Chris Shilling

Physical capital and situated action:a new direction for corporeal sociology

Pierre Bourdieus writings provide us with a powerful vision of corporeal sociology (an approach towards human relationships and identities that has at its centre the socially shaped embodied subject), and an understanding of the body as a form of physical capital. Despite his protestations to the contrary, however, a reproductionist bias pervades Bourdieus conception of social action, making it difficult for him to account theoretically for those individuals who deviate from the class trajectories ‘assigned’ them during their formative years. After exploring the idea of physical capital implicit within Bourdieus work, this article places this conception of the body on a non‐reproductionist footing by developing the pragmatist notion of situated action. This conception of action is then used to illustrate how the relationship between social field and physical capital can result in not only a continuation of habitual action (and an associated accumulation of particular quantities and qualities of physica...Pierre Bourdieus writings provide us with a powerful vision of corporeal sociology (an approach towards human relationships and identities that has at its centre the socially shaped embodied subject), and an understanding of the body as a form of physical capital. Despite his protestations to the contrary, however, a reproductionist bias pervades Bourdieus conception of social action, making it difficult for him to account theoretically for those individuals who deviate from the class trajectories ‘assigned’ them during their formative years. After exploring the idea of physical capital implicit within Bourdieus work, this article places this conception of the body on a non‐reproductionist footing by developing the pragmatist notion of situated action. This conception of action is then used to illustrate how the relationship between social field and physical capital can result in not only a continuation of habitual action (and an associated accumulation of particular quantities and qualities of physical capital), but in action informed by crisis and revelation (and associated transformations in the individuals relationship with physical capital) that can aid our understanding of the education of bodies.

Reconceptualising Structure and Agency in the Sociology of Education: structuration theory and schooling

Since the 1970s there has been considerable debate among sociologists of education about the macro‐micro gap in educational analyses. However, educational research remains divided largely into the study of large‐scale phenomena such as social systems and national policies on the one hand, and case‐studies of individual schools and social interaction on the other. This split has had a number of unfortunate consequences for the development of the field. Most importantly, the dominant conceptions of structure and agency employed in the sociology of education are characterised by a dualism which makes it difficult to conceptualise adequately the processes involved in social change. In this paper, I briefly describe this structure‐agency dualism before critically examining three attempts which have been made to address this problem. The ability of structuration theory to overcome this dualism is then examined, and I conclude by arguing that this approach offers an important new direction for the sociology of e...

Sociology and the body: Classical traditions and new agendas

Reflecting developments in consumer culture, the politics of social movements, public health policy, and medical technologies, the body has since the early 1980s become one of the most popular and contested areas of academic study. The following discussion introduces this monograph by positioning the body as a subject within contemporary sociology, accounting for the disciplines historical ambivalence towards embodiment in terms of sociologys foundations, and tracing the factors behind the ‘rise of the body’ across the social sciences and humanities. Having examined the background to the subject, I then explore how this volume makes three main contributions towards the ongoing embodiment of the discipline. The chapters that follow explicate and build sociologically upon the legacy of sociological, feminist and anthropological approaches towards embodiment. They also apply these approaches to issues such as conflict, health, cultural differences and technology that have become increasingly important in contemporary society. Finally, they demonstrate the empirical utility of taking embodiment seriously via a series of case-studies that focus on body pedagogics. In so doing, they outline a new approach towards the body, able to combine a concern with social power, cultural (re)production, lived experience and physical change.

Social Space, Gender Inequalities and Educational Differentiation

Abstract The spatial dimensions of social interaction and reproduction have received increasing attention from sociologists in recent years. However, these issues remain largely implicit in most studies of classrooms, schools and the education system. In this paper, I argue that the study of social space should be integral to analyses of the relationship between educational differentiation and social reproduction. After examining the position of space in Giddenss theory of structuration, I focus on how space is used in schools as a resource in the production of unequal gender relations. Space is viewed not simply as a context in which interaction occurs, but as a phenomenon which both produces, and is produced by, gendered power relations.

Exploring the society–body–school nexus: theoretical and methodology issues in the study of body pedagogics

In this article I identify how developments in consumer culture, waged-work and health policy have informed our current interest in the body, before suggesting that Durkheims and Mausss methodological approach towards the external and internal dimensions of ‘social facts’ provides us with a valuable basis on which we can analyse the impact of these factors on those subject to them. Building on their interest in the corporeal internalization of societal trends, and the centrality of body techniques to the habitus, I then outline a new corporeal realist framework that can assist us in analysing the education of bodies. This focuses on the relationship that exists between the general forms of body pedagogics dominant within a society as a whole and the specific types of body pedagogies evident in curricula and schools. Recognizing these different terms as referring to distinctive phenomena helps us avoid the assumption that schools simply mirror society, highlights the importance of exploring the interactions between society and school, and sensitizes us to the need to investigate how social norms and policy initiatives are variously filtered, mediated and re-contextualised within the educational field.

Supply teachers: working on the margins.review of the literature

Summary Supply teachers are playinggrowing role in many schools across England and Wales as a result of staff shortages and in‐service training associated with recent curriculum initiatives and the 1988 Education Reform Act. This paper reviews recent research which has been conducted into the work of this increasingly important body of teachers. Supply teaching is usually a highly demanding form of labour, and supply teachers can be seen as an especially disadvantaged section of the profession.

The female bodybuilder as a gender outlaw

This paper is a sociological exploration of the female bodybuilder as a ‘gender outlaw’, a figure who is stigmatised not because she has broken a formal law, but because she has disregarded so flagrantly dominant understandings of what is aesthetically, kinaesthetically and phenomenologically acceptable within the gendered order of social interaction. Illustrating our argument with reference to a two‐year ethnographic study of British female bodybuilders, we begin by explicating the contours of this deviance – associating it with multiple transgressions manifest in terms of choice, aesthetics, action/experience and consumption – and explore the costs accruing to these stigmatised women. In the second half of the paper, we attend to the motivations and experiences of female bodybuilders themselves in explaining why they remain engaged in an activity rendered perverse by dominant gendered norms. Exploring their commitment to an interaction order based upon muscle rather than gender, our conclusion suggests these women offend the most fundamental ‘collective sentiments’, possessing no authorised place in the cultural consciousness of society.

The two traditions in the sociology of emotions

The sociology of emotions is an established specialism within the discipline and its products have become increasingly visible parts of the sociological landscape since the late 1970s. This specialism has also demonstrated, at least to its own satisfaction, the importance of emotions for social action and order, and for those related moral issues concerned with self-determined and other-oriented action. Paradoxically, however, the relationship between the sociology of emotions and mainstream sociology remains relatively cool. Emotional issues are still portrayed in many general accounts of the discipline as a luxurious curiosity that properly resides on the outer reaches of the sociological imagination. Just as unfortunately, certain sociologists of emotions have accused the foundations of the discipline of neglecting emotional issues, and have sometimes excluded classical theorists from their discussions. This chapter argues that emotional phenomena occupy an important place in sociologys heritage which has yet to be explicated fully by the sub-discipline. The subject of emotions, like the closely related subject of the body, may fade from various classical writings. Nevertheless, the major traditions of sociological theory developed particular orientations towards the social and moral dimensions of emotional phenomena. I begin by examining the relevance of emotions to the context out of which the discipline emerged, and then focus on how the major theorists of order (Comte and Durkheim) and (inter)action (Simmel and Weber) conceptualized emotional phenomena. The chapter concludes with a brief assessment of Parsonss contribution, and suggests that his analysis of the religious foundations of instrumental activism provides a provocative account of the relationship between values, emotions and personality that can usefully be built on.

Emotions, embodiment and the sensation of society

The study of emotions has attracted an increased amount of attention from mainstream sociologists in recent years, both because of its potential to provide an added dimension to the analysis of such subjects as social conflict, gender inequalities and the organisation of the workplace, and as a result of its relevance to theoretical and methodological debates which have long characterised the discipline. This paper suggests that some of the core questions facing this subject can be interrogated productively by engaging critically with the work of one of the most important ‘founding figures’ of the discipline, Emile Durkheim. What Collins (1988) refers to as the ‘underground wing’ of Durkheims work has yet to be fully utilised or developed by sociologists concerned with emotions, yet it provides us with a suggestive and provocative means of reconceptualising the gulf that often exists within contemporary work on emotions as malleable and controllable, on the one hand, and that concerned with emotions as intransigent ‘somatic states of being’, on the other. As such, Durkheims writings constitute an important resource for sociologists concerned with the ongoing project of ‘embodying’ the discipline.

Cultures of embodied experience: technology, religion and body pedagogics

Two trends have dominated recent sociological analyses of embodiment. There has, on the one hand, been a proliferation of analyses identifying bodies as the experiential vehicles through which we exist and interact in the world. On the other hand, this has been accompanied by a large growth in studies suggesting that technological advances have both increased our exposure to instrumental rationality and radically weakened the boundaries between humans and machines. Considered together, these trends raise an important question which has, however, been marginalised in the literature: if bodies are increasingly shaped and even constituted by the performative demands and invasive capacities of technology, what implications does this have for our lived experience of ourselves and our social and natural environment? In addressing this issue, our paper revisits Heideggers discussion of the technological ‘enframing’ of humans and asks two questions. First, what have we lost experientially by being positioned as a ‘standing reserve’ for technologically driven demands for efficiency in contemporary society? Second, can the analysis of religious attempts to reframe human experience provide us with a perspective from outside this technological culture that enables us to appreciate the embodied experiences, dispositions and potentialities of humans in fresh ways? Our approach to these issues proceeds via a comparative study of the ‘body pedagogics’ of modern technological culture and two, very different, religious cultures.