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Reading: Introducing Pierre Bourdieu

Thursday 26th August, 2010 - 11:26pm with 0 comments

Subject: Investigating Media, Reflective Practices
Reading: Swartz, D. L. (1997). ‘Introducing Pierre Bourdieu’, Culture and Power: The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 1-14.

General

  • criticises theoretical theory
  • pragmatically forged concepts out of empirical research and confrontation with intellectual viewpoints
  • establishing distance from opposing viewpoints
  • belief that subjectivist/objectivist forms of knowledge hinder the development of a unified theory of practices
  • relative to action, culture, power, sociological knowledge
  • all cultural symbols and practices embody interests and function to enhance social distinctions
  • issue of power relations eg. educational system
  • power stands at the heart of all social life
  • cultural socialisation places individuals and groups within competitive status hierarchies
  • reproduction of the social stratification order
  • culture is an expression of political content
  • a “genetic theory of groups”
  • what motivates human action – is it culture, social structure or mode of production?
  • human action a direct unmediated response to external factors

Fields of Power

  • fields: structured arenas of conflict
  • modern society as homologous fields of production, circulation and consumption of various forms of cultural/material resources
  • fields mediate relationship between social structure and cultural practice

Sociology/Socioanalysis

  • cultural processes and resources lock people into reproducing patterns of domination
  • social unconscious: unacknowledged interests that actors follow as they participate in a social order
  • exposing underlying interests that bind people into unequal power relations, sociology offers measure of freedom from domination
  • the degree to which socioanalysis elicits resistance

Reflexivity

  • self-critical practice of social science
  • achieving objectivity on the social world
  • sociology of sociology – component of all sociological inquiry
  • practice of genuine social science requires “reflexive return” upon itself
Posted on: Thursday, August 26th, 2010 at 11:26 pm
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