From sociological fictions to social fictions: some Bourdieusian reflections on the concepts of ‘institutional habitus’ and ‘family habitus’

Abstract

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 overstretch and reduce the explanatory power of the French thinker’s concepts but to stifle analysis of the kinds of struggles and complexities that both he and, somewhat contradictorily, the researchers in question spotlight. Bourdieu had his own ways of making sense of the themes raised, and although there is indeed a need to push him further than he went, to say what he did not and to emphasise what he would not, this has to be guided by consistent logic and not simply pragmatic empiricism.

Keywords:

• Bourdieu
• doxa
• expectations
• family habitus
• institutional habitus

Notes

1. There seems to be no shortage of confusion, especially at conferences but also in print (including Bourdieu’s own writings in English), over the plural form of the Latin word habitus. ‘Habituses’ and, as in this case, ‘habiti’ have both appeared, but in actual fact the correct plural form of habitus, as far as I am aware, is simply habitus.

2. Although, as mentioned earlier, it is sometimes implied that Bourdieu himself did or would have used the notion of familial habitus, I can find only one instance of the term in his corpus, qualified with parentheses. He is, however, referring to the habitus of the individual acquired through family relations, not the habitus as a possession of the family (Bourdieu 2004, 43).

3. Of course one can also say non‐living physical entities possess dispositions – for example, ice has a disposition to melt when heated – but I doubt Reay and the others would rather liken the institutional habitus to such regularities.

4. Although it does not negate the general point I was making (that there is more to the social world than fields alone), this seems to go some way toward answering a question I have posed elsewhere – just what field is the young child in (Atkinson 2010a)? They are, one could respond, in the familial field, and this acts to mediate the influence upon their habitus of all other fields and relations within which the other family members are situated.

5. In fact Reay, Crozier and Clayton (2009) have themselves indicated (without any elaboration) that educational institutions may be treated as fields, but the same line‐up happily returned to the language of institutional habitus a year later (Reay, Crozier and Clayton 2010) without mention of how to cohere these divergent conceptualisations. Perhaps it could be argued that to conceive of an institution as at one moment a habitus and the next as a field is a matter of focusing on different aspects of it depending on the topic at hand, apparently following the Bourdieusian logic of concepts as tools. Yet, in so far as scientific constructs are fashioned to interrogate and, in Bachelard’s sense, approximate the intricate workings of reality rather than loosely categorise empirical observations, they cannot simply be swapped around at will. Tools they may be, in other words, but trying to use the notion of habitus rather than doxa and field to analyse the workings of ‘schools’ (etc.), whatever aspect one is interested in, is rather like trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver when the hammer is right there. Perhaps part of the confusion here lies in the assumption that, if habitus and field are mutually constitutive, and if institutions are placed in the (primary, secondary or higher) education field, then they must have a habitus. But I would argue that the habitus corresponding to the different fields of education are still those of human agents – namely, those within the various school (etc.) fields – as the field effects still only operate as they are internalised as schemes of perception and dispositions. When, like Bourdieu (1996), one plots particular institutions in fields, then, the names should be understood as shorthand for the school/university sub‐fields and doxai they designate and that mediate the effects of the field of education.