International Perspectives on Theorizing Aspirations

Applying Bourdieu's Tools

Garth Stahl, Derron Wallace, Ciaran Burke, Steven Threadgold

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350040342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

International Perspectives on Theorizing Aspirations offers new insights and guidance for those looking to use Bourdieu's tools in an educational context, with a focus on how the tools can be applied to issues of aspiration. Written by contributors from the UK, USA, Australia, Nigeria, Jamaica and Spain, the book explores how Bourdieu's tools have been applied in recent cutting-edge educational research on a range of topics, including widening participation, migration, ethnicity, and class. The contributors consider how aspirations are theorized in sociology, as well as exploring the structure/agency debates, before recapitulating Bourdieu's tools and their applicability in educational contexts. A key question running through the chapters is: how does social theory shape research? Including recommended readings, this is essential reading for anyone looking to use Bourdieu in their research and for those studying aspiration in an educational research setting.

Part One

Advancing Bourdieu’s Conceptual Tools

1

Maybe It Is for the Likes of Us: Reconsidering Classed Higher Education and Graduate Employment Trajectories

Ciaran Burke

Introduction

To say that Bourdieu has been an influential voice in contemporary sociology would be an understatement. He is one of the most referenced, applied and debated figures within sociology and its sister fields, the subject of editorials, symposiums and conferences, leading some to bemoan that we have reached peak Bourdieu. We need to ask ourselves why this French peasant–turned professor is so relevant, especially as he died before many of the events which now shape post-industrial society, in particular the ‘war on terror’ and the 2007 global financial crisis. One account (and certainly an argument I support) is that, despite Beck’s assertion that we have entered a period of ‘capitalism without the class’ (1992: 88), we very much live in a society of increasing inequalities, violence and enduring privilege, all thinly veiled behind the concept of the individual and freedom. This social reproduction of power and the playing out of one’s ‘place’ is perhaps no more clearly expressed than in the higher education system and, by extension, the graduate labour market.

There have been a number of significant moments in the UK higher education system starting with the Robbins Report in 1963, which led to the amalgamation of vocationally oriented technical schools into polytechnics, and began the democratization of post-compulsory education and the opening up of the sector. These new polytechnics, with degree-awarding powers, would increase the level of participation in higher education, in particular by those groups who, until then, were not represented in the higher education system: women, ethnic minority and non-traditional/working-class students. Over time, these polytechnics emerged as universities. This movement culminated in the 1992 Higher Education Act, which further reduced barriers to access, put all degree-awarding institutions on an equal level and addressed the binary system which had emerged through the establishment of polytechnics. Until the late 1990s, university courses were not subject to tuition fees, and grants and student loans were also available. While the introduction of university tuition fees was seen to close the door on those very students the Robbins Report intended to support, the policy of deferred fees, introduced alongside the raising of tuition fees in the 2004 Higher Education Act, was in part a move to alleviate this criticism. Further increases in tuition fees in 2010 were mediated through widening participation policies such as access agreements or the now-defunct educational maintenance allowance (Mountford-Zimdars, Sullivan and Heath 2009), a small bursary for students at the end of compulsory education intended to balance income lost as a result of continuing their education.

What this quite brief tour through UK higher education policy has demonstrated is that there has been an opening up of higher education in terms of places, fees and attitudes of institutions. Access to education is a key facet of Ulrich Beck’s model of reflexive modernity (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002) and of reducing the shackles of industrial Britain – in particular, social class (Beck 1992). Diane Reay characterizes this context of increased choice and opportunities as the ‘triumph of individualisation’ (2000: 995), in which the successes of the individual are considered theirs to enjoy and praise is offered to the individual and the individual alone. Blame for failures is also levelled at the individual and the individual alone, without considering enduring structural influences on attitudes and practice.

These attitudes dull what C. Wright Mills (1959) described as the sociological imagination, the position that to understand an individual or society we must account for both. Blurring the sociological gaze prevents us from observing how structure and agency interact, leading to such agentic arguments offered by Beck. There are two central issues when considering the continuing structural influences in UK higher education: structural mechanisms which advantage elite/middle-class students (Jones 2013) and issues of self-regulation limiting/rejecting levels of aspirations and expectations. It is the latter which this chapter – indeed, this collection – intends to unpack. The source and influence of aspirations and expectations of higher education and graduate employment will be critically examined through Bourdieu’s theory of practice.

The research which this chapter discusses has been extensively discussed elsewhere (Burke 2015a); however, a brief overview is now supplied. The research asked: To what extent are strategies that graduates use to secure employment influenced by social class? The research sample comprised twenty-seven university graduates who had graduated between two and ten years before the research was carried out. Respondents had all attended a Northern Irish university for their undergraduate degree, and the degrees the respondents completed were categorized as non-vocational. The sample was stratified in terms of gender, institution attended and social class, which was measured using the NS-SEC self-completion questionnaire. The primary form of data collection was the Biographical Narrative Interview Method (BNIM).

Thinking with Bourdieu: Habitus, capital and field

The central components of Bourdieu’s theory of practice – habitus, capital and field – have been discussed in numerous texts, monographs (Bathmaker et al. 2016; Atkinson 2010; Reay, David and Ball 2005) and other guides/introductions (Webb, Schirato and Danaher 2002; Grenfell 2008); indeed, this collection begins with a summation or clarification of these conceptual tools. What makes these tools so robust and relevant today is that there is still a requirement for the researcher to account for how they used them; the fundamental position that these are tools to be used, not commandments to be adored, is what gives Bourdieu’s work longevity and relevance in different contexts in both time and space. For this chapter and the research which informs it, the application of Bourdieu’s theory is similar to Bourdieu’s epistemic position: a combination of history/structure and creativity/agency.

Despite the criticisms against Bourdieu, in particular charges of structural determinism (Jenkins 2002; Archer 1996, 2003), Bourdieu’s theoretical project was concerned with bridging structure and agency. Writing at a time of competition between structural anthropology and phenomenology, Bourdieu (with Wacquant 1992) attempted to provide a middle ground characterized as ‘structural constructivism’. In other words, Bourdieu’s theoretical project was concerned with understanding and accounting for the social world through an appreciation of both structure and agency, in the case of my research social class and higher education/graduate employment trajectories. To assist in this theoretical project, Bourdieu developed thinking tools; three central tools for this research were habitus, capital and field. Before I unpacked and conceptually stretch each tool, it is important to note Bourdieu’s position that these three tools should be used in unison, expressed as the formula: [(habitus) (capital)] + field = practice (1984: 101).

Habitus, arguably one of Bourdieu’s most applied concepts (at times to the point of saturation) (Reay 2004), is a central facet of Bourdieu’s structural constructivism. Habitus – our way of seeing the world, sense of place, dispositions and values – is both structured and set but also open to choices within certain limits. Formed through institutions including family, school, peers and environment (Bourdieu 1977), there are boundaries to an individual’s sense of what is appropriate/suitable and their understanding of how various environments and institutions operate and how to successfully navigate such spaces. Within these boundaries, there are choices to be made; this almost contradictory understanding of choice and constraint was described by Bourdieu as ‘regulated improvisations’ (Bourdieu 1977: 78). The particular nature of variables which engender habitus means that, at its most basic level, habitus is unique to each individual; however, shared environment, culture and norms mean that those in close proximity, socially, geographically and so on, are likely to share a significant number of characteristics, leading to a group habitus or class habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Among other qualities, the group/collective habitus reinforces each individual member through providing a shared identity and actively rejecting divergent identities and practices (Bourdieu 1974).

Turning specifically to educational aspirations and expectations, Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) apply the concept of habitus to theorize why educational dropout rates (essentially self-exclusion) are concentrated within one social class rather than randomly distributed. The authors discuss ‘subjective expectations of objective probabilities’ – in other words, the level of (honest) expectation a working-class student has of successfully entering and graduating from the education system and becoming socially mobile. This arrangement all but condemns working-class/dominated students. As Bourdieu (1974) illustrates, the education system benefits the middle class through architecture, language, tacit expectations and application of resources. Diane Reay comments that habitus is a combination of ‘products of opportunities and constraints framing the individual’s earlier life experiences’ (2004: 433); it is these constraints, coming from the education system in particular, that help frame the often referenced ‘that’s not for the likes of us’ (Bourdieu 1984: 380). Through such processes, becoming socially mobile via education is an untenable goal, allowing the education system to perform its primary function: to act as an acceptable form of inheritance for the dominant social group (Bourdieu and Passeron 1979). As I have said, the ‘not for the likes of us’ line in Bourdieu is one of his most referenced, but, if we continue reading, we are afforded not only a succinct articulation of the relationship between habitus and aspiration but also a lesson in its durability. Bourdieu comments: ‘Objective conditions also contain a warning against the ambition to distinguish oneself by identifying with other groups, that is, they are a reminder of the needs of class solidarity’ (1984: 381).

It is the sense of solidarity and the reassurance that stems from belonging to a group, and indeed the group/collective habitus, that supports the durability of the individual habitus, aligning an individual’s norms, attitudes, aspirations and expectations closely to those of the larger group and reducing opportunity for divergence. While habitus has considerable influence over actions and attitudes, which seemingly grows stronger over time, Bourdieu is careful to explain that habitus is not some sort of inescapable prison, arguing that ‘[habitus] is durable but not eternal!’ (1992: 133). To return to the main components that form the habitus – family, school and environment – none of these can claim immortality; moreover, some of the components (in particular environment) are more likely to change as we move into a liquid modern period of history (Bauman 2000). Characterizing such a shift in environment as an ‘out-of-environment experience’ (Burke 2016), I have demonstrated instances of an altered habitus in the context of an increasingly fluid graduate labour market. Importantly, these experiences did not render habitus powerless or inapplicable but changed the core elements of habitus, particularly levels of understanding of how to navigate the graduate labour market.

I have previously argued (Burke 2016) that capital operates in the shadow of habitus, but, in Bourdieu’s theoretical formula, capital is as directive and influential as habitus on the outcome of practice. Within his theoretical project, Bourdieu (2004) outlines three main forms of capital. First, there is economic capital, which is essentially economic resources, including savings, property, stocks and so on. This form of capital was a way to acknowledge the Marxist position on class conflict while also forestalling comparisons between the two theorists. Second, there is social capital, which is comprised of access to social networks and whether these networks can be used in an advantageous manner. Third and finally, there is cultural capital, best described as cultural competency. Capital carries a number of different functions; an immediate role is to demonstrate the transactional nature of resources. Thinking about resources such as social networks or cultural know-how as capital provides us with the language to describe what is happening: a transaction between a resource and goods and services – in the case of my research...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor’s Foreword Mark Murphy
• Foreword Diane Reay
• Introduction: Using Bourdieu to Theorize Aspirations Garth Stahl, Derron Wallace, Ciaran Burke and Steven Threadgold
• Part One Advancing Bourdieu’s Conceptual Tools
• Part Two Using and Developing Habitus
• Part Three Using and Developing Theoretical Approaches to Capital
• Part Four Advancing Bourdieu’s Concepts in the Field of Education
• Part Five Bourdieusian Perspectives on Aspirations and Gender
• Part Six Ethnic Inequalities and Identities: Assessing Bourdieu’s Tools
• Index
• Copyright