Category: theory

• 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

• 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