Bringing Bourdieu to policy sociology: codification, misrecognition and exchange value in the UK context

Abstract

The task of social scientists is to find ways of investigating and understanding the social, political and economic world, in order to offer insights into everyday and public life in the past, present and future. Bourdieu’s tool kit offers a particular way of theorizing the rules, narratives and self‐held truths of social phenomena and of educational policy as a specific object of analysis. In this article I develop a series of propositions about the ways in which field theory might be applied to explain the abrupt public policy shift effected by the Thatcher government and the adjustments made to it by the Blair government. I suggest that a Bourdieuian approach shows policy working as a means of codification, as a doxa of misrecognition and as currency exchange within and across fields. I conclude with some thoughts about the difficulties of explicating interactions between fields.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Bob Lingard for help in finalizing this paper.

Notes

1. There are possibilities here for further research directed specifically to the details of ‘codification’ in order to test out this propositional analysis.

2. The National Primary Strategy Excellence and enjoyment [Department for Education and Skills (DfES), 2003] is an example par excellence of the framing of apparently progressive goals into managerially coded forms. My colleagues and I have analysed this text as part of on ongoing research project into the creative arts, inclusion and primary schooling, but it is at present work in progress.

3. Bourdieu represented these, for example, in a diagram of ‘the space of social position’ in Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984, pp. 128–129), in which technicians, teachers and artistic producers were represented as upward, semi‐skilled and skilled workers as stable and farmers and small shopkeepers as downward. This is clearly an analysis developed at a particular time and place.