Will Atkinson
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 142438 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Will Atkinson |
| NOMBRES | Will |
| APELLIDO | Atkinson |
| FIRMA | ATKINSON W |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Bristol |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1032-1241 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 65 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 628 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 64 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2007 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
Bourdieusian class analysis and labor, exploitation and production
In a recent paper in this journal, Seim and McCarthy continued the ongoing debate between Marxists and Bourdieusians over the meaning and purpose of class analysis. Taking issue with Bourdieu’s apparent neglect of labor, exploitation and production, they suggested that whatever insights Bourdieu may have had should be encased within a Marxist framework giving priority to these three elements of class. In this response, I make the opposite case, s…
The UK field of higher education institutions and its homologies
This paper tests whether the system of Higher Education Institutions in the UK forms not just a status hierarchy, as commonly assumed or previously suggested, but a multidimensional space or ‘field’ of the kind explored by Pierre Bourdieu in France. Using data from the UK’s Higher Education Statistics Agency and geometric data analysis, it answers in the affirmative, revealing a tripolar structure formed by orthogonal axes of difference and domin…
Class, race and lifestyles in the US
Pierre Bourdieu's famous thesis on the homology between class and lifestyles has been accused of overlooking or downplaying race and ethnicity. The most sophisticated tests and updates of his thesis in statistical research have so far done little to counteract this, even though recent advances in theorising ethno-racial domination and its intersection with class have been inspired by Bourdieu's field theory. This paper attempts to bring the diver…
Multidimensional social mobility and educational strategies in the UK
Recent studies of social mobility inspired by Pierre Bourdieu have sought to move beyond the traditional focus on vertical movement between big classes. Drawing on his language of capitals and social space, and spotlighting access to and differences within the elite, they have demonstrated mobility to be both multidimensional and fine-grained. This paper seeks to synthesise and broaden these developments, taking the UK as its case study. It uses …
Outline of a Theory of “Work-Life Balance”
The phenomena going under the label of “work-life balance” (WLB) are crucial for understanding not only major pressures weighing on people’s well-being and choices but also the very organization and negotiation of everyday life. Despite being heavily researched, however, WLB is surprisingly undertheorized within sociology. This article attempts to redress the situation by proposing a robust and multilayered sociological model capable of explainin…
Critical notes on Racial Domination
The making of a chorister
Artificial Intelligence as a Strategy in the British Economic Field
Drawing on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, this paper conceives the adoption and development of artificial intelligence by businesses as a strategy within the economic field. Using a survey of over 2000 businesses in the UK and tools of geometric data analysis, I construct a model of the British economic field and project into it indicators of past, present and intended AI adoption. This provides a sense of the correspondences between the struc…
Bourdieu on love
This article offers an elaboration and reconstruction of Pierre Bourdieu's brief account of interpersonal love in Masculine Domination . Although Bourdieu presented love as a possibility of escape from relations of domination, he also understood that love was a product of labour, inserted within an economy of exchanges, and liable to become infused with domination. I build on these remarks to make the case that it is possible to conceive of love …
Field theory, role theory and role conflict
This paper puts Bourdieu's influential field theory into dialogue with the classic sociological tradition of role theory. I argue that while role theory per se is certainly problematic, it nonetheless bore the virtue of conceptualising in clear terms something amply borne out by empirical research but underemphasised in Bourdieu's account of the social world: that people are situated in more than one social structure, with differing salience to t…
Who Feels Looked Down Upon? Sources of 'Symbolic Violence' in the United States
This paper explores the factors increasing the chances of thinking one's cultural tastes and interests would be looked down upon by others, a sentiment put under the label of 'symbolic violence' by Pierre Bourdieu. Using data from a survey fielded in the US in 2017-18 (n = 2,514), it examines the role of social position, lifestyle, family status and other properties. Multiple correspondence analysis is used to model both the US social space and t…
The Class Structure of Capitalist Societies, Volume 4
The Class Structure of Capitalist Societies, Volume 3
This book continues the Class Structure of Capitalist Societies series by exploring the place of class among a confluence of factors in shaping people’s lives, loves and lifestyles across three nations. Previous volumes in the series examined the shape, history and cultural expressions of class structures. Now, grappling with themes usually put under the labels of ‘intersectionality’ and ‘work-life balance’ and bridging literatures seldom brought…
Charting fields and spaces quantitatively
Multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) has started to gain popularity within sociology as a method of mapping ‘fields’ and ‘social spaces’ in the style of Pierre Bourdieu, its capacity to document multidimensional geometric relationships within data being a snug fit for the relational mode of thought he championed. There is a risk, however, of over-relying on MCA when the data suggest alternative methods and, as a result, drawing unsound conclusi…
The Structures of Everyday Life
The German social space and its homologies
This article constructs a comprehensive new model of the contemporary class structure of Germany. More specifically, inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s geometric conception of class relations and drawing on original survey data, it adopts multiple correspondence analysis paired with cluster analysis to chart the German ‘social space’, that is, the relational configuration of key forms of capital. It then explores correspondences with occupational grou…
The class differentiation of older age
Older people have been overlooked in recent debates over the relationship between age, class and culture despite their prevalence and the conceptual questions they raise. Seeking to bridge mainstream class analysis with debates in social gerontology, especially via a shared turn to Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology, this paper draws on survey data from the US to examine not only the class position of older people but their internal social an…
Field Theory and Assemblage Theory
This paper engages with Manuel DeLanda's Deleuze-inspired 'assemblage theory' from a perspective sympathetic to Pierre Bourdieu's field theory. It first outlines DeLanda's proposed new 'philosophy of society', focusing on his major works in this vein, and registers some scepticism as to its originality for sociology. It then introduces and responds to DeLanda's critique of Bourdieu. Rather than simply reject assemblage theory outright, however, I…
The German space of lifestyles
This paper charts the space of lifestyles in Germany in order to assess whether its structure resembles that famously uncovered in France by Bourdieu. Mobilising multiple correspondence analysis and using data from a bespoke national survey of tastes and lifestyles fielded in 2017–18 ( n = 2244), it unveils a two-dimensional system defined by tastes for the culturally exclusive and the economically exclusive. These dimensions are strongly associa…
Rethinking the nation and international relations
Efforts to move sociology beyond the nation state and international relations theory have both been plagued by several limitations and dualisms. Recent research has begun to find ways beyond the problems by turning to Pierre Bourdieu's relational conception of social structure and practice. Yet one specific relational structure forming a key part of the puzzle has been neglected or merely implicitly assumed so far: the space of nation states. Aft…
Marxism versus Bourdieu on domination, consciousness and resistance
Michael Burawoy's recent book-length engagement with the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu constitutes, at root, a Marxist critique of its inability to conceive of the dominated as anything other than duped and submissive, despite this sitting uneasily with Bourdieu's own research and political practice later in life. Burawoy wonders whether Bourdieusians will be able to recognise the limits of their master's thought, and set about revising and extend…
The genesis of Brexit in the UK
This paper outlines a sociological model of the conditions of possibility of the UK's decision to withdraw from the European Union in 2016. Drawing on the conceptual tools of Pierre Bourdieu and those inspired by him, it synthesises and goes beyond the partial and fragmentary accounts offered so far to offer a more comprehensive narrative implicating the interrelation of multiple fields, with agents' evolving strategies within the different field…
The U.S. Space of Lifestyles and Its Homologies
Pierre Bourdieu’s influence on the study of lifestyles in the United States has been profound, yet the vast majority of relevant research operates with methods and assumptions at odds with Bourdieu’s own. His specifically relational or geometric understanding of social structures, and lifestyles, has been overlooked, meaning that no one has yet done for the contemporary United States what Bourdieu did for France, that is, construct a model of the…
Falling in and out of love
This paper engages with the theme of individual disenchantment, that is, the process of falling out of love with something that once gave pleasure and purpose. Drawing on the conceptual tools of Pierre Bourdieu, it sketches the process by which individuals become ‘enchanted’ with the stakes of different fields, the phenomenology of enchantment and disenchantment and several ideal typical modes of genesis of disenchantment. Attention is given to i…
Class, Individualization and Late Modernity
Introduction: From Affluence to Reflexivity PART I: THEORETICAL PRELIMINARIES Reflexivity and its Discontents Conceptualizing Class and Reconceptualizing Reflexivity PART II: SEARCHING FOR THE REFLEXIVE WORKER Educational Reproduction Today Topographical Trajectories Distinction and Denigration 'Class' as Discursive and Political Construct Conclusion: Rigid Relations through Shifting Substance Appendix: The Search Process
The context and genesis of musical tastes
Beck, individualization and the death of class
Ulrich Beck has argued that the changing logic of distribution and, more importantly, the 'individualization' of social processes in reflexive modernity have killed off the concept of social class and rendered the analysis of its effects a flawed endeavour. The present paper takes issue with this perspective by exposing its key weaknesses, namely its ambivalence and contradiction over what exactly constitutes individualization and the extent to w…
From sociological fictions to social fictions
This paper expresses serious reservations regarding the increasingly popular Bourdieu‐inspired notions of ‘institutional habitus’ and ‘family habitus’ in education research. Although sympathetic to the overall theoretical approach and persuaded of the veracity and importance of the empirical findings they are used to illuminate, it argues that, from a Bourdieusian point of view, they actually present several difficulties that threaten not only to…
The myth of the reflexive worker
Several influential social theorists contend that the increased insecurity injected into the labour market by neo-liberal economic policies, coupled with a discourse of flexibility concretised in lifelong learning initiatives, have contributed to the withering of class in contemporary society. Careers and job shifts now follow a 'de-standardised' pattern, they argue, in which people incessantly switch between divergent occupations, education, tra…
Class habitus and perception of the future
This paper examines the consequences of the recent economic downturn and UK government spending cuts, as exacerbations of prevailing trends in neoliberal employment policy, on temporal perception, specifically as it relates to the adaptation of subjective anticipations of and projections into the future to objective prospects of unemployment by class. Grounded in a phenomenologically-minded Bourdieusian conceptualization of class and time and con…
Phenomenological Additions to the Bourdieusian Toolbox
In constructing his renowned theory of practice, Pierre Bourdieu claimed to have integrated the key insights from phenomenology and successfully melded them with objectivist analysis. The contention here, however, is that while his vision of the social world may indeed be generally laudable, he did not take enough from phenomenology. More specifically, there are two concepts in Alfred Schutz's body of work, which, if properly defined, disentangle…
Time for Bourdieu
This paper explores the role of time in Pierre Bourdieu's social theory with a view to highlighting, and plugging, some of its conceptual gaps. It proceeds by identifying four elements of the social structuring of temporal experience: the temporal structure of consciousness; field rhythms and pace; imposed timings; and time binds. The first two of these Bourdieu brought to the fore, even if there are some aspects of his account in need of further…
Rethinking the Work-Class Nexus
The sociology of class and the sociology of work have, historically, occupied two sides of the same coin, sharing foundational studies such as the Affluent Worker series and Braverman's vivisection of the labour process. Recently, however, the par tnership has been questioned. Though the seeds of the split were sown by Erik Wright and John Goldthorpe, the overdue de-hegemonizing of Marx and Weber in research on class with the growing influence of…
Class and Cuisine in Contemporary Britain
Thirty-five years ago Pierre Bourdieu asserted that food preferences, as much as any other element of culture, are distributed within a space of difference more or less homologous with the social space of class positions. Plumbing data on annual spends on all manner of food items, he detected two key oppositions - a taste for the light versus a taste for the heavy on the one hand and a taste for rich foods versus a taste for healthy and exotic fo…
Anthony Giddens as Adversary of Class Analysis
The special issue of Sociology on 'Class, Culture and Identity' illustrated how often Anthony Giddens is cited as an antagonist of class *theor y. It comes as some surprise, then, to find that his exact view on the demise of class has, to date, received remarkably little in the way of substantial exposition and critique.This ar ticle seeks to fill this void by outlining Giddens' theor y of the reflexive project of the self in late modernity and i…
Not all that was Solid has Melted into Air (or Liquid)
Whilst theories of individualization are usually perceived as posing a severe challenge to the oft-disputed concept of class, the recent work of postmodernist-turned-liquid-modernist Zygmunt Bauman in this vein has generally escaped the attention of faithful class analysts keen to defend their object of study. Indeed, in places Bauman has been mobilised to critique the cognate ideas of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, despite the fact that the in…
A sketch of 'family' as a field
This article sets out the argument that 'family' relations constitute so many small-scale 'fields' in Pierre Bourdieu's sense. It does so primarily to put on firmer conceptual ground a valuable means of making sense of how broader structures of social and cultural domination are lived, reproduced and transformed in everyday life, though in so doing it also intends to challenge those who believe Bourdieu has little to offer scholars of familial li…
Beyond false oppositions
Reproduction Revisited
Pierre Bourdieu's famous theory of educational reproduction is often depicted by critics in simplistic terms: individuals either have plenty of cultural capital, and thus symbolic mastery and school success, or they do not and develop practical mastery and vocational interests instead. Social mobility, deviant trajectories and resistance, on the other hand, are seemingly impossible. The nature of Bourdieu's writing fuelled this perception, but im…
The Structure of Literary Taste
In Distinction, Bourdieu indicated that literary taste was just as homologous with social class as tastes in music, food or art, even if it received comparatively little attention. Recent scholarship across various nations aiming to test, update and refine Bourdieu's thesis has generally confirmed a relationship between cultural capital and reading habits, but neglect of Bourdieu's multidimensional view of class, as well as reliance on rather und…
Luc Boltanski's pragmatic sociology
Luc Boltanski's programme of pragmatic sociology, now gaining substantial attention among English-speaking sociologists, was forged in opposition to the supposed excesses and blind spots of Pierre Bourdieu's 'critical sociology'. After outlining the main lines of development of Boltanski's project and emphasizing the major points of difference with Bourdieu, the article offers a critical Bourdieusian response to pragmatic sociology. It highlights…
Fields and individuals
Bernard Lahire's critique of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology aims to establish a 'dispositionalist-contextualist' vision of human agency capable of fully sociologising biography and individuality. While accepting the utility of the notion of field, Lahire emphasises the plurality of non-field entities - including games, worlds and figurations - shaping people's dispositions and the contexts in which they come to act, leading him to downgrade the noti…
Class, Individualisation and Perceived (Dis)advantages
One of the core contentions of the individualisation thesis is that the residents of contemporary Western nations are no longer willing or able to perceive the motors of their life paths as external, social forces such as 'class' or material resources and instead talk of internal, personal facets and motivations. This paper, grounded in a Bourdieusian understanding of class, engages with this prominent assertion through analysis of 55 life-histor…
On Disgrace
This paper engages with the theme of disgrace from a Bourdieusian point of view. Starting out from a specific definition of 'grace' in terms of misrecognition, it goes on to consider some of the ways in which disgrace can be generated and some of the ways it can be handled by the disgraced party. While there are certainly many intra-field modalities of the genesis of disgrace, including violation of the rules of the game, the paper also emphasize…
The Swedish space of lifestyles and symbolic domination
This article constructs a model of the space of lifestyles in Sweden. It does so not simply to test whether its structure conforms to that discovered by Pierre Bourdieu and his colleagues in 1970s' France, and confirmed by others across the globe, but to examine the extent to which it is wrapped up with symbolic domination. It draws on data from an unusually rich survey of consumption patterns and taste fielded in 2017-2018 (n=1,498) and deploys …
Some further (orthodox?) Bourdieusian reflections on the notions of ‘institutional habitus’ and ‘family habitus’
The U.S. Space of Lifestyles and Its Homologies
Pierre Bourdieu’s influence on the study of lifestyles in the United States has been profound, yet the vast majority of relevant research operates with methods and assumptions at odds with Bourdieu’s own. His specifically relational or geometric understanding of social structures, and lifestyles, has been overlooked, meaning that no one has yet done for the contemporary United States what Bourdieu did for France, that is, construct a model of the…
The structure of food taste in 21st century Britain
This paper draws on the concepts and tools of Pierre Bourdieu to construct a comprehensive model of the contemporary British "food space." It uses multiple correspondence analysis to unearth a space structured in two key dimensions revolving around the lean and the rich. A host of supplementary variables are available to examine the relationship, or homology, between food tastes and broader alimentary dispositions, including orientations toward s…
The social space, the symbolic space and masculine domination
There have been countless efforts to test and ‘update’ Pierre Bourdieu's thesis that there is a correspondence between the space of social positions and the space of lifestyles. The best known of these targeting the UK are the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion project and, more recently, the Great British Class Survey, but their conceptual and methodological limitations mean their findings are questionable and hinder closer investigation of a…
The class differentiation of older age
Older people have been overlooked in recent debates over the relationship between age, class and culture despite their prevalence and the conceptual questions they raise. Seeking to bridge mainstream class analysis with debates in social gerontology, especially via a shared turn to Pierre Bourdieu's relational sociology, this paper draws on survey data from the US to examine not only the class position of older people but their internal social an…
Beyond false oppositions
Beck, individualization and the death of class
Ulrich Beck has argued that the changing logic of distribution and, more importantly, the 'individualization' of social processes in reflexive modernity have killed off the concept of social class and rendered the analysis of its effects a flawed endeavour. The present paper takes issue with this perspective by exposing its key weaknesses, namely its ambivalence and contradiction over what exactly constitutes individualization and the extent to w…
Anthony Giddens as Adversary of Class Analysis
The special issue of Sociology on 'Class, Culture and Identity' illustrated how often Anthony Giddens is cited as an antagonist of class *theor y. It comes as some surprise, then, to find that his exact view on the demise of class has, to date, received remarkably little in the way of substantial exposition and critique.This ar ticle seeks to fill this void by outlining Giddens' theor y of the reflexive project of the self in late modernity and i…
Not all that was Solid has Melted into Air (or Liquid)
Whilst theories of individualization are usually perceived as posing a severe challenge to the oft-disputed concept of class, the recent work of postmodernist-turned-liquid-modernist Zygmunt Bauman in this vein has generally escaped the attention of faithful class analysts keen to defend their object of study. Indeed, in places Bauman has been mobilised to critique the cognate ideas of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, despite the fact that the in…
Culture, Class, Distinction – By T. Bennett, M. Savage, E. Silva, A. Warde, M. Gayo‐Cal and D. Wright
Rethinking the Work-Class Nexus
The sociology of class and the sociology of work have, historically, occupied two sides of the same coin, sharing foundational studies such as the Affluent Worker series and Braverman's vivisection of the labour process. Recently, however, the par tnership has been questioned. Though the seeds of the split were sown by Erik Wright and John Goldthorpe, the overdue de-hegemonizing of Marx and Weber in research on class with the growing influence of…
Class, Individualization and Late Modernity
This book puts to the test the prominent claim that social class has declined in importance in an era of affluence, choice and the waning of tradition. Arguing against this view, this study vividly un
Class, Individualisation and Perceived (Dis)advantages
One of the core contentions of the individualisation thesis is that the residents of contemporary Western nations are no longer willing or able to perceive the motors of their life paths as external, social forces such as 'class' or material resources and instead talk of internal, personal facets and motivations. This paper, grounded in a Bourdieusian understanding of class, engages with this prominent assertion through analysis of 55 life-histor…
The myth of the reflexive worker
Several influential social theorists contend that the increased insecurity injected into the labour market by neo-liberal economic policies, coupled with a discourse of flexibility concretised in lifelong learning initiatives, have contributed to the withering of class in contemporary society. Careers and job shifts now follow a 'de-standardised' pattern, they argue, in which people incessantly switch between divergent occupations, education, tra…
Phenomenological Additions to the Bourdieusian Toolbox
In constructing his renowned theory of practice, Pierre Bourdieu claimed to have integrated the key insights from phenomenology and successfully melded them with objectivist analysis. The contention here, however, is that while his vision of the social world may indeed be generally laudable, he did not take enough from phenomenology. More specifically, there are two concepts in Alfred Schutz's body of work, which, if properly defined, disentangle…
From sociological fictions to social fictions
This paper expresses serious reservations regarding the increasingly popular Bourdieu‐inspired notions of ‘institutional habitus’ and ‘family habitus’ in education research. Although sympathetic to the overall theoretical approach and persuaded of the veracity and importance of the empirical findings they are used to illuminate, it argues that, from a Bourdieusian point of view, they actually present several difficulties that threaten not only to…
The context and genesis of musical tastes
Some further (orthodox?) Bourdieusian reflections on the notions of ‘institutional habitus’ and ‘family habitus’
Reproduction Revisited
Pierre Bourdieu's famous theory of educational reproduction is often depicted by critics in simplistic terms: individuals either have plenty of cultural capital, and thus symbolic mastery and school success, or they do not and develop practical mastery and vocational interests instead. Social mobility, deviant trajectories and resistance, on the other hand, are seemingly impossible. The nature of Bourdieu's writing fuelled this perception, but im…
Where Now for Bourdieu-inspired Sociology
Class Inequality in Austerity Britain
When the Coalition Government came to power in 2010 in claimed it would deliver not just austerity, as necessary as that apparently was, but also fairness. This volume subjects this pledge to critical
Class habitus and perception of the future
This paper examines the consequences of the recent economic downturn and UK government spending cuts, as exacerbations of prevailing trends in neoliberal employment policy, on temporal perception, specifically as it relates to the adaptation of subjective anticipations of and projections into the future to objective prospects of unemployment by class. Grounded in a phenomenologically-minded Bourdieusian conceptualization of class and time and con…
‘Sorry mate, you're finishing tonight’
This article considers the nature of employment in the UK Film Industry in the period 1927–1947 against a background of US domination of the global market for film. Drawing on archived interview material from 60 participants in the archive of the History Project of BECTU (the British trade union for Media and Entertainment workers) the article focusses on entry routes, working hours, training and pay grades to assess the degree of stability prese…
A sketch of 'family' as a field
This article sets out the argument that 'family' relations constitute so many small-scale 'fields' in Pierre Bourdieu's sense. It does so primarily to put on firmer conceptual ground a valuable means of making sense of how broader structures of social and cultural domination are lived, reproduced and transformed in everyday life, though in so doing it also intends to challenge those who believe Bourdieu has little to offer scholars of familial li…
Putting Habitus Back in its Place? Reflections on the Homines in Extremis Debate
This commentary reflects on Loïc Wacquant's interpretation of the concept of habitus as developed in his response to critics of his article published in this journal, Homines in Extremis. His comments on collective habitus and fieldless habitus in particular are deemed questionable, not just on the grounds that they break from the relational logic of Bourdieu's sociology but because they sit uneasily with findings unearthed in a diverse array of …
Class and Cuisine in Contemporary Britain
Thirty-five years ago Pierre Bourdieu asserted that food preferences, as much as any other element of culture, are distributed within a space of difference more or less homologous with the social space of class positions. Plumbing data on annual spends on all manner of food items, he detected two key oppositions - a taste for the light versus a taste for the heavy on the one hand and a taste for rich foods versus a taste for healthy and exotic fo…
Class and Cuisine in Contemporary Britain Reheated
The Structure of Literary Taste
In Distinction, Bourdieu indicated that literary taste was just as homologous with social class as tastes in music, food or art, even if it received comparatively little attention. Recent scholarship across various nations aiming to test, update and refine Bourdieu's thesis has generally confirmed a relationship between cultural capital and reading habits, but neglect of Bourdieu's multidimensional view of class, as well as reliance on rather und…
Beck's unintended legacy for class analysis
Class in the New Millennium
Class in the New Millennium paints a fresh and comprehensive picture of social class in Britain today. Anchored in a broad repertoire of methods and pursuing a distinctive theoretical agenda, it not only painstakingly maps the structure, transformation and effects of the UK’s key fault lines but goes behind closed doors to see how they play out in everyday family life. Throughout the book Atkinson throws new light on a diverse array of themes, in…
Sociology (55 obras) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (50 obras) · Epistemology (46 obras) · Social science (34 obras) · Philosophy (32 obras) · Political science (26 obras) · Law (24 obras) · Cultural capital (19 obras) · Habitus (19 obras) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (17 obras)