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TRE0010.1177/1477878514530231Theory and Research in EducationEdgerton and Roberts

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Cultural capital or habitus? Bourdieu and beyond in the explanation of enduring educational inequality

Theory and Research in Education 1­–28 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1477878514530231 tre.sagepub.com

Jason D. Edgerton and Lance W. Roberts University of Manitoba, Canada

Abstract Evidence for Bourdieu’s social reproduction theory and its contributions to understanding educational inequality has been relatively mixed. Critics discount the usefulness of core concepts such as cultural capital and habitus and most studies invoking these concepts have focused only on one or the other, often conflating the two, to the detriment of both. We disentangle cultural capital and habitus, and argue that taken together – in conjunction with practice and field – they hold significant explanatory potential. Moreover, we argue that these concepts can be incorporated into a scientific realist ‘structure–disposition–practice’ explanatory framework that seeks to address the misalignment between Bourdieuian relational constructs and standard positivist quantitative research methods. This reframing can help generate practical, actionable knowledge of the mechanisms underlying persistent socioeconomic disparities in educational attainment.

Keywords Bourdieu, cognitive habitus, cultural capital, educational inequality, field, practice, habitus

Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social and cultural reproduction is one of the most prominent attempts to explain the intergenerational persistence of social inequality. Bourdieu contended that the formal education system is a primary mechanism in the perpetuation of socioeconomic inequality, as it serves to legitimate the existing social hierarchy by transforming it into an apparent hierarchy of gifts or merit (Bourdieu, 1997, 2006; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). In constructing his account of social reproduction, Bourdieu Corresponding author: Jason D. Edgerton, Department of Sociology, 318 Isbister Building, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, R3T 2N2. Email: [email protected]

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deployed a number of compelling concepts. Cultural capital is arguably the most wellknown of these concepts. Less prominent, but no less integral to his conceptual framework are the accompanying notions of habitus, practice, and field. Yet research on educational inequality that utilizes Bourdieu’s framework seldom takes all four of these concepts into account. Most sociology of education research has focused on cultural capital or habitus, occasionally on both. Most research on cultural capital has been quantitative and has focused on operationalizing cultural capital in the objectified state, while the bulk of research on habitus has been qualitative in nature. To date, the evidence regarding Bourdieu’s ideas has been somewhat mixed. Some critics discount Bourdieu’s reproduction theory in its entirety, while others suggest that some concepts, freed from the baggage of his larger theoretical apparatus, still have analytical promise. For example, some critics doubt the usefulness of the cultural capital concept altogether (e.g. Kingston, 2001).Whereas others see it, with some revision, as a potentially important piece of the educational inequality puzzle, but reject the concept of habitus as too vague and unquantifiable to offer any important contribution (e.g. Sullivan, 2002; Van de Werfhorst, 2010). Contrary to these positions, we argue that cultural capital and habitus taken together – in conjunction with the concepts of practice and field – still hold significant explanatory potential. Moreover, we argue that these concepts can be incorporated into a scientific realist ‘structure–disposition–practice’ (SDP) explanatory framework that seeks to address the misalignment between Bourdieuian relational constructs and standard positivist quantitative research methods. Such reframing can help generate practical, actionable knowledge of the mechanisms underlying persistent socioeconomic disparities in educational attainment. First, we will provide a brief encapsulation of Bourdieu’s notions of cultural capital, habitus, practice, and field. We will then turn to a consideration of Lareau and Weininger’s critique of status-marker cultural capital research and their contention that embodied cultural capital entails both cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Next, we will reflect on habitus in more depth, first, weighing it favorably against commonly leveled charges of structural determinism, before turning to Nash’s elaborations on the cognitive aspects of habitus and the limits of Bourdieu’s ‘cultural arbitrary’ for explaining educational inequality. In the next to last section, we discuss the common conceptual confusion surrounding cultural capital and habitus that contributes to an ‘either or’ tendency in many Bourdieu-inspired accounts of educational inequality. We explicate the dual nature of dispositions as both habitus and cultural capital and how dispositions and practice interact with the school field to influence educational success. Last, following Nash, we outline a neo-Bourdieuian ‘SDP’ explanatory scheme that, in concert with a realist reconsideration of positivist criteria for social explanation and common sense mixed-methods research techniques, may help equip us with practical tools for disrupting mechanisms underlying the perpetuation of social disparities in educational attainment.

In brief: Four key Bourdieuian concepts Bourdieu (1997) delineates three fundamental forms of capital: economic capital, which is readily convertible; social capital, which is comprised of ‘social obligations’ or

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‘connections’; and cultural capital or ‘cultural competences’, which can be embodied (internalized and intangible), objectified (cultural products), and institutionalized (officially accredited). Bourdieu (1997) sees the forms of capital as mutually constitutive in that economic capital affords the time and resources for investment in the development of children’s cultural capital, which is associated with future educational and occupational success and, in turn, contributes to the accumulation of economic capital. Socioeconomic success is also associated with greater social capital in that one’s social network becomes broader, more influential, and more conducive to opportunity and further enhancement of one’s other capital stocks. Habitus is the learned set of preferences or dispositions by which a person orients to the social world. It is a system of durable, transposable, cognitive ‘schemata or structures of perception, conception and action’ (Bourdieu, 2002: 27). Habitus is rooted in family upbringing (socialization within the family) and conditioned by one’s position in the social structure. Bourdieu termed it ‘socialized subjectivity’ or subjectivity conditioned by structural circumstances. Habitus shapes the parameters of people’s sense of agency and possibility; it entails perceptual schemes of which ends and means are reasonable given that individual’s particular position in a stratified society. The term field refers to the formal and informal norms governing a particular social sphere of activity (e.g. family, public school, higher education, art, politics, and economics). Fields are organized around specific forms of capital or combinations of capitals, which ‘are both the process within, and product, of a field’ (Thompson, 2008: 69). Fields are relational in nature and are characterized by their own particular regulative principles – the ‘rules of the game’ or ‘logic of practice’ – which are subject to power struggles among different interests seeking to control the capital (and ‘rules’) in that field. Individuals’ positions within a particular field derive from the interrelation of their habitus and the capital they can mobilize in that field. People’s practices or actions – their behavioral repertoire – are the consequences of their habitus and cultural capital interacting within the context of a given field. Fields overlap and exist at various levels, with smaller fields (e.g. family) nested in larger fields (e.g. educational field, economic field). Fields are semi-autonomous, but often share similarities (homologies) in terms of defining social patterns and practices. All fields fall within the overarching field of power (social space), which is structured by two competing principles of social hierarchy: the distribution of economic capital and the distribution of cultural capital.

Cultural capital: Status signal or tool kit? While Bourdieu’s conceptualization of cultural capital is abstract and much debated, in North America, particular elements have been brought into relief and handed down as essential. Lareau and Weininger (2003) observe that the prevailing interpretation that has guided the majority of cultural capital research in North America is based on two premises: (1) cultural capital entails appreciation of ‘highbrow’ cultural tastes and (2) cultural capital is ‘conceptually and causally’ distinct from other knowledge or ability involving technical skills or competence (i.e. human capital). Lareau and Weininger (2003) argue that this interpretation misrepresents Bourdieu’s ideas and has needlessly circumscribed the scope of cultural capital–related research.

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Lareau and Weininger (2003) revisit Bourdieu’s treatment of cultural capital and offer a broader interpretation of the concept that they argue is not only more consistent with his intentions but, most importantly, is also more analytically useful than the received interpretation. First, they contend that cultural capital entails more than being conversant with highbrow cultural preferences – which are arguably of decreasing importance in contemporary North American society anyway (e.g. Erickson, 1996; Lamont, 1992). They argue, rather, that cultural capital includes adaptive cultural and social competencies such as familiarity with relevant institutional contexts, processes, and expectations, possession of relevant intellectual and social skills (e.g. ‘cultural knowledge’ and ‘vocabulary’), and a more ‘strategic conception of agency’. In the field of education, these competencies work in concert to enhance parental ability to successfully affect their children’s educational outcomes by cultivating these same skills in their children at home from an early age and by effectively liaising with schools. Second, they argue that cultural capital cannot be divorced from academic/technical skills or ‘ability’; the two interpenetrate. Citing a number of passages from his writings on education, they argue that Bourdieu saw the boundary dividing ‘technical’ skill from ‘social-behavioral’ competence as largely a social construction, an imposition of evaluative standards by ascendant interests invested in preserving and justifying the means of their ascendance. In Bourdieu’s words, the ‘ . . . dominants always tend to impose the skills they have mastered as necessary and legitimate and to include in their definition of excellence the practices at which they excel’ (quoted in Lareau and Weininger, 2003: 582), and moreover, to define excellence in these practices as deriving wholly from individual merit – independent of social status. Accordingly, the artificial separation of the technical ‘ability’ (cognitive skills) from the social competence (non-cognitive dispositions) aspects of academic performance conceals their underlying continuity; their shared origins in family background and thereby their class-contingent nature. Separating the technical from the social-behavioral bases of achievement obscures the fact that the technical competencies by which academic merit is evaluated are rooted – together with socialbehavioral competencies that enable individuals to both conform and distinguish themselves – in the familial transmission of cultural capital. Lareau and Weininger’s (2003) notion of cultural capital avoids this bifurcation, instead viewing both technical and social-behavioral skills as aspects of cultural capital and as synergistic determinants of the individual’s capacity to comply with prevailing evaluative standards. Their understanding of the concept focuses on ‘ . . . microinteractional processes whereby individuals’ strategic use of knowledge, skills, and competence comes into contact with institutionalized standards of evaluation. These specialized skills are transmissible across generations, are subject to monopoly, and may yield advantages or “profits”’ (p. 569). While some scholars (e.g. Kingston, 2001) express concern over a more expansive definition of cultural capital, a broader conceptualization as posited by Lareau and Weininger offers useful language for discussing important aspects of how socioeconomic advantage translates into academic advantage, of how ‘higher SES families produce more of the kinds of skills [cognitive and non-cognitive] that schools reward’ (Davies and Guppy, 2006: 106).1 For example, Swidler (1986) describes culture as a ‘“tool kit” of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct “strategies of action”’ (p. 273). The composition of this tool kit is largely dependent on

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one’s location within the social structure which conditions how a person perceives and relates to the world. This invites a much richer conception of cultural capital, viewing culture as the situated frame through which we meet our world rather than the more limited notion of culture as marker of class position. Thus, in this broader sense, cultural capital becomes not merely an arbitrary set of elitist aesthetic and social hallmarks, but rather an adaptive set of cognitive skills – such as verbal, reading, writing, mathematics, and analytical reasoning skills – and behavioral skills – such as achievement motivation, self-regulation, and delay of gratification – that are associated with academic and, subsequently, occupational success (Farkas, 2003).2 The implements of this cultural ‘tool kit’ – the skills and preferences conducive to successfully negotiating the ‘rules of the game’ in particular areas of social action – are not evenly distributed across the socioeconomic spectrum, and these disparities tend to be transmitted intergenerationally. Put another way, the behavioral repertoire (practices) available to middle-class families – via their habitus and cultural capital – has greater currency within formal institutional settings such as the school (field) than does that of working-class families, and the resulting differences in educational and socioeconomic outcomes tend to perpetuate this imbalance across the next generation. Lareau’s research reveals important differences in the cultural tool kits that families from different class backgrounds bring to bear on their interactions with teachers and the school and how these differences can translate into disparate educational trajectories. Middle-class students and parents are advantaged in terms of the greater congruence between their dispositional skills and the school’s ‘institutionalized standards of evaluation’ which enables them to more successfully manage institutional encounters and effect favorable academic outcomes. Middle-class parents are more likely to exhibit, and instill in their children, the micro-interactional skills required for successful compliance with school expectations of ‘active, engaged, and assertive’ parenting (Lareau and Weininger, 2003: 590). Middle-class parenting practices tend to emphasize reasoning and negotiating and to employ talking as a form of discipline, whereas working-class parents were more likely to employ directives and physical discipline (Lareau, 2002, 2011). Additionally, Lareau (2002, 2011) has noted a greater ‘sense of entitlement’ among middle-class parents, in terms of greater propensity to question and intercede with institutional authorities (e.g. teachers, doctors), than among working-class parents who tend to be more restrained and deferential, although at the same time distrustful, in their approach. These different attitudes and interactional styles, in turn, tend to be passed on to their children. Additionally, middle-class parents also tend to have greater institutional knowledge and problem-solving resources that allow them to more effectively facilitate their children’s educational trajectories (Lareau and Cox, 2011). Lareau (2011) refers to the more interventionist middle-class parent cultural logic of parenting as ‘concerted cultivation’. Parents invoking this logic are much more actively involved in attempting to engineer appropriate life-skill-promoting activities and experiences, compared to the more laissez-faire approach to extra-curricular activity she observed among workingclass parents – which she terms the ‘accomplishment of natural growth’. This interventionist logic, premised on the belief in the necessity of actively fostering their children’s skills and talents, is also evident in later adolescence as middle-class children transition from high school into post-secondary education or the work force. Middle-class parents

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are generally actively involved in the strategic mapping of their children’s educational careers, while working-class parents remained comparatively hands off regarding their children’s educational paths (Lareau, 2011; Lareau and Weininger, 2008). Also consistent with the notion of cultural capital as cultural tool kit is evidence of the diminishing importance of highbrow culture as a status signifier and the increasing importance of cultural versatility. Lamont (1992), for example, concludes that compared to the French context informing Bourdieu’s initial analysis, cultural boundaries (i.e. hierarchies of cultural tastes) in the United States tend to be ‘more blurred and less stable’ (p. 178). Furthermore, she observes that in the United States, ‘upper-middle class men have particularly broad cultural repertoires and often appreciate diversity’ (Lamont, 1992: 182). In complex modern societies, people may engage in a wide range of activities in multiple spheres, and hence, ‘boundaries vary across contexts and across groups (not only classes)’ (Lamont, 1992: 183). Similarly, Erickson (1996) contends that, increasingly, it is facility with multiple cultural genres – or possession of a diverse cultural repertoire – that provides social advantage. In this view, highbrow culture is just one ‘genre’ of culture, and is, in fact, of diminished consequence in many sectors of society (fields) including, for example, the business sector where profit-oriented business culture prevails (Erickson, 1996). Which cultural repertoire is most valuable varies across fields (professions, workplaces, business sectors, etc.), and thus ‘cultural advantage (or cultural capital)’ derives not from ‘high-status taste but highly varied tastes combined with a keen sense of the rules of relevance of which kind of culture to use in which situation’ (Erickson, 2008: 347). Such cultural versatility (or ‘cultural omnivorism’) offers social advantages including enhanced opportunities for employment and promotion in many occupations (Emmison, 2003; Garnett et al., 2008; Van Eijck, 2000).

Habitus revisited Let us now turn to a more detailed consideration of the nature and influence of habitus. Habitus is a set of acquired dispositions, the internalized interpretive framework, rooted in family upbringing and conditioned by one’s position in the social structure, through which one perceives the social world and one’s prospects within it. Bourdieu termed it ‘socialized subjectivity’ or subjectivity conditioned by structural circumstances, such that segments of society that share similar conditions of existence will share similar habitus.3 As Swartz (1997) observes, ‘ . . . habitus generates perceptions, aspirations, and practices that correspond to the structuring properties of earlier socialization’ (p. 103). Furthermore, ‘[t]he dispositions of habitus represent master patterns of behavioural style that cut across cognitive, normative, and corporal dimensions of human action. They find expression in human language, nonverbal communication, tastes, values, perceptions, and modes of reasoning’ (p. 108). Habitus is both a ‘structured structure’ and a ‘structuring structure’. As the circumstances of one’s social origins – and associated life chances – tend to influence one’s perceptual and behavioral dispositions, so too do one’s consequent actions (practices) tend to contribute to the perpetuation or reinforcement of like circumstances and life chances. One’s practices or actions in a particular field are the interactive consequences of one’s habitus and capital within the dynamics of that field.

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Critics charge that habitus is an overly deterministic construct that leaves little room for individual agency, innovation, and change. Socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals are socialized into dispositions that destine them to think and act in ways that recreate the conditions of their own disadvantage: structures produce dispositions, which produce practices, which reproduce structures. Embedded in this critique are three related concerns: that the dispositions of habitus are set early in life and largely unaltered by subsequent experiences; that habitus operates largely ‘behind the back’ of the individual, leaving little room for conscious, rational behavior; and that, as a consequence of its immutable and pre-reflective nature, habitus leaves little purchase for individuality, innovation, and social mobility. In response to the first criticism, although stability of perceptual and behavioral patterns of the habitus may be the default setting, and novel situations are first encountered in terms of past experiences, habitus is in fact adaptive and incrementally modifiable in the face of variant circumstances. That is, the dispositions of habitus are enduring but not unchanging: . . . habitus, as the product of social conditionings, and thus of history . . . is endlessly transformed, either in a direction that reinforces it, when embodied structures of expectation encounter structures of objective chances in harmony with these expectations, or in a direction that transforms it and, for instance, raises or lowers the level of expectations and aspirations. (Bourdieu, 1990b: 116)

Although the structurally situated roots of habitus favor stability over change in the long run, habitus is not static, not categorically immutable; its properties can evolve by degree in response to changing experiences and circumstances. Primary socialization experiences are indeed foundational, and although wholesale change is unlikely as new experiences are ‘perceived through categories already constructed by prior experiences’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 133), habitus continues to be molded by new experiences. The key issue here is the degree of habitus-field congruence: if the dispositions of habitus align well with the conditions of a particular field (a ‘fish in water’), change is unlikely or minimal; if the dispositions align less well, then some degree of disruption is inevitable and success (or lack of it) within that field will be contingent, in part, upon the extent of change or adjustment within the habitus. For example, the middle-class student who exhibits the dispositions and competencies congruent with school standards and expectations is likely to experience a level of academic success that acts to reinforce their school-positive habitus and the probability of their continuing onto higher education, whereas the working-class student with a less congruent habitus is, without sufficient adjustment, liable to experience less academic success, increasingly negative attitudes toward school, and lower levels of educational attainment. Alternately, working-class students who experience sufficient early academic success may increasingly see schooling in a positive light and may come to regard the accumulation of cultural capital via schooling as a means of social mobility, as a means to help overcome the impediments to opportunity associated with their class position. Academic success and the rewards of increased cultural capital positively alter the student’s aspirations and orientation toward

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school (habitus), which in turn feeds back into their practices and performance. In this manner, habitus may be transformed ‘ . . . by the effect of social trajectory leading to conditions of living different from initial ones’ (Bourdieu, 1990b: 116). Although difficult, habitus is even subject to conscious change through ‘socioanalysis’, a sort of ‘selfwork’ that involves processes of ‘awareness and of pedagogic effort’ (Bourdieu, 2002: 29; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 133). Also, similar to notions of cultural diversity as an increasingly important source of cultural capital, some theorists even suggest that the flexible, reflexive habitus is becoming more common in late modern societies as various economic, cultural, and social shifts including changing patterns of work, community, and relationships increasingly necessitate greater capacity for ongoing adaptation on the part of the individual (Crossley, 2001; Sweetman, 2003). Turning to the ‘behind the back’ charge, critics argue that Bourdieu overemphasizes the unconscious, pre-reflexive aspects of habitus and underplays the reflective, mindful dimensions. It is true that Bourdieu provides plenty of fuel for such criticisms, for example, characterizing the operation of the habitus as ‘spontaneity without consciousness or will’ (Bourdieu, 1990a: 56), entailing a ‘feel for the game’ or ‘practical sense’ that allows ‘intentionality without intention which functions as the principle of strategies devoid of strategic design, without rational computation and without the rational positing of ends’ (Bourdieu, 1990b: 108). But such descriptions must be considered within the broader context of Bourdieu’s work. Bourdieu was concerned to counteract what he considered the cloistered, overly intellectualized conception of human action propagated by academics – part of what he termed the ‘scholastic fallacy’ which is characterized by a general failure to distinguish between the ‘theoretical viewpoint and the practical viewpoint’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 54), resulting in the ‘serious epistemological mistake’ of inserting: . . . ‘a scholar inside the machine’, . . . picturing all social agents in the image of the scientist . . . [by placing] . . . the models that the scientist must construct to account for practices into the consciousness of agents, to do as if the constructions that the scientist must produce to understand practices, to account for them, were the main determinants, the actual causes of practices. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 70, n10)

Thus, Bourdieu ‘twist[s] the stick in the opposite direction’, purposely amplifying the contrariness of his propositions in the face of academic orthodoxy (Atkinson, 2010: 12). But upon closer inspection, a more nuanced construct emerges, one sensitive to different levels of awareness and deliberateness in our actions. The habitus operates primarily in the background until the actor is faced with circumstances – a sufficient degree of habitus-field disjuncture – that may bring conscious deliberative action to the fore. So, although the pre-reflective, practical sense operation of habitus guides the majority of our behavior,4 it ‘may be superseded under certain circumstances – certainly in situations of crisis which disrupt the immediate adjustment of habitus to field – by other principles, such as rational and conscious computation’ (Bourdieu, 1990b: 108). Bourdieu rejects the ‘pure model of rational action’ as an accurate portrayal of human behavior, because actors ‘ . . . only very exceptionally possess the complete information, and the skill to appreciate it, that rational action would presuppose’ (Bourdieu, 1990a: 62). For example,

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a working-class student may make intentional decisions about their future path (university, vocational training, work, etc.), but may do so with limited knowledge of some options (e.g. relevant institutional processes, degree requirements, labor market prospects) and with idiosyncratic or situated dispositions and priorities – not solely economic as rational action theory assumes – that condition the ‘rationality’ of their decisionmaking (relationships, sentiment, identity, etc.), not all of which the individual is equally aware of or able to identify. Thus, even when engaging in intentional deliberative action, the ‘calculations’ from which decisions derive are influenced by biographically conditioned, deep-seated ‘propensities to think, feel and act’ (Wacquant, 2004: 316) in particular ways and informed by varying degrees of relevant knowledge and self-awareness. In this sense, habitus is ‘the unchosen principle of all “choices”’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 137). That is, we can only think with the cognitive (cultural) tools at our disposal and these tools or schemas – the habitus – are the sediments of previous, structurally situated, socialization experiences:5 [S]ocial agents will actively determine, on the basis of these socially and historically constituted categories of perception and appreciation [i.e. habitus], the situation that determines them. One can even say that social agents are determined only to the extent that they determine themselves. But the categories of perception and appreciation which provide the principle of this (self-) determination are themselves largely determined by the social and economic conditions of their constitution. (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 136)

Similarly, thinking with and beyond Bourdieu, Atkinson (2010) draws on Schutz’s (1964, 1972) notion of the ‘subjective stock of knowledge’, and its framing ‘attitudes’, to suggest a conception of habitus that more explicitly recognizes the multilayered nature of consciousness and knowledge. He argues that this depth dimension is implicit but underdeveloped in Bourdieu’s work on habitus. He suggests that habitus can be seen as underlying the full continuum of action, from more automatic, pre-reflective, mundane action to more intentional, deliberative ‘rational’ action, but that intentionality is only partly, or incompletely, informed by ‘rationality’ in the academic sense. Such that . . . even so-called rational action: what is rehearsed, considered and weighed up, the ends valued and means considered, and the final choice or decision, are not separate from the interpretive schemes and dispositions of the situated habitus but based on them. (p. 14)

If we accept that the habitus is not immutable, but open to evolving incremental change in the face of new experience, and that it operates not only at an unconscious, pre-reflective level but also at a conscious, deliberative level, then we can also address the third concern about individuality, innovation and change. As Atkinson (2010) notes, Bourdieu was adamant that ‘ . . . habitus is not a mechanistic translation of objective structures into action, but a generative and creative capacity for thought and action within limits’ (p. 4). This generative, creative capacity – which Bourdieu likens to a potentially expansive underlying grammar – enables an actor to make a great variety of ‘moves’ adapted to a great variety of situations ‘which no rule, however complex, can foresee’ (Bourdieu, 1990b: 9). This great diversity of ‘moves’ is, however, not limitless, but confined within

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the parameters of the historically and socially conditioned schemes of perception and action that we have to organize our experience with. Thus, the ‘ . . . conditioned and unconditional freedom [the habitus] secures is as remote from a creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from a simple mechanical reproduction of the initial conditions’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 95). Thus, our choices, our actions, are shaped but not programmed by our habitus; we cannot fully escape nor are we caged by our history. In terms of individuality, those experiencing similar conditions of existence within society will develop broadly similar, but not identical, habitus: The principle of differences between individual habitus lies in the singularity of their social trajectories, to which there correspond series of chronologically ordered determinations that are mutually irreducible to one another. The habitus which, at every moment, structures new experiences in accordance with the structures produced by past experiences, which are modified by the new experiences within the limits defined by their power of selection, brings about a unique integration, dominated by the earliest experiences, of the experiences statistically common to members of the same class. (Bourdieu, 1990a: 60)

Hence, ‘[j]ust as no two individual histories are identical so no two individual habituses are identical’ (Bourdieu, 1990c: 46). Thus, it can be argued that the analytical potential of the habitus concept is not necessarily denuded by exaggerated charges of structural determinism, that Bourdieu’s habitus concept – bolstered by subsequent theorists’ refinements – can be made to account for deliberative, innovative, and idiosyncratic thought and action. If habitus is open, in some degree, to change in the face of new environments and experiences, if it is a generative principle that enables a diverse range of actions, and if an individual’s habitus is not fully coterminous with any single group, but rather a unique sedimentation of their situated history, then habitus-mediated individual action can still be novel and innovative, and social origins do not necessarily determine social destinations; social reproduction is not inevitable. As Lizardo (2004) argues, although Bourdieu was guilty of sometimes deploying habitus in a ‘deterministic and somewhat reductive’ manner, there is ‘nothing inherently faulty or intrinsically deterministic in the concept of habitus that precludes its usage and application in non-deterministic ways’ (p. 392). It is, he argues, a conceptual gateway to a cognitive sociology that links social and cognitive structures and draws attention, as Cicourel (1993) notes, to ‘the social genesis of abstract mental structures of schemes of perception, thought and action which are constitutive of habitus’ (p. 103). In short, we can build on what is potentially useful about the habitus concept, revising and elaborating without being limited by the need to be strictly faithful to his larger theoretical apparatus (Grenfell and Kelly, 1999).

Cognitive habitus Nash (2002a) refers to the positive orientation toward schooling that Bourdieu describes as the ‘educated habitus’. The ‘educated habitus’ includes more than just an instrumental view of education, it includes the desire to be educated and to identify and be identified as such. Many of the positive effects of the educated habitus on educational attainment

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are associated with non-cognitive dispositions such as high aspirations, positive academic self-concept, and favorable perceptions of school and teachers (Nash, 2001). Nash (2002a) cites ethnographic evidence that high-attaining secondary school students exhibit a ‘distinctive concept of self-discipline’, one that emphasizes the value of attentiveness, diligence, and self-control to academic performance (Nash, 2002a: 39–41). But the concepts of education and of the educated person that inform the educated habitus are not appreciated equally by students of all social backgrounds: Many working-class students reject education regarded as superfluous to their perceived needs, which are primarily informed by a concept of relevance tied to their projected occupation, but it is not that they want to be ‘dumb’ – they simply have a different conception of what is worth knowing than the school. (Nash, 2002a: 34)

Nash’s concept of the ‘educated habitus’ conforms fairly closely to Bourdieu’s basic notion of the effect of class-variant dispositions on academic achievement, but Nash veers from the conventional social reproduction reading of Bourdieu, to posit a ‘realist’ understanding of educational inequality that holds: there are certain non-arbitrary, educationally necessary analytical and problem-solving skills imparted in schools; and the cognitive operations underlying these are rooted in the socialized ‘cognitive habitus’, the development of which is affected by classed family environments (Nash, 2003, 2005b). Nash (2005a) uses the term ‘cognitive habitus’ to refer to ‘a set of mental dispositions to process symbolic information, that is to acquire the tools of communication, and specifically those of literate communication, and to be able to use these mental operators effectively in appropriate conditions’ (p. 15). Or more specifically, the cognitive dispositions comprising ‘the skills dedicated to classifying, remembering, concept formation, problem-solving, and so on’ (Nash, 2005b: 604) that are ‘exercised in mathematics and other language-based, symbolic information processing’ (Nash, 2003: 172). These dispositions result from specialized ‘socialisation practices directed at the development of specific forms of thinking’ (Nash, 2003: 174) and do not develop evenly across all family environments. These fundamental intellectual capabilities and capacities are contingent on the organization of the neural system, underlie academic performance, and are implicated in the production of social inequality in educational attainment. The concept is not meant to draw a sharp distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive aspects of habitus, but rather to highlight that cognitive dispositions are part of ‘that structure of dispositions, acquired in specific cultural settings, by virtue of which individuals are able to adopt the established practices of their social group with the accomplished ease of those who know the rules of the game’ (Nash, 2005b: 603). Nash argues (2001, 2003, 2005b) that both Bernstein’s theory of cognitive socialization and Vygotsky’s account of cognitive development are, each in their own way, concerned with the development of the cognitive habitus. Bernstein’s emphasis on class-related differences in codes of speech and thought (‘elaborated’ and ‘restricted’ semiotic codes characterized, respectively, by ‘universal, general, and abstract’ concepts and ‘local, particular, and concrete’ concepts) and Vygotsky’s account of cognitive development, which emphasizes that development of ‘higher mental functions’ occurs in specific social and linguistic processes and environments, are each in their manner investigating the

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development of the cognitive habitus, and the basic question, ‘in what ways are children able to think as a result of the socialization they receive?’ (Nash, 2001: 199). The shared implication of their work, Nash argues, is that children who experience literate forms of socialization in early childhood are able to demonstrate, in Vygotsky’s terms, ‘higher mental function’ and, in Bernstein’s terms, an ‘elaborated semiotic code’, and as a result make better progress at school than those who do not. (p. 200)

To point out – in the tradition of Bernstein and Vygotsky – the classed dimension of cognitive development and its relationship to disparities in educational achievement does not equate with ‘an attempt to resurrect classical deficit theory’, nor is it premised on the notion ‘that the existing distribution of educational access is either inevitable or desirable’ (Nash, 2003: 186). Nash (2001, 2003) argues that the tendency in sociology of education to deny that differences in ‘intelligence’ are of any consequence to explaining class differences in educational achievement is akin to putting our heads in the sand, and to externalize – to ‘black box’ – this factor in our models as an ‘ability’6 control variable is to deny an important social reality. Scores on tests of cognitive ‘ability’ (various IQ-type tests), or prior achievement, often account for the largest proportion of variance in academic attainment. One does not have to accept IQ theory to appreciate that individual differences in developed cognitive skills are implicated in the production of disparities in educational success: If the neural structures that do our thinking . . . develop differentially, with more or less permanent effect, as a result of the environments in which children are raised, that will be ‘theory’ enough to give assessments of developed cognitive skill a role in the explanation of social variation in access to education. In other words, it is likely that some differences in test performance and schoolwork are due to differences in relevant brain properties. (Nash, 2001: 192–193)

Importantly, the concept of ‘cognitive habitus’ suggests that we can explain some further portion of this variation without reference to innate, or genetic, factors – and the ethically fraught implications of such – but rather by understanding relevant disparities in conditions of cognitive socialization, disparities that may be made amenable to systematic mitigation. Many interpreters of Bourdieu hold unwaveringly to the relativist critique that the school’s standards of knowledge, practice, and evaluation are arbitrary cultural impositions – the product of a particular history of class power relations, with no inherent claim to truth. As Nash (2002a) notes, acknowledging that forms of knowledge are cultural products that can be framed historically does not, in and of itself, invalidate the conceptual soundness or practical utility of those knowledge forms. For example, he argues for the necessity of asserting ‘that the modern scientific and mathematical curriculum is essentially correct in its representation of the world and therefore should be recognized as non-arbitrary in that crucial respect’ (Nash, 2002a: 43). Formal schooling imparts practically useful conceptual and analytical tools (cognitive operations) as well as the behavioral dispositions necessary to the development of those tools

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(e.g. self-discipline). Nash (2002a) argues from a scientific realist position that Bourdieu’s emphasis on the use of symbolic power by dominant classes to impose an arbitrary discourse and preserve their legitimacy misses the more straightforward possibility that dominant classes ‘ . . . are powerful in so far as they are equipped with effective techniques of literary and scientific analysis with which the social and physical world can be understood and to that extent controlled’ (p. 46). Nash is not denying the existence of class-based educational inequality or the impact of structural asymmetries on the life chances of students from less privileged backgrounds, but what he is contending is that there has been an overemphasis on the political nature of knowledge and the arbitrariness of the school curriculum: Do working-class students who fail at school lose only the exchange value of an arbitrary knowledge, but retain their class dignity and the potential for resistance, or are they denied knowledge with an inherent capacity to analyze the real nature of the world? (Nash, 2002a: 41)

Despite post-modernist and relativist theorizing to the contrary, there are wellestablished socially beneficial bodies of knowledge such as mathematics and science that cannot be simply dismissed as arbitrary, discredited simply as ideological tools of dominant group legitimation. These forms of knowledge are increasingly necessary to individual and societal adaptation and progress.7 The indisputable social fact that there are persistent disparities across social strata in children’s success at acquiring and applying these fundamental knowledge forms cannot be simply defined away as symptomatic of dominant class hegemony or ‘symbolic violence’. Furthermore, to insist on doing so does a grave disservice to these children and the goals of reducing educational and social inequality. Nash sees the ideology – which he terms ‘possibilism’ – that asserts that educational equality can be unilaterally effected by appropriate school policy as misguided or at least naïve and unfair to both teachers and students (Nash, 2003, 2005b). Not that teachers and policymakers should not make every possible effort to reach all children and to educate them to their fullest potential, but it must be acknowledged that if, as the child development literature indicates, some critical developmental periods have passed before entrance to school, then there may be a limit to what degree of learning disparity can be bridged by schooling alone. There is growing evidence to suggest that important aspects of neural organization fundamental to life-long learning are already well-developed by age 5, as are cognitive and socioemotional abilities important to life-long learning (Keating and Hertzman, 1999; McCain and Mustard, 1999; UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2002). Educational disadvantage starts early and tends to grow incrementally (Cleveland et. al., 2006). Thus, to place the burden of correction on the school for what are larger systemic issues in society – requiring larger systemic solutions – is unrealistic and unfair. In this light, Nash takes great care to distance the concept of cognitive habitus from the theoretical baggage of ‘deficit theories’ – particularly IQ, or general intelligence, theory. He argues that to deny that classed socialization influences differential development of cognitive faculties associated with disparities in academic performance is to deny an important social reality. An important policy implication here is that the earlier that stimulating social and cognitive environments can be universally provided to children, especially the disadvantaged, the

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lesser the extent of educational inequality. In other words, universally available highquality early-childhood education is essential to mitigating later educational and socioeconomic inequality (Cleveland et al., 2006; Doherty, 2007; Esping-Andersen, 2004).

Cultural capital or habitus? So, on one hand, Lareau and Weininger argue that embodied cultural capital entails both cognitive and non-cognitive aspects, while, on the other hand, Nash attributes cognitive and non-cognitive dispositions to habitus. The question is, are these accounts contradictory or can we reconcile them? Sociology of education researchers appear, for the most part, to have followed one approach or the other: concentrate on cultural capital or on habitus – to the detriment of the concepts’ joint explanatory potential. This disjuncture seems particularly true of quantitative research in the area. There is a substantial body of quantitative research focused on the effects of cultural capital on educational attainment (e.g. Aschaffenburg and Maas, 1997; De Graaf et al., 2000; DiMaggio, 1982; DiMaggio and Mohr, 1985; DiMaggio and Unseem, 1978; Farkas et al., 1990; Flere et al., 2010; Mohr and DiMaggio, 1995; Nobel and Davies, 2009; Sullivan, 2001), mostly implementing an operationalization of cultural capital in the objectified state that focuses on highbrow culture. There is also a substantial body of research on the influence of habitus on educational attainment, some quantitative (e.g. Bodovski, 2010; Edgerton et al., 2013) but most qualitative (e.g. Horvat and Davis, 2011; Lehmann, 2004, 2007, 2009; Nash, 2002a; Reay, 1995, 1997; Reay et al., 2009; Zevenbergen, 2005). Interestingly, though, there has been little quantitative research that attempts to consider these constructs – both key components to Bourdieu’s framework – in conjunction (e.g. Dumais, 2002; Gaddis, 2013; Nora, 2004). A few cultural capital– focused quantitative studies include variables in their models that, from a Bourdieuian stance, are indicators of habitus – for example, ambition (Barone, 2006), educational expectations (Wildhagen, 2009), occupational expectations (Tramonte and Willms, 2010) – but are not conceptualized as such. Examples of research invoking these core concepts together within a fuller Bourdieuian framework (also including variously: practice, field and other forms of capital) are generally more evident in the qualitative literature (e.g. Horvat, 2001; Lareau, 2011; Lareau and Horvat, 1999; Reay et al., 2005; Walpole et al., 2005; Watson et al., 2009). How do we relate embodied cultural capital and habitus? In order to understand their interrelation, we must consider them in concert with practice (action) and field. A common approach to illustrating the interrelation of these concepts is to use the analogy of a card game. The card game is the field of interaction, the cards dealt to each player constitute their stock of cultural capital, and the approach they take to playing their cards (practice) depends on their habitus. The value of certain cards and hands and the most advantageous way to play them will vary according to the rules of the particular card game as will any player’s relevant knowledge and skill. The value of your cards in context of a particular game, will influence how you play them (do you fold, raise, etc.), at the same time, your skills, knowledge, and preferences as a player will influence how you appraise your cards and the possible options you have, and how you play your cards can in turn affect their value (bid conservatively, bid aggressively, fold, bluff, etc.) and

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your position in that game. Additionally, each of these must be understood relationally in the dynamic context of other players’ positions and their respective hands, skills, knowledge, and preferences. Certainly, this analogy is simplistic and begins to break down the further you push it, but it illustrates the basic idea that the value of cultural capital is field dependent and relational, as are habitus and practice. For the present purposes, the problem of interest concerns the cards in one’s hand as an analog for cultural capital, and one’s card skills and playing preferences as an analog for the dispositions of habitus. According to Bourdieu, and to Lareau and Weininger’s (2003) elaboration, cultural capital in its embodied form also entails skills and dispositions and thus would influence how one plays the game – the supposed function of habitus. So, are embodied cultural capital and habitus the same thing? If yes, then is there need for both in a theory of practice, or should one be discarded, and if so which? Or can the two concepts be understood relationally as complementary and necessary conjuncts? In short, we will answer these questions: yes (essentially), neither should be discarded, and yes. Part of the issue is that Bourdieu invokes the term ‘disposition’ at different points to describe both habitus (e.g. Bourdieu, 1977) and embodied cultural capital (e.g. Bourdieu, 1997). On one hand, Bourdieu (1977) characterizes habitus ‘ . . . as a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified tasks’ (pp. 82–83); on the other hand, he describes embodied cultural capital as ‘long-lasting dispositions of the mind and body’ (Bourdieu, 1997: 47) and, furthermore, as ‘external wealth converted into an integral part of the person, into a habitus’ (p. 48). Although general discourse in the sociology of education literature often gives the impression of two parallel, but distinct, processes at work, the accumulation of embodied cultural capital and the formation of habitus are in actuality two sides of the same socialization process: the situated internalization of cultural schemas. Habitus and embodied cultural capital are not separate things but rather ‘continuous with each other, as “moments”’ of the same process (Moore, 2008: 105). What the ‘capital’ metaphor adds to the picture is to highlight that dispositions themselves are valuable assets, or resources, that can realize returns for the actor in particular fields of social action: [T]he notion of ‘capital’ adds . . . an attention to the exchange value which specific dispositions have within particular social fields. When an agent’s ability to ‘read’ great works of art or their accent and demeanour suffice to impress others sufficiently that they ‘connect’ with those others and secure a strategic advantage in the pursuit of their goals, for example, then those specific dispositions function precisely as capital. (Crossley, 2001: 107)

So dispositions, to the extent that they are valued or preferred in a particular field, can translate, whether consciously intended or not, into ‘profit’ or advantage. To take an educational example, certain parent interactional dispositions manifest in contacts with teachers may benefit their children’s school progress. There is evidence, for instance, to suggest that particular ‘socioemotional styles’ of parental involvement – e.g. calm, positive, supportive, respectful – are defined by the school as helpful and legitimate and hence more likely to positively effect their children’s educational trajectory (Lareau and

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Horvat, 1999). Similarly, certain student dispositions – for example, attentive in class, not disruptive, conscientious in completion of assignments – offer advantage in terms of actual academic performance but also in terms of positive teacher perceptions (e.g. Farkas, 1996; Farkas et al., 1990). In both these examples, certain valued or preferred dispositions lead to actions that produce educational returns for actors. Particular dispositions enacted in a given field translate into advantages or profits within that field. Those dispositions to think and act, the schematic structures of the habitus, function as capital – cultural capital of the embodied variety.8 In this sense, to say someone has cultural capital in a particular field is to say they have the dispositions to think and act (the cognitive skills and behavioral repertoire) in ways advantageous to their pursuit of desired ends, and to their position or trajectory in that field. So is it necessary or useful to retain both of these constructs or are they redundant? Each concept, of course, has its doubters (e.g. Kingston, 2001; Sullivan, 2002). Such critiques notwithstanding, though, the question here is, taken together, do they offer something more than either does alone? Arguably of the two, cultural capital has received the most attention from researchers, but operationalization of cultural capital has concentrated predominantly on its objectified state (Van de Werfhorst, 2010) – possession of and/or exposure to cultural products (e.g. books, theater, art museums), with an emphasis on the status signaling function of highbrow cultural consumption. Some researchers have gone a step further by distinguishing ‘reading’ activity from ‘beaux arts’ status signaling activity (Crook, 1997; De Graaf et al., 2000). Both Crook (1997) and De Graaf et al. (2000) find that reading activity is related to school success, but that ‘beaux arts’ participation is not, and suggest that reading affects academic performance by fostering the development of analytical and cognitive skills. Sullivan (2001) finds an additional effect for television-viewing habits, suggesting that ‘[w]atching relatively sophisticated television programmes is also associated with these skills’ (p. 905). Similarly, Barone (2006) and Tramonte and Willms (2010) broke cultural capital into material or ‘static’ and communicative or ‘relational’ forms, with the former representing objectified cultural capital (possession and consumption of cultural products) and the latter (cultural discussions, communications, and elaborations of cultural experiences within the family) representing embodied cultural capital. Both found that the communicative/relational form of cultural capital had a larger effect on reading achievement than did the material/ static form. Such evidence, pointing toward the effects of reading-related activity and cultural communication and discourse on cognitive development or ‘cognitive resources’ (Barone, 2006), begins to touch on the development of embodied cultural capital via habitus, more specifically, the ‘classed’ effects of literate socialization practices on the ‘cognitive habitus’ as described by Nash (2003, 2005a, 2005b). As noted above, research into educational inequality that invokes Bourdieu’s two most prominent concepts has tended to focus on one or the other or to emphasize one over the other. When attempt is made to incorporate both concepts, the formulation usually resembles that of the card game analogy, with cultural capital conceived as skills and knowledge, or cultural resources, and habitus as the orientation to using those resources. But this analogy fails to adequately capture the interpenetrating nature of the two constructs as ‘moments’ (Moore, 2008) of, or aspects of, the same culturally conditioned system of cognitive schemas.

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Reay (2004) hints at the coupled nature of habitus and cultural capital when she describes habitus as underlying cultural capital, ‘generating its myriad manifestations’ (p. 436). If we focus just on the cultural capital aspect of dispositions, we highlight the exchange or symbolic value of particular skills and knowledge in particular fields, how actors are able or unable to generate returns, or realize advantages, from their cultural capital in particular fields. We are viewing behavior through what is at base an economic metaphor of assets, investments, profits, and quasi-markets, one that conceives behavior in exchange or value-added terms (whether material or symbolic). Viewed in this way, what is at stake in any given field, and across fields in social space, is the accumulation of capital in its varied forms, and, although these forms are not fully commensurate, the fundamental relation is capital begets capital. But dispositions do not become capital, with more or less value, more or less advantageousness, until they are enacted in context of particular fields. Yet, those dispositions exist beyond the field, as characteristics or properties of the actor, as potentials for action, as potential capital to be realized (mobilized) through ‘legitimate’ (valued) action in particular fields. Thus, capital is a field concept that does not fully capture the interiority of dispositions as mental and behavioral properties of the socialized, situated actor. To explain an actor’s success in a field in terms of the ‘capital’ value of his set of dispositions, and the capacity this gives him to act advantageously in pursuit of further capital(s) and desired ends, may indeed capture key dynamics of how social action is structured, and stratified, in social space, but it is an incomplete account that gives short-shrift to the ‘mechanism’ of dispositions, the conditions and processes of their acquisition and operation. Habitus, as a set of structurally and culturally conditioned cognitive structures generating characteristic tendencies of thought and behavior is integral to Bourdieu’s conceptualization of this ‘mechanism’. Understanding this mechanism also requires understanding how dispositions of the habitus generate practices in fields which in turn can affect those dispositions by (de)valuing them as cultural capital. Thus, in the dialectic between field and habitus, cultural capital functions, in part, like a price signal that modulates adjustment of the dispositions of the habitus within a particular field. Practices, and the dispositions underlying them, that are valued (rewarded) in the field are reinforced or encouraged, those practices and dispositions that are valued less or not at all are discouraged.9 Put another way, those dispositions that, via practices, can function as capital in a field, are likely to endure and strengthen. Some actors enter a field with what Bourdieu terms a ‘well-constituted habitus’, which means their dispositions align well with the expectations and exigencies of that field. Thus, for example, some students enter the school system with greater ‘readiness to learn’, or in terms of the present discussion, they experience greater habitus-field congruence: they have the set of cognitive and behavioral dispositions conducive to the scholastic performances recognized as academic achievement by the school. The greater the habitus-field incongruence an actor experiences, the less cultural capital they have in that field, because their dispositions (via the practices they generate) secure lower returns. In a sense, then, habitus completes the feedback loop by incorporating field valuations of dispositions (cultural capital) into ‘legitimate’ lines of action (consciously and unconsciously) as best it can. Although the cognitive structures of the habitus can, as argued previously, transform by degree in response to misalignment with the field (via processes similar to Piaget’s notions of

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accommodation and assimilation10), the greater the disjuncture, the greater the disadvantage and the more difficult the adjustment. Individuals vary not only in the necessity to adjust – where they are on the field-habitus congruence–incongruence continuum – but also in the capacity to adjust. As Sweetman (2003) suggests, some habituses may be less rigid, more adaptable, than others, and for individuals ‘ . . . who display a flexible or reflexive habitus, processes of refashioning – whether emancipatory or otherwise – may be second nature, rather than difficult to achieve’ (p. 537). Similarly, some researchers have begun exploring differences in patterns and degrees of habitus adjustment among students from marginalized or non-traditional educational backgrounds (e.g. Horvat and Davis, 2011; Mills, 2008; Watson et al., 2009).

Structures, dispositions, and practices: Toward a realist account of educational inequality The proceeding discussion has sought to demonstrate, in brief, that although the various critiques of Bourdieu’s theory of social reproduction have raised noteworthy concerns (e.g. Goldthorpe, 2007; Tzanakis, 2011), some of his key concepts – cultural capital, habitus, practice, and field – remain salvageable, and in fact, with minor renovations by subsequent theorists, serve to provide the basis for a conceptual framework that still has much to potentially contribute to untangling the Gordian knot of persistent educational inequality. Following from Bourdieu, this framework entails what Nash (2002b, 2002c, 2005c) terms a ‘structure–disposition–practice explanatory scheme’ (p. 202). Such an account seeks to integrate ‘the structural properties of emergent social entities, the dispositional properties of individuals, and the actions performed by individuals within recognized social practices’. Accordingly, Nash, drawing inspiration from Bourdieu’s work, posits a ‘family resource framework’ that seeks to move beyond Bourdieu’s idealist position to a scientific realist perspective that is more amenable to empirical research. Nash (2002b: 284–285) sees the family resource framework as ‘an explanatory sketch, or a set of connected hypotheses’ for guiding research and interpreting findings from both quantitative and qualitative (especially ethnographic) methods. In brief, this framework supposes that families are located in a socioeconomically stratified societal structure and differ in the material and symbolic resources they are able to mobilize for the procurement of various goods and in the accomplishment of various tasks including child-rearing. These structural properties of families differentially condition dispositions (cognitive and noncognitive) and enable or restrict the adoption of particular practices. Schooling plays a role in this process of socioeconomic differentiation by sanctioning particular sets of resource-contingent socialized skills, at least some of which are educationally necessary (as opposed to arbitrary). Such family resources, the dispositions they engender, and the practices they support, have a continuous distribution (as opposed to the ordered categories comprising most social-class typologies). In general, as common sense would suggest, the most highly resourced actors have the best opportunities for securing desired ends. Although Nash does not explicitly invoke ‘field’ or ‘cultural capital’ in his conceptualization, these concepts are not incompatible with it, and in our view add to the explanatory potential of the framework.

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An important methodological implication of adopting an SDP frame such as this is that, although the three components are interrelated, they are ‘actually and analytically distinct’ (Nash, 2002c: 405). Nash (2002c) argues that it has been commonplace in conventional quantitative analysis for this distinction to be overlooked and the respective properties conflated in the construction of composite indices that combine structural (resource), dispositional, and practice variables into a single indicator, while dismissing their interrelations as ‘accidental’, as a technical problem of multicollinearity. An SDP account should attempt to avoid such conflation by constructing indicators at each level from variables at each level. For example, indicators of material wealth or possessions (economic capital and objectified cultural capital) are representative of structural properties of families; indicators such as attitude toward school, academic self-concept, and aspirations are representative of dispositional properties (habitus); and indicators such as paying attention in class, timely completion of assignments, and disruptive behavior are representative of practices. Any SDP explanatory scheme must also confront several methodological issues related to the reductivist constraints of scientific positivism and the limits of the conventional approach to ‘quantitative’ sociological research, which is based on assessing correlations between indicator variables of social properties for the purpose of specifying causal models of the processes and events of interest. Conventional quantitative model building is prone to confusing indicator variables with the things or processes it points to. Furthermore, indicators denoted as proxies for specific lived processes lead to inadequate accounts of process mechanisms that underlie social reality (Nash, 2002c, 2005c). Research of this sort leads to incomplete and unsatisfactory explanatory narratives that often presume to ‘explain’ behavior in terms of statistically determined ‘risk factors’ – an approach Nash dubs ‘at risk positivism’. An SDP scheme, such as the family resources framework, recognizes the reciprocal relations between social structure, dispositions, and practices, but demonstrating these interconnections is critically problematic for quantitative methods. Nash (2002b: 280) points out the difficulty of quantifying the double linkages between the three levels in constructing an account of educational inequality or difference: we must show that practices (hours spent on homework, etc.), the dispositions generating those practices (aspirations, etc.), and the sets of relations constituting social fields (structure) are interrelated (p. 280). It is, he notes, one thing to demonstrate linkages between the first two, but another thing entirely to incorporate the third level: One might show that some students do not complete their work, at least as often and to the same standard as others, one can point to the connection between that behavior and their dispositions with respect to school, but to demonstrate that those dispositions are acquired within particular kinds of class-cultural settings, and to a degree that varies from individual to individual in recognition of personal differences, is not only difficult, but as it departs from the area of things that can be given an ‘operational’ definition and counted, is particularly open to criticism within an unreformed and ‘positivist’ conception of science. (p. 280)

Furthermore, he argues that if social scientists are not allowed to legitimately address this third level, the level of structure, which is actually fundamental to sociological explanation, then what we are left with are ‘tautological models that suppose patterns of

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behavior to be accounted for in terms of the variables statistically associated with them, so that those “at risk” demonstrate the extent to which they are “at risk”’. Instead, Nash (2002b) posits a ‘realist’ framework for sociology of education which accepts that the structural properties of emergent social entities are real; that the dispositions of socialized actors are real; that actors’ social actions are shaped by real practices which tend to reproduce the social relations that give rise to emergent social structural properties (fields); and that understanding the interrelations of these three levels is essential to constructing complete accounts of social events and processes. Such an approach accepts (unlike critical realism) that quantification has an important part to play in social science but holds that statistical models should not be treated as explanations in themselves, rather ‘as sources of information more or less useful in the construction of complex explanatory narratives. These explanations, moreover, will often require information external to the statistical model that is likely to be generated by so-called qualitative studies’ (Nash, 2005c: 200). Thus, he is advocating a mixed-methods approach – that he terms ‘numbers and narratives’ – in which the goal is not the construction of multivariate causal models but rather ‘multilevel explanatory narratives’, the adequacy of which depends not only on variance explained or associated odds but also on identification of underlying ‘generative mechanisms’. Much has been made of the difficulties of operationalizing Bourdieu’s concepts (e.g. Sanders and Robson, 2009), which he tended to treat as open, iterative ‘thinking tools’, often, over time, invoking multiple changing or not entirely consistent definitions.11 Habitus, for example, has been dismissed by some as too nebulous to quantify (e.g. Sullivan, 2002; Van de Werfhorst, 2010) and, therefore, of no real use for educational researchers. In addition, the relational nature of his concepts presents a challenge to conventional positivist methods; the habitus-field dialectic in particular remains largely inscrutable to standard quantitative methods. For example, how would one operationalize cultural capital and habitus as explicated earlier in our discussion? How can the same indicators represent two concepts at the same time, or even more to the point, two moments of essentially the same thing? How do you ‘measure’ field – an emergent structural property – to bring it into the equation to assess how it affects dispositions through the (de)valuation of cultural capital as manifested in practice? Perhaps in future, non-recursive structural equation modeling or hierarchical linear modeling12 will have something to contribute here, but even then, certain measurement issues remain.13 In this sense, the testability of the Bourdieuian SDP model with standard quantitative methods is limited at best, and viewed in this light, its relative dismissal by those concerned with ‘evidencebased’ theory and social policy is quite understandable. Given the mounting pressures toward fiscal austerity weighing on contemporary governments and public policymakers in general, the demand for ‘hard data’ and numbers seems more likely to grow than relent. As such, in addition to the existing qualitative evidence, the quantitative case for Bourdieu’s theory, and the tools it may offer – if any – for mitigating educational inequality, will have to be made more unequivocal. It is here that the importance of clearly distinguishing between cultural capital and habitus becomes more critical, not merely as an academic exercise in terminological distillation but as a process of developing clear, concise, and complementary – rather than conflated – measures that allow us to better investigate the empirical validity and potential real-world utility of these concepts.

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Of course, given the dynamic nature of Bourdieu’s theory, the quantitative case alone will not suffice, and in the spirit of Einstein’s famous aphorism – ‘everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted’ – Nash cautions that modeling statistical associations between static indicators of social and individual properties does not equate to full explanation. Measurement issues notwithstanding, even the most completely specified regression models typically leave a substantial proportion of the variance in the outcome of interest ‘unexplained’ – more to the point, even the ‘variance explained’ is more properly thought of as ‘variance accounted for’, as identifying associations among indicators may reveal important statistical regularities that improve prediction, but this does not necessarily equate with explanation. Quantitative analysis is necessary (Nash, 2005c) to ‘establish the extent of social disparities and [to estimate] the relative weights that should be accorded to distinct processes’, but identification of such statistical regularities is not in and of itself sufficient to the task of making intelligible the underlying causal mechanisms (p. 201). This is especially true in the open systems of non-experimental correlational research, where any identified association or effect can only be partially ascertained in terms of a limited set of influences.14 Analyses of such statistical regularities must complement, and be complemented by, on the ground sorts of qualitative research such as the richly detailed ethnographic studies carried out by, for example, Lareau and colleagues (Lareau, 2011; Lareau and Cox, 2011; Lareau and Horvat, 1999; Lareau and Weininger, 2008). On one hand, in-depth ethnographic analyses, case studies, and narrative accounts centered on specific sites of practice, on individuals and groups in particular social contexts and processes, are important to research within a SDP framework and key to uncovering mechanisms inaccessible to standard statistical techniques; on the other hand, such approaches always run the risk of sometimes not being able to ‘see the forest for the trees’. That is, some crucial aspects of the problem may not be evident up close and are detectable only at the systemic or structural level as aggregate or emergent statistical regularities or ‘patterns of connection’ (Kemp and Holmwood, 2003). Furthermore, the preponderance of data in many ethnographic studies of Bourdieu’s concepts comes from interviews – a data source that is not without its own limitations. Such studies tend to use interview data in one or more of the following ways: ‘treating the informants as witnesses, as selfanalysts, and as indirect sources of evidence about perspectives’ (Hammersley, 2003: 124), but often with too little regard for the potential problems attending such uses – for example, the performative nature of interviews as social occasions subject to response bias due to issues of impression management and suggestibility, and the potential instability of respondent constructions which researchers risk portraying as more fixed than they actually are. The solution, of course, is not to abandon interview data but to keep in mind its strengths and limitations and to augment it accordingly with other sources of data (Hammersley, 2003). Ideally, multisite longitudinal studies that involve ethnographic (observational as well as interview) and quantitative analyses within a SDP framework may offer synergistic insights into the interplay of micro- and macrostructures and processes underlying the perpetuation of educational inequality. Quantitatively, this involves devising indicators appropriate to each level and augmenting these models with qualitative analyses of sitespecific practices and processes. For instance, incorporating the duality of dispositions

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would be more workable if qualitative analyses are used to fill in the gaps of the quantitative analyses. We might devise indices of dispositions as habitus and be able to model these as mediating variables between family structural properties, student practices, and academic outcomes. But in order to adequately capture the role of cultural capital and a more complete picture of the disposition–practice–field dynamic, we would need to incorporate ethnographic analyses and narrative accounts of these processes in specific sites across time. For example, students’ scores on a quantitative index of pro-school habitus could be compared across several time points, with qualitative analyses used to help interpret corresponding patterns of change. We may compare relative change in students’ habitus index scores across time points, or we may compare trajectories across students. We may be able to incorporate grades or teacher evaluations as limited proxy indicators of embodied cultural capital (institutionalized validation of embodied cultural capital), but we would also need to incorporate ethnographic analyses of classroom processes and valuations of dispositions and practices within the school/classroom setting (e.g. teacher interaction and feedback) and how these correspond with observed changes in habitus index scores and perhaps contribute to individual differences. We would also want to incorporate quantitative indicators of family resources (capitals) as well as ethnographic analyses of parental interactions (dispositions and practices) with teachers and the school (field). Such combined quantitative and qualitative data collection should ideally involve multiple schools as multiple site instantiations of practices or processes can help us ‘flesh out’ underlying mechanisms, establishing, in concert with observed statistical regularities, empirical patterns of connection that may suggest practical causes and solutions. Of course, such an ambitious research undertaking would not be easy given the logistical and funding challenges it would face, but it is this kind of research that will be required to move us forward in our practical understanding of how educational inequality is produced and how we might more successfully intervene to mitigate it.

Conclusion The intention of this article has been to demonstrate that despite noteworthy critiques of Bourdieu’s social reproduction theory, elements of his approach remain viable; bolstered by subsequent theorists’ elaborations, they provide the basis for an ‘SDP’ conceptual framework that stands to contribute important insights into the mechanisms underlying persistent educational inequality. Research on educational inequality utilizing Bourdieu’s framework seldom incorporates all four of his fundamental concepts. Quantitative researchers have, until recently, focused primarily on cultural capital in the objectified state, while most research on habitus has to date been qualitative in nature. Some researchers have suggested that habitus is too nebulous a concept to quantify and so adds little of substance to accounts of educational inequality. We argue against this and suggest that the concept of habitus is vital to our understanding of how dispositions (internalized cultural schemas) affect behavior and that embodied cultural capital and habitus must be understood as aspects or ‘moments’ (Moore, 2008) of the same dispositional structure which interacts with the exigencies of particular social fields to shape practice. Although the difficulties of operationalizing habitus, cultural capital, practice, field, and their interrelationships are certainly problematic for standard quantitative

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research methods, they do not necessitate either wholesale abandonment of the conceptual framework or selective preclusion of problematic aspects such as the duality of dispositions or their dialectical relation to fields. Instead, it may prove profitable to expand our conception of the dialogue between theory and evidence in the generation of practically useful social explanation. We suggest, following Nash, that this purpose could be well served by a realist reconsideration of the positivist requirements of social causality and how we link theory, common sense knowledge, and ethnographic observation of specific social contexts, with statistical regularities to generate meaningful and useful explanations that can suggest practical means of disrupting the processes and mechanisms sustaining educational inequality. Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes   1. Swartz (1997) holds that Bourdieu saw cultural capital as a general power resource encompassing a number of capacities, the value of which varies across fields, ‘including such things as verbal facility, general cultural awareness, aesthetic preferences, information about the school system, and educational credentials’ (p. 75).   2. See Farkas (2003) for an interesting discussion of the debate regarding the relative importance of ‘cognitive skills’ (e.g. vocabulary, reading comprehension, computation, problem-solving, critical reasoning) and ‘non-cognitive traits and behaviors’ (e.g. industriousness, perseverance, discipline, attendance, participation, sociability, impulsiveness, self-confidence, locus of control) in the stratification process.   3. Bourdieu was primarily concerned with differences across social classes, but it has been suggested that his analysis can be usefully extended to gender and racial/ethnic differences as well (e.g. Horvat, 2001; Mickelson, 2003; Reay, 2004).   4. Bourdieu (1990b) quotes Leibniz: ‘We are empirical [practical, habitual, unreflective] in three quarters of our actions’ (p. 108).   5. One does not, indeed cannot, intend to circumvent the earth if they are under the impression that it is flat.   6. Nash (2003) makes the point that ‘ability’ has come, if unacknowledged, to serve as a euphemism for ‘intelligence’ which is dismissed as a ‘social construct’.   7. Kingston (2001: 95) makes a similar defense of the intrinsic importance of logic, reason, and critical thinking skills to successful fulfillment of the demands of citizenship and productivity in modern society. He also questions the attendant criticism of the culturally ‘biased’ behavioral expectations in the formal school context, noting, for example, that relevant research shows that ‘hard work pays off in more learning’ and surely cannot be minimized as merely an arbitrary ‘teacher-pleasing “style”’. He further suggests that ‘in any imaginable educational system, hard work would seem to be a necessary ingredient of genuine academic accomplishment. Can anyone sensibly imagine rewarding some other habit in its place?’ See also Sullivan (2007).   8. See Stampnitzky (2006) for an interesting analysis of the historical transformation of particular individual characteristics into cultural capital in the field of elite university admissions.   9. It is important to note that fields are not static but relational and dynamic in nature and contingent on the practices and dispositions of constituent actors who vary in the resources

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

Theory and Research in Education  (capitals) they can bring to bear within and upon that field, and field configurations endure/ change to the degree that they reflect the practices and dispositions of ascendant actors; it is also possible that changing valuations of practices and dispositions may also affect actors’ positions within a field as well as their capacity (power) to influence the constitution of the field. Lizardo (2004) shows how Bourdieu’s habitus-field dialectic is rooted in Piaget’s fundamental cognitive developmental processes of accommodation and assimilation. New experiences will first be made sense of, assimilated, in terms of existing cognitive schemas, but confronted by sufficiently novel/foreign situations or experiences, extant structures are modified, accommodated, to better fit the environment. Arguably, this is less of a problem for the more flexible inductive theory generation commonplace in qualitative studies, but more problematic for deductive theory testing with quantitative multivariate methods, which may go some way toward explaining why more comprehensive invocations of Bourdieu’s conceptual framework are more common in the qualitative literature on educational inequality. Non-recursive models allow for the specification of bidirectional or reciprocal relationships between variables or constructs. Hierarchical (multilevel) linear modeling allows for the partitioning of variance and estimation of effects within and between different contextual levels – for example, students nested within families, nested within schools, or neighborhoods, or social classes – and may prove of some use in determining the relative influence of different levels of social structure on practice (Cockerham and Hinote, 2009). The critique of standard ‘measurement’ theory is beyond present purposes but in essence charges that it produces a false sense of certainty and that its twin legitimating concepts, validity and reliability, are actually quite arbitrary and untenable (see Berka, 1983). The related problem of excluding possibly important variables from the model is referred to in quantitative methodological terminology as ‘omitted variable bias’ or ‘misspecification error’.

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Author biographies Jason D. Edgerton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Manitoba. His research focuses primarily on the dimensions of social inequality. Lance W. Roberts is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Manitoba and a Senior Fellow at St. John’s College.

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