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The term ‘habitus’ is considered to be mainly related to Bourdieu’s work on social structure and agency although this concept exists implicitly in works by Durkheim, Hegel and Aristotle (Stones, 2006). As mentioned earlier, Becher and Trowler’s (2001) notion of academic tribes and territories implies that academic members are classified into groups according to their intellectual enquiry and culture of the discipline. Academics learn about the culture of the discipline when they enter the tribes to mark out their territories; hence, the acculturation of members to their group norms. For Bourdieu, however, it is the other way around. Habitus is not a physical place; rather, it is embedded inside people’s mind with a transposable disposition for them to act, as in his argument:

The habitus is necessity internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions; it is a general, transposable disposition which carries out a systematic, universal application—beyond the limits of what has been directly learnt—of the necessity inherent in the learning conditions. (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 170)

Instead of getting into the community to learn about the culture of the discipline and act like others, Bourdieu argues that members are living in their own habitus and they act according to the disposition which is embodied in them. With these embodied dispositions, people have different social life styles and these differences contribute to identity, class and culture distinctions. Bourdieu argues that people have a predisposition to show their visceral taste or visceral disgust towards things around them, for example, food, dress, newspapers, furniture, gesture and even social manner. Habitus provides individuals with a condition to create social identity. To illustrate, Bourdieu’s (1984) analysis of people from different classes shows that the upper and middle classes such as executives, professionals and big employers choose bouillabaisse (a thick soup made of fish) as their favourite dish in contrast to the working classes such as clericals, manuals and small employers who prefer pot-au-feu (a soup of boiled

beef). This judgement of taste in food is an example of the identification of a person’s social class.

In relation to the concept of habitus, Bourdieu (1990) also provides the notions of ‘field’ and ‘practice’. Individuals must engage in a kind of ‘regulated improvisations’ with the same life conditions before they share the same habitus. This explains why when individuals encounter the same class situation, they react with similar actions which constitute their acceptable ways of doing. For Bourdieu, this same class situation which is shared by individuals is defined as ‘field’ and this acceptable way of doing, ‘practice’.

Bourdieu (1979) also likens social life to a game and the space for such game, ‘field’. All games have rules to guide what players can and cannot do. The actions by the players in the field are analogous to practices. When individuals move within their own field, they have ‘the feel for the game’ and they feel ‘at home’. They just know what to do. However, when individuals move away from their own field and face unfamiliar situations, they may exhibit various reactions ranging from unease to disgust. It implies, therefore, that habitus is like a set of rules of conduct to guide individuals to act, i.e., to engage in practices in the field.

Practices, nevertheless, are not solely governed by official rules. Bourdieu (1979) explains this by arguing that all practices are equipped with a practical sense or a practical logic which is tacit. In other words, individuals practice or act according to what they find ‘obviously right’ or what makes sense for them (Cuff, Sharrock, & Francis, 2006). Since in the field of the game there are many positions with their own rules of conduct to achieve the target, individuals usually identify themselves with a certain position or role in their field so that they can perform according to the logic of practice. Further, every field is a social arena where people struggle for power and resources. This is where Bourdieu introduces the concept of ‘cultural capital’, based on Marx’s notion of ‘capital’, to explain the social classes within the same field. However, he goes beyond Marx’s economic capital to include cultural capital (or personal attributes which accumulate over time as part of acculturation) and symbolic capital (or personal roles and positions in the field). It is this symbolic capital which allows individuals to access and gain power. For example, those people

who have a good educational background (cultural capital) can turn their degree into a well-paid profession (symbolic capital) in a much easier way than those who lack it. Therefore, individuals with a larger amount of capital are likely to belong to a dominant group in the field because they have access to power. One form of cultural capital is literacy because literacy can have an enormous impact on individuals. Carrington and Luke (1997) argue that this cultural capital of literacy can be classified into three types: embodied, objectified and institutional. Embodied cultural capital refers to knowledge, skills, dispositions and linguistic practices because these are directly connected to (or ‘embedded’ in) individuals. Objectified capital refers to transmissible material objects such as books and paintings. Institutional cultural capital might come in the form of academic qualifications, certificates and credentials approved by a legitimate authority or an institution. However, although these forms of cultural capital are valuable, they are so only in particular fields and not in others. Therefore, the problem in education is that school-based literacy achievement cannot guarantee social success of students because school literacy might be of no value in other fields apart from school. Therefore, it is argued that a combination of these forms of capital needs to be taken into account on the life path of students to fully understand their social achievement (Carrington & Luke, 1997). As regards this relationship between literacy and symbolic power, Bourdieu (1991) remarks that it is through the ‘correct’, or to be precise ‘corrected’, expressions which are socially acceptable by institutions (e.g., in the case of irregular verb forms) that individuals can manifest their cultural capital and practical mastery which they inculcate. In this way, a person can say they use the legitimate language.

With regard to academic writing, Bazerman (2001) draws on Bourdieu’s notion of capital to argue that academic writing is a kind of capital for scholarly writers to gain access to power in the academy. To become a successful scholar in the discipline, writers need to adopt the appropriate ways of using the knowledge and expressing it with a powerful voice. To be specific, the knowledge of the writers, which is cultural capital, can be converted into symbolic capital such as membership, career success and powerful voice in the academic world through academic writing, as Bazerman (2001) puts it:

The university provides students with the means and motives to become members of one or another elite. Even the most democratic and egalitarian universities are about access to power. Learning academic writing sits even more at this tension point between power and democracy, for learning academic writing entails learning to wield tools of symbolic power for immediate rhetorical purposes. (Bazerman, 2001, p. 25)

Although Bourdieu’s concept provides a useful framework for the development of academic writers as they live in habitus and accumulate their cultural capital for scholarly publication to achieve symbolic capital as an authority in their discipline, the problem with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is how individuals develop habitus in the first place to have a predisposition towards the situations surrounding them. For me, ‘habitus’ sounds and seems to be like ‘habit’ or a repeated action of which individuals are sometimes unaware although Bourdieu denies it. Bourdieu also suggests the innateness of habitus in individuals, leaving only a few alternatives for them to act against the force of their own habitus, like the phrase ‘a creature of habit’, unless they encounter a new field and a new form of practice. Moreover, Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital undermines the performative aspect of identity since it emphasises the accumulation of cultural capital as part of identity formation. Therefore, I shall consider Foucault’s notion of discourse which implies no predisposition within individuals but an external condition for individuals to subject themselves to it either consciously or unconsciously. Moreover, Foucault is often cited for the concept of discourse as a social practice which incorporates ideology and power to create a discursive self.