Their daily rhythms comeunstuck.

One consequenceof this is that poverty is beginning to break into the lower-salaried groupings and even the middle strata, in part becausethey are now often suddenly confronted by the impossibility ofpaying off their accumulated debts

Massunemployment is no longer experienceable as a collective fate inlarge part because it isn’t mass unemployment in the same wayit used to be. It is parceled out and individualized. It is dis-tributed in life-phase portions, as it were. In one way, this repre-sents a kind of democratization, because unemployment nowbecomes an experience that almost everyone shares at one timeor another during her lifetime.

This is also connected to the debate about how to reawakenand enliven civil society. The question there is how to create aspace in which political activities initiated from below canreconnect people to a society in a way that makes sense to them.If citizen work really took off, it could precipitate out into allkinds of initiatives and organizations. They could stretch fromenterprises that bordered on the real economy – for example,attempts to reform our botched-up energy supply system bybuilding small-scale wind and solar power generators andgetting them hooked up to the grid with a decent rate struc-ture; or attempts to develop new forms of education that tookreal advantage of current computer technologies to deepen andbroaden people’s educational connections – to political initia-tives strictly speaking, like aiding and integrating foreigners. Orrediscovering the history of a town or region in order to bringthat history alive, to bring it into contemporary political debates,and perhaps as well to lay the basis for a local tourist economy.And so on. The possibilities are endless. But in order for themto flourish they need a space in which to develop, they needmaterial support, and they need social recognition. Conqueringthis deep-seated conviction that there are no real alternatives topaid labor is an important step in gaining that social recogni-tion. There are attractive alternatives, a wealth of them. But theyneed to be recognized in order to exist

Our jobs and professions determine our securityand participation chances, or our lack of the same. To a greatextent, how we live depends on what we do for a living.But as we have been discussing, these causal chains aregetting more and more difficult to construct.

he British sociologist T. H. Marshall argued shortly afterWorld War II that social security in the broad sense, whichincludes the relative predictability of one’s career chances, is anecessary precondition for people to take seriously and use thepolitical freedoms that exist on paper. For labor society to work,it has to be filled with citizen workers. Citizen workers arepeople who secure their financial existence and self-esteem andself-consciousness through participation in the labor market,and then have free time and energy beyond their jobs to pursueother activities like being an active citizen.

his lifelong activity is assumed to be the center of all socialexistence.Today, work has been revolutionized away from that model.Work has been “flexibilized,” and cut into spatial, temporal, andcontractual packets

In this latter phase, risk consciousness dwells more on risksthat haven’t yet come into existence than on advantages thatmight flow from new developments. The establishment retortsby saying we paint everything in the blackest of colors and willend up strangling progress.

Groups who are affected will no longer have tobear the costs of such illnesses themselves

isk conflicts have a destruc-tive creativity that cuts through existing rules. Consequently,risk crises make it possible to redistribute costs in ways thatwere considered unthinkable until they occurred

To pretend that this multi-level game can be flattened outinto a merely technical question is naïve. That becomes clearwhen it enters the patently political phase and people fight overthe legislative and regulative details.

To misconceive uncertainty as being merely animperfection in our data is to think that all we need is moreinformation and better knowledge, and then we’ll be able topredict and control it just like we used to. But not only can realuncertainties not be resolved through more and better knowl-edge, when we are dealing with what Anthony Giddens callsmanufactured uncertainties, more knowledge can actuallyproduce more uncertainty.

When you see a lot of fingerpointing, it’s a sign that you have a risk conflict, meaning afrenzied attempt by all parties to avoid the risk, rather than acollective attempt to accept it in common, to take joint mea-sures to reduce it, and to bear the compensation costs together.Finger pointing is a sign that things are beyond the control ofpoliticians and technicians.

They seem to move in andmake a nest for themselves not only despite but because of ourattempts to deny them.

Instead what happened is that con-sumers in France and Germany immediately renounced almostall meat consumption regardless of origin.This was an excellent example of the paradoxical honey-scraping effect, where the more you try to get the risk off ofyou, the more you get all over you.

What this makes clear is that risk is not something limited tothe environment. It doesn’t only affect the environment of thepolitical system

between the security that it isthe state’s raison d’être to provide – and which we have up untilnow expected it to provide – and the systematic injuring of thatexpectation that takes place in risk conflicts.

The explosiveness of riskconflicts lies in the fact that they delegitimate the politicalsystem

On the one hand, such move-ments continually renew the credibility claims of the dominantinstitutions by demanding and requiring their seal of approval.On the other hand, they are continually calling those credibil-ity claims into question

The more the rules of law and the rulesof science (working in conjunction) find no valid evidence thata risk has been produced for, which someone can be heldindividually accountable the more risks it is possible for societyto produce, and the more the total potential threat increases

causality cannot be demonstrated, there is there-fore no risk.

It is insti-tutionally incapable of comprehending that a risk can be basedon uncertainty rather than probability. Instead the forces oforder always seem to translate “uncertainty” as “minusculeprobability.”

pollution is thrown into the air, the more difficult it is toshow anyone is liable, and the greater the probability thatcollective damage will be suffered without anyone being heldresponsible

The plaintiffs couldn’tprove that it was this factory in particular which had producedthe toxins which had affected them personally. So the guiltyparty could not be identified and the accused was acquitted

the people most affected are often notthe workers, who have some proximity to the process and thussome access to the signs of something going wrong, but peoplemuch farther afield, like consumers, or sometimes even peoplewho have no connection to the products at all, who neithermake nor use them or even live nearby

Ruhr

We felt like we were hanging from the marionette stringsof these experts and institutions who continually contra-dicted each other. They kept saying they had everything well inhand, and it constantly turned out not to be true. To get answersto the most everyday questions, like “Can I let my kid play inthe sandbox? Can I buy mushrooms? Are all the vegetablespoison, or just those from specific regions?” we were dependenton the minute to minute statements of experts who were simplyblinding in their contradictoriness. And underneath it all wasthe horrifying thought that maybe food itself might now bepoison

We still seem unable toaccept the crucial difference between probability and radicaluncertainty, and to come to terms with the fact that the latternow dominates, at least among the risks that occupy the publicstage. This basic misunderstanding permeates even the mindsetof the natural sciences

That’s exactly right. The epochal difference between thedefined risks of the first modernity and the global risks of thesecond modernity is still not being taken seriously either con-ceptually or institutionally

The main thesis of the theory of risk society is that this insti-tutionalized program of making side effects calculable is beingeroded away by the political, economic, social, and technologi-cal changes that result from the continuing radicalization of themodernization process

Events like these(and there are many which fit the bill) are all illustrations of aqualitatively different kind of risk, one that is not clearlybounded, and which therefore can’t fit into the old calculus ofrisk, nor into the interdependent social system of which it wasa part.

While they might appear to besettled at the edge of their so-called “guest” countries, wherethey are discriminated against on account of their origin or skincolor, “at home” they count as people who are rising into themiddle class, and they are honored and respected as such, if alsosometimes mocked and laughed at for their bi-nationality. Inshort, they live here and there at one and the same time. Theyare positioned simultaneously in two different frameworks ofsocial inequality, two different frameworks that are both beingenlarged and brought into a new relation with each otherthrough their mediation.

But it istrue that at the same time as globalization is abolishing distanceand borders, it is opening up new unbridgeable gulfs, and theabolition of distance only makes them worse. The globalizationof poverty and wealth puts the glitz world of the super-rich andthe de-civilized world of the propertyless right next to eachother.

Poverty in rich countries is gradually becoming more of aphase in the average working life that most people pass throughrather than a lifetime situation.

Another point that is important for class analysis is that thissort of individualization necessarily entails a decline in over-arching social narratives, paradoxically by multiplying them sothat no single one can achieve an undisputed hegemony.

The fact that governments are losing their influence over theeconomy and the labor market also feeds into this temptation.This loss of influence weakens the core of their legitimacy. Theyneed different means of looking strong and capable of action,and one way is to take up the mantle of reform. It bestows onits proponents the air of decisive action and a reputation fororder.

tion is that the truth of a minority group can only be known(because it can only be experienced) by its members

But there are at least three counter-tendencies that we have towatch out for which could end up prevailin

In some ways, the question is the same one that deTocqueville found insoluble two centuries ago. How can asocially and politically creative individualism be grounded initself? Is there anything inherent to the individualization processthat keeps alive the consciousness that the foundations of theself-chosen life can only be secured and defended throughpublic and political exchanges with others? Or does the old rulestill hold in transformed form, that for there to be politicalaction there must be gods? That is, compulsive collective beliefs

But it is impossible to organize any“self-chosen” life except through networks with others. Thus,such people are forced to become tinkerer-inventors not onlyof their own lives, but also of networks. No matter whattheir ideology, they are almost forced into becoming an alter-native kind of entrepreneur, a social entrepreneur, because theycan only construct their self-chosen lives by entering into a con-tinuous process of harmonizing their projects with those ofothers.

But in fact it would be closer to the truth to see themas completely exposed in a jungle of global markets on whichthey are completely dependent.

because then at least you can set up a political defenseagainst it. Now it seems at the next level of capitalism thecorporation is off-loading the responsibility for keeping upthe pressure onto the individual.

nize all of its features into preemptive conformity with marketcondition

In the second modernity, everyshortfall of social institutions causes not only a strain on, butalso a reorganization of, the family. This is not society’s inten-tion, but it is the result

One is that it involves the individualization ofrisks. Individuals are forced to bear more and more of the con-sequences of decisions they’ve been forced to make, and moreof those consequences are unforeseeable

The myth of national homogeneity continues to disguise thisincrease in social creativity. The ideas of integration and assim-ilation are still dominant.

Individualization replaces this with a dialogic existence, adialogical imagination, in which the opposites of the world mustbe borne in our own lives, and must be bridged there. Everyoneis now living in different cultures simultaneously. Each of ussomehow has to harmonize their discordances simply in orderto make life livable.

hey both increase the number of cultural opposites we haveto be able to experience simultaneously while still being able tothink and live

Thus the idea of individualizingby oneself is a contradiction in terms. Individualization is asocial concept or it is nothing

And, as I said, they came in role-sets that hadevolved to fit together. You couldn’t change one without wreck-ing the whole set and thus endangering the smooth functioningof society. That is why traditional roles were defended so fer-vently for so long

Modern legitimacy is also based onthis new principle, that no group should be legally privilegedover any other.

Biographies cease to be pre-given by society. Instead, the con-struction of a narrative that makes sense of the individual lifebecomes a task performed by the individual

In the second modernity,the individual becomes, for the first time in history, the basicunit of social reproduction

Individualization is also not simply a phenomenon of thesecond half of the twentieth century. Earlier historical phases ofindividualization occurred in the Renaissance; in the courtlyculture of the Middle Ages; in the inward asceticism of Protes-tantism; in the emancipation of peasants from feudal bondage;and in the loosening of intergenerational family ties at the endof the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth

What “free” means is free with respect to borders, that is,free to flow across them in both directions, free to operate as ifthey didn’t exist. In this world of flows that can rush acrossborders, the worst thing that can happen to a society is that theflow suddenly rushes out, leaving them high and dry

Now, as we’ve just said several times, when we inquire intothe transnational corporation and the nature of its power, wefind it is no longer the imperialism of marching in, but insteadthe imperialism of marching out

t’s as if they are usingthe same pieces to play checkers while the companies areplaying chess

Toparaphrase Joan Robinson, in the age of globalization, the onlything worse than getting exploited by multinationals is notgetting exploited by multinationals. It’s this power to withdraw,to not enter countries and to not provide investment, that is theirreal coercive force. This is what forces states, against their will,to dismantle their systems of social protection and instantiatethe neoliberal regime. This diffuse economic force is purpose-ful, and it is cooperative. Competing investors and companiesall share the same basic demands, and they all refuse to enter acountry until those basic demands are met. Together they wieldwhat is proving to be an irresistible force

It’s the end of a certain kind of state, and the endof a certain understanding of politics that went with it, namelythe politics of the territorial nation-state. But the state hasn’tcome to an end. It is possible to have a deterritorialized state.And it is completely conceivable that a new kind of state anda new age of politics will emerge out the state’s desire to holdpower

The problem is that when we try to conceive of a world state,we think of a big nation-state, that is, a huge mass of territory.We think of the world economy in the same terms, even thoughwe know it isn’t true. A more fruitful way to frame the prob-lem is to say that we have a deterritorialized, multi-centeredeconomy, and we need a deterritorialized multi-centered stateto go with it.

Both paths are possible. Both arerealities

optimism

It means a local-ity has to actively attempt to change its course of development,and in a sense to refound itself anew against resistance. Theother option is that the duality that local inhabitants are alreadyexperiencing can become conscious of itself and find a way ofexpressing itself coherently. It can produce a new kind of pluralculture, one that satisfies the desire to reach backward into localtraditions without stopping local culture from opening up andletting more of the world in

But a collection of ele-ments, or a collection of people, brings with it its own culturallogic

A cosmopolitan sociology is one that treats the transnationalexistence of its inhabitants as the emergent rule, rather than asthe increasing exception

ities and metropolises are the nodal points of the secondmodernity

In my conception of the second modernity, by contrast,globalization is considered as a phenomenon internal to thenation-state, and internal to its citizens.

There are two different ways to understand globalization.The first one is additive, and the second one is substitutive. Aslong as one posits the nation-state as an unchanging reality, towhich all social phenomena are subordinate, then globalizationcan only be conceived in the first sense, as an external relation,as something added on to the nation-state

fact there are more of them, andthat the disparity is growing. I think banal cosmopolitanism ishollowing out the everyday experience of nationalism, andfilling us instead with the experience of globality, even if ourconscious recognition is still lagging behind

We haveto keep these divisions continually before our eyes if the ideaof a “global conversation” is ever to become more than a liter-ary phrase

to make a developing reality clear and graspable.

Sociology’s job is to take the trouble to make empirical obser-vations

But while we arejust as intent as they were to study society in transition, soci-ologists today have to completely give up the idea that we canpredict the future

transnational

For example, the enormous split between the centerand the periphery, the first and third world, is now being dis-placed to, and reproduced within, the metropoles themselves,where the super-rich and the globally excluded often occupyneighborhoods that are physically actually quite close.

he first thing we have to do is describe how society is react-ing under the new conditions. Our starting hypothesis is that alleveryday social relationships are changing and dissolving alongthe lines of our household example.

ocial development isopen-ended. Its end cannot be foreseen, and that has to beincorporated in our conceptual framework.

By this I mean the assumption that theWest’s is the best possible way to organize a society

The idea of society as being fundamentally made up of largeconstituent subgroups presumes that there are pre-given col-lective situations that make common sense to all members ofthose groups. New processes of individualization and differ-entiation are rendering this assumption less tenable.

The first is the assumption that territory is essential to thenature of society

But I think we can saysomewhat systematically that there are three principles onwhich our old conceptualizations rested that have now becomequestionable

Zombie category” is a wonderfully nasty phras

o first weuncover key generalizations that are no longer true. Then wedevelop new dichotomies and a new system of reference. Andthen, having opened up a new space for the imagination, a newway to think about society and politics, we color it in and fill itwith life through empirical work, empirical work that thisrethink has made possible

To what extent are our fundamental categoriesbased on assumptions that have become historically obsolete?

Pull this one thread,and the whole sweater starts to unravel.

This is a perfect illustration of a zombie category. Noneof what I’ve just said is news, least of all to sociologists. Yetwe still measure households like we always have

complementary

Thisshould be exciting. It means all the big questions have to berolled out again, and all the small ones too. They all have to beposed anew, negotiated, and answered again – and not throughuniversalistic arm-chair theory, or through the lost innocence ofcounting national flyspecks, but through truly transnational andcomparative statistics that we have yet to develop.

It is not only that those bound-aries have become much blurrier. The nation-state has also lost thesacred meaning that it had in the nineteenth century, when nation-alism was widely considered a form of moral regeneration. It wasalready impossible to think that way about nationalism after WorldWar I, and that was almost a century ago.

be the work of one man, even a genius, and it cannot be summedup in a few universal laws

The reason whysociologies and social theories of the center have traditionallybeen blind to power might well be because it’s right in front oftheir face. The perspective of the other, sharpened to the realityof power through the experience of humiliation, has an essentialrole to play in understanding both sides of the power equation.

Globality, by contrast, is what results whensociologists from all countries of the world, having interpretedtheir own societies through the use of the same universal cate-gories, then meet and confront each other with their differentfindings and try to reconcile them.

We could call it the universalist inference. It’sfalse. Yet the perspective it made possible had an enormousamount of explanatory power

his is one of the main reasonswhy, for many non-Europeans, “globalization” looks like just anew euphemism for the same old imperialism and exploitation,only this time by a “world market” that flies no flag

all improvement in develop-ing countries to westernization, and ascribes all deterioration intheir situation to not westernizing or not modernizing enough

To distill conceptsout of the experience of your own society, and then make thosethe standards against which to measure all societies of the sameperiod, no matter how different their historical formations

This

The social space that is bordered and administeredby the nation-state is assumed to contain all the essential ele-ments and dynamics necessary for a characterization of society

Its keyassumption is that humankind is split up into a large but finitenumber of nations, each of which supposedly develops its ownunified culture, secure behind the dike of its state-container

We have then to deal with the fact that society is alwaysdisguising itself

What this analysis is dealing with is how in the secondmodernity there are many out-of-control processes, systemicunintended side effects.

Third, the major movements of change have little todo with class

especially young middle-class people undergoinghigher education

First,poverty is no longer a characteristic of those within the workingclass

it is less clear that socialclass is the principal unit of analysis and investigation.

Beck showshow globalization coerces people to live less role-centered lives,lives that involve extensive negotiation and dialogue and wherepeople have themselves to accept responsibility for their actionsas they try to work them out with others in their network

Roughly speaking Beck argues that globalism is bad (or atleast very problematic in its neoliberal face), globalization isgood and is in fact the only vaguely progressive show in town

Globalization thus includes the pro-liferation of multiple cultures (as with cuisines from around theworld), the growth of many transnational forms of life, theemergence of various non-state political actors (from AmnestyInternational to the World Trade Organization), the paradoxi-cal generation of global protest movements (such as the WTO),the hesitant formation of international states (like the EU), andthe general processes of cosmopolitan interdependence (earlierreferred to as banal cosmopolitanism

Globalism

globalism and globalization

This transforms people and places from within,especially with the proliferation of many new and extensivetransnational forms of life. Probably the most extensive of theseis that of the overseas Chinese, a transnational society with tensof millions of members around the world. In many ways this isa powerful society

Second orreflexive modernization disenchants and dissolves its owntaken-for-granted foundations. The normal family, career, andlife history have all to be reassessed and renegotiated. Thenotion in, for example, Talcott Parsons’s writings that eachsociety is a closed and self-equilibriating system dissolves, albeitat uneven speed and impact.

Zombie concept

Beck and others have helped to subvertany sense of a single evolutionary scale of the development ofsociety from the less to the more developed

Especially American sociology developed in this way, presum-ing that all societies were more or less like that of the USA, justpoorer!

The nation-state provides thecontainer of society and hence the boundary of “sociology.

Modern science according to Beck increasinglytreats the whole world as its laboratory and this spreads risksacross the globe. In recent formulations Beck emphasizes theglobal nature of risks; that there is not so much a risk society asa global risk cultur

risks

And this in turn generates complex relationshipsbetween expert knowledge and lay forms of knowledge andespecially with how the latter in a “risk-expert” society are oftentreated as inferior, subordinate, and replaceable by expertise

Risk society brings out how important aspects of people’slives are structured not through social processes alone such asthe distribution of goods in a welfare state society. Rather majoraspects of human welfare stem from the movement and poten-tial impact of these “person-made” risks

Risk societie

The thesis of risk society brings outthat most important phenomena within the world are social-and-physical, such as global warming, extreme weather events,global health risks such as AIDS, biological warfare, BSE, nuclearterrorism, worldwide automobility, nuclear accidents, and so on.None of these is purely social but nor are they simply physicaleither.

sociology of-and-with the environment. No longer is itpossible to believe that there is a pure sociology confined andlimited to exploring the social in-and-of itself. The distinction ofsociety and nature dissolves

An important theme in Bourdicu's work on education is his assertionthat ac.Hlemic selection is shaped by class-based sdfse/ectioll. Whclher students St;ly in school or drop Out, and the course of study they pursue, Bour(lieu argues, depends on their pr:lctical expectations of the likelihood thatpeople of their social class will succeed :Icadcmically. Bourdieu believesthert is gener;.llly a high correlation between S\l bjcctivc hopes and objectivechances. A child's ambitions and expect.ltions with regard to education:11ld career arc the structurally determined products of parental and otherreference-group education;11 experience ami cultural life.1

but that much action can be carricd omsuccessfully Ollly If il S interested chancter goes lIIisrecognizcd

An uninrentional consequence of engaging in ficld competition is that actors, though they may contest the legitimacy of rewards given by fields, nonetheless reproduce the structure offields.

New llrrivals to fields must pay the price of ;lll initial investment fa!· entry, whichinvolves recognition of the value of the game ;llld the practical knowledgeof how to play ir

hat religion is worth talking about in thefirst place

Challengers and incumbents share a com1llon interest in preserving thefield i[Self, even if they ,Ire sharply divided on how it is to be controlled.Evcry field presupposes and produces :'I particular type of ;IIIISio, whichBourdicu defines 11S a helief or acceptance of the worth of the game of afield.

Conservation strategies tend to be pursuedby those who hold dominant positions and enjoy seniority in the field. Strategies of succession are attempts to gain access to dominant positions in afield nnd are generally pursued by the new entrants. Finally, strategies ofsubversion arc pursued by those who expect to gain little from the dominantgroups

Fieldsare to be viewed as systems in which eaeh particular element (institution,organization, group, or individual) derives its distinctive properties fromits rebtionship to ,III other elcmenL",

In other words, fir/tis lireIIrnlllS ofstruggle fm' /cgir;1IJlu;01l: in Bourdieu's language, for the right [Qmonopolize the exercise of "symbolic violence

Fields may be thought of as structured spaces that are organizedaround specific types of capital or combinations of capital.

a network, or l.'Onfigurntion, of ohjective rebtions between positions.

his would stem from subse(]lIenr adaptations of habitus to new stTuctllralconditions rather than bec:mse the early formation of habitus was somehow deficien

His idca is to identifyunderlying master patterns that represent deep structural patterns that(:ross-cut and find characteristic forms of expression in all of mese (limensions

This key feature of habilUs permitS Bourdieu, for cxample, toidentify parallel styles of action in arcnas as differem :IS fiunily planning,dress, choice of sport, and diet

bjccrh'c limits bcCQme a stnsc of limits, a pr.lcrical anticipation of objtttivc limitsacquired by cxllCrience of obj<.wve limits, a "sense of one's I'l:.l.ce� which IC:l(is oneto exclude oneself from Ihe goods, persons, place and so forth from which one isexcluded

The dispositions of habitus prcdisposc actors to select forms of conductth:u al'C most likely to succeed in light of their resources :md past e."pericnce.

Habitus adjusts aspirationsand expectations accord ing to the objective probabilities for success or failure common to the members of the same class for a pnrtieular behavior

Bourdieu emphasizes the collective basis of h:lbims, stres.."ing that individuals who internalize similar life ch:mces share the same habitus

ncorporation" of thefund,unental social conditions of existence into dispositions

It shows how strlletur.JIdisadvalH:lgcs C1I1 bc internalized into relatively dllrJblc dispositions thatcan be transmitted intergener.Jtionally through socialization and produceforms of sclf-dcfe,lting behavior

-bbitus tends toreproduce those actions, perceptions, and attitudes consistent with the conditions under which it was produced.

"The operntion of gift exchange," for example, "presupposes (individualand collective) misrecognition (mero1l1Il1issffllce) of the reality of the objective'mechanism' of the exchange" (Bourdicu 1977C:S-6). Action occurs ns ifactors pursue their sclf-inrerests for this is the way it appears to the "Outsider" sociologist who is able [Q c:llculate the statistical regularities of behavior

Symbolic practices dcflect altention from theinterested char.Jcter o( practices and thereby contribute to their enactment;)s disinterested pursuits.

Misrecognition

Thus, for Bourdieu, symbolic power legitimizes economic and politicalpower but docs not reduce 10 them

But symbolic power is n legitimaling power that elicits the consentof both the dominant nnd the dominated

symbol ic violence," as me capacityto impose Ihe means for comprehending and adapting to the social world byrepresenting economic and political l>ower in disbTt,ised, taken-for-grantedforms.

by taken-for-granted assumptions and praC[iccs in the constirutioll and maintenance of power relations.

hat is to say, in the very StruCUlreof the field in which belief is produced and reproduced

lUrdieu, symbolic power resides 1101 in theforce of ideas hut in their relation to social stnlcture.

Jlllinlltioll

symholic

or Bourdieu, the traditional Nbrxist emphasis on economicand class structures underestim:ttes the importance of the symbolic dimension of power relations in both the undifferenti:tted precapit:tlist and highlydifferentiated postindustrial societies

In Bourdieu's world. all arc capital holders and investors seeking profits

How rhe various c:lpitals intcrconvcrt also IXlSCS :. prohlem. One con·tribution by Hourdieu to thc sociological shldy of power relations is theforceful demonstration that cultural capital, suchl capital, and economiccapit:,1 can be interchange'lblc. Yet the interchange is not equally possiblein all (Iirections.

oot of all the other t)'I>CS of Clpital

energy of social physics

The unequ:ll distrihution of objecti fied and instit'Utionalizcdcultural capital :lcross social classes is for BOllrdieu one of the key dimcnsions of soci:ll inC(IIl:l lity ill model'll societies.

Third, cultural capiml cxists

usc

The accumulation of clilrural capit;11 i n its cmhodied form hegins inearly childhood. It rCtluirc.<; "ped;1gogical action": the investment of timeby parentS, other f:1Il1ily mcmbers, or hired professioll;l ls to scnsitize lhechild to culumll distinctions.

His point is to suggest that culturc (in the broadest sense of thc tcrm) can become a powerresource

hether they be Ill:lterial, cultural,social, or symbolic.

bjectivist science confl:nes "thernodcl of reality [with] the reality of the model" by forgetting that objectivi�1' models merely describe practic<ll :lctiol1 os iIiT were the c<lse (Bourdieu1 977l'),

bjectivistscience, however, tends to abstract from consideration this practical orienI�ltion of action

ualitative indicatOrs as well as quantitative data

The researcher also needs to reject the "objectivism"of statistical patterns and reappropriate and incotj}()rare the representationsof agents into the analysis in order to constnl('t :111 '''l<lcqu<ltc science ofpractices"

situated within determining,,[ruet"Urcs that are not readily available to everyday consciousness but musthe eonstructed by the social scientist.

ocial-scientific knowledge IllllSt break decisively withagents' self-understandings.

The first task of lIle socialscientist muSt be to initiate an epistemological break with commonsense,everyday reprcsent:llions by constructing the statistical regularitics of pr:lctice.

general science of practices

Symbolic power is a power to'·consecrate," to render sacred. He thus associates the concept of the sacredwith legitimation, particularly in high culture and :Irt where boundariesdelimiting the legitimate from the illegimate are particularly strong.

Like Durkheim, Bourdicu ( 1989c:376) works with theidea of a historical transition from fairly unified and undifferenti;ltcd socielies to modern societies where various cultural modes of c.xpression become,Iifferentiarcd and constituted as rcbtively autonomous fields

To discover the social at the very heart of the mOSt subjectiveexperience is a cenlTal aim of Hourdiell, JUSt as it was for Durkheim

ut like Durkheirn, he beg.m sociological investig"ationwith the "methodological decision to 'treat social facts as things'" (Bourdieu, Boltanski ct al. 1990:2

Bourdieu adopts thisdi..tinction to :Irgue for a "rdational" as opposed to a realist approach to.., ...·i:ll classcs

Vebcr's discussion of lhe specific and opposing interests of theprincipal typcs of religious lcadership permits Bourdieu to show how p:lrticular fields of cu Itllr:ll life emerge through the development of specialize

ltilicalioll

religio1ls CIIpitn/ and (IIitllml CIIpim/ as irreducibleforms of power thQugh imerchange.lble with economic capital

t He goes on to Stress that "religious or magical behaviorur thinking must not be set apart from the range of everyday purposiveconduct, particularl)' since even the ends of the religious and magical actions are predominantly economic." Bourdieu ( l 990h:4) argues that b)' in,isting on the "this-worldly" character of I>chavior motivated by religiousf:lctOrs \.yebet provides a "way of linking the contents of mythical discourse(;1I1d even its syntax) to the religious interests of those who produce it,diffuse it, and receive it."

Weber offering a "political economy of religion"111:11 brings out "the full potcntial of the materialist analysis ofreligion with'>tIt destroying the prol>crly symbolic character of the phenomenon.

Inste:ld of distinb'llishing superstructure from infrastructure, Bourdiell conceptualizes the soci<ll world as a series of relatively :lutonOlllOlLS but srntcrurally homologous fields of production, cireubtion, and consumption ofvarious fonns of cultural as well :JS material resources

Marxist claim th:n cultural pr.ac[ices func·tion to legitimate and l)Crperuate class inequality, he resists focusing on thesymbolic dimension of social life as separate and derivati\'e of the morefundamental material components ofsocial life

property

from l\o[arx, Bourdieu draws his gener.al program to write a sociologyof reproduction.

Their theories of sociological knowledge actually converge inwhat Bourdieu calls the "principle of non-consciousness" (Bourdieu,Ch:unboredon, and I}asseron 1991:15-18), which posits that the scientificexplanation of social life does not reduce to comlllon everyday perceptionsor individual ideas or intentions

By suljecriviS'lII, BOUl·dicu means all those forms of knoll' ledgethat focus on individual or intersubjective consciousness and interactions.By objectivism he means all those forms of knowlcdge that focus on [ile,t;ltistical regularities of human conduct. Both his key concepts, habitus andjidll display a similar movement of dlOughr. Habitus calls for moving to:1 conception of action and structure that breaks with and trJnscends thetr:lditiunal dichotornies ofsubjectivisrn and objectivism.

He is interested incalling attention to the 1·cSCIn.b prQ(CSS itself and strcsscs tll.H the sodolo�gist's relationship to his or her practicc is usually mediatcd by values, atti�tudes and their represcntations that are frequently quite remOte froUl thefomlal standards of verification.

l)'. He �ces a unique role for epistemology as a necessaryn::ilexive monitoring instrument for increasing awareness of both the cogniI ive and social conditions that shape and lilllit existing scientific work

cientificprogress is marked by abrupt shifts in outlook, not by cumulative knowledge. Earlier conceptuali"n1tions and constructs :HC displaced and replacedby new, more encompassing understanding

is historical, discontinuous, dialectical, and no longer centered in some continuous, unchanging, or ever-renewing cogito.

I tried totranspose into the ficld of the sodal sciences a whole epistemological tra-

Bourclieu's intellectual lineage clearly owesmuch more to the second campi yet his intellectual project represents acritical dialogue with both

n approaching the Bourdieu's work it is helpful-particularly for British and American social scientists-to keep in mind that he originally studied philosophy and approaches his social scientific work through disrincti},philosophical concerns.

Bourdieu's work is nor to be thought of as strictly academic socialscience; it also represents a mode of political illfl'"ve1ltioll

in fact, a critical reflection on the usc of social scientific categories hascharacterized Bourdieu's work from the very start.

Rather, he arglJes thaI" it is QI/ly I"hrough a reOcxjve practiceof soci:.l inquiry that one can hope to achieve ,I desirable degree of objectivity on the social world.