From an emancipatory point of view it is essential to “…know more about want for a simple reason: individuals do not always, or often, know what they want, truly want what they imagine they want, or gain satisfaction from acquiring what they think they want (Levine 1998, pp. 1-2). The purpose of this paper is to develop an explanatory sociological approach of wants. We do this in relation to the concept of preferences of rational choice theory (RCT) (Becker 1996). By using one of the favorite cases of this theory, namely preferences prevailing educational choices and investment in human capital, we manage to show that the assumption of stable preferences is unrealistic. The want-lists of different student’s (n=27) demonstrate this. In this context, a want-list of an individual is defined as the relative ranking of each articulated want. These lists contain high levels of inconsistency from the perspective of RCT (Elster 1990): meaning that they violate the principle of transitivity (viz. irrationality) and manifest an indifference which is derived from the principle of completeness (viz. indeterminacy). We argue that this inconsistency arises because of radical uncertainty (Beckert 2002), denominated as epistemological opaqueness. Hence, here we argue for a stratified, multidimensional view of human being, where the want in question can have numerous roots (Archer 2000; Peterson 2001). Moreover, agents tend to have some kind of motivational factor that enables social, political and economic action, but the roots of this motivation is open ended (cf. Fitzgerald 1977; van Zanten 2005). Accordingly, our definition lies in harmony with an explanatory approach that seeks to understand why given wants arise in the first place. From this we propose an alternative approach to want formation anchored in the concept of the habitus (Bourdieu 1986) and reflexivity (Archer 2003). The habitus concept establishes the set of wants (merely the bundle of wants), whereas reflexivity conditions the want-list (the interconnectedness of wants). This approach both eases the problem of epistemic opaqueness and maintains that wants should be seen to form an organic totality. Wants could for example be shared by different social classes (e.g. education or work), but a taste will condition which object is legitimate object for want satisfaction (e.g. which education; what kind of work). Consequently, wants foregoing choices depends on the habitus and reflexive capability of an individual, which ultimately hinges on an agent’s ability to deal with micro-political affairs.

The empirical material underlying our discussion is collected from Swedish upper secondary school students. A total of 27 students from a vocational oriented (VP), and an academic preparatory programme (AP) were interviewed and asked to fill in a structured questionnaire. The students were first interviewed in focus groups, two groups in each programme, and later followed up by 8 individual interviews equally divided between the programmes. They were interviewed about their wants prevailing choices in education, and their vision of the future: more precisely, what they want to do and what they want to acquire. It should be added that 8 of the 15 interviewed in the AP were girls, whereas all in the VP were boys. Additionally, all students did also state their wants, prioritizing them, and reflecting over obstacles and possibilities in satisfying these in the structured questionnaire. Complementary interviews were also conducted with teachers, study-counselors, and headmasters.

The results of students’ want-lists were saturated by inconsistency. Firstly, different wants were commonly stated at the same order leading to indeterminacy; secondly, the same wants were stated at different rank which manifests irrationality. These inconsistencies could be understood as fundamental uncertainty (epistemological opaqueness) related to vocational and academic school environment and in the prolongation to class and gender habitus. From RCT’s point of view this poses a serious challenge and questions its basic foundation. We have tried to show that by applying the concept of the habitus and reflexivity synthetically, we could both ease the real problem of epistemic opaqueness as well as provide an explanatory approach of want formation. All in all, one important contribution has thus been to demonstrate that the study of human wants harbors greater potentiality in explaining choices in relation to its micro-political significance; that is agents’ interpretations and negotiations within prevailing social order.