Pierre Bourdieu

Since its conception as a discipline, sociology has consistently questioned the significance of agency and of structure in relation to the defining aspects of social reality, such as social organisation, hierarchy and action. Initially more concerned with structure, social theorists did not delay in providing the counter argument that was agency, sparking the structure/agency debate that is still relevant in social thinking today. More recently, attempts to synthesise the two have been made, where in this essay, Pierre Bourdieu’s take on the matter will be explored.
On the one hand, social theorists present the concept of ‘structure’ as an objective, external constraint influencing individual behaviour, where structure is the, ‘recurrent,
Considering this link between strategy and internalisation to social structures, habitus as an answer to the agency/structure debate can be explored by looking at how the two function within each other. As a ‘structured structure’ habitus sets limits to action when structure presents constraints to behaviour, but as a ‘structuring structure’ generates perceptions and aspirations, ‘dependent on the condition of which it is product’ (1984 p.170). It can explicitly be said that the structure an individual is subject to, determines their social position, which corresponds to their necessities. Therefore choices they make will be based on practical evaluations that would also fulfil their interests and take advantage of their circumstance, and thus agency and structure are highly dependent on each other. Here can be stressed Bourdieu’s emphasis on the collective implications of habitus, where internalisation leads to inaccessibility, in that not every social world is equally available to everyone (Swartz 1997 p.106). However, at the same time this creates, ‘regularity, unity and systematicity,’ despite lack of conscious coordination within a specific social setting (Bourdieu 1990 p.59). Habitus
Fields, such as religion, politics or economy, are independent social spaces which provide the context that produce particular actions and discourses (Webb 2002 p.21), also taking into account the institutions relating to these fields. Essentially it can be said that habitus and field also work in a dialectical relationship where, ‘habitus is ‘at home’ in the field it inhabits [where] it perceives it immediately as endowed with meaning and interest’ (Bourdieu, Wacquant 1992