The Ambiguity of Practice Theory

There is, first, the school of analysis that I will call, for lack of a more widely employed term, cultural practice theory , in whose development Pierre Bourdieu has played a celebrated role. Although Bourdieu has scarcely applied his approach to the analysis of the capitalist factory, he has established a baseline for discussion of the symbolic and material dimensions of economic conduct. It is therefore incumbent upon me to suggest why his approach does not address the guiding question of this book—and why; perhaps, it should.

Bourdieu's work is intended to overcome the contest between cultural and purely utilitarian accounts of the development of social institutions which divides contemporary theory. The utilitarian approach, consecrated anew in the currently fashionable theories of "rational choice," would explain the visible social order as the outcome of the well-considered activity of individuals pursuing their interests as best they can.^[58] Of course, supporters of cultural approaches have long accepted the viewpoint that people conduct themselves as strategizing agents. But adherents of cultural forms of explanation insist that the process by which agents pursue their interests must be situated within a broader perspective upon the operation of human agency and reason. Before people set out in pursuit of their interests, they require an order of cultural symbols that establishes for them a relation to the world. The concepts on which agents rely to accomplish this are an historical product whose constitution and development follow a discipline of their own. Cultural forms of explanation need not exclude the play of

[57] Ann Swidler summarizes the reasons for the shift to practice-centered cultural theory in "Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies," in American Sociological Review Volume 51, No. 2 (April 1986), pp. 273–286.

[58] By way of illustration, see James S. Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990).

utilitarian calculation, but they are inclined to emphasize that collective concepts give shape to individuals' percepts.

Thus is initiated the cycle of debate between cultural and utilitarian varieties of social explanation. For just as culture can inaugurate the terms for the exercise of instrumental reason, so instrumental reason can establish the conditions for the development of culture. The rational choice theorist may admit that the horizon for agents' conduct is momentarily fixed for them by collective traditions. The question then becomes, what are the forces that lend such a system of shared insights and concepts its distinctive shape? Its formations, too, may follow from simple strategic logic, and its defining features may represent a convenient adaptation to the circumstances of action.^[59]

Bourdieu tries to overturn several of the distinctions on which this debate between cultural and purely utilitarian modes of explanation has been founded. Like rational choice theorists, he underscores the agents' unceasing manipulation of their symbolic and material environments. But he contends that agents' strategies are not purely means chosen for the pursuit of interests. The strategies are patterned by implicit principles governing perception and action that are transmitted to the agents by their prior life circumstances in society. The long-term acquisition of these skills enables the agents to compete against others, but in so doing the agents do not rationally follow preestablished interests. They are guided by implicit know-how, and they find themselves dedicated to the very practices through which the competition takes place.^[60]

[59] This is the vision of hard-headed anthropologists such as Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), pp. 56–58. The wide variety of ecological explanations are explored in John G. Kennedy and Robert Edgerton, editors, Culture and Ecology: Eclectic Perspectives (Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1982). Political scientists, ever the philosophers of cynical reason, have also treated culture as a byproduct from the rational pursuit of self-advantage. They have emphasized that political entrepreneurs may manipulate forms of cultural identity in order to create and sustain political alliances between disparate groups. Their stress upon the malleability of culture in the pursuit of self-interest results in a less naturalistic appreciation of culture than that of reductionist anthropologists such as Harris. These political scientists do not treat culture as if it were an adaptation to the physical environment or to the true state of things-as-they-are, but their moral for human society remains the same: culture represents a dependent tool of utilitarian practice. See, illustratively, Abner Cohen, "Symbolic Strategies in Group Organisation," in his Two-Dimensional Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). For a survey of the application of rational choice theory to the formation of political identities, see David D. Laitin, Hegemony and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 99–102.

[60] Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 290.

Bourdieu's insistence that agents organize manufacturing and other kinds of practices in accordance with acquired schemata seems congenial to cultural forms of explanation. But he also suggests that these acquired schemata are "durably inculcated by objective conditions."^[61] The agents' accumulated know-how "organizes perception of the world and action in the world in accordance with the objective structures of a given state of the world."^[62] What room, then, does Bourdieu leave for the symbolic mediation of social conditions as agents acquire their social skills? Bourdieu adds a proviso that the agents' dispositions do not mechanically mirror social structures. Rather, the agents' prior locations in the social structure decide how they will appropriate and respond to structural conditions of the moment.^[63] The historical filtering of "objective" structures does not offer a positive theory for culture's systematic influence. What is more, since Bourdieu views culture as a creation of practice, he insists that it has only partial coherence as a system of meaning. To his mind, cultural principles exist only in the process of getting things done. Their operation appears fuzzy and inarticulable in the light of contemplative reason. Bourdieu's emphasis on culture's inextricability from the ongoing life of practice enjoins us against representing culture as an intellectually coherent structure with a systematic effect of its own.^[64]

Yet Bourdieu's refusal to define culture's own structural effects leads him in his histories to embrace economistic explanations that he denies in his theories. In Distinction , his wide-ranging investigation of contemporary tastes in France, Bourdieu takes care to show that the dispositions of persons in the working class appear to follow a popular logic of their own but actually reflect the force of economic necessity. He claims, for instance, that "it is possible to deduce popular tastes for the foods that are simultaneously the most 'filling' and most economical from the necessity of reproducing labor power at the lowest cost which is forced on the pro-

[61] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 77.

[62] Logic , p. 94. Likewise, see Pierre Bourdieu, "Scientific Field and Scientific Thought," in Comparative Study of Social Transformations Working Paper Number 32, University of Michigan, November, 1989, p. 92.

[63] Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 135–136.

[64] Bourdieu, Logic , pp. 90–91, 261–262. Neil J. Smelser discusses the implications of practice theory for the investigation of cultural systematicity in "Culture: Coherent or Incoherent," in Richard Münch and Neil J. Smelser, editors, Theory of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 16.

letariat as its very definition."^[65] Such shifts to reductionist forms of explanation are probably unavoidable if Bourdieu wants to account for—rather than merely redescribe—social practices in contemporary societies. In his model, only economic or institutional circumstances (or the agents' transversal of such circumstances over time) offer a specifiable foundation for explanation. Culture is a marker, often misrecognized, of the true arrangement of things. It serves as a model of society, not as a model for society's creation.^[66]

In sum, Bourdieu's work grants culture a prominent but analytically dependent role. To be sure, in Distinction Bourdieu makes the survival of the capitalist system dependent upon culture's ability to mystify and legitimate inequality. But if culture serves as a conduit for the expression of economic power, it does not thereby gain independent influence upon the development of institutions or upon historic change.^[67] To address the question of whether culture donates a separate constitutive logic to the formation of institutions, we may still preserve one of Bourdieu's insights: namely, culture can be conceived provisionally as the schema that agents employ to orchestrate their instrumental strategies, rather than as a set of revered values.^[68] If the principles of a culture are thereby conditioned by the

[65] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 177. Likewise, the culinary styles of other class strata develop from the commercial value of the food preparers' time and from the ethic of deferred or immediate gratification that is instilled by their occupational position.

[66] "On Symbolic Power" in his Language and Symbolic Power , edited by John Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 169. Logic , p. 94; Outline , p. 77.

[67] In Distinction , Bourdieu's exclusive attention to France for illustrations of contemporary capitalist society is integral to his explanatory strategy: it sustains his maneuver of reducing the specificities of French cultural life to a revelation of the generic logic of mature capitalism. He can thus avoid pondering the character of the fit between French culture and the economy, of why certain symbolic goods and practices prevail in France, whereas different ones arise in countries with analytically similar economies. Bourdieu's cross-societal comparisons are limited to gross contrasts between traditional and modern social formations, which protects the implicit reduction of culture to social structure.

[68] What other research falls into the subdivision of cultural practice theory? Certainly Ann Swidler's presentation of a new research agenda in her incisive essay "Culture in Action." Swidler grants culture "an independent causal role" because it shapes agents' competencies at assembling enduring strategies of action. Unlike Bourdieu, Swidler does not insist that culture corresponds to the objective institutional environment. But neither does she demonstrate that different cultural complexes can survive in similar structural settings. To the contrary, she emphasizes that institutions distribute resources to decide which cultural ideas will be sustained in the body social. What is more, her definition of culture as a set of skills separates the effectivity of culture from the conventions of an autonomous system of signs. In her view, the capacities that comprise culture are learned rules of purposive action. As for Bourdieu, so for Swidler it is not essential to focus on the mediation of the environment by a set of symbols: the cultural competencies may represent a common-sensical correlate to the surroundings, asis demonstrated in Swidler's exposition of the culture of poverty. For these reasons, her framework makes it difficult to isolate the independent influence of a symbolic schema upon instrumental conduct (p. 275). Sherry Ortner's initial formulation of practice theory also emphasized this approach's relative disinterest in isolating culture as an analytically separable domain of social life. Sherry B. Ortner, "Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties," Comparative Studies in Society and History Volume 26, Number 1 (January 1984), p. 148. Her recent work, however, returns to the issue of culture's own identifiable influence upon action. See "Patterns of History: Cultural Schemas in the Foundings of Sherpa Religious Institutions," in Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, editor, Culture Through Time: Anthropological Approaches (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

ongoing logic of practice, we can still employ a comparison to search for the means by which culture partially shapes practice into a consistently meaningful structure. If a degree of cultural coherence obtains, it must be identified initially by comparing practices themselves—in our case, everyday solutions to similar manufacturing challenges—rather than by comparing discourse about practice.