BIG IDEAS - and what they mean

 When I look around and see what people are concerned about right now, human rights and social justice issues are front-and-centre. This is not surprising given the massive amount of ethnic, social and economic turbulence the world has faced over recent times. And, as with any type of transformative change, there a few winners, but a lot more losers. What’s more, societies across the planet seem to be getting increasingly divided by the day.

During the 1950s and 1960s the dominant divide was social class, where society was stratified by wealth, income, and lifestyle. Two good expositions of how class revealed itself in Australian society were provided by Rob Connell and Terrence Irving in Class Structure in Australia History (Longman Cheshire, 1980), and Craig McGegor, in Class in Australia (Penguin Books, 1997). In 1999 Tony Bennett, Michael Emmison and John Frow reported on their study into class, which was based on the idea that people’s cultural tastes and practices were good indicators of their class and social position. Their book was titled Accounting for Taste: Australian Everyday Cultures (Cambridge University Press, 1999). An extended update of this study was recently published [Tony Bennett and others, Fields, Capital and Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities and Social Divisions (Routledge, 2021)], which included case studies on the arts, literature, television, heritage, and sport. It also provided a unique model of social class, which was built on a foundation of six distinctive but overlapping clusters of cultural practices linked to different occupations and income levels. They all confirmed that class divisions were alive and well, while also conceding that social mobility was a constant theme running through most of the nation’s 20th century history.

 However, during the last 40 years or so, the use of class to explain the structural and behavioural diversity of Australia and elsewhere - and the inequalities that followed - was often jettisoned in favor of concepts based around the body and its performative qualities. It was not always clear as to how and why this shift occurred, but the initial driver appeared to the emergence of a radical feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a special sensitivity to gender divisions and gender inequality  Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (Knopf, 1953), and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (Dell books, 1963) were especially influential, as was Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (University of Illinois Press, 1969), and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (Paladin, 1970).

The women’s movement had a dramatic impact on male-female relationships, while also enabling more women to attend university, secure professional employment, and achieve pay rates that were nor dissimilar to those of men. Issues of prejudice and bias were interrogated, and regulations were introduced that made it unlawful to discriminate against people based on their sexuality. Anti-discrimination laws were also passed in relation to race, skin-colour, age, ethnicity, religion, and disability. These regulations had a common aim, which was to eliminate structural disadvantage, and deliver greater equality. This was a noble initiative, but in moving along this policy pathway, it led to an incredibly fragmented society, where everyone had differences to highlight, but few opportunities build cohesive relationships with the ‘other’ so to speak.

 It is fair to say that the first twenty years of the twenty-first century witnessed an explosive expansion of what we now call identity politics. While it had its critics, with Joshau Mitchell’s Afflictions (American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions (2021) leading the charge, it legitimized the personalization of politics, with anyone having the opportunity to claim an identity that not only said who they were and what they stood for, but also revealed the scale of the discrimination they have suffered. So, whereas Marxism divided people according to who owned the means of production, and whose only asset was their labour-power, identity politics divided people into any number of racial, cultural, and social groups that signified oppression and victimization. In recent times identity politics had taken another turn by utilizing the notion of ‘intersectionality’ to strengthen its theoretical foundations and broaden its sphere of influence

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Intersectionality was first promulgated in the late 1980s by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American academic. Crenshaw, who identified - amongst other things - as feminist, used it to highlight her claim that women were not only oppressed at every turn, but also subjected to a multitude of discriminatory forces and configurations. According to Kimberle, these forces and configurations began with patriarchy, which legitimized the right of ‘straight’ men – especially those with white skin and who spoke English - to control the lives of women. But, in Kimberle’s mind, a white supremacist hetero-normative patriarchy – which privileged the male gender over the female gender - was only the beginning, since women were also marginalized and subjugated according to their sexuality, their ethnicity, their physical appearance, the colour of their skin, their religious beliefs, their social class, their level of disability, their personality and disposition, their age, their overall capabilities, and even the place they lived. Female oppression was ubiquitous. KImberle also observed that it came with varying degrees of intensity. Moreover, the sources of the oppression were structural and cultural - not biological – and bound together by ‘the intersectional systems of society’.

At first glance, intersectionality theory appeared to provide an acutely sensitive lens for viewing disadvantage and marginalization, since it illuminated the massive range of challenging lived experiences not only within the same cohort of people, but also between cohorts. In Kimberle’s mind it was axiomatic, for instance, that the average life experience of a poor white female would differ substantially from that of a wealthy black male. Similarly, the experience of a white trans woman would differ markedly from the experience of a black lesbian. The white, trans woman would be privileged by her skin colour, but suffer oppression because of her gender identity, while the black lesbian would be privileged through her ‘cis’ gender identity but oppressed because of her ‘race’ and sexuality. Additionally, gay white males would navigate their life journey in quite different ways from hetero-normative white women.

Kimberle concluded that rich white men of Western/European heritage held all the power and used it to keep the remainder of society in a state of fearful subjugation. Kimberle’s intersectionality theory additionally assumed that maleness would always be privileged over femaleness, heterosexuality over homosexuality, white skin over black skin, and able-bodied over disabled.

Kimberle understood that disadvantage was multi-pronged, but only briefly touched on other socially desirable traits like physical attractiveness, cognitive capability, and emotional intelligence, all of which could secure a social advantage and create a position of privilege. But I got the feeling that Kimberle thought – as a black female – these largely positive traits would rarely be sufficient to overcome the advantage that accrued from being male and white.

This argument raises many interesting issues around the causes of social deprivation, and to what extent they are based in biology on one hand, and socio-cultural backgrounds on the other. Kimberle’s model of intersectionality also tempts readers think that white men could never suffer the level of deprivation that regularly confronts women, be they white or coloured. However, my own observations do not always coincide with Kimberle’s diagnosis. I have met lots of cognitively impaired, white heterosexual men with no formal qualification who were far more disadvantaged than a university educated lesbian safely tucked away in a well-paid government job.

Either way it is difficult to know exactly where intersectionality theory will take us. Its intent is clear though, which is to create a fairer world where oppression and discrimination have been eliminated, everyone can participate in society, the costs and potential harms are spread, and the benefits shared.

This is a noble project, but also a very risky one. This is because the radical identities built on every layer of oppression have the potential to alienate dissenters, crush any inkling of social solidarity, undermine any sense of national identity, and deliver not also additional demographic and racial ghettos, but cultural and gendered ones as one. This is a scary thing to contemplate.

But there is no doubt that intersectionality theory is now part of the mainstream.  When job recruiters set out to increase diversity in their organizations, intersectionality theory is now front of mind. While gender balance is still a major goal, the emphasis is now on hiring staff who, are at the minimum, doubly disadvantaged. This achieves two positive outcomes according to its proponents. First, it delivers greater diversity, and second it goes some way to decreasing the inequality gap in society. It thus makes sense to seek staff who are not only female, but also coloured, since coloured women have always been hired less often, and when they have been given a job, are inevitably paid less. The disadvantage increases exponentially when their sexuality does not fit the hetero-normative benchmark, and they have some type of disability. Intersectionality theory enables HR departments to prioritise their employment strategies and ensure that white males are no longer privileged because of their gender and skin colour, while everyone else can confidently enjoy safe workspaces, and be paid a fair and equitable salary.

And who can argue with a theory that has social justice as its ethical lynchpin?

 Kimberle Crenshaw's seminal (1991) research paper is 'Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color', Stanford Law Review, 43 (6): 1241-1299.  

Bob Stewart.

12 February 2024 

Sociologists have a habit of taking simple ideas and transforming them into complex theoretical constructs that only a select few insiders pretend to understand. The French were masters of this esoteric intellectual art-form, and during the latter part of the twentieth century had captured the hearts of minds of ‘intellectuals’ across the planet. Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva, Henri Lefebvre, Jean-François Lyotard, and Tzvetan Todorov were especially influential, as were Bruno Latour and Michel Foucault, although they saw themselves as philosophers first and foremost. They had a lot to say about postmodernism, cultural relativism, neo-Marxism, identity politics, and the dynamics of power. 

But there was one sociologist whose work was a bit more accessible and provided many sharp insights into the subtle interdependencies between society and the individual. His name was Pierre Bourdieu. One of Pierre’s best-known books was Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, which was first published in 1979 and translated into English in 1984. It involved 600 pages of detailed analysis of the leisure habits of French citizens, with special attention to what Pierre called ‘cultural goods’. Cultural goods were all those experiences which could be used to not only build an identity, but also ‘distinguish’ oneself from other citizens. They included museum visits, concert-going, traveling, sporting interests, artistic preferences, and anything else that demonstrated one’s ‘taste’, cultural sensitivities, and social position. And all was revealed in a “social hierarchy of the consumers” which functioned as “markers of class.”  Pierre went to note that one’s pattern of ‘cultural goods’ use was not random, but instead sharply influenced by home background and formal education.  

And this is where Pierre’s notion of the ‘habitus’ came into play. According to Pierre, a person’s habitus - something akin to a disposition surrounded by a constellation of values and beliefs - is the aggregation of years of socialisation and adaptation to one’s cultural, geographical, and economic surroundings. The habitus also consisted of the ‘hexis’, which comprised a person's carriage and posture on one hand, and speech and accent on the other. 

And, according to Pierre, not only does everyone have their own unique habitus, but they also gravitate to people and groups occupying a similar habitus. The result is a class of habitus where one class occupies either a superior or inferior position to some other class within a particular setting, or as Pierre called it, social field.

For Pierre the habitus is essentially all about who we are, and what we want to be. First, it shapes the way people view their world, their perceived place in it, and their social identity. Second, it provides a catalyst for action, since it enables people to confidently enter various social fields and reap the rewards (or ‘capital’, as Bourdieu labels it). This capital (be it economic, cultural, social, and symbolic) can then be used to enhance their capacity for further action, capital accumulation, and power to influence others. Third, one’s habitus also constrains action, since it is the repository of all sorts of moral boundaries, taboos, customs, traditions and ideologies that inhibit or even forbids certain types of behaviours, be it fasting at specific times of the year or refusing to take blood transfusions. In Pierre's words, habitus can be described as a 'necessity internalised and converted into a ... [general, transferable] ... disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions.'

Pierre concedes that one’s habitus tends to inertia and institutionalisation, However, it can also shift and re-shape in response to changes to the social field resulting from external jolts and boundary-line turbulence. First, the rules can change – in the case global warming for example – where people are rewarded for softening their ecological footprint. Second, the competition for capital can escalate - as in the case where women are increasingly educated above the standards of men - and this can lead to a significant re-allocation of rewards and benefits. Finally, the tactics by which capital and power can be secured can change. For example, in situations where workplaces are de-masculinised, the change in ideology can force employees to reconfigure their habitus so that it is better aligned with contemporary inter-gender relations.

In Pierre's social world, the habitus will be the dominant influence on people’s leisure experiences. As already noted, it reflects people’s unique histories and life journeys, and as a result we would confidently expect middle class, professional inner suburban families to have quite different leisure aspirations to those of outer suburban families whose main breadwinner is a skilled tradesperson.

So, for instance, university educated upper middle middle-class professionals are more likely to have finely tuned dispositions that reveal a self-conscious cosmopolitanism focussed on fashion brand names, good-taste, and watching ‘art house’ movies. When it came to sport and recreation, they would gravitate to international ski holidays, membership at private golf clubs, rowing regattas, and premium seats for the big sport events. In contrast, outer-suburban, family-centred, middle –income, materialist households where trade certificates or business diplomas were the educational norm, will spend more of their time on community netball, district football competitions, car racing, powerboating, angling and contact sports like boxing and mixed martial arts. They would also be less likely to participate in more feminised activities like bushwalking, recreational cycling, sailboarding and tennis. Pierre used the term body-schema to accommodate the ways in which different classes of habitus constructed their sport and leisure preferences, and how the habitus was used to judge the merit of one leisure activity against another.

In other words, people’s experiences both shape and are shaped by, their habitus. Through the integration of family relations, gendered opportunities, educational attainments, social position, physical prowess, and personality, the habitus builds up a collage of expectations, aspirations, and ambitions. These enablers are balanced by an amalgam of constraints that are built around early childhood socialisation, gendered roles, income level, bodily appearance, cultural traditions, religious convictions, and the like This produces patterned systems of inclinations, dispositions, and lifestyles that not only shape identity, but also establishes modes of practice and social behaviour. 

To sum up, and to put things as succinctly as I can, I reckon Pierre is saying that people’s habitus is the driving force for their day-to day behaviour and social interactions. One half of their time is spent creating a unique and distinctive identity that they can call their own and use to enhance their social position, while the other half is spent searching for people who are most like them and have the same distinctive qualities.

I like what Pierre has to say.  In my mind his idea of ‘habitus’ encapsulates all those apparently superficially random things we do on our life journey.  But as it turns out, they are calculated to achieve clearly defined personal and social ambitions along the way.

Bob Stewart

 13 February 2024.

In 1994 two American social scientists, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, wrote a book titled The Bell Curve: Intelligence, and Class Structure in American Life. According to the back cover ’blurb’ it told the story of a “society in transformation.” At the top of the nation’s socio-technical pyramid was a ‘cognitive elite’. They had secured the best education and the top jobs not because of a significant social advantage or parents support, but because they were smart and lucky enough to use it to their advantage. At the bottom of the pyramid was, not surprisingly, a disadvantaged underclass. It was at this point that Richard and Charles asserted that the “common denominator” of the underclass was not “racial and social disadvantage”, but rather the disadvantage that came with “low intelligence”.

But it did not end there. Richard and Charles also argued that intelligence – or IQ as it was colloquially referred to – was also a factor that influenced things like “crime, unemployment, welfare, child neglect, poverty”, fertility levels, and ‘illegitimate’ births. In other words, America’s major social problems were the result of individual differences in cognitive capabilities. This meant that if the social policies of government were to have any positive impact on disadvantaged communities, they had to begin by targeting young people with learning disabilities and low IQs, enhancing their educational experiences, improving their decision making-skills, building their confidence, and giving their lives purpose and meaning.

And finally, Richard and Charles reckoned that some demographic cohorts were, on average less cognitively capable, and more likely to have a learning disability. And this was followed by the monumentally courageous claim that these differences were most visible between different racial groups. Not surprisingly, the Bell Curve got a hostile response, with world renowned intellectuals - Jay Gould and Noam Chomsky in particular - leading the pack. 

Having recently skimmed over the book’s contents, I decided to revisit the bell curve concept, and work out why it was made the centrepiece of Richard and Charles’ study. It did not take me long to conclude that the bell curve was an integral component of social science research. It also became evident that anyone who pretends to understand statistical analysis should be familiar with what the bell curve and its variants can reveal about society’s problems and how we might go about solving them. 

To put it simply, a bell-curve is a symmetrical curve that represents the distribution of sets of data which are usually expressed as values, frequencies, or probabilities. But to be symmetrical 50% of the values will be above the mean and 50% below the mean. Moreover, the spread of the data each side of the mean will by identical. Hence the use of the term ‘bell curve’. Data that can be usually represented as a bell-shaped curve include things like weight, age, height, cognitive capability, reading ability, job satisfaction, time spent watching television, and so on. 

Let’s go through an example from Australia to get a clear picture of how it might work in practice. A good current case is a nation’s income distribution across households.  Australia’s current population is around 27 million, which comprises just over 12 million households with an average household size of around 2.5 persons. 

Let’s assume that the average – or mean – (a measure of central tendency that summarises a dataset with a single number) disposable income for Australian households is around $1000 a week. The real figure, is, as it turns out, $1,124.

Let’s also assume the mean, the mode (the value that occurs most frequently in a set of data), and the median (the value separating the higher half of a data sample from the lower half), are all the same, which is $1,000. This means that in this example 50% of all households have a weekly disposable income below $1000, and 50% above it. And we finally assume that the spread of data is the same for each half of the curve. This is not what happens when it comes to income distribution in the real world, so to speak, but more about this later. 

Under these assumptions it follows that the data for Australian household disposable income will take the form of an archetypal bell curve, which is, by definition, symmetrical. A bell-shaped curve is also known as a normal distribution or Gaussian distribution curve. 

So far so good, but we also must account for the fact that not all bell-shaped or normal curves have the same shape. In the case of data for Australian household disposable income, we do not yet know the variation or dispersion of the data. For some data sets the values will be very close to the mean, but in other cases will be heavily dispersed.  This means that the width of a bell curve, can vary enormously.

When it comes to quantifying the variability of data dispersion, statisticians have come up with a measure called the standard deviation (SD). In addition, a so called ‘empirical rule’ has been established which tell us most values lie within a normal distribution or bell curve arrangement. It contains three axioms, which are: 

* Around 68% of values fall within 1 standard deviation from the mean.

* Approximately 95% of values lie within 2 standard deviations from the mean.

* Nearly 99.7% of values are within 3 standard deviations from the mean.

In an ideal world we would like to see the data for Australian household disposable income taking the form of a bell-shaped curve. But not only that, it would be also good to see a low SD (say less than 1), which would indicate a low dispersion of data, which would reflect a relatively equitable distribution of income. On the other hand, a SD of more than 2.5 would indicate some serious problem with the distribution of disposable household income levels. 

But the core problem with the frequency distribution of Australian household disposable income data is that the bell curve / normal distribution feature does not apply in practice. In short, we end up with a frequency distribution curve that is heavily skewed to the right, where the left tail is shortened while the right tail is considerably lengthened. A curve of this type immediately indicates a high degree of inequality, since a significant majority of households have incomes below the average, while a few households will have income levels massively above the average. 

But Richard and Charles were not critiquing the distribution of income. The were interrogating the distribution of IQ. But even more controversially, they were also comparing IQ levels amongst different ethnic and racial groups.  And this is why their analysis was so heavily contested. 

As it turned out, Richard and Charles had compiled several bell/normal curves for IQ, each of which related to specific ethnic and racial cohorts. And in this case, the problems they raised had little to do with skewed curves, but a lot to do with shifting curves, 

Richard and Charles found that the bell curves for different groups were located on different parts of the horizontal scale, which were the IQ values. These findings were disputed, since they purported to show that some ethnic and racial groups did better than others. Not only were the results challenged, but Richard and Charles were also accused of running a racist agenda. 

While you may not agree with the findings, there is no dispute that Richard and Charles provoked enormous amounts of discussion- with a lot of it hostile - about the use of this type of statistical analysis in social science research. The debate continues to this day. 

Bob Stewart

10 May 2024.

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