This article focuses on the importance of quantifying Bourdieu’s “research programme”, linked with the concepts of field, habitus, and capital. It presents possible ways of doing statistics within this framework and argues that continuous methodological development should be pursued. To support this argument, the article highlights the methodology and empirical results of a doctoral dissertation on the Swiss field of economic sciences. It stresses the relevance of using a prosopographical strategy and advocates further development of multiple correspondence analysis, and the use of sequence analysis and social network analysis. The main contributions of these methods concern the investigation of subgroup profiles in fields, the trajectories of accumulation and conversion of capitals and the structure of social capital. When asking whether or not we should think with or beyond Bourdieu when suggesting new methodological developments to his programme, this article argues that we ought to think beyond his strict written work, but still within his theoretical framework, which proves particularly relevant to the study of power relations among individuals.
This paper studies the rise of professors of economics and business studies in the second half of the 20th century in Switzerland. It focuses on three types of power resources: positions in the university hierarchy, scientific reputation and extra-academic positions in the economic and political spheres. Based on a biographical database of N = 487 professors, it examines how these resources developed from 1957 to 2000. We find that professors of economic sciences were increasingly and simultaneously successful on all three studied dimensions – especially when compared to disciplines such as law, social sciences or humanities. This evolution seems to challenge the notorious trade-off between scientific and society poles of the academic field: professors of economics and business increased their scientific reputation while becoming more powerful in worldly positions. However, zooming in on their individual endowment with capital, we see that the same professors rarely hold simultaneously a significant amount of scientific and institutional capital.
The Chilean military regime offered a prime example of interactions among elite groups in the making of macroeconomic policies. Through the lens of both Bourdieu's field theory and Mills's elite coordination through networks, we show how Chilean elites sought to implement these policies despite being divided by their transnational and national ties. We have constructed an original database on the 62 most influential individuals within the space of macroeconomic policies using a variety of descriptive methods (multiple correspondence analysis, cluster analysis, and social network analysis), only used on very few occasions to study South American elites. We explore the internal divisions in these elites in terms of their orientation to national and transnational capital and biographical trajectories. We identify three groups – high‐ranking military officers, Chicago academic economists, and public and private sector professionals. Military officers were mostly endowed with national assets, while civilian groups relied on transnational resources. Moreover, the Chicago economists, characterized by their transnational and scientific legitimacy, were the closest to influential state positions overall (the Ministry of the Treasury and the Central Bank). Finally, we categorize the same three groups through (national and transnational) network ties. Organizational ties between those groups were significant, particularly among Chicago economists and professionals, which suggests an intense coordination process, facilitated by transnational affiliations and profile.
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