The practical importance of Bourdieu's analyses of higher education

ABSTRACT The paper issues a warning about interpreting any one strand of Bourdieu's work in isolation from the other strands but, nevertheless, attempts to effect a functional disaggregation in order to explore the practical implications for contemporary higher education of the educational research undertaken by Bourdieu and his collaborators over the last 30 years. The paper proceeds to represent the main features of that research—concentrating on the three emphases which correspond historically with the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s. The account of Bourdieu's work is, therefore, historical rather than thematic. This reflects Bourdieu's own contention that there is a continuously reciprocal relationship between theory and practice, interpretation and implementation. It does not at all preclude the possibility that Bourdieu's work might acquire cumulatively a relevance which is practically important in the present. By both describing and prescribing social events during the last 30 years, Bourdieu's work—now seen as a corpus of research—has contrived to accommodate and transcend those events in such a way that it now offers a perspective on current developments which escapes the self-fulfilling character of educational research which is solely the product of present concerns and problem definitions. The paper tries to use the detachment which has been constructed in this way out of historical involvement to reflect, within Bourdieu's conceptual framework, on some of the prevailing features of current thought and practice in higher education including, for instance, the practice of accrediting prior learning. It argues, finally, that the tendency for separate institutions to become socially homogeneous in order to present clearly differentiated corporate identities has implications for the practice of higher education research. It means that researchers must be sensitive about their own institutional position, and it also means that the sociology of education needs to be rethought. The concentration on what happens within institutions of higher education has to be set in the context of a sociology of learning which will be able to analyse the trajectories of individuals in society to assess how they use an extensive range of learning contexts to find their way through the social system.