‘He’s actually very kind’: bullying figurations and the call of capital

Abstract

In this paper, we draw on the concepts of figurations, capital, and hegemonic masculinity to analyse a bullying relation involving two fifth-grade boys at a Swedish comprehensive school. The findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork, which included participant observations and group interviews with eight teachers and fourteen students (seven girls and seven boys) from the same class. Our findings demonstrate the complexity of the relation between the boys and suggest that rather than constituting a straight-forward bullying situation involving a problematically aggressive ‘bully’ targeting a less powerful ‘victim’, it is part of a more complex figuration involving interdependent social relations that are tenuously balanced in terms of power dynamics and where the boys position themselves and are positioned in relation to the long-term symbolic norms of status dominant within their specific school field.

Keywords:

• Bullying
• school
• figurations
• capital
• hegemonic masculinity
• ethnography

Introduction

Friendship dynamics in schools are as fraught, brittle, and tensely maintained as any social relations one can encounter in society. Indeed, research points to the importance of understanding issues such as school bullying as relational phenomena that involve an interplay of various factors (Forsberg and Thornberg 2016; Hong and Espelage 2012). Despite this, there is still a tendency within schools to approach issues like bullying as individual problems involving the problematically aggressive behaviour of children (Thornberg, Bjereld, and Sjögren 2022). There has been a lack of focus on how school students themselves understand school bullying (Bjereld, Daneback, and Mishna 2021; Kofoed and Staksrud 2019), and as Søndergaard and Hansen (2018) have noted, this ‘one-sided adult perspective may have contributed to the production of individualising understandings of bullying focused on “the desire to hurt”’ (325). A critique of focusing on the behaviour of individuals and groups of individuals can be found in figurational approaches to harassment and bullying (Mierzwinski, Cock, and Velija 2019; Webb 2021). A figurational approach entails accounting for the ways in which the individual, their social context, and the broader society are inseparable and inextricably connected to one another (Quintaneiro 2006; Webb 2021). We draw on this work to investigate bullying processes as figurational tensions rather than as aggressive behaviour necessarily intended to do harm (Webb 2021).

While figurational perspectives pay attention to the ways interdependent relationships direct the behaviours of individuals, research on social capital has looked more specifically at how access to social networks impacts experiences of school bullying in various ways. Researchers have, for example, investigated the relationship between levels of family and school social capital and bullying (Radu 2018), the relationship between exposure to bullying and sense of social capital (i.e. in terms of perceived trustworthiness, fairness, and helpfulness of peers) (Carney, Jacob, and Hazler 2011), and the relationship between perceived school support, school connectedness, and acceptance of diversity (Carney, Liu, and Hazler 2018). Yet other researchers have sought to examine the links between social capital and prosocial bystander behaviour (Evans and Smokowski 2015; Jenkins and Fredrik 2017), and between social capital deprivation (indicating a weak or absent social network) and anti-social capital (social capital from so-called negative social networks) and negative bystander behaviour (Evans and Smokowski 2017).

With very few exceptions, studies of school bullying utilising the concept of social capital have been quantitative in focus and are thus reflective of the more general dominance of quantitative research methods within school bullying research (Horton and Lyng 2022; Smith, Robinson, and Slonje 2021). Most researchers who have considered the links between social capital and school bullying have also tended to draw on the works of Coleman (1990) and/or Putnam (2000) (e.g. Carney, Liu, and Hazler 2018; Evans and Smokowski 2017; Jenkins and Fredrik 2017; Radu 2018). There has been much less use of Bourdieu’s (1984, 1985, 1986) seminal work on social capital. In their qualitative study of victimisation in Chilean schools, however, Webb and Alvarez (2018) utilised Bourdieu’s understanding of social capital to consider the extent to which social capital enables Latin American migrant school students to manage victimisation. As McGonigal et al. (2007) have pointed out, Bourdieu’s work differs in important ways from the work of Coleman and Putnam. Firstly, unlike Coleman and Putnam, Bourdieu was more focused on the importance of social capital to individuals, rather than the family and community levels. Secondly, while Coleman and Putnam focused exclusively on social capital, Bourdieu sought to theorise various forms of capital, including economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1986; McGonigal et al. 2007).

Some researchers have drawn on Bourdieu’s notions of cultural and symbolic capital to investigate bullying amongst boys. In their quantitative study of participation in US school cultural activities, for example, Lehman and Dumais (2017) investigated how cultural capital (measured in terms of participation in arts classes and extracurricular activities) influenced the bullying of male students. In her qualitative media-based study of school shootings in the US, Klein (2006) analysed the relations between some male students’ lack of access to cultural capital, the bullying to which they were subjected, and their attempts to demonstrate their masculinity through school shootings. In his ethnographic study of health and physical education (HPE) and bullying in a Canadian school, Jachyra (2016) studied the relations between the bullying of boys and their perceived lack of cultural and symbolic capital, in the sense of not measuring up to hegemonic masculinity. As Jachyra (2016, 126) noted, ‘boys who did not possess particular forms of valued capital (such as high physical ability, a domineering masculinity, or fit muscular bodies) were often subjected to ostracism, derision and bullying, and developed a habitus of disengagement rather than active participation in HPE.’

Similar findings have been found by Renold (2004), whose ethnographic research in English primary schools has demonstrated the ways in which boys who invest in non-hegemonic forms of masculinity may be routinely bullied and marginalised at school. Likewise, in their qualitative research conducted at secondary schools in Australia, New Zealand, and Spain, respectively, Martino (1997, 1999), Horton (2007) and Carrera-Fernandéz, Lameiras-Fernández, and Rodríguez-Castro (2016) have all highlighted the links between hegemonic masculinity and the dominance of a ‘fag discourse’ (Pascoe 2005, 329), which is commonly used to police the behaviour of boys and to bully those deemed not to measure up to hegemonic masculine expectations.

In this paper, we draw on the concepts of figurations (Elias 1984, 1987), capital (Bourdieu 1984, 1986), and hegemonic masculinity (Carrigan, Connell, and Lee 1985; Connell 1995) to elucidate some of the internal dynamics that illustrate the complexity of school-based peer relationships. More specifically, we investigate a bullying relation between two fifth-grade boys (Max¹ and Charlie) at one Swedish comprehensive school and argue that rather than simply addressing the relation as a bullying situation involving a ‘victim’, a ‘bully’, and ‘bystanders’, it needs to be more complexly understood as a bullying figuration within a school context infused with understandings of and struggles for various forms of capital.

Theoretical framework

Elias and Bourdieu saw autonomous and interrelated spaces of social interactions as the essence of sociological inquiry. Both agreed that systems can never be analysed as static conceptions and opted for the conceptual tools of figuration and field respectively to describe the constantly evolving systems of social life (Paulle and van Heerikhuizen 2012). Both were acutely aware of the multi-sited nature of power and its dynamic undercurrents that would prevent either structure or individual agency from being considered separable. Indeed, Elias (1984, 1987) was adamant that social phenomena could not be understood as static entities, but instead needed to be understood as processes of development and change. His concept of figuration refers to the webs of interdependency that come from macro, long-term social arrangements (or sociogenesis) that become internalised and acted out by individuals at a deep-rooted and often unquestioning level of psychological structures (psychogenesis) (Van Krieken 1998). Crucially, this interplay between structural and interactive aspects means that social phenomena can only be understood as processes and as something relational. This is important for the issue of school bullying because, from an Eliasian perspective, individuals’ impulses, desires, and emotions are not merely a matter of personal agency, but rather they occur within a network of relationships and patterns of behaviour that are not of their own planning (Webb 2021).

This means that students’ desires for popularity and status are part of ongoing dynamics of interdependency in schools. These social attributes can only be understood relationally inasmuch they have no ontological meaning outside the ties that bind or divide them. As with Elias’s use of the dance (1984) to explain figurations and the impossibility of comprehending them through the study of singular human beings, the same is true of conflict. It cannot occur without a minimum of two participants who are interlocked in dependent relations within a specific social context, which is historically loaded with cultural meaning. In other words, bullying relationships occur within specific social contexts governed by power ratios, or what Bourdieu (1984, 1985) termed fields.

Bourdieu’s notion of field is useful for analysing school bullying because it draws on a notion of specific social arenas in which struggles occur over different stakes or resources (Jenkins 1998; see also Eriksson et al. 2002 for a discussion of the school as a specific arena for bullying). Every field operates according to its own logic, which means the resources required to achieve higher status or hierarchy within each arena also differ. People vie for position or status within the field by acquiring the capital or resources concordant with its stakes, which are structurally defined by prior struggles and shifting histories.

Elias used the terms second nature and, like Bourdieu, habitus in his work to describe specific forms of personality structure that are not particular to any one individual, but rather are part of figurational networks of belonging (Paulle and van Heerikhuizen 2012). That is, individuality is only possible through the influences of social relationships, much like Mead (1934) and Cooley (1902) stressed in the school of symbolic interactionism. Habitus thus refers to the force of history acting upon the present in the form of internalised dispositions, or a ‘feel for the game’ (Nash 1990, 176), and points to how individual and group feelings and emotions are acculturated, accepted, and internalised as the natural and normal state of things (Wilterdink 2017). Crucially, habitus is not merely a mental fortitude or rationalisation of current society; it is something that invokes emotional and instinctual practices in response to objective structures (Jenkins 1998). This is vital because it allows bullying processes to be distinguished from purely rational intentions to harm and instead viewed as part of a long-durée process of power relations and internalised emotive responses to desires for inclusion, status, and acceptance, and anxieties about potential social exclusion (Søndergaard 2012), misfitting (Thornberg 2018) and being singled out (Strindberg, Horton, and Thornberg 2020).

Like Elias, Bourdieu understood power in dynamic terms, involving relational tensions surrounding what he termed different forms of capital, which as he noted are ‘like the aces in a game of cards’ (Bourdieu 1985, 724) and are ‘what makes the games of society … something other than simple games of chance offering at every moment the possibility of a miracle’ (Bourdieu 1986, 241). Bourdieu (1986) argued that capital can take three forms, including economic capital (e.g. money), social capital (e.g. social connections), and cultural capital, which in turn can take the form of institutionalised cultural capital (e.g. educational qualifications), objectified cultural capital (e.g. consumer goods), and embodied cultural capital (e.g. bodily comportment). One form of embodied cultural capital that is a particularly useful heuristic device for understanding bullying behaviour comes from authors who have worked on the notion of emotional capital (Reay 2004; Zembylas 2007). Not all individuals manage the same emotional resources, meaning their responses to specific stimuli may result in them being labelled as bullies, as socially inept, or as misfits. When different forms of capital are legitimised and more broadly perceived in terms of reputation, status, prestige, and recognition, they take the form of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1985).

Hegemonic masculinity has been put forward by some authors as a particularly salient form of cultural and symbolic capital in schools (Jachyra 2016; Klein 2006). In line with Elias’s concept of figuration and Bourdieu’s concept of capital, hegemonic masculinity can be understood as a historically situated ‘configuration of gender practice’ (Connell 1995, 77) that is ‘materialized in daily practices and interactions’ (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 850). Indeed, as Connell (1995, 81) has argued, ‘terms such as “hegemonic masculinity” and “marginalised masculinities” name not fixed character types but configurations of practice generated in particular situations in a changing structure of relationships.’

As we demonstrate in this article, the bullying relation between the two boys at the centre of this study is more complex and nuanced than a straightforward situation involving a more powerful boy intentionally harming another. We suggest that it can be better understood as a bullying figuration involving interdependent social relations that are tenuously balanced in terms of power dynamics and where the boys position themselves and are positioned in relation to the long-term symbolic norms of status that are dominant within their specific school field. Although the specific forms of capital used to achieve this vary, they remain relatively stable, clustered around masculine ideals of bodily shape, physical attractiveness, physical toughness, emotional fortitude, and social/cultural competence (coolness), as well as normative social categories of age, ability, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity.

Materials and methods

The findings presented in this study are part of a larger ethnographic research project conducted at three comprehensive schools and one lower-secondary school in Sweden. In this article we focus on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at one of the comprehensive schools, which we call Woodland School. Woodland School is a municipal school located in a medium-sized Swedish city with a student population of approximately 350 students from preschool class (i.e. ages 6-7) to grade six (i.e. ages 12-13). The school has an international profile and tends to attract higher educated parents with a mixture of Swedish and non-Swedish backgrounds. At the time of the fieldwork, the student population consisted of roughly 50% students with a non-Swedish background, three quarters of whose parents had at least a post-secondary education. Author 1 conducted eight weeks of fieldwork at the school, with two-three weeks spent with one preschool class (i.e. ages 6-7), one second-grade class (i.e. ages 8-9), and one fifth-grade class (i.e. ages 11-12).

As the overall research project was conducted at multiple schools, the fieldwork at each school utilised a ‘compressed time mode’ (Jeffrey and Troman 2004, 538), which involved Author 1 spending almost every day at Woodland School during an eight-week period. The fieldwork consisted of participant observations, as well as interviews with members of the school student safety team (trygghetsteam)², teachers from each class, and students from each class. In this article, we focus on a bullying relation involving two boys in the fifth-grade class (Max and Charlie), which had 22 students and which we refer to as Class 5H. In analysing Max and Charlie’s relation, we draw on data from participant observations, group interviews with three teachers who were part of the school student safety team (Ingrid, Sofia and Marie), a group interview with five teachers from Class 5H (Edward, Emily, Patricia, Joakim and Clare), two friendship group interviews with seven 5H girls (Stella, Bianca, Zoe and Greta in one and Hailey, Sally and Tyra in the other) and two friendship group interviews with seven 5H boys (Charlie, Adam and Michael in one and Max, Hugo, Harry and Walter in the other).

Group interviews were used due to the overall focus of the research project on teachers’ and students’ perspectives on the relations between schooling and school bullying. The interviews were not aimed at investigating personal experiences of bullying, even though these were asked about if raised by the students themselves. Friendship group interviews were utilised as a means of providing students with a space where they felt comfortable being interviewed, able to challenge the first author’s interpretation of observed events, and able to elaborate on, challenge, or corroborate what was said by their friends (Davies 2008). Instead of being interviewed individually by an interviewer and having a perceived pressure to answer every question, the friendship group interview context created a peer environment that was similar to the small peer group settings that students were familiar with from their everyday school life, and in which they ‘could follow on each other’s leads, pick up points and confirm, comment or move on’ (Mayall 2008, 112). The friendship groups were decided after at least a week of observations, once it was possible to see which friendship groups existed in the class, and after consulting with the class teachers to reduce the risk of potential in-group conflicts.

The group interview with the school student safety team was undertaken at the beginning of the fieldwork as a means of providing an overview of the situation at the school and informing the subsequent participant observations. The participant observations, in turn, were a central part of the data collection, but also served to build rapport with teachers and students and inform the subsequent interviews, which were undertaken after the first week of fieldwork (Agar 1980; Hammersley and Atkinson 2007). Different kinds of fieldnotes were taken during the fieldwork, including descriptive notes, reflexive notes, and analytic notes (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995). The fieldnotes were written down in notebooks and then typed up into a Word document. The interviews were semi-structured and aimed at gaining the perspectives of the teachers and students (Davies 2008). The interviews were conducted in separate rooms and ranged in duration from 60 min to 130 min. One of the interviews with a group of girls was conducted in two parts, as the girls wanted more time to talk. All the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim.

Analysis of the data began at the very beginning of the fieldwork and was not a distinct stage of the research (Agar 2006; Hammersley and Atkinson 2007). Rather it was an iterative process that involved ‘movement back and forth between ideas and data’ (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007, 159). The fieldwork followed an AIR (abductive-iterative-recursive) logic,³ involving looking for and investigating aspects of interest, attempting to make sense of these through further observations and interviews, and revising and revisiting working hypotheses by going back and questioning and rethinking them (Agar 2006). The bullying relation involving Max and Charlie emerged as a ‘rich point’ (Agar 2006) or ‘punctuation point’ (Rhodes 2015, 273), which, while not the initial focus of the study, caught the attention of the first author, as the increasing complexity of the boys’ situation seemed to point to a ‘blind field’ beyond, which could be explored to help unveil some of the dynamics at play (Rhodes 2015, 275). While grounded in the particularities of Max and Charlie’s relation, the analysis entailed use of ‘the ethnographic imagination’, whereby we asked how the boys’ interactions could be made sense of ‘in terms that relate to wider analytic perspectives’ (Hammersley and Atkinson 2007, 189). In this sense, the analysis was theoretically informed, and we sought to understand ‘the messiness of [their] ordinary life’ (Willis 2000, xi) in relation to the concepts of figurations (Elias 1984), capital (Bourdieu 1986), and hegemonic masculinity (Carrigan, Connell, and Lee 1985).

Ethical approval (2018/284-31) was received from the regional ethical review board prior to the fieldwork and all participants, as well as the legal guardians of the students, provided informed consent. Participants were informed about the focus of the project, that their participation was voluntary and that they could opt out at any time, that they could choose not to answer certain questions, and that any information they provided would be treated confidentially. Throughout the article, pseudonyms are used for the school, the class, the teachers, and the students.

Results

Max and Charlie were both in the same fifth grade class. Even prior to the first author beginning fieldwork in the class, an afterschool activities teacher, Haris, had suggested that it was a difficult class to manage:

I also talked with Haris outside earlier and said I would be following 5H next week. He wished me good luck and said that the class has a reputation and that he remembers them from the third grade. But then he said that I should make up my own mind about them (Fieldnotes, 11 March).

This perception of the class was reinforced by teachers of the class, one of whom described the class as ‘very, very special’, while others described it as ‘very interesting from a psychological perspective’ and as ‘a class of personalities.’ Max also said that the class was ‘the worst class in the school.’

Max was not born in Sweden, was Muslim, and had Arabic as his first language. He suggested in an interview that he had ADHD and was ‘hyperactive 24/7.’ He was provided a specific seat in the classroom so that he could see his classmates, and a member of the school student safety team suggested that he bullied Charlie because he was struggling to fit in. Charlie was born in Sweden and had Swedish as his first language. He received special educational support outside of the classroom and was regularly collected for extra sessions with a special educational needs teacher. Both boys stated that they had been to see the student safety team numerous times.

A bullying situation or a bullying figuration?

Max and Charlie were provided as an example of a bullying situation already during the initial interview with the school student safety team. During the first friendship group interview with a group of girls from the class, the girls also talked in length about Max and Charlie’s situation in response to a question about how they would explain bullying. In the second group interview, with Charlie and his two friends Adam and Michael, Charlie responded to a question about how they like it at school by pointing out that he had been bullied over the course of four or five years. When asked to elaborate about the situation, he explained:

Yeah, it’s been that one guy who’s been at me, his name’s Max and he’s been at me a lot like this and yeah, he calls me slow all the time when I don’t understand something maybe or he has someone, that he has to be against me all the time. Or that he has to talk shit about me or something, which makes me a bit sad; angry.

While Charlie pointed to examples of verbal forms of bias-based bullying (e.g. ‘he calls me slow all the time’) related to his special educational needs and alluded to forms of relational bullying (e.g. ‘he has to be against me all the time’), girls in another of the group interviews also gave an example of physical bullying whereby other students had to intervene outside of school to stop Max from beating up Charlie. As Hailey explained, ‘Charlie had to run, and his nose was bleeding, and he had lots of bruises and stuff.’

Charlie explained that the bullying began in the first grade, a week or two after Max had joined the school, when he had realised that Charlie was the ‘weakest’ and ‘most sensitive’. In a similar way, although she did not explicitly name Charlie, one of the safety team members, Marie, said that the bullying was targeted at ‘the weakest’ student in the class. Charlie said that he had gotten used to it and did not really care about it anymore, although during the interview he also said that the bullying was something that made him ‘sad’ and ‘angry’. Charlie stated that he had reported the bullying to his teachers and that this had led to conversations between him and his class mentor. His mother had also visited the school twice and attended meetings where Max was also present. Charlie said that things had improved after the first meeting, but only for about a week before the bullying started again. After that first meeting, the case was also taken up by the school student safety team. Charlie explained that things had improved for several weeks afterwards but had started again after that.

Charlie said that things had been better this year, even though ‘they’ still called him ‘slow and stuff’. That Charlie used the plural form ‘they’ suggests that it was not only Max who bullied him. During observations, it was clear that other students became irritated with Charlie and often reacted negatively to being paired up with him during class exercises or as part of in-class seating arrangements. This was highlighted, for example, during a music lesson, when Charlie and two other students were absent:

The music lesson is in the basement. The room is small and is arranged with chairs. There are 19 students present. Ronja, Stella, and Charlie are away. The music teacher asked which groups the three missing students could join. Ronja and Stella were quickly added to groups, but no-one seemed to want to take Charlie. Eventually, Adam and Michael took him, and the other students thanked them (Fieldnotes, 18 March).

That Adam and Michael were the boys that eventually accepted Charlie into their group is illustrative, as Charlie, Adam, and Michael often hung out together. However, Adam, for example, said that his friendship with Charlie had also negatively affected his relations with his other classmates, who asked him why he was friends with Charlie and suggested that he would catch something from him. As Adam put it:

I am friends with him and every time I say I’m friends with him, they think I’m weird, I’m stupid and that no one will like me just because I’m with him. And then they say, ‘Ew, you’re going to get Charlie bacteria’, ‘Ew, he’s so disgusting, he’s going to fart on you’, stuff like that. And it, it’s sickening.

Getting ‘Charlie bacteria’ means Adam is likely to experience social exclusion from more prestigious peer groups, thereby negatively influencing his interactive possibilities. The symbolic capital at play here is intricately linked to Elias’s (1994) civilising process of hygiene and embarrassment thresholds. Adam is told that Charlie is biologically disgusting; that his behaviours exist outside the thresholds of shame upheld by most of the class.

The excerpts presented so far appear to paint a clear picture of a bullying situation, mainly involving two boys, Max and Charlie, but also impacting and involving other students, including Adam. The interview with Max and his friends, Hugo, Harry, and Walter, in contrast, adds another layer to the picture and makes it somewhat more complex. In the interview, Max said that he had earlier been bullied by some of his classmates because his mother was studying and because he was considered ‘fat.’ Max gave an example of weight-based bullying from the school cafeteria, whereby he said that every time he sat down with his food, the girl who sat opposite him would comment on the amount of food he ate and express sympathy for his mother, who she said had to make food for Max ‘every 15 min.’ Max also said that he had confronted a girl who had been commenting on his mother and told her not to talk to him if she hated him so much, to which she had responded that it was difficult to avoid him because of his size. Hugo said that he had been with Max then, and that the girl had said, ‘It’s hard to avoid you because you’re so fat.’ Comments about Max’s bodily shape could also be heard during the fieldwork, as exemplified in the following fieldnotes from an English lesson:

Adam is making a presentation about Roblox. Max pointed to a picture saying, “that’s me.” Joel pointed to a round pumpkin-like character and said, “that’s you.” Max pointed to the other one and said, “no, that’s me.” Joel again pointed to the pumpkin-shaped one and said, “Max, that’s you!” (Fieldnotes, 29 March).

These examples suggest that embodied capital and figurational norms about body shape structure social relations in schools. That is, norms about appropriate and desirable body sizes – as part of long-term historic processes of sociogenesis (e.g. Lupton 2013) – are worked out at the level of student figurations (Elias 1994). These kinds of interactions, then, cannot be individualised as merely expressing personal distaste or repulsion about certain body types. Instead, we suggest that they ought to be understood as instances of tense figurations in which social groupings attempt to demarcate their own positive symbolic and cultural capital by drawing on negative moral and biological notions of inferiority about the outsider ‘other’ (Elias and Scotson 1994). These practices become ingrained as part of their second nature or habitus as they are socialised into broader social values about body size, masculinity, ethnicity, and so on.

In discussing his relationship with Charlie, Max talked about his meetings with the school student safety team, who he said did not listen to his version of events. As Max put it, ‘I’ve tried to tell them, but they say I’m bullying that person, when he freaking calls me a fucking Arab!’ Max explained that Charlie had not only called him a ‘fucking Arab’ but also questioned his belief in Islam and called him ‘a terrorist’. Max exemplified his experiences by talking about a party he attended in what he called ‘a traditional Arabic outfit’. During the interview, Max’s friend Hugo said that he was at the same party and had lent Max his telephone so that he could call his dad, because he was upset after ‘Charlie called him and [another boy] niggers and called him a terrorist.’ According to Max, he had been called the N-word three times, twice by Charlie and once by Adam. Despite this, Max said that he had been confronted by Charlie’s mother during meetings at the school on several occasions:

Yeah, she called me, okay you really have to take this up, she called me psycho kid. She says my mom can’t raise me. She says my dad is a kidnapper and stuff like that. She once said that to the principal. […] But I mean she only thinks about her kid. Okay, I know parents do, but she should also think about what her kid does to others.

According to Max, the school safety team and Charlie’s mother perceived Max and Charlie’s relation as a somewhat one-sided bullying situation, without also taking the abuse he had received equally seriously. In contrast, Max described his relation with Charlie as one where he was being bullied by Charlie and said that this had reached a point where he had gradually lost control of his actions because of the verbal bullying he was subjected to. As Max expressed it:

But now when Charlie gets going, then I start to lose my control. I even hit and sometimes I just lose control, lose my head and I don’t know, I do things without thinking about it.

Max’s version of events questions whether the bullying was a one-sided bullying situation, involving a problematically aggressive ‘bully’ (i.e. Max) targeting another less powerful ‘victim’ (i.e. Charlie), or rather a more complex bullying figuration involving verbal and physical forms of bullying that had been ongoing for several years. Taken together, Charlie’s and Max’s perspectives portray a less static and more fluid and complex figuration that not only involves Charlie and Max, or even the peer and school contexts, but also extends beyond these contexts to incorporate societal power structures around hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1995), fat phobia (Lupton 2013), islamophobia, racism, and the privilege of whiteness (McDermott and Ferguson 2022). Rather than simplistically labelling Max or Charlie as ‘bullies’ or ‘victims’, it is necessary to address the complex interdependencies involved in the educational field that lead each of the boys to behave in the ways that they do.

School bullying, coolness, and capital

Throughout the interviews, students raised the issue of coolness and pointed to an array of things that could make someone cool, including having money and bringing things like candy, chewing gum and Red Bull to school (i.e. economic capital), being popular and/or having a ‘good-looking girlfriend’ (i.e. social capital), and talking back or otherwise misbehaving in class (i.e. cultural capital). In this sense, coolness can be understood as a constant negotiation and navigation of accepted aesthetics, behavioural patterns, and status that are attained through the demonstration of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital. Following Bourdieu’s (1984) work on distinction, coolness among peers in school can be understood in terms of reputation, prestige, and recognition, and thus amounts to specific forms of capital within specific subcultural fields that are crucial for gaining acceptance and status in peer circles. These require very specific behaviours that demonstrate cultural competency. From a figurational perspective, these are not behaviours of their own making, but rather are part of long-term chains of interaction based around scarce resources that regulate social status. Hence, they are not rational reactions to others, but rather are part of an embodied second nature reproduced via affect drives (Elias 1994).

When discussing the importance of being perceived as cool, Charlie, Adam and Michael talked about ‘the cool guys’ in their class and how their coolness affected the behaviour of others. Michael, for example, described Class 5H as ‘chaotic’, which is also how numerous teachers described the class, and said the class was much calmer when he joined it than it was now. Both he and Charlie connected the chaotic change in class climate to a new ‘cool guy’, Hugo, and Charlie suggested that other boys in the class ‘try to act so that they also become cool, so they become like him, you could say.’ Charlie explained that he did not ‘fit into the cool group’ because he was ‘very sensitive’ and cried ‘a lot’. He said that he tried not to cry even when he wanted to because of how people would react:

I want to cry but at the same time I don’t want to do it in front of everyone. Because then I know that those cool guys will just be like, ‘Oh, look, he’s crying’ and blah, blah, blah, like that. And that’s why I usually try not to cry anyway sometimes when I want to cry, like when someone’s abusing me or something.

Adam also pointed to the risks associated with boys demonstrating sensitivity and thus not living up to the perceived norms of hegemonic masculinity, which dictate that boys should not cry. As he put it, crying would lead to the other boys thinking ‘that you’re pathetic’ and to them laughing and telling ‘all the girls, “Don’t be with that guy, he’s crying because he’s so incredibly sensitive”.’

When teachers were asked what they thought was the main cause of bullying in schools, one of the teachers, Joakim, stated that he thought those engaging in bullying do so because ‘they want some form of status, to somehow be seen’, and that ‘it is their way of taking their place.’ In a similar way, bullying was put forward by many of the students as a means of becoming cool and popular. For example, when Charlie, Adam and Michael were asked why people bully, Adam suggested that bullying was connected to popularity and was ‘about being cool and showing what you can do’. In a similar way, girls in the class pointed to the importance of being perceived as cool when explaining why someone might bully someone else. Bianca, for example, said that bullying was a way for someone to ‘try and show that they are cool.’ Reflecting Charlie’s comment about not wanting to be perceived as sensitive or to be seen crying in front of his peers, Bianca and Stella said that Charlie would often try to act cool by laughing and acting like it was no big deal when being bullied, despite being negatively affected.

Two girls, Zoe and Stella, said that Charlie often provoked not only Max but also his other classmates, for example by deliberately walking into them and then saying it was their fault. Rather than simply perceiving Charlie as a ‘provocative victim’, Charlie’s behaviour needs to be understood in relation to the social figuration of which he is a part, as his actions may provide a means through which he can deflect challenges to his status and perceptions that he is overly sensitive and prone to crying. At the same time, however, his actions appeared to undermine his status and position him as irritating and attention-seeking in the eyes of his peers. When talking about the relation between Max and Charlie, Zoe and Stella said that Charlie was ‘not nice’ and that he provoked his classmates ‘to get attention’.

In contrast, some of the girls suggested that Max liked Charlie but bullied him in an attempt to be cool. As Tyra put it, ‘It’s as if Max tries to be cool by bullying Charlie even though he somehow likes him as a friend.’ Tyra and Sally pointed to the fact that Charlie was perceived as annoying by many of the students in the class and that Max saw bullying as a means to improve his own status within the class. As Sally explained:

He gets attention, I mean he wants attention, and he wants to be liked by the others, so he thinks the way out is to bully Charlie. Yeah, because he is annoying to the others and that.

What is notable here is that Max was also positioned as attention-seeking. However, unlike Charlie, who was positioned as ‘not nice’ because of his provocative behaviour, Max was positioned by the girls as ‘a very kind person’ who sometimes engaged in negative behaviour as a means of being ‘cool’ and fitting in with ‘the cool guys’ in the class. As Stella put it, ‘he tries to like show that he can do it, that he dares, and that he is tough’ and ‘that he’s not afraid of adults, I mean the teachers and that.’ As Stella elaborated:

He’s actually kind, but he tries to show something to the boys in the class that everyone likes the most. He tries to show something, that he is also on the same level as them, even though he’s not really, he’s actually very kind.

In a similar way, one of the school safety team members, Marie, suggested that Max ‘doesn’t want to be the way he is, say stupid things and offend people in various ways’ but that he was struggling to figure out other ways to interact with his peers instead.

As discussed earlier, the established and outsider tensions of figurational interdependency in school pull individual behaviours in specific directions. Elias notes that ‘a particular social dynamism triggered a particular psychological one’ (1994, 86), which is to say that there are normative psychological responses to certain social processes. According to the girls, Max is a kind person, but the social pressure to be accepted by a popular group of boys creates drive gratification and inclinations toward alternate (deviant) behaviours that are difficult to renounce or restrain. Indeed, many of the girls said that Max was actually ‘very kind’ but that the particular social field affected his behaviour in a negative way. This social field is bounded within a specific school context, which provides an arena for the demonstration of coolness through bullying to take place in front of a large captive audience (Strindberg and Horton 2022). Indeed, as Adam pointed out, in schools there are more people for students ‘to demonstrate their coolness on, there are more people to abuse and more people to bully and more people to hit and more people to go up against and to know everything.’

Discussion

The relations between Max and Charlie could easily be understood as a clear-cut bullying situation involving a more powerful ‘bully’ (Max) physically, verbally and relationally bullying a less powerful ‘victim’ (Charlie) over the course of many years. Indeed, this appeared to be how it was largely understood by members of the school student safety team, teachers, Charlie’s mother, and even other students who used it as an example when discussing bullying. However, taking seriously both Max’s and Charlie’s perspectives, as well as the perspectives of their classmates, suggests a more complex bullying figuration governed by ‘silent tugs-of-war’ (Elias and Scotson 1994, xxxvii) between them and their peers within a school field infused with understandings of and struggles over various forms of capital.

Rather than simply understanding their behaviour as proactively aggressive and intended to cause harm, our findings illustrate the need to understand their behaviour in terms of the figurational tensions of which they are a part (Webb 2021). The behaviour of each boy is connected not only to the action of the other but also to broader social dynamics that make up the school field. Their behaviour is also influenced by the habitus, or second nature, they have accumulated that gives them an embodied sense for how best to play the relational ‘game’ (Nash 1990, 176). While neither boy had ‘aces’ that he could play (Bourdieu 1985, 724), both boys sought to play the best cards they could in a bid to fit in and thus avoid being perceived as misfitting (Thornberg 2018) and being singled out by their peers (Strindberg, Horton, and Thornberg 2020). The ever-present risk of social exclusion (Søndergaard 2012) meant that the relational stakes were high. Indeed, both boys were bullied by their peers and cast as outsiders (Becker 1991; Elias and Scotson 1994); as was Charlie’s friend Adam by association.

Both Max and Charlie sought to navigate the social ‘game’ and demonstrate their capital (Bourdieu 1985). While both boys sought to answer the call of capital, which holds out the existential possibility of belonging (Søndergaard and Hansen 2018) by being perceived as cool, or at least not uncool, they did so in different ways and were received differently as a result. Charlie was positioned as a less powerful ‘victim’ who was subjected to physical, verbal, and relational bullying by his classmate and is sensitive and prone to crying. In contrast, Max’s tendency to ‘lose control’, lose his ‘head’, act impulsively, and engage in physical acts of violence led to him being positioned as a ‘bully’ by school staff, Charlie’s mother, and some of his fellow students. These different positions reflect contrasting forms of emotional capital (Zembylas 2007) and performances of masculinity (Connell 1995) and highlight the complexity of the figurations of which Charlie and Max are a part (Elias 1984). While Charlie was positioned as the ‘victim’, he was also positioned by his classmates as ‘not nice’, annoying, attention-seeking, and as not living up to hegemonic masculine norms. While Max was portrayed as a ‘bully’, he was also portrayed as ‘a very kind person’; albeit one who behaves in negative, hegemonically masculine, ways in an attempt to fit in with ‘the cool boys.’

Our findings highlight the importance of moving beyond simplistic understandings of bullying as individual problems located in the negative behaviours of ‘bullies’, ‘victims’ and ‘bystanders’ (Walton 2005) and paying more attention to how such behaviour may be fostered by the ‘spaces between them’ (Jacobson 2007). Understanding bullying figurations and how they relate to the various forms of capital that are used by students to jockey for position in the specific social arena of the school field requires taking the perspectives of all students seriously and not only those deemed as ‘victims.’ It also requires taking physical, verbal, and relational forms of bullying equally seriously and not deeming certain forms as more or less important (Horton, Forsberg, and Thornberg 2024; Mazzone, Kolleróva, and O’Higgins Norman 2021).

Taken together, our findings provide important insights that can be used to better understand and deal with bullying in schools, not only in Sweden but also elsewhere. Indeed, while the findings are obviously not statistically generalisable, they are analytically generalisable (Larsson 2009) as they provide a theoretical foundation for better understanding and addressing the complexities of bullying. While the specific contexts of schools may vary, the contextual similarities of the fields are such that it is also possible to transfer the findings and use the insights gained for better understanding school bullying in other school settings (Larsson 2009; Tracy 2010).

These findings are both theoretically and practically significant. Theoretically to the extent that they highlight the importance of thinking about bullying not simply as the behaviour of individual students, but as interdependent power dynamics that emerge within and through contextually defined relationships. That is, the field in which power ratios or power hierarchies arise is directly relevant to the types of relationships that students develop, including their emotional drives for prestige, status, and reputation. This leads us to the practical significance of the findings. No relationship is identical to another, but rather is historically contingent. This is why focusing on ‘bullies’ and ‘victims’ is inadequate and may even be counterproductive. Rather, school staff need to help students engage in inclusive and caring social interactions and relationships, while being aware of the complexity and fluidity of bullying figurations. As the examples of Charlie and Max demonstrate, bullying behaviour is not simply a matter of personal agency and a desire to cause harm but occurs within a complex network of relationships and social interactions where the stakes are high and where the call of capital is strong; precisely because of the positional possibilities that certain ways of being perceived entail.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the school principal who provided access to the research field, the parents who consented for their children to participate in the study, and all the staff and students who took the time to share their experiences and perspectives with us. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful feedback during the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) for the project Bullying Arenas: A social-ecological investigation of school bullying (2017-03604).

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms.

2 Most schools in Sweden have a student safety team that usually consists of a group of teachers or other staff at the school. The student safety team provides a support function for students and school staff regarding unsafe situations and violations and works to prevent such instances from occurring.

3 What Agar (2006) calls an IRA logic.