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UNCERTAINTY AND
UNINTENTIONALITY: A DIFFERENT
LINE ON BECK AND BOURDIEU FOR
THE SOCIOLOGY OF YOUTH
Dan Woodman
Youth Research Centre, Faculty of Education, The University of Melbourne
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
Many of the most common tropes for understanding social change within the sociology of
youth have been drawn from Ulrich Beck’s work on reflexive modernization. Within the
field, critiques of Beck, and attempts to understand social continuity, often draw on the
practice theories of Pierre Bourdieu. This paper suggests that work within the sociology of
youth tends to place both Beck and Bourdieu into a structure/agency framework, with
Beck seen as emphasizing agency and Bourdieu structure. In contrast, this paper
supports an alternative reading of both theorists as thinkers of uncertainty and
unintentionality whom, with many contemporary theorists, deliberately try to make a
structure-agency frame secondary in their work. Seeing the two theorists through this
frame points to several resonances in their work which may make a useful contribution to
how the field of the sociology of youth explores change.
1
INTRODUCTION
While claims of radical change should be made cautiously, there is now a significant body
of sociological literature claiming that the Western World, including Australia and New
Zealand, has changed rapidly since the late 1960s (Bauman, 2000; Beck, 1992; amongst
others). These shifts are seen to profoundly reshape all aspects of life. As young people
have lived their entire lives under these conditions, writers working within the loosely
bound field of the sociology of youth have shown a particular interest, compared even to
sociology’s general interest, in the question of social change.
As Furlong and Cartmel (2007: 8-9) put it:
[y]oung people today are growing up in different circumstances to those
experienced by previous generations; changes which are significant enough to
merit a reconceptualization of youth transitions and processes of social
reproduction.
Flowing from this interest, theorizing on a shift to reflexive or second modernity,
particularly the works of Ulrich Beck, has been influential in this field. Beck’s work is
often used to make a distinction between the choice biographies of contemporary young
people and normal biographies of the youth of their parents. Normal biographies refer to
the relatively predictable and linear move between set markers of youth to those of
adulthood, in paid work, education and household formation, amongst others, that is
seen to have characterized the youth of those born in the Western World’s post-World
War II baby-boom. Choice biographies on the other hand refer to contemporary
experience where more of the biography is seen as open to decision and in need of being
constructed personally (du Bois-Reymond, 1998; Dwyer & Wyn, 2001: 88; McLeod &
Yates, 2006: 84). Yet others point out that despite apparently radical transformations,
social inequalities still seem to follow predictable patterns (Teese, 2000; Evans, 2007).
Critiques of Beck within the field, and attempts to understand continuing inequalities,
tend to draw on the practice theories of Pierre Bourdieu (1977), particularly his concept
of habitus (dispositions based on social positioning). Lehmann (2004), and Evans (2007),
in their respective explorations of post high school transitions, in which both find class
and gender continue to structure the dispositions people form towards work and
education alternatives, draw on the concept of habitus to critique Beck for apparently
suggesting researchers should not expect to find such relationships. Both draw on
Evans’s concept of bounded agency which she argues fills a middle ground between the
agency of Beck and the structural determinism of Bourdieu and, ‘sees actors as having a
past and imagined future possibilities, which guide and shape actions in the present,
together with subjective perceptions of the structures they have to negotiate, the social
landscapes that effect how they act...influenced but not determined by environments’
(Evans, 2007: 91-92).
The sociology of youth has tended to places Beck and Bourdieu in a structure/agency
framework, as theorists of agency and structure respectively. While there are elements of
both theorists work which support these readings, as with many other contemporary
theorists, the structure-agency frame is at best secondary to their thinking. This paper
provides to an alternative reading of Bourdieu and Beck, as theorists of uncertainty and
unintentionality, which I argue will facilitate sociological explorations of the way young
people negotiate their contemporary milieu by providing an alternative to seeing the
degree of social change as bound up in the degree to which institutional constraints have
weakened.
2
2.1
DISCUSSION
A DIFFERENT FRAME FOR BECK AND BOURDIEU
BOURDIEU
Claiming Bourdieu emphasizes structure over agency is somewhat ironic as he contends
he created his concepts of field and habitus primarily to overcome the spilt between
subjectivist (agency) and objectivist (structure) positions (Bourdieu 1990). Bourdieu uses
the concept of social fields to represent the various sets of bundled socio-historical
relationships between positions secured by power operating through forms of capital and
suggests these fields stimulate particular collections of responses, or habitus, that
disposes people to certain values and actions (Bourdieu, 1977: 78-79).
Bourdieu has been critiqued numerous times for a deterministic tendency within his
writing, which it is argued seems to leave no room for autonomous decisions not driven
by the habitus which is in turn structured by positionality within the field (Butler, 1999).
While Bourdieu would argue that no decision can be autonomous in a strong sense of free
from any cognitive frames or dispositions, he defends himself against this critique by
pressing the generative nature of habitus (Bourdieu & Waquant, 1992: 136). Fields and
the habitus they engender limits, making some actions more possible than others, yet
there is movement across fields which may involve contradictory and dissonant power
relations, and a habitus produces the possibility of countless practices in a particular
situation, which when enacted will then in turn impact on the field and future
possibilities.
Bourdieu (2004: 127) suggested, for example, that his own habitus is split, and that his
ability to critique his own social context was heightened by this split. His split habitus
emerged from a personal biography that included a childhood in relatively meager social
conditions mixed with a swift rise through the French education system. In a sense
Bourdieu saw his own dispositions as pitted against each other, and suggested that
particularly in times of rapid change this split would become quite common. Habitus is
experience embodied in an actor, and as all biographies includes some conflicting
experiences and exposure to conflicting ways of understanding the world, hence a
‘habitus’ often faces conditions unlike those in which it was produced. As well as
potentially heightening the possibility of social critique, these ‘paradoxical relations may
result in a tormented habitus riven by the tension and contradictions of social
marginalisation which may ultimately form the source of social transformation’ (McNay,
2001).
As briefly explored, in the field of youth research, Bourdieu is seen as a theorist who
emphasizes reproduction and structure (Evans, 2007; McLeod & Yates, 2006). This
reading is correct in that empirically Bourdieu aimed to explore sociological problems
often concerned with social reproduction within a French culture that claimed to be
meritocratic, but alternatively, it is possible to read Bourdieu’s concepts themselves as
not carrying determinism within them. Habitus was conceptualized by Bourdieu as a tool
for empirically understanding the way a person’s subjectivity is both embedded in the
world and relational. The sociology of youth somewhat obscures the historicity of habitus,
the habitus is tied to historical forms and the content of the habitus is an empirical
question and, importantly for the sociology of youth, can and will, take different forms in
different eras. Bourdieu did see change as possible; for him reflexivity and change are
embedded in and are of the world and not some sort of ability to overcome this
embeddedness.
Beck
Beck is sometimes characterized as suggesting that all structure has receded to the point
where nothing can be taken for granted and everything has to be reflexively decided. He
is hence accused of failing to account for restraints on agency. Admittedly, there are
points in his writing which, taken alone, could suggest this (for example Beck and BeckGernsheim 2002: 51). However, I think his work is more nuanced than this.
Beck is primarily concerned with what he sees as a shift between high or first modernity
and second or reflexive modernity. Western high modernity had a social logic of
functional differentiation and clear-cut assignment of authority, a meta-logic of an either/
or distinction. Uncertainties existed in high modernity but were either excluded, or seen
as in principal being resolvable given enough time. This logic manifested itself in social
institutions such as the nuclear family and ‘career’ work, which provided relatively
unambiguous positions that strongly integrated people into society. Second modernity
was the result of a ‘modernization of modern society’ in a large part due to a recognition
of the unintended consequences, or unexpected side effects, of a push for more and
better technology, economic growth, and specialization (Beck, Bonss & Lau, 2003). This
weakened the relatively taken for granted boundaries provided by first modernity’s
institutional forms and hence they no longer provide the same strong social integration.
In these conditions the direction of the life course comes, on one register only, to appear
less prescriptive and more open to the choice.
Beck is not pointing to something after modernity where the principles of modernity are
completely transformed. Even in his early work he suggests that structural inequality in
developed countries shows much stability. Yet, he suggests, inequalities are no longer
perceived of as class problems or politically acted on as such and people ‘are now
compelled to make themselves the centre of their own life plans and conduct’ (1992: 92).
This can lead to what Beck calls brokendown biographies:
Living a life of one’s own therefore entails taking responsibility for personal
misfortune and other events… Social problems can be directly turned into
psychological dispositions: into guilt feelings, anxieties (Beck & BeckGernsheim, 2002, p. 24).
In the sociology of youth, Beck is often critiqued for overemphasizing choice in
contemporary biographies. Lehmann (2004) does this when he suggests that Beck
believes that researchers should not expect to find significant relationships between
social origins (class) or gender and post school plans. Yet Beck very rarely, if at all, uses
the term choice biography, but uses instead reflexive, or do-it-yourself biography and I
do not read beck as claiming either de-structuration, or people having more ‘real
choices’. Reflexivity for Beck is not reflection followed by choice, it is paradoxically an
awareness that mastery of either consciousness or the world is not possible and hence a
new bundle of social relationships forming around this dissolution of certainty (Beck,
et.al, 2003). The uncertainty Beck points to is not a breakdown in the basic principals of
modernity into unstructured pluralities; but a weakening of modernity’s institutional
forms – in previously fairly clear cut boundary definitions, such as the definition of a
family. Beck proposes that the contemporary milieu can be characterized by a form of
compromise between two or more fundamentally contradictory positions into single
formula for action, or a hierarchical pluralism (Beck & Lau, 2005: 542-544).
2.2
UNCERTAINTY AND UNINTENTIONALITY INSTEAD OF STRUCTURE
AND AGENCY
As with all theories, Beck and Bourdieu’s work contain tensions and are no doubt open to
more than one reading. There are differences between the two (for example, Beck’s
relatively cognitive biographical subject compared to Bourdieu’s relatively embodied
concept of habitus). However, I am wary of how useful it is to see this difference in terms
of structure and agency. Van Kreiken (2002) suggests that this dichotomy emerges from
a lineage of theory, through Talcott Parsons, interested in the question of what holds the
social together, in the sense of the Hobbesian ‘problem of social order’ or a tension
between order and chaos – an individualistic struggle for power, or ‘war of all against all’
that would emerge if each person was not somehow integrated into the larger whole.
This way of conceiving of the problem of order, and the various attempts to answer it, is
the basis for dichotomies such as individual, society, structure and agency (van Kreiken
2002). He suggests Bourdieu is part of a minority lineage within sociological theory that
starts from an understanding of the problem of social order as the tension between
human intentionality and, largely unintentional, social order – a lineage more concerned
with habit than structure and agency. With Bourdieu, Beck is also primarily interested in
unintentional outcomes, and theorizes the uncertainty arising when modern forms reflex
back on the institutions of modernity.
Contributors to the sociology of youth have drawn on an opening up of choice in personal
biography (agency) due to social change they link to Beck and critiqued it using
Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to theorize ongoing (structural) constraints on choice, to
show that some young people have greater resources for negotiating the contemporary
social milieu than others (Evans 2007; McLeod & Yates 2006). A generous engagement
with, and critique of, Beck and Bourdieu, one that looks for resonances between the two
theorist instead of using each as a resource to point to, and somewhat overstated,
deficiencies in the other, opens up new ways for the sociology of youth to pursue its
interest in the nature, of and responses to, social change, and build on these insights into
inequality. This reading avoids conceptualizing action as a zero-sum playoff between two
opposed positions, as seen in the concept of bounded agency – a concept that begs the
question of what exactly unbounded agency could mean. Both Beck and Bourdieu point
to uncertainty as, on one register, opening up new possibilities, through split habitus and
hierarchical pluralism, but having another register – closing down some possibilities,
leading to brokendown biographies and tormented habitus, concepts that seem to
resonate. This shifts the focus from structure and agency to generative (of possibilities
and anxieties) relationality. Conceptualized this way, neither Beck nor Bourdieu’s
theorizing is inconsistent with recent research showing that a majority of British young
people still hope for an opposite-sex life partner and two children (Smallwood & Jefferies,
2003). The point would be that this norm would coexist with the recognition that this
outcome is uncertain, and that other possibilities exist. In one sense, there are extra
possibilities opened up by reflexive modernization, but in another sense it is more a
recognition that normative, and desired, possibilities are at risk (Wyn & Woodman, 2007:
377). Beck has noted that late modernity leads to multiple responses, yet does not
theorize far into the processes behind this. As long as he is not seen as simply a theorist
of reproduction and structure, Bourdieu offer a resource for the sociology of youth to
explore the empirical question of variations in young peoples’ dispositional and positioned
capacity for adaptation in late modernity.
3
CONCLUSIONS
The characterization of Bourdieu within the sociology of youth as emphasized social
determinism, and of Beck emphasizing choice and agency, arises from conceptualizing
their work within a structure/agency framework. Shifting frames brings out some
resonances between the two theorists’ work. Beck suggests that a process of reflexivity
changes what seems normative and possible as a ‘dissolution of certainty’ normalizes
itself at multiple levels. Both Beck and Bourdieu point to this uncertainty as, both
opening up and closing possibilities and the resonances between their conceptual tropes
offers a resource that encourages the sociology of youth to remain open to the
possibility, in the face of clear continuing inequality, of new forms of boundary
management emerging in a social milieu in which no one can say exactly how this
management is to be done, in which people set variable, dispositionally driven, pragmatic
boundaries and have to constantly manage these boundaries.
4
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Tim Marjoribanks, Richard Woolley, Sarah Hinde and the anonymous reviewers
for comments on a draft version of this paper.
5
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