`It's all becoming a habitus': beyond

the habitual use of habitus in

educational research
Diane Reay*
London Metropolitan University, UK
The concept of habitus lies at the heart of Bourdieu's theoretical framework. It is a complex
concept that takes many shapes and forms in Bourdieu's own writing, even more so in the wider
sociological work of other academics. In the rst part of this paper I develop an understanding of
habitus, based on Bourdieu's many writings on the concept, that recognizes both its permeability
and its ability to capture continuity and change. I also map its relationship to Bourdieu's other
concepts, in particular eld and cultural capital. In the second part of the paper I examine attempts
to operationalize habitus in empirical research in education. I critique the contemporary fashion of
overlaying research analyses with Bourdieu's concepts, including habitus, rather than making the
concepts work in the context of the data and the research settings. In the nal part of the paper I
draw on a range of research examples that utilize habitus as a research tool to illustrate how habitus
can be made to work in educational research.
Introduction
For Bourdieu the goal of sociological research is to uncover the most deeply buried
structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as
the `mechanisms' that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation (Bourdieu,
1996, p 1). This is a very different agenda and terminology to that of much
contemporary educational research, which tends to view any focus on structures
and mechanisms as part of a discredited Marxist research agenda. However,
while Bourdieu recognized the contribution Marxism made to his work, his own
theoretical framework is a complex drawing on the ideas of not only Marx, but Weber,
Durkheim and Merleau-Ponty, plus a great deal of conceptual development that is
distinctly his own. In fact, Bourdieu insisted that he was to the left of Marx (Cresswell,
2002).
*Institute for Policy Studies in Education, London Metropolitan University, 166220 Holloway
Road, London N7 8DB, UK. Email: d.reay@londonmet.ac.uk
ISSN 01425692(print)/ISSN 14653346 (online)/04/040431-14
2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/0142569042000236934
British Journal of Sociology of Education
Vol. 25, No. 4, September 2004
Some of Bourdieu's ideas and concepts are better known and better understood
than others. In particular, references to cultural capital have become commonplace in
academic writing, Habitus, in contrast, is less well known and is probably Bourdieu's
most contested concept. Although, in common with cultural capital, there is an
increasing tendency for habitus to be sprayed throughout academic texts like
`intellectual hair spray' (Hey, 2003), bestowing gravitas without doing any theoretical
work. However, unlike cultural capital, habitus has been subject to widespread
criticism, mainly on the basis of its latent determinism. This is ironic in view of
Bourdieu's rationale for developing the concept. He argues that habitus is central to
his methodology of structuralist constructivism, an attempt to transcend dualisms of
agencystructure, objectivesubjective and the micromacro. Habitus then is the
conceptual tool that Bourdieu uses within this methodological framework of
structuralist constructivism in an attempt to reconcile these dualisms (Bourdieu,
1985a). Bourdieu (1999a) continued throughout his career to challenge the view of
habitus as a formof determinism, asserting that habitus offers the only durable formof
freedomthat given by the mastery of an art.
Habitus as a concept has a very long history dating back to Aristotle. Although I
do not have the space here to include a genealogy of habitus, Nash (1999) includes
an excellent history of the concept. According to Bourdieu it is through the
workings of habitus that practice (agency) is linked with capital and eld (structure).
In relation to the charge of determinism, Bourdieu (1990b, p. 116) argues that
habitus becomes active in relation to a eld, and the same habitus can lead to very
different practices and stances depending on the state of the eld. I will elaborate on
the links between habitus and Bourdieu's other concepts later in the paper. First I
want to tease out just what Bourdieu meant by habitus by analysing it in terms of four
related aspects.
Becoming a habitus
Habitus as embodiment
Instead of working with what he considers to be a awed conceptualization, that of the
`active subject confronting society as if that society were an object constituted
externally' (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 190), Bourdieu developed the concept of habitus to
demonstrate the ways in which not only is the body in the social world, but also the
ways in which the social world is in the body (Bourdieu, 1977). The habitus:
Is a socialised body. A structured body, a body which has incorporated the immanent
structures of a world or of a particular sector of that worlda eldand which structures
the perception of that world as well as action in that world. (Bourdieu, 1998a, p. 81)
Thus, one of the crucial features of habitus is that it is embodied, it is not composed
solely of mental attitudes and perceptions (see also Chris Shilling's article in this
volume). Bourdieu writes that it is expressed through durable ways `of standing,
speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking' (Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 70).
People's relationships to dominant culture are conveyed in a range of activities,
432 D. Reay
including eating, speaking and gesturing (Bourdieu, 1984). So the habitus as
the social is inscribed in the body of the biological individual (Bourdieu, 1985b,
p. 113)
Habitus and agency
Bourdieu sees habitus as potentially generating a wide repertoire of possible actions,
simultaneously enabling the individual to draw on transformative and constraining
courses of action. He writes that:
Habitus is a kind of transforming machine that leads us to `reproduce' the social
conditions of our own production, but in a relatively unpredictable way, in such a way
that one cannot move simply and mechanically from knowledge of the conditions of
production to knowledge of the products. (Bourdieu, 1990c, p. 87)
However, as the quote reveals, the addendum in Bourdieu's work is always an
emphasis on the constraints and demands that impose themselves on people. While
the habitus allows for individual agency it also predisposes individuals towards certain
ways of behaving:
The habitus, as a system of dispositions to a certain practice, is an objective basis for
regular modes of behaviour, and thus for the regularity of modes of practice, and if
practices can be predicted this is because the effect of the habitus is that agents who are
equipped with it will behave in a certain way in certain circumstances.(Bourdieu, 1990b,
p. 77)
Despite this implicit tendency to behave in ways that are expected of `people like us',
for Bourdieu there are no explicit rules or principles that dictate behaviour, rather `the
habitus goes hand in hand with vagueness and indeterminacy' (Bourdieu, 1990b, p.
77). The practical logic that denes habitus is not one of the predictable regularity of
modes of behaviour, but instead `that of vagueness, of the more-or-less, which denes
one's ordinary relation to the world' (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 78).
However, at other times, Bourdieu does point out that the operation of the habitus
regularly excludes certain practices, those that are unfamiliar to the cultural groupings
to which the individual belongs (for excellent examples of such exclusions, see Skeggs,
1997; Charlesworth, 2000). Taking the working class as an example, an individual
will be far more likely to make a virtue out of necessity than attempt to achieve `what is
already denied' (Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 54). Bourdieu views the dispositions, which
make up habitus, as the products of opportunities and constraints framing the
individual's earlier life experiences. They are:
durably inculcated by the possibilities and impossibilities, freedoms and necessities,
opportunities and prohibitions inscribed in the objective conditions. (Bourdieu, 1990a,
p. 54)
As a result, the most improbable practices are rejected as unthinkable, but,
concomitantly, only a limited range of practices are possible.
Beyond the habitual use of habitus 433
Habitus as a compilation of collective and individual trajectories
It appears that Bourdieu is conceiving of habitus as a multi-layered concept, with
more general notions of habitus at the level of society and more complex,
differentiated notions at the level of the individual. A person's individual history is
constitutive of habitus, but so also is the whole collective history of family and class
that the individual is a member of. Thus, for Bourdieu:
the subject is not the instantaneous ego of a sort of singular cogito, but the individual
trace of an entire collective history. (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 91)
At times, Bourdieu seems to be suggesting a degree of uniformity. At other times, he
recognizes differences and diversity between members of the same cultural grouping
and writes in terms of the singularity of individual habitus. Habitus, within, as well as
between, social groups, differs to the extent that the details of individuals' social
trajectories diverge from one another:
Just as no two individual histories are identical so no two individual habituses are
identical. (Bourdieu, 1990c, p. 46)
However, because there are classes of experience there are also classes of habitus or
the habitus of classes. Bourdieu attempts to justify his collective denition of habitus.
In reference to class habitus he asserts that:
interpersonal relations are never, except in appearance, individual-to-individual rela-
tionships and the truth of the interaction is never entirely contained in the interaction.
(Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 81)
A collective understanding of habitus is necessary, according to Bourdieu, in order to
recognize that individuals contain within themselves their past and present position in
the social structure `at all times and in all places, in the forms of dispositions which are
so many marks of social position' (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 82).
Habitus as a complex interplay between past and present
Habitus `refers to something historical, it is linked to individual history' (Bourdieu,
1990c, p. 86). Individual histories therefore are vital to understanding the concept of
habitus. Habituses are permeable and responsive to what is going on around them.
Current circumstances are not just there to be acted upon, but are internalized and
become yet another layer to add to those from earlier socializations:
The habitus acquired in the family is at the basis of the structuring of school experiences
; the habitus transformed by the action of the school, itself diversied, is in turn at the
basis of all subsequent experiences and so on, from restructuring to restructuring.
(Bourdieu, 1972, cited in Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 134)
Therefore, although the habitus is a product of early childhood experience, and in
particular socialization within the family, it is continually re-structured by individuals'
encounters with the outside world (Di Maggio, 1979). Schooling, in particular, acts to
provide a general disposition, a turn towards what Bourdieu terms `a cultured habitus'
(Bourdieu, 1967, p. 344). Thus, while habitus reects the social position in which it
434 D. Reay
was constructed, it also carries within it the genesis of new creative responses that are
capable of transcending the social conditions in which it was produced. Bourdieu
(2000b) maps this process of transformation in relation to the Algerian working class
during the 1950s and 1960s, demonstrating how habitus is `the product of social
conditionings, and thus of a history' (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 116). The range of
possibilities inscribed in a habitus can be envisaged as a continuum. At one end,
habitus can be replicated through encountering a eld that reproduces its
dispositions. At the other end of the continuum, habitus can be transformed through
a process that either raises or lowers an individual's expectations. Implicit in the
concept is the possibility of a social trajectory that enables conditions of living that are
very different from initial ones.
By drawing together these four themes running through Bourdieu's discussions of
habitus, habitus can be viewed as a complex internalized core from which everyday
experiences emanate. Choice is at the heart of habitus, which he likens to `the art of
inventing' (Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 55), but at the same time the choices inscribed in the
habitus are limited. I envisage habitus as a deep, interior, epicentre containing many
matrices. These matrices demarcate the extent of choices available to any one
individual. Choices are bounded by the framework of opportunities and constraints
the person nds himself/herself in, her external circumstances. However, within
Bourdieu's theoretical framework he/she is also circumscribed by an internalized
framework that makes some possibilities inconceivable, others improbable and a
limited range acceptable. As Lizardo (2003) points out, the notion of a transposable
matrix both sets limits at the same time that it implies exibility. Dispositions are
inevitably reective of the social context in which they were acquired.
Habitus is only an aspect of Bourdieu's conceptual tool-box. For Bourdieu it is the
interaction of habitus, cultural capital and eld that generates the logic of practice
(Bourdieu, 1990b). In particular, the concept of eld adds to the possibilities of
Bourdieu's conceptual framework and gives habitus a dynamic quality:
The relation between habitus and eld operates in two ways. On one side, it is a relation
of conditioning: the eld structures the habitus, which is the product of the embodiment
of the immanent necessity of the eld (or of a hierarchy of intersecting elds). On the
other side, it is a relation of knowledge or cognitive construction: habitus contributes to
constituting the eld as a meaningful world, a world endowed with sense or with value, in
which it is worth investing one's energy. (Bourdieu, in Wacquant, 1989, p. 44)
Grenfell and James (1998, p. 15) argue that `if habitus brings into focus the subjective
end of the equation, eld focuses on the objective'. As Grenfell (2003) succinctly
asserts, habitus and eld need to be understood as highly charged matrices involving a
dynamic philosophy of human praxis. The relationship between habitus and cultural
capital is more enmeshed. Scott Lash perceives habitus as made up of cultural capital
(Lash, 1993, p. 197). However, most writers, including Bourdieu, view the two
concepts as more separated. Bourdieu himself is very explicit about the relationship
between the two concepts. In Distinction he maps out a formula that elaborates their
interconnection, `(Habitus 3 Capital) + Field=Practice' (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 101).
My understanding of this interconnection is one in which habitus lies beneath cultural
Beyond the habitual use of habitus 435
capital generating its myriad manifestations. There is a similarly close dynamic
between habitus and eld:
social reality exists, so to speak, twice, in things and in minds, in elds and in habitus,
outside and inside social agents. And when habitus encounters a social world of which it
is the product, it is like a `sh in water': it does not feel the weight of the water and it takes
the world about itself for granted. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 127)
However, when habitus encounters a eld with which it is not familiar, the resulting
disjunctures can generate change and transformation. The refractory and destabiliz-
ing implications that the notion of eld has for the concept of habitus can produce
nuanced understandings of power relations and political agency (McNay, 2000).
The possibilities and limitations of using habitus in relation to critical
research agendas
As Andrew Sayer (2004) points out, one of the most distinctive yet unremarked
features of Bourdieu's theoretical framework `is that the most widely studied forms of
division, domination and exclusion in social researchmost obviously racism and
sexism, but also ageism, homophobia, disabilismonly enter as incidental modiers,
if at all'. Although in one of Bourdieu's last books Masculine Domination (Bourdieu,
2001) he does write extensively on gendered habitus, his main empirical focus is not
current relationships between the sexes and contemporary masculinities and
femininities, but gender divisions in Algeria in the 1960s. Yet, habitus is primarily a
method for analysing the dominance of dominant groups in society and the
domination of subordinate groups, and as such Katherine McClelland asserts that:
it can easily be applied to the analysis of gender (or racial and ethnic) disadvantage as
well. (McClelland, 1990, p. 105)
Habitus can be used to focus on the ways in which the socially advantaged and
disadvantaged play out attitudes of cultural superiority and inferiority ingrained in
their habitus in daily interactions. As McClelland highlights, such dispositions are
inuenced by gender and `race' as well as social class.
However, gender is subsumed throughout much of Bourdieu's writing under his
primary focus on social class, and despite his main anthropological study being of the
Kabyle tribes of Algeria he makes no mention of the way in which habitus is
differentiated by `race'. However, it is possible from his extensive writing on the
concept to develop an understanding of habitus as shaped by both gender and `race'.
Indeed, Weininger (2004) argues that in Masculine Domination Bourdieu (2001)
moves from his earlier position in Distinction (Bourdieu, 1984), where the gendered
character of social actions is contingent on class habitus, to a view of gender divisions
as an independent force structuring habitus. Cicourel (1993, p. 109) has argued that
there is a need to expand habitus to explore how gender and racial differences are
linked to circumstances that can occur within and across cultures and social classes or
ethnic groups within larger nation-states. I would add that expanding habitus to
436 D. Reay
include race and gender differences is equally important in relation to smaller research
contexts such as classrooms, staffrooms and playgrounds:
Habitus is a way of looking at data which renders the `taken-for-granted' problematic. It
suggests a whole range of questions not necessarily addressed in empirical research; How
well adapted is the individual to the context they nd themselves in? How does personal
history shape their reponses to the contemporary setting? What subjective vocations do
they bring to the present and how are they manifested? Are structural effects visible
within small scale interactions? What is the meaning of non-verbal behaviour as well as
individuals' use of language? These questions clearly raise issues of gender and `race'
alongside those of social class. (Reay, 1995a, p. 369)
So habitus can be used to uncover how class, `race' and gender are embodied, played
out not only in individuals actions and attitudes, but also in a whole range of bodily
gestures (Reay, 1995a, 1995b, 1997; Connolly, 1998). It can also provide a corrective
to `sociological na ve claims about the transformation of social (and sexual) identities'
by highlighting the rootedness of class, gender and ethnic divisions (McNay, 1999, p.
106).
While most criticisms of habitus invoke structuralism or determinism (Jenkins,
1992, Alexander, 1995), some of Bourdieu's texts provide more space for agency than
others. As Lois McNay (2001, p. 146) asserts, `there has been an increasing emphasis
in Bourdieu's more recent work on moments of disalignment and tension between
habitus and eld, which may give rise to social change'. In particular, in The Weight of
the World (Bourdieu, 1999b) there is a great deal of striving, resistance and action
aimed at changing current circumstances as many of the poor and dispossessed,
interviewed by Bourdieu and his colleagues, search around for ways of changing and
transforming their lives. Often the movement of habitus across a new, unfamiliar eld
resulted in:
A habitus divided against itself, in constant negotiation with itself and its ambivalences,
and therefore doomed to a kind of duplication, to a double perception of the self, to
successive allegiances and multiple identities. (Bourdieu, 1999b, p. 511)
We begin to get a sense not only of the myriad adaptations, responses, reactions and
resistances to `the way the world is', but also of individuals struggling to make the
world a different place. There is little evidence of determinism here. It is not a lack of
action that is problematic, but rather the focus on pre-reective dimensions of action.
As Andrew Sayer (2004) convincingly argues, Bourdieu overplays the unconscious
impulses and aspects of habitus, neglecting mundane everyday reexivity; what Sayer
terms `our inner conversations' (see also Archer, 2003). In doing so he denies or
marginalizes the life of the mind in others. In a similar vein, Brenda Farnell (2000)
asserts that in Bourdieu's formulation of habitus, individuals' adjustments to the
external world are all apparently unconscious, or less than conscious. Nick Crossley
(1999, p. 658) makes a identical criticism that habitus as a concept levels out the
distinction between reection and the pre-reective, and that `it needs to recuperate
the reective and creative aspects of practice'.
Implicit in the concept is that habitus operates at an unconscious level unless
individuals confront events that cause self-questioning, whereupon habitus begins to
Beyond the habitual use of habitus 437
operate at the level of consciousness and the person develops new facets of the self.
Such disjunctures between habitus and eld occur for Bourdieu when individuals
with a well-developed habitus nd themselves in different elds or different parts of
the same social eld. However, as Sayer argues, and I think correctly, disjuncture and
the resulting striving, resistance and/or new awareness (what Bourdieu [Bourdieu &
Wacquant 1992] terms socioanalysis) can occur during the formation of habitus, and
indeed can be constitutive of the habitus. Although the emphasis on `protensionthe
feel for the game' rather than calculation and strategizing is an important counter to
rationalism, Bourdieu seems to leap straight from a rationalist interpretation to an
anti-rationalist one. One key consequence, according to Sayer, is that Bourdieu's
focus on the unconscious and the prereexive does not allow for any ethical
dimensions of the habitus. Nick Crossley (2000, p. 138) makes a related point when
he argues that habitus needs to include `dialogues with oneself'. Sayer's (2004)
important work recuperating ethical dispositions or `moral sentiments' for habitus
enhances the possibilities for and of habitus, and allows us not only a richer
understanding of the strivings, struggles and disenchantments of those burdened by
The Weight of the World (Bourdieu, 1999b). It also provides the potential for a broader
conceptualization of habitus that makes space for `cares, concerns and commitments',
and weaves together conscious deliberation with unconscious dispositions so that we
can attempt to grapple analytically with aspects of identity such as our personal and
political commitments that current conceptualizations of habitus marginalize.
However, later work, and especially State Nobility (Bourdieu, 1998b), includes a
recognition of cognitive aspects of habitus that earlier work such as Distinction
(Bourdieu, 1984) neglects.
Habitus as a methodological tool and its use in educational research
According to Richard Harker, Bourdieu `works in a spiral between theory, empirical
work and back to reformulating theory again but at a different level' (Harker et al.,
1990, p. 3). This results in problems of indeterminacy and changing notions of
habitus, although Bourdieu himself sees this as a positive attribute and describes his
concepts as `open concepts designed to guide empirical work' (Bourdieu, 1990b, p.
107). In an interview with Beate Krais, Bourdieu suggests that the chief strength of
concepts such as habitus lies in their empirical relevance:
Ideas like those of habitus, practice, and so on, were intended, among other things, to
point out that there is a practical knowledge that has its own logic, which cannot be
reduced to that of theoretical knowledge; that in a sense, agents know the social world
better than the theoreticians. (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 252)
There is an indeterminacy about the concept that ts in well with the complex
messiness of the real world. But there is also a danger in habitus becoming whatever
the data reveal. In particular, aspects of habitus that are related to the way it is
internalized become tenuous when they are applied to `social class aggregations within
complex societies and across different cultures' (Cicourel, 1993, p. 5). I would
438 D. Reay
suggest that it is these conceptual gaps, the aspects of habitus that remain relatively
unlled, and what Jenkins has described as `the ontological mysteries of the habitus'
(1992, p. 130), that simultaneously contain its utility and its pitfalls.
Even Roy Nash (1999) who wrote an article defending the use of Bourdieu's
concepts in an earlier issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education questioned
whether I could claim that habitus is a method. Yet, this is exactly how Bourdieu
describes his concepts:
The main thing is that they are not to be conceptualised so much as ideas, on that level,
but as a method. The core of my work lies in the method and a way of thinking. To be
more precise, my method is a manner of asking questions rather than just ideas. This, I
think is a critical point. (Bourdieu, 1985, quoted in Mahar, 1990)
Clearly, Bourdieu is using the term `method' in a very elastic sense but what he is
stressing is that rst and foremost habitus is a conceptual tool to be used in empirical
research rather than an idea to be debated in texts. Also, the difculties, inconsist-
encies, risks of determinism, and aspects of circularity inherent in habitus can be
viewed as far less problematic if habitus is viewed more uidly as both method and
theory; a way of understanding the world. Bourdieu himself sees his concepts as in a
continual process of being reworked. Writing of his conceptual framework he
comments:
I blame most of my readers for having considered as theoretical treatises, meant solely to
be read or commented upon, works that, like gymnastics handbooks, were intended for
exercise, or even better, for putting into practice one cannot grasp the most profound
logic of the social world unless one becomes immersed in the specicity of an empirical
reality. (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 271)
Habitus provides a method for simultaneously analysing `the experience of social
agents and the objective structures which make this experience possible'
(Bourdieu, 1988, p. 782). Using habitus as a conceptual tool ensures that the
research focus is always broader than the specic focus under study. While it is
important to view individuals as actively engaged in creating their social worlds,
Bourdieu's method emphasizes the way in which `the structure of those worlds is
already predened by broader racial, gender and class relations' (Bourdieu &
Waquant, 1992, p. 144). Habitus, then, is a means of viewing structure as occurring
within small-scale interactions and activity within large-scale settings.
Habitus' duality as both collective and individualized offers theoretical potential,
but also, as Circourel points out, conceptual difculties. Bourdieu often refers to class
habitus, and a number of researchers have also worked with the concept of class
habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979; James, 1995; Bridge, 2001; Hartmann, 2000;
Sawchuk, 2003). The largest and most comprehensive research study of class habitus
is Bourdieu's own study of Distinction in French society (1984). Although the study
draws on both quantitative and qualitative data, because habitus cannot be directly
observed in empirical research and has to be apprehended interpretively, much of
Distinction is devoted to a qualitative study of the myriad preferences and practices
that cluster in each sector of social space (i.e. within each class and class fraction) in
Beyond the habitual use of habitus 439
order to identify the specic habitus that underlies them (Weininger, 2004). There is
also a further strand of research that works with institutional notions of habitus
(McDonough, 1997; Reay, 1998; McNamara Horvat & Lising Antonio, 1999; Reay
et al., 2001; Barber, 2002).
Most empirical research attempts to work with habitus' duality as both collective
and individualized, and some excellent research has been conducted that moves from
the individual to the class collective and back again (Charlesworth, 2000;
1
Nash,
2002). However, a great deal of educational research references habitus instead of
working with the concept as Bourdieu advocates. Habitus is assumed or appropriated
rather than `put into practice' in research accounts, and it appears that it is `the
gravitas of habitus' that is desired rather than its operationalization. Although there
are many examples that I could drawon, some of my own work is less productive in its
utilization of habitus than other research I have undertaken. In `Shaun's story', I argue
that:
Shaun's tale is an example of contradiction and tension between the social order and
psychological processes rather that the `homology, redundancy and reinforcement
between the two systems' that Bourdieu (1999: 512) asserts is normative. In contrast to
the norm, Shaun's experience generates a habitus divided against itself; an experience
Bourdieu (1999: 511) describes as `doomed to duplication, to a double perception of
self'. He is positioned in an untenable space on the boundaries of two irreconcilable ways
of being and has to produce an enormous body of psychic, intellectual and interactive
work in order to maintain his contradictory ways of being, his dual perception of self.
(Reay, 2002, p. 223)
Here habitus is introduced as a concept before the introduction of any of the data.
Bourdieu's challenge to use the concept as a way of interrogating the data is ignored
and habitus becomes an explanation of the data rather than a way of working with it.
In contrast, in an earlier paper (Reay, 1997) I work with notions of habitus as both
embodied and as a complex interplay between past and present. I use data from a case
study of Christine, a once working-class woman who nowidenties as middle class, to
show how working-class habitus can be still embodied in ambiguously located
individuals within the eld of education, generating uncertainty, ambivalence, anxiety
and a sense of disenfranchisement. I also draw on data on Christine's educational
history to showhowhabitus continues to operate long after the objective conditions of
its emergence have been dislodged (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 13).
Educational researchers have operationalized notions of habitus in relation to both
qualitative and quantitative data. Chris Atkins (2000) works with qualitative
interviews, utilizing the concept of habitus in relation to the individual dispositions
of rural adult learners and attempts to move from individual dispositions to notions of
a collective rural habitus. In contrast, Susan Dumais (2002) draws on quantitative
data in her study of cultural capital and schooling. She operationalizes habitus as
students' occupational aspirations, arguing that perceptions about the opportunity
structure and what is necessary to succeed are all part of habitus. However, as she
recognizes, students' ability to obtain prestigious jobs is only one small component of
habitus, and her study is `really only a rst attempt to operationalise the concept of
440 D. Reay
habitus alongside the concept of cultural capital' (Dumais, 2002, p. 62). A more
holistic, intensive approach to working with habitus is Roy Nash's longitudinal New
Zealand Progress at School Project. Drawing on focus group interviews with
secondary school students, Nash (2002) examines the consequences for working-class
students who reject the concept of education offered by the school and are unable to
construct a habitus in accordance with it. He works carefully with the data to delineate
`the educated habitus' and how the working classes both exclude themselves and are
excluded from it. Similarly, Rapoport and Lomsky-Feder (2002) conduct a micro-
analysis of `intelligentsia' as an ethnic habitus. Working with life histories they
examine in detail how habitus is inculcated and transformed in the context of Russian
Jewish migration to Israel. Their ndings `verify the transposal quality of habitus and
its heightened dynamic nature in times of structural lag or rupture and a mismatch
between opportunities and dispositions to grasp them' (Rapoport & Lomsky-Feder,
2002, p. 245).
Probably the most comprehensive attempt to use habitus in order to move
analytically from the individual to the class collective and back again is Simon
Charlesworth's (2000) Aphenomenology of working class experience. He provides us with
an analysis of habitus that draws powerfully of Bourdieu's own conceptualizations,
but which also works organically and sensitively with the data. The result is an analysis
that combines unconscious impulses with mundane everyday reexivity. So, for
Charlesworth, working-class masculine habitus is:
Characterised by a way of walking, of moving in space, of gesticulating, of swearing,
joking, bantering, of laughing, eating, drinking and `being a lad', of being straight as a
die', a `rait lad', of being open to talk about the problems of life but which rejects
excessive sentimentality. (Charlesworth, 2000, pp. 229230)
As well as habitus coming into view as a mixture of the embodied, the instinctual and
the unthought, we also glimpse the `life of the mind', the reective as well as the pre-
reective.
Conclusion
In this paper I have approached Bourdieu's concept of habitus from three
perspectives. First, I have outlined its conceptual development and theoretical status.
Second, I have examined its relevance, emphasizing strengths but also a number of
limitations, particularly in relation to gender, race and everyday reexivity. Finally, I
have explored habitus as a methodological tool and it is this aspect of the concept that
I want to come back to briey in the conclusion. As I have argued elsewhere,
`paradoxically the conceptual looseness of habitus also constitutes a potential
strength. It makes possible adaptation rather than the more constricting straightfor-
ward adoption of the concept within empirical work' (Reay, 1995b, p. 357). Roy Nash
(2002, p. 46) asserts that `if the full value of Bourdieu's method is to be achieved, it will
be through the close investigation of denite habitus, as states of mind or effective
Beyond the habitual use of habitus 441
dispositions'. There is plenty of scope, and I would argue a real need, for putting
habitus into practice. To reiterate Bourdieu's words a second time:
one cannot grasp the most profound logic of the social world unless one becomes
immersed in the specicity of an empirical reality. (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 271)
Note
1. Although Charlesworth writes extensively on habitus in relation to education, his research is
primarily a sociological study of the working class.
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