Thematizing embeddedness: Reflexive sociology as interpretation

Philosophy of the Social Sciences

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 49-66

  Lewandowski, Joseph D ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL MISSOURI   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0039931528     PISSN: 00483931     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/004839310003000103     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. For three insightful criticisms of Bourdieu's attempt to transcend subjectivism-objectivism, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, "The Reality of Reduction: The Failed Synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu, "in his Fin de Siecle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason (London: Verso, 1995); Richard Jenkins, "Pierre Bourdieu and the Reproduction of Determinism, "Sociology 16 (1982): 270-281; and Axel Honneth, "The Fragmented World of Symbolic Forms: Reflections on Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology of Culture, "Theory, Culture, and Society 3 (1986): 55-66. Most generally, all three criticisms object, on various grounds, to the deterministic and circular character of Bourdieu's account of habitus.
2. For three insightful criticisms of Bourdieu's attempt to transcend subjectivism-objectivism, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, "The Reality of Reduction: The Failed Synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu, "in his Fin de Siecle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason (London: Verso, 1995); Richard Jenkins, "Pierre Bourdieu and the Reproduction of Determinism, "Sociology 16 (1982): 270-281; and Axel Honneth, "The Fragmented World of Symbolic Forms: Reflections on Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology of Culture, "Theory, Culture, and Society 3 (1986): 55-66. Most generally, all three criticisms object, on various grounds, to the deterministic and circular character of Bourdieu's account of habitus.
3. For three insightful criticisms of Bourdieu's attempt to transcend subjectivism-objectivism, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, "The Reality of Reduction: The Failed Synthesis of Pierre Bourdieu, "in his Fin de Siecle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason (London: Verso, 1995); Richard Jenkins, "Pierre Bourdieu and the Reproduction of Determinism, "Sociology 16 (1982): 270-281; and Axel Honneth, "The Fragmented World of Symbolic Forms: Reflections on Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology of Culture, "Theory, Culture, and Society 3 (1986): 55-66. Most generally, all three criticisms object, on various grounds, to the deterministic and circular character of Bourdieu's account of habitus.
4. A partial list of "subjectivists" includes thinkers such as Hobbes, Hempel, Elster, and Rawls, while a list of "objectivists" includes Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, and Luhmann, among others. In different ways, theorists such as Marx, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Garfinkel, Habermas, and Bourdieu attempt to incorporate the insights of subjectivism and objectivism nondualistically. The point of such an attempt, to paraphrase Marx, is to discern how actors "make history" not simply as they choose but "under circumstances directly encountered."
5. Here Bourdieu's targets are American "post"-modern ethnographic theorists such as James Clifford, George E. Marcus, and Stephen Tyler. See especially the volume edited by Clifford and Marcus titled Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); see also Tyler's contribution to that volume. And for a historical overview of the emergence of kinds of ethnographic "styles" Bourdieu wants to reject, see George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fisher, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
6. Here Bourdieu's targets are American "post"-modern ethnographic theorists such as James Clifford, George E. Marcus, and Stephen Tyler. See especially the volume edited by Clifford and Marcus titled Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); see also Tyler's contribution to that volume. And for a historical overview of the emergence of kinds of ethnographic "styles" Bourdieu wants to reject, see George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fisher, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
7. For a related hermeneutic discussion of Bourdieu's work, see Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, "Can There Be a Science of Existential Structure and Social Meaning?" in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 35-44. Dreyfus and Rabinow are right to suggest that "to understand the significance of human action requires an interpretive approach" (pp. 35-36). But they miss the point I want to make here, namely, that the cash value of an "interpretive approach" is not that it merely makes accessible the "meaning" of human action but rather that it best captures the reflexive, context-transforming potential of such action.
8. The interpretively deterministic cast of Bourdieu's theory of practice is in fact not in keeping with his methodological account of "reflexive sociology, "as I shall demonstrate in section I.
9. The term "embeddedness" is deployed in economic sociology to examine how economic action in premarket societies is structured by social relationships of kinship, but grows increasingly autonomous in modern industrial society. Inasmuch as it seeks to demonstrate the social character of economic life, the conception of embeddedness can be understood most generally as a response to undersocialized or atomized-actor accounts of social agents. Yet, embeddedness becomes a "problem" in economic sociology when accounts of the social character of economic action overdetermine structure, replacing undersocialized agents with overly socialized ones. The "problem" of embeddedness is typically solved by various appeals to subjectivism (in the guise of the disembedding effects of individual practical reason) or objectivism (in the guise of the historically differentiating forces of modernization and rationalization). See, for example, Mark Granovetter, "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness, "American Journal of Sociology 91 (1985): 481-510. What is striking about such discussions, however, is the absence of talk about the enabling interpretive dimensions of embeddedness. It is precisely such a hermeneutical rehabilitation of the conception of embeddedness that I want to develop in this article.
10. Hence, the position I want to advance here resonates strongly with the "structuration theory" of Anthony Giddens (New Rules of Sociological Method, 2nd ed. [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993]). In elaborating what he calls the "double hermeneutic" of social science, Giddens rightly argues that "structure must not be conceptualized as simply placing constraints upon human agency, but as enabling. This is what I call the duality of structure. Structure can always in principle be examined in terms of structuration. To enquire into the structuration of social practices is to seek to explain how it comes about that structure is constituted through action, and reciprocally how action is constituted structurally" (p. 169). For an attempt to show the enabling epistemic features of interpretation, see James F. Bohman, "Holism without Skepticism: Contextualism and the Limits of Interpretation, "in The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture, ed. David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Schusterman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
11. Hence, the position I want to advance here resonates strongly with the "structuration theory" of Anthony Giddens (New Rules of Sociological Method, 2nd ed. [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993]). In elaborating what he calls the "double hermeneutic" of social science, Giddens rightly argues that "structure must not be conceptualized as simply placing constraints upon human agency, but as enabling. This is what I call the duality of structure. Structure can always in principle be examined in terms of structuration. To enquire into the structuration of social practices is to seek to explain how it comes about that structure is constituted through action, and reciprocally how action is constituted structurally" (p. 169). For an attempt to show the enabling epistemic features of interpretation, see James F. Bohman, "Holism without Skepticism: Contextualism and the Limits of Interpretation, "in The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture, ed. David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Schusterman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
12. "The Struggle for Symbolic Order: An Interview with Pierre Bourdieu, "Theory, Culture and Society 3 (1986): 35-51.
13. "The Struggle for Symbolic Order, "41.
14. In The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995), John Searle makes a directly related point in his discussion of what he calls the "Background" and "Background abilities": "Suppose a baseball player learns how to play baseball. At the beginning he actually learns a set of rules, principles, and strategies. But after he gets skilled, his behavior becomes much more fluent, much more melodic, much more responsive to the demands of the situation. In such a case, it seems to me, he is not applying rules more skillfully; rather, he has acquired a set of dispositions or skills to respond appropriately, where the appropriateness is actually determined by the structure of the rules, strategies, and principles of baseball. The basic idea … is that one can develop, one can evolve, a set of abilities that are sensitive to specific structures of intentionality without actually being constituted by that intentionality" (pp. 141-42, emphasis added).
15. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Tlieory of Action (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 80 (emphasis added).
16. Practical Reason, 80-81.
17. Although such a homology is something Bourdieu appears to want to avoid in his account of the entwinement of structures, habitus, and social practice, as his characterization of "intentionless invention of regulated improvisation" suggests. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), esp. 78-87.
18. Outline of a Theory of Practice, 115-16.
19. I borrow this insightful formulation from Alexander's critique of Bourdieu in Fin de Siecle Social Theory, esp. 135.
20. Outline of a Theory of Practice, 116.
21. Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 71.
22. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 71-72.
23. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 194.
24. An Invitation to Reflexwe Sociology, 68.
25. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 199.
26. See Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 4, 27-28. Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus also cite the role of cross-appropriation in the freeing up of rigid gender classifications: "cross-appropriation can also produce massive changes in style, as when feminists cross-appropriated masculine practices and changed the styles according to which men and women understood gender identity" (p. 27). See also their crucial distinction between "customary disclosing" and "historical disclosing" (p. 22), which in many ways resonates with the distinction I make between "context-sensitive" or first-order thematizarions of embeddedness and "context-transforming or second-order thematizations. The difference between my position and that outlined by Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus, however, is that I want to emphasize the reflexive character of "historical disclosing." For another discussion of the connection between "world disclosure" and social change, see James Bohman, "World Disclosure and Radical Criticism, "Thesis Eleven 37 (1994): 82-97. Contra Heidegger and Rorty, Bohman argues that "world disclosure" is not the select province of poets and artists but the task of "radical" social criticism.
27. See Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 4, 27-28. Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus also cite the role of cross-appropriation in the freeing up of rigid gender classifications: "cross-appropriation can also produce massive changes in style, as when feminists cross-appropriated masculine practices and changed the styles according to which men and women understood gender identity" (p. 27). See also their crucial distinction between "customary disclosing" and "historical disclosing" (p. 22), which in many ways resonates with the distinction I make between "context-sensitive" or first-order thematizarions of embeddedness and "context-transforming or second-order thematizations. The difference between my position and that outlined by Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus, however, is that I want to emphasize the reflexive character of "historical disclosing." For another discussion of the connection between "world disclosure" and social change, see James Bohman, "World Disclosure and Radical Criticism, "Thesis Eleven 37 (1994): 82-97. Contra Heidegger and Rorty, Bohman argues that "world disclosure" is not the select province of poets and artists but the task of "radical" social criticism.
28. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 10.
29. For a useful discussion of the differences between Geertz's model of action as text and Bourdieu's conception of action as embodied practice, see Orville Lee, "Observations on Anthropological Thinking about the Culture Concept: Clifford Geertz and Pierre Bourdieu, "Berkeley Journal of Sociology 33 (1988): 115-30.
30. The allusion here is to the penultimate paragraph of Geertz's "Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" in The Interpretation of Cultures, 452.