Principles of an economic anthropology

The Handbook of Economic Sociology

Volumn , Issue , 2010, Pages 75-89

  Bourdieu, Pierre ^a  

^a Laboratoire de Physiologie de la Perception et de l'Action   (France)

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EID: 84883928665     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (43)

1. In the absence, as yet, of any formalization along the lines laid down by these principles, we can call on correspondence analysis (the theoretical foundations of which are very similar) to help us bring out the structure of the economic field or, in other words, the true explanatory principle of economic practices.
2. Walton H. Hamilton et al., Price and Price Policies (New York: McGraw Hill, 1938).
3. Mare R. Tool, "Contributions to an Institutional Theory of Price Determination," in Rethinking Economics: Markets, Technology, and Economic Evolution, ed. Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Ernesto Screpanti (Hants: E. Elgar, 1991), 29-30.
4. This conception of social capital differs from the definitions that have subsequently been given in American sociology and economics in that it takes into account not only the network of relations, characterized as regards its extent and viability, but also the volume of capital of different species that it enables to be mobilized by proxy (and, at the same time, the various profits it can procure: promotion, participation in projects, opportunities for participation in important decisions, chances to make financial or other investments). See Bourdieu, "Le capital social. Notes provi-soires," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 31 (January 1980): 2-3.
5. Cultural capital, technical capital, and commercial capital exist both in objectivized form (equipment, instruments, etc.) and in embodied form (competence, skills, etc.). One can see an anticipation of the distinction between the two states of capital, the objectivized and the embodied, in thework of Thorstein Veblen, who criticizes the orthodox theory of capital for overestimating tangible assets to the detriment of intangible ones. See Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1964).
6. Beth Mintz and Michael Schwartz, The Power Structure of American Business (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
7. Jan A. Kregel, "Markets and Institutions as Features of a Capitalistic Production System," Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics 3, no. 1(1980): 32-48.
8. As R. H. Coase has pointed out, it is on the basis of the assumption, tacitly made in orthodox theory, of zero transaction costs that acts of exchange can be rendered instantaneous: "Another consequence of the assumption of zero transaction costs, not usually noticed, is that, when there are no costs of making transactions, it costs nothing to speed them up, so that eternity can be experienced in a split second." R. H. Coase, The Firm, the Market, and the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 15.
9. Jean Tirole, The Theory of Industrial Organization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 4.
10. The classic work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahne-man has shown up the shortcomings of agents, and the mistakes they make, with regard to probability theory and statistics. See A. Tversky and D. Kahneman, "Availability, a Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability," Cognitive Psychology 2(1973): 207-32; see also Stuart Sutherland, Irrationality, the Enemy Within (London: Constable, 1992). There is a danger that the intellectualist assumption that underlies this research may lead us to miss the fact that the logical problem one infers from a real situation is not posed as such by the agents (friendship as a social relation is not informed by the principle that "my friends' friends are my friends") and the logic of dispositions means that agents are capable of responding in practice to situations involving problems of anticipation of opportunity that they cannot resolve abstractly. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
11. Mark Granovetter, "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness," American Journal of Sociology 91(1985): 481-510.
12. Anselm L. Strauss, Continual Permutations of Action (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1993).
13. See Mark Granovetter, "Economic Institutions as Social Constructions: A Framework for Analysis," Acta Socio-logica 35(1992): 3-11. Granovetter presents here a modified version of the alternative between "individualism" and "holism," which is rampant in economic (and sociological) orthodoxy, in the form of the opposition, borrowed from Dennis Wrong ("The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology," American Sociological Review 26[1961]: 183-93) between the "undersocialized view" dear to economic orthodoxy and the "oversocialized view," which assumes that agents are "so sensitive to the opinions of others that they automatically [obey] commonly held norms for behavior" (Granovetter, "Economic Action," 5) or that they have so profoundly internalized the norms or constraints that they are no longer affected by existing social relations (wholly erroneously, the notion of habitus is sometimes understood in this way). Hence the conclusion that, ultimately, this oversocialization and undersocialization have much in common, both of them regarding agents as closed monads, uninfluenced by "concrete, ongoing systems of social relations" (6) and "social networks."
14. Tirole, Theory of Industrial Organization, 2-3. A little further on, the author gives some hints regarding the costs enefits associated with the different categories of product (mainly, theoretical and empirical) on the economics market, which enables us to understand the comparative destinies of the "Harvard tradition" and the "new theory of industrial organization" he is defending: "Until the 1970s, economic theorists (with a few exceptions) pretty much ignored industrial organization, which did not lend itself to elegant and general analysis the way the theory of competitive general equilibrium analysis did. Since then, a fair number of top theorists have become interested in industrial organization."
15. Edward S. Mason, "Price and Production Policies of a Large-Scale Enterprise," American Economic Review 29(1939), supplement, 61-74 (esp. 64).
16. "The structure of a seller's market includes all those considerations which he takes into account in determining his business policies and practices." Mason, "Price and Production Policies," 68 (my italics, to point up the oscillation between the language of structure and structural constraint and that of consciousness and intentional choice).
17. Max Weber observes that commodity exchange is quite exceptional in that it represents the most instrumental, most calculating of all forms of action, this "archetype of rational action" representing "an abomination to every system of fraternal ethics." Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et al., vol. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 637.
18. Philip Kotler, Marketing Management, Analysis, Planning, Implementation, and Control (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988), 239.
19. Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 62.
20. Although this vision has sometimes been contested in recent years on the grounds that the recession has seen a constant overturning of hierarchies, and that mergers and acquisitions allow small firms to buy up large ones, or to compete effectively with them, the world's two hundred largest firms have nonetheless remained relatively stable.
21. Alfred D. Chandler, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 598-99.
22. See John L. Campbell and Leon Lindberg, "Property Rights and the Organization of Economic Action by the State," American Sociological Review 55(1990): 634-47.
23. Neil Fligstein has shown that one cannot understand the transformation of corporate control without dissecting the state of firms' relations over the long term with the state. And he has done this in the case most favorable to liberal theory, that of the United States, where the state remains a decisive agent in the structuring of industries and markets. See Neil Fligstein, The Transformation of Corporate Control (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). Further evidence of the decisive importance of central regulation is provided by the organized lobbying activity European firms carry on in Brussels.
24. The state, which plays a clear role in the case of the economy of house building, is far from being the only mechanism for coordinating supply and demand. Other institutions, such as networks of interpersonal relations in the case of crack cocaine, the "communities" formed by auction-goers, or "matchmakers" in the economy of boxing, also play their part in the creative regulation of markets. See Phillippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Charles W. Smith, Auctions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1990); and Loïc Wacquant, "A Flesh Peddler at Work: Power, Pain, and Profit in the Prizefighting Economy," Theory and Society 27, no. 1(1998): 1-42.
25. Among France's major employers I have elsewhere demonstrated a close homology between the space of firms and the space of their directors, as characterized by the volume and structure of their capital. See Pierre Bourdieu, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power, trans. Lauretta C. Clough (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 300-335.
26. See Fligstein, Transformation of Corporate Control, which describes how the control of firms comes successively under the sway of the directors in charge of production, marketing, and, ultimately, finance. See also Neil Fligstein and Linda Markowitz, "The Finance Conception of the Corporation and the Causes of the Reorganization of Large American Corporations, 1979-1988," in Sociology and Social Policy, ed. William Julius Wilson (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1993); Neil Fligstein and Kenneth Dauber, "Structural Change in Corporate Organization," Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989): 73-96; and Neil Fligstein, "The Intraorganizational Power Struggle: The Rise of Finance Presidents in Large Corporations," American Sociological Review 52 (1987): 44-58.
27. Harrison White, "Where Do Markets Come From?" American Journal of Sociology 87(1981): 518.
28. Weber, Economy and Society, 636.
29. White, "Where Do Markets Come From?" esp. 518.
30. Ibid., 543.
31. Phrase in English in original [Trans.].
32. See Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 49-50.
33. Gary S. Becker, Treatise on the Family (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), ix. See also The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
34. Vilfredo Pareto, Manual of Political Economy, ed. Ann S. Schweir and Alfred N. Page, trans. Ann S. Schweir (London: Macmillan, 1972), 29-30.
35. See J.-C. Passeron, "Pareto, l'économie dans la soci-ologie," in Economia, sociologia e politico nell'opera di Vilfre-do Pareto, ed. Corrado Malandrino and Roberto Marchion-atti (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2000), 25-71.
36. Thorstein Veblen, "Why Is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?" Quarterly Journal of Economics, July 1898, 390.
37. James S. Duesenberry, Income, Saving, and the Theory of Consumer Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949).
38. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985).
39. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986); Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). As we see from the analysis of the economic and social determinants of preferences for buying a house or renting, we may repudiate the ahistorical definition of preferences without condemning ourselves to a relativism-which would rule out all rational knowledge-of tastes consigned to pure social arbitrariness (as the old formula de gustibus non est dis-putandum, invoked by Gary Becker, suggests). We are led, rather, to establish empirically the necessary statistical relations that form between tastes in the various fields of practice and the economic and social conditions of the formation of those tastes, that is to say, the present and past position of the agents in (or their trajectory through) the structure of the distribution of economic and cultural capital (or, if the reader prefers, the state at the given moment and the development over time of the volume and structure of their capital).
40. See Tversky and Kahneman, "Availability."
41. We may call in evidence here the findings of the be-haviorist tradition, represented most notably by Herbert Simon, though without accepting this philosophy of action. Herbert Simon has stressed, on the one hand, the degree of uncertainty and incompetence that affects the process of decision making, and, on the other, the limited capacity of the human brain. He rejects the general maximization hypothesis, but retains the notion of "bounded rationality": agents may not be capable of gathering and processing all the information required to arrive at overall maximization in their decision making, but they can make a rational choice within the bounds of a limited set of possibilities. Firms and consumers do not maximize, but, given the impossibility of gathering and processing all the information required to achieve a maximum, they do seek to achieve acceptable minima (a practice Simon calls "satisficing"). Herbert Simon, Reason in Human Affairs (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1984).
42. See Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria, 1960, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
43. Alan P. Kirman, "Whom or What Does the Representative Individual Represent?" Journal of Economic Perspectives, 6(spring 1992): 117-36.