Thomas Medvetz
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3584065 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Thomas Medvetz |
| NOMBRES | Thomas |
| APELLIDO | Medvetz |
| FIRMA | MEDVETZ T |
| AFILIACIONES | University of California San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2456-6765 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 45 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 94 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 15 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 30 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2006 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2023 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
The Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics
This volume brings together investigations from social scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars into the political dimensions of expertise. It is motivated by the sense that growing mistrust in experts represents a danger to democratic politics today, insofar as science and experts are integral to the checks and balances on which liberal democracies depend for their health and functioning. At the same time, the contributions to this handbook …
Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics
Transcendence, fast and slow
This paper builds on two leading models of artistic practice, the “network-building” and “autonomous sphere” approaches, to show how an expressive work can reverse the normal antinomy between artistic recognition and commercial success and become an immediate crossover hit. Focusing on a single “pointy” case from the world of literature—the 1996 novel Infinite Jest , by David Foster Wallace—I ask whether a set of unique social dynamics attends th…
Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the "Other Sciences" at the National Science Foundation
Seeing the World
On the Reception of Bourdieu’s Sociology in the World’s Most Equal Societies
This chapter discusses the reception of Bourdieu in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, which are three of the richest, but also most egalitarian, societies in the world, with strong welfare state traditions. The sympathy toward Bourdieu’s thinking in Scandinavia may be linked to a resonance for his critique of domination and of neoliberalism; the strong resistance his thinking also has encountered stems from a denial of its relevance for Scandinavia. F…
Bourdieu and Schutz
Chapter abstract This chapter considers the relationship between the sociologies of Pierre Bourdieu and Alfred Schutz. It begins by making plain the shared rootedness of many of their ideas in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and tracing the different directions in which they took that influence, given the dissimilar states of the intellectual fields they were positioned in. It then goes on to compare the two thinkers on philosophical anthropo…
Bourdieu and the Sociology of Intellectual Life
Chapter abstract Having grown up in the relative cultural backwater of Béarn, in southwestern France, Pierre Bourdieu found himself wrenched and jolted by his earliest encounters with French intellectual society. His perceptions, tastes, and dispositions offered constant reminders that he had not been made for this world. But the same disjuncture yielded productive insights and made Bourdieu into an accidental anthropologist of intellectual life.…
The Transdisciplinary Contribution of Pierre Bourdieu to the Study of the Academic Field and Intellectuals
Bourdieu’s contribution to the study of the academic field and intellectuals rests on a series of novel concepts and methodological rules. This chapter focuses on three. The first is Bourdieu’s use of history and the historical method, which he combined with sociology to produce a method for establishing critical distance between researcher and empirical object. The second is Bourdieu’s penchant for international comparisons. Contrary to the obje…
Habitus and Beyond
Chapter abstract Pierre Bourdieu coined the concept of habitus to capture the connection between embodiment, cognition, processes of singularization and temporalization, and the collective. This chapter discusses the aporias that result from this semantic ambition. It starts with a presentation of the many uses of habitus in Bourdieu’s own work; what follows is how the concept has been deployed in research by US sociologists; the third and main s…
Bourdieu’s Uneven Influence on Anglophone Canadian Sociology
Pierre Bourdieu is one of the most influential and widely cited figures in anglophone Canadian sociology. Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, in particular, his theories have guided research in areas such as the sociology of culture, education, social theory, social networks, and social capital. This chapter presents a content analysis of journal articles to better understand Bourdieu’s influence on anglophone Canadian sociology. …
Bourdieu and Geometric Data Analysis
Chapter abstract The extent to which the concepts of field and social space are linked to a concrete mode of empirical research—and in particular to a set of original statistical tools—has seldom been acknowledged. This chapter aims to re-establish the close link between the field concept and geometric data analysis (GDA), Bourdieu’s preferred technique for mapping the “social distances” between individuals. The elective affinity between the two …
The Relevance of Bourdieu’s Concepts for Studying the Intersections of Poverty, Race, and Culture
Chapter abstract The connection between poverty and culture has long been a contentious one in the sociological literature. While distancing itself from the culture of poverty theory of the past, recent scholarship seeks to provide a deeper analysis of the relationship between structure and culture and how this relates to poverty. This chapter argues that the work of Pierre Bourdieu—and the significant body of literature that has built upon his k…
Bourdieu’s Unlikely Contribution to the Human Sciences
Chapter abstract The author of this chapter proposes that we consider Bourdieu’s work neither on its own terms, nor in the terms of the postwar French academic field, but in terms of the general problems that it solved. When we do so, we find that Bourdieu developed lines of thinking that had stalled in Germany and the United States. The former was the field theoretic tradition associated with Gestalt psychology and empirical phenomenology; the s…
Bourdieu in the Post-Communist World
The collapse of the communist regimes in the former Soviet bloc and the subsequent economic, political, social, and cultural transformations opened up new challenges for social science research. Working with the methodological and conceptual tools of Pierre Bourdieu, including habitus, field, capital, symbolic power, hysteresis, and the logic of honor, among others, scholars have defined and addressed four clusters of important research questions…
Bourdieu’s International Circulation
An influential figure in the French intellectual field since the 1960s, Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) is increasingly influential also—and probably mainly—on a global scale. In fact, the circulation of Bourdieu’s ideas and concepts outside of France greatly exceeds their transatlantic importation, both temporally and spatially. His works circulated in different parts of “old Europe” well before their renown in the United States, especially in count…
Bourdieu and Organizations
This chapter examines the relationship between Bourdieu’s sociology and organizational research, some of the ways he has been influential, how his ideas have been used, and new opportunities to push his research. In helping to spark the cultural turn in sociology, Bourdieu indirectly influenced the new institutionalist approach within organizational sociology. Although organizations were rarely the primary focus of his own work, we argue that the…
Tensions, Actors, and Inventions
Chapter abstract This chapter argues that Bourdieu’s sociology of the state outlines an interesting research program, which focuses on innovation and transformation rather than only domination and reproduction. The chapter begins by presenting some of the epistemological and conceptual elements found in Bourdieu’s sociology of the state. The chapter then goes on to focus on his often overlooked sociohistorical approach to state formation, which i…
Reading Bourdieu in South Africa
Pierre Bourdieu is the quintessential theorist of domination and social order. South Africa presents an exemplar from the Global South—fractured, contested, disputative, disorderly, violent. This chapter examines Bourdieu’s concepts of order through the jagged realities of South African society, at the same time exploring South African society through the conceptual lenses provided by Bourdieu, and in the process rethinking both. The author uses …
A Concise Genealogy and Anatomy of Habitus
Chapter abstract The concept of habitus plays a central role in Bourdieu’s dispositional theory of action, itself part of his lifelong effort to develop a science of practice and a correlative critique of domination. Retracing the concept’s philosophical origins and its early uses by Bourdieu clears up four recurrent misunderstandings about the concept: first, habitus is never the replica of a single social structure, but a multilayered and dynam…
Four Transversal Principles for Putting Bourdieu to Work
Chapter abstract This chapter spotlights four transversal principles that undergird and animate Bourdieu’s research practice, and can fruitfully guide inquiry on any empirical front: the Bachelardian imperative of epistemological rupture and vigilance; the Weberian command to effect the triple historicization of the agent (habitus), the world (social space, of which field is but a subtype), and the categories of the analyst (epistemic reflexivity…
The Poverty of Philosophy
Chapter abstract Marx and Bourdieu embark from similar criticisms of philosophers as suffering from the illusion that ideas make history—what Marx calls ideology and Bourdieu calls scholastic reason. Accordingly, both turn from the logic of theory to the logic of practice. However, where Marx sees the relations of production as leading to class struggle and revolution, Bourdieu sees bodily practice as instilling symbolic domination through habitu…
The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu was arguably the most important social theorist of the twentieth century. A French sociologist, he produced during his lifetime scores of empirical studies that laid the foundation for a rich theoretical program. These included studies of French colonialism in Algeria, the education system in France, new forms of state power, and the rise of autonomous artistic and scientific fields. Bourdieu’s research program was grounded in con…
Bourdieu and the Body
Chapter abstract The work of Pierre Bourdieu provides a framework to see how class position is written on the body and expressed through classed styles of walking, talking, gesturing, eating, drinking, and so forth. This chapter considers how Bourdieu’s work on the body has informed and advanced empirical research on the body. From Bourdieu’s perspective, each body is the visible product of the composition and volumes of class-specific capitals a…
Is a Bourdieusian Ethnography Possible
Chapter abstract This chapter argues that Pierre Bourdieu’s research program is less compatible with ethnography than it first appears. Bourdieu was critical of structuralism, that perspective on the social world that prioritizes general patterns over lived experience, whereas ethnography claims as its raison d’être the elucidation of lived experience. A close reading of Bourdieu’s entire body of writings, however, reveals multiple reservations a…
The Contemporary American Conservative Movement
The American conservative movement that began to gain steam in the post-World War II era had, by the 1980s, emerged as a transformative political force in the United States and the world. Yet sociology has been slower than other disciplines to come to grips with conservatism. In the hope of spurring more research, we review the substantial literature on the conservative movement produced by historians, political scientists, and serious journalist…
Public Policy is Like Having a Vaudeville Act
This research note uses in-depth interviews, ethnographic observations, and archival records to examine the self-understandings of think tank-affiliated policy experts. I argue that policy experts draw on a series of idioms-those of the academic scholar, the political aide, the entrepreneur, and the media specialist-to construct a unique albeit synthetic professional identity. The essence of the policy expert's role lies in a continuous effort to…
The Strength of Weekly Ties
The current Republican ascendancy in American government has generated considerable scholarly interest in the conservative movement. Through an ethno-graphic study of the widely publicized but seldom-observed 'Wednesday meeting' of conservative activists, this article inquires into the bases of the conservative movement's internal cohesion and successful management of alliances with state officials. I argue that the meeting functions as both an i…
Les think tanks dans le champ du pouvoir étasunien
L'ensemble des approches regroupées sous le label de « field theory » a beaucoup retenu l'attention de la sociologie étasunienne au cours des dernières décennies. Confrontant la théorie des champs de Bourdieu à celle des « strategic action fields » récemment développée par Fligstein et McAdam, cet article montre que la première est à la fois plus exigeante et plus souple que la seconde qui repose sur un concept largement autonome. Là où le « cham…
The Strength of Weekly Ties
The current Republican ascendancy in American government has generated considerable scholarly interest in the conservative movement. Through an ethno-graphic study of the widely publicized but seldom-observed 'Wednesday meeting' of conservative activists, this article inquires into the bases of the conservative movement's internal cohesion and successful management of alliances with state officials. I argue that the meeting functions as both an i…
Les think tanks aux États-Unis
Cet article retrace l’histoire singulière des centres de recherches sur les politiques publiques aux États-Unis, ou « think tanks ». L’histoire de ces institutions fait office de baromètre du rôle des intellectuels et des relations au sein de l’élite américaine. Les institutions préfigurant les think tanks d’aujourd’hui ont vu le jour au début du XX e siècle, à partir de l’alliance précaire entre des élites politiques, économiques et culturelles,…
Think Tanks
A think tank is a half‐century‐old notion commonly invoked in political discourse to refer to civil society organizations specializing in the production and dissemination of knowledge related to public policy. In recent decades, the number and apparent political significance of think tanks have increased worldwide, making them a focus of growing scholarly and popular attention. Even so, ambiguities surrounding the proper definition of a think tan…
Public Policy is Like Having a Vaudeville Act
This research note uses in-depth interviews, ethnographic observations, and archival records to examine the self-understandings of think tank-affiliated policy experts. I argue that policy experts draw on a series of idioms-those of the academic scholar, the political aide, the entrepreneur, and the media specialist-to construct a unique albeit synthetic professional identity. The essence of the policy expert's role lies in a continuous effort to…
The Contemporary American Conservative Movement
The American conservative movement that began to gain steam in the post-World War II era had, by the 1980s, emerged as a transformative political force in the United States and the world. Yet sociology has been slower than other disciplines to come to grips with conservatism. In the hope of spurring more research, we review the substantial literature on the conservative movement produced by historians, political scientists, and serious journalist…
Think Tanks in America
Over the past half-century, think tanks have become fixtures of American politics, supplying advice to presidents and policy makers, expert testimony on Capitol Hill, and convenient facts and figures to journalists and media specialists. But what are think tanks? Who funds them? What kind of research do they produce? Where does their authority come from? And how influential have they become? In Think Tanks in America, Thomas Medvetz argues that t…
Scholar as Sitting Duck
The controversy surrounding historian William Cronon, whose blog post about the collective bargaining rights of public employees in Wisconsin generated fierce reprisals from Republicans, has frequently been cited as an assault on academic freedom. This essay argues that the “Cronon affair” is better understood as an object lesson in the structural marginality of intellectuals in American public debate
Les think tanks dans le champ du pouvoir étasunien
L'ensemble des approches regroupées sous le label de « field theory » a beaucoup retenu l'attention de la sociologie étasunienne au cours des dernières décennies. Confrontant la théorie des champs de Bourdieu à celle des « strategic action fields » récemment développée par Fligstein et McAdam, cet article montre que la première est à la fois plus exigeante et plus souple que la seconde qui repose sur un concept largement autonome. Là où le « cham…
Think Tanks in America
Think Tanks
The term “think tank” refers to a half‐century‐old political folk concept denoting a civil society organization specialized in the production and dissemination of policy‐related knowledge, rhetoric, and advice. The concept's entry into the political lexicon was made possible by the formation, typically at the national level, of relatively stable institutional niches in which organizations compete to produce relevant “policy research.” In recent d…
The Evidence Enigma
On the Reception of Bourdieu’s Sociology in the World’s Most Equal Societies
This chapter discusses the reception of Bourdieu in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, which are three of the richest, but also most egalitarian, societies in the world, with strong welfare state traditions. The sympathy toward Bourdieu’s thinking in Scandinavia may be linked to a resonance for his critique of domination and of neoliberalism; the strong resistance his thinking also has encountered stems from a denial of its relevance for Scandinavia. F…
Bourdieu and Schutz
Chapter abstract This chapter considers the relationship between the sociologies of Pierre Bourdieu and Alfred Schutz. It begins by making plain the shared rootedness of many of their ideas in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and tracing the different directions in which they took that influence, given the dissimilar states of the intellectual fields they were positioned in. It then goes on to compare the two thinkers on philosophical anthropo…
Bourdieu and the Sociology of Intellectual Life
Chapter abstract Having grown up in the relative cultural backwater of Béarn, in southwestern France, Pierre Bourdieu found himself wrenched and jolted by his earliest encounters with French intellectual society. His perceptions, tastes, and dispositions offered constant reminders that he had not been made for this world. But the same disjuncture yielded productive insights and made Bourdieu into an accidental anthropologist of intellectual life.…
The Transdisciplinary Contribution of Pierre Bourdieu to the Study of the Academic Field and Intellectuals
Bourdieu’s contribution to the study of the academic field and intellectuals rests on a series of novel concepts and methodological rules. This chapter focuses on three. The first is Bourdieu’s use of history and the historical method, which he combined with sociology to produce a method for establishing critical distance between researcher and empirical object. The second is Bourdieu’s penchant for international comparisons. Contrary to the obje…
Habitus and Beyond
Chapter abstract Pierre Bourdieu coined the concept of habitus to capture the connection between embodiment, cognition, processes of singularization and temporalization, and the collective. This chapter discusses the aporias that result from this semantic ambition. It starts with a presentation of the many uses of habitus in Bourdieu’s own work; what follows is how the concept has been deployed in research by US sociologists; the third and main s…
Bourdieu’s Uneven Influence on Anglophone Canadian Sociology
Pierre Bourdieu is one of the most influential and widely cited figures in anglophone Canadian sociology. Since the first decade of the twenty-first century, in particular, his theories have guided research in areas such as the sociology of culture, education, social theory, social networks, and social capital. This chapter presents a content analysis of journal articles to better understand Bourdieu’s influence on anglophone Canadian sociology. …
Bourdieu and Geometric Data Analysis
Chapter abstract The extent to which the concepts of field and social space are linked to a concrete mode of empirical research—and in particular to a set of original statistical tools—has seldom been acknowledged. This chapter aims to re-establish the close link between the field concept and geometric data analysis (GDA), Bourdieu’s preferred technique for mapping the “social distances” between individuals. The elective affinity between the two …
The Relevance of Bourdieu’s Concepts for Studying the Intersections of Poverty, Race, and Culture
Chapter abstract The connection between poverty and culture has long been a contentious one in the sociological literature. While distancing itself from the culture of poverty theory of the past, recent scholarship seeks to provide a deeper analysis of the relationship between structure and culture and how this relates to poverty. This chapter argues that the work of Pierre Bourdieu—and the significant body of literature that has built upon his k…
Bourdieu’s Unlikely Contribution to the Human Sciences
Chapter abstract The author of this chapter proposes that we consider Bourdieu’s work neither on its own terms, nor in the terms of the postwar French academic field, but in terms of the general problems that it solved. When we do so, we find that Bourdieu developed lines of thinking that had stalled in Germany and the United States. The former was the field theoretic tradition associated with Gestalt psychology and empirical phenomenology; the s…
Bourdieu in the Post-Communist World
The collapse of the communist regimes in the former Soviet bloc and the subsequent economic, political, social, and cultural transformations opened up new challenges for social science research. Working with the methodological and conceptual tools of Pierre Bourdieu, including habitus, field, capital, symbolic power, hysteresis, and the logic of honor, among others, scholars have defined and addressed four clusters of important research questions…
Bourdieu’s International Circulation
An influential figure in the French intellectual field since the 1960s, Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) is increasingly influential also—and probably mainly—on a global scale. In fact, the circulation of Bourdieu’s ideas and concepts outside of France greatly exceeds their transatlantic importation, both temporally and spatially. His works circulated in different parts of “old Europe” well before their renown in the United States, especially in count…
Bourdieu and Organizations
This chapter examines the relationship between Bourdieu’s sociology and organizational research, some of the ways he has been influential, how his ideas have been used, and new opportunities to push his research. In helping to spark the cultural turn in sociology, Bourdieu indirectly influenced the new institutionalist approach within organizational sociology. Although organizations were rarely the primary focus of his own work, we argue that the…
Tensions, Actors, and Inventions
Chapter abstract This chapter argues that Bourdieu’s sociology of the state outlines an interesting research program, which focuses on innovation and transformation rather than only domination and reproduction. The chapter begins by presenting some of the epistemological and conceptual elements found in Bourdieu’s sociology of the state. The chapter then goes on to focus on his often overlooked sociohistorical approach to state formation, which i…
Reading Bourdieu in South Africa
Pierre Bourdieu is the quintessential theorist of domination and social order. South Africa presents an exemplar from the Global South—fractured, contested, disputative, disorderly, violent. This chapter examines Bourdieu’s concepts of order through the jagged realities of South African society, at the same time exploring South African society through the conceptual lenses provided by Bourdieu, and in the process rethinking both. The author uses …
Sociology (40 obras) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (32 obras) · Social science (32 obras) · Political science (31 obras) · Epistemology (30 obras) · Philosophy (25 obras) · Law (21 obras) · Habitus (18 obras) · Politics (16 obras) · Cultural capital (14 obras)