Research for Progressive Change: Bourdieu and Social Work Author(s): MaryahStella Fram Source: The Social Service

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Research for Progressive Change: Bourdieu and Social Work

Maryah Stella Fram
University of South Carolina

Social work research about poverty is complex, ideally blending academic efforts with a social justice professional agenda. But the translation between research and practice is challenged by a poor t between the increasingly dominant economic models used in much poverty research and the political contexts in which poverty is shaped and experienced. This article argues for the relevance of Pierre Bourdieus scholarship to a social work poverty research agenda. Accounting for class, conict, and the dynamics of the political economy, Bourdieus conceptual framework provides a map for contextualizing poverty and integrating research and social change efforts.

When you want to escape the world as it is, you can be a musician, or a philosopher, or a mathematician. But how can you escape it as a sociologist? Some people manage to. You just have to write some mathematical formulae, go through a few game-theory exercises, a bit of computer simulation. To be able to see and describe the world as it is, you have to be ready to be always dealing with things that are complicated, confused, impure, uncertain, all of which runs counter to the usual idea of intellectual rigor. (Bourdieu et al. 1991, p. 259)

Social work research about poverty is complex, ideally blending insights from academic and more purely intellectual efforts with engagement in a professional agenda that involves social justice. But the translation between research and practice is challenged by a poor t between the increasingly dominant economic models used in much poverty research and the political, messy, value-laden contexts in which poverty is
Social Service Review (December 2004). 2004 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0037-7961/2004/7804-0002$10.00

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shaped and experienced. This article is centrally concerned with the need to better align rigorous research with work for progressive social change, arguing for the relevance of the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu. Pierre Bourdieus scholarship has received little attention within the American social work literature on poverty. However, his theoretical framework is one specically focused on capturing conict, value, and the political elements within empirical research. By attending carefully to class, processes of domination, and the dynamics of an interest-serving political economy, Bourdieu creates intellectual space for thinking outside of economic models. At the same time, his formulation of habitus (1993, p. 87), which is dened in terms of situational agency, sheds light on the person in environment, tting well with social works dominant conceptual framework. It pushes that framework to better specify structural constraint, including the behaviors and practices of privilege that tend otherwise to be lost as background in the study of the poor. In these ways, Bourdieus theory provides an ideal framework for studying poverty and afuence in dynamic contexts, pointing to a more politically engaged policy practice and thus guiding research efforts that better reconcile science with the complicated, confused, impure, uncertain (Bourdieu et al. 1991, p. 259) world in which social workers practice and social policy is implemented. This article discusses parts of Bourdieus theory, explicating core components for social work purposes. It uses his central concept of social capital to demonstrate a way in which his theory can be operationalized and applied to the study of inequality. Finally, it considers the implications of using Bourdieu in social work research on poverty.

Bourdieu and Social Reproduction

Trained in both anthropology and sociology, Pierre Bourdieu combined eldwork, empirical study, and political action throughout his career. In moving between disciplinary settings, hands-on social research, and politics, Bourdieu confronted the inadequacy of the dominant theories of his time to explain how and why things actually happen in the social world. He saw limitations in the materialism of Karl Marx and in the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss (see Jenkins 1992, pp. 2441), the former failing to make adequate space for individual agency and the latter failing to account for the importance of material conditions. Bourdieus scholarship, then, should be understood as a response to the theorists who shaped his academic development, but it is a response that emerged through practical, engaged investigation as the driver of intellectual and conceptual claims. Personally and intellectually, Bourdieu took on the task of problematizing the structural barriers to mobility while afrming the value and power of the experience of belonging, or of ascribing to a particular

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social place. On the one hand, this led him to examine how and why mobility is miraculous (Bourdieu and Eagleton 1994, p. 272) in seemingly open social systems; on the other hand, this led him to resist valorizing or even naturalizing the lives and practices of people of privilege. Bourdieus scholarship centers on the conceptual reconciliation of structural constraint with individual agency. Loc Wacquant (2003) describes this reconciliation as a genetic structuralism which recognizes that the world is socially constructed by individuals but with instruments of cognitive construction that are themselves constructed by the world, that is, by history deposited in bodies meeting with history reied in institutions (p. 479). Individual agency, for Bourdieu, is situational and real; it is a historical and social construction; people themselves enact and embody the unequal societal arrangements that are the context for rationality, choice, and behavior. Arguing that individual experience is fundamentally situated in structural arrangements, Bourdieu offers a sociology that links the experiential everyday world directly and explicitly to the political economy. Particularly compelling is his analysis of the political economy as an interest-serving system that works to advantage the privileged classes to the detriment of the rest. Of particular interest for this article, Bourdieu seeks to make visible the ways that a capitalist economic system perpetuates class membership. He does this by drawing noneconomic domains of life into the purview of economic analysis. Arguing that the theory of strictly economic practices is a particular case of a general theory of the economy of practices, Bourdieu asks us to abandon the economic/non-economic dichotomy, in part by focusing on practices that are oriented towards non-material stakes that are not easily quantied (1990, p. 122). But why the choice of capital? Why the focus on encompassing all practices within economic analysis? The short answer is that Bourdieu presents capitalism as an underlying conduit of inequality, an arbitrary substructure that hides processes of reproduction in a guise of normalcy and neutrality (see Bourdieu 1977, p. 172; 1986). Explicitly attaching noneconomic interactions to their unstated but real worth in the economy is therefore intended to provide a more accurate evaluation of the distribution and dynamics of wealth and poverty (Bourdieu 1986). Such a move contextualizes inequality, locating individuals multilayered experiences of the social world with respect to the working of the political economy.

Rehumanizing Social Structure

Bourdieu portrays a social world in which the practices of daily life matter, intrinsically to those who experience them and as a window into the structural processes that organize a society. To describe the relationship between experiences and the contexts that shape them, Bour-

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dieu employed a cluster of terms: doxa, orthodoxy, and heterodoxy. These clarify the human, interest-serving, and changeable nature of social structure. Doxa is dened as that which is taken for granted (Bourdieu 1977, p. 166) within a social system. Doxa is a societally accepted subtext about how the world works, so natural and unspoken that it is unthinkable (p. 170) and thus not available to opinion. It is the primal state of innocence (p. 169), the framework through which domination is practiced, but practiced so subtly that it cannot even be questioned. In line with structuralist perspectives, doxa involves processes that undergird the everyday world. But in a more materialist vein, doxa is fundamentally contingent on what happens in that everyday world. Doxa is arbitrary and interest-serving. Yet, since it can only be sustained by its everyday acceptance, it is open to change. When doxa becomes denaturalized and questioned, generally through some crisis, the result is what Bourdieu calls heterodoxy, or the articulation of an alternative to doxa (Bourdieu 1977, pp. 16471). Heterodoxy is, de facto, disagreement with mainstream assumptions about the way things should be. But the emergence of heterodoxy means that doxa has been apprehended, embraced, and by some, nally rejected. As long as the natural is considered to be natural, people can be more or less satised with their lot in life, but there is no cognitive space for understanding why things are not better or even different, much less for seeing systemic causes for personal problems. Heterodoxy, then, represents a sort of lifting of the societal curtain to reveal hidden workings of the social order. Heterodoxy emerges in those moments when disadvantaged groups notice the behind-the-scenes players whose interests dominate the show. The emergence of heterodoxy draws attention to the ways in which domination is structured through social institutions, cultural norms, and taken-for-granted practices of daily life. Heterodoxy, for Bourdieu, is the necessary precursor of the awakening of political consciousness (Bourdieu 1977, p. 170). At the introduction of heterodoxy, those with an interest in maintaining the status quo respond by asserting what Bourdieu labels orthodoxy. Bourdieu writes, The dominated classes have an interest in pushing back the limits of doxa and exposing the arbitrariness of the taken for granted; the dominant classes have an interest in defending the integrity of doxa or, short of this, of establishing in its place the necessarily imperfect substitute, orthodoxy (Bourdieu 1977, pp. 16869). As an imperfect substitute for doxa, orthodoxy imposes a veneer of correctness to prop up what was once considered simply natural. Where doxa shapes the social and material world through the invisibility of its relationship to particular group interests, orthodoxy holds sway through the status, persuasiveness, and control of resources of the groups who claim and preach it. To give a concrete example, American society has reached a moment

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in which the previously assumed naturalness of the nuclear family is open to question. This is evident in the increasing proportion of households that break from traditional married-family composition (Iceland 2003; Xie et al. 2003). As a result, moralistic outcries against same-sex marriage (Spalding and Loconte 2004) and nonmarital childbearing (Fagan 2001) are connected aspects of an orthodox reaction to growing claims that the preferencing of traditional household arrangements is arbitrary and therefore questionable. That questioning, in Bourdieus terms, is an example of heterodoxy, or the introduction of an alternative to the doxa of the nuclear family. The battle between the heterodoxy of social liberals and the orthodoxy that has been labeled family values is captured in the culture wars that are manifest in much current political debate (see Graff 2002). However, the battle is not limited to the ideology of political rhetoric. Rather, within the popular media and public debate, calls for legal rights for same-sex partners, for inclusion of gays and lesbians as a protected class (American Civil Liberties Union 2003), for expanded child care (Institute for Womens Policy Research 2001), and for womens wage equity (Britton 2001) all reect cognizance that pragmatic challenges of daily life for nonconforming families are socially constructed and given potency in the real world through the imposition of nuclear family norms as natural and inevitable. In contrast, marriage promotion programs (Fagan 2001), welfare family caps (Kocieniewski 2003), challenges to lesbian and gay parents rights (Graff 2002), and bans on same-sex marriage (e.g., see Sussman 2003) reect dominant group investments in shoring up the naturalness of the nuclear family by mandating daily life practices that will ensure economic and social marginality for those who violate nuclear family norms. The separation between social groups (e.g., poor single mothers from more afuent married parents) is claried in the process by which doxa splits into heterodoxy and orthodoxy. That process delineates the conictual nature of group difference: what the conict is, how it is being played out, and what is at stake for each side. Ultimately, Bourdieu argues that capitalism is a particularly powerful current doxa in which the groups involved are classes with fundamentally conicting interests. The naturalness of the market, competition, private property, and work for wages is profoundly ingrained in the citizenry. This naturalness is reinforced in every aspect of social and institutional organization.1 But it is problematic for the disadvantaged that capitalisms practices and institutions function to maintain class boundaries and constrain mobility. To the degree that capitalism is perceived to be morally and situationally neutrala doxa commonly invoked in terms of meritocracy, survival of the ttest, and even freedom and individualismthe societal curtain remains down. People believe that they win or lose in the marketplace by their own merit or the luck

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of the draw, rather than because the market predisposes different groups or individuals toward different outcomes (Bourdieu 1986). In this context, possibilities for progressive social change depend on the formulation of a heterodox response to capitalism. Such heterodoxy requires better identication of privileged groups (the behind-thescenes players in traditional perspectives on poverty) and of the practices, institutions, and structures through which privilege is maintained. In Bourdieus words, It is only when the dominated have the material and symbolic means of rejecting the denition of the real that is imposed on them through logical structures reproducing the social structures (i.e., the state of the power relations) . . . when social classications become the object and instrument of class struggle, that the arbitrary principles of the prevailing classication can appear as such (Bourdieu 1977, p. 169). This observation is at the heart of much of Bourdieus work (in particular, see Bourdieu 1984), including his conceptualization of social capital. The link from the structurally oriented analysis of doxa, orthodoxy, and heterodoxy to individuals experiences of social location lies in Bourdieus formulation of habitus (Bourdieu 1977, pp. 7287; 1990, pp. 5265; 1993; also Jenkins 1992, pp. 6699).

Habitus: Real Autonomy in Critical Context

While attributing real potency to social structure, Bourdieu eschews an overly deterministic portrayal of the individual. There is space for agency, for change, and for progress in Bourdieus writing. That space is generally staked around habitus. Bourdieu denes habitus as the principle of a real autonomy with respect to the immediate determinations of the situation (Bourdieu 1993, p. 87). This denition warrants some scrutiny. First, Bourdieu is clear in attributing real autonomy to individual actors: even in the face of social structure, people do make choices. But, somewhat opaquely, Bourdieu hinges autonomy on the immediate determinations of the situation. Autonomy, it seems, is situational rather than complete or intrinsic. It is somehow caught up in features of daily life and thus does not quite correspond to the individualism at the heart of American political ideology. Moreover, autonomy is vested in an individuals time-bound understanding of the situation. Situations do not exist as objective givens but, rather, are the focus of autonomous action as they become meaningful to the particular individual in the particular moment. A person makes a determination as part of exercising autonomy. This suggests something like a rational choice framework for understanding individual action. But Bourdieu argues that rational choice, particularly as it is portrayed in economic theory, is only available to and meaningful for those individuals who possess the material and cultural resources

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through which proper economic behavior (Bourdieu 1995, p. 42) makes sense. For people of privilege in the capitalist economy, a seemingly innate rationality is learned. This rationality consists of the specic set of dispositionshabits, behaviors, mannerisms, preferences, tastes, skills, and tendenciesthat leads to success in the economy and the sustaining of a position of privilege. Although troubling for social justice efforts, the development of habitus among the poor involves a gradual acceptance of conditions of deprivation. These conditions reinforce and make natural the behaviors, preferences, and attitudes that sustain disadvantage. Deprivation, therefore, tends to be interpreted, even by those who experience it, as the consequence of an individuals inability or unwillingness to adapt and behave rationally, rather than in terms of injustice or political conict over resources. The concept of habitus creates space for contextualizing rational action. Habitus is a set of dispositions developed through a personal history of self-reinforcing experiences of ones social location. From the material conditions of daily life within his or her social location, an individual learns what is possible, appropriate, and expected. Each piece of learning works to socialize the individual to his or her location, making logical and natural the behaviors and choices that will keep the person bound to that location. For Bourdieu, autonomy is part of the process through which individuals construct the social world. However, the world is experienced as it is constructed, and it is shaped in each moment by the history of practices and structures that generate the particulars of a given situation. Autonomy is encompassed by habitus; habitus works to make logical the choices and behaviors that stabilize social arrangements. So, habitus disposes people of privilege to act in ways that maintain privilege, while disposing members of disadvantaged groups to act in ways that perpetuate their disadvantage. For example, youth from disadvantaged backgrounds may engage educational settings in ways that constrain opportunities, such that a students perceived distance from the social world and norms of his or her teacher leads to academic difculty. This difculty, in turn, leads youth to act out, to take low-level classes, to further distance themselves from relationships with teachers or counselors, and so on. In this way, disadvantage is reproduced through a progression of practices that reect not personal decits or innate preferences but the accumulation of messages, experiences, and symbols that have predicted, all along, a disadvantaged future (see Bourdieu 2000). Without seeing how this accumulation of messages takes place, how habitus reects social location rather than a persons intrinsic capacities, disadvantaged individuals are left to blame themselves for failure in the economic and social mainstream (Bourdieu and Eagleton 1994, pp. 26869). The value of Bourdieus intellectual project for a social justice agenda lies in the projects specicity about how to lift the societal curtain on

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the hidden structural and individual-level processes that perpetuate inequality. By lifting the curtain and specifying the privileged groups whose interests are served, social scientists can help make space for progressive social change. The next section of this article focuses on one concept within Bourdieus economy of practices (1990, p. 122) social capitalto demonstrate rst, how Bourdieus theory can be operationalized, and second, how incorporating Bourdieus theory into empirical research changes what is asked, learned, and understood about poverty. It should be noted that Bourdieu presents social capital along with cultural and symbolic forms of capital (see Bourdieu 1986, pp. 24158). The selective focus on social capital in this article is strategic, providing an example of the applicability of Bourdieus ideas to social work poverty research. Social capital is chosen over other forms of capital, because it has become a popular term in recent years and because it ts particularly well with social work interests, providing what Frank Furstenberg and Mary Hughes (1995, p. 581) describe as a conceptual link between the attributes of individual actors and their immediate social contexts.

Social Capital and the Study of Inequality

Social capital has been used in recent years to refer to nearly anything good and valuable about social relationships (see Fine 2002). As used in American scholarship, social capital theory primarily reects functionalist understandings of society (Coleman 1988), emphasizing adaptation and equilibrium through attention to trust, interpersonal helping, and community life as essential ingredients in a healthy democracy (Putnam 2000). Aligning well with the ecosystems perspective that frames much social work thinking (e.g., Meyer 1983), American strands of social capital theory support efforts to build community capacity, to encourage the poor to help each other, and to use social support and natural helping systems to deal with hardship. In contrast, Bourdieus conceptualization of social capital focuses on the conictual nature of a class-based society, pointing to structural barriers that make a self-help approach untenable for economically marginalized communities and individuals. Bourdieus thinking about social capital denaturalizes capitalist democracy, clarifying the interconnectedness between the privileged and the poor, rehumanizing those in power, and understanding their behaviors as intentional. Thus, Bourdieu illuminates processes and actors that tend to be invisible in social work discussions of the environment or in abstractions of power and privilege.

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Within the broad project of an economy of practices (1990, p. 122), Bourdieu formally denes social capital as the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network or more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance (Bourdieu 1986, p. 249). In other words, social capital is the value available to an individual through his or her social ties and networks. The value of social ties and networks available to any given individual is not, however, arbitrary or natural. Rather, the volume of social capital . . . depends on the size of the network of connections . . . and on the volume of capital possessed in his own right by each of those to whom he is connected. Further, The existence of a network of connections is not a natural given, or even a social given . . . [but] is the product of investment strategies, individual or collective, consciously or unconsciously aimed at establishing or reproducing social relationships that are directly usable in the short or long term (Bourdieu 1986, p. 249). Social capital for Bourdieu is how the experience of day-to-day social connectedness is translated into effects. As a concept, social capital distills felt aspects of friendship, camaraderie, and social support from the structure of opportunities for relationships. Social capital reects both the distribution of social others and the function of that distribution in sustaining and reproducing inequality. People invest in social relationships that they can use to meet their needs and goals. However, because people invest in relationships with people and groups who seem naturally available to them, some individuals networks are more powerful than others. This power differential goes unnoticed in efforts to explain why some people succeed in the seemingly neutral economy while others do not. On the surface, Bourdieus denition of social capital is similar to other, more popularized denitions. Michael Woolcock and Deepa Narayan (2000) discuss social capital in terms of the friends, family and associates (p. 226) in ones social network. Michael Foley and Bob Edwards (1999) refer to social capital as the use-value of ones network position and ties. And Robert Putnam (2000) uses social capital to refer to the strength and functioning of networks of association. In each of these formulations, the end-state essence of social capital includes what people can and are willing to do for each other. But the broader theoretical context in which Bourdieu conceptualizes social capital makes his idea more potentially useful to a social justice approach to knowing about and responding to poverty. Accounting for social capital within a capitalist economy involves identifying how and to what extent everyday relationships with family and friends accrue different value to

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people in different social locations. In this way, social capital becomes one piece of an expanded set of structural predictors of who wins and who loses in a purportedly neutral economic system. Recognizing all components in this set of structural predictors is important because it demonstrates that success is neither random nor fully explainable by person-level attributes. Accounting for these predictors therefore contextualizes individual poverty, providing evidence to shore up and legitimate a heterodox response to the assumed naturalness of inequalities produced through the capitalist economy. For social capital to be useful as a concept beyond the isolated realm of social theory, it must be as applicable as it is conceptually provocative. The next section discusses core propositions of social capital theory that guide the translation of Bourdieus broad thinking into more specic, empirical applications. Operationalizing Bourdieu: Social Capital as a Construct for Empirical Research Bourdieus view suggests that, because people in advantaged social locations not only have more money but also information, resources, behaviors, and opportunities that help them to further their advantage, social networks among people of privilege work conservatively to keep resources and access to resources within the group (Lin 2001). Social ties have real worth in the economy when they link individuals to others who can provide access to a good job, a good college, or a good deal on a home. However, that worth is hidden in the guise of friendship and relationships with family, coworkers, or neighbors. Similarly, because people in disadvantaged social locations tend to have resources, skills, experiences, and behaviors that sustain disadvantage, networks among marginalized individuals work conservatively. They preserve the ratio of too many people to too few resources. Social ties have real costs in the economy when they create a responsibility to share scarce resources and the burdens of labor, but those costs are hidden in the guise of family obligations, mutual aid, and solidarity. In this way, a social relationship is a resource that can facilitate access to other resources and exclude others from such access (Bebbington 2002, p. 801). This relationship is achieved through processes of inclusion and exclusion. Because these processes are embedded (see Portes and Sensenbrenner 1993) in day-to-day social relationships, they are a mechanism for enforcing group norms as natural and desirable. Such enforcement stabilizes the status and privileged position of elites. Hierarchy, Structure, and Location Social capital is a meaningful construct within social systems that are hierarchical (Bourdieu 1986; Burt 1992, 1998; Lin 2001) and that dis-

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tribute resources and goods unequally. A pyramid can be used to demonstrate this arrangement, with resources (i.e., money, prestige, information, political clout) distributed roughly equally between strata. The small point at the top and the wide span across the bottom indicate that when very few people split a pot of resources, each has more than if many people split that same pot. Thus, social hierarchies reect the intersection of resource distribution with population distribution. Bourdieu represents social domination in terms of multiple, interrelated hierarchies. Economic, cultural, and social capital are specic vectors along which resources are unequally distributed. However, social and cultural capital are disguised forms of economic capital (Bourdieu 1986, p. 252). Bourdieu argues that social and cultural capital produce their most specic effects only to the extent that they conceal (not least from their possessors) the fact that economic capital is at their root (p. 252). Thus, while there are multiple dimensions to social domination, Bourdieu sees these dimensions as stemming ultimately from the distribution of economic capital. In part, the doxa of capitalism remains a doxa because the processes that sustain economic inequality are hidden by the conversion of economic capital into social and cultural forms.2 Because individuals are embedded in hierarchical social systems, social location carries meaning about access to resources. At any point in time, people who are highly marginalized through lack of money and concrete goods are also likely to have decits in human and cultural capital. Otherwise, they would have converted those individual-level resources into more advantaged social locations. By extension, people tend to have more in common across the multiple domains of social and economic life with similarly positioned others than with differently positioned others. Citing a natural tendency for people to develop close relationships to others with whom they have much in common (think also about habitus), Nan Lin (2001, pp. 4654) posits differences between homophilous and heterophilous interactions as core social capital processes that sustain stratication. Homophilous interactions are those that occur between similarly positioned others. Because similarly positioned others are unlikely to have nonredundant resources to offer, homophilous interactions are not helpful for getting ahead and yield low return when the motivation for action is the desire to gain resources. Thus, heterophilous interactions, those that occur between dissimilar individuals, are necessary for mobility. These interactions, also termed bridging ties (Putnam 2000, p. 22) and social leverage (Briggs 1998, p. 178), may involve high levels of effort to bridge cultural, linguistic, lifestyle, and even spatial boundaries. Bourdieus broader project, an explanation of the reproduction of inequalities, can be integrated into poverty research through attention

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to the specic nature and quality of social ties and to the processes and social structures in which social ties take shape and are valuable. The next section presents examples of empirical research that accomplish pieces of this integration. Not intended as a literature review, this section aims to highlight how the incorporation of social capital into more traditional domains of poverty-related research can open up more structural understandings of the dynamics of inequality. The discussion will focus on education and work because the two topics are common in poverty research and are generally understood within economic models of rational action. The emphasis will fall on how Bourdieus ideas, particularly as expressed within social capital analysis, shift the focus of attention away from individuals attributes and behaviors to closer analysis of the political, societal, and institutional contexts in which individuals actions reect and shape inequitable material conditions.

Applying Bourdieu: Social Capital and an Expanded Poverty Research Agenda

Contextualizing Education: Human Capital, Social Capital, and Academic Achievement Measures of human capital are typically included in examinations of social and economic inequality. Conceptually, human capital refers to the value of an individuals accumulated skills, knowledge, and experiences (Becker 1964). Human capital theory, in general, indicates that individuals make short-term educational investments in order to establish long-term advantage with respect to earnings potential (Schultz 1961). The decision to invest in human capital is understood primarily in terms of rational action. It is a strategic movement within a properly functioning system in which better jobs are available to those who are better qualied (e.g., see Kiker 1966). From the strategic perspective, an individuals failure to adequately invest in education is seen as problematic. It reects personal deciencies and leads to other life challenges. For example, low accumulations of human capital are associated with families that are persistently poor (Axinn, Duncan, and Thornton 1997), single parent (McLanahan 1997), or welfare dependent (Peters and Mullis 1997). Low human capital is also shown to have negative effects, including reduced earnings (Neenan and Orthner 1996; Blank and Schmidt 2001), increased welfare use (Harris 1996; Zedlewski and Loprest 2001), inadequate parenting and problems in childrens behavior, well-being, and development (Yoshikawa 1999; Shonkoff and Phillips 2000, pp. 26796; Jackson 2003). Efforts to manipulate human capital as a mechanism for reducing inequality focus on opportunities for education within various marginalized groups, such as women on welfare (Hamilton 2002), low-income

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preschool-age children (Vernon-Feagans 1996), and disadvantaged youth making decisions about college (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Ofce for Civil Rights Evaluation 2002). For example, some propose giving greater exibility to welfare recipients who wish to pursue education in place of work. Proponents of this increased exibility refer to ndings that women on welfare are more likely to experience successful transitions into the primary labor market if they have a college degree. They have shorter welfare spells, higher wages, and reduced likelihood of returning to welfare than do less well-educated welfare participants (Harris 1996; Henly 1999). Efforts to correct human capital inequities by expanding opportunities for education are in this way justied by the promise that investments in education today will ameliorate future economic disparities. The implicit understanding is that an individual who increases human capital can subsequently improve earnings. Alternatively, a social capital perspective on human capital indicates that an individual-level attribute like educational attainment is inseparable from the context in which it occurs (DeFilippis 2001). Education is conceptualized with respect to the structure of inequality. Within that structure, educational opportunities are experienced, and educational attainment takes on different meaning for differently positioned groups. In work considered important background to the development of social capital theory, Glenn Loury (1977) challenges the traditional model of human capital development, drawing attention to social constraints on the dynamics through which human capital is developed and translated into economic mobility. Looking at income inequalities, Loury argues that equal opportunity policies are insufcient to reduce the income gap among races. Not only is black parents inherited poverty passed on to their children via lower-quality material and educational resources in the home and community, but according to Loury, young black workers lack access to the good jobs that should compensate for educational investments. Because black youth are excluded from information networks and social contacts that would help them translate educational achievement into labor force advantage, educational attainment takes on different meaning and value for blacks and whites. Inclusion of human capital in analyses of income disparities is problematic, then, if a high school diploma is evaluated in the same way for blacks and whites (i.e., scored as 12 years of education in each case). Such an accounting of education may collapse structural disparities, such as inadequate schools, lack of opportunities for connecting to the labor market, and even overt racial discrimination in education and employment, onto individual-level attributes. It incorrectly asserts that a causal connection between education and income can be generalized across diverse groups of individuals, perhaps explaining variability in outcomes in terms of cultural or individual dysfunction. Also drawing on the concept of social capital in relation to education,

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Ricardo Stanton-Salazar and Sanford Dornbusch (1995) examine how minority youths school success relates to the development and functionality of ties to institutional agents (e.g., counselors and teachers). Their study sample of Mexican-origin high school students includes youth who speak different languages at home and school. Students linguistic disadvantage leads to signicant barriers to accessing those institutional supports that would help in academic achievement. Experiencing more than simple language differences, minority youth bring a primary discourse of home and neighborhood to the school environment. This mismatch leads to supercial communicative difculties, as well as to deeper differences in cultural understandings of help-seeking behaviors and cues. In Bourdieus terms, the outcomes of this mismatch can be considered in terms of habitus and as decits in linguistic and cultural capital (see Bourdieu 2000). Stanton-Salazar and Dornbusch (1995) argue that among students for whom the discourse of home and school align, natural behavior in school works to demonstrate intelligence and academic potential.3 These students also know how to signal when they are having difculty and require additional support. They can signal for support in ways that elicit help without compromising positive regard. The signals are subtle but work powerfully to build social capital through the initiation and development of leveraging relationships that can provide specic resources for academic mobility (e.g., information on what classes to take, a letter of reference for college admission). Stanton-Salazar (1997) suggests that minority youth would benet from direct education in decoding behavior (p. 14) or skills that would allow them to translate between the primary discourse of home and other, secondary discourses, such as those at school or in the dominant culture. Teaching such skills could enable more equal access to social capital and other resources in the school environment. Invoking Bourdieu, one could interpret this suggestion in terms of its potential to reveal aspects of doxa. Through the denaturalizing of linguistic and cultural differences, and the opening of them as subjects for discussion, minority youth could gain access to more proactive and transformative strategies for investing in valuable social ties.4 Understanding how minority youth develop human capital, particularly with such nuanced attention to the cultural, linguistic, and social context in which the educational process is practiced, highlights the structure of inequality within the purportedly neutral and merit-based educational system. Contextualizing Work: Welfare, the Formal Labor Market, and Social Capital Paid work is the normative means of generating income. Not surprisingly, studies that examine economic marginality often focus on the extent and nature of work participation (e.g., Card and Blank 2000).

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Within poverty research, work is often examined as a counterpart to welfare participation (Boisjoly, Harris, and Duncan 1998; National Resource Council 2001; Blumenberg 2002), reecting societal preferences for the distribution of resources through the private labor market. This is evident in welfare-to-work and work-rst policies (see the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, U.S. Public Law 104-193). Within the empirical literature on welfare, work, and inequality, studies attend to individual-level predictors of successful welfare-to-work transitions. Such predictors can include higher levels of education (Strawn, Greenberg, and Savner 2001), age, marital status (Boisjoly et al. 1998), previous work experience (Harris 1996), and behavioral characteristics (Rector 2001, p. 264). Other studies focus more specifically on barriers to nding and sustaining employment, demonstrating, for example, that mental health and health issues (East 1999), lack of basic education and skills (Zedlewski and Loprest 2001), problems with child care (Brooks and Buckner 1996; Anderson and Levine 2000), and poor English-language prociency (Zedlewski and Loprest 2001) can constrain womens efforts at work-based self-sufciency (see Olson and Pavetti 1996; Blumenberg 2002 for overviews of work barrier research). Studies also address structural predictors of work participation, demonstrating that proximity to transportation, child care, and good job opportunities can shape work and welfare decisions (see Coulton 2003). Local labor market conditions and the adequacy of welfare benets and other resources (Bane and Ellwood 1994; Edin and Lein 1997) also play roles in womens transitions from welfare to employment. However, the emphasis tends to remain on the individual woman as a rational actor who calculates how to maximize opportunities even in a system that supplies limited options (Tickamyer et al. 2000, pp. 17576). A social capital perspective for understanding work stresses the signicance of social location within a hierarchy for explaining dynamics of stability and mobility, linking underlying processes of social organization to lived experiences of welfare, work, and advancement. Work is a loaded concept in American culture. It carries with it a package of meanings about worthiness, morality, and responsibility. In this way, work functions as an important context not only for generating income but also for acquiring and practicing identity and status and for shaping opportunities in the social world. Social capital theory offers one lens through which these multiple functions of work can be understood as mutually reinforcing and systematically related to mobility.5 Contrary to the notion that better qualied individuals nd better jobs and experience more success in the workplace, in an early application of social capital to empirical research, Mark Granovetter (1973) nds that properties of an individuals network of workplace social ties explain some of the variation in trajectories of advancement. Individual

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characteristics, such as skills, performance, and experience, are important predictors of workplace promotion, but they do not fully account for who is promoted or how quickly promotion takes place. Granovetter nds that workers who have weak ties (p. 1363) to coworkers who are higher up in the workplace hierarchy experience more rapid workplace advancement, due in part to the structural tendency for those to whom one is only weakly tied to have better access to job information one does not already have (Elliott 1999, p. 201). Ronald Burts work (1992) also supports this overall prediction but draws into question the role of gender in shaping the value of social ties for advancement. Burt (1998) indicates that processes of inclusion, exclusion, and legitimation assign women to outsider status in many work settings. As outsiders, women are constrained from developing the social networks to which men have access. Their weak ties fail to confer benets, regardless of the time and energy that women may spend investing in and trying to build those ties. Womens possibilities for promotion are thus shaped by genderbased practices of exclusion. These practices impede the development of and ability to leverage social capital. Womens most efcient path to promotion is consequently to borrow the legitimacy of a male coworker who will sponsor their advancement. From this perspective, work success depends on the gendered opportunity structures in which work activity is embedded. Looking also at the gendered nature of social capital in the workplace, Jennifer Stoloff, Jennifer Glanville, and Elisa Jayne Bienenstock (1999) use the Los Angeles Survey of Urban Inequality to examine relationships between womens network composition and work outcomes. They nd that, controlling for background and human capital characteristics, women with more diverse and extensive networks (factors of social leverage) are more likely to be working for pay. This would be expected by social capital theory. However, they nd that women also require strong social support in their networks, because the strong ties available to women (typically other women) are more willing to help with child care. Without the combination of resources for child care and resources for work advancement, the balance of work and home life cannot be maintained, and women cannot translate opportunities for advancement into actual workplace gains. Again, success in the workplace is partially explained by structural factors. In this case, these factors are the availability of diverse social others who can shore up packages of resources to meet womens competing needs to work and parent. Social capital does not see work success as an isolated experience of the worker, who strives within a work hierarchy and succeeds because of individual-level attributes. The application of social capital theory instead fosters a view of womens work at the juncture of labor market, family, and broader societal systems. These

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systems simultaneously shape employment opportunities while assigning women the bulk of unpaid childrearing work. In this way, social capital analysis highlights work as a multilayered practice that has different demands and effects in the social world. These depend in part on person- and family-level attributes of the worker but also on a gendered structuring of social and economic arrangements.6 We now turn from gender to class considerations. James Elliott (1999) examines social capital and work outcomes among less educated urban job seekers. Finding that less educated workers in high-poverty neighborhoods tend to use informal rather than formal job search strategies, Elliott demonstrates that the use of social support ties is most likely to lead to job acquisition but also leads to jobs with lower average wages. Elliott interprets these ndings to suggest that for less educated workers, extensive networks of family and friends help in a job-tting process. This is, in part, because job acquisition tends to be seen as the only realistic goal. The less educated workers job search success depends on nding a job, rather than on nding a good job. Therefore the lack of strategically placed social ties does not inhibit job tting but does keep less educated workers bound to less desirable jobs. In this way, the objective conditions of disadvantage are reproduced by the natural use of friends and family for help in nding work; workers are quickly moved from low-wage job to low-wage job. Such an analysis has real implications for the implementation of welfare-to-work programs. Participants are encouraged to accept the rst job they can nd, while lifetime limits on welfare participation make critical the stability of work arrangements and the long-term viability of wages to meet family needs. If social networks and the use of networks in the job search process are important predictors of employment outcomes beyond the simple dichotomy of work versus welfare participation, then it is critical to develop the knowledge base on how specic populations of welfare recipients can most advantageously develop and use social ties in the job search process. Such research would inform practices aimed at promoting work-based self-sufciency. Building on the network-level ndings, Elliot (1999) also nds that the negative effect of informal ties on earnings is exacerbated by neighborhood poverty, net of individual attributes and the particular network strategies used by individuals. Considering attributes at the neighborhood level reveals important relationships that work to more fully contextualize individual experiences. In this way, a social capital perspective helps to understand this complex relationship between individual outcomes and the structure of inequality (Wilson 1998, p. 509), making explicit the connections among qualities of individuals, social networks, and properties of neighborhood life. Such a perspective also suggests that difculties with nding a good job may be expressions of structural

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and contextual dynamics that reverberate down through neighborhoods and become manifest in individuals varying opportunities for friendship and family relations. In each of these studies, a social capital framework for the analysis of inequality suggests the presence of structural constraints on peoples day-to-day lives. It complicates perceived markers of individual deviance, such as welfare use, school failure, and work difculties, pointing to ways that even the proximal contexts of family and friends are related to broader social organization. Together, these studies illustrate how attention to social capital, in line with Bourdieus formulation, can be useful in social works efforts to understand and address poverty. First, while pointing to the structures of the political economy, the consideration of social capital focuses on the specic people, resources, and daily life environments through which structures are encountered and experienced. Social capital is measured in terms of individuals actual social ties and social networks, but Bourdieus broader framework provides a clear conceptual map that reveals how the functionality and composition of those social networks reect more structural domains of social position. For example, in assessing the social support network of a mother on welfare (Ceballo and McLoyd 2002), Bourdieus framework for social capital research would point also to the structural opportunities for both diverse and homogeneous ties (Briggs 1998), to the neighborhood processes that shape the moments and events in which social ties may be developed and reinforced (Fernandez-Kelly 1994), and to the interplay among local norms, physical and institutional environment, and the information and resources that are likely to be exchanged through friendship networks (Wilson 1987). By examining how the functionality and composition of social networks reveal structural factors, the inclusion of social capital highlights how the opportunities for social ties at any given social position relate to class conict, group conict, and often invisible practices of domination. For a welfare mother, the history of segregationist housing policies (Hirsch 2000), gender discrimination in the labor market (Lovell and Hartmann 2001), and race-moderated returns on educational investment (Holzer 2001) may shape the material conditions that initiate her development of a habitus; such a habitus makes welfare use both logical and increasingly inevitable. It also may be that the explicit decisions of elites regarding the proximity of public housing to the welfare ofce, good jobs, good schools (e.g., Coulton 2003), and perhaps even safe parks determine who that mother is likely to encounter as a potential social tie over the course of her day-to-day life. Bourdieus framework also enables a closer focus. It guides an examination of network functionality, composition, and value. It stresses the differences between the social ties that help one to get by and those

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that can help one to get ahead (Briggs 1998). A welfare mother may have social networks that are enormously effective in sharing food, cash, clothes, and other necessities during short-term emergencies (Stack 1974). Her network may be composed almost entirely of other welfare recipients who know well the ins and outs of making ends meet (Edin and Lein 1997). But, it may be that no one in her network has a good job or can provide information on job openings (Wilson 1996). There may be no one who has completed postsecondary education and can direct her to educational or work opportunities. There may be no one who grew up middle class, whose habitus makes accessible and natural the norms of mainstream parenting or work behavior. In this way, the nuanced representation of the value of social networks draws attention not only to who is there but also to who is missing from the social networks of people at the economic and social margins. A social capital analysis illuminates the absence of advantaged social ties, and that absence becomes more than simple personal preference or happenstance. It takes on political dimensions, as processes of inclusion and exclusion are seen to sustain class boundaries by constraining access to opportunities and resources for mobility. The social and spatial separation between classes is therefore an appropriate and necessary focus for intervention, particularly as part of a project for progressive change. Repoliticizing poverty in this way better aligns poverty research with the basic needs of political action, reconstructing poverty as class conict over resources rather than as an ailment of the unsuccessful. In Bourdieus terms, such a reconstruction strengthens a heterodox response to capitalism that can support the awakening of political consciousness (Bourdieu 1977, p. 170).

Conclusion
This article presents an argument for thinking differently and more broadly about poverty, about what poverty means, and about what the experience of poverty does in sustaining social arrangements. Reclaiming the political as a necessary domain of rigorous research, a Bourdieusian framework contextualizes poverty by incorporating seemingly noneconomic domains into economic analysis. The conceptualization of doxa, heterodoxy, and orthodoxy claries how privilege is sustained through practices of domination, particularly within a society where a capitalist economic system is accepted as natural. Bourdieus formulation of habitus sheds light on the ways that interactions between person and environment entrench social location within an individuals beliefs, preferences, and behaviors. These concepts, applied to empirical research, support a more contextual understanding of inequality. For example, attention to social capital demonstrates how class boundaries are sustained outside of market-based interactions through apparently

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natural preferences for relationships with similar others. As a whole, Bourdieus theory points to a complicated, confused, impure, uncertain (Bourdieu et al. 1991, p. 259) social world in which individual experience is intertwined with structural dynamics. In this world, the experience of poverty cannot be separated from the interests of privileged groups and the political processes through which such interests are expressed. For social work, one implication of Bourdieus theory is that the study of poverty is itself part of an interest-serving political process (see Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 47). Fortunately, social work is an interested profession. The Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers demands that social workers promote progressive change and insists that social justice is an enduring social work value, guiding all forms of social work practice. The professions interest in doing something about poverty is clear, and this interest demands a research agenda that rst and foremost seeks to inform progressive social change. Bourdieus theoretical framework is presented as one road map for such a research agenda. The map highlights social structure, class, and conict, emphasizing privilege as a primary context in which the experience of poverty takes on meaning and power.

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Notes
1. The interested reader should see Bourdieus discussion of misrecognition (1990, pp. 13541) that also addresses the imposition of capitalisms processes via its naturalness and invisibility. 2. It is interesting to consider that Bourdieu theorizes the differences between social, cultural, and economic capital primarily based on his observations of French society. For example, he notes that in present-day France, cultural capital may be one of the conditions for access to control of economic capital (1984, p. 120; also, see Bourdieu 1984, pp. 27, for related discussion of the historical role of tastes . . . as markers of class [p. 2] in French society). Current social stratication in the United States may map more directly

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onto economic difference, with the dominance and naturalization of the market subsuming differences in tastes, titles, family background, and culture. Comparisons of the nature and relative signicance of different forms of capital in different societies may be a useful direction for future research. 3. While outside the scope of this article, the discussion of cultural capital, linguistic capital, and symbolic capital in relation to social capital would further enhance analyses of educational achievement. For example, a students taste for literature that falls within the accepted canon is an aspect of cultural capital. Possession of this cultural capital works to identify a student as having academic potential. Social ties to teachers are consequently strengthened, as cultural capital is converted to social capital. When teachers then help a student gain admission to a prestigious college, social capital is converted to symbolic capital for the student, who reaps benets from the colleges reputation and, ultimately, from possession of a degree that symbolizes his or her afliation with that college. In the end, this symbolic capital is converted into economic capital that comes from the job market advantage gained from the prestigious degree. See Bourdieu (2000, pp. 5669) for discussion of such dynamics. 4. Stanton-Salazar (1997) critiques the educational system more broadly as well, dis cussing the role schools play in processes of cultural reproduction. In line with Emile Durkheims work on education, Stanton-Salazar presents the schools as neglecting to teach decoding skills as part of an interested process of social reproduction that stands in contrast to the rhetoric of meritocracy permeating educational discourse. 5. This discussion of work is intended to illustrate how Bourdieus theory can be operationalized in empirical research. Therefore, this discussion is intentionally selective in its focus on social capital. Economic, cultural, and symbolic capital are also at play and would be important to consider in a more comprehensive Bourdieusian treatment of work and mobility (see Bourdieu 1984, pp. 11225; 1986). 6. Bourdieus concept of social elds (1984, pp. 22656) is also relevant for representing the dynamics among gender, class, race, and other hierarchies relating to womens welfareto-work experiences.