed to act in a certain way and can ordinarily do so without thinking about it. Bourdieu describes this as being a fish swimming in waterâthis is when we feel most comfortable and have a good sense of âfitâ in the practical world (1990). We become a âfish out of waterâ, that is, uncomfortable with a sense that we do not fit in when we cross into a field that we are not familiar with. So, we try to adapt and make changes to our habitus according to the field we are in.
Bourdieuâs concept needs to be thought about as inseparable from objective field structures. As Thomson (2008, p. 67) notes, to fully understand relations between people one must âexamine the social space in which interactions, transactions, and eventsâ occur. Bourdieu thinks about social space as field; field relates to a number of things, and it can mean a personâs objective position within structures in social space. This is analogous to a football pitch, as Bourdieu says, in which players have positions and are limited by the conditions of the field. The game that takes place in this field has its own ârules, histories, star playersâ, making each field different to the next (Thomson 2008, p. 69). As Maton puts it, âWhere we are in life at any one moment is the result of numberless events in the past that have shaped our pathâ (2008, p. 52). Bourdieu theorized that there were as many possible fields as there were âpossibilities for the pursuit of distinctionâ (1984, p. 223). Each field3 has a practical logic to it that a person must master if they are to be familiar and comfortable in this social space. Thomson (2008) adds that field is not fixed, rather, change occurs within the field as a result of adaptations in the way people play social games.
Bourdieu also talks about the field of power: this relates to âmultiple social fieldsâ (Thomson 2008, p. 70) and the similarities between the logic structuring these fields and the dominant players. Thomson notes how fields are inter-related and so this can mean that a playerâs position in one field can also advantage him or her in another field (e.g., field of education and the economic field). So, âwhat happens in the field of power shapes what can happen in a social fieldâ (Thomson 2008, p. 71). The field of cultural production relates to a system of signs and systems of exchange that have their own meaning within social fields, and as Johnson states, âthe field of cultural production [âŠ] encompass[es] the set of social conditions of the production, circula...