Pierre Bourdieu is the most noted French sociologist of recent times. His prime contribution to sociology is an elaboration of the concept of capital in sociological contexts. Bourdieu has studied several fundamental categories of capital and the ways in which they can be exchanged and transformed into one another, including: cultural capital (arising from prestigious cultural goods produced and positions within cultural institutions such as universities), social capital (arising from networks of social relationships and influence), and economic capital (ownership of money, stocks, etc.). Cultural capital is described in three forms: the embodied state (in which culture is literally "embodied", as when a scholar internalizes knowledge during the extended period of a doctoral research program), the objectified state (when culture is made manifest in objects, such as paintings or books), and the institutionalized state (in which cultural status is recognized and legitimized by institutions, as a degree conferred, or a prestigious appointment held). [Bourdieu, 1986: 243-248]
In his famous analysis of academic sociology Homo Academicus, Bourdieu analyzes tensions and trends in French higher education, with particular attention to the historical circumstances of the student protests in May 1968. His analysis focuses on how the backgrounds and agendas of different academic groups first led to conflict and then uneasy transitions in 1968 as a result of changes in university demographics and economics. His statistical analysis and discussion of various opposed forms of cultural capital in faculty provide insight into the ways that academic elites tend to react to changes and pressures on the circumstances of higher education. This insight will be subsequently relevant to the discussion of the crisis in scholarly communication.
Bourdieu statistically analyzes various demographic factors in the makeup of French faculty members and identifies a variety of opposing poles of cultural capital. There are three sub-categories of this polar opposition, relating to disciplinary prestige, faculty renewal, and orthodoxy / heterodoxy.
Faculty of different disciplines inevitably hold positions of greater or lesser institutional influence, with the greatest prestige in France acruing to faculties of medicine and law. These disciplines often have a very different concept of research and scholarship than that of disciplines within the humanities. Medical research, for example, is much more oriented to direction of pragmatic laboratory studies (often very technological in nature) and grantsmanship than traditional scholarship. [Bourdieu, 1988: 54] Members of these groups usually come from socially elite class backgrounds, and have a vested interest in preserving the status quo of university culture. Prestige and power descends through various faculties of humanities and sciences. Bourdieu identifies a more or less direct correspondence between disciplinary prestige and original social class of member faculty. This observation is the start of a thread which he develops concerning the linkage between academia and social class. Academic systems of classification (grading and ranking performance of students) tend to reproduce social class strata. [Bourdieu, 1988:207] Academic careers therefore tend to follow social origins. [Bourdieu, 1988: 215] Bourdieu characterizes academia as a fundamentally conservative institution that reproduces and reinforces social class distinctions as a result of internalized faculty outlooks and expectations. Attempts to challenge this conservativism in academia meet with resistance by the vested power interests of the faculty because it challenges aspects of the ongoing renewal of academic makeup. This leads to the next polar opposition.
A key pole of academic power stems from the attainment of positions which govern (as Bourdieu puts it) the reproduction of the corps. [Bourdieu, 1988: 84] Fundamentally, the makeup of academia is determined by the control of the mechanisms for accepting new faculty members into the university ranks. The selection, culling, and molding of these new faculty members is a core exercise of power in the ongoing creation of academia. Senior faculty members who control this process for particular departments have tremendous long term control over the shape of the academy. The opposing pole is represented by faculty who for various reasons lack influence in the reproduction of the corps (they are junior, they are only lecturers, etc). As Bourdieu points out, the time of succession in academic positions is critical to power relations, as is true in all social situations in which there is an ongoing "changing of the guard" through time. Those who control the circumstances of the transition hold the reins to the future. Bourdieu elaborates the forms this power takes, with particular emphasis on the control of junior scholars' time in study, dissertation preparation, and prospects for successful careers through recommendations. Control of the acceptance process for key scholarly documents such as dissertations and works contributing to tenure is an essential part of this power pole, and an aspect that will be seen to have major consequences for potential transformation of scholarly communication systems.
The third major pole of opposition in academia is between faculty holding orthodox institutionally approved intellectual viewpoints and those faculty who hold "heretical" views. The heretics are often marginalized because of their viewpoints, but Bourdieu points out that in some cases heretics can gain enough followers that they become "consecrated heretics." Once their heretical views become consecrated (accepted within prominent circles, albeit still considered heretical in nature), this elevated class of heretic gains a large measure of independence and autonomy from the typical academic pressures. This class of heretic will play a part in the subsequent discussion of scholarly communication systems.
A final key concept which Bourdieu uses to understand the sociology of academia is the concept of habitus. [Bourdieu, 1988: 99] [Fowler, 1997: 18] This concept refers to the enduring outlooks (perceptions, appreciations, behaviors) which are internalized by particular social groups. The habitus of academics incorporates many assumptions, beliefs, and behaviors surrounding the question of what scholarly activity means. The habitus of academics can constrain many of their responses to new situations. Habitus is what forms faculty opinions about what represents legitimate expectations for junior scholars, the length of time appropriate to spend developing a thesis, their prospects for appointment, etc. Habitus is a term featured in much of Bourdieu's broader work and is a useful "shorthand" expression for much of the socialization that individuals of particular groups have undergone. In academia, this concept becomes important in conditions featuring great change, and will be invoked in the subsequent discussion of scholarly communication systems.
Bourdieu maintains that change in academia, deep and significant change anyway, is driven by changes in the demographics of students and the economic needs of society as a whole. [Bourdieu, 1988: 128-9] The 1968 crisis in French higher education can be seen as inevitable when demographic and economic trends of the period are examined. The numbers of students enrolled in French universities more than tripled from 1958 to 1968. [Cohen, 1978: 10-11] This shift was partly due to the postwar baby boom, but was also aggravated by increased desire for socioeconomic advancement through education. Financial investment in French higher education during this period was the lowest of any major Western country, and actually declined in real terms across some measures. [Cohen, 1978: 10-11] The main adaptation of French academia to the tremendous influx of new students was to create positions for many more non-tenure track lecturers to teach the vastly swollen classes, thereby institutionalizing a two tier system of faculty. As Bourdieu says, "the crisis of the university hierarchies... crystallized around the opposition between professors and lecturers." [Bourdieu, 1988: 152] At the same time that this opposition arose between the two tiers of faculty (those with and those without institutional power), the enormous logjams of students were encountering both intolerable conditions of crowding while in school and greatly constrained horizons for employment after graduation. The combination of tensions was explosive.
Points of crisis can feature conflicts between those who hold different forms of academic power. A key feature of this conflict is what Bourdieu terms Academic generations, dramatically different sets of expectations and outlook on the changes at hand. [Bourdieu, 1988: 147] In the acute crisis of 1968, one of the major changes encountered was that the pace of many new academic appointments changed. The need for new professors was such that the old pattern of writing a dissertation over a period of more than ten years could be short-circuited. Especially in newly emerging academic fields where there were many tenured openings, one could rush through the dissertation process in a much shorter period of time than previously anticipated. Those scholars oriented to the new generation of academic circumstances, who understood and took advantage of these opportunities to produce "a slimmer, reduced form" of thesis, could "jump the traffic lights" and attain tenured positions in a fraction of the time that more traditionally oriented scholars could. This led to consternation for those scholars who were mentally part of the till-then traditional academic generational mindset, the scholars: "who insist on producing according to the rhythm of the old university life-cycle, like those old marine creatures thrown up on the shore which continue to live according to the rhythm of the tide, find themselves in fact deprived, especially when they are not particularly precocious, of the benefit of the expansion of the universities. The dearth of candidates having both unofficial and official qualifications... thus allowed those of the newcomers who were readiest to understand the new rules of the game to fill a good proportion of the newly created posts of professor." [Bourdieu, 1988: 156]
There are several respects in which Bourdieu's analysis can be applied to the current circumstances of crisis in academia, and its system of communication. Bourdieu shows that a crisis point arises when expectations of stakeholders are disrupted and ordinarily balanced tensions are thrown out of equilibrium. By focusing attention on the changing set of expectations for junior French academics he illuminates the tensions and opportunities that characterized the acute crisis point of May 1968. There are difficulties in direct application of the historical cases of 1968 in France with 1998 in the United States (the structure of higher education is much less centralized in the latter, various elements of the nations and the time periods differ significantly, etc.), but there are also a great many pointed similarities. In both cases academia has encountered dramatic demographic increases in the number and variety of students, in 1968 because of the baby boom and the increasing desire of blue collar segments of society for social mobility through higher education [Cohen, 1978: 11], in 1998 because of the children of the baby boom generation and the widespread desire of many new student populations (groups considered "non-traditional" students because they typically did not pursue college degrees before World War II) to advance economically through higher education (women, virtually all racial minorities, students with full-time jobs, parents, etc.). [Pascarella, 1998] The many new students required additional faculty in both periods. In both 1968 and 1998 there is pressure to hire additional faculty while minimizing costs, in both situations a pattern of creating more non-tenured positions resulted. Finally, in both periods there had been a rapid increase in numbers of new disciplines which featured many employment opportunities for degree-holders, although these opportunities varied wildly over time (one has only to think of chemical engineers during and after the oil crisis, physicists during and after the cold war, the changing fortunes for computer scientists, etc.). The tensions of 1998 are quite similar to those Bourdieu described in 1968, but have even greater magnitude, with even more potential for disruption of the academic enterprise. These tensions are pressing academia in new directions which will cause many changes in the system of scholarly communication which it utilizes. To understand these changes, however, the relevant groups involved in scholarly communication in 1998 must be studied closely using the principles of cultural capital.
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