Comparative Education Bulletin - Faculty of Education - The ...

Figure 2. Categorization of theories on social forces and knowledge
change
Habermas Foucault
Archer
Toulmin
Micro/agency
Objective Subjective
Bourdieu
Macro/structure
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Mannheim
Note: On this matrix, I have put “Foucault” in italics to allude to his discursive-orientation.
In the middle ground are structuration theories which argue that
social change (and mutatis mutandis, disciplinary change) is achieved
through the operation of both structure and agency. I discuss the
theories of Bourdieu and Archer respectively. Bourdieu’s theory of
the intellectual field attempts to reconcile the problems of agency and
structure. He conceives the intellectual field as like a magnetic field,
made up of a system of power lines with constituting agents which
by their existence, opposition or combination determine the field’s
specific structure at a given moment in time (Bourdieu, 1966). These
agents have positional properties which are determined by the total
amount and the configurations of four types of capital – economic,
social, cultural, and symbolic; and they operate through ‘habitus’,
where ‘habitus’ refers to a set of dispositions that enable agents to
modify constraints embodied in the social structure (“Social Change”
in Encyclopedia of Social Theory). Thus, Bourdieu proposes a ‘soft’
determinism which recognizes that humans have some freedom to
make social choices within the parameters of opportunity which they
inherit, and to effect gradual social change by the inter-generational
modification of structures.
Archer (1984) offers another middle-ground theory as Bourdieu,
which aims to explain how macro-structure and micro-agency factors
interact in producing social (and disciplinary) change. Archer argues
that the historical processes creating educational systems ‘structurally
condition’ the interaction processes; and while such interactions can
‘structurally elaborate’ macro-level structural conditioning, it is still
essential to visualize micro-level encounters among, for example,
teachers, students and administrators as highly circumscribed by the