Trans Cultural Transfer Ability of Bourdieu's Sociology of Education

8/3/2019 Trans Cultural Transfer Ability of Bourdieu's Sociology of Education

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The Transcultural Transferability of Bourdieu's Sociology of EducationAuthor(s): Derek RobbinsReviewed work(s):Source: British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 25, No. 4, Special Issue: PierreBourdieu's Sociology of Education: The Theory of Practice and the Practice of Theory (Sep.,2004), pp. 415-430Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

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British Journal of Sociology of EducationVol. 25, No. 4, September2004CarfaxPublishingTaylor Francis roup

The transcultural transferability ofBourdieu's sociology of educationDerek Robbins*University of East London, UK

As earlyas 1970, M. S. Archer argued that Bourdieu's sociology of education was the product of theparticular conditions of the French educational system within which it was formulated. The sameargument was subsequently advanced more generally by Richard Jenkins, who insisted thatBourdieu's sociology of culture, particularly the analysis contained in La Distinction/Distinction(Bourdieu, 1979, 1986), was an expression of the peculiarly French emphasis on taste as a basis forsocial differentiation. Bourdieu was himself interested in the relations between particular anduniversal explanation in social science, and in many of his later articles he focused specifically on thequestion of the transferability of his concepts, such as 'cultural capital'. The English Preface toHomoAcademicus(Bourdieu, 1988) is an explicit discussion of how the analysis presented in the textof French higher education should be read and adopted by English readers, while PracticalReason(Bourdieu, 1994, 1998) contained published lectures in which Bourdieu considered theapplicability of La Distinction to Japanese society.The purpose of my proposed contribution is to trace the development of Bourdieu'ssociology of education in the context of educational policy developments in France during hislifetime and, equally, to trace the ways in which his work has been used in the British contextduring the period between the first reception of his educational work in the United Kingdomin Knowledge and Control (Young, 1971) to the reception of his more polemical politicalinterventions of the 1990s, many of which implicitly invoked earlier educational thinking.The intention is that this discussion should revive interest in the relevance of Bourdieu's work tothe British situation by reference to many of the later texts that appeared after the emphasis ofthe British field of reception had shifted from education to cultural studies. La noblessed'etat/Statenobility Bourdieu, 1989, 1996) and La mise're u mondel/The eightof the world(Bourdieu etal., 1993,1999) have direct implications for British thinking about education that are different from theimplications of the texts of the 1960s, and it is important to disrupt the tendency still to see theimportance of Bourdieu's educational work primarily in relation to Les heritiers/TheInheritors(Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964b; 1977) and La reproduction/ReproductionBourdieu & Passeron, 1970,1977). Finally, the discussion will confront the question of transferability and ask whether thecomparative conditions in Britain and France between 1960 and 2002 justify the transfer of hisanalyses and research methods across the cultures in the future beyond his death.

*Professor of International Social Theory, School of Social Sciences, University of East London,UK. Email: [email protected] 0142-5692(print)/ISSN 1465-3346 (online)/04/040415-16? 2004 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/0142569042000236925


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416 D. RobbinsIntroductionThe paper begins with the author's retrospective account of his 1986 analysis ofthe reception of Bourdieu's work in the United Kingdom up to 1977. Thisaccount had emphasized the ways in which a few of Bourdieu's early articles hadbeen used in the debates of the 1970s around the 'new directions for the sociologyof education'. There was, however, a more sophisticated appropriation wherebyMargaret Archer diminished Bourdieu's work by suggesting that it was specificallythe product of the French educational system and social structure. As such,Bourdieu's work had to be subsumed under a more generalized study of comparativestructures. This view neglected Bourdieu's contemporary articulation of a post-structuralist position. For Bourdieu, what had to become paradigmatic was nothis 1960s objectivist, sociological accounts of social, educational and culturalreproduction within French society, but the cross-culturally transferable capacityof social agents in different cultures to analyse the particular ways in which theyinter-act with their different structures. Methodological reflexivity was at the coreof Bourdieu's continuing engagement with French educational and socialissues. Although much of his work after 1980 was not labelled as 'sociology ofeducation', there was a persistent engagement with educational matters. The paperthen examines the reception of Bourdieu's work in the BritishJournal of the Sociologyof Education in the period from 1980 to 2000. This is by no means acomprehensive analysis of the reception of Bourdieu's work in the UnitedKingdom in the period, but it is a case study that seeks to suggest that theresponse of professional sociologists of education continued to concentrate onthe work of the 1960s and failed to take up the challenge implicit in Bourdieu'sreflexive engagement-a challenge made explicit in the Preface to the Englishedition of the largely ignored Homo Academicus. The purpose of the paper is to revivethat challenge and to stimulate a transcultural implementation of his reflexivemethod.

BackgroundIn 1986 I wrote a paper entitled 'Bourdieu in England, 1964-1977', which wassubsequently published in Higher Education Policy (Robbins, 1989; reprintedRobbins, 2000). I discussed the reception of Bourdieu's work in England byreference to the contexts in which some of his texts had been published in translationduring the period, examining the ways in which his intellectual production hadbeen 're-framed' for English consumption. The paper did not engage directly withthe content of Bourdieu's theoretical position nor with the very limited number ofcritical articles that had appeared. It showed some early affinity with Bourdieu'sapproach in seeking to offer the crude elements of a sociological analysis of thephenomena of textual reception. It gave an account of two phases of appropriation ofBourdieu's work by the sociology of education-appropriation in the sense thatthe educational reception ignored Bourdieu's defining social anthropological


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Transculturaltransferabilityof Bourdieu's sociology 417fieldwork in Algeria and confined 'him' to one autonomous intellectual sphere. By thefirst phase was meant the period in the immediate aftermath of the Durhammeeting of the British Sociological Association of April 1970, which led to thepublication of ideologically competing texts-Knowledge and Control. New Directionsfor the Sociology of Education (Young, 1971) and Readings in the Theory ofEducational Systems (Hopper, 1971), as well as the more official proceedings of theconference published as Knowledge, Education and Cultural Change. Papers in theSociologyof Education (Brown, 1973). By the second phase was meant the period from1974 until 1977, when a few of Bourdieu's articles were included in readers of thesociology of education such as ContemporaryResearch in the Sociology of Education(Eggleston, 1974), Schooling and Capitalism. A Sociological Reader (Dale et al., 1976)and Identity and Structure: Issues in the Sociology of Education (Gleeson, 1977). Theaccounts of these phases implied a sociological analysis that was never fullyarticulated. The article suggests that there was a tension between the sociologies ofeducation that were developing at the London School of Economics and at theInstitute of Education, London, and that the explanation for the tension might lie inthe distinction between the academic, sociological orientation of the one institutionand the vocational, pedagogic orientation of the other. It also suggests that thistension in the first phase persisted through the second, now more apparent as acontrast between the politically activist approach to teacher training of the teachingteam at the Open University and the more academic institutionalization of thesociology of education spreading from an established base at the University ofLeicester to the University of Keele and beyond. The paper broke off at 1977. Again,it only offered hints as to why this end point had been adopted and what might be theshape of the reception of Bourdieu's work in the period from 1977 until the date ofwriting in 1986. It argued that:

... in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the practice of English education has beencontrolledbypoliticalandeconomic orcesandagenciesratherhanby anytheory,whilstthe educational hinkingwhich revivedafter hepassingof thesociologyof educationhasbeen forced to stand impotently by. (Robbins, 2000, p. 362)This was code for suggesting that, by the end of the 1970s, the influence on policy ofthe sociology of education had become marginal as Mrs Thatcher had begun tointroduce measures and mechanisms that assumed inter-institutional economiccompetition was the necessary motor for educational reform. The paper also pointedout that 1977 was a turning-point in the reception of Bourdieu's work. It was the yearof the publication in English both of Outline of a theory of practice (Bourdieu, 1977),which had originally been published as Esquissed'une theorie de la pratique, precededetrois etudes d'ethnologiekabyle (Bourdieu, 1972), and of the English translation of Lareproduction.Elementspour une theorie du systeme d'enseignement, which Bourdieu hadwritten in collaboration with Jean-Claude Passeron (1970). Rather optimistically, thepaper concluded by hoping that these two translations would ensure that Bourdieu'swork would then be seen much more in the round and that his contributions to


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418 D. Robbinsresearch and theory in anthropology and education would not continue to bedivorced:

Taken together, these two books for the first time enabled the English reader to associateBourdieu'santhropological nd educationalwork and to relate both strands to widercultural enquiries. (Robbins, 2000, p. 362)Very few such 'English readers' existed and the paper failed to signal that thedominant development of the period from 1977 to 1986 was that there was a newappropriation bid from the emerging field of Cultural Studies associated with theremains of the 'New Left' movement associated mainly with Raymond Williams andStuart Hall. I have recently written about this period of Anglo-French intellectualexchange in a contribution to a collection of essays on Cultural theory (Edwards,forthcoming), but it is worth pointing out here that it was Richard Nice who wasresponsible for facilitating the shift in the reception of Bourdieu's work from the fieldof the sociology of education to that of the field of culture or cultural studies. Nicetranslated Esquisseand La reproductionand, still in 1977, when he was working at theCentre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, he alsotranslated two short articles. It is significant that the French subtitle of La reproduction,which offered, literally, the 'elements for a theory of the educational system', became,in translation Reproduction in education, society and culture. Stuart Hall (1978)discussed Bourdieu's work in his On ideology,while the new journal Media, culture andsociety carried the first translated extracts from La Distinction in its second volume(Garnham & Williams, 1980) with an introductory article on Bourdieu written byNick Garnham and Raymond Williams entitled 'Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology ofculture'.

The real reason why the paper ended at 1977 was that I ran out of time. I had beenin receipt of a small grant from the ESRC to become familiar with the work of theCentre de Sociologie Europenne, Paris, based at the Maison des Sciences del'Homme, Paris. Bourdieu was by then well installed in his office at the Coll ge deFrance and was less closely involved with the everyday research of the Centre, and Iwas advised that the best way to secure a meeting with him would be for me to write apaper that could be the basis of a discussion. I reached 1977 in my reading andresearch in time to forward the paper to him in advance of our first meeting in October1986. We discussed the specific content of the paper, but he was anxious to thinkthrough procedures for understanding the transcultural transmission of texts,proposing that I should undertake a series of case studies that would analyse thedifferences in the transnational reception of the work of Habermas, Foucault andothers. He had, of course, published Homo academicus (Bourdieu, 1984) and, inretrospect, it is possible for me to surmise that he was developing the ideas that he wasto offer in the preface to the English translation of that book in 1988. HomoAcademicus was not to be read in other cultures as a representation of the competingstaff interests and institutional ideologies in Parisian institutions of higher education,but, instead, as a model for the kind of analysis that should be undertaken reflexivelyof their own intellectual and institutional positions by sociologists operating from the


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Transculturaltransferabilityof Bourdieu's sociology 419inside. It cannot be denied, of course, that Bourdieu wanted to offer his mode ofanalysis as of potentially universal validity. His analysis of the field of production ofthat analysis sought to pre-empt alternative analyses both of the field of production ofhis thought and of the different international fields of reception. He offered theaccount of Parisian higher education as a particular example of the general and invitedreaders to perceive their particular situations in terms of the same generality. Thepurpose of this paper is briefly to scrutinize the transnational transferability ofBourdieu's sociology of education from the period covered in my article of 1986through to the present. I shall take the representation of Bourdieu in the BritishJournal of the Sociology of Education (BJSE) as my main case study, although the fullsociological study of the production and dissemination of the sociology of educationin the period that this article invites would necessarily involve an analysis of differentdiscipline markets and different levels of primary concern, by contrast, for instance,with Higher Education Studies. A full study would prolong the kind of analysis offeredby R. Szreter in two articles published in early issues of the journal: 'Institutionalisinga New Specialism: Early Years of the Journal of Educational Sociology' (Szreter,1980) and 'Writings and Writers on Education in British Sociology Periodicals, 1953-1979' (Szreter, 1983)

Margaret Archer's structuralist appropriation of Bourdieu's early workConsideration of the work of Margaret Archer provides a link between the receptionof Bourdieu in the UK in the 1970s and the establishment of the BJSE in 1980 (ofwhich she was a member of the Editorial Board). In the late 1960s, Margaret Archerhad, like Michael Young, become irritated by the extent to which functionalistassumptions were dominating the agenda for sociological research in the educationalfield. Unlike Young, however, Archer eschewed the attractions of phenomenologyand sought, instead, a perspective derived from the comparative analysis of socialstructures. Her article of 1970 entitled 'Egalitarianism in English and FrenchEducational Sociology' was an important statement of her position. Politicalcommitment to egalitarianism had led to research that had been:... almostexclusively oncernedwith the distribution f education, gnoring ssuesaboutitscontentandprocedures,whichmaybe affectedbydistribution, utarenotjustifiedbyit. (Archer, 1970)Archer quoted from Ioan Davies's 'The Management of Knowledge: A Critique of theUse of Typologies in Educational Sociology' (which had appeared in Sociologyin 1970before inclusion in M. F. D. Young's [1971] Knowledge and Control) to support herown view that sociological research had become over-concerned with the input toeducation. Archer's article pre-dated the debate of the early 1970s and it is clear thatshe would have been unhappy with the politicization of the sociology of education thatwas apparent in that debate. Equally, she clearly wrote from close acquaintance withBourdieu's untranslated accounts of his educational researches. With R. K. Kendall'sReporton an inquiryinto applicationsfor admission to universities(1957) in England, she


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420 D. Robbinsalso singled out, for France, Bourdieu and Passeron's (1964a) Les e'tudiantset leursetudes to suggest that in both countries the analysis of higher education had, hitherto,concentrated 'upon differential chances of entry according to social class'. Similarly,she quoted from Les he'ritiers(Bourdieu & Passeron, 1964b) to substantiate hergeneral contention that

... therehas been a tendencyto equateequality n educationwith the absenceof socialclass influence on educational opportunity and to take proportional representation of thedifferent social classes at each level of schooling as its yardstick. (Archer, 1970)Finally, the article concluded with a close analysis of the different theoreticalresponses of Touraine and Bourdieu/Passeron to the student unrest of May 1968.The purpose of the comparison, however, was not to express a preference for oneposition or the other, but rather to show that both demonstrated the inadequacy ofmethodologies that paid insufficient attention to macrosociological understandingand to show that both, in this respect, shared a common characteristic of adistinctively French orientation:

These two studies have only been dwelt upon to illustrate the ways in which weakness inthe macrosociological understanding of education leads to overemphasis of eitherinternal or external determination of University goals and how over-preoccupation withsocial stratification leads to an exaggerated view of students as either future elites or sub-elites. In other words, they are studies which find their place in a distinctive sociologicaltradition and share with it the overriding preoccupation with egalitarianism. (Archer,1970)

With Michalina Vaughan, Archer published a historical study of educational changethat sought to be comparative and macrosociological-Social Conflict and EducationalChange in England and France, 1789-1848 (Vaughan & Archer, 1971)-and in 1972she edited Students, University and Society (Archer, 1972). The exposition ofmethodology of the earlier book appeared as 'Domination and assertion ineducational systems' as the third contribution to Earl Hopper's (1971) Readings inthe Theory of Educational Systems, but, otherwise, it appears that Archer was notdirectly involved in the 'new directions' debate nor in the ideological appropriation ofBourdieu's researches. She seems to have made space at the University of Readingand it was there that, beyond the struggle of competing readings in the sociology ofeducation, she tried to develop macrosociological studies that would situateeducational research within a comparative framework. Under the auspices of theGraduate School of Contemporary European Studies, Giner and Archer organized aseries of seminars that brought together colleagues who dealt with various aspects ofEuropean society on a country-by-country basis. The outcome of this first series ofseminars was Contemporary Europe: Class, Status and Power, which was published in1971 (Archer & Giner, 1971). This was followed by a further one-day seminar as aresult of which it was suggested that the contributions and discussions should:... eventually be published as a new symposium which would look at European societiesacross state frontiers, isolating emerging structures, international cultural patterns, andshared institutions, cleavages and conflicts. (Giner & Archer, 1978, pp. vii-viii)


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Transculturaltransferability of Bourdieu's sociology 421The final outcome was ContemporaryEurope. Social Structures and Cultural Patterns(Giner & Archer, 1978) for which Margaret Archer herself contributed the first,methodological chapter entitled 'The Theoretical and the Comparative Analysis ofSocial Structure'. Here she suggested that recent tendencies-in the 'new soci-ology'-towards 'methodological individualism' had served to generate a conver-gence, through common opposition, between Marxist and functionalist views ofstructure that were, in any case, theoretically compatible:

... developmentsof the phenomenological raditionwith their rejectionof objectivestructuraland culturalpropertiesand (concomitant)neglectof macroscopicproblemshaveprompteda closingof ranksamong macro-sociologists.For the positiontakenbybothethnomethodologistsndthetougherversionsof symbolicnteractionismonstitutean attackon the problems,subject-matter nd methodologywhich are centralto thelatter. (Archer & Giner, 1978, p. 2)The published collection of ContemporaryEurope included an article that had beenpublished in French in 1973 by Bourdieu, Boltanski and Saint-Martin entitled 'Lesstrategies de reconversion. Les classes sociales et le systeme d'enseignement'(Bourdieu et al., 1973). The translation of the text-rendered as 'Changes in SocialStructure and Changes in the Demand for Education'-also included a translation ofthe first footnote in which the authors had sought to locate their new article alongsidetheir other recent researches. The footnote ran:

The analyses presented here are based on a body of empirical research, the findings ofwhich(particularlyhe statistical indings)havebeen published n detailelsewhere.SeeespeciallyP. Bourdieu, Reproductionulturelle t reproductionociale',Informationsurles sciences sociales, Vol X, no. 2, 1971, pp. 45-79; P. Bourdieu, L. Boltanski, P.Maldidier, 'La Defense du corps', Informations ur les sciencessociales,vol X, no. 4, 1971;L. Boltanski, 'L'Espace positionnel. Multiplicite des positions institutionnelles et habitusde classe,' RevuefranCaisede sociologie,Vol XIV, 1973, pp. 3-26 ... (Archer & Giner,1978, p. 221)

The authors had wanted to demonstrate the continuity and coherence of their recentresearch, but the effect of the reproduction of the footnote in the English translationwas to emphasize the Frenchness of the analyses and findings. The orientation of thecollection is indicated by the way in which Archer introduced the work of Bourdieuand Boltanski in her initial summary of the collected texts. She offered a comparisonbetween the Bourdieu/Boltanski text and an earlier contribution and commented:

WhilstCauser' discussesdegreesof interdependencen a relationshipwhich some haveinterpreted s one of completedependence,Bourdieuand Boltanskiare concernedwiththe opposite-the detection of an underlying nterdependencebetween parts whichsuperficially ppear o be becomingmoreindependentof one another. n examining heinterfaces etweenoccupationaltructure, lass stratificationndtheeducational ystem,they in fact seek to show that the three remain closely linked despite appearancesindicating their progressive dissociation. (Archer & Giner, 1978, pp. 20-21)

What we see, therefore, in Archer's work of the 1970s in respect of the work ofBourdieu is a different kind of appropriation from that which was occurring within thecontext of the 'new sociology' debate. Archer wanted to use Bourdieu's work not so


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422 D. Robbinsmuch in itself but, instead, as a phenomenon that could be absorbed into a moregeneral, structuralist account of the relations between education and occupationalstructure. She aspired to produce an analytical model that, recognizing the culturalspecificity of Bourdieu's work, would potentially transcend it.

The emergence of Bourdieu's post-structuralismIn fact, Bourdieu had, from the mid-1960s onwards, been gradually articulating theposition that was to be labelled 'post-structuralist'. A key text of this period'Condition de classe et position de classe' (Bourdieu, 1966)-argued explicitly againstthe structuralist attempt to extrapolate institutional patterns or patterns of socialbehaviour across cultures on the grounds that these patterns were reflections of thedispositions of the observers and insufficiently recognized that particular structuresare the constructs of social agents working within their discrete cultural contexts.Similarly, 'La comparabilite des systemes d'enseignement' (Bourdieu, 1967) soughtto argue that the process of making comparisons across culture involved constructinga model of structural homogeneity by reference to which dissimilarities might bemeasured and that the application of the descriptive model tended to becomeprescriptive (anticipating the argument of 'Decrire et prescrire'; Bourdieu, 1981). Inparticular, this was an article that was a contribution to a collection of essays onEducation, developpement et democratie, which contended that the application ofanalytical models of higher education systems derived from Western Europeancapitalist states constituted a form of 'symbolic violence' in relation to the indigenoussystem in Eastern European communist states. The essence of Bourdieu's post-structuralist method was stated in Esquissed'une the'orie e la pratique (Bourdieu, 1972)and published in English a year later as a self-contained article entitled 'The ThreeForms of Theoretical Knowledge' (Bourdieu, 1973b) before it was reformulated andincluded in the opening chapter of Outlineof a theoryof practice (Bourdieu, 1977). Thismade it clear that Bourdieu was not sympathetic to only an ethnomethodologicalapproach nor to only a structuralist approach. He argued that it was not possible forstructuralist analysis to remain hors de combat so as detachedly to disclose patterns indisparate primary experience. There had to be a second 'epistemological break' bymeans of which structuralist knowledge could itself be subjected to sociologicalscrutiny so as to reveal the covert social purpose behind the imposition of certainframeworks of conceptual order on the behaviour of individuals and societiespossessing their own inherent motivations and self-understandings. 'Les strategies dereconversion' (Bourdieu et al., 1973) was an important text in the development ofBourdieu's application of a post-structuralist framework to encounters within societyrather than simply the conceptual encounters between observer and observed. Thepoint of the article was to show that objective, structuralist sociological researchsought to explain the relations between education and employment by hypostatizingboth spheres, whereas reflexive, post-structuralist analysis had the capacity to showthe intrinsic dynamics. Post-structuralist analysis could show that in any given societythere are culturally specific power struggles in operation that mean there is a constant


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Transcultural transferability of Bourdieu's sociology 423shifting of the reciprocal relationship between education and employment. Based on astudy of the inter-generational succession strategies of the 'patrons' of 100 leadingFrench firms ('le patronat'), Bourdieu argued that the social status of occupationsalters as a direct consequence of the democratizing of the 'meritocratic' access to theseoccupations or, alternatively, that the status of different subjects of study changes sothat employment-friendly study appropriates the meritocratic legitimacy of traditionalstudy in order to safeguard the interests of those possessing economic power.The important point for the purpose of this article is that it was a necessary corollaryof the post-structuralist position Bourdieu was developing that he should subject theeducational context within which he was working to sociological analysis. HomoAcademicus (Bourdieu, 1984) worked from a conventional sociology of knowledgeaccount of knowledge construction in Parisian higher education institutions thatBourdieu had undertaken in 1968. The analysis was transformed by the way in whichhe returned to the earlier findings, carried out supplementary research, and produceda text in which he sought to show that the intellectual positions adopted by individualswithin different institutions was a function of their 'strategies of reconversion'-theirattempts to trade power and status acquired intellectually for economic and politicalpower and vice versa. The English translation of Homo Academicus added an articlethat had been separately published in French in 1975 as 'Les categories del'entendement professoral' (Bourdieu & de Saint Martin, 1975). Here Bourdieuhad demonstrated that the discourse used by professors in marking the work of theirstudents at the Ecole Normale Superieure was one aspect of a socialization processwhereby was created an espritde corpsthat would socially define normaliens for life. Hewent on to document a similar process of social differentiation in relation to theFrench 'grandes ecoles' and the 'classes preparatoires to these institutions, and hepublished his findings in La noblessed'etat: Grandes e'coleset espritde corps (Bourdieu,1989). The analysis can be regarded as an application to educational institutions ofthe social critique of judgement that Bourdieu had offered in La distinction. (1979).Bourdieu's analysis of the marking of professors might just as appropriately have beenentitled the 'categories of professorial judgement' and the Kantian echo is there inboth texts. The alternative title for the article might have established the link with Ladistinctionthat, in translation, became lost as the book was subtitled 'A Social Critiqueof the Judgement of Taste' and was captured for debate within the field of CulturalStudies. La noblessed'etat analysed the social procedures by which private educationalinstitutions were agents in constructing their own distinctive social status-by theirselection processes, curricula, teaching methods, and assessment procedures. Thebook used some of the findings of the research project on 'le patronat' and it alsoreflected Bourdieu's increased recognition of the power of 'institutionalised capital'rather than the individualized 'cultural capital' as formulated in his earlier work.

Bourdieu's continuing engagement with educational issues, 1970-2002It would be possible to go on in great detail to illustrate the way in which Bourdieu'swork continued to impinge on educational practices and developments in the


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424 D. Robbinsorganizationof educational systems. I will simply mention three pertinent examples,one from each of the last threedecades of his life, before turningto the main thrustofmy argument. The first example is the report that Bourdieu edited on behalf of theprofessors of the College de France in response to a commission from PresidentMitterand to formulate some Propositionspour l'enseignement de l'avenir (Bourdieu,1985). There were nine propositions, which were elaboratedin turn. The first threewere as follows:

1. The unity of science and the plurality of cultures. Harmonious instruction mustbe ableto reconcile he universalismnherent n scientific houghtand the relativismtaughtin the humansciences,alert as they areto the pluralityof cultural ife-styles,sensesand sensitivities.2. The diversification of forms of excellence. Teaching must leave no stoneunturned to combat the unitary view of 'intelligence'which brings about thehierarchisationf formsof achievement n relation o each other. It should increasethe sociallyrecognised orms of excellence.3. The multiplication of opportunities. It would be important to weaken as much aspossiblethe consequencesof exam resultsand to preventeither the successfulfrombenefiting rom a kind of consecrationor the unsuccessful rombeingsubjected o akind of life sentence. This should be done by multiplyingthe number of careerpathwaysand the routes between them and by weakeningall irreversible ut-offpoints. (Propositions,985, p. 47; my translation)Shortly after the publication of the Report, Bourdieu gave an interview in LaQuinzaine Litteraire in which he was asked specifically about the second and thirdpropositions. Referring to the concept of 'reproduction', which had substantiallyestablished his international reputation, Bourdieu commented:

Yes, I think that the two main contributionsof the schooling system to socialreproductionarethe verdicteffect- the deliberateeffect which locks those subjecttotrial(lesjusticiables)nto anessence,a nature('youare that andnot anythingelse'), andthe hierarchisationffectwhichconsists n imposing he acceptance hat there s a linearhierarchyof all competencesand that all are only downgraded orms of the perfectcompetencewhich is that of the cacique2for the ENA3 ... In that way everyoneissomeoneelse manque.(Bourdieu,1985, pp. 8-9; my translation)The second example derives from the account of French poverty that, as director of ateam of researchers, Bourdieu published in 1993 as La mise'redu monde (Bourdieu etal., 1993). The publication offered a series of transcripts of interviews with variousrepresentatives of deprived sectors of the French population and also with variousrepresentatives of caring professionals-teachers and social workers. The transcriptswere contextualized by means of short introductions provided by the academicinterviewers or observers. The intention was that, in this way, the accounts offered bythe researchers would be presented alongside the perceptions of the interviewees andcontribute to a multi-perspectival vision of complex social situations. By offering thetranscripts of people occupying different power positions within situations, it was alsointended that there would be a 'maieutic' effect whereby the interviewers acted as'midwives' for a series of virtual or vicarious encounters. One of the sections of the textwas devoted to interviews between researchers and teenage school pupils and between


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Transculturaltransferability of Bourdieu's sociology 425researchersand teachers. The effect of the juxtapositionswas not only to show howdifferently pupils and teachers perceived the situations that they shared, but also,relatedly,to demonstrate that the pedagogical relationshipcould not be autonomizedbut had to be understood as only one dimension in situations of multiple andinteractingdeprivations.The third example comes from Bourdieu's last course of lectures given at theCollege de Franceduringthe firsthalf of 2001 and published later thatyearas Sciencede la scienceet reflexivite Bourdieu, 2001). Bourdieu began his enquiry by outliningsome of the recent sociological analyses of science, beginning with the 'structural-functionalist' account offered by R. K. Merton. Bourdieu discusses a Mertonianarticleby Cole and Cole entitled 'Scientific Output and Recognition:A Study in theOperation of the Reward System in Science' (Cole & Cole, 1967) and he alsodiscusses Merton's own contributions to the sociology of science, particularly TheSociology of Science. Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (Merton, 1973). Assummarized by Bourdieu, the Cole and Cole article analysed the research of 120physicists, counting 'forms of recognition', 'honorific awards and memberships inhonorific societies', positions 'at top rankeddepartments'and citations as indices ofthe use of researchby others. Bourdieumakes a seriesof comments on this approach.He begins:

This research akes ndicesofrecognition,ikecitation,attheir acevalue,andeverythingtakes place as if statisticalenquirieswere aimed at verifying hat the distributionofrewardss perfectly ustified.This typically tructural-functionalistisionis inscribed nthe notion of 'rewardystem' s definedby Merton ... (Bourdieu,2001, pp. 27-28; mytranslation)He continues:

The reward ystemorientates he most productive owards he most productiveroutesand the wisdom of the systemwhichrewards hosewho merit t alsoconsignsothers todead-endroutes ikeadministrativeareers. .. The moreresearchers rerecognized bythe academicsystem and then by the scientificworld), the more they produce andcontinueto be recognized. Bourdieu,2001, p. 29; my translation)And he concludes:

Veryobjectivist,veryrealist(thereis neverany doubt whether the social worldexists,whether scienceexists, etc.), veryclassical(the most classical nstrumentsof scientificmethod aredeployed),this approachdoes not make the least reference o the way inwhich scientific conflicts are regulated.It accepts, in fact, the dominant, logicist,definition of science to which it intends to conform ... (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 30; mytranslation)I do not need to spell out the ways in which these three examples of Bourdieu's worksince the mid-1980s show how far his analyses related to issues that concerneducational practice in the United Kingdom at present. Suffice it to say thathis awareness of the French educational system (combined, increasingly, with hissensitivity to international developments) enabled him to articulate a coherentsystem of thought that suggested links between social phenomena. Consistently andcogently, he questioned whether social science knowledge was of the same kind


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426 D. Robbinsas knowledge in the natural sciences. He therefore thought it possible thatthe adoption of norms of universal social science knowledge might be a strategyadopted by educational institutions to maintain a 'meritocratic' hierarchy thateuphemizes social distinction, devaluing the social perceptions of socially excludedminorities. He would also have thought that the research 'reward system' or researchassessment exercise is as much a device for maintaining a self-replicating socialcommunity of researchers as, in the teaching context, are admission and assessmentprocedures, and that both are strategically deployed by institutions to reinforce socialdistinctions.

The BJSE case studyThese may be superficial or facile transferences from Bourdieu's thinking to thecurrent UK situation, but my concluding point is to draw attention to the fact thatthere has been very little British effort to consider the relevance of Bourdieu's 'recent'(post-1980) sociological work for an understanding of current educational develop-ments at all levels. It is even possible to suggest that the exclusion of seriousconsideration of the implications of his thinking constitutes a verification of hisanalysis.The Editorial of the first volume of the BJSE in 1980 made two key points. Itargued, first, that there was a place for a new journal because the American Sociology ofEducation 'shares in the ethnocentrism characterising American sociology and focusesvery closely and also very selectively upon the American scene' (BJSE [1980], Volume1, No. 1, p. 3). The new journal would remedy this situation 'by providing aninternational, albeit British-based, forum for the publication of the increasing amountof work in the field of sociology of education' (BJSE [1980], Volume 1, No. 1, p. 3).It argued, second, that there was 'no such thing as a consensus on the right approachto the sociology of education' and it therefore followed that the present directionof the journal would be 'concerned with questions of unity, mutual respect andattempts to draw the various tendencies together in a profitable way' (BJSE [1980],Volume 1, No. 1, p. 4). The initial team of 24 people-Executive Editors and theEditorial Board-was ideologically balanced but it was not institutionally balanced.Thirty 'new' polytechnics had been in existence since 1969/70 and, by 1980, hadalmost as many advanced students as universities (see Pratt, 1997, pp. 26-32) butthere was only one representative from the sector in the team. As early as Volume 2,No. 3, of 1981, there was a new Editorial that heralded an increased emphasis oninternational educational developments. This led to several excellent 'review essays'such as that in by Anton Wesselingh (1982) on 'Sociology of Education in theNetherlands: situations, developments, debates', which considered then specificity ofother social and educational contexts but, nevertheless, the tendency of the newinternational dimension was towards conceptual homogeneity, likely to emphasizetransnational structural uniformity rather than cultural difference. There was adanger, therefore, both that educational theories and theorists would becomedecontextualized and that, relatedly, theories would become detached from social and


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Transcultural transferability of Bourdieu's sociology 427educational realities. Volume 5, No. 2 in 1984 showed awareness of this latter danger.The introduction to a symposium on 'The Cuts in British Higher Education' thatincluded an article by John Brennan of the Council for National Academic Awardsentitled 'Sociology, Sociologists and survival in Public Sector Colleges' made thecomment that:

In the future,historiansof educationmaywellbe surprisedby the dearthof material neducational ournalsof our time about the dramaticchanges implemented n Britishhighereducation n the early o mid-1980s. (Brennan,1984, p. 167)This point was well made and it applies equally to the response to the dramaticchanges that have occurred since 1984.

Meanwhile, the work of Bourdieu was receiving attention. Originsand Destinations.Family, Class, and Education in Modern Britain by Halsey, Heath and Ridge waspublished in 1980 (Halsey et al., 1980). Based on a referenced knowledge of only twoarticles by Bourdieu ('The school as a conservative force' [Bourdieu, 1974] and'Cultural reproduction and social reproduction' [Bourdieu, 1973b]), they hadpresented a critique of Bourdieu's theories of cultural capital and reproduction. BJSE(Volume 2, No. 1 of 1981) carried a Review Symposium that included a review by M.Hammersley in partial defence of Bourdieu. Volume 3, No. 1 carried a piece byHeath, Halsey and Ridge in which it was manifest that they believed that the widerdistribution of educational qualifications amongst social classes discreditedBourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction. Hammersley's rejoinder rightly pointedout that:

... wide disseminationof educationalcredentials s perfectly compatiblewith a strictreproduction f culturalcapital,sinceBourdieu ays greatemphasison status differencebetweeninstitutions, ubjectsand courses.(BJSE [1982], 3 (1), p. 91)In other words, Halsey et al. were taking qualifications at face value whereas theessence of the position that Bourdieu had already developed and was to consolidate inhis work on 'le patronat' was that the valuation of qualifications is a pawn in the gameof occupational allocation. Halsey et al. were disinclined to problematize anautonomous sociology of education perspective by placing it in the wider context ofsociologies of culture and knowledge. This exchange is symptomatic of the responseto Bourdieu in the subsequent years. As the field of education became autonomizedand internationalized, references to Bourdieu's Reproduction n Education, Society andCulture seemed to become at once more and more obligatory in articles and more andmore neutralized in respect of specific application. A citation index of references tothat one text in the journal would provide rich support for Bourdieu's scepticismabout citation as a measure of value. In general, it remained the case that, throughoutthe life of the journal, references to the work of Bourdieu have almost exclusively beento those texts that were translated into English in the 1970s from texts that he wroteduring the 1960s, arising from the educational research that he carried out with Jean-Claude Passeron at the Centre de Sociologie Europeenne, Paris. There have, ofcourse, been some wider discussions of Bourdieu's work, such as Roy Nash's'Bourdieu on Education and Social and Cultural Reproduction' (BJSE [1990],


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428 D. RobbinsVolume 11, No. 3); Harker and May's 'Code and Habitus: Comparing the Accountsof Bernstein and Bourdieu' (BJSE [1993], Volume 14, No. 2); and the reviewsymposium in which Sara Delamont, Roy Nash and Michael Apple reviewed RichardJenkins's introduction to the work of Bourdieu (BJSE [1993], Volume 14, No. 3)-but, as their titles suggest, the first two were still looking back to the terminology of'habitus' and cultural reproduction, and the third moved towards a broaderperspective as a result of the scope of Jenkins's book. In the review symposium,Roy Nash commented:

It is becoming ncreasingly bviousas we get to gripswith moreand more of Bourdieu'swork .. thatthis is a sociologistoperatingwith a set of concepts, eclecticallyderived,butmoreor lesscoherentlyorganisednto theirnewframework, ndcreatinga methodologysuitablefor applicationto investigationsof the broadestrange of social events andphenomena. (1993, p. 322)

Quite so, but how is it, therefore, that the texts produced by Bourdieu since the late1970s that have been translated into English and published, mainly by Polity Press,since 1984, have commanded so little attention? Serious engagement with HomoAcademicus (Bourdieu, 1984)-Homo Academicus (Bourdieu, 1988)-and La noblessed'etat (Bourdieu, 1989)-The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power(Bourdieu, 1996)-in particular, has been notably lacking. These are two textsdirectly about education but, as I have tried to show, other key texts such as La mise'redu monde and La distinction relate closely to educational experiences and demandattention.

The challengeWe are compelled to suppose that there has been a tacit denial of Bourdieu's message.It is as if it is safe to refer to the Bourdieu of the 1960s as some kind of conceptualguru, some kind of legitimate citation fodder, but unsafe to respond to what he wasactually trying to say for 45 years. It is as if the sociology of education has become anintellectual instrument for preserving institutional and social hierarchies rather thanan instrument for stimulating social criticism and reflection on egalitarianism. This isnot to ignore that his work may prove crucially to have been the product of specificallyFrench educational and social conditions and, as Archer contended, of a typicallyFrench obsession with equality, but it is to urge that we should look analytically atthose different conditions of production of theory and assess how far his insights aretransferable to our situation.

Notes1. G. Causer's 'Private Capital and the State in Western Europe' (Giner &Archer, 1978, pp. 28-54; my note).2. Pupiltaking irstplacein the entranceexaminationo thegrandes 'coles.3. Ecole Nationale d'Administration.


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