This section will discuss the concept of institutional-habitus (introduced in 4.4) and explain the merit in using it. Reay et al (2001) argue there have been few studies (like mine) that have focused on the impact made by individual institutions on student ‘choices’. In educational contexts questions of identities are critical because the development of educational practice and policies is grounded in ways of understanding who learners are or ‘should be’. Educational institutions develop systems often based on historical ways of ‘doing things’ which become entrenched within institutions’ habitus, so that they become the expected norm. As Burke et al (2013:167) state:
While Bourdieu himself does not use the term institutional habitus, the phrase is useful when considering the incorporation of the institution into the habitus. An institution can bring about an adjustment in the habitus of individuals within it through its collective actions (or the actions of those within it).
Thus, how students interpret and develop identities shaped by institutional- habitus is influenced by self-perceptions and fields e.g. sociopolitical ideologies, histories and structures beyond the control of individuals (Sadowski, 2003). The fluidity of perceived or actual movements of people and messages in school cultural fields illustrates identities which are conceptualised as ‘mattering’ in social-interactions across different school institutional-habituses. Reay et al (2001:1.3), writing about choice of university, suggest:
Perceptions and expectations of choice are constructed over time in relation to school friends’ and teachers’ views and advice and learning experiences no less than in relationship to the views and expectations of families […] ‘a school effect’ - what we term institutional habitus-is an intervening variable, providing a ‘semi- autonomous’ means by which […] processes are played out in the lives of students.
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However, the use of the concept of institutional-habitus is not without its critics. Atkinson (2011:331) has:
Reservations regarding the increasingly popular Bourdieu‐inspired notions of ‘institutional habitus’ and ‘family habitus’ in education research. Although sympathetic to the overall theoretical approach and persuaded of the veracity and importance of the empirical findings they are used to illuminate […] from a Bourdieusian point of view, they actually present several difficulties.
Atkinson (2011) claims that Reay’s (2001) use of the concept of institutional- habitus is anthropomorphic as institutions cannot have schemas, expectations and perceptions. However, the people who make-up an organisation can indeed have these traits and collectively they become imbued into organisational cultures as institutional-habitus. Atkinson (2011) further argues that the use of the concept moves away from Bourdieu’s (1993) ontological philosophical location of habitus as relational existing in fields. When I use the concept of institutional-habitus, I view the three institutions examined as located within educational fields. However Atkinson (2011:335) contends that:
The notions of familial and institutional habitus actually threaten to throttle analysis of the very things they were intended to comprehend: specificity, complexity and difference. This is because, in rolling all members of the family, school or university in together as one monolithic unit, it completely steamrolls any internal heterogeneity or dissension.
I disagree with this claim as institutional-habituses are fluid, interlinking with family and peer-subcultural habituses to create a ‘heterogeneous soup’ that when coupled with individual student agency offers a heterogeneous analysis of ‘G&T’-identity constructions and groupings. Despite Atkinson’s (2011:347) claims that: ‘educational institutions as habitus falls foul of a trio of fallacies- substantialism, anthropomorphism and homogenisation’, I argue that the concept has merit, as Atkinson (2011) neglects the dynamic nature of habitus, its social embodiment and the flexibility of the concept in accounting for heterogeneity. However, Atkinson (2011:346) advocates the use of ‘doxa’ as a replacement for habitus as staff (e.g. GATCOs) ‘possess the symbolic power to speak for ‘the school’ and enforce its doxa’. Thus Atkinson (2011) refers to ‘institutional-doxa’, arguing that:
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Trying to use the notion of habitus rather than doxa and field to analyse the workings of ‘schools’ […] is rather like trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver when the hammer is right there […] field effects still only operate as they are internalised as schemes of perception and dispositions (Atkinson, 2011:347).
However, I prefer the concept of institutional-habitus as used by Reay et al (2001) as habitus epitomises the connectedness of school/family/peer institutional cultures, processes, practices and structures that enmesh ‘G&T’- students impacting on their ‘G&T’-identity constructions. Although I appreciate Atkinson’s (2012) point that ‘doxa’ encompasses notions of symbolic power and struggle, I do not agree that habitus is not designed to embody them:
The merit of doxa and mystery of ministry is that both specifically draw attention to unity and delegation of authority (qua symbolic power) amidst struggle within a field, whereas the notion of habitus is simply not designed for that purpose (Atkinson, 2012:185).
Atkinson (2011:335) has also argued:
People are gelled together in perception as belonging to a particular ‘school’ or ‘family’, with a degree of unity and shared experience and expectations, which then shapes their actions; and on the other hand, the way in which the school or family seems to act as a monolithic agent through its delegated spokespeople […] these are precisely the phenomena that I described under the labels of field doxa and ‘mystery of ministry’ in my critique.
Atkinson’s (2011) claim (above) is pertinent to ways in which school institutional habitus identifies and labels certain students as ‘G&T’. However, I agree with the defence of the concept of institutional-habitus provided by Burke et al (2013:165) as: ‘an individual’s dispositions are mediated through an institution’s organisational practices and collective forms of cooperation.’ In particular the school institutional-habitus embodies its ‘practices’ through student and staff actions that at times may resist, thus subverting the institutional norms but the institution remains, as institutional-habituses are enduring, ultimately impinging on students’ actions:
Institutions have an active socio-cultural effect on the habitus of those within them. In other words, schools and other institutions can
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directly shape the habitus and practices of individuals through their
organisational forms and collective practices (Burke et al, 2013:165). Various ideologies, power-structures, and historical-legacies associated with forms of language use, cultures and situations, frame individuals’ linguistic and cultural practices as ‘types’ of people e.g. ‘types’ of learners, with ‘types’ of recognisable ‘practices’ (Anderson, 2008). Recognition is about being valued and respected as students of various identity-positions within an institutional- habitus. Thus institutional-habitus is a useful extension of the Bourdieusian ‘tool-kit’ for my data-analysis as:
If we think of the concept of collective habitus as a socio-analytical tool of the Bourdieusian researcher in their dynamic, flexible and critical engagement with empirical data, then its value cannot be missed (Burke et al, 2013:181).
School institutional-habitus can reproduce social-inequalities by implementing ‘G&T’/‘non-G&T’ categorisation systems based on ‘G&T’-identification as if ‘G&T’ were innate, rather than socially constructed, (chapter 3). All three of the schools operate systems for ‘G&T’ identification. Thus, ‘G&T’-education can be seen as supporting hegemonic power-relations by seeing ‘intelligence’ as innate and measurable, leading to segregation via labelling of students into homogenous groups of ‘G&T’ or ‘non-G&T’. These groups are then offered differential education with the ‘elite’ ‘G&T’ fast-tracked (like Olivia, who was accelerated by a year). ‘G&T’-students are offered privileged ‘subject-positions’, seen as ‘different’, even as born to provide for the national-economic good. ‘G&T’-policies separating and compartmentalising students, construct a social ‘reality’ that socially constructed differences are innate differences. Hence ‘G&T’-ness is an invented category where outcomes of the application of the construct may be beneficial, or harmful, or innocuous for some. I agree with Borland (2003:111) that:
The category was created in advance of the identification of its members, and the identification of the members of the category both is predicated on the belief that the category exists and serves, tautologically, to confirm the category’s existence.
The three schools have different cultural expectations and reactions to high achievement, having consequences for ‘G&T’-students and their management
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of ‘G&T’-identities. The differences at the three schools in ‘G&T’-identification processes and ‘collective actions’ and discourses of personnel (what Anderson, 2011, calls ‘institutional-doxa’) inhabit school institutional habitus that impact on ‘G&T’-student identities. The ‘institutional habituses’ were reported by my participants most often as: Appleton being ‘academic’; Barratt as promoting ‘learning as fun’, developing ‘confidence-capital’; and Castle as ‘supportive of individuals’, developing ‘identity-capital’. Students from Appleton reported the academic pressures they felt the school and its staff placed upon them; whereas those from Barratt emphasised the differentiated in-class and independent-learning support provided by the school; and those from Castle spoke of its extension classes, strong pastoral support and values of solidarity, equality, and democracy. Factors making-up a school’s institutional-habitus are varied and interrelated. I use Bourdieu’s work to interlink school institutional- habitus with ‘G&T’-identities, fields and individual habitus. ‘G&T’ school ‘practices’ and student identities can be understood as constructed through: ‘[(habitus) (capital)]+ field=practice’ (Bourdieu, 1984:101).
Relevant to the schools in my research, Bourdieu (1989) argues that behaviour is influenced by the relationship between agents and institutions within a field: ‘to think in terms of field is to think relationally’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992:96). Bourdieu (1990) emphasises that objective relations exist independently of consciousness, and social ‘reality’ derives not from inter-subjective interactions, but from activated connections between agents within social-spaces. The positions agents occupy within fields are relative to the volumes and compositions of capitals possessed (for my students, this includes cultural capital deriving from their ‘G&T’ status).
Fields have some autonomy from external pressures by the structural counter- pressures they exert, gradually developing some insulation (Bourdieu, 2004). This independence allows fields to develop their ‘own logic’ and ‘nomos’ (Bourdieu, 2004:47). Each field is defined by its ‘nomos’ as underlying rules and laws which govern the ‘practice’ and experiences of participants (Bourdieu, 2000). The ‘nomos’ of one field is irreducible to the logic of another (Bourdieu, 2004); it is this differentiation of laws between fields which perpetuates their autonomy. Influenced by historical and cultural development, fields project
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rules, regularities and evaluation criteria to remain impervious to ‘forces’ of neighbouring fields (Wacquant, 1998). This ‘field of forces’ (Bourdieu, 1993:31) is analogous to a magnetic-field, possessing poles of ‘attraction’ and ‘repulsion’ (Lane, 2000). Bourdieu claims that individuals have capacity to preserve or subvert power distributions dependent on capitals possessed (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992).
In line with this argument, my data shows student identity formations do not take place in vacuums, but are chameleon-like, dependent on interactive contexts. Negotiated self-concepts are susceptible to perceptions of power held by significant-others in interaction milieus. Students actively construct their social-worlds through complementary aspects of interaction and the permeability of habitus provides a nuanced understanding of such processes. The focus of this chapter is the three school contexts (described in chapter 5) that socially construct identities of 16 ‘G&T’ post-16 students; showing that school institutional-habitus shape the chances of ‘positive’ ‘G&T’ experiences. Such processes are particularly important in the further development of individual students’ habitus:
The notion of habitus […] is relational in that it designates a mediation between objective-structures and practices. First and foremost, habitus has the function of overcoming the alternative between conscious and unconscious […] Social-reality exists, so to speak, twice, in things and in minds, in fields and in habitus, outside and inside agents. And when habitus encounters a social-world of which it is the product, it finds itself as a fish-in-water, it does not feel the weight of the water and it takes the world about itself for granted (Bourdieu, 1989:43).
As discussed in chapter 4, institutional-habitus like individual habitus has: ‘power of adaptation; it constantly performs an adaptation to the outside world which only occasionally takes the form of radical conversion’ (Bourdieu, 1993:78). Castle School’s move from ‘Special Measures’ to ‘Outstanding’ can be seen as a form of institutional ‘radical conversion’. Both habitus and institutional-habitus provide a dynamic ‘rich interlacing of past and present, individual and collective’ (Reay, 1998:521). So habitus is a complex, internalised core that shapes everyday experiences and ‘practices’ both for individuals and institutions. Habitus is confined to a range of available
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possibilities; hence actions tend to be reproductive rather than transformative: ‘Dispositions inevitably reflect the social context in which they are acquired’ (Reay et al, 2001:1.2). Schooling is diversified, embodying social relationships and positions that become dispositions. These add-up to senses of ‘reality’, of limits/possibilities, and are about difference, and knowledge of positioning in particular fields. Habitus as systems of dispositions acquired through relationships to fields, serves to construct comfortable feelings of fit, as ‘fish-in- water’. This is so for the ‘nomos’ of institutional-habitus too, that acquires logic through relationships to fields (e.g. local communities, families, educational).
Some of my students avoided the ‘steer’ of habitus by gaining ‘G&T’- identification despite their disadvantaged social backgrounds (James, Matt and Hazel); as Bourdieu (1984:370) states, they (like me) had: ‘a dream of social flying, a desperate attempt to defy the gravity of the social field’. Student habitus shapes the manner in which students ‘receive’ education. Conditions for ‘G&T’- identity formation, are affected by policies of diverse marketized systems of school ‘choices’ (chapter 2), and the accompanying concept of ‘the individual’ as enterprising ‘self-as-consumer’ (Rose, 1998). When students/parents/teachers engage with school ‘social-spaces’, they are not mere recipients of services. They develop, confirm and disconfirm aspects of their own and others’ social-identities (Brantlinger, 2003). Working-class ‘G&T’- Oxbridge students may have ‘educational-capital’ but may feel they lack other forms of cultural-capital, feeling socially like ‘fish-out-of-water’ or as ‘strangers in paradise’ in elite-university fields (Reay et al, 2009). Pete’s mother illustrates some of the social ‘problems’ ‘G&T’-students may experience in some fields:
Where I think he struggles most is socially (I am almost certain he has Asperger’s traits). He did not mix very well as a young child and was happier doing things on his own. The sports he enjoys are golf and tennis, not team-games; he hates having to rely on other people who may not deliver. He doesn’t do small-talk and can often be quite opinionated which puts people’s backs-up. He does seem better at chatting now as he has got older but thinks it a waste of time. He is very driven and sets his own sights very high […] he said that he felt that people’s expectations of him are very high because he is bright, but as I said, really the expectations are his own; he cannot bear to do anything badly.
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