La lingüística de corpus y el funcionalismo

Habitus is Bourdieu’s attempt to ground practices in terms of both historical and cultural ideologies, and, on the other hand, an individual person’s ideology (Webb et al., 2002, p. 15).

Literature Review Page 39 Bourdieu acknowledged that the concepts of habitus derive originally from Aristotle’s “hexis”, which is translated as a “state”, “stable situation” or “way of being” (Rodrigo, 2012). Bourdieu also explicitly referenced Hegel, Husserl and Mauss in his development of habitus (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 12). Hegel introduced used concept of “sittlichkeit”, or “ethical life”, where the individual applies a cultural definition of what is ethical to their life (Moyar, 2011):

“sittlichkeit” was Hegel’s response to the Kantian “moral life”, where the definition “moral” is timeless and universal. Bourdieu was also influenced by Husserl’s idea of habitus or

“Habitualität”, or how people develop habitual styles of thinking, which then become ossified into permanent convictions (Moran & Cohen, 2012). Mauss (Durkheim’s nephew) developed an anthropological definition of habitus to mean a bodily technique, which is specific to a social setting, and which demonstrate the individual’s mastery of their environment (Mauss, 1979). This “techniques du corps” refers to the ways by which people, according to the society to which they belong, know how to use their bodies.

A major weakness of habitus is that, as with all Bourdieu’s concepts, there is no single, consistent definition. Bourdieu revisited his description of habitus throughout his career in order to address criticisms and meet the demands of new empirical applications (Crossley, 2013). Bourdieu’s work has been judged guilty of “obscurantism” (Lizardo, 2004, p. 378), his definitions as “elliptical” and “inaccessible” (Di Maggio, 1979, p. 1462). His writing has been described as “wooden” (Hazareesingh, 2016) and “long-winded, obscure, complex and

intimidatory” (Jenkins, 2002, p. 9). From the outset, Bourdieu’s definition of habitus appears almost circular:

The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material

Literature Review Page 40 transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively "regulated" and "regular" without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor. (Bourdieu, 1977)

The loops and repetitions of Bourdieu’s language are an attempt to escape simplistic oppositions: the “individual versus society, action versus structure, freedom versus

necessity”(Edelman et al., 1992). In rejecting the determinism of social life, which he felt was reductive and a particular weakness of the structuralists (Bourdieu, 1987), Bourdieu also

rejected the idea that people consciously and rationally choose every one of their actions. While his language is difficult to understand, his concepts are powerful. Bourdieu envisaged habitus as a bridge between the external structures and individual decision-making. Habitus will now be explained in more detail.

There are three ways in which habitus can be understood. Firstly, we can understand habitus as a concept in an individual’s head, that drives his or her activities in a way that the individual cannot fully articulate. Furthermore, habitus may be not in the rational interests of the

individual who performs it. This is where the concept of habitus meets Bourdieu’s theories of power: the dominant “who move in their worlds as fish in water” (Bourdieu, 1987) do not need to engage in rational thought as to how to achieve the goals that best suit their interests. Their habitus will naturally generate socially desirable actions which meet their interests. Those who are not dominant in a society either do not understand the habitus, or the habitus does not meet

Literature Review Page 41 their individual interests. For example, a working-class person in an art gallery will not

understand how to talk knowledgeably about art: their silence or uninformed opinions will be understood as confirmation of their ignorance. In this way, habitus becomes a product of necessity; Bourdieu noted that the working class eat high-calorie, fattening food because they cannot afford anything else; their habitus is an inevitable product of economic necessity, yet they are judged as being coarse and tasteless: “Taste is amor fati, the choice of destiny, but a forced choice, produced by conditions of existence…which leave no choice but the taste for the necessary.” (Bourdieu, 1984a, pp. 173–174).

Bourdieu produced a more refined definition of habitus in 1989, nine years after his initial formulation:

The habitus, as the 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, the effect of the habitus is that agents who are equipped with it will behave in a certain way in certain circumstances. (Bourdieu, 1986)

In this second definition we can understand habitus as an expression of cultural norms, or “acquired dispositions” that can be observed through the individual’s interactions with each other and with their environment: habitus is not an abstract concept, it is manifest in an

individual’s behaviour, yet habitus can be replicated without explicit direction, so that a group of individuals will display the same set of behaviours. Habitus has predictive power: we can formulate hypotheses for future actions, based on previous actions. This makes the concept of habitus particularly useful for this research, which attempts to understand how familiness, a

Literature Review Page 42 type of habitus unique to the family firm, can predict behaviour in relation to innovation. Habitus not only predicts an individual’s behaviour, but also operates with a number of individual actions to produce a systematic effect. This means that familiness should be

observable across a number of different behaviours. Bourdieu described a middle-class habitus as follows:

Banalities about art, literature or cinema are inseparable from the steady tone, the slow, casual diction, the distant or self-assured smile, the measured gesture, the well-tailored suit and the bourgeois salon of the person who pronounces them. (Bourdieu, 1984a, p. 170).

In the quotation above, we can see that habitus is a physical manifestation, in the same way that “hexis” is carried in the body, through deportment, stance, language and dress. Habitus is a bodily state, and can be described as “ as a system of acquired dispositions functioning on the practical level as categories of perception and assessment or as classificatory principles as well as being the organising principles of action..” (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 13)

Thirdly, habitus is a classificatory system, which enables us to name aspects of a person, or object. Here, we see a tension between Bourdieu’s dislike of binary oppositions, and his willingness to use simple classifications. However, Bourdieu recognises that, simply by the act of classification, we start to objectify and judge individuals:

The network of oppositions between high (sublime, elevated, pure) and low (vulgar, low, modest), spiritual and material, fine (refined, elegant) and coarse (heavy, fat, crude, brutal), light (subtle, lively,

Literature Review Page 43 sharp, adroit) and heavy (slow, thick, blunt, laborious, clumsy), …is

the matrix of all the commonplaces which find such ready acceptance because behind them lies the whole social order. (Bourdieu, 1984a, p. 470)

While classifications are useful for the ethnographer and the social scientist, Bourdieu warns us that classification also represents the dominant and dominated. Taxonomies are therefore, in the Bourdieusian world, always value-laden. Bourdieu challenges the assumption that social

systems are subject to change; instead he used statistical tools to demonstrate that, far from being dynamic systems, “there is stability, there is inertia” (Carles, 2002), and that dominant forces try to maintain, rather than change, the status quo. Habitus will “underlie the unity of the life-style of a group or a class” (Bourdieu, 1990) and is therefore durable; it allows a family business to learn through the lens of what is normal and acceptable behaviour, but also prevents learning, in that it privileges past behaviours.

Bourdieu explicitly set his definition of habitus against definitions of action whereby the individual makes a conscious and deliberate choice as to how to behave. Bourdieu found it unfeasible that “each action [is] a sort of unprecedented confrontation between the subject and the world.” (Bourdieu, 1986). Habitus therefore instructs the individual, albeit instantaneously and unconsciously, how to behave. However, at moments of crisis, habitus may be suspended in favour of rational judgement:

By way of aside, habitus is one principle of production of practices among others and although it is undoubtedly more frequently in play than any other, one cannot rule out that it may be superseded under

Literature Review Page 44 certain circumstances – certainly in situations of crisis which disrupt

the immediate adjustment of habitus to field – by other principles, such as rational and conscious computation. (Bourdieu, 1987).

The habitus of a family will be shared by its members and the concept of habitus gives weight to historical events. The passing of time is crucial to the operation of habitus: collective practices, and power structures, are carried forward in a process of reproduction, through the everyday interactions of daily life. History is experienced as the axiomatic necessity of daily rituals. In this way, history forms the cornerstone of habitus. Habitus is therefore a “a shared body of dispositions, classificatory categories and generative schemes is, if it is nothing else, the outcome of collective history” (Jenkins, 2002, p. 80)

In a family business, habitus has appeared as a “kitchen sink” environment i.e. the recurring conflict between, for example, the parent who still sees their grown child/successor as a rebellious teenager, even though this person is now grown and her behaviour has changed. To what extent can the family move beyond their habitus, constituted from past behaviours and the application of doxa, to allow for learning from new experiences and behaviours? The weakness of Bourdieu’s concept habitus is that is learned implicitly, without formal instruction. But this may not be true of a family business, where a strong founder, often a male, will explicitly define acceptable behaviour, both within the family, and within the business (Garcia-Alvarez & Lopez-Sintas, 2001).

Bourdieu himself noted in his study of the Kabyle that their habitus discourages innovation, but also that “if innovation is always suspect – and it is not only insomuch as it flouts tradition – it is because the peasants are always inclined to see it as the desire to distinguish oneself, to stand apart, as a way of challenging others and crushing them.” (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 18). While this

Literature Review Page 45 study will apply Bourdieu’s Kabyle-derived concepts of doxa, fields, and habitus to family firms, the actual doxa, fields, and habitus will differ between the Kabyle and modern family firms. This is because a pre-industrial, agrarian, rural society based on wide kinship is clearly different from SME manufacturers based on nuclear family structures in the United Kingdom. Modern SME manufacturers are actively encouraged to be innovative (Government Office for Science, 2013; House of Commons Library, 2015b). Innovation would therefore be expected to be part of the habitus of modern manufacturers. It can therefore be envisaged that SME manufacturers, whether family or non-family, have developed a habitus that rejects tradition, embraces competition and are keen to innovate.