Bernard Lahire
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bernard Lahire (French pronunciation: [bɛʁnaʁ la.iʁ], born 9 November 1963 in Lyon) is a French sociologist and author who serves as a professor of sociology at the ENSL graduate school in Lyon. Lahire is also a member of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies.[1] By the late 2000s, Lahire rose to prominence as one of the country's most eminent living sociologists.[2]
Lahire's early work involved a critical discussion of Pierre Bourdieu. In his edited volume Le travail sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu: Dettes et critiques (The Sociological Work of Pierre Bourdieu: Uses and Criticisms), he contributed chapters critiquing the concepts of field and habitus. Lahire's main contention was that these concepts were useful as heuristics, but also risked overgeneralisation.[3]
The Plural Actor
To Lahire many aspects of human activity or practices escape the overly narrow contours of fields, even if they are differentiated from other activities. Similarly, he argued that while there were conditions where actors embodied unitary and homogeneous dispositions, this is not always the case. This latter point was elaborated in some considerable detail in his 1998 L’Homme pluriel: Les ressorts de l’action, translated in 2005 as The Plural Actor.[4]
In the book, Lahire raises a number of issues around Bourdieu's formulation of the concept of habitus. Beyond the questions about the unitary nature of habitus, he raises the question of whether social action is so overwhelmingly pre-reflexive and practical as Bourdieu suggests. More generally, with the book Lahire signaled a focus on the processes whereby dispositions actually become embodied, i.e., socialization. The approach thereby highlights how concrete individuals are socially shaped by a number of factors. In the book, the approach is called psychological sociology, but Lahire now refers to it as a sociology at the level of the individual. It is also sometimes called a dispositionalist-contextualist approach.[5]
