1. Lay or Sociological? Bourdieu, Archer, and Reflexivity in the Neoliberal Academia
Jana Bacevic
Department of Sociology
University of Cambridge
@jana_bacevic
“Recovering the social: personal troubles and public issues”
BSA annual conference, University of Manchester, 4-6 April 2017

2. Outline
Distinction between lay and sociological forms of reflexivity stems from concept’s theoretical biography, but has implications for…
- Question of knowledge
- Question of epistemic status of personhood (identity politics)
- Question of research process
- Question of legitimation, including of sociological/specialized/professional knowledge
- Question of sociological futures
Particularly relevant in context of increasing pressure to account for and justify distinctive contribution of academic knowledge (vis-à-vis ‘post-truth’, anti-expert etc. discourse) to society

3. Reflexivity: (brief and very reductive) theoretical biography
Giddens, Beck, Lash, Bauman: weakening/dissolution of bonds of tradition in late modernity compels subjects to deliberate on their circumstances, reflexively making their way through the world => ‘knowledgeable’ agents
Archer: reflexivity - deliberation on objective circumstances impinging on oneself, relation to ultimate concerns, + decision on the course of action
Bourdieu: sociological reflexivity - awareness and (possible) mastery of constraints that impinge on the scientific subject of which she must free herself

4. Common denominators
(a) Identification/knowledge of (~objective) conditions/circumstances
(b) ‘Self’ (as epistemic subject and agent)
(c) Relationship between (a) and (b)
[Creation of epistemic distance]
What is the relationship between lay and sociological forms of practising reflexivity?
What is the role/status of procedures/professional socialisation in the establishment of difference between these forms of reflexivity?

5. Archer (2007)
Reflexivity, exercised through internal conversation…not only mediates the impact of social forms upon us but also determines our responses to them (…) If it is held that agential subjectivity has itself been molded by social influences, such as ideology, ‘habitus’ or, for argument’s sake, ‘discourse’, it is impossible to ascertain for whom this is and is not the case without examining their inner dialogue. It cannot be the case for all, because ‘the sociologist’ has seen through these attempts at ideational misrepresentation in order to be able to describe them, but cannot claim a monopoly on this ability.
For a person to find a vested interest good does not entail that she has full discursive penetration of that property, as if she were endowed with all the qualities of the best sociologist.

6. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992)

7. Different types of things?
Archer’s critical realism: clarification of the ontological foundations of subjects’ experience
=> Accounting for the empirical object in terms of subjectivity constructed by the empirical subject (‘lay’ knowledge as epistemic proto-exemplar, Cruickshank 2010)
Bourdieusian praxeological sociology: clarification of epistemological foundations of sociologists’ reading of subjects’ experience
Accounting for the empirical subject in terms of objectivity constructed by the scientific subject

8. …And never the twain shall meet?
But: ‘seeping’ of sociological theories into everyday life; (e.g. critiques of ‘left-wing bias’ in academia) => ‘double hermeneutic’ (Giddens)
Context of critique (Boltanski): (‘lay’) actors regularly engage in criticising or challenging elements of policy etc. (e.g.the critique of neoliberalism)
But: transformation of conditions of academic labour = decreasing distance between ‘us’ and ‘circumstances’: degrees of ‘complex exteriority’
Context of justification: invoking (sociological) reflexivity increasingly necessary to account for the funding for, status and value of social science to society (public engagement, impact)

9. Boltanski (2011)
Metacritical theories of domination…encounter in an especially vexed fashion the issue of the relationship between the knowledge of social reality which is that of ordinary actors, reflexively engaged in practice, and the knowledge of social reality conceived from a reflexivity reliant on forms and instruments of [sociological] totalization – an issue which is itself at the heart of the tensions out of which the possibility of a social science must be created.

10. Lay vs. sociological?
Conceptualising difference between lay and sociological reflexivity becomes all the more relevant with pressures to justify the distinctive contribution of academic knowledge to society
This conceptualisation cannot proceed on the grounds of fundamental distinction between lay and sociological reflexivity, because it lends itself to critique of e.g. Trump and Brexit voters as (insufficiently? differently?) reflexive, reinforcing the gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’

11. How to think about reflexivity in the post-truth era?
Multiple knowledges, epistemologies, ontologies (alter-realities)
Self-decolonisation: applying the critique of representation of the ‘Other’ to the representation of ‘Self’