Magne P. Flemmen

Sociology

  • Blog
  • “Populism” and the idea of morally superior elites

    Is populism a good concept? Or is it a new way of denigrating “the people” and glorifying the elites? It might be more of the latter than you think, according to a fascinating paper by French political sociologist Annie Collovald. The concept of populism has basically done a 180, as it moved from a label…

    magneflemmen

    February 27, 2023
    Uncategorized
    class, elites, front nationale, ideology, legitimation, political sociology, politics, populism, symbolic power
  • Cultural capital approaching 60

    Cultural capital will soon turn 60 (I’m folllowing Johan Heilbron, who in the Dictionnaire International Bourdieu dates the concept to the publication of Les héritiers in 1964). A lot has happened to that concept throught its long life. In a new paper, Mike Savage, Annick Prieur and I discuss some recent studies and reflect on…

    magneflemmen

    February 20, 2023
    Uncategorized
    Bourdieu, class, cultural class analysis
  • Arguing empirically about the theory of practice

    A major issue in sociology is what is sometimes called the structure-action problem. It involves the problem of to what extent social phenomena are to be accounted for in terms structural properties of societies, or in terms of the actions and interactions of individuals. The debates over this issue often involves the problem of voluntarism…

    magneflemmen

    September 2, 2022
    Bourdieu, Lahire, theory, theory of practice, Uncategorized
    action, Bourdieu, determinism, Lahire, practice, social theory, structure, theory, voluntarism
  • What’s useful in Marxism?

    What’s useful in Marxism and what should be discarded?[1] That’s the question Anthony Giddens set out to answer in a book that came out 40 years ago: A contemporary critique of historical materialism: Vol 1 – Power, property and the state. Even beyond the beautiful cover design, the book merits serious consideration. It is one…

    magneflemmen

    September 1, 2022
    Uncategorized
  • On what class is and how it works

    A few years ago, the Norwegian Journal of Social Research asked a bunch of researchers about their reflections on the past and/or future of their discipline. What follows is a (rough) translation of my response. In recent years, questions about social inequality and class differences have returned to the agenda in the social sciences and…

    magneflemmen

    August 10, 2022
    class, socialisation, theory
    Bourdieu, class, cultural class analysis, goldthorpe, marx, social class, vandebroeck, weber
  • Ordinary relationships to politics: Interview with Daniel Gaxie

    A few years ago, I presented what later became this paper at a conference in Florence. I met some colleagues there that were utterly surprised that I was compeltely unaware of the work of Daniel Gaxie. Luckily, a few months after that, CAIRN published the digitial version of Le cens caché, Gaxie’s first major work,…

    magneflemmen

    August 10, 2022
    class, political sociology, politics, theory
    Bourdieu, class, gaxie, politics
  • Notes on Bernard Lahire’s The Plural Actor

    Last summer, I finally managed to read Bernard Lahire’s The Plural Actor (2011, French original from 1998). What follows is a slightly edited version of a Twitter thread I wrote then. The Plural Actor presents itself as a critical discussion of sociological theories of action, but mostly it’s about Pierre Bourdieu’s «theory of habitus». Generally speaking,…

    magneflemmen

    August 10, 2022
    Bourdieu, Lahire, theory, theory of practice
  • Giddens’ strange neglect of Bourdieu

    One thing that has puzzled me was how Giddens would write essays on almost any major figure or strand in social theory — from Durkheim to Habermas via Goffman; even Frank Parkin, André Gorz and Ulf Himmelstrand — but almost nothing on Bourdieu. In the first instance, this is strange because they had a theoretical…

    magneflemmen

    August 10, 2022
    Bourdieu, Giddens, structuration, theory, theory of practice

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