Culture, Capitals and Graduate Futures

Degrees of class

Ciaran Burke

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317556107
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Educación general

In a time of too many graduates for too few jobs, and in a context where applicants have similar levels of educational capital, what other factors influence graduate career trajectories? Based on the life history interviews of graduates and framed through a Bourdieusian sociological lens, Culture, Capitals and Graduate Futures explores the continuing role that social class as well as cultural and social capitals have on both the aspirations and expectations towards, and the trajectories within, the graduate labour market.

Framed within the current context of increasing levels of university graduates and the falling numbers of graduate positions available in the UK labour market, this book provides a critical examination of the supposedly linear and meritocratic relationship between higher education and graduate employment proposed by official discourses from government at both local and national levels.

Through a critical engagement with the empirical findings, Culture, Capitals and Graduate Futures asks important questions for the effective continuation of the widening participation agenda. This timely book will be of interest to higher education professionals working within widening participation policy and higher education policy.

Chapter 1
Sociology of ‘choice’

Sociological enquiry, at its fundamental level, is the relationship between structure and agency, individual and society or choice and regulation in everyday practice. In C. Wright Mills’ seminal work The Sociological Imagination (1959), he challenges social researchers to accept and appreciate the role of both structure and agency and critically and empirically examine how these work together to engender practice. The focus of this book, and the research that formed its basis, is to question the directive influence of social class on graduate employment trajectories within a society that is increasingly characterized as populated by individuals making choices and, in large part, directing their own pathways based on levels of capital – in particular, educational capital they have amassed for themselves and by themselves.

In order to effectively examine the influence of social class and meet Mills’ challenge to appreciate the relationship between the individual and society, the research applied the theoretical position of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The scope of Bourdieu’s work covers areas such as education, employment, cultural consumption, art, television, politics and anthropology, and, as such, he has established and applied a large set of ‘thinking tools’ with which to discuss these areas of enquiry. As a precursor to this chapter, a brief discussion concerning the rationale of Bourdieu’s theoretical project and, in part, a defence of my own rationale for adopting this particular theoretical lens would be prudent. Equally concerned with the reduction of practice to a mechanical reaction associated with the anthropology of Levi-Strauss and the ephemeral status phenomenologists, such as Merleau-Ponty, had ascribed to social structures, Bourdieu offered a structural constructivist model of practice adopting elements of both positions but also going beyond the limitations of each view. In an Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972/1977) – Bourdieu’s first theoretical publication – he offered not a theory of practice but rather a theory of the generation of practice that seeks to reconcile both structure and agency. In order to explain the amalgam of structure and agency, Bourdieu began to develop certain tools: Habitus, Capital and Field. Bourdieu displays his triad in schematic form ‘[(habitus) (capital)] + field = practice’ (1979/1984: 101), in an effort to demonstrate their interpenetrative relationship.

The purpose of this chapter is not to provide an inventory of Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual toolbox.¹ Instead, this chapter comments on how I under stand his conceptual tools and applied them in my empirical research, specifically in relation to the directive role of social class and that of choice – or, in a theoretical context, reflexivity – on graduate trajectories. While Bourdieu is ‘good to think with’ (Hodkinson et al., 2000), there are certain limitations to Bourdieu’s theory, as ‘borrowing the emperor’s clothes can leave one looking very naked’ (Nash, 1999: 172). As such, I intend to discuss how I have adopted and progressed, rather than simply applied, certain conceptual tools. Once this theoretical groundwork has been laid, the chapter will move to demonstrate the effectiveness of Bourdieu’s – albeit altered – logic of practice. This effort will be achieved through considering and, to an extent, defending Bourdieu’s position on choice and reflexivity. The chapter will provide a critical discussion on various attempts at different models of reflexivity, from Ulrich Beck (1992, with Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) and Margaret Archer (2007, 2013), and hybridized models of habitus and reflexivity, from Andrew Sayer (2005) and Will Atkinson (2010a, 2010b). This section of the chapter will then offer an account of my own position on the role and influence of ordinary reflection, as discussed by Greg Noble and Megan Watkins (2003), as an aspect of Bourdieu’s logic of practice.

This chapter will conclude with a discussion on the relationship between social theory and empiricism and the specific research design and empirical processes employed in the research study, primarily, biographical narrative interview method (BNIM). It will specifically describe how this approach challenged and informed a theoretically driven project. This section will discuss how the BNIM is suited to create an opportunity to observe the directive influence of Bourdieu’s conceptual tools.

Habitus

‘Definitions’

The habitus is perhaps the most widely used and most generally misunderstood of the concepts² within the Bourdieusian toolbox. Bourdieu by no means coined the term;³ nevertheless, it is a central conceptual and empirical element in his theory. The concept of habitus was born from the rejection of alternative models of practice, namely those that rested either on structure or agency. It was the habitus, Bourdieu explains that, ‘allowed me to break away from the structuralist paradigm without falling back into the old philosophy of the subject of consciousness’ (1985: 13).

Providing a definition of habitus has proved quite challenging, certainly thanks, in part, to the interpenetrative relations between structure and agency within the habitus. The most often cited definition of the habitus is ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures’ (Bourdieu, 1972/1977: 72, emphasis in original). This explanation of the habitus as a set of durable dispositions appears to be quite structuralist; however, there are more subjective and individualistic understandings of the habitus. For Bourdieu (2002), the habitus is not understood as reductive, nor its practice monolithic; rather, habitus, while being an open concept, is built upon limitations. This position is further elaborated through this definition of habitus as ‘a durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations’ (1972/1977: 78, emphasis added). In other words, the habitus is attempting to fuse these two concepts together. The habitus is a set of generative improvisations – however these improvisations are framed – and, therefore, are constrained/regulated by the structure in question.

The habitus is formed through experiences related to our material conditions as well as influences from sources like the family, peer group and the educational system influencing levels of strategic action or practical mastery. The durable dispositions and the generative improvisation, albeit regulated, are understood to mould our aspirations and expectations, our ‘subjective expectations of objective probabilities’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970/1990: 156). The habitus was intended to provide an escape from the Cartesian philosophy of the rational agent who, through intentional strategy, can choose the best means to maximize their goal (Bourdieu, 2002). While there are conflicting definitions of or comments on the habitus, it was meant to resemble real life, and we should understand, as Reay argues, ‘there is an indeterminacy about the concept [habitus] that fits in well with the complex messiness of the world’ (2004b: 438). This point – of the ‘subjective expectations of objective probabilities’ founded by the habitus, along with capital, which I shall discuss next – is a crucial element of how habitus was applied within this research. Thinking about attitudes, the subjective expectations, through the habitus is useful when examining aspirations and expectations of university graduates. This approach provides an opportunity to consider their genesis and progression, as well as how they work alongside and through capital and field.

As a conceptual tool, habitus exists as both an individual and collective model. According to Nash (1999), there are two forms of habitus: the specific and the general. The general habitus is concerned with large-scale statistical regularities and provides Bourdieu with the apparatus to explain statistically relevant social generalizations and reproduction without having to discuss individual cases. The specific habitus, however, is individual and used to consider individual practices. Reay (2004b) discusses the multifaceted and seemingly contradictory position of considering the habitus at both the individual and the collective level. From this perspective, the habitus becomes a complex multifaceted and multi-layered concept; it is formed through the individual’s history but also through the collective histories of the family and the wider social group/class. At times, the habitus appears quite individualistic while, on other occasions, demonstrating a uniform or group dimension. Bourdieu (1972/1977) defends the notion of a group habitus, arguing that, while it is impossible for all members of a social group to have the same experiences – which in part form the habitus – it is more likely that members from the same group will have similar experiences and exist in similar conditions than members from different social groups. Habitus is most influential when in group form, the homogeneity of self-presupposed shared norms – attitudes and dispositions – provides an opportunity for significant directive influence. A plural appreciation of the habitus provides us with an opportunity to consider both the social structure and the socially structured individual while not reducing their relationship to a zero-sum situation.

The habitus is a ‘thinking tool’; as such, the level of habitus a researcher adopts or appreciates is based on the empirical challenge at hand. It has certainly been the case with regard to the progression of the ‘institutional habitus’ and the ‘familial habitus’ (Reay, 1998; Reay et al., 2001; Reay et al., 2009b; Ingram 2009, 2011; Burke et al., 2013). Appreciating the habitus at different levels or heights was critical to my research. While I was considering the relationship between a graduate’s habitus and capital in relation to a field at an individual level, I also framed that discussion in the wider context of class habitus through discussing the role of habitus via classed conceptual groups.

Progression through critique

While I intend to discuss the critiques of Bourdieu’s model, his logic of practice and his position on choice/reflexivity in a subsequent section of this chapter, there are a number of specific critiques of the habitus that I think will offer a greater insight at this juncture. Bourdieu’s reaction to such criticisms will also provide a fuller understanding of his position of the habitus and how it was applied throughout the research. A charge often brought against the habitus is based on the reading of ‘durable dispositions’; it is seen as being structurally deterministic (DiMaggio, 1979; LiPuma, 1993; Mouzelis, 1995, 2007; Goldthorpe, 2007). In his now notorious critical publication on Bourdieu, Jenkins (2002) argues the habitus removes any influence agency may have over the structure and, therefore, over practice. He is equally critical of the apparent stable nature of dispositions, which, for Jenkins, begs the question of how to account for social change. Through comments such as these, the habitus appears to share a similarity with Foucault’s (1978) concept of the soul – a durable and all-encompassing prison of the self – or, perhaps, with Durkheim’s (1893/1982) social facts – forming outside of the individual’s consciousness and ruling from above.

Bourdieu, when presented with similar charges by Wacquant (1992a), argues that at the centre of these critiques is the problem individuals (lay and academic) have with the idea that we are, at least in part, structurally constrained. Habitus ‘collides head on with the illusion of (intellectual) mastery of oneself that is so deeply engrained in intellectuals’ (Bourdieu, 1992b: 132). Individuals like to think of themselves as freethinking reflexive individuals in charge of their own destiny, while the habitus is firmly based on an appreciation of structural influence. Bourdieu attempts to show there is a pragmatic relationship between structure and agency and to give a realistic, but non-reductionist, account of the role they play.

In addition to Bourdieu’s defence that a site of hostility toward the habitus is that individuals enjoy the sense of autonomy and choice, the habitus is also open to change. The habitus is formed by the environment; therefore, a change in environment could lead to an altered habitus (Bourdieu, 1992b). Bourdieu is cautious to point out that an environment strong enough to affect the habitus is unlikely, as it would require a significant push to change such a strongly embedded element of practice and, due to the habitus, we are more likely to encounter experiences that reassure rather than question the habitus. With regard to actors who share a similar position in the social space but have divergent end results, Bourdieu (1979/1984) proposes that the relationship between social class/position and practice is based not only on the influence from their family or conditions in the formative years of their lives but also on trajectory from experiences along the way. This point demonstrates the role of environment on the habitus and how it can develop with the appropriate circumstances. Whatever the next stage of an individual’s life is, it will be influenced by the previous stage and so on, as the habitus is an incomplete creation, constantly being added to. It is the generative principle within habitus that provided an escape from structural determinism.

In support of Bourdieu, DiMaggio (1979) and Reay (2004b) accept and maintain that the individual’s habitus is open to change; it is this appreciation that saves Bourdieu from a Parsonian trap.⁴ As Atkinson (2010a) has pointed out, however, the habitus’ ability to change can be difficult to appreciate; nevertheless, the possibility of change based on exposure to new environments and new experiences in the habitus is a central facet of my research. To provide a greater opportunity for this to be realized, I have adopted Reay’s (2004b) ‘permeable habitus’ model. This reading sees the habitus as being able to react to the context of its surroundings. It is this permeability that provides an opportunity for the influence of new environments and experiences. While Bourdieu discusses the influence of experience on the habitus and, arguably, intended for a more permeable understanding of the habitus than some commentators have granted, the contribution from authors such as Reay is that she essentially ‘says it out loud’ – there is no ambiguity concerning either the permeability of the habitus nor on the role of experience in (re)shaping it.

In order to provide a bridging mechanism between structure and agency, habitus requires a certain level of malleability. Above all else, the habitus is a thinking tool; its plural understanding of structure and agency is replicated in its plural application by researchers. As such, it is important to clarify that the habitus, applied in this research, was understood as a set of dispositions, expectations and aspirations created and influenced by sources such as family, peer group and the educational system that, along with capital and field, influence practice. While at times being empirically (heuristically) understood on an institutional, collective or classed level, the habitus is specific to the individual. Via its permeable character, the habitus is open to alteration through new experiences and environmental change, however unlikely these experiences and environmental changes may be.

Capital

Forms of capital

In order to have a thorough appreciation of Bourdieu’s theory of practice, an understanding of the forms and roles of capitals is necessary. For Bourdieu (1983/2004), three essential forms of capital are economic, cultural and social. Economic capital is measured by levels of monetary capital: savings, investments, property, etc. Cultural capital is understood to include personal tastes, knowledge and skills.⁵ Social capital is based on the combination of actual or potential contacts that can lead to a form of exchangeable credit. The amount of social capital an individual has is based on the size of the contact network and the position within the social space each contact inhabits. As such, Bourdieu suggests, social capital is not an autonomous form of capital, independent from economic and cultural capital. The composite, or fourth, form of capital is symbolic capital – essentially, legitimate levels of these capitals. Symbolic capital is the most powerful form of capital, as those people who possess it can shape the doxa, the norms (that benefit the dominant group) or common sense of the field. Economic capital is the root of the other forms of capital; however, these forms of capital, with their specific character and manner, are not reducible to economic capital alone. Multiple forms of capital allow us to appreciate capitals other than economic while also remembering their economic influence.

These forms of capital allow us to ‘plot’ an individual’s position within social space, moving beyond merely economic indicators. There are three dimensions that need to be taken into consideration when placing individuals within social space: ‘volume of capital, composition of capital, and change in these two properties over time (manifested by past and potential trajectory in social space)’ (Bourdieu, 1979/1984: 114). Crossley (2008) comments that, through mapping social space, we are able to place individuals within social groups based on similar levels of capital and attitudes. Crossley warns us, however, that we must remember these groups are only created ‘in theory’ or, what Bourdieu calls, ‘classes on paper’ (ibid.: 92). Similarity of positions within social space does not guarantee similar or collective practices or attitudes. A similar position within the social field, however, does suggest similar life chances and attitudes. While it is not guaranteed, individuals within similar positions are more likely to socialize with each other than with those who possess differing positions.

According to Bourdieu, levels of capital and subsequent positions within the social space are crucial for understanding levels of aspiration and expectation. Similar to ‘subjective expectations’, understood to be moulded by the habitus, levels of capital are thought to enable or restrict what individuals think or know they can achieve – the ‘field of the possibles’ (1979/1984: 110, emphasis in original). Capital has a tendency to reproduce itself in almost its exact form and contains a certain longevity to its influence; it is capital that influences individuals to essentially cap their aspirations, to make us understand certain trajectories as ‘not for the likes of us’ (ibid.: 471). Appreciating all forms of capital is crucial for a Bourdieusian project. Oliver and O’Reilly (2010), researc...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editors’ introduction
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Sociology of ‘choice’
• 2 Setting the scene
• 3 Graduate employed
• 4 Non-graduate employed
• 5 Theoretical discussion: a wide-angle approach
• 6 Social policy implications: lessons to be learned
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Respondent matrix
• Appendix B: Graduate employment position by variable
• Bibliography
• Index