Contrasting Giddens and Bourdieu: Theory of Structuration and Habitus We will explore how Giddens and Bourdieu address problems of agency and structure, objective and subjective, and determinism and teleology. At the beginning, Giddens’ ideas will be presented separately. Then, Bourdieu’s will be presented alongside with similarities they share and differences they have. Finally, I discusses the methodological implications of their perspectives. Both Bourdieu and Giddens came out giving response to the renaissance of Marxism and to the philosophical debate between Cartesianism, structuralism, and post-structuralism. Both wanted to stand somewhere between the classical sociological tradition and historical materialism. They were critical of the roots of social domination and saw the possibility of social science to become emancipatory. They also tried to develop an alternative methodology that could solve the problem of ‘extreme’ subjectivity in rational choice theory and phenomenology and the problem of the anti-humanist dissolution of the subject practiced by structuralism, post-structuralism, and functionalism (Callinicos 1999). However, these similarities do not necessarily lead to the same way of doing sociology and of connecting social science with the real social life. Giddens Giddens sees that agency “refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capacity of doing those things in the first place (which why agency implies power)” (Giddens, 1984: 9) . So, agents are actors that are capable of ‘doing otherwise’ and their actions alongside with the meaning constituted are the products of interactions. Because of the autonomy and dependence between actors, determinism becomes impossible and contingency becomes inevitable. Then, he explains the relationship between power and agency/action: “to be able to ‘act otherwise’ means being able to intervene in the world, or to refrain from such intervention, with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs” (p. 14). From this conception, he asserts that “the use of power characterizes not specific types of conduct but all actions, and power is not itself a resource. Resources are media through which power is exercised as a routine element of the instantiation of conduct in social reproduction.” Thus, power within “social systems which enjoy some continuity over time and space presume regularized relations of autonomy and dependence between actors or collectivities in contexts of social
interactions” (p. 16). In other words, interaction is structured in relatively regularized patterns. However, this structure exists only in action as a continually constituted product of action. Thus, it has only ‘virtual existence.’ This does not lead to the ‘lawlike’ patterns of repetitive conduct. Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens (born January 18, 1938) is a British sociologist who is renowned for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern contributors in the field of sociology, the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29 languages, issuing on average more than one book every year. Another characteristic of this structure is that pre-exists any particular individual in a sense that it is historical products constructed through previous interactions by agents. It means that human activity does not create structure from nothing, but agents who reproduce and transform it. Furthermore, this structure is a material and a medium of action that can become ‘enabling’ or ‘constraining.’
When structure is perceived as a medium and material of action, agency and structure become dual where both are interdependent and mutually constitutive. It, then, becomes impossible to imagine the existence of agents without structures and vice versa. This theorem of duality is crucial to the idea of structuration where the “constitutions of agents and structures are not two independently given sets of phenomena, a dualism, but represent a duality” (p. 25). But, what is structure? Giddens defines structure around two main concepts, i.e. rules and resources which are mutually constitutive, occurring in every social relation where rules and positions exist. Thus, dualism between structure and culture is resolved. Rules are “techniques or generalized procedures applied in the enactment/reproduction of social practices” (p. 21) “which requires interpretation and are constituted in interactions,” such as rules of language in daily life. Resources are “capacities, including personal capacities, and those which are a function of place or position in social relations.” These resources, both allocative (e.g. raw materials) and authoritative (e.g. organization of life chances), constitute the structures of domination which represent the generation of power. Manicas (1993) illustrates how Giddens has been misunderstood as a subjectivist or positivist by others due to the way he explicates resources and rules in human relations. Manicas notes that it is “easy enough to diagnose the misunderstandings. Social relations collapse
into rules, which to be rules must be at least tacitly known by subjects. Thus, social relations become subjective – in the head of persons (period). But rules are no more subjective than social relations.” He adds that “Giddens critics also fail to see that rules cannot be conceptualized apart from resources, which refer to the modes of whereby transformation relations are actually incorporated into the production and reproduction of social practices” (p. 225). Sewell (1992) notes that it is surprising when Giddens considers resources as virtual, especially for what he calls allocative resources because, according to Sewell, these kinds of resources are nonhuman that include factories owned by capitalists. I think Sewell misunderstood how resources defined in Giddens’s idea. For Giddens, I think, it is not the allocative resources that matter, but it is human relation to these resources that matters. Giddens, for example, explains that “the gardening of allocative resources is closely involved with time-space distanciation, the continuity of societies across time and space and thus the generation of power” (Giddens 1084: 259). In addition, Manicas (n.d) notes that Sewell misses the point by giving a real example to argue against his point: “Thus, statutes, constitutions, etc. actually exists … The marks on the paper actually exist, but they are statutes only because of our beliefs, beliefs that we act on” (p. 50). (continued) What then makes agents able to act within social life? Knowledge, for Bourdieu, is very important in order to make people capable of action (Sewell 1992). This knowledge has several characteristics: it is socially distributed, mostly tacit, and may not be articulatable. In addition, the conditions and consequences of action taken based on this knowledge might be wrongly understood. This implies that social science is inherently emancipatory in a sense that when agents realize that they hold false beliefs about the conditions and consequences of their actions, they can be motivated to act differently (Manicas). How does change occur? How does the reproduction or transformation of structure happen? Does it happen under the control of human beings? Following Marx Weber, Giddens sees that action always has unintended consequences as a result of agent's knowledge, what is always characterized of uncertainty. As a function of transforming in action inherits meanings and relations which are continuously changing, there is contingency both in action and in history. Thus, actions and changes they bring about are not deterministic. Giddens explains that the nature of constraints to which individuals are subject,
the uses to which they put the capacities they have and the form of knowledgeability they display are all themselves manifestly historically variable (p. 219). Like Schutz, Giddens sees that social science does not explain the acts of particular actors, but the typical acts of typical actors in typical structured situations by constructing a model. In order to construct such model, understanding actions from the actors point of view as well as the conditions and consequences of action is required. What is, then, the task of sociology? For Giddens, the first fact that it should establish is how people relate to one another and to nature to generate the means of life (Manicas). He argues that upon our capacities for social learning, in the world that is the legacy of modernity, we predicate our future. In order to do so, he asserts that only societies reflexively capable of modifying their institutions in the face of accelerated social change (characterized with unintended consequences and contingency of social change) will be able to confront that future with any confidence. It is sociology that becomes the prime medium of such reflexivity (Giddens 1987: 21). Bourdieu The task of sociology, according to Bourdieu is to uncover the most profoundly buried structures of the various social worlds which constitute the social universe, as well as the mechanisms which tend to ensure their reproduction or their transformation (p. 7). This implies Bourdieu's objection towards structuralism, subjectivism and at the same time represents his ideas of agency and structure problem. According to Bourdieu, the universe structures have a double life that exists twice. First, it comes in the objectivity of first order constituted by the distribution of material resources and means of appropriation of socially scarce goods and values. Second, it comes in the objectivity of second order in the form of classification, the mental and bodily schemata that function as symbolic templates for the practical activities of social agents (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 7). Then, a science of society understood as a bidimensional system of relations of power and relations of meaning between groups and classes where double reading is required to treat society as a social
physics and social phenomenology(p. 7-8). This explanation is similar to the way Giddens sees the structure of universe, which he calls rules (the objectivity of the second order/mental schemata) and resources (the objectivity of the first order/bodily schemata). They also locate power and relation in the heart of social science. However, Bourdieu sees that practice, rather than knowledgeability of actors in relations, plays more important effects on determining their actions. Furthermore, while Bourdieu talks about double reading as a consequence of the very fact that the structure of universe has double life which exists twice, Giddens introduces us to the idea of double hermeneutic . However, Giddens double hermeneutic is not only associated with the issue of the structure of universe, it is also related to the problem of social research orientations, which Bourdieu also encounters in his discussion of the idea of total social science. Wacquant explains how Bourdieu sees the problem of dualism between agency and structure that it is true enough, society has an objective structure; but it is no less true that it is also crucially composed of representation and will (p. 9). So, here Bourdieu rejects the reduction of sociology to become either an objectivist physics of material structures or a constructivist phenomenology of cognitive forms by means of a genetic structuralism (p. 5). By doing so, Bourdieu expects to develop a unified political economy of practice, and symbolic power that can unite phenomenological and structural approaches into an integrated and epistemologically coherent mode of social inquiry of universal applicability (p. 4). Further, like Giddens, Bourdieu criticizes both mechanical structuralism and teleological individualism. The former puts agents on vocation and the latter recognizes people only in the truncated form of an oversocialized cultural dope or in the guise of more or less sophisticated reincarnations of homo economicus. Therefore, according to Bourdieu, objectivism, subjectivism, mechanicalism and finalism, structural necessity and individual agency are false antinomies (p. 10). How does, then, Bourdieu unify these antinomies? He introduces the notion of transcending, which is like meta-theory by Giddens, by turning seemingly antagonistic paradigms into moments of a form of analysis designed to recapture the intrinsically double reality of the social world. This mechanism results in what is called social praxeology that operates to weave together a structuralist and a constructivist approach (p. 11).
How does Bourdieu explain the process of this weaving together? In order to operationalize this process, he introduces an idea of habitus, which is like what Giddens does when he introduces the concept of structuration. If Bourdieu uses the idea of habitus to let agency and social structure to interpenetrate one another, Giddens applies the concept of structuration to transcend the relationship between them. How does this weaving together allow the habitus of agents and the social field or structure to generate actions? Wacquant explains this process in order to make it intelligible as follows, First, we push aside mundane representations to construct the objective structures (spaces of positions), the distribution of socially efficient resources that define the external constraints bearing on interactions and representations. Second, we reintroduce the immediate, lived experience of agents in order to explicate the categories of perception and appreciations (dispositions) that structured their actions from inside Â… Although the two moments of analysis are equally necessary, they are not equal: epistemological priority is granted to objectivist rapture over subjectivist understanding (p.11) Like Giddens, Bourdieu sees that structure is both enabling and constraining for individual as an individual actions are structured both from inside by habitus and from outside by objective structure or field. However, they seem to differ in the epistemological priority. While Bourdieu tends to see that priority is given to the objectivist structure, that is practice, Giddens turns to contingency in actions and history to explain actions, and in turn, social change - which are both often unintended. Therefore, for Giddens I argue, actors are like the ones who get into the sky rollers. They do make actions, but once they get into the game, mega forces are inevitable. In addition, even though Bourdieu has claimed to solve the problem of antinomies, he still seems to treat structure and agency as two independent entities interpenetrating one another, and constraining and enabling individuals to do actions. Giddens seems to be more successful in managing this ontological fusion by turning dualism into duality through the idea of structuration. The next question Bourdieu posts is where those perceptual and evaluative schemata come from and how do they relate to the external structures of society? In other words, where do the agents get their habitus or dispositions and how do they relate to the objective structure or social field?
Bourdieu provides answers on this question in four directions. First, the correspondence between cognitive and social structures observed in traditional communities also obtains in advanced societies through school systems. School systems, then, in modern societies play significant roles in shaping cognitive and social structure of the society. Second, cumulative exposure to certain social conditions plants in individuals a set of durable and transposable dispositions that internalize the necessities of the extent social environment, inscribing inside the organism the patterned inertia and constraints of external reality. Bourdieu sees that an adequate science of society must encompass both objective regularities and the process of internalization of objectivity whereby the transindividual, unconscious principles of (di)vision that agents engage in their practice are constituted (p. 13). This second idea, assuming that habitus is another form of objective structure, is similar to Giddens idea of structure in form of rules as a medium and a product of actions (previous agents). However, Bourdieu seems not to imply the virtuality of the structure. Rather, he tends to see that both external structure (field) and internal structure (dispositions or embedded values) are objective and real. In other words, both are one structure. This unity is expressed in his statement that the analysis of objective structures logically carries over into the analysis of subjective dispositions, thereby destroying the false antinomy ordinarily established between sociology and social psychology (p. 13). But, both tend to agree that there is a correspondence between agent dispositions (or rules constituted in interaction in Giddens) and external structures, and that they are historical. Third, Bourdieu suggests that the correspondence between social and mental structures fulfills crucial political functions. Symbolic systems are not simply instruments of knowledge; they are also instrument of domination. Bourdieu calls the dominants operators of cognitive integration who promote a social integration of an arbitrary order. In order to become agents of change with limits, people should understand that symbolic systems are social products that constitute social relations. They, then, can transform the world by transforming its representation (p. 13). Bourdieu prefers the usage of symbolic capital to other forms of capitals (e.g. economic, social) in explaining social relations. For him, all forms of capitals are convertible and it
becomes more crucial in terms of domination when it is used in the form of symbolic capital (e.g. ideology). Further, it can be understood that Bourdieu, unlike Giddens who emphasizes the unintendedness of social change, perceives the importance of intentionally making symbolic systems as instruments of domination and transformation. Fourth, systems of classification constitute a stake in the struggles that oppose individuals and groups in the routine interactions of daily life as well as in the solitary and collective contests that take place in the fields of politics and cultural reproduction (p. 14). Unlike Giddens, Bourdieu is clearer in the idea of class conflict and struggle in human interactions. Social structures and cognitive structures are recursively and structurally linked, and the correspondence between them provides one of the most solid props of social domination (p. 14). It means that when both social and cognitive structures are strongly cohesive and unquestioned, it will become an effective tool to maintain stability under certain group domination. So, for Bourdieu, it is important to practice sociology of knowledge and culture as a political sociology; that is, a sociology of symbolic power in order to be able to transform society. Bourdieu does not translate the relationship between the agent and the world in a commonsense language. The relation between the social agent and the world is not between a subject and an object, but a relation of ontological complicity or mutual possession between habitus as the socially constituted principle of perception and appreciation, and the world that determines it. Practical sense operates at the preobjective, nonthetic level. It expresses this social sensitivity which guides us prior to our positing objects as such. It constitutes the world as meaningful by spontaneously anticipating its immanent tendencies in the manner of the ball player. Practice precognizes by reading in the present state the possible future states which the field is pregnant. For in habitus the past, the present and the future intersect and interpenetrate one another, habitus may be understood as virtual sedimented situations lodged inside the body that wait to be reactivated (Bourdieu & Wacquant, p. 21-22). This explanation of practical sense reminds us Giddens idea of rules that have become structure and pre-exist each individual. However, for Bourdieu, it is the habitus, rather than t acitknowledge of actors, that accommodates the past, the present, and the future.
But, "the lines of actions engendered by habitus do not, indeed cannot, have the neat regularity of conduct deduced from a normative or juridical principle. This is because habitus is in cahoots with the fuzzy and the vague. As a generative spontaneity which asserts itself in the improvised confrontation with endlessly renewed situations, it follows a practical logic, that of the fuzzy, of the more or less, which defines the ordinary relation to the world. Consequently, we should refrain from searching the productions of habitus for more logic than they actually contain: the logic of practice is logical up to the point where to be logical would cease being practical. The peculiar difficulty of sociology, then, is to produce a precise science of an imprecise, fuzzy, wooly reality. For this it is better that its concepts be polymorphic, supple, and adaptable, rather than defined, calibrated, and used rigidly" (p. 22-23). Like Giddens in defining knowledge, that is tacit and often leads to unpredictable actions and consequences, Bourdieu sees that regularity cannot be expected from habitus. How then is social science possible without regularity? Giddens offers the idea of modeling typical acts of typical actors based on understanding of both actions and consequences. Similarly, Bourdieu's analysis on the genesis and functioning of fields of cultural reproduction is not intended to challenge science. But, it aims at grounding scientific rationality in history, in knowledge producing relations objectified in the web of positions and subjectified in dispositions that together make up the scientific field as a historically unique social invention (p. 48). Bourdieu also argues that empirical knowledge is not as discrepant from the discovery and pursuit of moral aims as positivism followers say. Bourdieu, therefore, has high concern with the moral and political significance of sociology. He sees that the business of the sociologist is to denaturalize and to defatalize the social world, that is, to destroy the myths that cloak the exercise of power and the perpetuation of domination (p. 50). This critical tone, I think, makes Bourdieu quite different from Giddens and others. For Bourdieu, social science is not only about ontology and epistemology problems, but also about axiology issues. It is about intellectual responsibility to become agents of change based on well-grounded knowledge of what is going on. Sociology, according to Bourdieu, can become a tool for individual to
distinguish zone of necessity and of freedom, and thereby for identifying spaces open to moral actions. He argues that the more aware the agents become of the social within them by reflexively mastering their categories of thought and action, the less likely they are to be actuated by the externality which inhibits them (p. 49). This view represents his clear standpoint that sociology is an eminently political science that is highly concerned with strategies and mechanism of symbolic domination. Thus, its practitioners in the dominated sector of the field of power should not let social science to become neutral, detached, and apolitical (p. 50-51). Wacquant explains that the more scientific sociology becomes, the more politically relevant it becomes. Sociology, according to Bourdieu, provides not means of domination but perhaps means to dominate the domination (p. 51). Methodological Implications Bourdieu does not see any real distance between theoretical construction and practical research operations. He views that every act of research is simultaneously empirical (it confronts the world of observable phenomena) and theoretical (it necessarily engages hypotheses about the underlying structure of relations that observations are designed to capture) (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992: 34-35). This idea leads to the argument that sociology must be a total science. It must construct total science facts that preserve the fundamental unity of human practices across disciplines, empirical domains, and techniques of observation and analysis. Like Giddens with the idea of double hermeneutic, Bourdieu disagrees with the premature scientific specialization and to the detailed division of labor it entails because habitus endows practice with a systematically and an internal connectedness that cuts across these divides; social structures correspondingly perpetuate or transform themselves undivided, in all their dimensions simultaneously. Therefore, Bourdieu rejects methodological monism or absolutism; what he calls absolute rejection of the sectarian rejection of this or that method of research. It does not mean that he calls for epistemological anarchism, but rather that he sees that method choice must fit the problem at hand and must constantly be reflected upon in the very moment where they are applied to resolved particular questions (p. 28-30). In Giddens expression, sociology does not, and cannot, consist of a body of theory and research built up and kept insulated from its subject-matter the social conduct of human agents(Giddens 1987: 30).
Practice that might help explain how this concept of total science can work progressively is the idea of reflexivity. Reflexivity, according to Bourdieu, is not only about a requirement and form of sociological work. An individual doing reflexivity should be aware of his/her limits of knowledge associated with his membership and position in the intellectual field. These limits are manifested in three types of biases. First, it is linked to the social origins and coordinates (class, gender, ethnicity, etc). Second, bias linked to the position that the analyst occupies in the microcosm of the academic field. Third, the intellectualist bias which entices us to construe the world as a spectacle, as a set of significations to be interpreted rather than as a concrete problems to be solved practically (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Like Bourdieu, Giddens also emphasizes the importance of reflexivity. For Giddens, this reflexivity is not only for the social scientist, but it is also for subjects and society. Being reflexive for social science is to inject back in the reality it describes the knowledge that it generates. For subjects, it is to have capacity to turn back upon and to monitor their own actions. And, for society, it is to have the capacity to control and program its own development (p. 37). Both Giddens and Bourdieu suggest that human beings are conscious, have beliefs, purposes, and values and culture in social life. As a consequence, it is inevitable to use qualitative, ethnographic research if we want to understand events in society. However, Bourdieu seems to be more enthusiastic of developing a total social science by rejecting monistic research approach. Unlike Giddens in terms of theory and practice in social research, Bourdieu was very much involved in research activities in the real field. He did not only theorize the social world, but also gave firsthand accounts of the subject and society he studied. In his work, he did not only present his theory, but also provided us with his fieldwork findings, such as Distinction, The Inheritors, Kabyla, and Reproduction in Education. Giddens, on the contrary, wrote much about social theory, but as far as I knew, he lacks firsthand accounts of his subjects. In other words, Bourdieu's research was so much concerned with the micro sociology, rather than macro sociology. But, it does not mean that Bourdieu believes in the dualism between micro and macro. What he wishes to achieve is a total social science. It also does not mean that structuration theory is not applicable in the field of social research. Learning to Labor by Willis is one of a very rich ethnography
of working class school that uses structuration theory (Manicas).
Conclusion Both Giddens and Bourdieu have developed an advanced way of doing sociology in similar historical and intellectual contexts. They agree that a proper human science is a critical part of the solution to the contemporary society. They also agree that social science can become emancipatory. However, their theory of human and society does not bring them to the same path of contribution to the society. Unlike Giddens who perceived modernity as a juggernaut and inevitable, Bourdieu in France was fighting against neoliberalism in the field and saw it as a creation of agents that could be changed by other agents by doing sociology as a political enterprise (see Callinicos, 1992).