Review: Structure, Agency, and Practical Knowledge

Reviewed Work(s): The Logic of Practices. by Pierre Bourdieu and Richard Nice
Review by: Scott Lash
Source: Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Mar., 1992), pp. 155-156
Published by: American Sociological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2075406
Accessed: 27-03-2018 03:38 UTC

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156 SYMPOSIUM
categories. Giddens's notion is much more
grounded in the work of analytic philosophers
such as Winch, in Goffman, and in eth-
nomethodology. It is rather one-sidedly cog-
nitive in character. Bourdieu, who recently
has been fascinated by ethnomethodology-
now de rigueur for the younger generation in
Paris-offers a view of agency which not
only is bodily but also contains a strong
aesthetic component.
This is a powerful action theory. It is still
poorly understood among sociologists. But it
should in future years come to play an
increasingly prevalent role-as the reduction-
ist and deconstructionist notions of, corre-
spondingly, rational choice and postmodern-
ism fade in popularity. But I am much less
happy with the understanding of structure.
There is a more or less implicit theory of
modernization in both Bourdieu and Giddens.
For both analysts, as for the classical
sociologists such as Durkheim and Toennies,
this is a radically "discontinuist" model. That
is, roughly speaking, societies are either
traditional or they are modern. Traditional
interaction is based on face-to-face, subject-
subject interactions, whereas in modernity
more typical are relationships between indi-
viduals and institutions.
This stands in contradiction to "continuist"
models of modernization such as in Marx and
Habermas. Thus Bourdieu and Giddens,
unlike Marx and Habermas, do not see the
problem of social change as primary, but
instead, as in Durkheim and Toennies, the
problem is one of social reproduction, that is,
how society is possible. This is clear in
Giddens's preoccupations with "ontological
security" and Bourdieu's with "reproduc-
tion" itself.
This view also has strong implications for
their notions of agency, unlike that in
Habermas's communicative action, in which
agency brings about social change through
discursive will formation, and unlike Marx's
dialectic, in which structure changes agency,
which in turn provokes changes in structure.
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Instead, for Bourdieu and Giddens, agency
acts in order to allow structures to reproduce
themselves. That is, actors do considerable
work, through their practical conscious-
nesses, using material and symbolic rules and
resources, in order to enable-not change or
"resistance" -but structural reproduction. Thus
ultimately both Bourdieu and Giddens seem
to be rather more on the side of, not action
theory, but structuralism and even arguably
functionalism.
All these and many more Bourdieusian
concepts are developed in The Logic of
Practice, especially pivotal notions such as
"honor" and "symbolic capital" and the
crucial place of time in symbolic practices.
There is also further development of Bour-
dieu's critique of Levi-Strauss's "objectiv-
ism." Where Levi-Strauss tells us to look at
the structures underneath the narratives,
Bourdieu directs our attention to the narra-
tives themselves and their uses in strategies.
Such is the subject of systematic theoretical
discussion in the first half of the book; the
second half comprises examples from the
early fieldwork in Algeria. Notable here again
is not the change from but the continuity with
his previous work. More valuable for Bourdi-
eu's conceptual development during this
period are the articles in Actes (now also
translated in collections by Polity Press).
The book is, as I said, Bourdieu's second
theory treatise. The first, Outline of a Theory
of Practice, is available to the English-
reading public only in its revised edition,
published in English in 1977. A number of
these revisions by Bourdieu went into Le Sens
pratique, published in French three years
after. Thus there is a certain amount of
overlap between the two books.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice.
Cambndge: Cambridge University Press.
Durkheim, Emile and Marcel Mauss. [1903] 1963.
Primitive Classification. Translated by R. Needham.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.