Practice Theory - Key Terms

Key Terms

Methodological individualism: A claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions. It is used to criticize the structural functionalist view of society as the determinant of individual behaviour and was advocated by the Chicago school (sociology). It suggests that macro social events and conditions such as wars, recessions and the crime rate should be explained in the terms of beliefs and actions of individual people.

Structuralism: A theoretical paradigm emphasizing that elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure. According to structural theory in anthropology and social anthropology, meaning is produced and reproduced within a culture through various practices, phenomena and activities that serve as systems of signification. A structuralist approach may study activities as diverse as food-preparation and serving rituals, religious rites, games, literary and non-literary texts, and other forms of entertainment to discover the deep structures (eg. mythology, kinship) by which meaning is produced and reproduced within the culture.

Structuration: Human agency and social structure are in a relationship with each other, and it is the repetition of the acts of individual agents which reproduces the structure (Giddens).Social life is more than random individual acts, but is not merely determined by social forces. There is a social structure - traditions, institutions, moral codes, and established ways of doing things; but it also means that these can be changed when people start to ignore them, replace them, or reproduce them differently…e.g. The Arab Spring.

Habitus: Collective set of practices/habits that individuals or groups do day to day. Bourdieu uses as a central idea in analyzing structure and human practice. The notion captures ‘the permanent internalisation of the social order in the human body’.

Agency: An actor choosing to act, the human ability to act upon and change the world.

Cultural capital: Assets which enable holders to mobilise cultural authority e.g., competencies, skills, qualifications.

Hexis: The way in which social agents ‘carry themselves’ in the world; their gait, gesture, postures, etc.

Doxa: Those deeply internalised societal or field-specific presuppositions that ‘go without saying’ and are not up for negotiation. A constructed vision of reality so naturalized that it appears to be the only vision of reality learned, fundamental, deep-founded, unconscious beliefs, and values, taken as self-evident universals, that inform an agent's actions and thoughts within a particular field, e.g. 360 days, 24hrs, 60 seconds.

Field: A structured social space with its own rules, schemes of domination, legitimate opinions. Bourdieu uses the concept of fieldor instead of analyzing societies solely in terms of classes. Example fields in modern societies include arts, education, politics, law and economy.