Some further (orthodox?) Bourdieusian reflections on the notions of ‘institutional habitus’ and ‘family habitus’

A reply to Burke, Emmerich, and Ingram

Datos Bibliográficos

ID11635429
AutoresWill Atkinson (0000-0002-1032-1241, University of Bristol, autor de correspondencia)
Año2012
Volumen34
Número2
Páginas183-189
Fecha de publicación2012-12-20
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaBritish Journal of Sociology of Education (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0142-5692 • E-ISSN: 1465-3346
EditorialTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01425692.2012.746266
OpenAlexW2080264423
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas8
Referencias citadas11

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The points are developed more fully in Atkinson (2012a). 2. My view of what 'realisation' of a category involves is perhaps different to that of Burke, Emmerich, and Ingram, and less ambiguous than Bourdieu's. See Atkinson (2012a) for more detail. 3. Without wanting to engage in a game of 'out Bourdieu-ing' Burke, Emmerich, and Ingram, it is worth setting the quotes they marshal from Bourdieu (1990a, 56–58) on the mystery of ministry in their full context: at several points he clarifies that by 'institution' he means a 'state of capital' or field, and it is clear that he is talking of the subtle work of fostering (self-)belief that certain biological individuals personify trans-individual entities. 4. The latter argument follows an admission from Burke, Emmerich, and Ingram that they are 'confused' as to what substantialism means, which is somewhat surprising coming from Bourdieusians. 5. We could apply the principle of charity to Burke, Emmerich, and Ingram and assume that, in the case of institutional habitus, they are talking about classes of difference within the field of educational establishments rather than social space. That would of course make their programme for median-level analysis wholly redundant, since it becomes just a field analysis, and anyway 'statistically characterised' classes given by the pertinent principles of differentiation there would more than likely draw together multiple institutions (just as the cultural fraction of the dominant class in social space comprises artists, writers, higher education teachers, etc.). To distinguish one from the other within that on the basis of the particular practices, and so forth, taken for granted in each 'school', it would be best to talk in terms designed for this; that is, school doxa/ethos, which is of course, as Davey (2012) has recently highlighted, a specific articulation of the general doxa/orthodoxy/heterodoxy within the educational field itself. 6. To be fair I have myself in previous work (Atkinson 2009) talked of a 'police habitus' and 'firefighter's habitus' when it would have been more accurate to talk of fields of policing and firefighting with their own doxai homologous with the social space, partly because I was less certain then than I am now that many occupational domains and workplaces constitute fields. 7. The habitus is therefore obviously a model of how social structures 'get in' the individual, but to leave it at that, rather than try to conceptualise the formative process phenomenologically and neurologically, is to make of the habitus a vague and weak abstraction. It is a bit like being content that a car is the means of getting someone from one place to another without wanting to understand how the engine works. 8. It does not help their case that Burke, Emmerich, and Ingram's self-description comes across as a patent ploy to portray what is actually a defensive strategy attempting to provide post hoc theoretical justification for an ill-thought-through concept as a taking of the initiative, and to self-consciously cast themselves – earlier career researchers than me even (already!) – as the avant-garde

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