Crime, Disorder and Symbolic Violence Governing Th... - (Part I Introduction)

Part I
Introduction
Copyright © 2014. Pan Macmillan. All rights reserved.
Bowden, M 2014, Crime, Disorder and Symbolic Violence : Governing the Urban Periphery, Pan Macmillan,
Basingstoke. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [20 November 2018].
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1
Urban Disorder and Symbolic
Violence: Opening the Case
Criminology and urban disorder
Four themes are central to the perspective developed in this book. The
first is that urban disorder stimulates scholarly and political attention
to the conditions producing disorder. For example, the urban riots of
the 1980s in British cities served as backdrop to the formation of Left
Realism (Lea and Young, 1984). Equally, Rob Reiner’s (2010) historical
sociology draws our attention to the disorderly conditions which gave
rise to the police as a uniquely modern institution. Often the policy
developments tend to be half-baked efforts to restore social order. The
second theme is that of the preventive turn – the term used by Hughes
(2007) to capture the shift from the locus of crime control within the
criminal justice system and its dispersal to a wider range of actors. The
third theme is the socio-spatial formation of the urban periphery as a
distinctly recent and geo-historically specific context: it is here that the
manifestations of the preventive turn crystallize as a result of urban dis-

order. The fourth key theme in the book is that of the governance of the
subject (Garland, 1997). This concerns the basis upon which subjects are
governed or are engaged in what Nikolas Rose (1999) referred to as an
‘ethico-politics’ in which the subject is incentivized to self-govern as the
state withdraws from welfare. Critical here, however, is how this engage-
ment might be understood – either as an all-embracing set of governing
rationalities and technologies for governing the soul, or as an area of
uneven development in which the state is a player in a field of contest
for the domination of territory and the subject.
This book aims to discuss the case of governing the urban periphery in
Ireland and, in the process, to develop a Bourdieusian perspective – that
the urban periphery is a locus for everyday field struggles for power and
4 Introduction
domination. Actors are involved in a competitive struggle for the power

to dominate. That power, according to Bourdieu (1991), is the right to
wield symbolic rather than physical violence. Symbolic violence has to
do with a long-run investment in penetrating territory with a com-
mon understanding and has the power to dominate subjects through
more subtle and durable forms of power than otherwise achievable by
physical force.
Urban disorders have a tendency to ignite media and political moral
panic, but they also stimulate scholarly interest: partly because they
crystallize the structural conditions and major social transformations
of the time, whether it is the end of Fordism or the advanced indi-
vidualism and consumerism of post-modern society. Writing about the
‘post-political’ riots in London in the summer of 2011, Treadwell et al.
(2012) point out that those on the margins were unable to find an object
for their dissatisfaction and ‘turned to the shops’ (Winlow and Hall,
2012). Disorders stimulate reflections, not least in criminology. Another
example of this is the prolific Loïc Wacquant (1993b, 1996, 1999, 2001),
who, during the 1990s, published a series of articles and papers on the
nature of urban marginality and urban disorder in both France and the
US. At the beginning of one such article, Wacquant (1993b) describes
the scene of the urban disorders at Vaulx-en-Velin, a working-class area
on the periphery of Lyon. A local teenager was killed in a motorbike
accident caused by a police car: the catalytic moment for three nights of
rioting, the dispatching of riot troops by the French government and the
burning of 200 cars. The impact on government could not be underesti-
mated, as the ‘long-simmering rage of the banlieu – declining peripheral
areas with high densities of degraded public housing – tops the political
agenda and will dominate public debate for months on end’ (Wacquant,
1993b, p. 3).
Wacquant linked these disorders to the emergence of a ‘new poverty’
that had accompanied the end of the mid-century consensus and the
emergence of post-Fordism (Wacquant, 1996). The Vaulx-en-Velin story
was not an isolated incident: Wacquant (1993b) linked this with the
extensive urban disorders in Los Angeles following the acquittal of
police officers for the videotaped beating of Rodney King.1 In the pre-
vious decade, Margaret Thatcher had waged war against the ‘enemy
within’, including the striking coal miners and print workers, and cities
across the UK experienced outbreaks of urban disorder (Scraton, 1987).
Disorders are catalytic in a number of ways, not least that they produce
developments in criminology.
My own introduction to criminology began in 1991 after bearing wit-
ness to the urban disorders at Ronanstown, a residential area on Dublin’s
Opening the Case 5
western periphery which was planned as part of the ‘new town’ devel-
opments in the 1960s and built in the late 1970s. My primary interest
in this book is to analyse urban disorder and the state strategies that
emerged as encapsulating a type of governing. In doing so, one must
engage in the narrative and political economy of the city, the relational
field of state and urban politics, and the forging of, as Foucault (1977)
would have put it, technologies for the governance of the soul.
The empirical material for this book is drawn from the case of the
Republic of Ireland – a country of four million people which up until the
1970s was a largely rural, agricultural, post-colonial society and econ-
omy. Rapid urbanization followed the industrial strategy inaugurated
after the Programme for Economic Progress (1959), which shifted eco-
nomic policy from an import substitution model of industrialization to
one favouring foreign direct investment. Apart from occasional political
rioting associated with republican politics, riots were rather diminutive
in scale compared with those in English cities during the 1980s. Yet
they did occur, and warrant attention in this first chapter.2 There are
two goals in this scene setting: first, to provide an exposition of the the-
oretical and empirical issues; and, second, to provide an exposition of
the relational nature of the state’s response in the Irish case.
To begin, it is necessary to tell a story which is partly based upon field-
work and interviews, from media accounts and from official documents
which were made accessible for research purposes and from which an
extensive set of notes was compiled, including direct handwritten tran-
scription of relevant parts of documents.3 This account underlines the
theoretical and empirical challenges that were faced from the outset of
this research endeavour.
Urban disorder and the urban periphery – A natural history
26 February 1991
Two senior civil servants, a Principal Officer (PO) and an Assistant Prin-
cipal Officer (AP) from the Department of Justice, went on a visit to
the Neilstown area of Dublin.4 It is situated in the northern half of the
planned ‘new town’ of Clondalkin, approximately 12 kilometres west of
Dublin city centre. On 27 February, the two civil servants each wrote
reports and submitted them to the Assistant Secretary, the second most
senior ranking of officials in the Department of Justice. The officials
reported that they had witnessed scenes of despair and hopelessness
amongst both local people and state and professional service providers
working there. The Assistant Secretary prepared a memorandum for the
Secretary of the Department, the senior official who briefs the Minister.
6 Introduction
In his memo he described the contents of the report of the PO and the
AP as ‘disturbing’.
The officials had gone to the police station to meet the Gardai,5 and
they described the attitude of the officers as ‘defeatist’. The Inspector,
the most senior officer in the local Garda station, did not show up to
meet them as arranged; he had availed himself of annual leave. The PO
described the Station Sergeant who did meet with them as ‘useless’.6
Some discussion of this situation had taken place earlier between the
officials and the Garda Commissioner, and they had in mind ‘some
immediate steps’ they might take.7 In his report the AP told how the
Garda station was dilapidated in its physical condition and that he
had the impression that the police felt that the problems were ‘beyond
them’. Arising from this briefing with the Gardai, he noted that a ‘hard
core’ of 50 young people and a wider group of associates who gathered
after dark had no respect for authority and were not subject to parental
social control. The police, he wrote, were of the view that this group
needed to be confronted to restore law and order. One of the strate-
gies involved the police naming 31 individuals and their usual crimes,
and sharing this directly with the Department of Justice. It seemed as if
extraordinary challenges needed exceptional measures.
Tuesday, 19 November 1991

A car being driven by some young people moved at speed down
Neilstown Road. Two Gardai in a patrol car were in pursuit. It was early
on a dull and cold Tuesday evening. The road was about a mile and a
half long and it was straight, enabling the driver to gain speed. The car
was eventually driven to a piece of open ground. The drivers got out
and were joined by another group of young people. The officers who
were in pursuit moved in to make arrests, but they were prevented from
doing so by the size of the crowd and by stones thrown at their patrol
vehicle. They contacted their base by radio for assistance. The car driven
by the young people was set alight. A number of other cars were alight
at this time or shortly afterward. Reinforcements arrived on the scene
and were met with stones from the young people (Byrne, 1991). The fire
brigade was alerted and arrived on the scene to attend the burning cars.
Six fire fighters received injuries from stone throwing as they attempted
to deal with the fires at Neilstown Drive (Editorial, Sunday Tribune, 24
November 1991, p. 1). These events were carried as the main item of
news the following morning on the radio, and they made headlines in
the various print media for a good part of the following days, including
the front page of a then significant Sunday newspaper (Bowden, 2006).
Opening the Case 7
Monday, 25 November 1991

The Assistant Secretary at the Department of Justice wrote a memo to
the Secretary. He appended three separate reports on the riots from the
Garda Superintendent of ‘L’ district and an article from the Sunday Tri-
bune newspaper. He implored the Secretary to inform the Minister at the
earliest, as he was concerned that these events could escalate into the
large-scale rioting experienced in Britain in the 1980s.
Officials were watchful of the activities of the Provisional Irish Repub-
lican Army (PIRA) in the peripheral areas of Dublin. They were more
concerned, however, that efforts should be made to ensure that there
was support for the police force to prevent a recurrence of the policing
crisis in the inner city during the 1980s. Police–community relations
in the inner city were at a low, given what appeared to be the inabil-
ity of the police to stop heroin dealing, which was a key factor in the
emergence of the citizen anti-heroin movement, the Concerned Par-
ents Against Drugs (CPAD) (see Bennett, 1988). The primary concern
amongst the officials and police was the extent to which members of
the Provisional IRA had penetrated into civil society. In one area, for
example, they were seen as effectively operating their own community
centre and their own youth service.
The officials at the centre of the fact-finding efforts surrounding these
events urged that the Minister should meet immediately with the Garda
Commissioner and his colleagues about the situation. The Secretary,
on receipt of a memorandum that contained newspaper articles on
the events at Ronanstown appended with handwritten notes, suggested
to the Minister that he should read it as a signal from the police for
his help.
On Tuesday 26 November 1991 an urgent meeting took place between

senior Justice officials and Garda management to discuss urban policing
problems, just 24 hours after the Secretary had advised the Minister.
That evening of Tuesday 26 November 1991, the Minister for Justice,
Mr Ray Burke TD, met with the Garda Commissioner. The events of the
week culminated in an address to parliament.
Wednesday, 27 November 1991

An adjournment debate on ‘Violence and Vandalism in Dublin Suburbs’
took place in Dáil Éireann, the lower chamber of the Irish parliament.
It was addressed by the Minister for Justice, Mr Ray Burke. The Minis-
ter told the House that he had taken a direct personal interest in the
difficulties with juvenile vandalism in some Dublin suburbs, and as a
direct result of his enquiries he had set up two projects in two peripheral
8 Introduction
areas of west Dublin. The riots of 19 November had prompted the

government, he suggested, to ‘take special steps to improve the deliv-
ery of support and community services to these areas’. While noting
that he had met the Commissioner the previous evening, he said:
I am satisfied that the Force at this time is very conscious of and

committed to its responsibilities of preserving public order and the
freedom of the public to go about their daily lives in peace and safety.
The contribution made by Gardai at all levels towards the various
community projects I mentioned earlier has been enormous. It’s at
times like this the public see how important the role of the Force is
in our national life.8
He told the House that it was because the issues behind ‘juvenile vandal-
ism’ were so complex that it was not within the capacity of any single
minister of government or any agency. For this reason, he was drawing
together senior officials of the Departments of Environment, Education,
Labour, Health, Social Welfare and Justice at Assistant Secretary level to
submit proposals.
From early 1991, officials in the Irish government were aware that
the Neilstown/Ronanstown area would be, in their own terms, a ‘major
flashpoint’ of urban disorder. It is apparent from this chronological,
documentary account that the state was concerned at the absence of
policing strength and the crisis of policing morale in the urban periph-
ery. At this point, then, the state organized a response involving senior
officials of government departments, agencies and the police force, to
which I will return in Chapter 3. Ultimately, this activation led to the
extension and dispersal of over 100 youth crime and disorder preven-
tion initiatives throughout Ireland. The initial stages of this process were
incorporated under the police community relations strategy. In more
recent years, the initiatives, which became known as the Garda Youth
Diversion Projects, were moved to the Youth Justice Service. The focus
of the research in this book centres on this earlier stage.
These initial observations are not simply events in a narrative, but
raise questions about the wider meaning and significance of the pro-
cesses at work. They provide insights into the nature of the state and
its relationship with civil society, but they also provide a unique insight
into the local governance of crime and early attempts at community
safety in Ireland. This provides a detailed study of low-level crime
control in action, but it raises a wider question about the nature of
governance.
Opening the Case 9
The key theoretical problem here concerns governance of the urban

peripheral territories. A key argument developed in this book is that gov-
erning territory involves symbolic violence. Consequently, there are two
key dimensions in addressing this theoretical and empirical challenge.
The first is to understand the development of the urban periphery as a
distinct crystallization of space and time in the life of the city; as a ques-
tion of territoriality. The second problem concerns the integration of the
periphery within a common (national) cultural system: values, shared
understandings and a common agreement on civil behaviour resulting
in a governance of the subject.
The methodological frame is made more complex by the intermedi-
ate position of the institutions of civil society. A specific characteristic of
mobilizations of governing strategies in the Irish urban periphery dur-
ing the period studied is the role of civil society organizations. This book
centres upon research that sought to disentangle the relations between
the state, the police, civil society organizations and the generation of
young people involved in the urban disorder. The players in this game
are the officials of the central state apparatus, the police force, a range
of civil society organizations working with young people, the young
people themselves and the neighbourhoods in which they live. This
constitutes an arena of conflict and contestation in which there must
be some form of struggle so that the governors can govern and the
‘ungovernable’ can be civilized.
The key argument of the book is that we might see the preventive
turn as constituting a kind of symbolic domination of both territory
and subjects. Moreover, the argument has been put forward by Garland
(2001) that there is a cultural turn in governing: shifts from welfare to
governing through responsibilization, which requires the cultivation of

a new subjectivity. But what is missing from this analysis is how this
withdrawal is played out in socio-spatial and temporal terms: in the
spacing and timing of urban context. In the years before his death in
2002, Pierre Bourdieu grappled with these issues as he sought to develop
an understanding of the burden of social suffering at the end of indus-
trial society in modern France. Bourdieu’s ethnographic work gives us an
important key to unlock the theoretical and empirical challenges being
addressed here.
The urban periphery and symbolic violence
In his book The Weight of the World, Bourdieu (1999) made a call
for entering the ‘space of points of view’ which reflected his broad
10 Introduction
methodological approach. His call was for a sociology immersed in the

field it seeks to analyse, where the social scientist occupies a variety of
positions in order to understand how biographies and structures col-
lide. Bourdieu sets the scene vividly in his many thick descriptions of
the decline of the French urban working class and the abandonment of
the banlieux by the free market liberalism which had taken hold within
the French state from the early 1980s. The effect of this was the replace-
ment of the ‘left hand of the state’ (the interventionist state), resulting
in this sense of abandonment and despair. Bourdieu reveals this in his
interview with the self-labelling ‘terrorisers of suburbia’ (1999, p. 63),
who had internalized the failure and self-despair that had been signalled
to them by the school system, the jobs market and the police. Bourdieu
noted:
I did not have to force myself to share in the feeling, inscribed in

every word, every sentence, and more especially in the tone of their
voices, their facial expressions or body language, the obviousness of
this form of collective bad luck that attaches itself, like a fate, to all
those that had been put together in those sites of social relegation,
where the personal suffering of each is augmented by all the suffering
that comes from coexisting and living with so many suffering people
together – and, perhaps more importantly, of the destiny effect from
belonging to a stigmatized group.
(p. 64)
Interestingly, the interview takes place in the ‘club for preventive mea-
sures: meeting house and leisure centre’, which Bourdieu describes as
run down and temporary in nature (pre-fab), and to which, they tell
him during the interview, they have no access at night, so they invite
trouble as they hang around in stairwells.
Structural forces in Bourdieu’s account here reflect both the internal
processing of power and the communication of status and position to
the subject. Later in The Weight of the World, Bourdieu suggests that the
object of analysis of the ‘problem suburbs’ does not lie there. Media
accounts fetishize the events of disorder and conflict but do little to
account for the background story – the position papers, the social and
spatial planning and the many arguments over models of development
in their construction. The abdication of the state from intervention
reflects the triumph of neo-liberalism – the rise of the ‘right hand of the
state’ and the rise to dominance of the new government of experts edu-
cated in the Ecole National d’Administration and the Sciences Po who have
Opening the Case 11
abandoned public service in favour of a contemporary form of laissez

faire. Hence Bourdieu sheds light on how the field is dominated by
players whose actions and inactions, through a constellation of other
players, result in the social suffering in the urban periphery. That suf-
fering, he points out, could be ameliorated by the agents of the welfare
state and the education system, but their positions have been attacked
by the right hand of the state. Thus, social suffering is confounded by
stigma and the disconnection from organized labour. Hence the slide
into a state where solidarity is undermined and there is a feeling that
nobody can help anybody else – a ‘social slide downwards encounters
no brakes, none of the safety nets that other milieux might provide’
(1999, p. 186). In this context sudden violence erupts, which often
seems contradictory: the youth centre gets thrashed, for example, and
for a minority the slide progresses into organized gang-like structures.
Bourdieu’s observations here draw from his conceptual palette, but
primarily what he is referring to here is the symbolic violence which
pervades the urban periphery. Thus, the book seeks to follow Bourdieu’s
call – to complete the background story, to observe and analyse the
actors in the field, including planning decisions, failures of state and
market, police mobilizations, linguistic and symbolic manipulation of
the situation, and, of course, the creative alternatives.
Bourdieu’s sociology has a significant part to play in the development
of contemporary criminological theory, research and practice in a vari-
ety of settings. In this book, Bourdieu’s conceptual scheme takes a scenic
route to a realist criminology that is theoretically rich and empirically
grounded. To fully grasp this idea, we must deeply excavate Bourdieu’s
theoretical contribution in order that it may be applied more widely and
to the case material presented later in this book. It is to his conceptual

tool kit that we now turn.
2
A Bourdieusian Perspective:
Governing Territory and Subjects
Introduction
In the previous chapter the empirical data presented gave us an insight

into the state’s actions following urban disorder in the Dublin suburbs
in the early 1990s. These disorders were significant for a number of rea-
sons, but primacy must be given to the idea that these very suburbs
were centred upon a planning and economic optimism born in the
1950s and 1960s. It will be argued later that the symbolic impact of the
disorders was a significant moment for the Irish state. At centre stage
here is symbolism and social order – the meaning that is to be derived
by observers and the actions taken to bring social and moral forces
back into equilibrium. The question, then, becomes one of how these
‘disorderly’ or indeed ‘ungovernable’ territories are governed; whether
through coercive or persuasive state strategies or combinations of both.
The contribution of Bourdieusian sociology to this domain remains an
underdeveloped project. A critical bridge into understanding the polit-

ical nature of Bourdieu’s work, for instance, is his concept of field –
where political contestation takes place. In this regard, Bourdieu’s ideas
can help to encapsulate governance as a political process (Swartz, 2003).
A field is a competitive arena, the point where actors’ dispositions and
social structures are played out in a game-like fashion. But Bourdieu’s
palette enables us to grasp the governance of the subject – and in
this connection it is the strategies through which the disorderly are
to be educated, inculcated and targeted for crime prevention modali-
ties that are the primary concern. It might well be argued that Foucault
and various neo-Foucauldian contributions to governmentality theory
have already given us the definitive insights on the dispersal of disci-
pline and the penetration of governmental discourses into the social
12
A Bourdieusian Perspective 13
body. The aim here is not to dispute this argument. Bourdieu’s unique
contribution here is to enable us to comprehend the governance of the
subject as practice and how active resistance through practice might be
achieved. While it is not the goal here, researchers have successfully
combined Foucauldian and Bourdieusian concepts in the study of social
housing (Flint and Rowlands, 2003). The aim, however, is to grasp the
idea that domination centres on the actions of actors as practice.
The main purpose of this chapter is to create a conceptual foundation
for the remainder of the book by outlining and discussing some key
concepts in Bourdieusian sociology. Principally, the point is to elaborate
upon Bourdieu’s related ideas of symbolic power and symbolic violence.
There are two further goals in this chapter. The first is to lay out the
key concepts of habitus, capital and field so that the wider significance
of Bourdieusian ideas can be grasped and to enable some application
to the theoretical case. The second is to outline Bourdieu’s ideas on the
evolution of the state, in particular his ideas on statist capital and the
place of social capital in the exercise of symbolic violence over the state’s
territory.
The governance of the subject: Habitus, capital, symbolic

violence and symbolic power
Bourdieu’s concepts have limited application when considered in iso-

lation, for, as Wacquant (1998, p. 223) points out, ‘the concepts of
habitus, [field and] capital are [ . . . ] internally linked to one another
as each achieves its full analytical potency only in tandem with the
others’ (Wacquant, 1998, p. 223). It is necessary, therefore, to con-
sider these concepts together before we apply them to the research

problem. Bourdieu’s conceptual range stems from his efforts to bridge
the structure–agency dilemma by grasping the structuring power of
language together with the internalization of structures by individual
actors.
Habitus
The first key concept in Bourdieu’s sociology is that of habitus.
Bourdieu’s sociology is one that separates itself in many respects
from Marxism and from phenomenology while retaining elements of
both. Bourdieu’s ‘social praxeology’ results in the bonding of a struc-
turalist and a constructivist approach, bringing together both objec-
tive constraint and lived experience. Bourdieu is distinguished from
Giddens (1984) in many respects – primarily that Giddens called for
14 Introduction
individual reflexivity in the face of modernity and the advancement of

individualism; Bourdieu, of course, maintained a commitment to social
and political activism for the transformation of society, as opposed to
the reflexivity of the subject and their life projects. Habitus encapsulates,
to some extent, Durkheim’s division between mental and moral struc-
tures. Bourdieu departed from Durkheim on the basis that the latter had
no conceptual mechanism for determining and delineating the process
of social classification (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 13).
In this regard, Bourdieu suggested that habitus was produced by the
material conditions that characterize a class. The habitus is a system of
durable and transposable dispositions that lasts beyond the period in
which it is inculcated. These dispositions are foundational in language
and thought, so that they operate within the subject as ‘structured struc-
tures’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72). As habitus is effectively the internalization
of social structures, it structures everyday practice without recourse to
the following of rules, as such rules have already been laid down in ear-
lier stages of socialization. The rules of the game, what Bourdieu calls an
illusio, are laid down in the form of tests and affirmations of the child
such that the child realizes the rules of the game and invests in them
(Bourdieu, 1997, p. 166).
Bourdieu was critical of social psychology, interactionism and eth-
nomethodology for seeking to explain action through experimental or
observed interactions in a given situation, holding constant, as it were,
the structure in which the interaction has taken place. He arrived at this
point because he sought to connect habitus – dispositions governing
action and agency – with structures in which the material conditions
necessary for habitus were placed. He argued that practices of members
of a group or class are ‘endowed with an objective meaning that is at

once unitary and systematic, transcending subjective intentions and
conscious projects whether individual or collective’ (Bourdieu, 1977,
p. 81). In this context, habitus is the explanatory concept he used to
explain why classes exist in social, cultural and physical space and why
they reproduce themselves within that same context.
Habitus, it has been argued, transforms ‘necessity into virtue’ and
leads subjects to an immediate submission to order in the way that
it ‘legitimates economic and social inequality by providing a practi-
cal and taken-for-granted acceptance of the fundamental conditions of
existence’ (Swartz, 1997, p. 105). Hence, habitus is a form of practical
adjustment in the way in which it directs aspirations and expecta-
tions along the lines of probability for success and failure as shared by
members of the same class. In this way, habitus produces self-defeating
behaviour that we might associate with the self-limiting of working-class

horizons and cultural repertoires of actions:
As an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted

to the particular conditions in which it is constituted, the habitus
engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions, and all the actions
consistent with those conditions, and no others.
(Bourdieu, 1977, p. 95)
Habitus is a product of objective structures, and it enables a continuity

between the analysis of such structures and the individual dispositions
of actors. Thus, Bourdieu’s breaking of the antinomy between objective
and subjective leads to a ‘dialectic of social and mental structures’ result-
ing in a struggle for the power to classify (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992,
p. 13). Habitus is the imposition of form – it is a site in which inculcation
takes place and in this regard represents the basis of power, domination
and governance. It is a way in which members of a dominated class have
their social location and their ‘station’ both conveyed and maintained.
Hence, forms of schooling and informal curricula such as youth work,
and indeed, youth crime prevention, involve a process of inculcation
that generates habitus.
Forms of capital and symbolic violence

Social location conveyed through the habitus leads, then, to the second
of Bourdieu’s key ideas. This centres on the related concepts of symbolic
violence and symbolic power; for the struggle for classification is for the
power to dominate through symbolic systems where the dominant class
seeks to impose its definition of reality.

Critical here is that Bourdieu distinguished himself from Marxism by
proposing a plurality of capitals. Michel Peillon (1998, p. 216) has parsed
the various forms of capital well: economic capital as in material wealth;
social capital as the mobilization of actors through connections in net-
works and membership of groups; and symbolic capital that derives
from all other forms of capital where such capital is perceived as legit-
imate. Bourdieu held that cultural capital is one of the main forms of
capital accumulated and laboured for.
A foundational concept that links habitus and forms of capital is
symbolic violence. Bourdieu introduced this in his Outline of a Theory
of Practice (Bourdieu, 1977), which he drew from his anthropological
work in Kabyle in Algeria during the 1960s. This is especially evident
in his observations of exchanges of credit, gifts and arrangements for
16 Introduction
domestic labour from which he sought to develop a more general theory

of domination. He points out that, to appropriate the labour of another,
a master first has to tie-in, or create a bond with, the labourer and has
to persuade or ‘win’ them personally. There is a symbolic violence in
the gift relation surrounding this persuasion because it involves actors
in ‘a dialectic of challenge and riposte’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 14), which is
a game of structural domination that is misrecognized. Symbolic violence
is that form of communication that is recognized, therefore, by neither
object nor subject. This game calls upon the habitus – in this example
it is not the rules per se but the sense of honour internalized in both
where
the driving force of the whole mechanism is not some abstract prin-
ciple (the principle of isotimy, equality in honour), still less the set of
rules which can be derived from it, but the sense of honour, a dispo-
sition inculcated in the earliest years of life and constantly reinforced
by calls to order from the group, that is to say, from the aggregate of
the individuals endowed with the same dispositions, to whom each
is linked by his dispositions and interests.
(Bourdieu, 1977, p. 15)
This master–slave relationship in a pre-capitalist order ‘cannot in fact be

kept up without the direct application of material or symbolic violence
to the person who is to be tied’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 190). These rela-
tions of domination must be disguised or misrecognized, for coercive
power could beget violent riposte from the dominated. Hence, in pre-
capitalist society, legitimacy was to be gained and maintained through
a code of honour. Symbolic violence is a euphemization of objective

relations of exchange. The misrecognition based on the ‘ethic of hon-
our’ is, as Bourdieu suggests, a ‘collective denial of the economic reality
of exchange’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 196). Symbolic power is only exerted
when it is co-produced when there is a call for order:
Symbolic violence is the coercion which is set up only through the

consent that the dominated cannot fail to give to the dominator (and
therefore to the domination) when their understanding of the situ-
ation and relation can only use instruments of knowledge that they
have in common with the dominator, which being merely the incor-
porated form of the structure of the relation of domination, make
this relation appear as natural; or, in other words, when the schemes
they implement in order to perceive and evaluate themselves or
to perceive and evaluate the dominators (high/low, male/female,

white/black etc.) are the product of the incorporation of the (thus
naturalized) classifications of which their social being is the product.
(Bourdieu, 1997, p. 170)
Symbolic violence is pre-cognitive and embodied in the deep structures

of being, and as such it is responsive to symbols of domination, such
as the ‘august apparel’ of law courts, churches or monarchy, which will
produce a call to order and evoke the right response in the dominated
agent. Bourdieu introduced this concept to the condition of modernity
in the application of his ‘foundation of a theory of symbolic violence’
to the field of the French educational system. The first proposition,
which is the key point of his argument, proffers the theory that pow-
erful groups that can impose meaning add the weight of their own force
to the message communicated:
Every power to exert symbolic violence, i.e. every power which

manages to impose meanings and to impose them as legitimate by
concealing the power relations which are the basis of its force, adds
its own symbolic force to those power relations.
(Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977, p. 4)
This idea was underpinned by his utilization of propositions from

French structuralist linguistics: language itself is seen as having a logic
that classifies in the form of binaries and hence provides an ordered
set of dichotomies such as good/bad, inside/outside. Human agents
understand what is dominant by understanding its relation to the dom-
inated form through ‘antagonistic adjectives’ as homologies. Hence, we

understand ‘light’ in cultural tastes to petit bourgeois culture, while we
attribute ‘heavy’ to bourgeois taste and the language of cultural criti-
cism. Social agents formulate systems of classification based upon these
opposites (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 468). These antinomies are embodied
in the habitus as ‘structuring structures’ through which human agents
formulate and act upon practical knowledge.
Hence, in relation to schooling, and by extension to all institution-
alized cultural practices, Bourdieu argued that pedagogic action (PA) is
symbolic violence for two reasons. The first is because it is the ‘impo-
sition of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary power’ (Bourdieu and
Passeron, 1977, p. 5). In so far as PA is symbolic violence, it can only
be effected when bound within a system of ‘pedagogic communication’
(Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977, p. 7); that is, it needs the institutionalized
18 Introduction
conditions to be given effect. The second reason is that PA is symbolic

violence because of the ‘objective delimitation’ or the selection of cer-
tain meanings worthy of being reproduced by pedagogic agency. Hence,
for Bourdieu:
In any given social formation the cultural arbitrary which the power
relations between the groups or classes making up that social forma-
tion put into the dominant position within the system of cultural
arbitraries is the one which most fully, though always indirectly,
expresses the objective interests (material and symbolic) of the
dominant group or classes.
(Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977, p. 9)
Key to understanding symbolic violence is that it involves a ‘misrecog-

nition’ – it is not recognized as violence. This has a lot to do with the
way it is communicated – it is delegated to agencies to impose it by
the dominant group or class. This is where those who have undergone
a dominating PA have ‘the valuelessness of their cultural attainment
brought home to them by the anonymous sanctions of the cultural mar-
ket and by the symbolic sanctions of the cultural market’ (Bourdieu and
Passeron, 1977, p. 28). This, he suggested, was a form of ordering or ‘calls
to order’. It follows that agents for imposing symbolic violence through
PA must have their credentials to do so validated: hence, the state, in
so far as it is an instrument of class rule, is such through the organi-
zation and institutionalization of process for recognizing agents with
the authority to communicate. By extension, the modalities of ordering
cities, towns and neighbourhoods through informal systems of com-
munication in any educative process must also be an act of symbolic

violence by virtue of the way in which these classify, categorize and
communicate with those whose habitus needs to be formed or retrained
or by which alternate illusio can be established. Efforts to inculcate the
masses in order to generate or restore the symbolic universe in values or
behaviour, or to ‘educate’ the masses in the formal and informal sense, is
an exercise of symbolic violence. Hence, crime prevention modalities in
which the emphasis is on the adoption of subjectivities or ‘correct think-
ing’ in order to adapt to a named situation are acts of symbolic violence.
Using Bourdieu’s language here, they constitute the imposition of a cul-
tural arbitrary and the naming of the social universe premised upon a
pre-packaged definition of reality.
Such a process is necessary to produce a ‘durable’ and ‘transposable’
habitus, and in this way it is more permanent as a form of power
because of its legitimate power relative to modes of coercive power

(Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977, p. 33). Crucial here is the idea of legit-
imate power, for it is through symbolic violence that the dominant
class imposes its arbitrary, but legitimate, worldview. Hence, ‘the whole
of Bourdieu’s work may be interpreted as a materialist anthropology of
the specific contribution that various forms of symbolic violence make
to the reproduction and transformation of structures of domination’
(Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, pp. 14–15). In this sense Bourdieu’s
sociology reveals its potency as a theory of governance and as a form
of domination.
Governance as a relational field

Bourdieu’s methodology draws from both structuralism and social con-
structionism in order that the actions of agents can be understood in
connection with the structural forces to which actors attach themselves
and the structural positions they occupy. One way of describing the
research presented in this book is an exploration of the motivations
of the actors, their relations of exchange and how modes of gifting
and reciprocal relations are mobilized at micro, meso and macro levels.
Bourdieu’s conceptualization of how actors exchange and the relational
arenas in which they compete are critical to deepen this idea.
A major concept in Bourdieu’s sociology, field constitutes a ‘patterned
system of objective forces (much in a manner of a magnetic field), a rela-
tional configuration endowed with a specific gravity which it imposes
on all the objects and agents which enter in it’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant,
1992, p. 17). The field is the site within which the struggle for classifi-
cation takes place: the power struggle over the defining of reality where
actors compete for the power of ‘legitimate naming’ (see Loader and
Mulcahy, 2003 on policing, for example). In the field of politics, the
struggle is for a monopoly over symbolic violence (Peillon, 1998, p. 217);
the political capital that accrues from this is then converted into sym-
bolic capital and, thus, legitimate capital. This idea enables a fresh look
at questions of governance, an issue which will receive fuller attention
later. For now, fields are the sites in which contestation abounds for
legitimate naming, and, thus, the legitimate right to govern.
With reference to the welfare field, Peillon (1998) identified a number
of key elements for a sociology of the field. The first is the need to place
institutional practices in a wider social context. To begin an analysis of
a field, it is critical to understand the location it has in the social forma-
tion as a whole. Fields are determined by the level of the autonomy
they achieve from the social field in general. Fields are autonomous
20 Introduction
when they have a specific history; have a particular make-up of agencies

within them; and induce a particular habitus that maintains a distinct
set of beliefs (Peillon, 1998, p. 215). The welfare field, in Peillon’s case, is
comprised of civil society actors as well as the state bureaucracy and thus
‘constitutes a differentiated domain of activity’ which is ‘manifested
by the configuration of agents which operate within it, the resources
which are mobilized and by the stakes around which struggles develop’
(1998, p. 225). The second element is the identification of the main
players and their strategies. In this case, the ‘players’ ‘include macro-
agents which clash over the constitution of the field, and those agents
of micro-power and counter-powers which manifest themselves at the
local level, in the context of the organization and delivery [of social
benefits]’ (1998, p. 226).1 Thus, the empirical ambition of this book is
to set out this very dynamic in process in a relational field in which
social order is constructed and maintained. Moreover, the empirical
research in this book seeks to outline the struggles and parameters of
such a field. The relevant field is inter-institutional and cross-sectoral in
its scope.
In Bourdieu’s theory, fields are ‘homologous’ in that the boundaries of
each field are maintained by the distinct practices within. For Bourdieu,
a structural homology existed between the French grandes écoles and the
ruling class: securing access to leadership for the children of this class
reproduces the class, but it also reproduces the structure itself as a ‘field
of power’ (Wacquant, 1993c, p. 19). Thus, fields are homologous in that
the apparent action in one field (education in the grande école system)
results in the structuring of the field of power (politics) in which the con-
nection between the two is misrecognized. The ruling class is reproduced
along with the structure of reproduction.

The field of power is an overarching or ‘meta-field’ of struggle between
those dominant in their own respective fields, and it is also the social
space in which the elite struggle for power to dominate and to deal
with the internal divisions between them based upon their ownership of
relevant capitals. Hence, there is not so much a unified and hegemonic
ruling class as a space of contestation in which dominant members of
respective fields compete with each other for legitimacy in the field of
power. In this way the mode and means of wielding power are fought
out through a process involving the struggle for the right to dominate
which results in a settlement between the different dominant fractions
in a field (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 76).
The field concept enables the development and understanding of
the state and civil society as actors in governance across functional
domains: the manner and form in which they are linked in the field.
This is a critical component of the building of a theory of gover-
nance of the urban periphery for its merit as a theory of governance.
In this connection, the role of networks will be considered as the criti-
cal organizational form for the governing of crime and disorder in the
period under study. Key to developing these ideas and to creating a fur-
ther theoretical application to the urban periphery as a territorial and
socio-spatial configuration, we need to explore briefly Bourdieu’s obser-
vations of the evolution of the state and the bureaucratic field and its
connection with the formation of symbolic systems.
Territory and symbolic power
In this section, a number of key ideas from Bourdieu’s work on the

state and its dominance over territory are developed. Crucial here are
his ideas on the transformation from the feudal or dynastic state to
the bureaucratic state (Bourdieu, 2004). Governance within the territory
is, therefore, comprised of strategies, based upon nomination to office,
that are central to the monopolization of statist capital (Bourdieu, 1994).
Central here also are his ideas on the formation of states within integral
territories. In the latter, common meaning systems (symbolic systems)
are vital for any centralized system of domination within the territory
(Bourdieu, 1991). In this endeavour we are seeking to specify the basis
of social reproduction.
From the house of the king to the bureaucratic state

Bourdieu (2004) first specifies the characteristics and dynamic of the
dynastic state where power rests with the king. The king is the predom-
inant power over a system of power that is based upon exchanges of
symbolic capital for the reproduction of the power of the dynasty. The
means of social reproduction of the patrimony of the dynastic state is
marriage, the preservation of bloodlines and the inheritance of land.
Bourdieu (2004) reasoned that, in the dynastic state, the monarch is put
in a position where he has to manipulate the truth in order to ensure
that the claim to be the supreme power can be upheld, and believed.
The king retained the right to recognize the acquisitions of nobles – they
had to be in the gift of the king. Command was based upon allegiance,
which had to be bought. In part as a strategy to preserve the system
of reproduction based on patronage, which was dogged by palace wars,
Bourdieu (2004) observed that managers were recruited so as that the
hereditary powers could reproduce themselves.
22 Introduction
However, Bourdieu argued, the patronist system became unsustain-

able as the gift of the king as the individual holder of symbolic capital
and power gave way to cultural capital – access to understanding,
knowledge and information. The dynastic state was transformed because
the mode of reproduction was unsustainable: the ‘dynastic state perpet-
uates a mode of reproduction based on heredity and on the ideology of
blood and birth which is antinomic [ . . . .] it is simultaneously institut-
ing in the state bureaucracy, tied to the development of education, itself
linked to the emergence of a body of civil servants’ (Bourdieu, 2004,
p. 25). It follows, Bourdieu suggested, that the agents who become tied
to the state begin to have a vested interest, and they are able to strategize
with their stock of symbolic profits. Hence, the civil service is the inher-
itor of statist capital – Bourdieu cites historical evidence to show that
there was then generated a form of ‘rational bureaucratic habitus: they
invent the virtue of prudence, which inclines one to control affective
pulsions, to act lucidly in the light of one’s intelligence, with a sense of
proportion and courtesy, an instrument of social regulation’ (p. 30). The
emergence of the bureaucratic field is gradual, rather than seismic and
severing; there are continuities based upon the inheritance of symbolic
practices in the exercising of governing power. The state undergoes a his-
toric transformation from the seal of the king to the ‘logic of the public’.
By way of illustration, Bourdieu argues that one of these inherited rit-
uals was the ‘seal’ that once verified the signature of the king. As more
state officials were required, the process of delegation also widened.
Seals, therefore, are more than symbolic; they are instruments of rule.
Statist acts take place as power extends the more rule becomes depen-
dent up a network of agents or a ‘network of executive relays’. Hence,
for Bourdieu, this is how the field of power comes to be established – as

it becomes more differentiated and involves delegation.
The bureaucratic field, gradually conquered against the patrimonial

logic of the dynastic state, which subordinated the material and sym-
bolic profits of the capital concentrated by the state to the interests
of the sovereign, becomes the site of a struggle for power over statist
capital and over the material profits (salaries, benefits) and symbolic
profits (honours, titles, etc.) it provides, a struggle reserved in fact
for a minority of claimants designated by the quasi-hereditary pos-
session of educational capital. One would need to analyse in detail
the two-sided process from which the state has issued and which is
inseparably universalization and monopolization of the universal.
(p. 34)
Statist capital, ‘States of Mind’ and symbolic violence

Bourdieu’s analysis of the evolution of the state as the bureaucratic
field brings together issues of territoriality (the capacity of the state to
monopolize violence within its border to secure the integrity of the ter-
ritory) and in the sphere of cultural reproduction (acts of the state or
‘minds of state’ aimed at shaping the mental structures of the subject)
(Bourdieu, 1994). In this way the state is formed, often through wars
or insurrections that secure the boundaries of the state, after which
the state shapes the subjectivity of its citizens so that they internalize
a common system of communication; the state thus dominates through
its monopoly of physical violence but also through symbolic violence.
Hence, the state is not just comprised of offices, officials and institu-
tions but has a penetrative force that reaches into the governance of the
subject. Critical here is Bourdieu’s (1994) analysis of the character and
depth of statist capital – this is vital for the ability of the state to act as a
meta-governor over the various types of capital.
First is the capital of statist violence, which the state secures through
the securing of territorial integrity and which it uses internally to create
a statist unity. The second is economic capital, which the state institutes
through the foundation of a taxation system for, inter alia, the upkeep
of the agents of force (army, police) as the upkeepers of the monopoly
on violence. Third, the state creates a ‘theoretical unification’ through
the centralization of statist knowledge by way of statistics, account-
ing and mapping, which it also uses to dominate the territory. This is
the state’s accumulation of cultural capital, and, once achieved, ‘con-
tributes to the unification of the cultural market by unifying all codes,
linguistic and juridical, and by effecting a homogenization of all forms
of communication, including bureaucratic communication . . . .’ (1994,

p. 7). The fourth species of capital is symbolic capital, whereby the divi-
sions of officials of the state become recognized by subjects, who give
them value. This is by virtue of the state’s power to nominate and grant
titles of office; the bureaucratic state inherits the king’s power to make
appointments, founded upon merit rather than patronage, but it makes
careful nominations, as in doing so it is seeking to protect its own stock
and flow of symbolic capital.
In the same analysis, Bourdieu makes a fitting discursive play with
‘minds of state’ as the state transcends its physical manifestation into
the semiological. The state creates habitus, or, as Bourdieu frequently
refers to this concept, ‘structuring structures’, a shared agreement on
how to interpret the world as if it were natural and commonsense. The
state creates the orchestration of the habitus so that subjects internalize
24 Introduction
the meaning of the authority attaching to offices as a means of forming

a national commonsense:
Submission to the established order is the product of the agreement

between, on the one hand, the cognitive structures inscribed in bod-
ies by both collective history (phylogenesis) and individual history
(ontogenesis) and on the other hand the objective structures of the
world to which these cognitive structures are applied.
(Bourdieu, 1994, p. 13)
This pre-reflexive, deeply buried disposition implies submission (it is the

reason why the leaders must lead and instil in those who should be led
the hierarchical order of domination) to be instilled in curricular forms
of communication in both the formal and the informal sense. In this
way the state produces doxic knowledge, which represents, for Bourdieu,
‘the point of view of the dominant, when it presents and imposes itself
as a universal point of view – the point of view of those who dominate
by dominating the state and who have constituted their point of view
as universal by constituting the state’ (1994, p. 15). However, this is not
given, but is a constant struggle, because the monopoly over domina-
tion is not detached from the fields in which the struggle takes place.
State strategy, or what has come to be called ‘governance’, is that which
is necessary in order to retain the state’s position as the meta-governor,
whereby it defines the parameters of the field of power to underpin its
own monopoly over statist capital.
Language and symbolic violence

A final connection between state, territory and the governance of the

subject concerns the relationship that the evolving state builds with
subjects through symbolic systems. Here Bourdieu’s (1991) thinking on
language and the state provides a bridge between the state – as the
field of power – and the generation of a common understanding. Lan-
guage, as George Herbert Mead (1967) might have phrased it, is a form
of shared symbolic communication necessary for developing the mind.
In this sense the state is involved in the shaping of subjectivity in so far
as it is an active agent that intervenes to shape the mind and enlists,
as discussed above, various intermediaries endowed with the necessary
cultural capital to give effect to the state’s role in erecting linguis-
tic structures, and, thereby, symbolic structures. In his book Language
and Symbolic Power, Bourdieu (1991) likens this process to an ‘econ-
omy of linguistic exchanges’, but where language gives effect to power
and domination. This is evident in the legal discourse within the state,
which, once disseminated outside the specialist fields where it is spoken,
becomes universalized, ‘ceasing to be merely the utterances of dominant
or dominated agents within a specific field and becoming statements
valid for all dominant or all dominated individuals’ (Bourdieu, 1991,
p. 41). Because language is the way in which we create a shared under-
standing and representation of reality, it becomes the foundation, the
building blocks and the cement of power.
The process of universalization of an official discourse, Bourdieu
(1991) points out, can be found in Saussure’s distinction between langue
as a legislative and communicative code and parole – how langue is used
by those who practise it. In this sense the saying of something implies
doing in a particular way: utterances shape practice. For Bourdieu, it is
the necessity to universalize langue that brings about the social and polit-
ical structures around language. It follows that there is a need for an
apparatus of communication based upon school systems for the dissem-
ination of langue and the appointment of a network of agents for correct
use of the national language.
In Bourdieu’s application of this to the French republics, ‘jurists’ of the
langue – official ways of saying and, therefore, of thinking and doing –
were appointed from among spatially dispersed notables with cultural
capital – priests, doctors, teachers – who owed their positions to their
status as masters of expressive communication (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 47).
With this recognition of their status, these new professional elites were
empowered as agents of communication with the state.
Disorder in the periphery, as outlined in the previous chapter, calls to
mind the cultural struggle in which the state is permanently involved.
It has had to consistently ensure, over the course of its evolution,

that it can control territory and minds. Local notables in this way are
agents of national identity by virtue of the role they play in the sup-
pression of all other ways of saying, thinking and doing. In Language
and Symbolic Power, Bourdieu (1991) points out that the imposition of
the official and legitimate language was meant to replace langue d’oc
and patois after the French Revolution, as the means of producing and
reproducing the post-revolutionary subject, a new human agent. Here
he implies that it was the way in which a governance of the subject
could be sealed along with the security of the territory. Thus, the French
revolutionary intelligentsia were involved in a symbolic struggle for
symbolic power with the patois of the regions; in other words, the power
struggle was for the government of mental structures through symbolic
violence.
26 Introduction
It follows that symbolic power is contained within the state (and

the classes it mobilizes) to express and guarantee its power within the
territory, and symbolic violence is the means to ensure that there is
a common understanding of reality: the exercising of symbolic vio-
lence, the representation of reality in the langue (and, therefore, a
manipulation of language) is the basis of securing power.
It is as structured and structuring instruments of communication

and knowledge that ‘symbolic systems’ fulfil their political func-
tion as instruments which help to ensure that one class dominates
another (symbolic violence) by bringing their own distinctive power
to bear on the relations of power which underlie them and thus
by contributing, in Weber’s terms, to the ‘domestication of the
dominated’.
(Bourdieu, 1991, p. 167)
However, this is not a simple command and control set of relations

with notables in the fields, but a game that these agents play with the
dominant class. For Bourdieu, the dominant class in a capitalist society
possess economic capital and understand that the intellectual elite who
possess cultural capital could decide to define the social world for their
own benefit; hence, there is a level of game playing by the professional
elites who could use their positions and capital for radical transforma-
tive purposes. Instead, they become agents of domination through their
construction of the social world through symbolic power:
Symbolic power – as a power of constituting the given through

utterances, of making people see and believe, of confirming or trans-
forming the vision of the world, and thereby, action on the world
and thus the world itself, an almost magical power which enables
one to obtain the equivalent of what is obtained through force
(whether physical or economic), by virtue of the specific effect of
mobilization – is a power that can be exercised only if it is recog-
nized, that is, misrecognized as arbitrary. This means that symbolic
power does not reside in ‘symbolic systems’ in the form of an ‘illo-
cutionary force’ but that it is 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. What creates the power of words and slogans, a power
capable of maintaining or subverting the social order, is the belief
in the legitimacy of words and of those who utter them. And words
alone cannot create this belief.
(Bourdieu, 1991, p. 170)
Conclusion
What has been presented in this chapter is, of course, only a partial
exploration of Bourdieusian sociology. However, three key pillars that
underlie Bourdieu’s ideas are represented here. The first is that of sym-
bolic space – the domination of the subject by symbolic violence and the
communication through language that shapes the habitus. The second
social space comprises institutions of cultural reproduction – schools,
families, communities and, of course, in fields of contestation where
the struggle for cultural capital takes place and in which social catego-
rization into classes is also located. The third is physical space, which
involves the penetration of territory by the state as an instrument
of domination. Thus, whether we are talking about formal or infor-
mal process of educating, inculcating or governing, the point here is
that, howsoever the modalities are dressed, they represent attempts at
grasping symbolic power – that which is needed to rule legitimately.
In effect, the overall claim underlying this book is that we need to
see the emergence of pedagogic forms like youth crime prevention as
taking place within the ‘economy of symbolic goods’ (Bourdieu, 1997,
p. 193). This type of economy is based upon an exchange of a plurality
of capitals – a game with its own illusio, in which actors are involved
in a social game. The exchange is one based upon the gift, which is at
the heart of the economy of goodwill and the social relations that it
sets up and is not eradicated by taxation systems because the state uses
its welfare function as a type of strategic beneficence. The gift engages
social actors in a game of self-deception or, as Bourdieu (1997, p. 198)
called it, ‘common miscognition’: a game in which everyone recognizes
and has knowledge of the rules but simultaneously misrecognizes and
denies any knowledge of them.
The analysis of the case material is an analysis of this economy of sym-
bolic goods that is at the centre of the governing of crime and disorder
in the urban periphery.
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Part I

Criminology and urban disorder

manifestations of the preventive turn crystallize as a result of urban dis-

domination. Actors are involved in a competitive struggle for the power

Urban disorder and the urban periphery – A natural history

Tuesday, 19 November 1991

Monday, 25 November 1991

On Tuesday 26 November 1991 an urgent meeting took place between

Wednesday, 27 November 1991

areas of west Dublin. The riots of 19 November had prompted the

I am satisfied that the Force at this time is very conscious of and

The key theoretical problem here concerns governance of the urban

governing through responsibilization, which requires the cultivation of

The urban periphery and symbolic violence

methodological approach. His call was for a sociology immersed in the

I did not have to force myself to share in the feeling, inscribed in

abandoned public service in favour of a contemporary form of laissez

to the case material presented later in this book. It is to his conceptual

In the previous chapter the empirical data presented gave us an insight

underdeveloped project. A critical bridge into understanding the polit-

The governance of the subject: Habitus, capital, symbolic

Bourdieu’s concepts have limited application when considered in iso-

sider these concepts together before we apply them to the research

individual reflexivity in the face of modernity and the advancement of

of a group or class are ‘endowed with an objective meaning that is at

behaviour that we might associate with the self-limiting of working-class

As an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted

Habitus is a product of objective structures, and it enables a continuity

Forms of capital and symbolic violence

seeks to impose its definition of reality.

domestic labour from which he sought to develop a more general theory

This master–slave relationship in a pre-capitalist order ‘cannot in fact be

a code of honour. Symbolic violence is a euphemization of objective

Symbolic violence is the coercion which is set up only through the

to perceive and evaluate the dominators (high/low, male/female,

Symbolic violence is pre-cognitive and embodied in the deep structures

Every power to exert symbolic violence, i.e. every power which

This idea was underpinned by his utilization of propositions from

inated form through ‘antagonistic adjectives’ as homologies. Hence, we

conditions to be given effect. The second reason is that PA is symbolic

Key to understanding symbolic violence is that it involves a ‘misrecog-

munication in any educative process must also be an act of symbolic

because of its legitimate power relative to modes of coercive power

Governance as a relational field

when they have a specific history; have a particular make-up of agencies

along with the structure of reproduction.

Territory and symbolic power

In this section, a number of key ideas from Bourdieu’s work on the

From the house of the king to the bureaucratic state

However, Bourdieu argued, the patronist system became unsustain-

for Bourdieu, this is how the field of power comes to be established – as

The bureaucratic field, gradually conquered against the patrimonial

Statist capital, ‘States of Mind’ and symbolic violence

of communication, including bureaucratic communication . . . .’ (1994,

the meaning of the authority attaching to offices as a means of forming

Submission to the established order is the product of the agreement

This pre-reflexive, deeply buried disposition implies submission (it is the

Language and symbolic violence

A final connection between state, territory and the governance of the

It has had to consistently ensure, over the course of its evolution,

It follows that symbolic power is contained within the state (and

It is as structured and structuring instruments of communication