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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield? A glance into the
Higher Education in the UK using Bourdieu
Despite an overwhelming abundance of literature on broader leadership issues, very
little work in educational leadership seem to have engaged in a theoretical discussion
about what constitutes leadership practice in higher education. In a previous special
issue in this journal, edited by Lingard and Christie (2003), authors were surprised that
Bourdieu’s ideas had not found wider application in the field of educational leadership,
as much of the research in this area is mainly concerned, just like in Bourdieu’s work,
with the relationship between individual agency and structural determinism.
Theoretically informed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and in response to
Lingard and Christie, this paper contributes to the long established critical tradition in
the educational leadership literature, to advocate that Bourdieusian theory helps to
illuminate the multi-dimensional nature of power and leadership within a higher
education environment. The author suggests that interpretation of educational leadership
through the prism of Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ provides another opportunity to
consider and analyse simultaneously the invariant properties of the educational field and
the situated particularities of leadership work. My curiosity drove me to use Bourdieu’s
ideas to unpack any parallels between current power relations within the field of higher
education in the UK and my past experiences of Soviet totalitarianism.
Keywords: leadership; higher education; power; Bourdieu; social field; capital;
doxa; habitus; Soviet.
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
Introduction
Vyacheslav Molotov, a Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1940s, was overheard
talking to Joseph Stalin via trans-Atlantic telephone during the course of some very
intricate negotiations with the West. He said: “Yes, Comrade Stalin,” in a quiet tone,
then again: “Yes, Comrade Stalin”, and then, after a long pause, “Certainly, Comrade
Stalin”. Suddenly he became emotional: “No, Comrade Stalin,” he barked, “No. That’s,
a NO. Definitely, no. A thousand times - no!”
He soon calmed down and it was “Yes, Comrade Stalin,” again. The reporter who
overheard that conversation had never been so excited in his life. Clearly, Molotov was
daring to oppose the dictator on at least one point, and it would surely be important to
the West to know what that point might be. The reporter approached Molotov and said
as calmly as possible: “Mr Molotov, I could not help but hear you say at one point, “No,
Comrade Stalin.” Molotov turned his cold eyes on the reporter and said, “What of it?”
“May I ask,” said the reporter, cautiously, “What the subject under discussion was at
that time?” “You may,” said Molotov. “Comrade Stalin asked me if there was anything,
which he had said, with which I disagreed.”
I have decided to start my discussion with this very popular Russian joke for the reason
that it serves as a remarkable example of a typical Soviet leadership style based on the
perception of the leader’s unlimited power and over-exaggerated sense of self-
importance, when contradicting or disagreeing with those in power means either a
political or corporeal death. Unfortunately, this leadership style, though in a much more
obscured form, has continued to influence every sphere of life in the Soviet Union until
its dissolution in 1991. The power relationships within these leadership structures were
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
obstinate and informed by the principles of what I call a manipulative clientilism, where
the power of a patron (the leader) over his clients (the team) was unlimited and where
the few existing rules were interpreted and manipulated in the ways that suited the
patron.
It was that approach that shaped my early leadership identity as well as the identity of
thousands of others working in leadership positions across all business, educational and
cultural establishments of the USSR. My move into the leadership roles within the
higher education environment in the UK has enabled me to witness, experience and
exercise rather different and diverse models of leadership, where power was thought to
be shared among the members of the organisation, who have a common understanding
of the aims of the institution (Bush, 2011). These encounters and their impact on my
professional practice made me realise that leadership and power were not uniform and
static notions, as presented to me during the Soviet times, but a multi-faceted mesh of
ideologies, politics and personal relationships. This line of reasoning inspires me to
explore the multi-dimensional nature of power and leadership within a higher education
environment, employing a theoretical framework informed by Pierre Bourdieu (1930-
2002), whose perceptions of these concepts seemed to reflect their relevance to
leadership practice in higher education. My intention to work with Bourdieusian theory
was inspired by Lingard and Christie (2003, p.318), who asserted that ‘work of the late
French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, is very useful for theorizing educational leadership
as a both a field of practice and a field of research and scholarship.’ My curiosity was
further piqued by an ambition to use Bourdieu’s ideas to take a deeper look into current
power relations within the field of higher education institutions through the prism of my
past experiences of Soviet totalitarianism.
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
In the first part of this paper, I critically engage with the research literature on
Bourdieu’s theoretical framework so as to identify and explore its key features, such as
social field, capital, habitus and doxa; while the second part of the discussion focuses
specifically on the application of Bourdieu’s ideas to current educational practice with a
higher education institution environment.
Social field, doxa, habitus, hysteresis and capital
The social world can be represented as a space (with several dimensions) constructed on the basis of principles of differentiation or distribution constituted by the set of properties active within the social universe in question, i.e., capable of conferring strength, power within that universe, on their holder. Agents and groups of agents are thus defined by their relative positions within that space. Each of them is assigned to a position or a precise class of neighboring positions. Inasmuch as the properties selected to construct this space are active properties, one can also describe it as a field of forces, i.e., as a set of objective power relations that impose themselves on all who enter the field and that are irreducible to the intentions of the individual agents or even to the direct interactions among the agents. (Bourdieu, 1985, p.723)
This extract from Bourdieu’s work seems to embrace the majority of the key aspects
related to his concept of a social field, so it would be useful to start with deconstructing
this notion by breaking it up into its constituent parts.
Social Field and Doxa
The application of the idea of a field in general was originally associated with the
physical sciences (i.e., Newton’s gravitation field, electro-magnetic field, algebraic
number fields, etc.) and, later on, infiltrated the territories of psychology (i.e. Gestalt
theory) and sociology. However, while in sciences a field is, generally, characterised by
the patterns of behaviour of units, objects, numbers or particles in relation to specific
forces, in psychology and sociology the term field was mainly applied to processes
based on the interrelations of individuals with their environments or in response to
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
specific situations. These differences in the interpretation of the notion were noted by
Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), who clarified that, with regard to the physical field,
there is a prevalence of objective relations within a system over the particles within it;
however, social agents ‘are not particles, mechanically pushed and pulled by external
forces: they are, rather, bearers of capitals1 and, depending on their trajectory and on
the position they occupy in the field by virtue of their endowment (volume and
structure) in capital.’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p.108)
Nevertheless, despite these differences between the types of fields, Passeron (cited in
Hilger & Mangez, 2014) identified a number of features that characterise all field
theories regardless of the discipline, which include, first, the rejection of the existence
of an absolute (social or physical) space and, consequently, of individual objects or
agents existing independently of a set of relations; second, a relational nature of any
space, whether social or physical; and finally, the existence of a joint dynamics between
a totality and the elements that constitute a space.
In his attempt to refine the notion of a social field, Bourdieu (1985) identified a social
field as a kind social topology, where the social world can be represented as a multi-
dimensional space, inside which the constituent parts are interrelated or arranged into a
number of separate domains, while remaining under the umbrella of the same field.
Fraser and Atkinson (2014, p.156) suggested a useful association in relation to social
fields that may contain sub-fields, describing the latter as being ‘nested within, like
Russian dolls’. Thus, in each of Bourdieu’s social fields, all activities would be based
on specific rules, hierarchies and social relations that bond all elements within that
space. This takes us to the next important attribute of Bourdieu’s social field: the
relations of power.
1 The notion of capital is discussed further in this paper.
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
Thompson (2012) made an interesting observation in relation to the translation of the
word field in that Bourdieu used the French word ‘le champ’ – meaning ‘battlefield’,
and not - ‘le pre’, which suggests an idyllic and peaceful environment. From this
perspective, Bourdieu’s theory of social fields can be employed to uncover the hidden
structures and processes by which power is applied through specific spheres of activity
as well as through society as a whole. Thatcher, Ingram, Burke and Abrahams (2015,
p.3) also confirmed that ‘as such, field should be understood as a site of competition and
aggression in which an individual or group is required to negotiate’.
Bourdieu also offered a comparison of a social field to a game, providing an opportunity
to discuss the concept of the ‘rules of the game’ that can be suggested as a simplified
representation of Bourdieu’s notion of doxa. Bourdieu (1996) defined doxa as a
primary experience of the social world that is an adherence to relations of order which,
because they structure inseparably both the real world and the thought world, are
accepted as self-evident. According to Bourdieu (1996), doxa, ‘far from being a simple
mechanical reflection, is always an act of cognition involving principles of construction
that are external to the constructed object grasped in its immediacy; but at the same time
it is an act of miscognition, implying the most absolute form of recognition of the social
order’ ( p.471). It is those ‘rules of the game’ that distinguish each of the social fields
and the specific rules and hierarchies of their functioning, as well as defining the
conditions of the players’ (agents’) membership, who agree to adhere to these rules. The
players or the agents within a specific domain of activity use doxa to perceive and
interpret all external and internal relations and phenomena, therefore strengthening their
distinction from other domains or social fields and, thus, increasing the autonomy of
their field:
The autonomous principle of hierarchization, which would reign unchallenged if the field of production were to achieve total autonomy with respect to the laws
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
of the market, is degree of specific consecration, i.e. the degree of recognition accorded by those who recognize no other criterion of legitimacy than recognition by those whom they recognize. In other words, the specificity of the field is defined by the fact that the more autonomous it is, … the more it continues to be affected by the laws of the field which encompasses it. (Bourdieu, 1983, p. 320)
At this point, it is worth mentioning that, though the agents within a social field adhere
to specific rules defined by the nature of their domain, these fields do not remain static,
as, similar to any field game, their existence is always associated with a certain degree
of power struggle in which the agents’ perceptions - ‘with retrospective reconstruction
of a past tailored to the needs of the present and, especially, the future - are endlessly
invoked to determine, delimit, and define the always open meaning of the present’
(Bourdieu, 1985, p.728).
Habitus
According to Bourdieu (1969), the power struggles within social fields are triggered and
managed not by external ideologies or internal strategies, but by what Bourdieu called
habitus. This term appears in a number of his works in different contexts, and can be,
therefore, approached from different angles; however, the most concise explanation of
the term can be found in Homo Academicus (1988), where Bourdieu defined habitus as
‘a system of shared social dispositions and cognitive structures, which generates
perceptions, appreciations and actions’ (p.279). He offered a further explanation of
habitus in The Logic of Practice (1990), where he added that ‘the conditionings
associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of
durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as
structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and
representations (p.53).
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
Thatcher et al. (2015) attempted to expand on Bourdieu’s discussion, adding that
habitus can be understood as norms, values and dispositions inculcated via the familial
education and, to a lesser extent, the environment. They also suggested that habitus is
the most contested and critiqued aspect of Bourdieu’s conceptual framework, often
criticised for the removal of the element of choice from the human experience. One of
the examples of such a critique can be found in Archer (2010), who claimed that
Bourdieu’s notion of habitus excludes the possibility of reflexivity, and suggested that it
is reflexivity that should be considered the main tool of mediating between the objective
structural opportunities and the nature of individual agents’ subjectively-defined
concerns. However, as Thatcher et al. (2015) noted, though this type of critique can be
partially justified, for Bourdieu, it is not so much that the habitus is void of choice, but
rather that the range of choices and attitudes will be influenced by social structures,
leading him to also define habitus as ‘socialised subjectivity’ (Bourdieu, cited in
Thatcher et al., 2015, p. 2). Indeed, Bourdieu made his notion of a transformative nature
of habitus clear when he stated that habitus as a product of social conditionings, and
thus of a history (unlike character), is endlessly transformed (Bourdieu, 1987). Habitus
influences agents’ ability to manoeuvre within particular social fields, and on the other
hand, it also enables the agents to occupy specific positions within that field. To
elucidate the complexity of interrelations between a field and a habitus, it is useful to
refer to the formula, suggested by Bourdieu in his attempt to highlight the intertwining
nature of these relations: [(habitus)(capital)] + field = practice (Bourdieu, 1985, p.101),
which leads us to the discussion of Bourdieu’s notion of capital.
Capital
Bourdieu stepped away from a traditional Marxist definition of capital characterised
solely by economic aspects (i.e. wealth, money, property), broadening it to include
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
additional forms of capital, such as cultural capital (i.e. knowledge, educational
qualifications, skills), social capital (i.e. degree of trust and cooperation among agents in
a field) and symbolic capital (position in a society, reputation, honour), though he also
refered to a number of other types of capital in his works.
Though Bourdieu did not provide a definition of capital as such, he made clear his
understanding of capital as a resource that individuals use almost like a currency for
exchange or investment as well as what can be seen as a ‘place holder’, allowing those
individuals to occupy a specific space within their social field. In addition, it is not only
the type of capital (or perhaps more precisely, interconnected types of capitals) that an
individual possesses that matters, but also its volume, as the latter will affect the
position of individuals in a social hierarchy as well as their potential to achieve certain
objectives. According to Bourdieu (1989), ‘agents are distributed in the overall social
space, in the first dimension, according to the overall volume of capital they possess
and, in the second dimension, according to the structure of their capital, that is, the
relative weight of the different species of capital, economic and cultural, in the total
volume of their assets’ (p.17). Nevertheless, the distribution of social agents within a
specific field is not a mechanical exercise, where the agents are moved around like
chess pieces. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) made it clear that the agents are, rather,
bearers of capitals and, depending on their trajectory and on the position they occupy in
the field by virtue of their endowment (volume and structure) in capital, they have a
propensity to orient themselves actively either towards the conservation of the
distribution of capital or towards the subversion of that distribution.
Other related aspects of the notion include forms of distinction between different types
of capital, as well as the process of capital formation; however, since it is not my
intention here to provide an in-depth discussion of Bourdieu’s conceptual framework,
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
my discussion will be limited to simply offering a synopsis of his key ideas as a starting
point for a discussion of the practical application of these notions to a higher education
institution environment. First, though, it is important to mention another one of
Bourdieu’s thinking tools – hysteresis – which is closely related to the notions of field,
habitus and capital.
Hysteresis
As previously mentioned, Bourdieu stressed the transformative nature of the field and
its interconnectedness with habitus, where the change in one necessitates the change in
another. However, this does not necessarily mean that every change within a field will
automatically lead to a change in habitus. Quite the contrary, as noticed by
Chudzikowski & Mayrhofer (2011), Bourdieu saw habitus as being rather inertial,
meaning that there is a certain lag in the adaptation of habitus to the changes in a
particular field. Bourdieu (1997) called this the hysteresis effect and explained,
The hysteresis of habitus, which is inherent in the social conditions of the reproduction of the structures in habitus, is doubtless one of the foundations of the structural lag between opportunities and the dispositions to grasp them which is the cause of missed opportunities and, in particular, of the frequently observed incapacity to think historical crises in categories of perception and thought other than those of the past, albeit a revolutionary past. ( p. 83).
In other words, when there are changes taking place within field, resulting in changes to
the ‘rules of the game’ or doxa, habitus delays adaptation to the new rules. The
hysteresis effect, therefore, means that in the changed circumstances agents will
maintain their acquired habitus even though they no longer correlate to the field, or, in
Bourdieu’s (1996) words, ‘when the practices generated by the habitus appear as ill-
adapted because they are attuned to an earlier state of the objective conditions (this is
what might be called the Don Quixote effect).’ (p. 109).
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
The ‘field’ of higher education institution: appropriation of Bourdieu’s ideas
In current challenging political and economic climate, higher education institutions
have to adapt to Neo-liberal agendas and related issues of marketisation, rising student
tuition and increased student expectations as well as greater demands on university
academics to work towards specific targets and benchmarks in an increasingly prevalent
culture of audits and inspections. As Williams (cited in Sotirakou, 2004) pointed out,
universities have clearly moved from being neutral self-governing institutions, pre-
1980s, to a position, wherein the state has begun to drive the market, leading to the
current situation, when the state promotes managerial values above those of the
academic community, which management it is meant to serve; and the key shift that
underpins those changes is from input-based budgeting, where the state supplies
educational services, to output and performance-based budgeting, wherein institutions
receive resources by selling their services to various customers. Senior leaders in
higher education institutions have an almost impossible task of providing genuine
inspirational motivation amid the current struggles of the two opposing forces:
pressures from the central university administration and the aspirations of the
academics, who are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the changes to their
academic work ‘in the process of forging a new, fragmented professional self:
‘“researcher”, “administrator”, “teacher” and more recently “entrepreneur”’ (Morley, as
cited in Garratt & Hammersley-Fletcher, 2009, p. 308 ).
In such turbulent times for higher education , tainted by the contested agendas of
leadership and power, Bourdieu’s conceptual framework offers a helpful point of entry,
in particular his concept of field, which, as previously mentioned, forms part of
Bourdieu’s ‘thinking toolbox’.
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
Going back to the idea of seeing a social field as a Russian nested doll, a UK higher
education institution can be used as an illustrative example, having a number of sub-
fields, where higher education institution itself forms a part of a larger social field of
nationwide educational agencies and regulatory institutions, the majority of which seem
to be totally engulfed in field of the State. Figure 1 represents an attempt to show a
simple illustration of the higher education institution field, with its sub-fields and some
power trajectories within it.
Figure1. Dichotomy of power relationships within higher education institution field
with its sub-fields
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
Starting with the higher education institution as a field, we can then begin to examine
the positions of different agents within that field and its sub-fields and their
interconnected power relations. Justifiably, the field of higher education does not
operate separately from the notions of habitus and capital; however, it is the field that
Bourdieu identified as the main arena, where the agents, occupying dominant or
subordinate positions within its hierarchy, compete to obtain specific goals. Each of
these agents’ (i.e. key stakeholders - university governors, senior leaders, academics and
students) positions within the field depends on the amount of capital they possess.
Within the context of higher education institution field, our focus will be on social and
cultural (rather economic) resources, the possession of which enables membership of
the field.
Bourdieu (1986) differentiated between three different types of cultural capital:
embodied, objectified and institutionalised, where the latter is most notable within the
field of higher education institution , as it takes into account each agent’s credentials
(i.e. degree level) that give a more or less objective impression of each individual’s
level of knowledge and skills. Bourdieu also referred to this type of capital as ‘academic
capital’, stating that ‘by conferring institutional recognition on the cultural capital
possessed by any given agent, the academic qualification also makes it possible to
compare qualification holders and even to exchange them (by substituting one for
another in succession). Furthermore, it makes it possible to establish conversion rates
between cultural capital and economic capital by guaranteeing the monetary value of a
given academic capital (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 21).
We can see that in the social field of higher education institution there are agents who
are mainly concerned with production (research) and distribution (teaching) of
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
knowledge. According to Bourdieu (1992), fields may contain other fields within them
(sub-fields), i.e. all higher education institution activities largely take place within a
field that is itself subsumed under the State, making the higher education institution
something that often exists under the umbrella of the State, even as it continues to exert
its own force and is not reducible to the interests or operations of the governing field.
Therefore, to streamline the discussion of the university social field, it is useful to
identify the existing social sub-fields within that field: a social sub-field of university
administration, which governs all university processes; a sub-field of university
academics engaged in research and teaching; and a sub-field of students, who are
increasingly being constructed as consumers of university ‘products’.
Higher Education Institution Administrative Sub-field
The administrative sub-field of the university represents the space where key decision
are made in relation to strategic trajectories of the institution in terms of recruitment,
curriculum development (and therefore, possessing, of what Bourdieu (1990) defined as
a ‘pedagogic authority’) and system of knowledge accreditation, all of which form a
part of a bigger educational mechanism of, what Bourdieu called system of cultural
reproduction. According to Bourdieu and Passeron (1990), (though their example is
mostly applied to schools), the aim of the educational system and those dominating it is
to ensure the transmission of cultural capital across generations and of legitimising pre-
existing differences in inherited cultural capital by means of granting specific
credentials (or in the case of higher education institution, awarding degrees). Bourdieu
considered this system of social reproduction to be a huge classificatory machine,
contributing to the inequalities within a society: ‘In societies which claim to recognize
individuals only as equals in right, the educational system and its modern nobility only
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
contribute to disguise, and thus legitimize, in a more subtle way the arbitrariness of the
distribution of powers and privileges which perpetuates itself through the socially
uneven allocation of school titles and degrees’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990, x).
Indeed, looking at the system of admissions within a university, we find that those
applicants with a richer cultural capital, stemming from their families’ habitus, have a
clear advantage compared to those with lower entry qualifications. The university
system serves to enable these more privileged applicants to progress through the system
and gain higher education credentials, legitimatising their dominant position within the
field.
As mentioned above, the administrative sub-field enacts the role of the dominant power
within the university social field through its appropriation of the pedagogic authority
(PA). As Bourdieu (1990) explained, ‘in any given social formation the legitimate PA,
i.e. the PA endowed with the dominant legitimacy, is nothing other than the arbitrary
imposition of the dominant cultural arbitrary insofar as it is misrecognized in its
objective truth as the dominant PA and the imposition of the dominant culture.’(p.22).
This provides another potential opportunity to view the university administration
through the lens of Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, and specifically, his
understanding of symbolic power and symbolic violence. Though Bourdieu (1996)
provided no definition of symbolic power as such, he provided a useful categorisation
of ideas and concepts that fall under this notion in his description of the struggles of
power ‘to win everything which, in the social world, is of the order of belief, credit and
discredit, perception and appreciation, knowledge and recognition -name, renown,
prestige, honour, glory, authority, everything which constitutes symbolic power as a
recognized power’ (p. 251). There is a strong correlation between the notions of
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
‘symbolic power’ and ‘symbolic capital’, considered by Bourdieu to be an
amalgamation of the economic, cultural and social types of capital. Examining these
notions lead us to identify the higher education institution administration as the agents
possessing the greatest amount of symbolic capital, and, therefore, symbolic power,
within that social field, thus constructing a perfect structure for ‘le champ’ – a
battlefield for power struggles. Hilger and Mangez (2014) made an interesting
observation about the power struggles within a symbolic order, arguing that the new
agents entering the field tend to implement strategies aimed at subverting the existing
hierarchy of power through the process of symbolic violence that leads them to
recognize the legitimacy of a symbolic order that acts unfavourably toward them,
though the odds that established actors will succeed in preserving the order seem to be
greater than the probability of subversion:
The more legitimate an agent, the more her peers consume her products, and the more they consume her products, the more legitimate she becomes. The accumulation of this symbolic capital makes it possible to secure a more or less complete monopoly over the definition of the forms of legitimacy prevailing in the field. The stabilization of a hegemonic version of legitimacy helps to fix the distribution of positions in the space of relations that constitutes a field (Hilger and Mangez, 2014, p. 11).
In terms of symbolic violence, Bourdieu (1998) defined it as an imposition of systems
of symbolism and meaning upon groups or classes, accepted as legitimate: ‘I call
symbolic violence a gentle violence imperceptible and invisible even to its victims
exerted for the most part through the purely symbolic channels of communication and
cognition (more precisely, misrecognition), recognition, or even feeling. (p. 2). It is this
symbolic, or ‘soft’, power that the agents within the administration sub-field exercise to
impose the desired dominant ideas and perceptions through a well-structured system of
policies, guidelines and regulations as well as institutional visions and strategic plans.
The agents within that sub-field occupy dominant positions with the university
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
hierarchy due to their access to economic capital - university budgets, physical
resources, human resources - as well as their own habitus and a breadth of their cultural
and social types of capital (i.e. positions, roles, qualifications, experience, networks and
public recognition).
Higher Education Institution Academic Sub-field
Another sub-field within the higher education institution social field is that of the
academic teams of lecturers and researchers. The relation of this sub-field with the sub-
field of higher education institution administration seems to be two-fold: on one hand
the administrative sub-field can be seen as providing protection and a certain level of
security for the academic sub-field; on the other hand, it creates a site of struggle and
competition for control. The agents within the academic sub-field find themselves in a
constant dissonance with the managerial power coming from administrative structures,
trying to conceptualise the ever-changing targets, policies and requirements dictated to
the university administration by the State (its social field and its interrelation with the
higher education institution field can serve as a subject of discussion for a separate
paper). However, rather than acting as a passive recipient of symbolic power coming
from the higher administrative structures, the academic sub-field forms an active
environment, where the phenomena of hysteresis seems to be quite common, as the
agents within the academic field try to preserve their acquired habitus every time a new
change is imposed on them to which their current habitus no longer corresponds. The
responses to these changes from the academic sub-field vary in the scale of their
intensity, from ‘silent’ complacency to open expressions of frustration, such as in
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
Taylor’s example (cited in Molesworth, Scullion and Nixon, 2011), a sardonic
description of an imaginary Poppleton University, where a member of the academic
staff prides herself on her recognition of HE marketisation: ‘Our recent decision to
describe all students as ‘shoppers’ has been broadly welcomed by all our sales staff
(formerly the academic community) while my own previous experience in the
management of a large biscuit factory has given me unique insights into the art of
persuading people to purchase well-wrapped objects of little value.’ (p.237) This is just
one of the examples of how the multiplicity of constant changes within the higher
education institution strategic goals and trajectories can lead to a clash between the
habituses of the academic and administrative fields, making the higher education
institution landscape one far from being a peaceful and idyllic space of collaborative
knowledge production. Changes to the academic sub-field also include modification of
the relationships from ‘student-lecturer’ to ‘customer-service provider’, or a change in
emphasis from teaching to meeting individual research targets.
As we can see, following Bourdieu’s thinking, the higher education institution is a site
of competition and aggression, where the agents do not always remain passive actors on
the receiving end of the changes, but exercise resistance within their modus operandi in
an attempt to protect their existing habitus leading to its hysteresis. As Hilger and
Mangez (2014) explained, hysteresis of habitus occurs when the field changes, and with
it, the various rules and required resources, when there is a period of time or a gap
between a change in the field and in the habitus (whether group or individual) ability to
realise the structural change and act accordingly to manoeuvre within the altered set of
rules: ‘the struggle in a field is, thus, a struggle to impose a definition of legitimate
recognition, in which victory leads to more or less monopolistic control of the definition
of the forms of legitimacy prevailing in the field. The history of the field is the history
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
of the internal and external struggles that animate it, the history of the distribution of the
specific capital and the variation of this capital (p. 6).
Higher Education Institution Student Sub-field
The intricacy of interrelations among the different sub-fields within the higher
education institution field is further complicated by the presence of a student sub-field,
as students enter the social space of higher education institution with their own
individual habitus and cultural capitals. Recent economic and political changes within
the State field have resulted in additional pressures being placed on the student sub-field
in the form of higher tuition , which contribute to the development of a new student
identity as ‘customers’ or consumers, who have much higher expectations as to their
rights and entitlements. These changes have deeply affected the interrelations within
and between all university sub-fields, leading to significant modifications of all
university strategic plans, policies and structures that have gravitated towards a more
managerial (and less of a leadership) approach, strengthening the power-pressure of the
administrative sub-field, while reducing the decision-making ability of the academics.
As Temple, Callender, Grove and Kersh (2016) predicted, the cumulative effect of these
changes has resulted in resources being diverted from ‘front line’ teaching and research
into marketing and ‘customer care’; academic leadership being valued less highly than
‘business planning’ skills, with collegially determined norms being replaced by
performance measures and management targets.
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
Despite these additional pressures applied to the academic sub-field by the university
administration, with its externally-driven goals to achieve the highest possible levels of
student satisfaction, the student sub-field does not seem to be immune from the impact
of symbolic violence. According to Bourdieu (1996), the force of pedagogical authority
presents students with a curriculum that has been developed and interpreted by the
university academics and relevant administrative structures. Though students are
increasingly being involved in curriculum development within the university
environment, this involvement remains mostly on a superficial level, as students
generally are forced by the pedagogical authority to accept suggested interpretations
even when the students attempt to contest them.
And this is exactly how symbolic violence is exercised within the university social field
and its sub-fields, when the agents are publicly promoted as ‘the partners’ having equal
participatory rights in all university processes, while, in fact, university authorities (or
the State authorities above them) impose their decisions on the agents, who have little
choice about whether to accept or reject them. This takes us to the next part of the
discussion that specifically focuses on the interrelated nature of power and leadership.
Dissecting leadership and power with Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’
Leadership is a multifaceted concept, though it still has not been clearly defined despite
its popularity as a research subject. Current classifications and typologies of leadership
approaches seem to be only useful as an abstract tool for creating some sort terms for
use. Still, attempting to define leadership can be an ongoing, continuous discussion. For
the purpose of this paper one of the more common definitions from Northouse and Lee
(2016) will be a starting point, as it seems to embrace the key aspects of leadership in
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
more general terms by delineating leadership ‘as a process whereby an individual
influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.’ (p. 2). However, it might
be worth considering a slight adjustment to this definition, replacing the phrase
‘common goal’ with a ‘certain goal’, as both research and personal practice show that
leadership does not always entail the leader and the group sharing the same common
goal (as in the example of the joke on ‘Stalinism’). Ironically, this exercise of creating
another definition of leadership seems to echo Stogdill’s (1974) viewpoint that ‘there
are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to
define the concept.’ (p. 259). In this paper, however, I am less concerned with the
definitions of leadership and the nomenclature surrounding leadership styles, but rather
I prefer to focus on Bourdieu’s ideas of ‘symbolic power’ and the interrelations
between power and leadership.
Hatcher (2008) pointed out that in current research there is a tendency to detach studies
of leadership from studies of power, yet it is important to acknowledge that educational
leadership is shaped decisively by its wider environment and by the power relations
therein. Historically, the majority of educational structures have been controlled and
regulated by those who have the political power to promote and sustain a particular
type of educational system and purpose of education, as such. An explanation of the
legitimacy of that power can be found in Bourdieu’s (1991) work Language and
Symbolic Power, where he explained that symbolic power is a power of making people
believe in certain ideas (just as in the case of a political power) through the medium of
language, where power can be exercised only if it is recognised as arbitrary, and thus
can be ‘defined in and through a given relation between those who exercise power and
those who submit to it, i.e. in the very structure of the field in which belief is produced
and reproduced’ ( p.170).
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
Recalling the current dichotomy between different structures within the field of higher
education institution (see Figure 1), we can see that the symbolic power of the State
over the higher education institution is further translated into the symbolic power of the
administrative sub-field over the academics and students. These power relations can
also be viewed from the perspective of leadership, as ‘leadership can be seen as the
process and product by which powerful groups are able to control and sustain their
interests’ (Gunter, 2001, p. 8). Visibly, a dichotomy between leadership and power
cannot be considered from a static point of view or a stationary environment. Jansen
(2000) stressed the ever-changing nature of the educational landscape and the need for
the leaders to ensure that their followers have the capacity for change. This is especially
true in the current climate of higher education transformation characterised by the
process of marketisation as well as the remodelling of university governing bodies
along corporate lines (Waite, 2011; 2014), and the development of sector-wide
performance indicators (Brown, 2011). Applying Bourdieu’s thinking tools to the
issues or power and leadership helps us comprehend the dynamics of the challenges
that the leaders face when it becomes almost impossible to exercise true democratic
leadership within the higher education institution field, as leaders continuously
experience top-down non-negotiable imperatives from the administrative sub-field,
leaving leaders with very little freedom to negotiate these decisions, even when they
seem to be completely incongruous. So essentially, when a higher education institution
declares that it exercises a democratic approach in all its practices, in fact, it almost
certainly lacks the most important and absolute condition for such an approach, which
Lefort (cited in Robinson, 2007) described as freedom from personalised power.
According to Lefort , democracy has to be free of personalised power, because that is
what makes the contest to represent popular sovereignty a contest. Popular sovereignty
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
cannot be truly represented in its totality, so it is 'an empty space, impossible to occupy';
the result is that democracy 'is the power of nobody' ( p. 1217). Once again, these ideas
echo Bourdieu’s perspective on power within specific fields, allowing us to analyse ‘the
relations between the structure of the space of the positions constitutive of the filed, and
the struggles aiming to maintain or to subvert this structure’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p.74).
Lingard and Christie (2003) expressed their surprise at the fact that Bourdieu’s ideas
have not found a wider application within the field of educational leadership, as much
of the research in this area is mainly concerned, just like in Bourdieu’s work, with the
relationship between individual agency and structural determinism; thus, interpretation
of educational leadership through the prism of Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ gives us an
opportunity to consider and analyse simultaneously ‘the invariant properties of the
educational field and the situated particularities of leadership work’ (Lingard and
Christie, 2003, p. 319).
In summary, application of Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ to the issues of power and
leadership within the higher education institution landscape enables us to move beyond
the existing typology of leadership styles and poorly substantiated models of effective
leadership, to focus more on the recursive relationship between agency (individual
leader habitus) and structure (field) in the broader social context. Lingard and Christie
(2003) advocated use of Bourdieu to think of the interplay between the practices of a
leader with a particular habitus, working across a number of fields with different power
structures, hierarchies of influence, and logics of practice, where habitus enables us to
talk about the person of the leader not simply in terms of traits, character and personal
influence, but also in relation to specific social structures and embodied dispositions;
while field enables us to talk about the context of leadership as ‘structured social space’
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
with its own properties and power relations, overlapping and interrelating with
economic, power, political and other fields.
Final thoughts
At this point it is worth acknowledging that the discussion presented here contains only
a brief analysis of higher education institution practices through the lens of Bourdieu’s
theoretical framework. My intent is to provide a basis for further investigation into the
subject of educational leadership, using Bourdieu’s ideas, as Lingard and Christie’s
(2003) encouraged us to do.
Nevertheless, a brief glance into the subject allows me to make a number of useful
observations. First, there seem to be a few advantages in the appropriation of a
Bourdieusian theoretical framework, one of which is a realisation of the multiplicity of
power struggles that exist within the field of higher education institution. Bourdieu’s
ideas of domination and symbolic power, unwillingly, bring us back to the joke on
Stalinism at the beginning of this paper, compelling us to make disturbing parallels
between symbolic and physical violence and to question the amount of freedom and
autonomy that agents in the higher education institution can practise without being
castigated. In addition, Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus and hysteresis give us the
opportunity to explore the transformative nature of an individual’s perceptions as they
engage in the ‘locus of struggle’ (Bourdieu, 1992) within any social field, not just
education. For example, Shammas and Sandberg (2015) made an interesting analogy in
relation to the transformative effects on the individual’s habitus as a result of a field-
bounded existence as applied to the field of criminology: ‘just as a university student
might come to expand their vocabulary or learn to write essays according to certain
formula, so too might drug dealers come to learn how to measure out a pound of
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
cannabis without the aid of a scale or come to adopt preferences for clothing or music
specific to their world (p. 7). Indeed, Bourdieu’s ideas of field and habitus seem to be
applicable to a wide range of contexts, as they highlight the embedded nature of
individuals’ social activities within a complex tapestry of interrelated economic,
political and social domains.
Second, a deeper look into the social space of higher education institution helps us
identify a visible change from being a social field with a high degree of autonomy and
the ability to operate more or less independently from the State to a social sub-field of
the State where the former has been almost completely submerged in the values,
constraints and priorities of economic and political forces associated with Neo-
liberalism. Giroux (2004) provided a powerful and compelling critique of ‘the scourge
of Neo-liberalism’ (p. 11), stressing its aggressive attempts to make the market the only
arbiter of social destiny through the consolidation of economic power in the hands of
the few, while breaking the power of unions, decoupling income from productivity,
subordinating the needs of society to the market, and deeming public services and goods
an unconscionable luxury. Though the influence of Neo-liberalism on the social space
of higher education institutions is apparent , it is not confined just to the UK educational
system, but has an immense global impact. As Bourdieu (1997) expressed it in his
Outline of a Theory of Practice, every established order tends to produce (to very
different degrees and with very different means) the naturalisation of its own
arbitrariness, where these ‘systems of classification make their specific contribution to
the reproduction of the power relations of which they are the product’ ( p. 164). As the
agents and particularly academics within the higher education institution field continue
their struggle against external pressures, researchers (Giroux, 2004; Shore, 2008; Nixon,
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
2011; Garratt and Forrester, 2012) encourage us to contest and push back the limits of
doxa, as ‘the question of legitimacy arises from the very possibility of this questioning,
of a break with the doxa that takes the ordinary order for granted’ (Bourdieu, 1985, p.
734). Nixon (2011) offered a more optimistic and helpful standpoint, affirming that
‘recourse to notions of academic freedom and academic autonomy is a sloppy and
inadequate response to the big idea that institutions of higher education need to redefine
themselves within the public sphere’ (p. 40). Instead, he suggested that higher education
must ‘reach beyond the confines of its own institutional and sector boundaries in order
to gain legitimacy and credibility’ ( p. 40). Indeed, in spite of its diminished status
under the attack of Neo-liberalism, higher education institution academic sub-field
remains uniquely placed in relation to the student sub-field, enabling academics to
influence students’ habitus through the enhancement of their ability to understand, resist
and critique existing doxa, and with a further potential to intervene in the transformation
of the social order in favour of a true democracy and the elimination of the reproduction
and the production of inequality, as identified by Bourdieu.
Third, there seem to be a number of similarities in the way power relationships have
been balanced within the Soviet system of education and that of the UK. The agenda for
education is always constructed by those in power, which, in a way, explains the nature
of these similarities. Within both systems, educational structures have been controlled
and regulated by those who have been in political power, aimed at promoting and
sustaining a particular version of the educational system and the purpose of education,
as such. This, consequently, has shaped the power relationships within both systems.
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Liana Beattie (2017) Educational leadership: a nirvana or a battlefield?
Finally, Bourdieu’s philosophy and his ‘thinking tools’ have encouraged my self-
reflexion on personal professional practice as a senior leader within the field of higher
education institution, making me look deeper into the interrelations of power within the
different sub-fields and to examine critically ‘the rules of the game’, as per Bourdieu’s
analogy; the game, where the field of higher education institution is far from being an
idyllic nirvana, and where leaders have a difficult task of finding a perfect synergy of
leadership and power in an volatile climate of tensions between the sought after
academic autonomy and the increased pressures of accountability. As Bourdieu
(1992( put it, these critical self-reflections give us ‘a small chance of knowing what
game we play and of minimising the ways in which we are manipulated by the forces of
the field in which we evolve, as well as by the embodied social forces that operate from
within us (p. 198).
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