Research questions and objectives

This study examines the research habitus that has engendered in the higher education graduate level research and tries to open up new avenues of inquiry into the study of educational administration. In this respect, the present study traces two-tier approach to the qualitative and quantitative research conducted in the field of educational administration: one is the identification and examination of micro research units generated in the graduate level research, second is an analysis of the key themes in those units and characterize the research discourses relying on Bourdieu’s concepts of field and particularly the concept of habitus.

In this context, the major research questions of this study are:

1- What are the “micro research units” and “key themes” in the field of educational administration in Turkey?

2- What are the characteristics of the emerging ‘research habitus’ relying on the scholarly work within the field of educational administration?

In line with the arguments of this study, we focus on the research literature on educational administration through critical discourse analysis method and a theoretical framework that relies on the concepts Pierre Bourdieu’s field and habitus.

Theoretical framework

The central plank in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological approach is an attempt to transcend the dividing lines between subjectivism and objectivism. In rejecting the symbolic exchange formulations of practice grounded in objectivism, Bourdieu aims to construct a theoretical model for social practice. For Bourdieu, his theory of practice serves to uphold that classical social theory characterized by an opposition between objectivist and subjectivist approaches is problematic since subjectivist viewpoints define their center of gravity as “the beliefs, desires, and judgements of agent and consider these agents endowed and empowered to make the world and acts according to their own lights” and, in the meanwhile, objectivist views ground on explaining “social thought and action in terms of material and economic conditions, social structures, or cultural logics” (Postone,LiPuma, Calhoun 1993, 3) and situates social world “as a representation… or a performance…and practices are seen as no more than the acting-out roles, the playing of scores or the implementation of plans” (Bourdieu 1990, 52). Therefore, for Bourdieu, social life should be grasped with engaging in both “objective material, social and cultural structures” and “the constituting practices and experiences of individuals and groups. In sum, Bourdieu formulates a reflexive approach to social practice and society and habitus, field, and capital are the major notions within this approach.

    The concept of field is described as an arena for the social life where the position of a particular agent is relative to one another as a result of habitus and is certainly endowed with the appropriate forms of accumulated capital. Habitus, for Bourdieu, is “the system of structured, structuring dispositions…which is constituted in practice and is always oriented toward practical functions” (Bourdiue 1990, 52). With this definition, Bourdieu tries to transcend the opposition between constituting and constituted practice and formulates a “mutually constituting interaction of structures, dispositions, and actions whereby social structures and embodied knowledge of those structures produce enduring orientations to actions, which, in turn, constitutive of social structures” (Postone,LiPuma, Calhoun 1993, 4). Within this scheme, capital is a form of power for an agent to maintain and improve their positions in a field.

   In this study, the concepts of habitus and field are central to the understanding of individual and collective research practices that constitute a) particular research schemes (micro units and themes), b) a system of dispositions that perform continuity and regularity and the emerging problems concerning these issues.  

1-Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. California: Stanford University Press 2-Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. New York: Longman Publishing 3-Lipuma, Edward&Postone, Moishe& Calhoun, Craig J. 1993. Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 4-Van Dijk, Teun A. 2001. Critical Discourse Analysis. In (Eds.) Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton, The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publisher 5- Van Dijk, Teun A. 2005. Contextual knowledge management in discourse production: A CDA perspective. In (Eds.) Ruth Wodak and Paul Chilton, New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company