The local moral order: Emotions and the Development of a Middle Class Habitus

2018 ◽  
pp. 121-170
Author(s):  
Gesa Stedman
2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Frederick

This article examines the experiences of mothers with disabilities who engage in concerted cultivation, a parenting style commonly practiced in middle-class communities. The author explores these mothers' experiences in the "fields" of their children's schools and organized extracurricular activities. Findings illuminate how ruptures in these mothers' middle - class habitus occur as they confront accessibility barriers and social exclusion while engaging in concerted cultivation. These mothers are found to simultaneously deploy class-based resources to overcome these barriers. This analysis lays bare the ways in which the concerted cultivation habitus presumes a nondisabled identity.


2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 1066-1085 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kobe De Keere ◽  
Bram Spruyt

Although it is well established that contemporary school-based pedagogy continues to be primarily oriented towards a middle-class habitus, little research has documented how crucial elements of such habitus, like an expressive self-conception and emotional management, became integrated in the educational institute and its philosophy. Therefore, this article reconstructs how the current middle-class habitus was institutionalized and what type of personality structuring it eventually replaced. We study the shifts in pedagogical ideas, the role of education and the position of teachers and relate these to structural factors such as state-formation and changing class structures. We draw on the process-relational approach of Elias and Bourdieu and perform a content analysis of 480 pedagogical advice articles published in Flanders (Belgium) between 1880 and 2010, to demonstrate how a discourse of formalization and self-control has been substituted by a more informalized and expressive view. We conclude with a reflection on the impact of such an expressive pedagogical regime on the reproduction of class inequality.


2021 ◽  

The concept of habitus is central to the work of Pierre Bourdieu (b. 1930–d. 2002) the French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher. As with all of his work, it is a concept that operates interchangeably with others (especially capital and field), to raise questions about the impact of social structures on the practices and dispositions of individuals across diverse cultural and social contexts. Habitus is central to Bourdieu’s theory of practice—how patterns of power and inequality are reproduced through the practices that are embedded in everyday life. It is the habitus—the dispositions, ways of “doing” and “being,” thinking, talking, dressing, walking—the full compendium of our preferences, tastes, and desires that reflects our orientation in the world. Habitus is not explicitly “taught”; however, it is deeply embodied—a form of “knowing” that derives from the totality of immersion within a given cultural and social context. It is this ‘knowing’ that filters expectations, setting unarticulated boundaries or possibilities for future actions depending on the habitus in play. This is the power and impact of the habitus, and, with respect to social class (middle-class habitus/working-class habitus), clear patterns of advantage accrue to those whose habitus is most valued and recognized, that of the elites and middle class in society. This is especially evident, for example, in the field of education, which Bourdieu argued, embodies the middle-class habitus to the detriment of those from the working classes, who inevitably exit the system with lower rates of success. While Bourdieu was especially focused on dynamics related to social class stratification, the concept of habitus has been used widely in sociological studies. As a concept it is very applicable to childhood studies, providing an important frame of reference to analyze how diverse social structures influence the dispositions of children across different contexts. Further, as an action-oriented concept it aligns with the emphasis within childhood studies on children’s agency, providing a mechanism to explore how such agency is both enabled and /or constrained by the contexts within which children find themselves. As early childhood education and care takes increasing precedence, the concept has also been extended for use in relation to early childhood education and care settings. Typically, the concept of habitus focuses on issues related to language, literacy, and social class dynamics that influence children’s capacities to engage with their learning and education. However its flexibility as a concept—exactly as Bourdieu intended—ensures that it has been drawn on to explore the realities of children’s lives in their families, communities, and schools, including studies of children’s ethnic, gendered, and class relations; academic achievement; parenting practices; and leisure activities.


Author(s):  
Monika Borys

Given the lineup across much of our current television landscape, we could be forgiven for thinking that the medium is utterly obsessed with class struggle. One of the most popular TV genres to exploit class difference for dramatic purposes is the reality show. This essay examines Polish adaptations of three foreign reality show formats that rely on “clash of two worlds”-type tropes to drive their narratives. The shows in question are: Projekt Lady (prod. TVN, first aired in 2016), Damy i wieśniaczki (prod. TTV, first aired in 2016), and Rolnik szuka żony (prod. TVP, first aired in 2014). Drawing on sociological concepts of class as the embodiment of a specific collection of attributes and habits (Pierre Bourdieu), the author treats the shows in question as a particular sub-type of image designed to impart lessons in class. Calling on scholarship interpreting reality show programming as a neoliberal formula that gives weight to the middle-class habitus (Beverley Skeggs, Helen Wood), this analysis considers the specific nature of the Polish social structure, and interprets the relationship between class and gender in the analyzed programs. The inquiry elucidates what could be called the Polish strain of upward mobility, which compels reality show contestants to blend attributes associated with both the lower (“peasants”) and middle classes (“ladies”).


2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 278-294
Author(s):  
Andrea Virginás

This article focuses on the ambivalent features of intellectual white-collar female characters in post-1989 films fully or partly produced in Romania ( The Oak, Fox-Hunter, The District, Sieranevada, Graduation and Toni Erdmann). Their ambivalence is examined in the framework of Pierre Bourdieu’s class habitus theory as interpreted by Tony Bennett and his colleagues, suggesting that the simultaneous presence of working-class, petit bourgeois and bourgeois/middle-class cultural capital types contributes to this effect. The performance of iconic actresses (from Maia Morgenstern to Sandra Hüller) is also situated within melodrama genre theory, a filmic template representing social mobility, often accompanied by travel. Finally, within the framework of mediated cultural remembrances the argument is made that these white-collar women may be incorporated into the category of ‘banal commemoration’ as developed by Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, making it possible for Romanians to process traumatic memories of mobility engineered by the communist and post-communist states.


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 91-111
Author(s):  
Marta Olcoń-Kubicka ◽  
Mateusz Halawa

This article is a study of the domestic monetary and financial life of young middle-class couples in Warsaw, Poland, and its suburbs. We use ethnographic evidence presented as case studies to illuminate the practices in which our interlocutors actively appropriate, mobilize, and transform money and finance to pursue moral visions of the good life. The article focuses on the household understood in processual terms of ongoing negotiations between moral and market dimensions. The first section is focused on the ways in which young couples perform relational work aimed at achieving or maintaining moral order. Couples match the diverse possible uses of money at home to their changing notions of the kind of couple they are or wish to become. The second section proceeds from the observation of a widening gap between rising middle-class aspirations and economic possibilities in contemporary Poland and explores the practices of negotiating various forms of assistance from parental households. The third and final section argues that the incursion of technologies into domestic life means that artifacts like software or digital banking increasingly materialize and mediate morality and thus actively contribute to the shaping of the household as a project of a good life.


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