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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?

Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield? A glance into the

Higher Education in the UK using Bourdieu

Despite an overwhelming abundance of literature on broader leadership issues, very

little work in educational leadership seem to have engaged in a theoretical discussion

about what constitutes leadership practice in higher education. In a previous special

issue in this journal, edited by Lingard and Christie (2003), authors were surprised that

Bourdieu’s ideas had not found wider application in the field of educational leadership,

as much of the research in this area is mainly concerned, just like in Bourdieu’s work,

with the relationship between individual agency and structural determinism.

Theoretically informed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and in response to

Lingard and Christie, this paper contributes to the long established critical tradition in

the educational leadership literature, to advocate that Bourdieusian theory helps to

illuminate the multi-dimensional nature of power and leadership within a higher

education environment. The author suggests that interpretation of educational leadership

through the prism of Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ provides another opportunity to

consider and analyse simultaneously the invariant properties of the educational field and

the situated particularities of leadership work. My curiosity drove me to use Bourdieu’s

ideas to unpack any parallels between current power relations within the field of higher

education in the UK and my past experiences of Soviet totalitarianism.

Keywords: leadership; higher education; power; Bourdieu; social field; capital;

doxa; habitus; Soviet.

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Introduction

Vyacheslav Molotov, a Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1940s, was overheard

talking to Joseph Stalin via trans-Atlantic telephone during the course of some very

intricate negotiations with the West. He said: “Yes, Comrade Stalin,” in a quiet tone,

then again: “Yes, Comrade Stalin”, and then, after a long pause, “Certainly, Comrade

Stalin”. Suddenly he became emotional: “No, Comrade Stalin,” he barked, “No. That’s,

a NO. Definitely, no. A thousand times - no!”

He soon calmed down and it was “Yes, Comrade Stalin,” again. The reporter who

overheard that conversation had never been so excited in his life. Clearly, Molotov was

daring to oppose the dictator on at least one point, and it would surely be important to

the West to know what that point might be. The reporter approached Molotov and said

as calmly as possible: “Mr Molotov, I could not help but hear you say at one point, “No,

Comrade Stalin.” Molotov turned his cold eyes on the reporter and said, “What of it?”

“May I ask,” said the reporter, cautiously, “What the subject under discussion was at

that time?” “You may,” said Molotov. “Comrade Stalin asked me if there was anything,

which he had said, with which I disagreed.”

I have decided to start my discussion with this very popular Russian joke for the reason

that it serves as a remarkable example of a typical Soviet leadership style based on the

perception of the leader’s unlimited power and over-exaggerated sense of self-

importance, when contradicting or disagreeing with those in power means either a

political or corporeal death. Unfortunately, this leadership style, though in a much more

obscured form, has continued to influence every sphere of life in the Soviet Union until

its dissolution in 1991. The power relationships within these leadership structures were

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obstinate and informed by the principles of what I call a manipulative clientilism, where

the power of a patron (the leader) over his clients (the team) was unlimited and where

the few existing rules were interpreted and manipulated in the ways that suited the

patron.

It was that approach that shaped my early leadership identity as well as the identity of

thousands of others working in leadership positions across all business, educational and

cultural establishments of the USSR. My move into the leadership roles within the

higher education environment in the UK has enabled me to witness, experience and

exercise rather different and diverse models of leadership, where power was thought to

be shared among the members of the organisation, who have a common understanding

of the aims of the institution (Bush, 2011). These encounters and their impact on my

professional practice made me realise that leadership and power were not uniform and

static notions, as presented to me during the Soviet times, but a multi-faceted mesh of

ideologies, politics and personal relationships. This line of reasoning inspires me to

explore the multi-dimensional nature of power and leadership within a higher education

environment, employing a theoretical framework informed by Pierre Bourdieu (1930-

2002), whose perceptions of these concepts seemed to reflect their relevance to

leadership practice in higher education. My intention to work with Bourdieusian theory

was inspired by Lingard and Christie (2003, p.318), who asserted that ‘work of the late

French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, is very useful for theorizing educational leadership

as a both a field of practice and a field of research and scholarship.’ My curiosity was

further piqued by an ambition to use Bourdieu’s ideas to take a deeper look into current

power relations within the field of higher education institutions through the prism of my

past experiences of Soviet totalitarianism.

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In the first part of this paper, I critically engage with the research literature on

Bourdieu’s theoretical framework so as to identify and explore its key features, such as

social field, capital, habitus and doxa; while the second part of the discussion focuses

specifically on the application of Bourdieu’s ideas to current educational practice with a

higher education institution environment.

Social field, doxa, habitus, hysteresis and capital

The social world can be represented as a space (with several dimensions) constructed on the basis of principles of differentiation or distribution constituted by the set of properties active within the social universe in question, i.e., capable of conferring strength, power within that universe, on their holder. Agents and groups of agents are thus defined by their relative positions within that space. Each of them is assigned to a position or a precise class of neighboring positions. Inasmuch as the properties selected to construct this space are active properties, one can also describe it as a field of forces, i.e., as a set of objective power relations that impose themselves on all who enter the field and that are irreducible to the intentions of the individual agents or even to the direct interactions among the agents. (Bourdieu, 1985, p.723)

This extract from Bourdieu’s work seems to embrace the majority of the key aspects

related to his concept of a social field, so it would be useful to start with deconstructing

this notion by breaking it up into its constituent parts.

Social Field and Doxa

The application of the idea of a field in general was originally associated with the

physical sciences (i.e., Newton’s gravitation field, electro-magnetic field, algebraic

number fields, etc.) and, later on, infiltrated the territories of psychology (i.e. Gestalt

theory) and sociology. However, while in sciences a field is, generally, characterised by

the patterns of behaviour of units, objects, numbers or particles in relation to specific

forces, in psychology and sociology the term field was mainly applied to processes

based on the interrelations of individuals with their environments or in response to

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specific situations. These differences in the interpretation of the notion were noted by

Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), who clarified that, with regard to the physical field,

there is a prevalence of objective relations within a system over the particles within it;

however, social agents ‘are not particles, mechanically pushed and pulled by external

forces: they are, rather, bearers of capitals1 and, depending on their trajectory and on

the position they occupy in the field by virtue of their endowment (volume and

structure) in capital.’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p.108)

Nevertheless, despite these differences between the types of fields, Passeron (cited in

Hilger & Mangez, 2014) identified a number of features that characterise all field

theories regardless of the discipline, which include, first, the rejection of the existence

of an absolute (social or physical) space and, consequently, of individual objects or

agents existing independently of a set of relations; second, a relational nature of any

space, whether social or physical; and finally, the existence of a joint dynamics between

a totality and the elements that constitute a space.

In his attempt to refine the notion of a social field, Bourdieu (1985) identified a social

field as a kind social topology, where the social world can be represented as a multi-

dimensional space, inside which the constituent parts are interrelated or arranged into a

number of separate domains, while remaining under the umbrella of the same field.

Fraser and Atkinson (2014, p.156) suggested a useful association in relation to social

fields that may contain sub-fields, describing the latter as being ‘nested within, like

Russian dolls’. Thus, in each of Bourdieu’s social fields, all activities would be based

on specific rules, hierarchies and social relations that bond all elements within that

space. This takes us to the next important attribute of Bourdieu’s social field: the

relations of power.

1 The notion of capital is discussed further in this paper.

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Thompson (2012) made an interesting observation in relation to the translation of the

word field in that Bourdieu used the French word ‘le champ’ – meaning ‘battlefield’,

and not - ‘le pre’, which suggests an idyllic and peaceful environment. From this

perspective, Bourdieu’s theory of social fields can be employed to uncover the hidden

structures and processes by which power is applied through specific spheres of activity

as well as through society as a whole. Thatcher, Ingram, Burke and Abrahams (2015,

p.3) also confirmed that ‘as such, field should be understood as a site of competition and

aggression in which an individual or group is required to negotiate’.

Bourdieu also offered a comparison of a social field to a game, providing an opportunity

to discuss the concept of the ‘rules of the game’ that can be suggested as a simplified

representation of Bourdieu’s notion of doxa. Bourdieu (1996) defined doxa as a

primary experience of the social world that is an adherence to relations of order which,

because they structure inseparably both the real world and the thought world, are

accepted as self-evident. According to Bourdieu (1996), doxa, ‘far from being a simple

mechanical reflection, is always an act of cognition involving principles of construction

that are external to the constructed object grasped in its immediacy; but at the same time

it is an act of miscognition, implying the most absolute form of recognition of the social

order’ ( p.471). It is those ‘rules of the game’ that distinguish each of the social fields

and the specific rules and hierarchies of their functioning, as well as defining the

conditions of the players’ (agents’) membership, who agree to adhere to these rules. The

players or the agents within a specific domain of activity use doxa to perceive and

interpret all external and internal relations and phenomena, therefore strengthening their

distinction from other domains or social fields and, thus, increasing the autonomy of

their field:

The autonomous principle of hierarchization, which would reign unchallenged if the field of production were to achieve total autonomy with respect to the laws

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of the market, is degree of specific consecration, i.e. the degree of recognition accorded by those who recognize no other criterion of legitimacy than recognition by those whom they recognize. In other words, the specificity of the field is defined by the fact that the more autonomous it is, … the more it continues to be affected by the laws of the field which encompasses it. (Bourdieu, 1983, p. 320)

At this point, it is worth mentioning that, though the agents within a social field adhere

to specific rules defined by the nature of their domain, these fields do not remain static,

as, similar to any field game, their existence is always associated with a certain degree

of power struggle in which the agents’ perceptions - ‘with retrospective reconstruction

of a past tailored to the needs of the present and, especially, the future - are endlessly

invoked to determine, delimit, and define the always open meaning of the present’

(Bourdieu, 1985, p.728).

Habitus

According to Bourdieu (1969), the power struggles within social fields are triggered and

managed not by external ideologies or internal strategies, but by what Bourdieu called

habitus. This term appears in a number of his works in different contexts, and can be,

therefore, approached from different angles; however, the most concise explanation of

the term can be found in Homo Academicus (1988), where Bourdieu defined habitus as

‘a system of shared social dispositions and cognitive structures, which generates

perceptions, appreciations and actions’ (p.279). He offered a further explanation of

habitus in The Logic of Practice (1990), where he added that ‘the conditionings

associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of

durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as

structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and

representations (p.53).

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Thatcher et al. (2015) attempted to expand on Bourdieu’s discussion, adding that

habitus can be understood as norms, values and dispositions inculcated via the familial

education and, to a lesser extent, the environment. They also suggested that habitus is

the most contested and critiqued aspect of Bourdieu’s conceptual framework, often

criticised for the removal of the element of choice from the human experience. One of

the examples of such a critique can be found in Archer (2010), who claimed that

Bourdieu’s notion of habitus excludes the possibility of reflexivity, and suggested that it

is reflexivity that should be considered the main tool of mediating between the objective

structural opportunities and the nature of individual agents’ subjectively-defined

concerns. However, as Thatcher et al. (2015) noted, though this type of critique can be

partially justified, for Bourdieu, it is not so much that the habitus is void of choice, but

rather that the range of choices and attitudes will be influenced by social structures,

leading him to also define habitus as ‘socialised subjectivity’ (Bourdieu, cited in

Thatcher et al., 2015, p. 2). Indeed, Bourdieu made his notion of a transformative nature

of habitus clear when he stated that habitus as a product of social conditionings, and

thus of a history (unlike character), is endlessly transformed (Bourdieu, 1987). Habitus

influences agents’ ability to manoeuvre within particular social fields, and on the other

hand, it also enables the agents to occupy specific positions within that field. To

elucidate the complexity of interrelations between a field and a habitus, it is useful to

refer to the formula, suggested by Bourdieu in his attempt to highlight the intertwining

nature of these relations: [(habitus)(capital)] + field = practice (Bourdieu, 1985, p.101),

which leads us to the discussion of Bourdieu’s notion of capital.

Capital

Bourdieu stepped away from a traditional Marxist definition of capital characterised

solely by economic aspects (i.e. wealth, money, property), broadening it to include

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additional forms of capital, such as cultural capital (i.e. knowledge, educational

qualifications, skills), social capital (i.e. degree of trust and cooperation among agents in

a field) and symbolic capital (position in a society, reputation, honour), though he also

refered to a number of other types of capital in his works.

Though Bourdieu did not provide a definition of capital as such, he made clear his

understanding of capital as a resource that individuals use almost like a currency for

exchange or investment as well as what can be seen as a ‘place holder’, allowing those

individuals to occupy a specific space within their social field. In addition, it is not only

the type of capital (or perhaps more precisely, interconnected types of capitals) that an

individual possesses that matters, but also its volume, as the latter will affect the

position of individuals in a social hierarchy as well as their potential to achieve certain

objectives. According to Bourdieu (1989), ‘agents are distributed in the overall social

space, in the first dimension, according to the overall volume of capital they possess

and, in the second dimension, according to the structure of their capital, that is, the

relative weight of the different species of capital, economic and cultural, in the total

volume of their assets’ (p.17). Nevertheless, the distribution of social agents within a

specific field is not a mechanical exercise, where the agents are moved around like

chess pieces. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) made it clear that the agents are, rather,

bearers of capitals and, depending on their trajectory and on the position they occupy in

the field by virtue of their endowment (volume and structure) in capital, they have a

propensity to orient themselves actively either towards the conservation of the

distribution of capital or towards the subversion of that distribution.

Other related aspects of the notion include forms of distinction between different types

of capital, as well as the process of capital formation; however, since it is not my

intention here to provide an in-depth discussion of Bourdieu’s conceptual framework,

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my discussion will be limited to simply offering a synopsis of his key ideas as a starting

point for a discussion of the practical application of these notions to a higher education

institution environment. First, though, it is important to mention another one of

Bourdieu’s thinking tools – hysteresis – which is closely related to the notions of field,

habitus and capital.

Hysteresis

As previously mentioned, Bourdieu stressed the transformative nature of the field and

its interconnectedness with habitus, where the change in one necessitates the change in

another. However, this does not necessarily mean that every change within a field will

automatically lead to a change in habitus. Quite the contrary, as noticed by

Chudzikowski & Mayrhofer (2011), Bourdieu saw habitus as being rather inertial,

meaning that there is a certain lag in the adaptation of habitus to the changes in a

particular field. Bourdieu (1997) called this the hysteresis effect and explained,

The hysteresis of habitus, which is inherent in the social conditions of the reproduction of the structures in habitus, is doubtless one of the foundations of the structural lag between opportunities and the dispositions to grasp them which is the cause of missed opportunities and, in particular, of the frequently observed incapacity to think historical crises in categories of perception and thought other than those of the past, albeit a revolutionary past. ( p. 83).

In other words, when there are changes taking place within field, resulting in changes to

the ‘rules of the game’ or doxa, habitus delays adaptation to the new rules. The

hysteresis effect, therefore, means that in the changed circumstances agents will

maintain their acquired habitus even though they no longer correlate to the field, or, in

Bourdieu’s (1996) words, ‘when the practices generated by the habitus appear as ill-

adapted because they are attuned to an earlier state of the objective conditions (this is

what might be called the Don Quixote effect).’ (p. 109).

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The ‘field’ of higher education institution: appropriation of Bourdieu’s ideas

In current challenging political and economic climate, higher education institutions

have to adapt to Neo-liberal agendas and related issues of marketisation, rising student

tuition and increased student expectations as well as greater demands on university

academics to work towards specific targets and benchmarks in an increasingly prevalent

culture of audits and inspections. As Williams (cited in Sotirakou, 2004) pointed out,

universities have clearly moved from being neutral self-governing institutions, pre-

1980s, to a position, wherein the state has begun to drive the market, leading to the

current situation, when the state promotes managerial values above those of the

academic community, which management it is meant to serve; and the key shift that

underpins those changes is from input-based budgeting, where the state supplies

educational services, to output and performance-based budgeting, wherein institutions

receive resources by selling their services to various customers. Senior leaders in

higher education institutions have an almost impossible task of providing genuine

inspirational motivation amid the current struggles of the two opposing forces:

pressures from the central university administration and the aspirations of the

academics, who are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the changes to their

academic work ‘in the process of forging a new, fragmented professional self:

‘“researcher”, “administrator”, “teacher” and more recently “entrepreneur”’ (Morley, as

cited in Garratt & Hammersley-Fletcher, 2009, p. 308 ).

In such turbulent times for higher education , tainted by the contested agendas of

leadership and power, Bourdieu’s conceptual framework offers a helpful point of entry,

in particular his concept of field, which, as previously mentioned, forms part of

Bourdieu’s ‘thinking toolbox’.

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Going back to the idea of seeing a social field as a Russian nested doll, a UK higher

education institution can be used as an illustrative example, having a number of sub-

fields, where higher education institution itself forms a part of a larger social field of

nationwide educational agencies and regulatory institutions, the majority of which seem

to be totally engulfed in field of the State. Figure 1 represents an attempt to show a

simple illustration of the higher education institution field, with its sub-fields and some

power trajectories within it.

Figure1. Dichotomy of power relationships within higher education institution field

with its sub-fields

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Starting with the higher education institution as a field, we can then begin to examine

the positions of different agents within that field and its sub-fields and their

interconnected power relations. Justifiably, the field of higher education does not

operate separately from the notions of habitus and capital; however, it is the field that

Bourdieu identified as the main arena, where the agents, occupying dominant or

subordinate positions within its hierarchy, compete to obtain specific goals. Each of

these agents’ (i.e. key stakeholders - university governors, senior leaders, academics and

students) positions within the field depends on the amount of capital they possess.

Within the context of higher education institution field, our focus will be on social and

cultural (rather economic) resources, the possession of which enables membership of

the field.

Bourdieu (1986) differentiated between three different types of cultural capital:

embodied, objectified and institutionalised, where the latter is most notable within the

field of higher education institution , as it takes into account each agent’s credentials

(i.e. degree level) that give a more or less objective impression of each individual’s

level of knowledge and skills. Bourdieu also referred to this type of capital as ‘academic

capital’, stating that ‘by conferring institutional recognition on the cultural capital

possessed by any given agent, the academic qualification also makes it possible to

compare qualification holders and even to exchange them (by substituting one for

another in succession). Furthermore, it makes it possible to establish conversion rates

between cultural capital and economic capital by guaranteeing the monetary value of a

given academic capital (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 21).

We can see that in the social field of higher education institution there are agents who

are mainly concerned with production (research) and distribution (teaching) of

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knowledge. According to Bourdieu (1992), fields may contain other fields within them

(sub-fields), i.e. all higher education institution activities largely take place within a

field that is itself subsumed under the State, making the higher education institution

something that often exists under the umbrella of the State, even as it continues to exert

its own force and is not reducible to the interests or operations of the governing field.

Therefore, to streamline the discussion of the university social field, it is useful to

identify the existing social sub-fields within that field: a social sub-field of university

administration, which governs all university processes; a sub-field of university

academics engaged in research and teaching; and a sub-field of students, who are

increasingly being constructed as consumers of university ‘products’.

Higher Education Institution Administrative Sub-field

The administrative sub-field of the university represents the space where key decision

are made in relation to strategic trajectories of the institution in terms of recruitment,

curriculum development (and therefore, possessing, of what Bourdieu (1990) defined as

a ‘pedagogic authority’) and system of knowledge accreditation, all of which form a

part of a bigger educational mechanism of, what Bourdieu called system of cultural

reproduction. According to Bourdieu and Passeron (1990), (though their example is

mostly applied to schools), the aim of the educational system and those dominating it is

to ensure the transmission of cultural capital across generations and of legitimising pre-

existing differences in inherited cultural capital by means of granting specific

credentials (or in the case of higher education institution, awarding degrees). Bourdieu

considered this system of social reproduction to be a huge classificatory machine,

contributing to the inequalities within a society: ‘In societies which claim to recognize

individuals only as equals in right, the educational system and its modern nobility only

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contribute to disguise, and thus legitimize, in a more subtle way the arbitrariness of the

distribution of powers and privileges which perpetuates itself through the socially

uneven allocation of school titles and degrees’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990, x).

Indeed, looking at the system of admissions within a university, we find that those

applicants with a richer cultural capital, stemming from their families’ habitus, have a

clear advantage compared to those with lower entry qualifications. The university

system serves to enable these more privileged applicants to progress through the system

and gain higher education credentials, legitimatising their dominant position within the

field.

As mentioned above, the administrative sub-field enacts the role of the dominant power

within the university social field through its appropriation of the pedagogic authority

(PA). As Bourdieu (1990) explained, ‘in any given social formation the legitimate PA,

i.e. the PA endowed with the dominant legitimacy, is nothing other than the arbitrary

imposition of the dominant cultural arbitrary insofar as it is misrecognized in its

objective truth as the dominant PA and the imposition of the dominant culture.’(p.22).

This provides another potential opportunity to view the university administration

through the lens of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, and specifically, his

understanding of symbolic power and symbolic violence. Though Bourdieu (1996)

provided no definition of symbolic power as such, he provided a useful categorisation

of ideas and concepts that fall under this notion in his description of the struggles of

power ‘to win everything which, in the social world, is of the order of belief, credit and

discredit, perception and appreciation, knowledge and recognition -name, renown,

prestige, honour, glory, authority, everything which constitutes symbolic power as a

recognized power’ (p. 251). There is a strong correlation between the notions of

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‘symbolic power’ and ‘symbolic capital’, considered by Bourdieu to be an

amalgamation of the economic, cultural and social types of capital. Examining these

notions lead us to identify the higher education institution administration as the agents

possessing the greatest amount of symbolic capital, and, therefore, symbolic power,

within that social field, thus constructing a perfect structure for ‘le champ’ – a

battlefield for power struggles. Hilger and Mangez (2014) made an interesting

observation about the power struggles within a symbolic order, arguing that the new

agents entering the field tend to implement strategies aimed at subverting the existing

hierarchy of power through the process of symbolic violence that leads them to

recognize the legitimacy of a symbolic order that acts unfavourably toward them,

though the odds that established actors will succeed in preserving the order seem to be

greater than the probability of subversion:

The more legitimate an agent, the more her peers consume her products, and the more they consume her products, the more legitimate she becomes. The accumulation of this symbolic capital makes it possible to secure a more or less complete monopoly over the definition of the forms of legitimacy prevailing in the field. The stabilization of a hegemonic version of legitimacy helps to fix the distribution of positions in the space of relations that constitutes a field (Hilger and Mangez, 2014, p. 11).

In terms of symbolic violence, Bourdieu (1998) defined it as an imposition of systems

of symbolism and meaning upon groups or classes, accepted as legitimate: ‘I call

symbolic violence a gentle violence imperceptible and invisible even to its victims

exerted for the most part through the purely symbolic channels of communication and

cognition (more precisely, misrecognition), recognition, or even feeling. (p. 2). It is this

symbolic, or ‘soft’, power that the agents within the administration sub-field exercise to

impose the desired dominant ideas and perceptions through a well-structured system of

policies, guidelines and regulations as well as institutional visions and strategic plans.

The agents within that sub-field occupy dominant positions with the university

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hierarchy due to their access to economic capital - university budgets, physical

resources, human resources - as well as their own habitus and a breadth of their cultural

and social types of capital (i.e. positions, roles, qualifications, experience, networks and

public recognition).

Higher Education Institution Academic Sub-field

Another sub-field within the higher education institution social field is that of the

academic teams of lecturers and researchers. The relation of this sub-field with the sub-

field of higher education institution administration seems to be two-fold: on one hand

the administrative sub-field can be seen as providing protection and a certain level of

security for the academic sub-field; on the other hand, it creates a site of struggle and

competition for control. The agents within the academic sub-field find themselves in a

constant dissonance with the managerial power coming from administrative structures,

trying to conceptualise the ever-changing targets, policies and requirements dictated to

the university administration by the State (its social field and its interrelation with the

higher education institution field can serve as a subject of discussion for a separate

paper). However, rather than acting as a passive recipient of symbolic power coming

from the higher administrative structures, the academic sub-field forms an active

environment, where the phenomena of hysteresis seems to be quite common, as the

agents within the academic field try to preserve their acquired habitus every time a new

change is imposed on them to which their current habitus no longer corresponds. The

responses to these changes from the academic sub-field vary in the scale of their

intensity, from ‘silent’ complacency to open expressions of frustration, such as in

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Taylor’s example (cited in Molesworth, Scullion and Nixon, 2011), a sardonic

description of an imaginary Poppleton University, where a member of the academic

staff prides herself on her recognition of HE marketisation: ‘Our recent decision to

describe all students as ‘shoppers’ has been broadly welcomed by all our sales staff

(formerly the academic community) while my own previous experience in the

management of a large biscuit factory has given me unique insights into the art of

persuading people to purchase well-wrapped objects of little value.’ (p.237) This is just

one of the examples of how the multiplicity of constant changes within the higher

education institution strategic goals and trajectories can lead to a clash between the

habituses of the academic and administrative fields, making the higher education

institution landscape one far from being a peaceful and idyllic space of collaborative

knowledge production. Changes to the academic sub-field also include modification of

the relationships from ‘student-lecturer’ to ‘customer-service provider’, or a change in

emphasis from teaching to meeting individual research targets.

As we can see, following Bourdieu’s thinking, the higher education institution is a site

of competition and aggression, where the agents do not always remain passive actors on

the receiving end of the changes, but exercise resistance within their modus operandi in

an attempt to protect their existing habitus leading to its hysteresis. As Hilger and

Mangez (2014) explained, hysteresis of habitus occurs when the field changes, and with

it, the various rules and required resources, when there is a period of time or a gap

between a change in the field and in the habitus (whether group or individual) ability to

realise the structural change and act accordingly to manoeuvre within the altered set of

rules: ‘the struggle in a field is, thus, a struggle to impose a definition of legitimate

recognition, in which victory leads to more or less monopolistic control of the definition

of the forms of legitimacy prevailing in the field. The history of the field is the history

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of the internal and external struggles that animate it, the history of the distribution of the

specific capital and the variation of this capital (p. 6).

Higher Education Institution Student Sub-field

The intricacy of interrelations among the different sub-fields within the higher

education institution field is further complicated by the presence of a student sub-field,

as students enter the social space of higher education institution with their own

individual habitus and cultural capitals. Recent economic and political changes within

the State field have resulted in additional pressures being placed on the student sub-field

in the form of higher tuition , which contribute to the development of a new student

identity as ‘customers’ or consumers, who have much higher expectations as to their

rights and entitlements. These changes have deeply affected the interrelations within

and between all university sub-fields, leading to significant modifications of all

university strategic plans, policies and structures that have gravitated towards a more

managerial (and less of a leadership) approach, strengthening the power-pressure of the

administrative sub-field, while reducing the decision-making ability of the academics.

As Temple, Callender, Grove and Kersh (2016) predicted, the cumulative effect of these

changes has resulted in resources being diverted from ‘front line’ teaching and research

into marketing and ‘customer care’; academic leadership being valued less highly than

‘business planning’ skills, with collegially determined norms being replaced by

performance measures and management targets.

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Despite these additional pressures applied to the academic sub-field by the university

administration, with its externally-driven goals to achieve the highest possible levels of

student satisfaction, the student sub-field does not seem to be immune from the impact

of symbolic violence. According to Bourdieu (1996), the force of pedagogical authority

presents students with a curriculum that has been developed and interpreted by the

university academics and relevant administrative structures. Though students are

increasingly being involved in curriculum development within the university

environment, this involvement remains mostly on a superficial level, as students

generally are forced by the pedagogical authority to accept suggested interpretations

even when the students attempt to contest them.

And this is exactly how symbolic violence is exercised within the university social field

and its sub-fields, when the agents are publicly promoted as ‘the partners’ having equal

participatory rights in all university processes, while, in fact, university authorities (or

the State authorities above them) impose their decisions on the agents, who have little

choice about whether to accept or reject them. This takes us to the next part of the

discussion that specifically focuses on the interrelated nature of power and leadership.

Dissecting leadership and power with Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’

Leadership is a multifaceted concept, though it still has not been clearly defined despite

its popularity as a research subject. Current classifications and typologies of leadership

approaches seem to be only useful as an abstract tool for creating some sort terms for

use. Still, attempting to define leadership can be an ongoing, continuous discussion. For

the purpose of this paper one of the more common definitions from Northouse and Lee

(2016) will be a starting point, as it seems to embrace the key aspects of leadership in

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more general terms by delineating leadership ‘as a process whereby an individual

influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.’ (p. 2). However, it might

be worth considering a slight adjustment to this definition, replacing the phrase

‘common goal’ with a ‘certain goal’, as both research and personal practice show that

leadership does not always entail the leader and the group sharing the same common

goal (as in the example of the joke on ‘Stalinism’). Ironically, this exercise of creating

another definition of leadership seems to echo Stogdill’s (1974) viewpoint that ‘there

are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to

define the concept.’ (p. 259). In this paper, however, I am less concerned with the

definitions of leadership and the nomenclature surrounding leadership styles, but rather

I prefer to focus on Bourdieu’s ideas of ‘symbolic power’ and the interrelations

between power and leadership.

Hatcher (2008) pointed out that in current research there is a tendency to detach studies

of leadership from studies of power, yet it is important to acknowledge that educational

leadership is shaped decisively by its wider environment and by the power relations

therein. Historically, the majority of educational structures have been controlled and

regulated by those who have the political power to promote and sustain a particular

type of educational system and purpose of education, as such. An explanation of the

legitimacy of that power can be found in Bourdieu’s (1991) work Language and

Symbolic Power, where he explained that symbolic power is a power of making people

believe in certain ideas (just as in the case of a political power) through the medium of

language, where power can be exercised only if it is recognised as arbitrary, and thus

can be ‘defined in and through a given relation between those who exercise power and

those who submit to it, i.e. in the very structure of the field in which belief is produced

and reproduced’ ( p.170).

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Recalling the current dichotomy between different structures within the field of higher

education institution (see Figure 1), we can see that the symbolic power of the State

over the higher education institution is further translated into the symbolic power of the

administrative sub-field over the academics and students. These power relations can

also be viewed from the perspective of leadership, as ‘leadership can be seen as the

process and product by which powerful groups are able to control and sustain their

interests’ (Gunter, 2001, p. 8). Visibly, a dichotomy between leadership and power

cannot be considered from a static point of view or a stationary environment. Jansen

(2000) stressed the ever-changing nature of the educational landscape and the need for

the leaders to ensure that their followers have the capacity for change. This is especially

true in the current climate of higher education transformation characterised by the

process of marketisation as well as the remodelling of university governing bodies

along corporate lines (Waite, 2011; 2014), and the development of sector-wide

performance indicators (Brown, 2011). Applying Bourdieu’s thinking tools to the

issues or power and leadership helps us comprehend the dynamics of the challenges

that the leaders face when it becomes almost impossible to exercise true democratic

leadership within the higher education institution field, as leaders continuously

experience top-down non-negotiable imperatives from the administrative sub-field,

leaving leaders with very little freedom to negotiate these decisions, even when they

seem to be completely incongruous. So essentially, when a higher education institution

declares that it exercises a democratic approach in all its practices, in fact, it almost

certainly lacks the most important and absolute condition for such an approach, which

Lefort (cited in Robinson, 2007) described as freedom from personalised power.

According to Lefort , democracy has to be free of personalised power, because that is

what makes the contest to represent popular sovereignty a contest. Popular sovereignty

22


cannot be truly represented in its totality, so it is 'an empty space, impossible to occupy';

the result is that democracy 'is the power of nobody' ( p. 1217). Once again, these ideas

echo Bourdieu’s perspective on power within specific fields, allowing us to analyse ‘the

relations between the structure of the space of the positions constitutive of the filed, and

the struggles aiming to maintain or to subvert this structure’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p.74).

Lingard and Christie (2003) expressed their surprise at the fact that Bourdieu’s ideas

have not found a wider application within the field of educational leadership, as much

of the research in this area is mainly concerned, just like in Bourdieu’s work, with the

relationship between individual agency and structural determinism; thus, interpretation

of educational leadership through the prism of Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ gives us an

opportunity to consider and analyse simultaneously ‘the invariant properties of the

educational field and the situated particularities of leadership work’ (Lingard and

Christie, 2003, p. 319).

In summary, application of Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ to the issues of power and

leadership within the higher education institution landscape enables us to move beyond

the existing typology of leadership styles and poorly substantiated models of effective

leadership, to focus more on the recursive relationship between agency (individual

leader habitus) and structure (field) in the broader social context. Lingard and Christie

(2003) advocated use of Bourdieu to think of the interplay between the practices of a

leader with a particular habitus, working across a number of fields with different power

structures, hierarchies of influence, and logics of practice, where habitus enables us to

talk about the person of the leader not simply in terms of traits, character and personal

influence, but also in relation to specific social structures and embodied dispositions;

while field enables us to talk about the context of leadership as ‘structured social space’

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with its own properties and power relations, overlapping and interrelating with

economic, power, political and other fields.

Final thoughts

At this point it is worth acknowledging that the discussion presented here contains only

a brief analysis of higher education institution practices through the lens of Bourdieu’s

theoretical framework. My intent is to provide a basis for further investigation into the

subject of educational leadership, using Bourdieu’s ideas, as Lingard and Christie’s

(2003) encouraged us to do.

Nevertheless, a brief glance into the subject allows me to make a number of useful

observations. First, there seem to be a few advantages in the appropriation of a

Bourdieusian theoretical framework, one of which is a realisation of the multiplicity of

power struggles that exist within the field of higher education institution. Bourdieu’s

ideas of domination and symbolic power, unwillingly, bring us back to the joke on

Stalinism at the beginning of this paper, compelling us to make disturbing parallels

between symbolic and physical violence and to question the amount of freedom and

autonomy that agents in the higher education institution can practise without being

castigated. In addition, Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus and hysteresis give us the

opportunity to explore the transformative nature of an individual’s perceptions as they

engage in the ‘locus of struggle’ (Bourdieu, 1992) within any social field, not just

education. For example, Shammas and Sandberg (2015) made an interesting analogy in

relation to the transformative effects on the individual’s habitus as a result of a field-

bounded existence as applied to the field of criminology: ‘just as a university student

might come to expand their vocabulary or learn to write essays according to certain

formula, so too might drug dealers come to learn how to measure out a pound of

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cannabis without the aid of a scale or come to adopt preferences for clothing or music

specific to their world (p. 7). Indeed, Bourdieu’s ideas of field and habitus seem to be

applicable to a wide range of contexts, as they highlight the embedded nature of

individuals’ social activities within a complex tapestry of interrelated economic,

political and social domains.

Second, a deeper look into the social space of higher education institution helps us

identify a visible change from being a social field with a high degree of autonomy and

the ability to operate more or less independently from the State to a social sub-field of

the State where the former has been almost completely submerged in the values,

constraints and priorities of economic and political forces associated with Neo-

liberalism. Giroux (2004) provided a powerful and compelling critique of ‘the scourge

of Neo-liberalism’ (p. 11), stressing its aggressive attempts to make the market the only

arbiter of social destiny through the consolidation of economic power in the hands of

the few, while breaking the power of unions, decoupling income from productivity,

subordinating the needs of society to the market, and deeming public services and goods

an unconscionable luxury. Though the influence of Neo-liberalism on the social space

of higher education institutions is apparent , it is not confined just to the UK educational

system, but has an immense global impact. As Bourdieu (1997) expressed it in his

Outline of a Theory of Practice, every established order tends to produce (to very

different degrees and with very different means) the naturalisation of its own

arbitrariness, where these ‘systems of classification make their specific contribution to

the reproduction of the power relations of which they are the product’ ( p. 164). As the

agents and particularly academics within the higher education institution field continue

their struggle against external pressures, researchers (Giroux, 2004; Shore, 2008; Nixon,

25


2011; Garratt and Forrester, 2012) encourage us to contest and push back the limits of

doxa, as ‘the question of legitimacy arises from the very possibility of this questioning,

of a break with the doxa that takes the ordinary order for granted’ (Bourdieu, 1985, p.

734). Nixon (2011) offered a more optimistic and helpful standpoint, affirming that

‘recourse to notions of academic freedom and academic autonomy is a sloppy and

inadequate response to the big idea that institutions of higher education need to redefine

themselves within the public sphere’ (p. 40). Instead, he suggested that higher education

must ‘reach beyond the confines of its own institutional and sector boundaries in order

to gain legitimacy and credibility’ ( p. 40). Indeed, in spite of its diminished status

under the attack of Neo-liberalism, higher education institution academic sub-field

remains uniquely placed in relation to the student sub-field, enabling academics to

influence students’ habitus through the enhancement of their ability to understand, resist

and critique existing doxa, and with a further potential to intervene in the transformation

of the social order in favour of a true democracy and the elimination of the reproduction

and the production of inequality, as identified by Bourdieu.

Third, there seem to be a number of similarities in the way power relationships have

been balanced within the Soviet system of education and that of the UK. The agenda for

education is always constructed by those in power, which, in a way, explains the nature

of these similarities. Within both systems, educational structures have been controlled

and regulated by those who have been in political power, aimed at promoting and

sustaining a particular version of the educational system and the purpose of education,

as such. This, consequently, has shaped the power relationships within both systems.

26


Finally, Bourdieu’s philosophy and his ‘thinking tools’ have encouraged my self-

reflexion on personal professional practice as a senior leader within the field of higher

education institution, making me look deeper into the interrelations of power within the

different sub-fields and to examine critically ‘the rules of the game’, as per Bourdieu’s

analogy; the game, where the field of higher education institution is far from being an

idyllic nirvana, and where leaders have a difficult task of finding a perfect synergy of

leadership and power in an volatile climate of tensions between the sought after

academic autonomy and the increased pressures of accountability. As Bourdieu

(1992( put it, these critical self-reflections give us ‘a small chance of knowing what

game we play and of minimising the ways in which we are manipulated by the forces of

the field in which we evolve, as well as by the embodied social forces that operate from

within us (p. 198).

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