Transcript Education and Socialization Education and Post

EDM 6210
Education Policy and Society
Lecture 8
Education Policy and Social Differentiation:
The Class-Formation Analysis
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From Class Structure to Class Formation
 Orthodox Marxist core mode of class analysis
Class location, class place and structure analysis:
The class in itself thesis
Class formation and class struggle: The class for
itself thesis
The theory of history: The thesis of class struggle
history
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Class
Formation
(Wright, 1997, p. 374)
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(Wright, 1997, p. 379)
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(Wright, 1997, p. 380)
Strong or weak class formation
Unitary or fragmented class formation
Revolutionary, counter-revolution or reformist class formation
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From Class Structure to Class Formation
 E.O. Wright micro-macro levels of class
analysis
 Micro-level class analysis
 Class location
• Class places
• Class positions
 Class consciousness
• Perception and observation
• Theories of consequences
• Preferences
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(Wright, 1997, p. 385)
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(Wright, 1997, p. 385-6) 8
(Wright, 1997, p. 386)
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From Class Structure to Class Formation
 E.O. Wright micro-macro levels of class
analysis
 Micro-level class analysis
 Class location
 Class consciousness
 Class practice: “Activities engaged in by
members of a class using class capacities in
order to realize at least some of their class
interest.” (1997, p. 381)
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From Class Structure to Class Formation
 E.O. Wright micro-macro levels of class
analysis
Macro-level class analysis
Class structure
Class formation
• Material interests generated from class structure
• Class identity emerged from lived experience
• Resources distributed in the class structure
Class struggle
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From Class Structure to Class Formation
 E.O. Wright micro-macro levels of class
analysis
 Micro-level class analysis: Class consciousness
 Macro-level class analysis: Class formation
 The micro-macro linkage in class analysis
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Class Consciousness and Class Culture
 E.O. Wright survey of class consciousness
 Measuring class consciousness
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(Wright, 1985, p. 146)
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Class Consciousness and Class Culture
 E.O. Wright survey of class consciousness
 Measuring class consciousness
 Class ideology study in three countries
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Class Formation and Struggle: Debate on
the Historical Mission of the Proletarian
 Margaret R. Somers’ deconstructing Marxist
class formation theory
 The metanarrative underlying the class formation
theory
 From pre-industrial to industrial society
 Proletarianization
 The teleological prediction underlying class
formation theory
 The historical mission of English working class
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Class Formation and Struggle: Debate on
the Historical Mission of the Proletarian
 Margaret R. Somers’ deconstructing Marxist
class formation theory
 The anomalous proposition in Marxist’s class
formation study
Why have the English working class (and just
about all working classes) resolutely refused to
behave “properly” or to perform its “historical
mission”?
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Class Formation and Struggle: Debate on
the Historical Mission of the Proletarian
 Somers Theory of class formation as social
narrativity
 The concept of social narrativity
Social narrativity is “concepts of social
epistemology and social ontology. (It)… posits
through narrartivity that we come to know,
understand, and make sense of the social world,
and through which we constitute our social
identity. It matters… that we come to be (usually
unconsciously) who we are (however ephemeral,
multiple, and changing) by our locations in social
narrative and networks that rarely of our own
making.” (Somers, 1997, p.82)
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Class Formation and Struggle: Debate on
the Historical Mission of the Proletarian
 Somers Theory of class formation as social
narrativity
 Component of social narrativity



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Relationality of parts,
Temporality, sequence and places,
Causal emplotment, and
Selective appropriation
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Class Formation and Struggle: Debate on
the Historical Mission of the Proletarian
 Somers Theory of class formation as social
narrativity
 Four kinds of narrativity
 Ontological narratives and the constitution of
narrative identity
 Public, cultural and institutional narratives
 Conceptual / analytical / sociological narrativity
 Metanarrativity
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Class Formation and Struggle: Debate on
the Historical Mission of the Proletarian
 Somers Theory of class formation as social
narrativity
 Two methodological concepts
 Narrative identity: Class identity, class
consciousness and class action are mediated by
narrative rather by interest
 Relational setting: It refers to the temporal and
spatial configuration of public narrativities and
social and cultural environment within which
ontological narratives are constituted.
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Class Formation and Struggle: Debate on
the Historical Mission of the Proletarian
 Somers Theory of class formation as social
narrativity
Two methodological concepts
 Narrative identity: Class identity, class
consciousness and class action are mediated by
narrative rather by interest
 Relational setting: It refers to the temporal and
spatial configuration of public narrativities and
social and cultural environment within which
ontological narratives are constituted.
Somers’ research on English working class
formation in 1800-1850
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Narrative of citizenship formation and constitution of public
sphere OR narrative of class formation and constitution of
class society
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
 Bourdieu’s methodological stance in class analysis
“The construction of the theory of the social space
presupposes a series of breaks with Marxist theory.
 It presupposes a break with the tendency to emphasize
substances — here, real groups whose number, limits,
members, etc. one claims to be able to define — at the
expense of relations and
 with the intellectualist illusion which leads one to consider the
theoretical class, constructed by the social scientist, as a real
class, an effectively mobilized group;
 a break with economics, which leads one to reduce the social
field, a multi-dimensional space, to the economic field alone,
to the relations of economic production; and
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
Bourdieu’s methodological stance in class analysis
“The construction of the theory of the social space ….
 a break, finally, with objectivism, which goes hand in hand
with intellectualism, and which leads one to overlook the
symbolic struggles that take place in different fields, and
where what is at stake is the very representation of the social
world, and in particular the hierarchy within each of the fields
and between the different fields.” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 229; my
numbering)
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Bourdieu, Pierre (1991) “Social Space and the Genesis
of ‘Classes’. Pp.229-251. In P. Bourdieu. Language
and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Pierre Bourdieu, (1930-2002)
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
 Bourdieu’s theory of social space
 Concepts of social space and field
 Social space: “The social world can be represented in the
form of a (multi-dimensional) space constructed on the
basis of principles of differentiation and distribution
constituted by the set of properties active in the social
universe under consideration, that is, able to confer force
or power on their possessor in that universe. Agents and
groups of agents are thus defined by their relative
positions in this space. Each of them is confined to a
position or a precise class of neighbouring position.”
(Bourdieu, 1991, p. 229-230)
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
 Bourdieu’s theory of social space
 Concepts of social space and field
 Field and field of force: “In so far as the properties chosen
to construct this space are active properties, the space can
also be described as a field of forces: in other words, as a
set of objective power relations imposed on all those who
enter this field, relations which are not reducible to the
intentions of individual agents or even to direct interactions
between agents.” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 230)
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
Bourdieu’s concept of capital:
 “The active properties that are chosen as principles
of construction of the social space are the different
kinds of power or capital that are current in the
field.” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 230, my underline)
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
Bourdieu’s concept of capital:
 Definition of capital:
“Capital is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or
its 'incorporated', embodied form) which, when
appropriated on a private, i.e. exclusive, basis by agents
or groups of agents, enable them to appropriate social
energy in the form of reified or living labor. It is a force
inscribed in objective or subjective structures, but it is
also the principle underlying the immanent regularities of
the social world. It is what makes the games of society—
not least, the economic game—something other than
simple games of chance offering at every moment the
possibility of a miracle.”(Bourdieu, 1997, p. 46)
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
Bourdieu’s concept of capital:
Forms of capital
 Economic capital “is immediately and directly convertible
into money and may be institutionalized in the form of
property rights.”
 Cultural capital can exit in three states (1997, p. 47)
• embodied state, i.e. in the form of long-lasting
dispositions of the mind and body; (1997, p. 47)
• objectified state, i.e. in the form of cultural goods
(pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines,
etc.), which are the trace or realization of theories or
critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.
• institutionalized state, i.e. in the form of educational
qualifications (1997, p. 47)
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
Bourdieu’s concept of capital:
Forms of capital
 Social capital “is the aggregate of the actual or potential
resources which are linked to possession of a durable
network of more or less institutionalized relationships of
mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, to
membership in a group – which provides each of its
members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital.
(1997, p. 51)
 “Symbolic capital commonly called prestige, reputation,
fame, etc.” (1991, p.230)
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
Concept of the “space of positions”: As each forms of
capital establishes itself as the active property in a
particular a field of force, “a multi-dimensional space of
position” is formed. Agents are thus be distributed in this
space of positions in two dimensions, “in the first
dimension, according to the overall volume of capital they
possess, and, in the second dimension, according to the
composition of their capital – in other words, according to
the relative weight of the different kinds of capital in the
total set of their assets.” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 231)
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
 Concept of the “space of positions”:
 …..Subsequently, Bourdieu reformulates the
fundamental dimensions in the constructing space of
positions into three. In his own words, “one can
construct a space whose three fundamental dimensions
are defined by volume of capital, composition of capital,
and change in these two properties over time.”
(Bourdieu, 1979, p. 114)
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
 Concept of class: “One the basis of knowledge of the
space of positions, one can crave out classes in the
logical sense of the word, i.e. sets of agents who
occupy similar positions and who, being place in
similar conditions and submitted to similar types of
conditioning, have every chance of having similar
dispositions and interests, and thus of producing
similar practices and adopting similar stances.”
(Bourdieu, 1991, p. 231)
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
 Concept of class habitus:
 Concept of habitus as methodological device
synthesizing the controversy between
methodological objectivism and idealism and as one
of the essential constituting concept of Bourdieu’s
Theory of Practice/Logic of Practice.
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
Concept of class habitus: …
 Definition of habitus: It can simply be “defined as a system of
dispositions” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 214) found in practices of
agents and group of agents. More specifically, it refers to
 "systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured
structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is,
as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and
representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes
without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express
mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.
Objectively regulated and ‘regular’ without being in any way the
product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated
without being the product of the organizing (orchestrating) action of
a conductor” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 53; 1977, p. 72)
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
Concept of class habitus:
 Definition of habitus: ….
 “The habitus, the durably installed generative principle of regulated
improvisation, produces practices which tend to reproduce the
regularities immanent in the objective conditions to the production
of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands
inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation, as defined by
the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus.”
(1977, P.78)
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
Concept of class habitus:
 Habitus and history: Bourdieu conceives habitus as
“a product of history”.
 “The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and
collective practices – more history – in accordance with the
schemes generated by history. It ensures the active
presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each
organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought
and action, tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices
and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal
rules and explicit norms.” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 54)
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
Concept of class habitus:
 Habitus and history: Bourdieu conceives habitus as “a product
of history”.
 “The habitus – embodied history, internalized as a second nature
and so forgotten as history – is the active presence of the whole
past of which it is the product. As such, it is what gives practices
their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of
the immediate present. This autonomy is that of the past, enacted
and acting, which functioning as accumulated capital, produces
history on the basis of history and so ensure the permanence in
change that makes the individual agent a world within the world.”
(Bourdieu, 1990, P. 56)
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
Concept of class habitus:
 Habitus and institution:
 Bourdieu indicates that history is not only objectified in habitus and
also in institution. He underlines that within the logic of practice,
there are “two objectifications of history, objectification in bodies
and objectification in institutions.” (1990, p. 57)
 The dialectic between habitus and institution: These two modes of
objectified history are related in a dialectic way. It is within the logic
of practice, there lies “the dialectic between habitus and
institutions, that is, between two modes of objectification of past
history. In which there is constantly created a history that inevitably
appears …as both original and inevitable.” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 57)
On the one hand, institution or collective history are inculcated,
appropriated and socialized into individual and constituted her
habitus and individual history. On the other, it is in habitus and its
generated practices that institution will find its way to reactivate
and realize in daily human practices.
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
Concept of class habitus:
Concept of class habitus:
 One of the primary institutional and historical site in which habitus
of agents and groups of agents are formed is class condition. In
Bourdieu’s own words, “the conditionings associated with a
particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus.” (1990,
p. 53)
 “Class habitus, that is, the individual habitus in so far as it
expresses or reflects the class, could be regarded as a subjective
but non-individual system of internal structures, common schemes
of perception, conception and action, which are precondition of all
objectification and apperception; and the objective co-ordination of
practices and the sharing of a world view could be found on the
perfect impersonality and interchangeability of singular practices
and views.” (1990, p. 60)
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Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of Class Practice
Class practice and lifestyle:
In one of his major empirical work, Distinction: A Social Critique
of the Judgement of Taste, Bourdieu demonstrates that the most
distinct practices among social classes are to be found in the
arena of consumptions, more particularly cultural consumptions.
These consumptions will not be confined to “canonized forms of
culture” such as art, literature, music, theater, etc. but also
include consumptions in food, sport, newspapers and
magazines, clothing, etc. (Bourdieu, 1987; and Weininger, 2005)
The distinction in class practices can also be revealed in
difference in “lifestyle” or “stylization of life”, which can
generally be characterized as “the primacy of form over
function.” (Bourdieu, 1978, p. 176)
Other distinct class practices can be found in language use and
body language composure. (Bourdieu, 1987, p. 176-177)
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Bourdieu’s Reproduction Theory of Education
 By applying the conceptual apparatuses found in
Bourdieu’s theory of class practice, educational system,
education policy and more specifically pedagogic action
can be understood as
 “All pedagogic action is, objectively, symbolic violence insofar
as it is the imposition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary
power.” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 5)
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Bourdieu’s Reproduction Theory of Education
 “Insofar as it is a power of symbolic violence, exerted within a
relation of pedagogic communication which can produce its own
specifically symbolic effect only because the arbitrary power
which makes imposition possible is never seen in its full truth;
and insofar as it is the inculcation of a cultural arbitrary, carried
on within a relation of pedagogic communication which can
produce its own, specifically pedagogic effect only because the
arbitrariness of the content inculcated is never seen in its full
truth– pedagogic action necessarily implies, as a social
condition of its exercise, pedagogic authority and the relative
autonomy of the agency commissioned to exercise it.”
(Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 11-12)
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Bourdieu’s Reproduction Theory of Education
“Insofar as it is the arbitrary imposition of a cultural arbitrary
presupposing pedagogic authority, i.e. a delegation of authority,
which requires the pedagogic agency to reproduce the
principles of the cultural arbitrary which a group or class
imposes as worthy of reproduction both by its very existence
and by the fact of delegating to an agency the authority needed
in order to reproduce it, pedagogic action entails pedagogic
work, a process of inculcation which must last long enough to
produce a durable training, i.e. a habitus, the product of
internalization of the principles of a cultural arbitrary capable of
perpetuating itself after pedagogic action has ceased and
thereby of perpetuating in practices the principles of the
internalized arbitrary.” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 31)
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Bourdieu’s Reproduction Theory of Education
“Every institutionalized education system owes the specific
characteristics of its structure and functioning to the fact that, by
the means proper to the institution, it has to produce and
reproduce the institutional conditions whose existence and
persistence (self-reproduction of the system) are necessary both
to the exercise of its essential function of inculcation and to the
fulfillment of its function of reproducing a cultural arbitrary which
it does not produce (cultural reproduction), the reproduction of
which contributes to the reproduction of the relations between
the groups or classes (social reproduction)” (Bourdieu &
Passeron, 1977, p.54)
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Cultural Arbitrary of
the Dominant Class
Social Space/Space of Position
Field of Force
Other Fields
Pedagogic Action
(imposition of cultural arbitrary)
Capital
Pedagogic Authority
Other Forms
of Capitals
Time/History
Social Reproduction
Inculcate
Pedagogic Work
Habitus
Institution
Reactivate
Education Institution
Self (institutional) Reproduction
Cultural Reproduction
Pierre Bourdieu’s Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture
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Debate on Cultural Resistance in Education
Paul Willis’ ethnographic study of working class kids’
resistance to school culture
 Paul Willis (1977) Learning to labor: How working class kids get
working class jobs. From 1972 to 1975 Paul Willis studied 12
working class youths’ school life and the transmission to life on
the shop floor.
 Willis revealed that a kind of school counter-culture prevailed
among his subjects. This culture consisted of elements such as
anti-authority, anti-intellectual, hard-tough masculine identity,
sexism and racism.
 Willis argued that this school counter-culture had direct
relationship with the main features of the shop-floor culture of
the working class.
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Debate on Cultural Resistance in Education
More importantly, the study poses a significant question to the
resistance theory in education and to a larger extent to the theory of
class-culture formation, that is, what is the real meaning of school
counter-culture to working class kids in the context of class
reproduction in class society?
“For no matter what the larger pattern of working class culture and
cycle of its continuous regeneration, no matter what the severity
of disillusion amongst ‘the lads’ as they get older, their passage is
to all intents and purposes irreversible. When the cultural
apprenticeship of the shopfloor is fully worked out, and its main
real activity of arduous production for others in unpleasant
surroundings is seen more clearly, there is a double kind of
entrapment in what might then be seen, as the school was seen
before, as the prison of the workshop. Ironically, as the shopfloor
becomes a prison, education is seen retrospectively, and
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hopelessly, as the only escape.” (Willis, 1977, 107)
Debate on Cultural Resistance in Education
John U. Ogbu’s theory of “acting white”
In an ethnographic study Fordham and Ogbu argue that “one
major reason that black students do poorly in school is that they
experience inordinate ambivalence and affective dissonance in
regard to academic effort and success.” These ambivalence and
dissonance are mainly invoked from the cultural differences
between White and Black American. Ogbu argues that “Black and
White cultural and dialect frames of reference are different and
oppositional.” (Ogbo, 2007, 367)
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Debate on Cultural Resistance in Education
John U. Ogbu’s theory of “acting white”
 Since the cultural and linguistic frames of reference in schools
are predominantly those of White, Black students are therefore
experiencing collective identity ambivalences or even crises
along their educational attainment paths. Ogbu suggests that
they could adopt different strategies coping with the burden of
“acting white”, e.g.
 Assimilation or emulation of White,
 Accommodation without assimilation,
 Ambivalence, and
 Resistance or opposition.
 Ogbu also argues that there are social sanctions, in particular
peer pressure, among Black youths against ‘acting white’. This
would cost some of them their academic achievements.
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Debate on Cultural Resistance in Education
Counter arguments against the “Acting White” theory
Evidences from other ethnic groups in the U.S., especially Asian
Americans, suggest that academic performances cannot simply
be explained away by racial identity or the burden of ‘acting
White’. As Jamie Lew illustrates in his study of Korean American
youths’ academic success and failure, he suggests that they can
be attributed to “Acting Neither White Nor Black.” (Lew 2007)
His findings suggest that cultural and contextual differences in
social class are more essential than racial identity in accounting
for academic success or failure among his subjects, i.e. Korean
American.
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Debate on Cultural Resistance in Education
Counter arguments against the “Acting White” theory
Lew therefore concludes that “The stereotype of Asian ‘success’
much like Black ‘failure’ cannot explained solely on their cultural
orientation. …Through expanding the current debate across and
within racial/ethnic lines, this research shows that culture is
significant and race remain salient; however, researchers may
benefit by examining race relations beyond a Black and white
discourse, and how students’ racial and ethnic identity intersect
with culture, class, race, and school context.” (Lew, 2007, 389)
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Lecture 8
Education Policy and Social Differentiation:
The Class-Formation Analysis
END
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