Pierre Bourdieu: agency and structure

Similarities with Giddens: as with Giddens, Bourdieu sees everyday life as structured by routines in which we respond to events in a habitual way. Our ability to do this depends on a set of practical skills which Bourdieu calls the habitus. As with Garfinkel’s notion of reflexivity, this know-how enables us to reproduce social order.
Unlike Giddens, Bourdieu does not give an account of the psychology of the self and we are left wondering how identity is achieved and what role it plays in motivating the individual. On the other hand, Bourdieu does stress the individuality of the ways in which we respond to the process of social reproduction, i.e. we all have our own ways of doing social reproduction, whether this is about maintaining institutional life or the individual‘s status within institutions.
Unlike Giddens, Bourdieu does deal with real structures, institutions and their reproduction, e.g. social class divisions are reproduced through the way that education distributes cultural capital amongst students. Bourdieu emphasises that people use cultural capital as a means of obtaining an entry to desired social circles. In La Distinction he points out the role played by taste in discriminating between insiders and outsiders. Taste is determined by advertisers, fashion gurus, marketing agencies and other ‘style merchants’ e.g. journalists/broadcasters. Popular culture becomes a resource to be plundered for new tastes as retro style becomes chic (see also Jameson here). However, once punk has become new wave and appears in the fashion pages of the Sunday Times, then ’the scene’ has moved on- to cite a familiar example.
Interests People are motivated by interests rather than identities for Bourdieu. They are motivated by interests to maintain or achieve their positions within a field of activity e.g. work. The entails struggles between different groups over status. Consequently social reproduction is importantly about power relationships. Again this contrasts with Giddens who although acknowledging that the state is a container of power cannot utilise this idea in any concrete way re power relationships between different groups.
Fields. The habitus works in relation to specific areas of social life each with their own logic. Bourdieu therefore refers to the habitus as operating in different fields. This bridges the gap between structure and agency i.e. the fields are internalised by subjects so we can operate within them without having to expend much conscious thought and energy; we know the rules or logic of the field and therefore have the disposition to reproduce the field and our position within it. This doesn’t tell us anything about social change though. To achieve change we’d have to break with routine and the habitus. There is no indication of the internal workings of the subject: what brings the subject to change their mind about things? Giddens and Garfinkel at least have the idea of sense and directionality of human endeavour which guide us in our day to day interactions via tact and reflexivity.
Hence Bourdieu’s work is weighted towards the structural end of the structure- agency relation and although we can see how real organisations reproduce themselves we get no sense that this might be due as much to the investment of identities in this (think of multiculturalism or identities based on gender and sexuality) as compared with material rewards to be gained from social reproduction and defence of one’s social position.

References
Parker, J (2000), Structuration, OU Press, Buckingham
Swingewood, A., (2000), A Short History of Sociological Thought, Macmillan, London

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