Bourdieu and Social Work

Bourdieu and Social Work
Mustafa Emirbayer
University of WisconsinMadison
Eva M. Williams
University of WisconsinMadison
Despite occasional ritualistic invocations of his key concepts and references to certain famous texts, the discipline of social work remains largely unaware of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. This essay seeks to show that Bourdieu contributed more than just a set of such terms as cultural capital and habitus; he also provided a new relational approach to the study of elds of domination and struggle, a new way of thinking about how power operates within social life. The article demonstrates as well the potential usefulness of his approach, which diverges signicantly from much of the research currently being done in social work. Focusing upon the eld of homeless services in New York City, the work illustrates how one might conduct a eld analysis in Bourdieuian terms. It also explores how use of such an approach might lead to alternative ways of understanding social work systems and practices.
Pierre Bourdieu was perhaps the greatest sociologist since the classical mile Durkheim. Yet, despite occasional generation of Max Weber and E ritualistic invocations of his key concepts and references to certain famous texts, social work remains largely unfamiliar with his ideas. Bourdieu contributed more than just a set of such terms as cultural capital and habitus. He provided a new relational approach to the study of elds of domination and struggle, a new way of thinking about how power operates within social life. This essay seeks to demonstrate the potential usefulness of Bourdieus approach, which diverges signicantly from much of contemporary research in the social work discipline. After a brief survey of his core theoretical insights, the article provides, by way of illustration and provocation to further research, an analysis of one particular empirical eld that is highly relevant to the discipline: the eld of homeless services in New York City. It discusses this eld in terms of its two constituent
Social Service Review (December 2005). 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0037-7961/2005/7904-0005$10.00
690
Social Service Review
components: on the side of production, the eld of shelters, and on the side of consumption, the eld of homeless clients.1 Finally, the article steps back from this dual analysis to explore the implications of Bourdieus ideas for social work inquiry and practical intervention. This work does not present a detailed portrayal of shelters and their clients or a denitive blueprint for improving homeless services. Rather, it sketches in bold strokes what a Bourdieuian analysis of the eld of homeless services might look like and how it might contribute to both the theory and practice of social work. Specically, it shows how Bourdieus theory of elds moves beyond social works traditional systems perspectives by illuminating, as those perspectives do not, the full signicance of eldspecic contestations: symbolic capital is accrued in widely varying forms and volumes by social service providers as well as recipients. Such capital becomes both a stake and a weapon in their respective struggles over legitimate authority within helping systems.
Constructing the Object

The rst and most important task in any Bourdieu-inspired analysis is to construct the object of study, and such a task always entails thinking systematically in terms of elds (or, as Bourdieu often terms them, spaces). Bourdieu conceives of elds (or spaces) as relatively autonomous social microcosms, exhibiting, like Webers (1946) life- or valuespheres, their own distinctive structures and dynamics and functioning according to their own inner logics. He posits a multiplicity of such spaces in any complex and differentiated society. Modern society, he claims, is marked not by the ascendancy of any one singular logic like that of the social relations of production but by the existence of a number of more or less independent social universes that, although empirically interrelated and mutually determinative (and also, as we shall see, structurally homologous), nonetheless obey, again to some extent, their own inner laws and principles. What happens in [any one of these elds], he writes, cannot be understood by looking only at external factors (Bourdieu 1998, 39). Bourdieu characterizes even the national society itself as a eld, terming this the social space as a whole (Bourdieu 1984), but within this social macrocosm he also delineates a number of less expansive spaces, such as the legal eld, the economic eld, the eld of cultural production (itself encompassing still more delimited spaces, such as the literary, artistic, and scientic elds), and the eld of bureaucratic powers (Bourdieus term for the state). Also included within the social space as a whole are exceedingly circumscribed and even microcosmic social worlds, such as individual families. In between, at a level identied as intermediate (mesolevel) in terms of scope and complexity, are also such elds as the one discussed below: that of homeless services in one particular metropolitan setting.
691
Bourdieu conceives of elds as conguration[s] of objective relations between positions (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 97), such that any given eld (one consisting, e.g., of two or more homeless shelters or of two or more shelter clients) can be conceptualized as a structure of relations not between the concrete entities themselves (e.g., the specic shelters or the specic clients) but, rather, between the nodes that those entities happen to occupy.2 In other words, Bourdieu takes as his units of analysis not concrete or empirical entities but what he calls constructed or epistemic objects. These objects are dened in terms of where they are situated within a relational system. (Hence his rejection of substantialist ways of thinking in favor of a more relational mode of analysis; see Emirbayer 1997; Emirbayer and Mische 1998.) For Bourdieu, to construct an object means to break with preconstructed, takenfor-granted understandings of that object in favor of situating [it] at a determinate place in social space (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 214). This is important because one gains a way of systematically taking into account forces that act upon and are determinative of these objects from elsewhere or from outside: Like heavenly bodies belonging to the same gravitational eld, objects within a space produce effects upon one another from afar (Bourdieu 1996b, 132). Bourdieu indicates that the nodes or positions within a eld are objectively dened, in their existence and in the determinations they impose upon their occupants, agents, or institutions, by their present and potential situation (situs) in the structure of the distribution of species of power (or capital) whose possession commands access to the specic prots that are at stake in the eld, as well as by their objective relation to other positions (domination, subordination, homology, etc.) (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 97). In other words, positions within a eld, including those that mark the dominant and dominated poles of that eld, must be analyzed in terms of the distinctive proles of capital associated with them. Bourdieu refers here to species of capital in the plural: while capital most often connotes material or economic resources, for him it also encompasses a wide range of other types of resources, any of which, when accrued by actors within the eld at hand, can enable them to climb to positions of relative privilege within the eld.3 Within any given eld, different specic entities can be said to engage in the struggles ongoing within that eld as bearers of different amounts and combinations of capitals, some yielding greater advantages within that particular eld than others. The concepts of eld and capital are intrinsically interlinked; just as a capital does not exist and function except in relation to a eld, so too, conversely, the distribution of capital (or capitals) constitutes the very structure of the eld (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 101). Capitals function both as weapons and as stakes in the struggle to gain ascendancy within elds. Any eld (from a synchronic perspective) is a struc-
692
ture or temporary state of power relations within what is also (from a diachronic perspective) an ongoing struggle for domination waged by the deployment or accumulation of relevant capitals, a struggle for successful monopolization of the legitimate violence (specic authority) which is characteristic of the eld in question (Bourdieu 1993, 73). Bourdieus perspective brings to the foreground the structural tension between occupants of dominant and dominated positions within any social microcosm. It requires that any eld be conceived of as a terrain of contestation among occupants of positions differentially endowed with the resources necessary for gaining and safeguarding an ascendant position within that terrain. Indeed, much of the contestation among actors can be said to concern the legitimate valuation that is to be accorded the precise species of capital in which they happen (actually or potentially) to be well-endowed; that is, such conict is about gaining the capacity to produce a recognition of the legitimacy of this capital distribution among the other contending parties. (In contrast to these efforts are the delegitimizing strategies by which other parties call into question their counterparts favored types of capital and argue instead for the primacy of their own.) Especially signicant in all such struggles (again, as both a stake and a weapon) is what Bourdieu terms symbolic capital, or capital in any of its forms insofar as it is accorded positive recognition, esteem, or honor by relevant actors within the eld. Contestations over symbolic authority are a crucial feature of eld dynamics, and those actors who succeed in amassing it gain considerably thereby in their efforts to assume a dominant position within the eld as a whole.4 Within the social space as a whole, the most consequential struggles over symbolic capital take place within what Bourdieu terms the eld of power, a relational reframing on his part of the more conventional idea of a ruling class. He denes this eld of power as a space of contention for ascendancy among dominant actors from all the other elds that constitute the social order (e.g., key state ofcials; leading lawyers and jurists; top bankers, nanciers, and corporate executives; prestigious literary, artistic, and scientic gures). Since the eld concept is meant to be applicable at all scales, from the most expansive to the most circumscribed, each of the more delimited social microcosms, too, can be said to feature something like its own internal eld of power. All such gaming spaces (Bourdieu 1996b, 264), whether large or small, exhibit certain structural properties that can be said to be invariant and universal. One of these properties is a bipolar structure, such that these spaces all revolve around an opposition between what Bourdieu terms temporal and spiritual (or cultural) power. At the level of the social space as a whole, this opposition typically translates to structural tensions between the holders of economic, political, or social privilege, on the one side, and of intellectual preeminence, on the other.5 (In these
693
structural tensions, the former will typically have the upper hand and, hence, be the dominants among the dominant holders of capital, while the latter will typically be in a subordinate position and hence be the dominated dominants.) In more delimited spaces, this polarity takes other but still structurally homologous forms. Close homologies, Bourdieu indicates, can often be found between what are outwardly very different kinds of gaming spaces. Looking ahead to this articles analyses, for example, the authors nd a bipolar structure between those homeless shelters that are relatively rich in the symbolic capital of order (at the temporal pole) and those that are relatively rich in the capital of authenticity (at the spiritual or cultural pole). So too, the same structure is observed between those homeless clients who are relatively well-endowed in staff-sanctioned capital (the temporal pole) and those who are relatively well-endowed in client-sanctioned capital (the spiritual or cultural pole). Bourdieu species another (and closely related) invariant property of gaming spaces. This has to do with the mutually opposed interests and strategies of action that one typically nds within such spaces. Actors interests are largely shaped (and Bourdieu speaks only probabilistically here) by the location of those actors within the overall distribution of capital (or capitals) and, thereby, within the structure of power relations constitutive of a contested space. Their strategies of action are also largely determined by such positioning. On the one hand, Bourdieu predicts that dominant actors or entities (or the dominant dominants, if one is speaking of the eld of power) pursue a conservation strategy, one in which their overriding aim is to preserve the principle of hierarchization, the distribution and valuation of species of capitals, that happens to be most favorable to them and to safeguard or even enhance their position within this hierarchy. On the other hand, he predicts that dominated actors or entities (or, if one is speaking of the eld of power, its dominated dominants) adopt a subversion strategy, in which their aim is to transform the elds system of authority, including its relative valuation of different capitals and, potentially, the very rules of the game according to which it ordinarily functions, to their own benet. Subversion strategies typically entail, he adds, a claim to be returning to the sources, the origin, the spirit, the authentic essence of the game, in opposition to the banalization and degradation which it has suffered (Bourdieu 1993, 74). Bourdieu claims that, in analyzing any eld, it is important to determine precisely how its constituent actors, differently positioned as they are within the eld in respect to the distribution of capital (or capitals) operative therein, perceive themselves, their competitors, and the eld as a whole, in all its opportunities and challenges. Actors, he asserts, gravitate in the direction of one or another of these opposing (conservative or subversive) strategies. One nal invariant property of elds is that actors and entities within
694
them not only have interests (and corresponding strategies of action) grounded in the discrete positions they happen to occupy relative to others in the eld but also have shared commitments to and investments in the eld overall. Bourdieu describes these ties as an illusio, or objective complicity which underlies all the antagonisms (Bourdieu 1993, 73). In the study of elds, it is crucial always to inquire into the tacitly shared interests, concerns, and ultimate beliefs that constitute the admission fee, as it were, into those elds; these attachments also guarantee that the dynamism and processuality (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994; Emirbayer 1997) constitutive of elds do not entail perpetual upheaval. Bourdieu points out that such unspoken agreements are often lodged at the level of what he terms the habitus. By this, he means the system of dispositions that become like second nature to actors as a result either of childhood socialization within the family (primary habitus) or, later in life, of more specic mechanisms of socialization (specic habitus; see Bourdieu 2000, 164). Such dispositions include deeply ingrained modes of perception, emotional response, and action within the world but also manners and bearing, ways of speaking, forms of dress, and personal hygiene. Since these systems of dispositions serve as a generative principle for strategies of action, differences at the level of habitus help to explain the different conservation and subversion strategies that actors nd themselves inclined to pursue; indeed, their very habitus often become forms of capital and, thus, weapons and stakes in struggles. Those actors who occupy the most dominated positions in the eld tend also to be those with habitus least well-suited for the contestations specic to that eld.6 However, commonalities at the level of habitus also serve to bind all these actors together, even despite the structural tensions that tend to separate them. A ght presupposes agreement between the antagonists about what it is that is worth ghting about; those points of agreement are held at the level of what goes without saying (Bourdieu 1993, 73).
The Field of Homeless Shelters

The eld of homeless services in New York City provides an illustration of how a Bourdieuian eld analysis might be constructed. This inquiry commences by analyzing the space of production of homeless shelters: the providers of homeless services. The second half of the essay lays out a similar framework in respect to the eld of homeless clients: the consumers of those services. The intent is twofold: to highlight how one might conduct an actual eld analysis and to demonstrate how such an approach might lead to alternative ways of understanding social work systems and practices. While other examples from social work could have been selected instead, the case of homeless services in New York City is featured because of the second authors intimate and rsthand
695
knowledge of that eld, accumulated over 5 years during the late 1990s as a director of social services and as the program director of one of the citys homeless shelter programs. Her experiences of the day-to-day operations of that shelter, her frequent meetings with other shelter administrators and staff from both the New York City Department of Homeless Services (DHS) and the Coalition for the Homeless, her supervision of casework staff and MSW eld students, and her extensive contact with clients serve as the principal data upon which this illustrative analysis is based.7 Principles of Division Even with such intimate familiarity with the eld, constructing the object of study is at best a highly challenging endeavor. Speaking practically, how are the elds most pertinent indicators, properties, or principles of division to be identied? How are its parameters to be ascertained? Bourdieu suggests that inquiry should be guided at rst by a basic sense of the eld or space at hand. But these early intuitions about the principles of division operative within that eld should be empirically tested and gradually rened until they yield an objective space, dened perhaps according to criteria quite different from those that originally guided the study. What follows is an attempt to convey how such a process might unfold. Ultimately, this inquiry ventures well beyond the initial categories used by the actors who work within the eld of homeless shelters. It breaks with what Bourdieu calls the doxa of that eld, the taken-for-granted, unquestioned, spontaneous, and commonsensical understandings that prevail across that space. The analysis demonstrates that even insiders to the eld do not always possess an immediate or unimpeachable knowledge of the divisions operative within it. Specically, it rejects three alternative ways of mapping the eld of homeless shelters, three different principles of division that are commonly deployed by those who staff shelter organizations: single-adult versus family shelters, general versus specialized shelters, and public versus private shelters.8 The rst of these principles of division, that between a single adult system and a family system, derives its legitimacy and ofcial sanction from New York Citys DHS, which has organized more than 200 shelters from the perspective of this division. Initially, it seems to be a reasonable principle of categorization, since single adults and families require very different types of social services and housing. However, while this division makes sense for the DHS, it fails to illuminate how shelters are actually organized within this space; that is, how different types of capitals that are highly salient within this eld are differentially distributed among the various shelters comprising it. More specically, a wide variety of shelters exist within each system (single adults, families), and across
696
the two systems, some shelters enjoy particular distinctions and others do not. In both systems, for example, there are shelters that social workers at assessment centers understand to be of ne quality. Social workers speak highly of these places to their clients and work hard to get those clients transferred to or placed on the waiting lists at these locations. But, within both systems, there are also other shelters that assessment social workers may from time to time invoke in threatening fashion (e.g., Act right or Ill have to transfer you to shelter X). Since this sort of hierarchy exists within both systems, and being part of the family system affords shelters no clear advantage over afliation with the adult system, this distinction between single-adult and family shelters must be rejected as the principle of division along which the space is organized.9 Nor is a second division, that between general and specialized shelters, entirely adequate for the current purposes. General shelters (e.g., Jamaica Avenue Armory Shelter, Brooklyn Womens Shelter, 30th Street Shelter, Charles H. Gay Shelter, and Camp La Guardia Mens Shelter) are typically very large and chaotic places. Specialized shelters (e.g., 350 Lafayette Street Transitional Living Community, Forbell Shelter, Valley Lodge, and Borden Avenue Veterans Residence), by contrast, are organized with a particular client population in mind. These sites are usually smaller than general shelters and have an intake or special referral process. Admissions criteria, such as gender, a minimum age, an Axis I (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition [DSM-IV]; American Psychiatric Association 1994) diagnosis, veterans status, and a willingness to stay clean and sober, are some of the many and varied prerequisites for referral. At rst glance, such a division of the eld in terms of general and specialized shelters seems like a viable way to proceed. Specialized shelters seem to be the dominant ones in the sense of being the most privileged (admission is limited to those with referrals), while general shelters seem to belong in the dominated sector of the space. In the second authors experience of the eld, some shelters did, in fact, seem to enjoy a certain distinction among social workers as well as clients, the DHS, and homeless advocates on account of being specialized. Among these were the shelters that work with a particularly difcult client population. For example, the Center for Urban Community Services serves homeless women with mental illness, and Valley Lodge works with homeless older adults. But providing services for a difcult population does not always accord a shelter symbolic authority in relation to other shelters. Some mental health shelters have reputations clearly inferior to those of others that similarly specialize in mentally ill populations. And while certain employment shelters or shelters for clients trying to remain clean and sober might well be seen as pathways to specialized housing, others of their ilk altogether lack such a distinction. Once again, it becomes clear that a conventional and
697
pregiven division does not fully explain how the space of shelters is organized: it lumps together entities that are highly distinct (the category of specialized shelters encompasses widely varying types of shelters) while distinguishing between entities that belong together. Finally, there is the distinction between public and private shelters. Although New York Citys DHS owns and operates many homeless shelters, in the 1990s it also began contracting with private not-for-prot organizations for services to homeless clients (Savas 2002). Two sharply distinguished categories of shelters resulted, the distinction between them seeming at rst glance to be a viable way of understanding the eld. It would not be difcult to establish (it certainly was the second authors experience) that homeless clients at city-run shelters typically wait longer to see caseworkers than clients at the private shelters, that city caseworkers are often overloaded with caseloads up to three times the size of those of their private counterparts, and that city caseworkers lack the training and credentials of their private counterparts. Researchers would also readily nd (this, too, was the second authors experience) that caseworkers at the public shelters are less invested in helping their clients because of the conditions cited above. This is made even worse by the poisoned-well effect of the negative climate pervasive in city- and state-run agencies (Passaro 1996).10 Among shelter staff and clients, circulating impressions that certain public shelters are more dangerous than others, that they are larger, and that they have a worse staff further contribute to this effect. In the second authors practical experience of the eld, it was clear that a negative attitude toward cityoperated shelters was pervasive among staff, clients, and homeless advocates alike. The movement toward privatization among specialized shelters even suggests, in fact, that the DHS concurs with this assessment. However, there are problems with dividing the eld between public and private shelters. While efforts have been made to privatize most of the shelters, the city plans to provide state-of-the-art programming in some of the remaining city-run shelters (Campbell and McCarthy 2000). Conversely, some private shelters are poorly run and have acquired a negative reputation among professionals as well as clients.11 Thus, the distinction between private and public shelters proves insufcient for grasping the underlying logic of the eld; we cannot clearly place all the privately run shelters at one end of the eld and all the city-run shelters at the other. Those unfamiliar with homeless services in New York City might propose race as yet another possible principle of division of the eld, arguing that the racial composition of shelters might affect their positioning in relation to one another within that space. In this study, the authors reject race as the primary way of understanding the underlying logic of the eld, although it is certainly an important feature of the context within which homelessness is a social problem. In the New York
698
City shelter system, clients are assigned a shelter (in some cases they must interview to get in); they do not self-select. The second author saw no evidence that such assignments were based on race.12 Nor do shelters with a large proportion of white clients enjoy clear advantages relative to those with large numbers of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and so forth, for white clients are not necessarily easier to work with in a shelter, nor are they necessarily easier to place in housingtwo important factors, from the second authors experience, in determining whether a shelter will identify a client as desirable. The separation between racial groups in New York City is not nearly the clear-cut principle of division that one might expect at rst glance.13 Dominants and Dominated Thus, all of the several aforementioned ways of understanding the elds organization fall well short, requiring that the current inquiry move in a very different direction, following the same tacking motion indicated by Bourdieu: There is thus a sort of hermeneutic circle: in order to construct the eld, one must identify the forms of specic capital that operate within it, and to construct the forms of specic capital one must know the specic logic of the eld (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 108). Specically, the essay proposes two other alternative principles of hierarchization that are simultaneously operative and exist in some tension with one another but that serve to distinguish the dominant from the dominated shelters (see g. 1). The rst of these revolves around the struggle between order and chaos. Shelters that control clients choices and behaviors accumulate a eld-specic capital of order and come to occupy (one side of) the dominant sector of the eld. These shelters provide a smooth and timely processing of clients from the assessment phase on through to housing placement. They excel at constraining clients actions by imposing shelter rules and by getting clients to comply with conditions of service plans, such as engaging in money management. They also control clients behaviors by getting clients to agree to participate in housing interviews in boroughs that may not be their rst choice, by helping clients to interview well by coaching them in interview skills (e.g., teaching them to be neat in appearance, to be well mannered, and to assume personal responsibility for their housing loss), and by getting clients to agree to accept suboptimal housing when offered. Although the DHS distributes housing appointments in a presumably fair manner, these advantages in controlling clients relative to housing appointments helps to distinguish the more privileged shelters from the less privileged ones. By contrast, shelters that are less able to control clients behaviors and choices, those with a high level of chaos, occupy the dominated regions within the eld.14
699
Fig. 1.Field of homeless shelters
The other principle of hierarchization revolves around the struggle between authenticity and inauthenticity. As Bourdieu points out in one of the quotations supplied above, there is much to be gained from returning to the putative authentic essence of the game (Bourdieu 1993, 74). Accordingly, certain shelters derive a special authority or legitimacy from being the real deal, from working with the most disadvantaged clients. These are the shelters that can point to being on the front lines or in the trenches, ghting the good ght against homelessness. Although these organizations, often drop-in centers, tend to be run-down and resource-poor spaces, staff willingness to take on certain types of clients and client problems that other shelters hope to avoid establishes them at (another pole of) the dominant end of the eld. Some mental health shelters and shelter programs for dual-
700
diagnosed clients (those with mental health and substance abuse problems) and most drop-in centers, especially those with homeless outreach teams (e.g., the Open Door Drop-In Center, John Heuss House, and Peters Place), are found within this category.15 Of course, it should also be noted that shelters well-endowed in this capital of authenticity stand in considerable tension with those others (also occupants of the dominant sector of the eld) that are rich in the capital of order. Conceiving of that sector as itself a space analogous to, and homologous with, the eld of power in the broader social space, one faces a familiar structural opposition: the pole of temporal authority (order) opposes the pole of spiritual or cultural authority (authenticity). In addition, there are still other shelters that lack altogether in both species (order and authenticity) of capital. Together, these capital-poor shelters occupy the dominated regions of the eld of homeless shelters. In what follows, we provide by way of illustration some examples of each of these various types of shelters, at both the dominant and dominated regions of this space. George Daly House (GDH), a shelter for 88 homeless adults, ages 45 and older, serves as an example of a more privileged shelter in the dominant pole of the eld, on the side of order. The shelter occupies a converted music school in the East Village neighborhood. The building has been completely remodeled to create a transitional shelter with mostly single rooms. By contrast, many of the larger shelters offer only barracks-style sleeping areas.16 The oors at GDH are always polished to a high shine. Its walls, which are kept freshly painted (a goldenrod yellow), are hung with original art and photography and coordinate nicely with the large, overstuffed, dark green leather sofas in the lobby. Bookshelves, as well as end tables with lamps and silk orchid ower arrangements, create the effect of an upscale hotel lobby. Classical or jazz music can be heard throughout the building and in a well-tended garden space lled with owering dogwood trees, manicured boxwoods, climbing vines, and owers. While most shelters gardens or patios would be lled with stackable plastic furniture or rusting metal folding chairs, that of GDH offers teak benches, chairs, and matching tables with dark green wood and canvas (market-style) umbrellas. While disarmingly elegant for a shelter, GDHs reputation as one of the most privileged shelters, a reputation communicated among clients via word of mouth and to staff of other shelters and homeless advocates during public forums such as shelter directors meetings, stems primarily from its proven track record. This record includes getting clients to comply with shelter rules governing behavior, good results with service plans concerning money management, and high rates of success in getting clients to accept available housing. Regarding compliance with shelter rules, for example, GDH maintains a zero tolerance policy for alcohol or drug use and threatening behavior. Clients who appear to
701
be under the inuence of alcohol are questioned by a member of the staff who may elect to administer a Breathalyzer test. Staff also regularly conduct urinalysis screens to detect illegal drug use. Clients who are found to be drinking or using drugs must meet with their caseworker and enroll in treatment. Clients already in treatment are required to intensify their treatment program. Clients who refuse or who continue to drink or use drugs are transferred to another shelter. Threatening or violent behavior results in an immediate shelter transfer.17 Further research might examine if this shelters records (along with those of other similarly situated shelters) contain comparatively few DHS incident reports concerning ghts or threatening behavior among clients. It might also be useful to compare GDH with other shelters on the frequency of complaints made against shelter staff to either the client advisory board (internal) or the Coalition for the Homeless (external).18 Finally, one might compare degrees of compliance with service plans and timeliness of placement into housing. A subsequent section of this article explores some of the conservation strategies employed by dominant shelters of this sort that help to perpetuate their reputation for order. Peters Place, a drop-in center, is a good example of a shelter located at the other side of the elds dominant sector, on the side of authenticity. From a cramped and often disheveled space, this program serves homeless men and women ages 45 and older. Upon entering this crowded setting, an observer rst notices the lockers that line several walls. These tall, battleship gray, rectangular boxes are available for storing clients belongings; clients must provide their own locks. Beyond these banks of gray are rows of tables and gray folding chairs. Clients are seated there day and night, reading, talking, eating, and sleeping (drop-in centers do not provide beds, only chairs, lockers, and showers). Just around the corner from this large client area are the cramped ofces and desk spaces of the Peters Place staff. The staff spend most of their time interacting with the clients. Clients who are relatively new to Peters Place are assessed by social workers. This process begins after a client has returned several times: Why would one begin an assessment, after all, if the client is a one-timer? Staff greet returning clients in a welcoming manner and ask how they have been faring.19 Peters Place, like other drop-in shelters, is a preferred shelter service among those clients who are either unwilling to participate in more structured shelter programs or who have effectively been kicked out of the other shelters. This population is comprised of the stereotypical street homeless. The media often depict them as disheveled, drunk, and psychotic. They move about with all their belongings and are often seen sleeping on subway trains. Peters Place clients come and go at will. They are not denied access if under the inuence of drugs or alcohol, provided they are not threatening. Challenging behaviors are expected,
702
and even threatening clients are welcomed back once they have calmed down. While drop-in centers like Peters Place exercise very little control over their clients, homeless services programs of this sort nonetheless occupy some of the most dominant positions within the shelter eld because they are seen as doing the real work required to address the needs of homeless clients. They are therefore high in the capital of authenticity.20 Less privileged shelters, those with less order and also lacking in authenticity, occupy the dominated end of the eld. These are the places understood as poorly run, impersonal, and potentially dangerous. Such shelters are seen as inadequate with respect to basic services, structure, and safety. Numerous ethnographic studies support these assessments with descriptive rsthand accounts and client-staff interviews (e.g., Dordick 1996; Desjarlais 1997; Hopper 2003; Williams 2003). Facilities at this end of the eld include the larger general shelters. Morale is low at these facilities, and researchers would likely nd a high level of staff turnover. Not only do staff at these shelters have more difculty in controlling clients, but they also lack a feeling of pride in taking on the true mission of social work.21 Again, further research might consider if these shelters have more clients from the dominated end of the eld of clients (more on this in the second half of this essay) and if they are less successful than privileged shelters in preventing clients from engaging in incidents of violence or threatening behavior. One might also assess whether these shelters are less successful in heading off client complaints to internal and external boards or less successful in nding housing or transitional placements for clients in a smooth and timely manner. Strategies of Conservation and Subversion Crucial to understanding the dynamics of the eld of shelters is the distinction between the conservation strategies of shelters that occupy positions of specic authority within the eld and the corresponding subversion strategies of shelters seeking to challenge and discredit this authority. To maintain their ascendant positions, the most order-privileged shelters engage in image or reputation protection by taking advantage of their right to refuse certain clients. This is a right gained by shelter administrators during contract negotiations with the DHS, a right to an interview or acceptance process wherein clients can be screened for appropriateness according to predetermined admission criteria.22 The shelters that possess this right make full use of it to protect their accrued symbolic capital. That is, order-rich shelters effectively accept those homeless individuals who are most likely to help maintain their positive reputation or position relative to other, more chaotic shelters or dropin centers. The obvious effect of this right of refusal is that the less
703
desirable homeless, those with challenging behaviors who are not compliant with their service plans, stay in the less privileged shelters. Image or reputation protection through right of refusal is one of the numerous causal mechanisms or recurrent causal sequences of general scope (Tilly 1998, 7) that a eld analysis can identify and underscore, casting doubt upon the conventional distinction in social science between description and causal explanation.23 More covert conservation strategies among shelters rich in order capital, strategies that also effectively keep out less desirable homeless people, are seen in the imposition of organizational rules and procedures: in this case, shelter rules. (Here we nd yet another generalizable causal mechanism.) A shelter that insists on zero tolerance for drugs and alcohol (using a Breathalyzer and random urinalysis), that enacts a strict curfew, or that requires clients to participate in money management will attract those homeless men and women who are willing to submit to such restrictions (and whose habitus inclines or predisposes them to do so). Such requirements will also deect others who reject rules and structure. Since the DHS is mandated to provide shelter for anyone who requests it, regardless of circumstances, it is not difcult to identify the results of these power plays and to see the source of conict. Homeless clients who are identied by the DHS as chronic, long-term stayers, especially those with aggressive dispositions and less social capital, tend to remain in the less privileged shelters. By contrast, temporarily homeless people, those who typically bear larger amounts of capital of various kinds, make the move rather quickly into more privileged settings. A close examination of shelter transfer patterns, with careful attention paid to which clients move where and how quickly, might test the hypothesis that shelters with more order capital are able to attract and receive clients who themselves are endowed with more personal capital, that is, clients with habitus more conducive to following restrictions, engaging in self-regulation, and exerting self-discipline. Bourdieu (1979) points out that the habitus of working-class people, shaped under conditions of comparative stability and orderliness, tend to be more conducive to the working out and following of a rational life plan. By contrast, the habitus of subproletarians that have been formed and perpetuated under conditions of uncertainty, incoherence, and arbitrarinesssubproletarians characteristically lacking secure employment and often also homelesstend to be particularly ill suited to a regularization of daily life conduct. Subversion strategies tend to be employed by the dominated dominants of a eld in order to legitimate a claim to ascendancy within it. In the case of the eld of homeless shelter programs, those shelters that are richest in claims to authenticity are precisely the ones most likely to engage in subversion strategies in seeking to better their position relative to those that manifest a high degree of order. Staff in the au-
704
thentic shelters frequently highlight the serious obstacles that they face on a daily basis, thereby drawing an invidious distinction between themselves and their counterparts in the more orderly settings. Such distinctions serve to undercut the latters own claims to legitimacy. Rather than minimize the number and severity of difculties confronting their program, the dominated (authentic) dominants identify these difculties themselves as badges of honor. War stories abound, and the worse off or more challenging their clients, the better. For them to be at the dominant end of the eld at all, however, other shelters, the DHS, homeless advocacy groups, and the consumers of shelter services must recognize and grant validity to the claims that they make. Indeed, shelter staff at the less privileged and capital-rich (in either sense) shelters willingly acknowledge the especially difcult work that these authentic programs undertake. The latters undeniable hard work and the almost insurmountable challenges that they face earn them a sort of mystique among shelter providers. So too, word on the street among homeless clients often characterizes these shelters as compassionate, dependable, port-in-the-storm kinds of settings. A plausible hypothesis is that shelter directors at these highly challenged shelter programs and drop-in centers utilize their own claims to authenticity to connect positively with DHS contract managers and with Coalition for the Homeless watchdogs. Such strategies help these shelters to further their inuence with both the DHS and the coalition, two entities with opinions that truly matter.24 Shelters that are without the symbolic capital of either order or authenticity engage in subversion strategies similar to those outlined above for both of the dominants. For example, capital-poor shelters attack their better-endowed counterparts by charging that the order-rich shelters handpick their clients or by criticizing authenticity-rich shelters as horribly chaotic places. (No one pays much attention, however, to these dominated shelters attempts to delegitimate their more privileged counterparts.) Capital-poor shelters also attempt somehow to account for both their lack of order, relative to the dominant shelters, and their lack of authenticity. It was the second authors experience that complaints are frequently heard at shelter directors meetings regarding the unfair advantages enjoyed by better-endowed shelters, regarding stafng shortages, and regarding the inadequate resources (e.g., exit options) available for dealing with challenging clients. In respect to exit options, for example, it was often pointed out that it is far easier for the dominant shelters to transfer challenging or rule-breaking clients to the less privileged shelters than the other way around, leaving the dominated shelters with clients whom they do not want. Staff members from dominated shelters resented the ability of their more privileged counterparts to dump difcult clients into their laps. Their complaints about this asym-
705
metry served as a way for these dominated shelters to claim symbolic authority in relation to their better-off counterparts. The eld of homeless shelters is a space riven with tensions and mutually opposing strategies of action. However, it is also worth noting that all of those involved in this eld, regardless of the particular position they occupy within it, are heavily invested in the work of helping homeless people; homelessness is recognized across the board as a problem that is worth addressing. Their underlying belief in the game, or illusio, serves as the fundamental premise upon which the entire eld is based, a shared understanding that goes without saying. The very willingness of the various actors in this eld to engage in struggle over the mechanisms of service delivery, denition of a challenging client, reasonable lengths of stay, and whether or not shelters ought to maintain their right of refusal supports this shared framework of investments and commitments. Bourdieu reminds us that small victories or partial revolutions that constantly occur in elds do not call into question the very foundations of the game, its fundamental axioms, the bedrock of ultimate beliefs on which the whole game is based. . . . Those who take part in the struggle help to reproduce the game by helpingmore or less completely, depending on the eldto produce belief in the value of the stakes (Bourdieu 1993, 74).
The Field of Homeless Clients

Having explored the eld of providers of services to the homeless, this article now turns to a consideration of the consumers of those services. It illustrates how a Bourdieuian framework can be utilized to raise questions about the homeless clients within these shelters, the positions that they occupy within a eld of homeless clients, and how their location within this space inuences the quantity and quality of services that they receive. In-depth studies of the homeless are plentiful. This rich collection of qualitative and quantitative research, far too extensive to discuss adequately here, provides scholars interested in that vulnerable population with a range of useful approaches, both theoretical and methodological. What follows is not an attempt to replace these studies or to discuss homelessness in general. Rather, it is an attempt to investigate in particular those homeless individuals who are located within the eld of shelter clients, insofar as they are located within this eld. As in the previous discussion of the eld of shelters, the primary source of data is the second authors experience as a director of social services and as a shelter director. In these roles, she supervised caseworkers, met directly with clients (especially during times of conict), and discussed particularly challenging cases with representatives from the Coalition for the Homeless and the DHS.
706
Principles of Division To begin once again, two familiar questions are revisited: What are the specic dimensions along which the eld of homeless clients is organized? And what separates those who occupy the relatively more privileged positions within that eld from those who occupy its relatively less privileged locations? As in the analysis of the eld of shelters, this discussion of the eld of homeless clients extends beyond pregiven and taken-for-granted categories. It requires rejection of an alternative principle of division that comes from the common sense of the social work universe, one that is commonly deployed by the DHS and by those who staff the shelters: the distinction between the chronically and the transitionally (or temporarily) homeless (New York City, Department of Homeless Services n.d.). These labels, together with a third label, the episodically homeless (often put forward as an intermediate category), pertain to a persons length and pattern of stay in the shelter system. Over time, they have come to be associated with various stereotyped characteristics or features. As before, it is necessary to begin by examining these doxic categories and by identifying the reasons why they fail to illuminate how individuals are organized within the space at hand. The transitional or temporarily homeless category consists of those men and women with infrequent or one-time shelter stays.25 These are the homeless clients with the lowest incidence of medical, mental health, and addiction problems; they often get back into housing once the basic reasons for their housing loss are addressed. Typical reasons for housing loss include loss of employment (e.g., owing to company downsizing), family composition changes (e.g., divorce), and safety issues (e.g., a threatening ex-partner or partner or increases in neighborhood violence) that resulted either in eviction or in a voluntary decision to abandon the home. Temporarily homeless clients are identied by shelter staff as capable of living on their own and are seen as motivated to do whatever it takes to be successful in a housing interview. They are often thought by caseworkers to be comparatively easy to work with, and it is widely held that once they have housing, these clients will happily put the whole experience behind them. Accordingly, it seems reasonable that these clients would be the bearers of the greatest volume of personal capital in the eld of homeless shelter consumers. The real story, however, is not nearly so simple. Some temporarily homeless clients lack a feel for the game, an ability to grasp the relationship between client and caseworker. Many are new consumers of social service assistance and consequently present themselves as deserving special consideration or as being somehow different from or better than the rest of the caseworkers clients.26 These attitudes, ultimately rooted in the clients habitus, may impede the delivery of services, alienate these individuals from other shelter clients, and result in their being deemed
707
more rather than less challenging by the shelter staff. In the end, such attitudes may prevent these clients from experiencing a positive transition from shelter to housing. By contrast to the temporarily homeless, men and women who are chronically homeless would at rst glance seem likely to occupy the least privileged positions within the eld. They are dened by the DHS as shelter clients who have infrequent yet lengthy (in excess of 638 days) shelter stays (Coalition for the Homeless 2003). Their longer length of stay, as compared with those of other clients, is determined by a number of different factors, such as immigration status, health problems, poor interviewing skills (necessary to obtain housing or employment), or a lack of familial connections. Irving Piliavin and associates (1993) also nd a higher incidence of long-term homelessness among individuals with a history of out-of-home care. Moreover, they nd that those with untreated alcohol problems are at great risk for longer lengths of stay and frequent returns to homeless services systems; often aficted with mental illness and addiction, those with untreated substance problems are understood to be difcult clients. Despite the formidable challenges faced by such clients, however, it was certainly the second authors experience that chronically homeless shelter clients did not lack in all forms of personal capital. Some are actually very well liked by both staff and clients. They may be identied, for example, as helpful around the building, pleasant to meet with, agreeable regarding their service plan, sought after by other clients, and generally well respected within both client and staff circles. The chronic, long-term homeless sometimes acquire, as a consequence of their long exposure to the shelter system, an insiders knowledge of how things work. This experience contributes to, rather than reduces, their personal capital. The episodically homeless, dened by the DHS as those clients who return to the shelters again and again, would be expected to occupy an intermediate sector (between transitional and chronic) of the space of homeless clients.27 Some of them make relatively few requests for shelter, but others return quite frequently. This category of homeless clients, however, comprises an exceedingly heterogeneous population and, as a result, is very difcult to characterize. For example, while psychosocial and emotional forces often lead these clients to return to shelter, the nature of these forces varies widely. In some cases, their problems closely resemble the kinds of cognitive and affectual disturbances found among the chronically homeless. But in other cases, these clients return to shelter because it becomes for them a sort of microcommunity. Researchers would likely nd that while many who are described as episodically homeless nd group living claustrophobic, a fair number of others derive emotional benets from the congregate setting. That is, clients who develop strong connections to their peers experience difculties in making the transition to independent living. A plausible
708
hypothesis is that when these clients are placed on their own in rooms or apartments, some experience a feeling of loneliness for which they are ill prepared. This loneliness is starkly contrasted with the social environment of the shelter. Still other clients are forced to seek shelter because of social developments largely outside of their control. Such developments include neighborhood gentrication, changes in economic climate and the resulting increases in unemployment, the growing burdens of health care, and housing loss.28 Accordingly, some of the individuals in this category gravitate rather easily toward more privileged positions within the eld of shelter clients; others quickly nd themselves in the dominated regions of that space. The authors initial impression was that length and pattern of stay enable one to understand the logic of the eld of homeless clients: that temporarily homeless men and women (or families) likely occupy the most privileged positions within the eld of homeless shelter clients, the episodically homeless occupy the mid-range positions, and the chronically homeless occupy the least privileged positions. Yet, through reection, as well as in ongoing dialogue between theory and the empirical material at hand, the authors came to see that the manner in which homeless clients interact with staff and with other clients plays the most important role in determining their position. While a shelter client may not have a lot of inuence in the overall system, he or she may wield a fair amount of power, earn a fair amount of distinction, and secure privileges internal to a particular shelter. In relation to their counterparts, clients earn capital both from the staff (staff-sanctioned capital) and from their fellow clients (client-sanctioned capital; see g. 2). These two often competing species of capital and principles of hierarchization cut across the categorical distinctions that we have been discussing. Specically, the unequal distribution of these two species, described in more detail below, illuminates the difference between those clients who are successful within the shelter system and those who occupy less advantaged places within it. Staff-Sanctioned and Client-Sanctioned Capital According to the authors hypothesis, staff-sanctioned capital, or, more broadly, the placement of a homeless client somewhere along a continuum between good and challenging, emerges from the cumulative impression that staff members develop of a client in response to the latters (perceived) attitude concerning shelter rules, policies, and expectations, reasons for housing loss, and purpose of shelter stay. Not all clients adhere to the rules and policies that shelters establish, which usually include curfews, restrictions on visitors, limited access to smoking spaces, no food during nonmeal times, restrictions on the amount and type of personal possessions, and limited access to telephone communication
709
Fig. 2.Field of homeless clients
(Schutt and Garrett 1992; Campbell and McCarthy 2000; Williams 2003). But when they do, conforming to staff expectations of appropriate bearing and conduct as well as being submissive and respectful, they are accorded a certain measure of value and esteem. Along with that personal capital, they are given greater opportunities to obtain housing; shelters, much like academic organizations that hold degree-conferring power over students, are gatekeepers to housing opportunities that are generally unavailable to people outside the shelter system. Many clients naturally and easily gain such privileges, being (as an outgrowth of their primary dispositions or habitus) already rule abiding, nonchallenging, exible, and polite. Others adopt in more strategic fashion the outward appearances of a good client in order to get through the system and obtain housing (Desjarlais 1997). While certainly there are clients who
710
understand active participation in case plans as an opportunity for selfimprovement, clients are a captive audience, and case plans are presented to them as a necessary rather than optional condition of shelter stays. How else to explain the spectacle of a 57-year-old client allowing a 24-year-old caseworker to criticize his or her money management style? Another determinant of staff-sanctioned capital is the way in which a client understands his or her housing loss. The client who takes personal responsibility for that loss paradoxically earns more symbolic capital from the staff than the client who identies other people (or impersonal social forces) as its cause. Perhaps the client who admits personal responsibility is understood to be more willing to learn from past mistakes, or perhaps shelter caseworkers espouse an ethic of personal responsibility that centers on patterns of action (e.g., money management habits) within their clients own scope of inuence, rather than on macroscopic forces such as declines in affordable housing stock or neighborhood gentrication. (The view that homeless shelter clients are to blame for their own homelessness is a prevalent one among shelter caseworkers.) In her study of homeless women and the shelter industry, Jean Williams (2003, 59) afrms, Shelters do not ignore low-income housing shortages or the value of the minimum wage as reasons for homelessness, but many of the most important facets of their programs address the perceived behaviors of the homeless. Dysfunctional behaviors are believed to have been instrumental in the process of becoming homeless (emphasis in original). Amy Dworsky and Irving Piliavin (2000, 212) also note that this individual decits framework assumes that people become homeless because they possess or lack certain attributes . . . which can include personal disabilities or human capital deciencies.29 The homeless shelter client who accepts responsibility for his or her housing loss accrues more staff-sanctioned capital. Shelter staff identify such a client as easy to work with and as someone who will be easy to place in housing. Should this client prove difcult to place in housing, staff often argue to the DHS that he or she should be allowed to remain in the shelter beyond the time limits specied in that shelters policy, pointing to external reasons for the delay.30 Discourse analyses of clinical staff meeting minutes, along with indepth interviews of caseworkers or observation of shelter interactions, would provide researchers with illuminating insights into how certain clients acquire large amounts of staff-sanctioned capital and the implications of such capital. A clients access to staff-sanctioned capital is also determined by the ways in which that client understands his or her caseworker and the shelter. Good clients, those with a large endowment of such capital, tend to treat the shelter with a certain attitude of grateful reverence, behaving much like a guest in someone elses home. They help to keep the shelter clean, complain only when absolutely necessary, try to frame complaints
711
as requests or suggestions, and avoid making negative statements about the shelter facility and staff. Clients are expected to make themselves at home within a shelter and yet not to become too comfortable.31 In contrast to good clients, their more challenging counterparts engage in behaviors and statements suggesting permanent residency; they communicate or behave in ways that indicate that they have little intention of leaving in a timely manner. Other clients identied by shelter staff as problematic are those who treat the facility like a prison and its staff like guards, those who are loud and disruptive, those who vandalize, those who frequently complain about the quality and quantity of services, and those who similarly complain about provisions. These challenging clients treat caseworkers not as counselors or guides but as scapegoats or servants; for example, a client might be heard saying to his or her caseworker: Youre my social worker; youre supposed to work for me. They regard the shelter not as a temporary safe haven but as a permanent home or as a prison. Some shelter clients, those with little prior experience as recipients of social services, also see themselves as different from the rest of the shelter clients. This attitude results in requests for special privileges, such as increased access to the caseworker, leniency concerning curfews, or indulgence when they bend shelter rules. The more successful such clients were prior to their shelter experience, the less able they often are to accept their present circumstances or to receive help from someone whose experience and training they view with skepticism. Often they act as if they know more than their caseworker and can do the workers job, in fact, better than the caseworker can. While more challenging types of clients may not gain for themselves much staff-sanctioned capital, it is nonetheless possible for them to garner a large amount of client-sanctioned capital. This is a second type of symbolic capital operative inside the eld of homeless shelter clients. Unlike staff-sanctioned capital, however, client-sanctioned capital is generated and bestowed entirely by other shelter clients. Client-sanctioned capital ows to those who directly and routinely challenge shelter staff, rules, and structure. Clients who garner large volumes of such capital are those who are strong advocates for themselves and others within the shelter environment. They become known inside the shelter as persons to consult when a caseworker is not being helpful, when a client has been denied a weekend pass, or when a client does not think that he or she is getting a fair shake regarding housing appointments.32 Sometimes these bearers of client-sanctioned capital take the lead in urging their peers to refuse currently available housing appointments, encouraging them instead to wait for subsidized Section 8 or New York New York (NYNY) housing.33 In providing such advice, these inuential clients forfeit their own chance to earn staff-sanctioned capital in favor of accumulating the esteem of their fellow clients. Since they often
712
complain to shelter advocacy groups both within and without the shelter, they are seen by the shelter staff as challenging and difcult. These are the clients with connections. Some can quote the Callahan decree from memory and are on a rst-name basis with staff at the Coalition for the Homeless.34 They may even have earned the coveted title of shelter monitor. This is a high-status volunteer position with the coalition. It allows them on-the-spot inspection access to any shelter (other than the one in which they are residing) in search of infractions of the Callahan decree. By contrast, those clients who separate themselves from other clients or who adopt an attitude of superiority do not accrue such clientsanctioned capital. In homeless shelters, clients with large endowments of either type of capital may be on the fast track to housing. In the rst instance, clients who have accrued staff-sanctioned capital may move through the shelter quickly because of preferential treatment. Such treatment may result in weekend passes, easier access to caseworkers, and recommendations for housing. Clients with large amounts of client-sanctioned capital, conversely and paradoxically, may also move quickly through the shelter because staff are anxious to get them out of that environment, where their perspectives and conduct may have a negative inuence upon other clients. Shelter staff are very cognizant of the effects that challenging clients can have upon other clients. Shelter environments are not static but always evolving and dynamic contexts, and the presence of putatively difcult clients can affect matters in sometimes signicant and dramatic ways. At bottom, what is most troubling to the shelter staff is the tendency of those clients who are well-endowed in clientsanctioned capital (or who aim to accumulate it) to seek to delegitimate the ofcially sanctioned rules of shelter life. In Bourdieus (1994) terms, such clients seek to transform the representation of this world which contributes to its reality by denouncing the tacit contract of adherence to the established order which denes the original doxa of that space (12728). This strategy of action among so-called difcult clients undercuts the staff-sanctioned recognition enjoyed by certain of their counterparts. It also makes it all but inevitable that the shelter staff will move these difcult individuals on or at least make a serious effort (ofcial regulations permitting) to do so. Empirical Illustrations The conguration of the eld of homeless shelter clients can be effectively illustrated through a series of composite proles. These sketches are ctional constructs that combine individual client characteristics with stylized background features and narrative trajectories drawn from multiple homeless (and formerly homeless) individuals. In order to protect subjects condentiality, pseudonyms are used throughout.
713
These composite sketches are meant to illustrate the different kinds of persons who occupy key positions within the space of homeless clients. The proles are also meant to demonstrate that length of shelter stay and pattern of shelter use are inadequate criteria for understanding the division of the homeless client eld. Ben, an example of a client well-endowed with staff-sanctioned capital.Ben lost his housing when he lost his job; he worked for a restaurant equipment company, but the rm downsized. For 4 years, he has been in and out of most of the adult shelters available for men. Ben has two grown children with whom he is in touch only a few times a year. They resent his divorce from their mother and his subsequent remarriage; Ben characterizes his relationship with them as, okay but not close. He has a number of extended family members in the area, but, having stayed with many of them for a few weeks to a month at a time, he has effectively worn out his welcome. At age 47, Ben is too young for subsidized apartments for adults over the age of 50 and must settle for single-room occupancy (SRO) housing. He nds its cramped quarters, shared bathroom, and shared kitchen to be very unpleasant. After 6 years in recovery for alcohol addiction, he also does not care for the drinking or evidence of drug use that he encounters in these converted welfare hotels, and although he reports that he has increased the number of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings he attends each week, he feels that these depressingly edgy, unsafe housing environments threaten his sobriety. He frequently leaves these SRO placements, returning to his previous shelter.35 Ben is a people person. Shelter staff and many of his fellow clients enjoy his company when he is in the building, and he usually nds something complimentary to say to his caseworkers. He routinely praises the shelter director for imposing strict rules and for running a tight ship. These rules, he informs her, help everyone there to feel safe. They also support his own efforts to stay sober. Shelter staff wish that more of their clients were like Ben. Shelter clients, by contrast, like him well enough, but some see him as more than a little annoying. Ben has gured out how to play the game. He follows shelter rules, is friendly and engaging with staff, praises the director for how he or she runs the shelter, and provides compelling reasons why substandard housing is not for him. This client is endowed with enough staff-sanctioned capital to stay on at the shelter until he becomes old enough for senior housing (age 50) or to move into an apartment if shelter staff manage to locate one of the scarce studio or one-bedroom apartments sometimes made available to single adults. Charlotte, an example of a client well-endowed with client-sanctioned capital.Charlotte was evicted from her apartment after having one too many conicts with her landlord. She had allowed her nephew to stay with her, which was against her lease, and had stopped paying rent in
714
the meantime because the landlord had failed to replace a rotten bathroom oor. In fact, she had led a civil suit against the landlord for failing to keep the premises in good repair. In court, the judge ordered the landlord to make repairs. However, Charlotte was unable to pay the past rent she owed, so the landlord evicted her for failing to pay that rent and for having a guest in excess of the 14-day period allowed under her lease. Charlotte sent her daughter to stay with the childs grandmother and entered the shelter system. All of Charlottes furniture went into a storage locker, and the bill for her storage exceeded her monthly Supplemental Security Income check. Charlotte resents her caseworker and does not hesitate to tell her so: If you really wanted to help me, youd nd me an apartment I can afford and get my storage bill paid! Charlotte also frequently challenges the shelter director for what she views as draconian rules and policies, often breaking them deantly. She enjoys engaging the other clients in conversation over cards and often offers them assistance with their problems. She tells them, You ought to sue; thats what Im going to do! Make those bastards pay! Charlotte has connections, she tells the other clients, and she is not afraid of using them. This helps her to earn a large volume of client-sanctioned capital. Clients like her because she is funny, forthright, and on their side. She says the things to staff that clients are thinking but are afraid to say. Staff members are eager to see Charlotte leave the shelter program as quickly as possible. She poisons the well with her loud pronouncements during mealtimes, and she intimidates her caseworker. Indeed, this is Charlottes third shelter in 6 months. Shelter directors have been transferring her like a hot potato to their unsuspecting colleagues at other shelters. She may even wind up with one of the scarce studio or one-bedroom apartments, just to ensure that this litigiously minded woman goes on her way. Leo, an example of a client lacking in either type of capital.Over the last 6 years, Leo has been in a few mens shelters but has never chosen to stay more than a few days at a time. This temporary status has prevented shelter staff from getting a full picture of his history and from providing the kind of assistance that might help him to nd permanent housing. Leos employment history is lled with short-lived, part-time, and temporary jobs, such as sweeping stores or stocking shelves. He sometimes receives a general relief income from income maintenance centers, but he hates having to comply with the work (usually on street-sweeping teams) that these centers assign him; in fact, he is frequently a no-show and has to negotiate to get his general relief case reopened. When not sleeping on trains, Leo uses drop-in centers for hot meals, showers, and a place to obtain clean clothing. There is no warm relationship between this client and the shelter system. Leo thinks that shelters are too much about rules and resents their insistence on planning for the future: I take things as they come. What good is planning?
715
Nothing ever turns out right anyhow. Leos cynical outlook is reinforced daily by the difculties he encounters living on the street: the delinquents who pick on him for sport, the police who hassle him, and the public at large who react to him, if not with avoidance, then with visible disgust. Unsurprisingly, Leo acts the part of the kicked dog. When in a drop-in center, he becomes easily annoyed with the staff and clients alike. On good days he mumbles profanity and sarcastic comments, while on the more volatile days he calls people out. Most fellow clients do not take up Leos invitations to ght, but his behavior does often result in temporary suspensions from drop-in centers. His behavior also makes him an unlikely candidate for referral to one of those relatively more privileged shelters that are steeped in the capital of order.
Implications for Research and Practice

This essay has now illustrated what a Bourdieu-inspired analysis of the eld of homeless services might look like. With this discussion in mind, it is possible to assess the implications of such an approach for social work research and practice. With respect to research, several substantive, theoretical, and methodological points are worth mention. To begin with, this approach to research contributes a new way to analyze homeless shelters and those who consume shelter services. It moves beyond preconstructed categories, however deeply ingrained they may be in the minds of shelter workers, clients, and other actors within the eld, and suggests an alternative understanding that captures more compellingly the objective principles of division actually operative within and effectual across that social universe. It understands the eld of homeless services as a space of contestation in which heretofore little-recognized stakes (those of order and authenticity on the side of production and of staffand client-sanctioned recognition on the side of consumption) all play a crucial role. In this way, it helps to underscore the importance of eldspecic struggles over power within the world of social work. Much of substantive value is also to be gained from exploring the interconnections among the two constituent spaces of this object of study: the elds of homeless shelters and of homeless clients. Such a dual inquiry helps to illuminate the structural homologies that obtain across these distinct social microcosms. It also enables researchers to recognize the permanent dialectic (Bourdieu 1996a, 249) between the needs of differently positioned clients and the services provided by homologously positioned shelters. These substantive contributions can also be extended to other regions and sectors of what has been called the broader welfare eld (Peillon 2001, 1). No one doubts, of course, that the societal tensions prominent within the social space as a whole, including tensions based in class, race, or gender, remain salient within this eld of homeless services. Such a view
716
is entirely consistent with Bourdieus own perspective. His later writings include, in fact, many wide-ranging critiques of neoliberalism, among them an ethnography (Bourdieu et al. 1999) of the social suffering caused by the retrenchment of the modern welfare state. For Bourdieu, social universes at the mesolevel of analysis can never be understood in isolation from their broader historical context, which includes such macrolevel spaces as the economic eld, the eld of bureaucratic powers, and (especially) the societal eld of power. Yet one must also bear in mind that the impact of these larger societal congurations, often discussed under the rubric of social control, is always refracted through the specic mediation of the specic forms and forces of more delimited elds (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 105). For example, the structures and dynamics of the eld of homeless services profoundly affect how larger societal inuences come to be expressed within it. Bourdieu concedes that the mechanical metaphor (1996b, 220) of refraction, which appears frequently in his work, is only partially satisfactory, but he adds that it has the merit at least of banish[ing] from the mind the even more inappropriate model of reection (220). If one denies to less encompassing spaces this capacity for refraction of broader inuences, then one runs the risk of committing the short-circuit fallacy of passing directly from what is produced in the social world to what is produced in the [more specic] eld (Bourdieu 1996a, 248). The substantive strengths of Bourdieus approach are owed in considerable part to its highly distinctive way of addressing social science problems. In particular, it pays close attention to the structural properties of elds or spaces as distributions of capital. Empirical research in social work has much to gain from eld analyses that take seriously the task of mapping relational congurations, such as the spaces that are at the core of all Bourdieuian inquiry. Random sampling and regression analysis, by contrast, nearly always have difculty grasping what is of greatest concern here, namely, the relational structures of those objects. (The authors thus concur with William Bordens assessment that the critical issues facing social work at present involve not only conrmation or disconrmation . . . but exploration of basic questions as to how and in what ways differing models, metaphors, and narratives foster the helping process [Borden 1992, 469].) Fields and capital may indeed be studied formally, as Bourdieu demonstrates by deploying the techniques of correspondence analysis in many of his writings (e.g., 1984, 1996b).36 Other formal approaches at the dominated pole of the space of methodologies, approaches not used by Bourdieu himself but belonging to the same family, might also be used; these include social network analysis, Galois lattice analysis, and sequence analysis (for a survey, see Mohr and Franzosi 1997). But even if not formalized, as is the case with the authors own analyses above, relational inquiry can still prove helpful for the attention it directs toward analytic themes
717
such as structural positionality, objective divisions between dominant and dominated sectors of a space, and the structural homologies among elds. Such inquiry promises to generate new, substantive, and useful insights into the structures of power that are of fundamental concern to social workers. Analyses of the spaces or relational congurations that are yielded by this type of inquiry have the further benet of not being purely static in nature. The dichotomy between statics and dynamics is a false one, and the elds discussed in this article are hardly the inert structures that such a dichotomization would lead one to assume. Field analysis is certainly synchronic in the sense that it maps out an array of positions, the occupants of those positions, and the pattern of their relations with one another, a pattern shaped, in turn, by the overall distribution of capitals within that space. Yet eld analysis is also diachronic in the sense that it helps one to gauge the strategies of action that actors within a eld are likely to pursue, depending upon their respective positions within that space. It makes possible specication of a number of action sequences likely to be prominent in eld dynamics, not only the conservation and subversion strategies likely to recur in most elds but also subsidiary ones specic only to certain kinds of elds. For example, in the eld of homeless services, it directs attention to shelters selective invocation of the right of refusal and to their imposition of organizational rules and procedures. Such processes are all causal mechanisms that help researchers better to understand how power operates, both within elds in general and within the kinds of spaces of concern to social work in particular. Relevant to the analysis of processes and sequences of general scope is the habitus, that system of dispositions that serves as the generative source of so many of these action strategies (rational calculation playing a lesser role). In the preceding analysis of the space of homeless clients, the discussion touched briey upon the role of the habitus in orienting these clients toward one or another of the elds major regions; their habitus makes them more or less likely to (seek to) accumulate the specic capitals around which that eld is structured.37 Bourdieu provides some useful insights into how best to study the habitus and strategies of action of differently situated actors, stressing that analysis should be conducted on the basis of a construction that determines the choice of objects and of pertinent characteristics (Bourdieu 1990b, 160). In particular, he advises ethnographic researchers to focus upon cases situated in regions that are located far away from one another but within the space at hand; he recommends, in other words, that they focus selectively upon cases located in key positions such as the dominant, dominated, and intermediate sectors of the space. He also recommends dividing the dominant sector into subregions, as an internal eld of power (this is the approach pursued above). Alternatively, Bourdieu
718
suggests comparing a small number of cases all within the same subspace or sector. Both lines of inquiry promise to shed light on the inner dynamics of elds, perhaps also illuminating the processes whereby such homologous spaces as those of production and consumption (e.g., of homeless services) manage, in a coincidence so miraculous (Bourdieu 1996a, 162), to adjust themselves to one another. Bourdieu summarizes his approach as a method whose aim is to set up a dialectic between the general and the particular, which alone may enable one to reconcile the general and synoptic view demanded by the construction of the overall structure with the close-up, nely detailed view (Bourdieu 1990b, 160). Field analysis, as he envisions it, seeks to undercut altogether the false opposition between particularizing and generalizing modes of social inquiry. Single-case studies can add to the project of developing a more comprehensive account of the invariant properties of all elds, facilitating the construction of a general theory of elds. Such a general theory, perhaps the ultimate goal of all of Bourdieus work, would offer an account not only of what makes different kinds of spaces distinctive but also of the fundamental features that all of these spaces share. Its implications for social work would be considerable. By the extension of Bourdieus approach to other social service systems, it would be possible to develop a theoretical framework that would unify the whole literature of social work. Whether studying young people or old, family structures or the criminal justice system, one would always be working to elaborate a unitary theory that spans the entire discipline. This ambitious research enterprise has implications, however, not only for the theory but also for the practice of social work. As social workers intervene in private homes, prisons, work settings, and the broader community, a relational and eld-analytic perspective can help them better to understand the external forces assigning, as it were, to their particular case some of its pertinent properties. It can also give them comparative purchase on the sometimes bewildering complexities, challenges, and difculties, seemingly so very idiosyncratic, of the cases that they seek to tackle: Nothing is more universal and more universalizable than difculties (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 218). Finally, knowing what mechanisms of domination and legitimation are encountered in their practice can empower social workers in their practical efforts to target or nullify those mechanisms. Power operates through eld-specic processes and dynamics; recognizing those processes and dynamics can advance practical efforts aimed at social transformation. This is especially the case when power dynamics reach into the innermost tendencies and dispositions of clients habitus. As Bourdieu often observes, the reshaping of the habitus can require arduous and lengthy labor, like an athletes training. Nevertheless, social work practitioners can at least benet from the insight that the potentialities
719
residing within the habitus spring into action only when awakened or triggered by structures of domination somehow reminiscent of the ones that originally produced that habitus. Just as one should not say that a window broke because a stone hit it, but that it broke, when the stone hit it, because it was breakable, similarly, as can been seen with particular clarity when an insignicant, apparently fortuitous event unleashes enormous consequences that are bound to appear disproportionate to all those who have different habitus, one should not say that a historical event determined a behavior but that it had this determining effect because a habitus capable of being affected by that event conferred that power upon it (Bourdieu 2000, 14849; emphasis in original). Such an insight promises to benet social work practitioners by rendering more comprehensible to them certain behaviors that would otherwise give the appearance of being thoroughly random, unpredictable, or even self-defeating.
Conclusion
This generative reading of Bourdieu has attempted creatively to transpose his ideas, developed in relation to the discipline of sociology, onto a new intellectual and professional terrain. Such a reading will succeed only if the effort adds a fresh voice to ongoing debates over how best to do social work, both as a science and as a practical endeavor. The perspective elucidated here does not promise to lead to research ndings or practical orientations that are in every instance new to social work. It does, however, offer a unique way of drawing together insights that have already been explored by others and of setting those insights within a more comprehensive and unitary framework. This approach also identies potentially fruitful alternative avenues both for empirical research and for practical intervention.
References
American Psychiatric Association. 1994. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). 4th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. Borden, William. 1992. Comments on Theories of Kernberg and Kohut: Issues of Scientic Validation. Social Service Review 66 (3): 46770. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. Algeria 1960, translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. . 1990a. Fieldwork in Philosophy. 333 in In Other Words: Essays towards a Reexive Sociology, translated by Matthew Adamson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 1990b. Programme for a Sociology of Sport. 15667 in In Other Words: Essays towards a Reexive Sociology, translated by Matthew Adamson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 1993. Some Properties of Fields. 7277 in Sociology in Question, translated by Richard Nice. London: Sage. . 1994. Description and Prescription. 12736 in Language and Symbolic Power, edited
720
by John B. Thompson and translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. . 1996a. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, translated by Susan Emanuel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 1996b. The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, translated by Lauretta C. Clough. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. . 1998. On Television, translated by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. New York: New Press. . 2000. Pascalian Meditations, translated by Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, Alain Accardo, Gabrielle Balazs, Stephane Beaud, Francois Bonvin, Emmanuel Bourdieu, Philippe Bourgois, et al. 1999. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, translated by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Susan Emanuel, Joe Johnson, and Shoggy T. Waryn. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Lo c J. D. Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Campbell, Gordon J., and Elizabeth McCarthy. 2000. Conveying Mission through Outcome Measurement: Services to the Homeless in New York City. Policy Studies Journal 28 (2): 33852. Coalition for the Homeless. 2003. A History of Modern Homelessness in New York City. Report. Coalition for the Homeless, New York. http://www.coalitionforthehomeless .org/downloads/NYCHomelessnessHistory.pdf. Desjarlais, Robert. 1997. Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood among the Homeless. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dordick, Gwendolyn A. 1996. More than Refuge: The Social World of a Homeless Shelter. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 24 (4): 373404. Dworsky, Amy Lynn, and Irving Piliavin. 2000. Homeless Spell Exits and Returns: Substantive and Methodological Elaborations on Recent Studies. Social Service Review 74 (2): 193213. Emirbayer, Mustafa. 1997. Manifesto for a Relational Sociology. American Journal of Sociology 103 (2): 281317. Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Jeff Goodwin. 1994. Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency. American Journal of Sociology 99 (6): 141154. Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Victoria S. Johnson. 2004. Bourdieu and Organizational Analysis. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August 17. Emirbayer, Mustafa, and Ann Mische. 1998. What Is Agency? American Journal of Sociology 103 (4): 9621023. Fram, Maryah Stella. 2004. Research for Progressive Change: Bourdieu and Social Work. Social Service Review 78 (4): 55376. Hopper, Kim. 1998. Housing the Homeless. Social Policy 28 (3): 6468. . 2003. Reckoning with Homelessness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mohr, John W., and Roberto Franzosi, eds. 1997. Special Double Issue on New Directions in Formalization and Historical Analysis. Special issue, Theory and Society 26 (23). New York City, Department of Homeless Services. n.d. Emerging Trends in Client Demographics Policy and Planning. Report. New York Department of Homeless Services, New York. http://www.nyc.gov/html/dhs/downloads/pdf/demographic.pdf (accessed June 9, 2005). Passaro, Joanne. 1996. The Unequal Homeless: Men on the Streets, Women in Their Place. New York: Routledge. Peillon, Michel. 2001. Welfare in Ireland: Actors, Resources, and Strategies. Westport, CT: Praeger. Piliavin, Irving, Michael R. Sosin, Alex H. Westerfelt, and Ross L. Matsueda. 1993. The Duration of Homeless Careers: An Exploratory Study. Social Service Review 67 (4): 57698. Savas, E. S. 2002. Competition and Choice in New York City Social Services. Public Administration Review 62 (1): 8291. Schutt, Russell K., and Gerald R. Garrett. 1992. Responding to the Homeless: Policy and Practice. New York: Plenum.
721
Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 1978. Theoretical Methods in Social History. New York: Academic Press. Tilly, Charles. 1998. Durable Inequality. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weber, Max. 1946. Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions. 32359 in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited and translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, Jean Calterone. 2003. A Roof over My Head: Homeless Women and the Shelter Industry. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.
Notes
This essay is equally coauthored. Mentions in the text of the second author of this article refer to alphabetical order only. 1. These are two constituent components of the eld of homeless services, in much the same way that heads and tails are two constituent components of a coin. In a slightly different context (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 105), Bourdieu speaks of two translations of the same sentence to convey a similar idea. More will be said about the relation between these elds of production and of consumption later in the article. 2. The term node is used here (and conceptualized by Bourdieu) much as it commonly appears in social network analysis, as a point within a relational conguration. 3. One of the few studies in social work that focuses squarely upon Bourdieu, that by Maryah Fram (2004), devotes especially close attention to his concept of social capital, exploring its applicability to poverty research. 4. What is sure, Bourdieu writes, is that, within certain limits, symbolic structures have an altogether extraordinary power (Bourdieu 1990a, 18). Bourdieu is not always consistent, however, in his statements regarding the relation between the symbolic and the social. He sometimes seems to privilege the latter over the former. We leave this important conceptual difculty to the side in what follows. 5. Bourdieu uses such terms as temporal and spiritual because they allow him to draw a deep analogy, as Arthur Stinchcombe (1978) would have it, between economic and cultural capital holders in the present day (the major antagonistic powers of contemporary society) and the bellators and oratores (warriors and priests) of medieval Europe (and hence to gesture at a possible transhistorical invariance among all elds of power). 6. Bourdieu takes pains not to blame the victim: If it is tting to recall, he notes, that the dominated always contribute to their own domination, it is at once necessary to recall that the dispositions that incline them toward this complicity are themselves the effect, embodied, of domination (Bourdieu 1996b, 4). 7. The limitations of such an approach are numerous and include the unreliability of human memory. Further empirical study is thus needed both of the eld of homeless services in New York City and of similar elds in other locales. 8. The process of constructing the object that is described below relies more upon a progressive questioning and rening of initial intuitions than upon an amassing of fresh empirical evidence. In the vast majority of cases, however, such a process involves both types of operations to some degree. 9. Of course, social service providers working with children enjoy possibilities for accumulating capital not available to those working exclusively with adults, since children are considered more vulnerable. But while this might support the claim that there is a clear advantage to being part of the family system as opposed to the adult system, the authors reject this claim because of the range of reputations of shelters within both the family and the single-adult shelter system. In other words, some family shelters have reputations clearly inferior to others that similarly provide services to families. 10. The expression poisoned-well effect refers to the effect of some persons negative statements upon the opinions of others. 11. The second authors experience in the eld fully supports this claim. This article will refrain, however, from naming specic private shelters with negative reputations. Such shelters may well have improved their programs since the late 1990s, when the second author worked in the citys shelter system. A variety of sources (e.g., Callahan inspection reports put out by the Coalition for the Homeless, case records and activity logs of par-
722
ticular shelters, and incident reports that shelters are required to le with the DHS) are readily available for investigating this question in greater depth. 12. It should be pointed out that, as a white administrator, the second author may not have been privy to conversations about race that occurred between nonwhite individuals at her shelter or between individuals located below her in the shelters management structure. Opportunities thus clearly remain for the issue of race to be explored more fully. 13. Homeless shelters are always competing with one another to make housing placements. Race would be the major principle of division among them only if those shelters with a predominantly white clientele derived symbolic capital from having a much easier time of placing their clients in housing. Paradoxically, however, nothing could be further from the truth. The easiest clients to place in housing are those who qualify for some sort of specialized housing, such as housing for families, housing for older adults, housing for people with disabilities, and so forth. That specialized housing often is located in nonwhite or economically deprived areas deemed undesirable by many clients. Indeed, clients of color frequently seem to be the most willing to accept available housing in such areas, moving, e.g., to the South Bronx or Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods. 14. It is important here to consider both workers perceptions and shelters rates of placement success. Difcult clients, those whom no one else wants, often wind up at the less capital-rich shelters, and those shelters are often forced to accept them, in large part because of the comparative brevity of their waiting lists. Dominant shelters, with their good reputations among workers at other shelters, are able to handpick their clients, who have to join a waiting list to get in. But shelters without a positive reputation are unlikely to have clients waiting to get in from the assessment shelters and are consequently required by the DHS to accept the less desirable clients. (Keep the beds full at all times was, in the second authors experience of New York City shelters, an injunction taken seriously by all shelters interested in maintaining a right of refusal.) Thus, the less capital-rich shelters end up with clients difcult to place in housing. This, in turn, results in problems with the DHS, whose staff are always pushing for quick housing placements. 15. Campbell and McCarthy (2000, 347) describe New York City drop-in centers as 24hour centers offering showers, meals, and some social service programs, [which] deal with a more transient, less stable population who are not suitable for, or do not want to live in, a shelter setting. The DHS distinguishes these drop-in centers from shelters on the grounds that the former do not provide beds, while the latter do. However, a more comprehensive use of the term shelter to describe a location where the homeless can escape the elements and receive services seems appropriate for the purposes of this article. The authors use of the term shelters (as well as eld of shelters) should thus be understood to include drop-in centers. 16. New York Citys DHS does not make the kind of distinction between transitional and overnight shelters that one sometimes nds in other cities. All assessed clients are assigned a homeless assistance number that is used to track them throughout the system. Once assessed, a client is assigned a bed at a general or specialized (transitional) shelter program. This eliminates the need for clients to line up each afternoon outside of shelters, as is the practice in other cities. Only clients who have failed to arrive at their assigned shelter by curfew (9:00 p.m.) face the possibility of losing their bed, and even then they remain the responsibility of their assigned shelter until an ofcial shelter transfer has been completed. 17. These were GDHs policies circa 1999. They may have changed since that time. 18. Shelters are required by the DHS to assist in the formation of internal client advisory boards. The Coalition for the Homeless is a not-for-prot external shelter advocacy group in New York City. It seeks to monitor shelters and the activities of city government on behalf of homeless people. 19. It is not the case that the client population is simply too large for assessments to be undertaken right away, nor do the staff try to deect less desirable clients by postponing assessments. The reason that staff assess clients only after twofour visits is that staff see their time as better spent on time-consuming assessment interviews only if it seems likely that the client will continue to return to the drop-in center for assistance. 20. What is signicant here is the collective opinion of others in the eld, in this case workers at other shelters, homeless advocates, and DHS administrators. It is through the
723
perceptions of others that the capital of authenticity can be understood to be gained or lost. 21. By the true mission of social work is meant the ideal of serving as an altruistic helper whose clients deeply appreciate the assistance provided. The authors hypothesize that both social workers and lay social service workers subscribe to this ideal and take pride in their work. When the work falls short of this ideal, they feel cheated at having a thankless job. 22. Order-rich shelters are typically in a good position to earn their right of refusal in contract negotiations with the DHS precisely because of the positive relations they already maintain with that organization. Notice, however, that this raises the question of how these shelters gain their favorable attributes in the rst place. Although this is a topic that falls outside the purview of the present study, the authors speculate that at least part of the answer lies in the habitus of the individuals responsible for those shelters creation and enduring culture. For example, in the case of GDH, the core group of individuals responsible for the creation of its parent organization, New York Foundation for Senior Citizens, were women and men with a particular set of dispositions and orientations toward operating a nonprot social service organization that proved highly conducive to the accumulation of symbolic capital. Imposing a top-down management style and a dress code to rival those of any bank or corporate law ofce, they set the tone early on of a formal organization capable of delivering services in a businesslike, orderly fashion. Comparative analyses of the founders of social service agencies and of their habitus (with a special focus on members of their initial boards of directors) would lead to a clearer understanding of those agencies later trajectories. So, too, would studies of how the internal cultures of these agencies are perpetuated over time. 23. For a discussion of this practice of image or reputation protection through exercise of the right of refusal, known within the New York City shelter system as creaming, see Campbell and McCarthy (2000). 24. Here the authors do not mean to suggest that capital is accumulated solely on the basis of the opinions of the DHS and of the Coalition for the Homeless. However, it was the second authors experience that shelter administrators feared the opinion makers within both these organizations because a shelter that was not in their good graces could expect more frequent inspections as well as greater difculties during contract renewal negotiations. 25. For an example of the use of this distinction, see New York City, Department of Homeless Services (n.d.). 26. The limitations of this data again include the unreliability of memory. They include as well possible biases stemming from the second authors position of relative authority within the shelter where she worked. It is hoped that readers will recall that the empirical evidence presented here is intended to stimulate a theoretical reconceptualization of social work research rather than to generate denitive ndings. 27. The authors refer here to the distinction that New York Citys DHS makes between chronic and episodic clients. This distinction stresses the difference between long-term stayers and frequent returners. Some researchers (e.g., Piliavin et al. 1993) have failed to nd signicant differences between these two categories of homeless. 28. Addressing client needs for social support, while clearly important, is thus no substitute for community work designed to address the broader issues of improving access to affordable housing, employment security, and comprehensive health care. For a discussion of such issues faced by advocates of housing for the homeless, see Hopper (1998). 29. Dworsky and Piliavin (2000, 212) dene personal disabilities as physical health problems, serious mental illness, and dependency on alcohol or other drugs and human capital deciencies as low educational attainment, lack of vocational skills, and a marginal employment history. 30. It was the second authors experience that time limits varied according to shelter type and the DHS contract agreement. For example, some transitional shelter programs were expected to move clients into housing within a 6-month time frame. 31. When homeless clients are in a shelter longer than 6 months, they face the possibility of a transfer to a less desirable shelter. This potential of a shelter transfer is used by shelter staff to get clients to accept less desirable transitional housing placement options, such as an SRO room. 32. In the New York City homeless services system, housing appointments are provided to clients after a multistage process. Caseworkers rst complete a housing packet to rec-
724
ommend the client for housing. This packet is sent to a central ofce where it is processed, and the information is then forwarded to housing providers, often nonprot agencies providing various types of transitional housing. These agencies then call on the shelter caseworker or housing specialist to set up interview appointments for the client. Housing specialists also try to develop relationships with independent landlords and may be able to obtain additional appointments for clients. 33. These forms of housing more often mean an apartment than an SRO space and are considered more permanent. However, the public housing projects known as New York New York (NYNY) have long waiting lists, while Section 8 vouchers, which provide a rent subsidy for privately owned rental units, are made available only at select times of the year. Tensions arise between clients and shelter staff because, in accepting available SRO housing, a client risks losing priority status on the waiting list for placement in a NYNY housing project or may not be in a shelter when the Section 8 vouchers are awarded. 34. The Callahan consent decree is a legally binding agreement signed in 1981 between the State of New York and homeless plaintiffs represented by the Coalition for the Homeless. The decree species the standards for minimum shelter provisions set by the landmark case of Callahan v. Carey, N.Y.L.J. (December 11, 1979) at 10, col. 4 (N.Y. Sup. Ct., December 5, 1979). It species the shelter provisions and services that must be provided to persons seeking shelter in New York City. For example, the Callahan decree makes it illegal for a homeless shelter in the city to have clients sleeping on mattresses with holes, on beds pushed too closely together, or in spaces lacking adequate ventilation. 35. New York Citys DHS considers clients homeless when they reside in any of the shelter facilities and domiciled when they have a nonshelter address, such as an SRO unit. 36. Correspondence analysis is a method that permits the plotting of a two-dimensional representation of the interrelationships among multiple sets of elements. Its advantage is that it allows one to grasp intuitively, in terms of spatial distribution upon a map, formal patterns of relationships among elements of a particular order, while simultaneously seeing how these are arrayed relative to similar patternings on the other order of social phenomena. 37. When discussing the space of production of homeless services, too, the authors could have spoken of the organizational habitus of different shelters within that space, although they refrained from extending the concept in that fashion so as to avoid the pitfalls of reication; on this point, see Emirbayer and Johnson (2004).

Bourdieu and Social Work

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Bourdieu and Social Work

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Bourdieu and Social Work

Social Service Review

Constructing the Object