Bowen Paulle

Elias and Bourdieu

The primary goal of this article is to uncover the deep-seated conceptual affinities between Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias. The second goal is to demonstrate that, in part because of their diverging sensitivities, when taken together the two authors’ highly compatible approaches yield a vision more fertile than either of their sociological perspectives considered separately. Tracing the intellectual roots of the two author’s three core concepts – habitus, field/figuration, and power/capital – we show how they selectively appropriated from their predecessors. We then outline how each of the two authors used their overlapping triadic approaches to interrogate a range of empirical phenomena. Attempting to make the authors’ unexploited complementarity more tangible, we reflect on a simultaneously Elias- and Bourdieu-inspired approach to the body-centred world of sport. The conclusion argues that looking back at Elias and Bourdieu’s theoretical contributions together can revitalize our conceptualizing and investigating of human societies in the future.

The Integration Matrix Reloaded: From Ethnic Fixations to Established Versus Outsiders Dynamics in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, there is increasingly critical debate about the governments top-down ethnic categorisation procedures and the assumption that analyses of integration should be based on internally homogeneous (and dichotomous) ethno-cultural blocks. While concerns about the ageing approach mount, no unified alternative framework has emerged. Informed by Brubakers work on ‘groupism’, we provide an account of the currently dominant approach and outline an alternative vision of social divisions, exclusion and inclusion. More specifically, we offer a framework that can help researchers consider easing away from ethnic reification (as well as from the attendant analytic promotion of highly subjective notions such as ‘ethnic groups’) and towards analyses founded on more objective, ‘first-order’ social scientific categories. Making use of Eliass work on established and outsider dynamics, and dealing substantively with education, we flesh out how an alternative approach to in- and exclusion in contemporary Dutch society might be put to use. The goal, in short, is to assist researchers interested in a path leading to more grounded, relational and processual approaches to integration.

The burden of acting wise: sanctioned success and ambivalence about hard work at an elite school in the Netherlands

Sam and his classmates despise ‘nerds’: they say working hard in school makes a student unpopular, and that they purposefully do only the minimum to pass. Research suggests that such ‘oppositional’ attitudes are prevalent among working class students and/or ethnoracial minorities. Like most of his classmates, however, Sam is white, hails from a privileged background, and attends a selective school in the Netherlands. Deeply ambivalent about working hard and ‘acting wise’, Sam and the others constituting his adolescent society are thoroughly caught up in peer dynamics which sanction success and promote mediocrity. We link these anti-school peer dynamics to the institutional configuration of education in the Netherlands, characterized by rigid tracking at the end of primary school and non-selective universities: state structures and policies contribute to these privileged students’ rationale for ‘taking it easy’ and doing poorly in school.

Stumbling on the rehabilitation gold? Foucault vs. Foucault in San Quentin and beyond

This article examines GRIP, a rehabilitation program currently spreading through California’s state prison system. While most ‘violent offenders’ come to GRIP hoping to increase chances of parole, this yearlong program with four main components – stopping violence, mindfulness, emotional intelligence, understanding victim impact – is meant to create conditions in which inmates can ‘do the work’ leading to genuine transformation. A central claim is that due in part to the trauma-treatment model GRIP follows, inmates end up ‘stumbling on the gold’ and going through changes (involving recovery of an ‘authentic self ’ rooted in childhood) that helps enable skillful responses even to ‘moments of imminent danger’. Understandably, researchers of such programs may seek theoretical inspiration from the ‘dominant’ version of Foucault. Yet this paper sets out to change the conversation about prisons and rehabilitation in part by demonstrating the utility of the ‘other’ Foucault’s pragmatic recovery of body-based self-disciplining practices and regimes.

Beneath rationalization: Elias, Foucault, and the body1

Elias and Foucault ended up making the same core discovery about the same fundamental social process, which we term the ‘social constraints towards self-discipline’ process. We show how three distinct biographical and intellectual factors were important in guiding them toward this discovery: (1) their shared exposure to philosophical traditions associated with Heidegger’s break from Husserl; (2) their common, sustained contact with ‘clinical’ practices; and (3) the traumatic events each experienced in relation to intentional injury and death.

Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica

al horse. The case for the two-year law school is weaker today than it was half a century ago, the last time a serious proposal of this sort was advanced. There is more to teach now than there was then. Fields once ordered mainly by common law principles are often now tightly ordered by codes. One-time backwaters of the law, like immigration law and intellectual property, have become subspecialties with their own complicated jurisprudence. Clinics and courses in trial practice, negotiation, and mediation provide students with skills that may be learned on the job only with difficulty and at considerable cost to clients. Beneficent effects on debt are also less than certain. The stratification of legal practice and law schools would remain, and the best paying jobs would most likely be reserved for those with three years of legal education. Lower ranking schools might hesitate to offer two-year degree programs, fearing the loss of both status and tuition, and if two-year law graduates were less likely to pass the bar or to compete successfully for good jobs than graduates of three-year schools, they might be worse off financially over the long run, even if initially less in debt. Other possibilities that Tamanaha notes have more potential. Perhaps the best and most likely is correction through market forces, a process that could and should be hastened by greater transparency about the school-specific costs of legal education and bar and job success rates. The high cost of legal education does not mean that law schools are failing, but it does mean they are in trouble. Their troubles may be more acute than the troubles confronting other institutions of higher education, but they are not unique. Even if law schools, helped by a cooperative profession, have some leeway to lower costs without degrading the value of their instruction, fully adequate solutions are unlikely. Tamanaha’s law school focus is unduly narrow given the breadth of the problems that confront all of higher education today. The fate of law schools is inextricably intertwined with the fate of the universities to which most belong. Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica, by Deborah A. Thomas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 298pp.

Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational JamaicaExceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica, by ThomasDeborah A.Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 298pp.

23.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822350866.

23.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822350866.

al horse. The case for the two-year law school is weaker today than it was half a century ago, the last time a serious proposal of this sort was advanced. There is more to teach now than there was then. Fields once ordered mainly by common law principles are often now tightly ordered by codes. One-time backwaters of the law, like immigration law and intellectual property, have become subspecialties with their own complicated jurisprudence. Clinics and courses in trial practice, negotiation, and mediation provide students with skills that may be learned on the job only with difficulty and at considerable cost to clients. Beneficent effects on debt are also less than certain. The stratification of legal practice and law schools would remain, and the best paying jobs would most likely be reserved for those with three years of legal education. Lower ranking schools might hesitate to offer two-year degree programs, fearing the loss of both status and tuition, and if two-year law graduates were less likely to pass the bar or to compete successfully for good jobs than graduates of three-year schools, they might be worse off financially over the long run, even if initially less in debt. Other possibilities that Tamanaha notes have more potential. Perhaps the best and most likely is correction through market forces, a process that could and should be hastened by greater transparency about the school-specific costs of legal education and bar and job success rates. The high cost of legal education does not mean that law schools are failing, but it does mean they are in trouble. Their troubles may be more acute than the troubles confronting other institutions of higher education, but they are not unique. Even if law schools, helped by a cooperative profession, have some leeway to lower costs without degrading the value of their instruction, fully adequate solutions are unlikely. Tamanaha’s law school focus is unduly narrow given the breadth of the problems that confront all of higher education today. The fate of law schools is inextricably intertwined with the fate of the universities to which most belong. Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica, by Deborah A. Thomas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 298pp.

[Review of: D.A. Thomas (2011) Exceptional violence: embodied citizenship in transnational Jamaica]

23.95 paper. ISBN: 9780822350866.

Toxic Schools: High-Poverty Education in New York and Amsterdam

al horse. The case for the two-year law school is weaker today than it was half a century ago, the last time a serious proposal of this sort was advanced. There is more to teach now than there was then. Fields once ordered mainly by common law principles are often now tightly ordered by codes. One-time backwaters of the law, like immigration law and intellectual property, have become subspecialties with their own complicated jurisprudence. Clinics and courses in trial practice, negotiation, and mediation provide students with skills that may be learned on the job only with difficulty and at considerable cost to clients. Beneficent effects on debt are also less than certain. The stratification of legal practice and law schools would remain, and the best paying jobs would most likely be reserved for those with three years of legal education. Lower ranking schools might hesitate to offer two-year degree programs, fearing the loss of both status and tuition, and if two-year law graduates were less likely to pass the bar or to compete successfully for good jobs than graduates of three-year schools, they might be worse off financially over the long run, even if initially less in debt. Other possibilities that Tamanaha notes have more potential. Perhaps the best and most likely is correction through market forces, a process that could and should be hastened by greater transparency about the school-specific costs of legal education and bar and job success rates. The high cost of legal education does not mean that law schools are failing, but it does mean they are in trouble. Their troubles may be more acute than the troubles confronting other institutions of higher education, but they are not unique. Even if law schools, helped by a cooperative profession, have some leeway to lower costs without degrading the value of their instruction, fully adequate solutions are unlikely. Tamanaha’s law school focus is unduly narrow given the breadth of the problems that confront all of higher education today. The fate of law schools is inextricably intertwined with the fate of the universities to which most belong. Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica, by Deborah A. Thomas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 298pp.