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The Non-Unitary Habitus: Structural Individualisation and

the Challenge of Conceptualising Class for the

Contemporary World

(Word count 2978)

Abstract

This paper uses the concept of individualisation (Beck 1992) to contribute to the

development of a Bourdieuian inspired model of contemporary class inequality. I

argue that apparent contradictions between claims of individualised inequality and the

notion of class habitus appear reconcilable using the concept of a non-unitary habitus

(Lahire 2010). I suggest that people’s habitus is shaped by contemporary institutions

that place contradictory demands on people and suggest contradictory guidelines

which become a personal responsibility to reconcile. This suggests that the habitus so

formed will itself contain contradictions. Two types of inequality are highlighted that

follow from this model. Firstly some face a greater number of contradictory rules and

guidelines in the settings in which they interact and hence need to draw on and hold

together dispositions that are relatively more varied and contradictory. Secondly,

some have greater access to resources (tied to class in the broad sense in which

Bourdieu defines it) to successfully negotiate these contradictions.

Key words: Individualisation, habitus, social change, inequality, class

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Many sociologists of class see themselves in a battle with antagonists who are

proclaiming the death of class (see Atkinson 2007). Intriguingly, despite many

arguing against the death of class, it is relatively hard to find people arguing for it.

While several writers have suggested that traditional class identity is weakening, very

rarely has it been suggested class is no longer useful a concept at (e.g. Pakulski and

Waters 19961). The major contemporary sociologist of note who does appear to take a

strong position is Ulrich Beck. He has called class a ‘zombie category’ (Beck 2002).

In part due to this provocative claim and in part to his influence in sociology, Beck is

arguably the primary target of criticism from those highlighting the continuing

salience of class.

In this paper I show that Beck is not the clear-cut antagonist of class analysis that

many make him out to be. The first part of this paper briefly introduces Beck’s

argument and shows how it is often misunderstood2. The second section suggests that

Beck’s work appears not to ask researchers to abandon class, but to put forward a

challenge to rejuvenate our models of class for contemporary conditions. Drawing on

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (embodied practical reason), the final section suggests

a way that this rejuvenation can proceed.

Second Modernity and Individualisation

Ulrich Beck is one of numerous contemporary theorists who have a claim of

significant social change at the centre of their work. Very briefly, his sociological

writing is based on an argument for a shift in the logics of modernity – a process of

transformation, but not destruction, of modernity’s general principles due to a build-

up of ‘side-effects’ – that marks the beginning of ‘second’ or ‘reflexive’ modernity

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(Beck & Lau 2005). Standard institutional criteria for decision-making and

justification come under pressure from these side effects, but instead of an ‘post-

modern’ pluralism what emerges is a ‘hierarchical pluralism’ – a structured relative

plurality as people struggle for compromises that can combine contradictory

positions, or to proactively deny alternative positions in the face of growing evidence

(Beck & Lau 2005: 541-544). For individual biographies the effect of this shift is that

older, taken-for-granted assumptions about what is possible (for example for women)

are opened to questioning and there is a relative destandardisation of the life course.

This does not end biographical norms, but embeds them in this same logic of

hierarchical pluralism and demands a new type of active biographical management.

There has been a tendency among critics to see Beck’s discussion of a weakening of

older biographical norms and of active biographical management as evidence that he

is proposing that agency is being freed from structural constraint (c.f. Brannen and

Nilsen 2005). Although critiques tend to correctly characterise elements of Beck’s

argument, often they unfairly characterise or fail to recognise the way these elements

they fit together. What is missed, and in fact assumed to be the opposite, is that the

need for more biographical management emerges because of an increase in the

structural constraints people must negotiate. While some previous norms weaken or

disappear, for Beck and his co-author Beck-Gernsheim ‘it is in fact in the bureaucratic

and institutional jungle of modernity that life is most securely bound into networks of

guidelines and regulations’ (2002: 22).

However, while we face more rules, guidelines and constraints than ever before, these

have become less coherent across different spheres:

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[P]eople are integrated into society only in their partial aspects as taxpayers,

car drivers, students, consumers, voters, patients, producers, fathers, mothers,

sisters, pedestrians and so on. Constantly changing between different, partly

incompatible logics of action, they are forced to take into their hands that

which is in danger of breaking into pieces: their own lives (Beck and Beck-

Gernsheim 2002: 22- 23).

It is in this structural context that life becomes an individual project. While Beck sees

some positives in the breakdown of traditional expectations that often narrowly

funnelled life-course experiences, it is a misleading simplification to argue that the

structural changes identified by Beck are freeing personal agency from constraint.

They do however ‘individualise’ lives in two senses. Firstly, people are left to deal

with structural contradictions themselves. Secondly, the exact set of rules and

guidelines that each person is exposed to, and the exact set of contradictions is less

likely to closely overlap with others (for example sharing the same class position).

This makes it harder for a consciousness of shared structural position to emerge.

Re-animating a Zombie Category: Beck on Class

While I have argued above that the criticism of Beck for over-emphasises agency is

based on misidentifying the causes behind people having to more be more ‘active’ in

shaping their own biographies, it is hard not to concede the point that he is

challenging the extent to which class influences people’s lives. He has called class a

‘zombie category’ on a number of occasions (c.f. Beck 2002). Yet, in this section I

shall argue that Beck’s use of the term zombie category is less a claim about the death

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of class in lived experience as a challenge to sociologists to re-animate their concepts

for new times.

Labelling class a zombie category can be understood if it is seen within the context of

his general project of putting forward a wide-ranging challenge to the discipline of

sociology:

The main purpose of the distinction [between first and second modernity] is a

twofold one: first, to position the question of new concepts and frame of

references and, second, to criticize conventional sociology as empty-term

sociology, a zombie sociology. In a research study at Munich University on

‘reflexive modernization’, which I am in charge of, we are conducting long-

term research on subjects like these: how does the meaning of ‘class’ change

under the conditions of individualization and globalization? (Beck 2002: 24)

While arguing that contemporary class analysis is founded on a zombie category, this

appears to be a call to bring to reanimate the concept, not to finally kill it off. For

example, Beck calls his own sociological project ‘a kind of class analysis after class

analysis, which takes on board globalization.... [a] descriptive analysis of social

structure with the assumption that this analysis gives us a key to understand the

political dynamics and conflicts of globalized social worlds (Beck 2002: 26).

While arguably using the term ‘zombie category’ is overly provocative way to make

the point, it appears that Beck is being unfairly treated when this is used to suggest he

thinks class is no longer salient (c.f. Atkinson 2007). Beck can easily be read as

saying instead that class is functioning in a new way that class analysis is yet to grasp.

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For thinking about class in the contemporary world, I believe Beck’s most interesting

and potentially useful contribution is the at first seemingly paradoxical, but as I have

shown above coherent, notion that people now have to ‘redefine structure for

themselves’ not because structures are disappearing but instead because

contradictions which must be held together through personal action are proliferating.

Class Habitus and Contradictory Dispositions

One of the shortcomings of Beck’s work is that, despite regularly saying that people

must now actively shape the biography in the face of growing demands and structural

contradictions, his work has focused mostly on broad-scale structural change. A

philosophy of human action and an exploration of everyday life are needed to support

a class analysis of the type of contemporary world that Beck is theorising. He has

recently acknowledged this and, interestingly, in the same place suggests that the

model of human action that underpins his theory (and following this it would seem

should provide the basis of these explorations) is that of ‘practical experience’, which

works on the logic of habitus explicated by Bourdieu (Beck 2009: 207).

Bourdieu conceptualises social agents as neither determined by external causes, nor

guided by conscious rational calculation, but driven by practical dispositions:

[social agents] are absorbed in their affairs (one could also say in their

‘doing’) they are present at the coming moment. …. Which is not posed as an

object of thought, a possible aimed for in a project, but which is inscribed in

the present of the game… In other words, social agents have ‘strategies’ which

only rarely have true strategic intention as a principle (Bourdieu, 1998: 80-81).

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Beck’s interest in Bourdieu’s model of how people engage with the world is

important because the two tend to be taken as having a fundamentally different

understanding of how people engage with the world. A central plank in critiques of

Beck from a class perspective is the belief that he argues that as the structural givens

of the biography have receded, reflective choices are possible for all, necessary and

demand considerable deliberation (Brannen and Nilsen 2005). This is seen as contrary

to a Bourdieuian model of action based on dispositions differently shaped by differing

positions in the social structure. Yet, based on the reading of Beck I have given, the

possibilities suggested by this (for many seemingly paradoxical) affinity Beck is

claiming with Bourdieu can and should be explored.

Continuing with the sporting metaphor, Bourdieu writes ‘[w]hile the bad player is

always off tempo, always too early or too late, the good player is the one who

anticipates, who is ahead of the game…Because she has the immanent tendencies of

the game in her body, in an incorporated state’. (1998: 80-81). These incorporated

dispositions or the ‘habitus’ – along with non-embodied social (relational), cultural or

economic resources (or ‘capitals’) – are the basis of a social space of distinctions

(between those with a good or bad feel for the game) by which class emerges and

inequality is reproduced. Hence Bourdieu’s model of class is seen as nuanced and

subtle relative to earlier models. Despite this, at many points in his work Bourdieu

seems to talk about the habitus as a consistent set of dispositions shared by those

sharing a class position, who will in turn share the same general set of experiences.

Much of Bourdieu’s work assumes or claims a ‘unity’ or ‘fit’ between the various

dispositions that make up the ‘habitus’, and a unity of these dispositions with the

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circumstances in which they were developed and those in which the person with that

habitus now finds themselves.

Several writers have suggested that further nuance in the conceptual repertoire and

empirical understanding of dispositions is needed for a Bourdieu inspired sociology in

the contemporary world (cf Lahire 2003; Adkins 2004). Fitting with the vision

developed by Beck, social change and the results of empirical research suggest that

this unity of habitus should not and cannot be taken for granted (Lahire 2010). When

a unity or fit was assumed, the notions of disposition and habitus functioned as a

‘black box’ where similar tastes and actions between different people could be

explained tautologically by reference to a unified and transposable set of shared

dispositions or habitus (Lahire 2003). This same unity allowed Bourdieu to make

clear-cut distinctions between those with ‘ordinary dispositions and properly aesthetic

dispositions’ (Lahire 2003: 333). This black box needs to be opened up and the

relationship or fit between various dispositions and how transposable they are across

different spheres needs to be better researched and re-theorised (Lahire 2010).

Bourdieu began to do this himself in his very last works, talking of a split habitus that

would become relatively wide spread during periods of social change (Bourdieu

2008).

While not having a well developed model of the actor, Beck gives us, with the reflex

of modernity and ensuing individualisation, a picture of how social structures are

being arranged in the contemporary world, and through which particular types of non-

unitary habitus could arise – a set of dispositions developed by people living in a

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world infused and shaped by an awareness of rapid change and in which, to varying

extents, people must manage a proliferation of contradictory rules and guidelines.

In turn, Bourdieu’s theory of human action provides a way to think about how people

may respond to the types of inconsistent and individualising structures proposed by

Beck. Bourdieu (and also Beck, as he has himself recently stated) sees human action

as underpinned by practical reason, based on dispositions built through day-to-day life

engaged with others. Fitting with the notion of a plural or non-unitary habitus

proposed by Lahire (2010), Beck suggests that these dispositions are developed by

people living in a world in which, to varying extents, people must manage a

proliferation of contradictory rules and guidelines. For many people, these

contradictions do not allow them to make reflective choices between different options,

or on which disposition to draw upon. There is not enough time, consistency, or

predictability in the contemporary world as theorised by Beck to allow this kind of

slow reflection to take place. Instead, people must continue to rely on their

dispositions, their ‘feel for the game’ no matter how poor this ‘feel’ may be or how

contradictory their dispositions.

In this developing model it is not possible to link a unitary and transposable set of

dispositions (or tastes) unambiguously or clearly to a class position, but it does point

to two possible forms of class based inequality. Firstly, that individualising structural

contradictions proliferate more in the lives of some than others. Some face a greater

number of contradictory rules and guidelines in the settings in which they interact and

hence, at least potentially, need to draw on and hold together dispositions that are

relatively more contradictory. Secondly, some have more structural access to

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resources (tied to class in the broad sense in which Bourdieu defines it) to

successfully negotiate the contradictions of partial and proliferating structures.

An example of these contradictory logics at work is the expanding number of

working-class young men who, as manufacturing declines, find themselves in retail or

hospitality ‘service’ sector jobs involving emotional labour, while trying to study at

university, but still trying to find the time to remain part of the local sporting club.

Many from the highest class backgrounds also find themselves in service work for a

period of their lives, with people from a mix of class background. But if this is

primarily for work experience and extra spending money while completing a

professional degree, the contradictions of ‘service’ work with the dispositions they

develop at school, in university and in the family will be relatively easy to manage.

Conclusion

Arguing against caricatures does not help class analysis progress. The challenge is not

to simply show that class still matters, but how. By showing how Beck may not be the

antagonist of class that many suggest, I have looked to propose a way of

conceptualising class inequality for contemporary conditions, suggesting we need

both beck’s concept of individualisation and a model of human action that builds on

Bourdieu.

In the version of a non-unitary habitus built here, rapid social change (as theorised by

Beck) will mean expectations and experiences more often fail to correspond. This

developing model has the potential to help researchers understand a situation in which

people more regularly (but unequally – stratified by class) find themselves in

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situations where the rules of the game of the various fields are changing rapidly, do

not fit with their dispositions, and contradict with the rules and demands of other

fields of which they are part.

References

Adkins, L. (2004) ‘Reflexivity: Freedom or Habit of Gender’, in L. Adkins & B.

Skeggs (eds.), Feminism after Bourdieu, Oxford, UK: Blackwell: 191–210.

Atkinson, W. (2007) ‘Beck, Individualization and the Death of Class: a Critique’, The

British Journal of Sociology, 58 (3): 349-365.

Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage.

Beck, U. (2002) ‘The Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies’, Theory, Culture,

Society, 19(1-2): 17-44.

Beck, U. (2007) ‘Beyond Class and Nation: Reframing Social Inequalities in a

Globalizing World’, British Journal of Sociology, 58(4): 679-705.

Beck, U. (2009) World at Risk. Cambridge: Polity.

Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002) Individualization: Iinstitutionalized

Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences, London: Sage.

Bourdieu, P. (1998) Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Cambridge, UK:

Polity.

Bourdieu, P. (2008) Sketch for a Self-Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Brannen, J., & Nilsen, A. (2005) ‘Individualisation, Choice and Structure: A

Discussion of Current Trends in Sociological Analysis’, The Sociological Review,

53(3): 412–428.

Butler, J. (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New

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Towards a Sociology at the Level of the Individual’, Poetics, 31(5-6): 329-355.

Lahire, B. (2010) The Plural Actor. Cambridge, UK: Polity

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Woodman, D. (2010) ‘Class, Individualisation and Tracing Processes of Inequality in

a Changing World: A Reply to Steven Roberts’, Journal of Youth Studies, 13 (6): 337-

746.

1 Even though Pakulski and Waters title their book the ‘Death of Class’, their argument is more

nuanced than the title would suggest. 2 This section build on and extends arguments I have made about the way Beck’s work has been

understood in the particular case of the sociology of youth (see Woodman 2010)