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From sociological fictions to social

fictions: some Bourdieusian reflections
on the concepts of ‘institutional
habitus’ and ‘family habitus’
a
Will Atkinson
a
School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies ,
University of Bristol , 4 Priory Road, Bristol BS8 1TY, UK
Published online: 13 May 2011.

To cite this article: Will Atkinson (2011) From sociological fictions to social fictions: some
Bourdieusian reflections on the concepts of ‘institutional habitus’ and ‘family habitus’, British
Journal of Sociology of Education, 32:3, 331-347, DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2011.559337

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 British Journal of Sociology of Education
Vol. 32, No. 3, May 2011, 331–347

From sociological fictions to social fictions: some Bourdieusian

reflections on the concepts of ‘institutional habitus’ and
‘family habitus’
Will Atkinson*
Downloaded by [University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries] at 18:44 19 December 2014

School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, 4 Priory

Road, Bristol BS8 1TY, UK
(Received 15 September 2010; final version received 14 December 2010)
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CBSE_A_559337.sgm

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10.1080/01425692.2011.559337
0142-5692
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w.atkinson@bristol.ac.uk
WillAtkinson
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&
Journal
Francis
(print)/1465-3346
2011
of Sociology of(online)
Education

This paper expresses serious 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, it argues that, from a
Bourdieusian point of view, they actually present several difficulties that
threaten not only to overstretch and reduce the explanatory power of the
French thinker’s concepts but to stifle analysis of the kinds of struggles
and complexities that both he and, somewhat contradictorily, the
researchers in question spotlight. Bourdieu had his own ways of making
sense of the themes raised, and although there is indeed a need to push him
further than he went, to say what he did not and to emphasise what he
would not, this has to be guided by consistent logic and not simply
pragmatic empiricism.
Keywords: Bourdieu; doxa; expectations; family habitus; institutional
habitus

Introduction
No one engaged in the studious examination of educational inequalities, partic-
ularly those related to the ever-contentious concept of social class, could fail
to notice the profound influence on the field exercised by France’s most
famous post-war sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. The concepts of cultural capital
– that is, the mastery of abstraction and legitimated modes of knowledge as a
socially distributed resource – and habitus – the agent’s action-generating
predispositions and schemes of perception based on a tacit anticipation of
objective probability – are now common currency in scholarship across the
globe and, to those of us who advocate a broadly Bourdieusian point of view
in sociology and social theory, this is obviously a welcome state of affairs. At

*Email: w.atkinson@bristol.ac.uk
ISSN 0142-5692 print/ISSN 1465-3346 online
© 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2011.559337
http://www.informaworld.com
 332 W. Atkinson

the same time, however, there seems to be a growing feeling that, useful as they
may be, Bourdieu’s concepts as he elaborated them are not quite enough on
their own to capture the messy complexities and myriad nuances of concrete
social life. This mirrors a concern registered in more general commentaries on
the thinker’s corpus (see, for example, Lahire 1998, 2003, 2005; Atkinson
2010a), but surfaces in educational research in conclusions that the renowned
model of reproduction presented by Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) four
decades ago – in which the dispositions of the dominant child inculcated by
capital-rich parents are held to harmonise with the academic demands of the
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school whereas those of the dominated do not – may well act as an indispens-
able overarching framework for interpreting empirical reality but that, the
closer one looks, the more intervening and cross-cutting influences never
considered by Bourdieu himself one sees. Researchers sympathetic to the
Frenchman are thus left little choice but to innovate and invent new, seemingly
consistent notions to make sense of it all.
Two such concepts, over a decade old and now steadily gathering momen-
tum, are ‘institutional habitus’ and ‘family habitus’, both of which boldly
aspire to extend the celebrated theorisation of practical action in a bid to
comprehend how the specific educational establishment attended – its ethos,
structure and self-conception – mediates or deviates from the dominant ethic
that Bourdieu implied characterises all schools and how this clashes or
meshes with the taken-for-granted expectations and practices of students’
families. Some schools, for instance, are focused entirely on academic
achievement and preparation for university, whereas others offer more voca-
tional and practical curricula and either prepare their pupils for the world of
work or struggle as best they can with their limited capacities to feed them
into the expanded, and distinctly stratified, post-compulsory sector. Invariably
this depends on the class composition of student intake – it is, in other words,
a tacit adaptation to circumstances – but the variety of family situations
means that some (more dominant) parents with children at the vocational
schools are driven to intervene whilst other (more dominated) parents with
progeny attending university-oriented institutions are overwhelmed by the
school’s demands.
An important finding indeed, and certainly one that flags the need for depth
and specificity within the Bourdieusian perspective. Unfortunately, however,
the use of the term ‘habitus’ in both cases is deeply problematic. As this paper
will attempt to demonstrate, in the spirit of friendly dialogue with intellectual
fellow travellers, not only does it violate conceptual logic and, in the process,
potentially reduce the potency of Bourdieu’s concept to naught, but it actually
threatens to smother analysis of the deeper layers of complexity and intricacy
that, as the researchers in question sometimes themselves paradoxically recog-
nise, are vital to a full understanding of educational inequalities. What is more,
it shall be contended, there already exist perfectly good means to grasp the
above processes in Bourdieu’s toolkit in a consistent way, even if, admittedly,
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 333

they need a little elaboration, making the notions not only unsound but rather
redundant as well.

The birth and infancy of a conceptual couplet

To make full sense of the critical comments, a little detail on the development,
definition and deployment of the two terms under the microscope is necessary,
beginning first of all with the initiating thrust in this intellectual development:
Patricia McDonough’s (1997) investigation of the principal factors shaping
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college choice among American high school students. Class, argues McDon-
ough, looms large, and in a manner familiar to all Bourdieusians, but so too
does something else: the influence of the specific school attended, with its
unique configuration of principles, practices and processes. The particular
experiences it provides refract, mediate and specify the impact of capital
possession to the extent that youth from otherwise proximate positions in the
social space of class difference envision starkly different futures and embark
on divergent trajectories within the field of higher education. Yet Bourdieu,
she discovers, has no means for making sense of this complicating factor – he
has, in her words, an ‘underspecified’ vision of the reproduction of educational
inequality in which largely homogeneous classes enter a largely homogeneous
educational system where all schools dance to the dominants’ tune and filter
out those unable to keep time (McDonough 1997, 107). There is no alternative,
she resolves, but to fill in the blanks of this abstract account, and thus, in an
effort to work within the Bourdieusian frame, she posits the existence of what
she calls ‘organizational habitus’.
Simply put, each organisation, in this case each high school, has its own
habitus – that is to say, its own predispositions, taken-for-granted expectations
and schemes of perception – just like the people who populate it, and this
serves to implicitly channel ‘the impact of a cultural group or social class on
an individual’s behaviour’, namely choice of college (McDonough 1997, 107).
More specifically, but a little confusingly, she claims that each school has four
‘habiti’,1 although it appears she is actually trying to convey that each habitus
has four components: the organisation and resourcing of college preparation,
the normative structure of the school (i.e. its envisioned ‘mission’), assump-
tions regarding students’ cultural capital possession and the role-expectations
and expertise of careers counsellors (McDonough 1997, 106–107). Elsewhere,
McDonough describes the organisational habitus more generally as the ‘the
view of the opportunity structure of American higher education officially
presented to all students’ (1997, 106), and as the ‘organizational culture’ of the
school which, communicating a specified version of class culture, acts to
shape students’ perceptions of appropriate choices (1997, 107).
A year later the notion was imported into British education research by
Diane Reay (1998a, 1998b), although under a slightly different name: the
‘institutional habitus’. Again the intention was to explore and conceptualise,
 334 W. Atkinson

against the undifferentiated analyses of others (explicitly Annette Lareau, but

implicitly Bourdieu as well), the ways in which the particular school attended
can impact upon not only the pupils’ habitus, practices and choices but on
those of their parents too. Conceiving it as ‘a complex mix of curriculum offer,
teaching practices and what children bring with them to the classroom’ (Reay
1998a, 67), but also the teachers’ expectations, prejudices and biases (1998a,
98; 1998b, 524–525), all formed in adaptation to student intake and, with that,
the anticipation of objective probabilities, she traces the divergent ‘habitus’ of
the two primary schools at the centre of her now well-known research, Milner
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and Oak Park. The one with a formal curriculum, the other with a much looser
set of prescriptions; one responsive to parents, the other largely dismissive of
them; one setting and demanding high standards of homework, whilst the
other does not – the two institutions, just three miles apart, differ so radically
in their practices that they inculcate valued resources within the children to
vastly different degrees over and above the actions and activities of the family.
That said, Reay (1998b) was also keen to explore how different parents
reacted in dissimilar ways to the respective institutions and, in so doing, decided
to build upon a term complementary to the institutional habitus and – although
presented as originating from the man himself in vague phrases such as ‘what
Bourdieu called …’ (Reay 1998b, 528) – first introduced incidentally, so far
as one can tell, by Gewirtz, Ball, and Rowe (1995, 185): the ‘familial’ (or some-
times ‘family’) habitus. This is defined as the ‘the deeply ingrained system of
perspectives, experiences and predispositions family members share’ (Reay
1998b, 527) on education; that is, the taken-for-granted, unarticulated assump-
tions about the child’s appropriate behaviour and likely trajectory (Reay 1998b,
525–526) – university, for example, as an impossible, a possible or an entirely
natural future, as Bourdieu and Passeron (1979, 3) put it. Although obviously
key to the formation of the child’s early capital possession, dispositions and
schemes of perception through the provision of information, advice and the
sense of what is for ‘people like us’, once the youngster enters the education
system it interfaces with the institutional habitus in a multiplicity of manners
depending on degree of match – clash, harmonisation, adaptation, resistance –
and generates a whole array of emotions (e.g. anxiety), practices (e.g. setting
extra homework) and interactions (e.g. making demands of teachers).
Subsequently Reay has, with colleagues, re-used the twin notions in fresh
research on uptake of higher education. Probably the only real conceptual
advance in this venture, however, was just after the new millennium, when
Reay, David, and Ball (2001) explicitly set out to develop and explore the
facets of institutional habitus. Acknowledging its multiple ‘gaps and rough
edges’ (Reay, David, and Ball 2001, para. 8.4), they proceeded to liken the
idea to what Basil Bernstein (1975, 38–39) dubbed the ‘expressive order’ of
schools; that is, the ‘complex of behaviour and activities in the school’ that
‘attempts to transmit an image of conduct, character and manner, a moral order
which is held equally before each pupil and teacher’, binding ‘the whole
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 335

school together as a distinct moral collectivity’, before then drawing on their

empirical material to demonstrate the impact of the quality and quantity of
careers guidance, a school’s links with and counsellors’ knowledge of specific
universities and a school’s position within the field of education on the range
of possibilities opened out to pupils. Since then, both the institutional and
familial conceptualisations of habitus have been mobilised with little elabora-
tion (for example, David et al. 2003; Reay, David, and Ball 2005; Reay,
Crozier, and Clayton 2010), the overt premise being that only through use can
concepts be verified and refined (Reay, David, and Ball 2001, para. 8.4),
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although it should not be overlooked that Reay (2004, 439–440), in discussing

the peculiarities and difficulties involved in seeing habitus as a collective
possession, has drawn a direct parallel between her two notions and Bour-
dieu’s conceptualisation of the class habitus.
Being concepts that appear to decipher a persistently observed reality and
nestle it comfortably within the popular, and oft-modified, Bourdieusian
framework, both the institutional habitus and family habitus have now begun
to find themselves subject to discussion, overview and application in numer-
ous handbooks, reviews and original research (see, for example, Thomas
2002; Slack 2003; Crossman and Osborne 2004; Tomanovic 2004; Severiens
and Wolff 2009). Undoubtedly the most significant recent contribution in this
assortment is Nicola Ingram’s (2009, 421) examination of two Belfast schools,
and not only because it styles itself as an explicit contribution to ‘the theory of
institutional habitus’. She sticks with the general understanding that the insti-
tutional habitus refers to the school’s taken-for-granted assumptions about the
purpose of education and its pupils’ probable pathways, and clearly and
convincingly discusses the patent differences between the grammar school and
the secondary school studied, but interestingly she also seeks to mine the
parallels between the notion and Bourdieu’s writings on the individual habitus
in a way that surpasses the efforts of Reay and her team. Two arguments stand
out in particular. Firstly, she contends, just as the individual’s habitus is both
structured – that is, formed by experience of particular conditions of existence
– and structuring – that is, the generative principle of thought and action – in
a constant dialectic, so too is the institution’s. Thus whilst the school’s habitus
moulds its individual pupils it is, in turn, remoulded by their actions, although,
reiterating a point made earlier by Reay (1998b, 521), the collective nature of
the school’s dispositions makes them rather more durable and resistant to
alteration by any one person (Ingram 2009, 424). Secondly, Ingram holds, in
precisely the same way as the individual agent’s habitus is the integration of
her accreted past experiences, the school’s habitus is a product of its accumu-
lated ‘history and experiences’, its past and present pupils and staff and its
perpetuated traditions (Ingram 2009, 424). It too is perched atop a ‘pyramid of
past life’, as Merleau-Ponty (2002, 457), inspired by Proust, put it, and it too
projects from the present deep into the future on the basis of its entire
Erfahrung.
 336 W. Atkinson

Three fatal flaws: substantialism, anthropomorphism, homogenisation

Let me repeat: there is absolutely no doubt that the empirical processes
unearthed by the various researchers above are genuine, significant and
evidence of a real need to add further flesh to the otherwise rather abstract and,
in some ways, homogenising Bourdieusian perspective. Indeed my own
research has documented the impact of expectations within the family milieu,
shown the effects of private schooling and demonstrated how attendance at
particular high-performing institutions at the behest of strategising parents
within the upper echelons of the dominated class can perpetuate social ascent
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(Atkinson 2010b, chapter 4, 77–105). But this does not mean that the way in
which they have been conceptualised by Reay and the others – through the
extension of the habitus to the collective level – is without fault. On the
contrary, these seemingly innocuous notions, when prodded by a little logical
inquiry, quickly erupt like the proverbial hornets’ nest with a torrent of debil-
itating troubles, three of which are particularly fatal.
Firstly, both concepts contravene the founding ontology upon which the
notion of habitus is founded: relationalism. As Bourdieu always stressed, a
habitus only exists in relation to the complex of fields and social spaces in
which it is embedded – the nature of the experiences sedimenting into it, the
situations it encounters and the actions it generates are, that is, defined in terms
of its being higher or lower, further or nearer, having more or less of the capi-
tal struggled over in that space and being more or less ‘distinguished’, power-
ful and so on vis-à-vis others, not the discrete amounts of capital or the
substance or essence of the experience or practice. In the case of the familial
habitus we thus immediately run into a problem – just what field is this
supposed to be situated in? There is no separate ‘field of families’ in which
each family derives its meaning – such a concept would be a nonsense – and
Reay and the others certainly never mention such a notion, or indeed any
contextualising field, so the only conclusion must be that they treat the family
habitus as a substantial property, a fixed essence defined in and of itself. This
is a problematic move on its own – given the heavily classed nature of the
family habitus, it follows that class is also treated as a substance rather than a
relation, unleashing all the difficulties inherent in that philosophy (such as
difficulty making sense of social change) – but it also jars somewhat with the
frequent appeals to social space and fields (or at least capital, which is inher-
ently relational) elsewhere. The only possible way out of this muddle, given
the more or less exclusively class-based expectations held to characterise the
familial habitus when used in practice, is to say that it derives its dispositions
from its place in the social space of classes – but then one must immediately
counter that only individuals are plotted in social space, not households nor
any other type of familial aggregate (Atkinson 2009). 2
The institutional habitus, on the face of it, fares much better on this front,
as the researchers often perceptively situate the schools and universities in ques-
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 337

tion within the highly stratified and struggle-filled field of education. But even
here there are several niggling slippages and inconsistencies. For example, both
McDonough (1997) and Reay, David, and Ball (2001, para. 3.1), lacking much
else to support their characterisation of the school as a habitus beyond expec-
tations and assumptions, tend to treat practices such as career guidance provi-
sion as constituent ‘aspects’ of the habitus when they would in fact be products
of it – although we may read off the existence of a habitus from the practices
it generates, one would not call a taste for fish an ‘aspect’ of the dominant class
habitus but a practice generated by its qua complex of dispositions toward
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privileging form over function based on relative distance from necessity. To

do otherwise is to treat the substance rather than the relation as the definitive
principle. Furthermore, Ingram (2009) casually shuttles between describing the
institutional habitus as an almost agential entity on the one hand and as the
social structure shaping pupils’ habitus on the other. This rests on Bourdieu’s
description of the habitus as a structure, but confuses two very different mean-
ings of that term. Habitus as ‘structure’ simply refers to the fact that it is inte-
grated into or governed by general formulae (such as a tendency to privilege
form over function, or symbolic mastery), whereas social structure unequivo-
cally designates the numerous webs of relations in which people are embedded
and which differentiate habitus-forming experience – namely fields. If a super-
habitus, rather than a system of relations, is said to be the ‘social structure’ shap-
ing individual habitus, then whatever else it might be it is hardly in line with
the fully relational conceptualisation of social life championed by Bourdieu all
his academic life. Of course the researchers could claim to be working merely
to the spirit rather than the letter of the Bourdieusian approach, to be aiming
for fruitfulness rather than faithfulness, but the danger in extending it thus, espe-
cially without the philosophical work necessary to sew up the gaps (i.e.
surmounting the relationalism-substantialism dualism), is that the concept of
habitus becomes looser and vaguer until little more remains than an ineffectual
synonym for taken-for-granted assumptions and expectations.
Secondly, the fact of the matter is that the kinds of qualities the notion of
habitus is supposed to convey simply cannot be extended to the collective
level. Just as Parsons erroneously ascribed ‘needs’ to systems, in other words,
one simply cannot argue that a supra-individual entity – whether the school or
family or, following the reasoning, why not such things as trade unions,
companies or states? – ‘experiences’, ‘perceives’, ‘has assumptions’, is
‘predisposed’ toward anything or, indeed, acts (in the sense that its habitus
generates ‘practices’) at all. Only individuals possess those traits and capaci-
ties. Ultimately this is because the habitus and all its components (dispositions,
schemes of perception, etc.) are necessarily corporeal or, to put it in broader
terms, organic; that is, rooted in the dense mesh of neural networks formed
through the strengthening and weakening of synaptic connections through
experience (Bourdieu 2000a, 136; see also Changeux 1985; LeDoux 2002). 3
Manifest in muscle memory and motor skills as well as declarative knowledge
 338 W. Atkinson

complexes and typification bundles, and working only through an emergent

consciousness characterised by intentionality in Husserl’s sense whether
intention is spontaneous or woven into a project (Atkinson 2010a, 2010b),
without this material base there is no habitus properly defined, only a baggy,
anthropomorphic label for shared expectations.
Appealing to Bourdieu’s notion of class habitus as some form of concep-
tual cousin to justify this move is no good either, because the two ways of talk-
ing about a ‘collective habitus’ are utterly different. For many, the institutional
habitus seems to qualify the school as an agent that – like Parsons’ needy
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systems – exists externally to individual members and thus (in so far as it is

held to generate practices) acts almost independently of them. Yet the class
habitus as Bourdieu talks about it is a completely different beast – it is not an
actor or agent, but merely a label for describing the family resemblances
between individuals situated in a certain section of social space. It is short-
hand; a heuristic tool similar to an ideal type for isolating the pertinent factors
that social proximates share to greater and lesser degrees. To say that the
‘dominant class habitus’ involves a taste for fish is not to say that some tran-
scendent entity therefore desires, consumes and generates practices involving
fish, but that members of that constructed class tend to display a predilection
for such food. Perhaps this is what Reay and the others are trying to get at –
that teachers in a school, or members of a family, simply have comparable
worldviews and thus act similarly – but the logic encoded in the language –
that the institutional habitus, for example, is resistant to change because of its
collective nature, that the school itself has dispositions, that ‘it’ struggles, that
‘it’ adapts and so on (see, for example, Ingram 2009, 427) – certainly implies
otherwise.
Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, the notions of familial and institu-
tional 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. What of the differences, contradictions, rifts, struggles and alli-
ances within the family on account of the gender, position in social space and
trajectory of each individual as well as size and composition of the family?
‘Cross-class’ families in which each parent could have a rather different vision
of the forthcoming trajectory of their offspring on the basis of their own capital
stocks and trajectory, clashing in everyday confrontations and compromises,
are only the extreme example of a general phenomenon – all manner of subtle
differences in capital possession and field membership, not to mention whether
they are step-parents, the situation of siblings, or whether the child is male or
female, will colour each individual’s expectations, involvement and interac-
tions and thus the child’s own capital possession (and hence performance) and
habitus (and hence choices) (cf. Lahire 1995, 2007). Likewise for the institu-
tional habitus: what of the effect of the individual teachers or lecturers, of the
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 339

‘mavericks’, the ‘light-touches’, the ‘rebels’, the ‘disciplinarians’ – in short, the

conservatives and the subversives – in the different subjects who struggle with
and against the vision and laws of the school instituted by the head teacher (see,
for example, Mac an Ghaill 1994)? What of the effects of the position in social
space, trajectory, gender, ethnicity and other features of the teachers on their
interactions with the pupils they instruct (see, for example, Maguire 2005)?
Contradictorily, some users of the terms often recognise precisely this kind of
internal variation – for example, Ingram (2009, 426f) notes the inconsistency,
dissatisfaction and devaluation of the teachers at the Belfast secondary school
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– yet the only way they could make sense of it with their chosen vocabulary
given that the habitus is supposed to be an integrated set of dispositions is to
claim that the school’s or family’s habitus is what Bourdieu (2004, 2007)
described as ‘cleft’; that is, divided against itself in some way. But unlike the
point Bourdieu had in mind – that a habitus can be essentially bisected follow-
ing contradictory experiences – the only recourse here would be to multiply
the number of clefts according to the number of individuals – which, of course,
dissolves the institutional or family habitus into the habitus of the individual
teachers or relatives and thus obliterates any need for the concepts at all.

From habitus to doxa I: the family spirit

How, then, to make sense of what Reay and the others rightly recognise with-
out falling for the sociological fictions of the familial and institutional habitus?
How to take into account the indubitable impact of kin, schools and their
apparent ethos and expectations whilst remaining at the appropriate ontologi-
cal level and making space for the analysis of individual differences and influ-
ences in a coherent manner? Well there is a way, and one surprisingly
neglected by advocates of the two illusory terms – the way Bourdieu himself,
beyond his obvious contributions to educational research, proposed. For the
Gallic thinker did in fact pen a succinct essay dedicated to unravelling and
reconstructing the thorny notion of ‘family’ (Bourdieu 1998, 64–74), which,
because it encapsulates and exhibits his entire approach to the social world in
concise form, can be not only easily harnessed to the specific theme of educa-
tional expectations but quarried for invaluable guidance in rendering the role
of educational establishments too.
The first step, says Bourdieu (1998, 64–65), is to apply the principle of
radical doubt; that is, to break with and bracket the pre-notions that plague so
much sociological inquiry and recognise that precisely the entity which Reay
and the others reify by ascribing it a habitus, the ‘family’, is a social fiction
(cf. Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 235; cf. Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and
Passeron 1991, 13–31). It is, in other words, a discursive construction, a cate-
gory of thought or typification bundle, but nothing more – there is no actual
ontological essence constituting a ‘family’. Only lay discourse, codified in
law, political debate and official statistics, constructs the ‘family’ as a distinct
 340 W. Atkinson

unit, a ‘reality transcending its members’, and, just like Reay and colleagues,
tends to talk of it as if it was an ‘active agent, endowed with a will, capable of
thought, feeling and action’ (Bourdieu 1998, 65).
Yet the next step is to recognise that, even if only a label, this typification
of the ‘family’, as a scheme of perception lodged within habitus, has real
effects on action and interaction. Invoking a common system of inherited
typifications and associations – ‘sister(hood)’, ‘mother(hood)’, and so on, but
also surnames – tailored to their own conditions of life, agents are predisposed
to recognise discrete others as ‘kin’ on the basis of certain labels and appella-
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tions and, with that, to feel a certain way toward them (affection, love, devo-
tion, loyalty, etc.) and act on that basis (care, assistance, dependence, gift
exchange, etc.) (Bourdieu 1998, 68). This ‘family sense’ or ‘family feeling’,
perpetuated through the generations, has the effect of integrating agents, says
Bourdieu, of making them feel and act like an exclusive unit, and, being main-
tained through narratives, maxims, celebratory occasions and photographic
displays (cf. Finch 2007), develops into a taken-for-granted sense of ‘family
tradition’ or ‘the family spirit’; that is to say, a family-specific doxa.
This latter term is taken from Husserl and used by Bourdieu (1977, 164ff)
to convey what phenomenologists describe as the ‘natural attitude’; that is,
utterly taken-for-granted beliefs about the world and existence, including a
sense of their limits. In so far as it only exists through the perceptions and doings
of embodied agents, a doxa is layered within the habitus, but it is analytically
separable from the latter concept in at least two ways. First of all, whilst the
habitus is the possession of an individual, a doxa transcends any one particular
habitus. Even if ultimately produced by particular habitus – namely those
possessing symbolic power – it is fed back into and sustained by multiple habitus
as shared beliefs and orientations. Secondly, doxic experience is only given by
the synchronisation of objective relational structures and the subjective percep-
tions of the habitus – any mismatch or sudden rupture and doxic experience
can be disturbed or even shattered, even if the habitus itself remains stable.
In an undifferentiated society, such as Kabylia, the doxa is a generalised
sense of ‘what is done’, specifically as it relates to the system of honour there,
but in differentiated societies like Britain, whilst there are still common doxic
perceptions perpetuated by the field of power (e.g. that the social world is
organised into families), there are also manifold specific doxai pertaining to
the multifarious intersecting fields and constructed ‘groups’ that have sprung
up. Indeed, doxai become the key means through which unity and unanimity,
the sense that people are ‘the same’ as one another in some respect or ‘belong’
to the same entity or field, is achieved in the face of difference. The
constructed ‘family’ is one such source of this, and, in so far as it shapes the
tacit perceptions of the possible and verbalised projections of those implicated
in it, and as it is inevitably shaped by the available (pooled) capital stocks and
the consecutive trajectories of the generations, it now becomes clear that it is
the family-specific doxa that Reay and colleagues reveal so vividly in their
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 341

empirical research. Attendance at university (especially Oxbridge) being

convention, following in a family business or trade, or simply getting work, as
‘what is done’, or higher education as an ancestral novelty but a reasonable
continuation of the steady advance of forebears – all these are so many
instances of the specification of the effects of class by the doxic expectations
generated by a constructed family history.
But where Bourdieu and the notion of family doxa provide an extra analytical
advance over the homogenising notion of familial habitus is in the final reali-
sation. For, once we have broken with the common constructions of the social
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world in order to demonstrate their effects, it becomes clear that, as well as being
the source of mutual affection and interdependence, the ‘family’, as a network
of agents disposed to perceive each other as close kin, tends to operate as a field
(Bourdieu 1998, 68–71). Structured above all by age, gender and capital posses-
sion, but also flavoured by the complex of fields in which the individual
members are engaged (or their ‘social surfaces’, as Bourdieu 2000b called
them), agents are locked in struggles to conserve or subvert the familial doxa
(or nomos, to use the proper term for a field-orienting doxa). In concrete terms
this means they vie to ensure or challenge the perpetuation of the constructed
tradition, or elements thereof – educational or occupational trajectories, but also
political allegiances, lifestyle practices, tastes, and so on – into the future. 4 Obvi-
ously this varies to different degrees in different familial fields, from near
harmony through subtle differences and minor struggles to open conflicts
(between husband and wife, adults and children, or other divisions and alliances)
dependent upon a range of factors, and in the latter case a family doxa can be
splintered into an orthodoxy (an explicit affirmation of that once taken for
granted, especially by one or both parents, e.g. in terms of education, attending
university, pursuing medicine, etc.) and its antithetical heterodoxy (e.g. studying
an arts subject or discontinuing studies altogether) (cf. Bourdieu 1977). The
upshot in terms of formation of the early habitus and the choices that flow from
it will be as varied as the fields which produce them, from the outright repro-
duction so often taken to be the be all and end all of Bourdieu’s theory through
multiple shades of ambivalent, unsure or cleft habitus to a brazen rejection of
inheritance (cf. Bourdieu 1999, 507–513).

From habitus to doxa II: the school ethos

Unfortunately Bourdieu was never quite so elaborate on educational establish-
ments, but there is no reason why his logic on the family – and indeed on
states, regions, unions and classes – cannot be extended to them too (in fact,
for a hint that it can, see Bourdieu 1992, 250). So again the first step is to
recognise that, contrary to what the notion of institutional habitus implies,
there is no supra-individual ontological entity of a ‘school’ (or ‘university’,
etc.) – this is instead merely a category of lay thought imposed upon an
uncategorised reality, a bundle of typifications and associations to make sense
 342 W. Atkinson

of the flux of experience in which certain buildings, people and practices are
gelled together in perception at varying levels of anonymity, as Schutz would
say (i.e. from ‘a’ school to ‘this’ school). But once more we then recognise the
profound effects this categorisation has on action in so far as, just as with the
family, unions, and so on, schools are constructed in lay perception as
corporate actors endowed with transcendent demands and thoughts, of which
those engaged in pedagogic work are seen by themselves and others as
integrated constituents (what ‘the school’ demands, what ‘we’ do here).
Treated as a real, bounded entity, people act toward it thus and, in so doing,
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perpetuate the perceptual principle of division.

What is more, the typification of a specific ‘school’ is inevitably structured
by a whole array of more or less formalised factors, including the typical class
positions of the children defined by themselves and others as its ‘pupils’, with
perceptions of their likely individual and generalised futures, its officially
sanctioned sub-categorisation (‘grammar school’, ‘City Academy’, etc.), the
specific physical facilities paired with it, the resources flowing to its designated
treasurers and a more or less consciously constructed ‘tradition’ (a history,
mottoes, etc.), all of which are necessarily the product and producer of its posi-
tion within the field of education. This typification, in turn, engenders a school-
specific doxa amongst those who perceive themselves as part of it; that is to
say, an ethos which, if often formalised into a stated ‘mission’, is usually mani-
fest and transmitted prepredicatively through the individual practices, policies
and interactions it orients. In the schools occupying privileged positions within
the field of education investigated by Ingram (2009) and Reay, David, and Ball
(2001), for example, the conscious construction and propagation of ‘long tradi-
tion[s] of superb academic achievement’ (Ingram 2009, 426) are fundamental
to the establishment and transmission of the classed doxai that hold court there,
the expectations amongst teachers that children should and will conform and
proceed to post-compulsory education are significant embodiments of them,
and the ingrained propensity to consistently punish transgression and to gather
and provide detailed information on universities, as well as all manner of other
teaching practices, are their products.
There is, however, another element of school doxa, or ethos, apparent in
Ingram’s (2009, 426) description of the role of the ‘principal’s address’ on the
grammar school website – where the tradition is presented, the academic focus
vaunted and the expectations and standards required made explicit – in setting
the framework in which those perceived as part of ‘the school’ operate: far
from being equally maintained, the construction of ‘the school’ (or ‘univer-
sity’) is also subject to what Bourdieu (1992, 248ff) dubbed the mystery of
ministry. This is the process through which, via specific instituted mecha-
nisms, a single person – in this case the head teacher (or vice-chancellor) – is
delegated the task of representing ‘the school’, of speaking for ‘the school’
and its doxa, to the extent that they speak as ‘the school’ (l’école, c’est moi).
It is they who set and police the doxa, which includes the integration of the
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 343

discourse and practices of the state or, in the case of City Academies and inde-
pendent schools, sponsors and benefactors, respectively – generally represen-
tatives from the field of power in all cases – with the envisioned history,
mission, resources, and so on, of ‘the school’.
Yet, paradoxically, if head teachers possess the symbolic power to speak
for ‘the school’ and enforce its doxa, it is only because, as Hatcher (2005) has
briefly suggested in his examination of school hierarchy, they sit at the apex
of a stratified field in which educators predisposed to recognise themselves as
part of the ‘school’ (or ‘university’), with their different resources, disposi-
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tions and trajectories, contend. 5 This means that the doxa (or nomos) may well
– it depends on the dynamics of the individual school fields (e.g. number and
degree of social heterogeneity of agents implicated, autocratic versus demo-
cratic decision-making mechanisms) and their level of autonomy – be highly
contested, with different factions of teachers aiming to subvert or conserve the
doxa, opening it out into a struggle between orthodoxy and heterodoxy.
Obviously this can encompass challenge to those elements of the orthodoxy
imposed by the state on all schools under its control, in which teachers of a
certain disposition in one school field look to others in homologous positions
and, constructing themselves as a separate trans-school group and speaking
through a union delegate, take the struggle to the national level – this is the
case, for example, with the resistance to the conscious marketisation and
managerialism of UK education first pursued by the Conservatives of the
1980s and 1990s and continuing to this day (see Mac an Ghaill 1992; Hatcher
1994). Equally, however, it can involve smaller-scale field-specific exclusions
from and resistances to the constructed tradition, self-evident assumptions and
established practices of the particular school ethos, especially as they relate to
class (for example, Maguire 2005), gender (for example, Acker 1989, 1994)
and the new versus the old (as in popular images of youthful dissidents). In any
case, struggles and their consequences play out in a variety of sites – not
simply in officially designated meetings, but in the classroom, through teach-
ing practice, with all the attendant effects this will have on the pupils’ (or
students’) habitus, and in all the formalised (e.g. parents evenings) and infor-
mal (i.e. away from the geographical site of the school) interactions between
concrete individuals in which those with certain stances on the school doxa
encounter those with certain stances on a familial doxa. Sometimes there will
be a clash, sometimes there will be compromise or adaptation and sometimes
there will be harmony, but equally there can be all types of contradiction,
ambivalence and ambiguity sedimenting into young minds and setting them on
their individual trajectories.

Conclusion
This overview of family spirit and school ethos has necessarily been concise
and suggestive, but hopefully it nonetheless fulfils its purpose of demonstrating
 344 W. Atkinson

that there are alternative means for analysing collectivities and shared expec-
tations from a broadly Bourdieusian point of view. It may even encourage
others to take them up and pad them out. Yet it could be retorted that, even if
truer to Bourdieu’s vision of the social world, advocating this switch from habi-
tus to doxa is a little fastidious when in fact the optimal modus operandi is to
work with and against Bourdieu in the business of empirical practice; that is,
to be unafraid to deviate from the famed thinker when findings demand it. But
this kind of pragmatic empiricism, although not entirely without fruit, has
limits. For the confirmations and falsifications of the empirical world are only
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one element of concept formation; the other is and must be logical vigilance
(Bourdieu, Chamboredon, and Passeron 1991).
Thus, without falling into the theoreticist trap of fashioning concepts for the
sake of neatness or synthesis rather than explanation and illumination of
concrete processes, I have tried to show through reason rather than original
research that treating families and educational institutions as habitus falls foul
of a trio of fallacies – substantialism, anthropomorphism and homogenisation.
The result is not only that the habitus is detached from the ontological frame-
work in which it was forged and reduced to little more than a needless synonym
for unspoken expectations, which alone are neither (given its relationality and
corporeality) exhaustive of nor (given the existence of doxai and nomoi)
confined to the habitus according to Bourdieu, but that proper analysis of the
intricacies of educational inequality is endangered. The latter consequence is
particularly troubling, for, to twist Marx’s famous formula, if sociologists are
to contribute toward changing the world in any meaningful way it is necessary
for them to interpret it, to understand and explain it, rigorously first.

Notes
1. There seems to be no shortage of confusion, especially at conferences but also in
print (including Bourdieu’s own writings in English), over the plural form of the
Latin word habitus. ‘Habituses’ and, as in this case, ‘habiti’ have both appeared,
but in actual fact the correct plural form of habitus, as far as I am aware, is simply
habitus.
2. Although, as mentioned earlier, it is sometimes implied that Bourdieu himself did
or would have used the notion of familial habitus, I can find only one instance of
the term in his corpus, qualified with parentheses. He is, however, referring to the
habitus of the individual acquired through family relations, not the habitus as a
possession of the family (Bourdieu 2004, 43).
3. Of course one can also say non-living physical entities possess dispositions – for
example, ice has a disposition to melt when heated – but I doubt Reay and the
others would rather liken the institutional habitus to such regularities.
4. Although it does not negate the general point I was making (that there is more to
the social world than fields alone), this seems to go some way toward answering a
question I have posed elsewhere – just what field is the young child in (Atkinson
2010a)? They are, one could respond, in the familial field, and this acts to mediate
the influence upon their habitus of all other fields and relations within which the
other family members are situated.
 British Journal of Sociology of Education 345

5. In fact Reay, Crozier and Clayton (2009) have themselves indicated (without
any elaboration) that educational institutions may be treated as fields, but the
same line-up happily returned to the language of institutional habitus a year later
(Reay, Crozier and Clayton 2010) without mention of how to cohere these diver-
gent conceptualisations. Perhaps it could be argued that to conceive of an institu-
tion as at one moment a habitus and the next as a field is a matter of focusing on
different aspects of it depending on the topic at hand, apparently following the
Bourdieusian logic of concepts as tools. Yet, in so far as scientific constructs are
fashioned to interrogate and, in Bachelard’s sense, approximate the intricate
workings of reality rather than loosely categorise empirical observations, they
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cannot simply be swapped around at will. Tools they may be, in other words,
but trying to use the notion of habitus rather than doxa and field to analyse the
workings of ‘schools’ (etc.), whatever aspect one is interested in, is rather like
trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver when the hammer is right there.
Perhaps part of the confusion here lies in the assumption that, if habitus and
field are mutually constitutive, and if institutions are placed in the (primary,
secondary or higher) education field, then they must have a habitus. But I would
argue that the habitus corresponding to the different fields of education are still
those of human agents – namely, those within the various school (etc.) fields –
as the field effects still only operate as they are internalised as schemes of
perception and dispositions. When, like Bourdieu (1996), one plots particular
institutions in fields, then, the names should be understood as shorthand for the
school/university sub-fields and doxai they designate and that mediate the
effects of the field of education.

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