Bourdieu’s key concepts have inspired a wealth of research and invigorated intellectual debate not just in education but in the social sciences more generally (Grenfell and James, 1998; Murphy, 2013). Since gaining currency in the Anglophone world and further afield, Bourdieu’s concepts have been adopted by a wide range of disciplines and influenced a variety of knowledge areas. Education as a field of inquiry is no stranger to the work of the French sociologist. The Bourdieuian lens is now frequently used across the educational field to study different social phenomena such as class (Stahl, 2012), practice (Costa, 2014), policy (Rawolle and Lingard, 2008), and educational transitions (Burke, 2010). Yet, the development of explicit links between theory and method are less noticeable in the literature - links that Bourdieu was keen to encourage.  

What Bourdieu’s work offers is more than a conceptual framework. His contribution is as much methodological as it is theoretical. This paper aims to analyse the ways through which the Bourdieuian lens can inform embed itself in the methodological decisions researchers make when constructing their research instruments (Costa and Murphy, in press; Murphy and Costa, in press). Hence, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the application of Bourdieu’s work from a methodological perspective whilst drawing attention to various phenomena typical of a society in transition. To illustrate the application of theory as method in Bourdieu’s work we will use the concept of habitus as an example, as habitus lends itself well to the study of transitions both in educational settings and in broader social contexts.

Habitus has a special place in Bourdieu’s set of research tools, because it allows researchers to explain how and why social agents conceive and (re)construct the social world in which they are inserted whilst acknowledging their trajectories of practice and lived experiences. With habitus, Bourdieu aimed to access internalised behaviours, perceptions, and beliefs that individuals carry with them and which, in part, are translated into the practices they transfer to and from the social spaces in which they interact. Habitus is thus more than accumulated experience; it is a complex social process in which individual and collective ever-structuring dispositions develop in practice to justify individuals’ perspectives, values, actions and social positions (see for example Bourdieu 1977; 1990).

The purpose of this paper is thus to flesh out how habitus can be used as both theory and method. In other words, through which mechanisms can research ‘capture’, operationalise and theorise habitus? In doing so, we will aim to answer what (methodological and theoretical) contribution Bourdieu’s tools can make to education in general and to the study of transitions in particular.

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford University Press. Burke, C. T. (2010). The Biographical Illumination: A Bourdieusian Analysis of the Role of Theory in Educational Research. Sociological Research Online, 16(2), 9. Costa, C., & Murphy, M. (in press). The art of application: Bourdieu, Habitus and Social Research. Palgrave Macmillan. Grenfell, M., & James, D. (1998). Bourdieu and Education: Acts of Practical Theory. Routledge. Murphy, M. (Ed.). (2013). Social Theory and Education Research: Understanding Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu and Derrida. Routledge. Murphy, M., & Costa, C. (in press). Theory as Method in Research: On Bourdieu, education and society. Routledge. Retrieved from http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9781138900349 Rawolle, S., & Lingard, B. (2008). The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and researching education policy. Journal of Education Policy, 23(6), 729–741. Stahl, G. (2013). Habitus Disjunctures, Reflexivity and White Working-Class Boys’ Conceptions of Status in Learner and Social Identities. Sociological Research Online, 18(3), 2.