Bourdieu blog

  •  

    May 2008
    M T W T F S S
    « Mar   Jun »
     1234
    567891011
    12131415161718
    19202122232425
    262728293031  

Doing organizational studies with Bourdieu

Posted by dnetz on May 16, 2008

In an important paper published recently in Theory and Society, Mustafa Emirbayer and Victoria Johnson argue for a more comprehensive usage of Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field in organizational analysis. So far, most authors have been using them selectively and one at a time, whereas Bourdieu’s mode of thought really only rises to its full strength when all three of these key concepts are combined, they argue.

There’s a post on this at orgtheory.net, in which brayden states:

Emirbayer and Johnson provide a good overview of how Bourdieuian concepts might be more fully utilized in organizational research. The paper is well worth reading.

and provides some highlights.

One Response to “Doing organizational studies with Bourdieu”

  1. Ziggy said

    The Emirbayer and Johnson paper has opened up a new direction for me in my research on universities. I have used their study of organizations for the institutional study of the university. It extends the concept of field very practically, it is therefore conceptually easier, using,PB’s conceptual framework as adapted by Emirbayer and Johnson to speak of both the university field and the university-as-field as objects of study. In their adaptation, PB’s concepts as ‘thinking tools’ are made to perform the kind of tasks that I think PB himself intended, particularly with respect to finding practical solutions to social problem.

Leave a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <pre> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>