In the last newsletter, we discussed culture and how often, when leaders talk about creating culture, they are really advancing an ideology. Here, we pivot slightly and detour through the thinker Pierre Bourdieu. While his work never uses the term ideology, he helps position how the individual backgrounds and collective behaviors function to form what he calls habitus and doxa.
There is a debate as old as time between determinacy and free will. This issue materializes on LinkedIn as the divide between individual agencies and the impact of systems and social constructs.
On the one hand, there are the classic tropes of individuals who have great success through pure effort and a strong will. This is often characterized by white male former execs from MAMAA (previously FAANG) companies. They talk about merit, hard work, not giving up, learning from failures, and how anyone can have what they did.
On the other hand, some believe that systems yield results and that society shapes individuals’ performance and outcomes. This could be seen as the company’s culture driving the results more than the individuals.
(To be honest, both perspectives here are straw men to emphasize the difference. Most people have more nuanced views.)
To examine this idea, I want to introduce two concepts from Pierre Bourdieu: Habitus and Doxa.
Habitus
Bourdieu coined the term Habitus to describe how norms and social practices are created.
Here is how Bourdieu describes it:
The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor. 1
While Bourdieu has some great ideas, the above is typical of his sentences: long, dense, and insightful. Let’s break this down:
The conditions you experience in your environment create a habitus. A habitus is a set of dispositions or likely ways for individuals to behave. These dispositions are based on their environment; they act as heuristics in that they can be applied across different scenarios.
The result is a set of norms and ways of being that are durable over time. It allows predictability (which, in turn, is seen as culture) without strict rules for people to follow.
It is because subjects do not, strictly speaking, know what they are doing that what they do has more meaning than they know. The habitus is the universalizing mediation which causes an individual agent’s practices, without either explicit reason or signifying intent, to be none the less “sensible” and “reasonable”. 2
This doesn’t exclude freedom or the idea of agency. However, it frames that agency within the bounds of what is known. One way to think of this is improvising by a jazz musician. The habitus is a piece of music’s chord chart, melody, and rhythms, but that doesn’t prevent a musician from improvising. The only difference here is that the musician isn’t aware of the arbitrariness of their accepted constraints.
As Bourdieu quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness:
For it is necessary to reverse the common opinion and acknowledge that it is not the harshness of a situation or the sufferings it imposes that lead people to conceive of another state of affairs in which things would be better for everybody. It is on the day that we are able to conceive of another state of affairs, that a new light is cast on our trouble and our suffering and we decide that they are unbearable.3
This also doesn’t mean we can’t imagine other possibilities. We can develop adjacent ideas, but they become feasible only when we see alternatives.
The approaches we are willing to take are also limited by the
“practical evaluation of the likelihood of the success of a given action in a given situation brings into play a whole body of wisdom, sayings, commonplaces, ethical precepts (“that’s not for the likes of us”) and, at a deeper level, the unconscious principles of the ethos which, being the product of a learning process dominated by a determinate type of objective regularities, determines “reasonable” and “unreasonable” conduct for every agent subjected to those regularities.” 4
In other words, we might be able to imagine doing something different, like asking the CEO a difficult question about a concern at an all-hands meeting. Still, if you think it is likely unreasonable to do so and unlikely to drive the effects you want (and could have negative consequences), you and everyone else remain quiet, and the question remains unasked.
Doxa
The underlying beliefs that make the question unaskable are the doxa. They are the beliefs that underlie the habitus and cannot be discussed.
While habitus describes social norms derived from historical action and material conditions, doxa describes the beliefs and ideas created by the habitus that reinforce it.
The best way to explain doxa is with the story told by David Foster Wallace in his commencement address, “What Is Water?”:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” 5
Doxa is like water for the younger fish; it is a reality that is so accepted that it is not seen, and we are unaware of it. No one needs to argue for the existence of water or challenge its role. As Bourdieu explains:
Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees and with very different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness. Of all the mechanisms tending to produce this effect, the most important and the best concealed is undoubtedly the dialectic of the objective chances and the agents’ aspirations, out of which arises the sense of limits, commonly called the sense of reality, i.e. the correspondence between the objective classes and the internalized classes, social structures and mental structures, which is the basis of the most ineradicable adherence to the established order. 6
Things are arbitrary. This way of being is not preordained as the right one; things are as they are as a matter of circumstance. We mistake this arbitrariness for something preordained.
”nothing is further from the correlative notion of the majority than the unanimity of doxa, the aggregate of the “choices” whose subject is everyone and no one because the questions they answer cannot be explicitly asked. The adherence expressed in the doxic relation to the social world is the absolute form of recognition of legitimacy through misrecognition of arbitrariness, since it is unaware of the very question of legitimacy, which arises from competition for legitimacy, and hence from conflict between groups claiming to possess it.” 7
What makes this feel preordained is the alignment of how things are and the habitus of individuals. This creates the experience of doxa. The fish were not aware of the water not just because they were always in it but also because of their ability to swim and breathe in the water through gills. Their material conditions correspond to the world they experience:
“When, owing to the quasi-perfect fit between the objective structures and the internalized structures which results from the logic of simple reproduction, the established cosmological and political order is perceived not as arbitrary, i.e. as one possible order among others, but as a self-evident and natural order which goes without saying and therefore goes unquestioned, the agents aspirations have the same limits as the objective conditions of which they are the product.” 8
Because of that perfect fit, no one questions the presence of the water (until the old fish does).
Terry Eagleton elucidates this as so:
What Bourdieu calls doxa belongs to the kind of stable, tradition-bound social order in which power is fully naturalized and unquestionable, so that no social arrangement different from the present could even be imagined. Here, as it were, subject and object merge indistinguishably into each other. What matters in such societies is what ‘goes without saying’, which is determined by tradition; and tradition is always ‘silent’, not least about itself as tradition. Any challenge to such doxa is then heterodoxy, against which the given order must assert its claims in a new orthodoxy. Such orthodoxy differs from doxa in that the guardians of tradition, of what goes without saying, are now compelled to speak in their own defence, and thus implicitly to present themselves as simply one possible position, among others. 9
This final point brings up a critical breakdown. Only when a heterodoxy challenges an existing order does an orthodox perspective emerge. Previously, that perspective was Doxa, and it didn’t need arguments to sustain it. It was unquestioned. When it becomes questioned, the orthodox arguments come into being. When the old fish names the water, it creates a sudden heterodox perspective. This then requires an orthodox view to emerge. One can imagine that water will officially come to mean everything there is, which attempts to reinforce and create the belief that seems to have underlined the previous doxa. But with this move, “what is discussable” changes.
“Orthodoxy, straight, or rather straightened, opinion, which aims, without ever entirely succeeding, at restoring the primal state of innocence of doxa, exists only in the objective relationship which opposes it to heterodoxy, that is, by reference to the choice – hairesis, heresy – made possible by the existence of competing possibles and to the explicit critique of the sum total of the alternatives not chosen that the established order implies.” 10
Of course, when this comes into doxa, it is not destroyed; a new doxa exists outside what the heterodox and orthodox can discuss.
What causes this voice of the heterodox to emerge? One condition that Bourdieu says is required is crisis:
“The critique which brings the undiscussed into discussion, the unformulated into formulation, has as the condition of its possibility objective crisis, which, in breaking the immediate fit between the subjective structures and the objective structures, destroys self-evidence practically… Crisis is a necessary condition for a questioning of doxa but is not in itself a sufficient condition for the production of a critical discourse” 11
What this means as a middle manager:
- Recognize the habitus and the range of improvisation it allows, both for yourself and your team. Each person has their own habitus, which can impact what appears possible or not for them.
- Undiscussables only become discussable when they are challenged. Challenge the unstated assumptions, contradict them, and force a reason to be given why things are as they are (orthodoxy). And from your team, openly accept challenges and realize that describing the way things are is part of the process; it isn’t until the orthodox is articulated that what is discussable can expand.
- Treat crises as opportunities to discuss the undiscussable and allow heterodox views to emerge.
- Bourdieu, Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice p72 ↩
- Ibid p79 ↩
- Ibid p74 quoting Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness ↩
- Bourdieu, Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice p77 ↩
- https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ ↩
- Bourdieu, Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice p164 ↩
- Ibid p168 ↩
- Ibid p166 ↩
- Eagleton, Terry. Ideology an Introduction ↩
- Bourdieu, Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice p169 ↩
- Ibid p169 ↩