Structure, action and change: a Bourdieusian perspective on the preconditions for a degrowth transition

Abstract

A deprioritization of economic growth in policy making in the rich countries will need to be part of a global effort to re-embed economy and society into planetary boundaries. However, societal support for a degrowth transition remains for the time being moderate, and it is not well understood as yet why this is the case. This article argues that Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology can help theorize societal stability and transformational change as well as the preconditions for a degrowth transition. The point of departure is the structure/action debate in sociology highlighting Bourdieu’s middle-ground position. Using his theory of practice, it moves on to analyze the predominating correspondence between structure, habitus, and action as well as the preconditions under which this correspondence may break and result in transformational change. Subsequently, his distinction of “doxa,” “orthodoxy,” and “heterodoxy” is applied to understand possible solutions to the multidimensional crisis of contemporary European societies. The last section addresses Bourdieu’s take on the role that researchers and activists may play during such a transition. The article concludes that in order to facilitate degrowth, formulations of eco-social policy strategies should avoid overburdening people’s experiences and immediate expectations of the future. Deliberative citizen forums can help co-develop and upscale such initiatives as well as broaden their social basis.

Keywords:

• Degrowth
• Bourdieu
• structure/agency
• crisis
• change
• deliberative forums

Acknowledgments

I thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Some of these initiatives found a remarkable societal response: The open letter “Europe, It’s Time to End the Growth Dependency" was published in 16 countries and signed by about 90,000 Europeans. It is available online at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/sep/16/the-eu-needs-a-stability-and-wellbeing-pact-not-more-growth.

2 Both authors reduced the significance of human agency to that of “carriers” of social structures. Althusser used the German word Träger to emphasize his position.

3 His writings on the role of the Protestant Ethic (Weber 1958) during the emergence of capitalism can hardly be regarded as based on individual intentions and motivations. To analyze these factors, Weber would have had to use original sources from rank-and-file Calvinists such as letters, newspapers, and so forth. Instead, he took the preaching and theological writings from historical figures such as Richard Baxter as “real-type” examples of Calvinism.

4 This observation resonates with recent psychological and economic reasoning according to which the human mind primarily deals with phenomena it has already observed. People do normally not take into account the entire complexity of the social world so that their understanding of it consists of a small and unrepresentative set of observations (Kahneman 2011).

5 Following the meritocratic idea, economic growth is perceived as the ideal environment for individual upward mobility, including by the poorest social strata who may, “objectively” speaking, be regarded as not benefiting from the dominant economic model.

6 Bourdieu does not develop a genuine crisis “theory” of the kind of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. As a corollary, he does not discuss why and how capitalist development proceeds in periodical minor and major crises. Neither does he refer to the most recent crises of the Fordist and finance-driven periods of capitalist development in theoretical terms. It therefore seems promising to go beyond his original work and link it to heterodox political economy. Boyer (2008) and Koch (2012, 2018, 2019) have demonstrated that the Regulation approach (Boyer and Saillard 2002) is in many ways compatible with Bourdieusian sociology. Bourdieu himself might have embraced such a (re-)unification given his critique of the status quo of an “artificially divided social science” (Bourdieu 2005, 210).

7 Alternatively, this can take an anti-EU and nationalist form and may hence be called “Sweden,” “Germany,” or “France first.”

8 Bourdieu refuses to provide a substantial or definite definition of who and what kind of practice actually counts as “intellectual.” Instead, he assumes the historical development of a relatively autonomous “intellectual field” with its own specific laws and principles of capital distribution, especially that of a symbolic kind. Though the “currency” of this capital is somewhat difficult to measure, Bourdieu (1990b) makes it clear that it cannot be expressed in commercial terms in the first place. More important is the recognition indicated through publications, citations, awards, appointments to academies, and so forth. An “intellectual” is then an actor who is included and operates in the intellectual field.

9 Research into “sustainable consumption corridors” has a similar ambition (Di Giulio and Fuchs 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This research benefited from funding from the Swedish Energy Agency (Energimyndigheten) project ‘Sustainable Welfare for a New Generation of Social Policy’ [project no. 48510-1].