Working with Bourdieu

Dr Scott EacottOffice of Educational Leadership

School of EducationThe University of New South Wales

Acknowledgement

Eacott, S. (2016). Mobilizing Bourdieu to think anew about educational leadership research. In M. Murphy & C. Costa (Eds.), Theory as method in research: On Bourdieu, social theory and education (pp. 117-131). London: Routledge.

Twitter: @ScottEacott

Web: scotteacott.com

Academia.edu | Researchgate | UNSW profile | ORCID

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Presentation Overview• Introduce my claims• Finding Bourdieu• Thinking with Bourdieu• Enduring struggles• An ongoing program• Thinking anew• Dialogue and debate

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INTRODUCE MY CLAIMSSetting the scene

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Dr Scott Eacott

Ladwig (1996)

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Some preliminaries• I embrace the fuzziness

• Bourdieu as a methodological rather than theoretical resource

• Beyond field, capital and habitus

FINDING BOURDIEUA road less travelled

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Path matters• Dissatisfied with status quo• Methodology not content• Categories of Bourdieusian thinking

– Defenders of the legacy;– Partial appropriators;– Critical revisers; and– Repudiators.

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Thinking through the literatures• Increasing use in educational leadership• Thinking through this literature

– Gunter’s work on knowledge workers;– English on misrecognition;– Thomson’s work on school leadership;– Wilkinson’s on working at the margins;– My own program

• Appropriation for school leadership preparation• Problematizing the intellectual gaze | temporality;

– Wood’s thesis

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Lisa Adkins (2011)

… has not sought to argue that we should (let alone attempted to) ‘apply’ or ‘map’ Bourdieu’s writings on time to and on to recent economic events, for such an application or mapping is neither desirable nor helpful. Such methods would, for instance, leave the received terms of those events entirely intact (pp. 361-362).

THINKING WITH BOURDIEUChallenging the orthodoxy

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Thinking with• Native theories

• To take as one’s object the social work of construction of the pre-constructed object (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992)

• The logic of discovery more so than validation

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Bourdieu (2000[1997])

… it is clear that, to secure some chance of really knowing what one is doing, one has to unfold what is inscribed in the various relations of implication in which the thinker and his thought are caught up, that is, the presuppositions he engages and the inclusions or exclusions he unwittingly performs (p. 99).

ENDURING STRUGGLESAn ongoing project

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Some matters• Science• Ontological complicity• Theory and method• Temporality• Socio-spatial conditions• The fuzziness• A willingness to not accept the world, or the

scholastic endeavour, at face value and to ask questions of everything

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AN ONGOING PROGRAMEmbracing the grey

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A relational approachFive relational extensions:• The centrality of ‘organizing’ in the social world creates an ontological

complicity in researchers (and others) that makes it difficult to epistemologically break from the spontaneous understanding of the social world;

• Rigorous social scientific scholarship would therefore call into question the very foundations on which the contemporarily popular discourse are constructed;

• The contemporary social condition cannot be separated from the ongoing and inexhaustible recasting of organizing;

• Studying relationally enables the overcoming of the contemporary, and arguably enduring, tensions of individualism and collectivism, and structure and agency; and

• In doing so, there is a productive – rather than merely critical – space to theorize.

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THINKING ANEW More than critique

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Some thoughts• Social theory is generative• Chasing research objects always in motion• Theory travels better than empiricism• Scholarship as an invitation• The organizing of scholarly communities• Programmatic not projects• Chase ideas and not money

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Dialogue and Debate

A presentation at:

Working with Social Theory Research Seminar Series Working with Bourdieu

University of SydneySydney NSW AUSTRALIA22 October 2015

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Contact Details

Dr Scott EacottPhD MLMEd GradCertPTT BTeach/BSocSci FACEL

Director, Office of Educational LeadershipSchool of EducationUniversity of New South WalesSydney NSW AUSTRALIA 2052

P: +61 2 9385 0704T: @ScottEacottE: s.eacott@unsw.edu.auW: http://scotteacott.com

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