RECONSIDERING REAL-ACTUAL-EMPIRICAL STRATIFICATION Can Bourdieu's Habitus be Introduced into a Realist Social Ontology?

Abstract

In the last couple of years there have been some attempts to introduce Pierre Bourdieu's concepts (especially habitus) into the critical realist conception of social science. But these attempts either limit themselves to the constitution of a philosophical connection between Bourdieu and critical realism or confine Bourdieu's theoretical contributions to analyses of human agency, whereas Bourdieu's habitus can provide a deepening of the critical realist conception of what the 'social' is. We can establish a socio-ontological connection between the concept of habitus (within its indispensable relation to the 'field') and the idea of the social as a stratified reality. In this way, it may be possible to employ real-actual-empirical stratification for the purpose of defining the domain-specific ontology of social science, and to comprehend the habitus-field relation as a component of the stratification in question. To this end, the paper suggests that habitus (together with social institutions) is 'the missing link between structure and agency'.