Bourdieu’s distinction between rules and strategies and secondary principal practice

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of selected literature on secondary principal practice and to argue for research that develops a primary focus on Bourdieu’s conceptualising of strategies as a way to access and explain everyday secondary principal practice.

Since Woolcott’s (1973) study The Man in the Principal’s Office, researchers have used a range of research techniques, most commonly interviews and observations (for example, Ribbins and Sherratt, 1992; Rossmiller, 1992; Salloum, 1996) to identify and understand the nature of principals’ work. More recently, studies have focused on the effects of neoliberal policies on secondary principals’ work (for example, these Bourdieuian scholars, Addison 2007; English, 2012; Gunter, 2012; Gunter and Forrester, 2010; Gunter and Thomson, 2009, 2010; Lingard and Christie, 2003; Lingard et al., 2003; Thomson, 1999, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2010). This paper engages with Bourdieu’s early theorising, particularly his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972) and the distinctions he made between rules and strategies, alongside a review of selected literature, to think about how well research into secondary principals’ leadership practices has illuminated what might be going on beneath the surface of principals’ everyday practice. Bourdieu claimed that if researchers continued to focus on the rules of social relations (as had been common practice in structural anthropology), their conclusions were likely to be incomplete and misguided, because people manipulate and play with the rules. Instead, as he explained in his interview with Lamaison (1986: 112), research on practice that engaged with his unique definition of strategy as ‘the product of a practical sense, of a particular social game,’ could get closer ‘to the reality of the practices’ (Lamaison, 1986: 115).

This paper explores how secondary school principals’ work has been studied, firstly by reviewing papers published in the journal Educational Management Administration and Leadership over the last 30 years and across a range of countries, to gain insights into the prevailing research interests and methodologies. This review established that while some aspects of Bourdieu’s theorising in his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972) have been applied in secondary school leadership research, scholars published in Educational Management Administration and Leadership have not yet taken up the challenge of using Bourdieu’s theorising of strategies as a way to understand the practice of secondary school leadership. The second part of the literature review focuses on identifying and analysing how other scholars have used or advocated using aspects of Bourdieu’s theory of practice to gain understandings of secondary school leadership.

The paper provides an overview of Bourdieu’s arguments in his early publication, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972), advocating that understanding and applying his concepts of rules and strategies, habitus, doxa, capital and misrecognition could strengthen understandings about what secondary school leaders do and why.

The final section examines the extent to which other secondary school leadership scholars have argued for or used Bourdieu’s theory of practice to assist their research and understandings of secondary school leadership practice.

Review of Educational Management Administration and Leadership 1980–2013

This section reviews the papers published in the journal Educational Management Administration and Leadership over the last 30 years in order to provide an (albeit partial) overview of (i) how secondary school principals’ work has been understood and reported; and (ii) the extent to which Bourdieu’s theorising has been applied to researching secondary school principals’ work. Several themes emerged from this review: the increasing complexity of the secondary principal’s role; the tensions, dilemmas and negotiations they have faced as they worked with these complexities; leadership development; performance management; and gender issues. A discussion of shifts in approaches to research in educational leadership concludes this section.

Bourdieu’s theory of practice

As noted earlier, the focus of this paper and discussion is Bourdieu’s early work on his theory of practice as this includes considerable detail on his theorising of rules and strategies. It is being argued that research that focuses on strategies in the first instance has the potential to enable better access to and understandings of some relatively unconscious, taken for granted and not so visible aspects of principals’ leadership practices. The final section of this paper reviews the work of other scholars who have argued for the value of Bourdieu’s conceptualising of habitus, doxa, capital, field and misrecognition as thinking tools for research into leadership practices. Before that though, this section explains Bourdieu’s challenge to researchers, in his Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972), to focus on identifying and recording what people do, their practices. He argued that structural anthropologists who worked within assumptions that they were ‘impartial spectators’ (p. 1) could only record what they saw or were told, resulting in partial, personal or distorted views, or even hiding what was really going on. Such approaches, he argued, might not identify or explain unconscious and somewhat inaccessible practices. Furthermore, they may neglect to include the ordinary everyday and often taken for granted activities of their informants’ lives, or over-emphasise remarkable ‘moves’ (p. 19).

Bourdieu argued that people’s actions were generated by habitus, ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions’ (p. 72) developed through immersion in a lifetime of social interaction. These social relations were influenced by the economic, social, political and cultural beliefs and values of the time and place. Habitus was therefore, shaped and re-shaped through a lifetime of social relations, which in turn created particular world views and guided what people did without intentional reference to norms or customs.

Bourdieu described these overarching and often taken for granted beliefs and values as doxa, a universal truth so natural that it ‘goes without saying: the tradition is silent’ (p. 167). He maintained that doxa determined capital – as whatever was valued and by whom. Capital could be in the form of economic capital (wealth and possessions), cultural capital (knowledge), social capital (connections and relationships) and symbolic capital in the form of prestige or reputation (p. 179). Some individuals and groups were privileged by having greater access to these forms of capital than others. Bourdieu maintained that it was in the interests of the privileged for all group members to support the dominant doxa, because in this way their privilege was maintained and reproduced. He explained that others misrecognised the unstated interests of the privileged as contributing to the good of all by maintaining the social order. This misrecognition meant that even those who were disadvantaged by having limited access to different forms of capital accepted privilege as self-evident and natural.

Bourdieu maintained that it was particularly difficult for researchers to identify, analyse and explain social practices that were influenced by silent or misrecognised doxa. He called for a shift away from the significance given to rules in research methodologies common to structural anthropologists, to an approach that could get to the heart of practice, claiming that the distinction he made between rules and strategies would enable researchers to do this.

For Bourdieu the word ‘rule’ was ambiguous because it offered a range of definitions and possibilities, such as social norms, rituals and traditions, laws, models and principles. He argued therefore that using rules as a basis for explaining what people did was problematic and confusing. For example, he raised concerns about the ways in which researchers used theoretical models to explain the complexities and contradictions they encountered. While on one hand models might clarify some complexities, on the other hand they could also be simplistic and incomplete, attempting to explain the intricacies of social interactions in an unsophisticated manner. He cautioned that researchers could be captured by these models if they interpreted them as the rules of practice, as being the way things are and ought to be (p. 29).

Indeed Bourdieu pointed out that practices may not be driven by rules at all. While it can appear that behaviour is ‘rule-governed’ (p. 31) in the sense that rules are upheld, the real driver could be the potential sanctions that result from not obeying the rules, or alternatively, the advantages that accrue from obedience to the rules. A researcher could therefore argue the case for practices as obedience to the rule when there may in reality be another story.

Bourdieu used the analogy of playing a game to explain how people interacted socially (p. 10). He maintained that participants gained an understanding of their social circumstances through the practice of playing in that social situation. This ‘practical mastery’ (p. 2) gave players an understanding of what to do, as well as when and how to gain an advantage or at least maintain their position, hence rules could be re-invented, improvised or ignored.

In his theory of practice Bourdieu accounted for the differences he identified between what people did and what the rules suggested they would do by using the term strategy. He explained strategy as ‘the product of a practical sense, of a particular social game. This sense is acquired beginning in childhood, through participation in social activities’ (Lamaison, 1986: 112), hence strategy refers to ‘appropriate actions taken without conscious reflection’ (Lingard and Christie, 2003: 325). His unique definition of strategy gave Bourdieu new insights into what people did and why, insights that had not been possible by focusing on rules. For example, a ‘well-meaning rule-breaker’ (Bourdieu, 1972: 40) strategised to gain both personal and collective advantage, then used second-order strategies ‘aimed at disguising the first order strategies and the interests they pursue, under appearances of obedience to the rule’ (Bourdieu, 1972: 43). He claimed that these second-order strategies gave group members confidence that their values and rules were respected even though individuals were playing the game in an attempt to gain an advantage. Bourdieu observed that group members accepted that the rules had been manipulated, and they even encouraged this when the strategy upheld the underlying principles, or doxa, of the group. He explained to Lamaison, ‘they know how to take liberty with the official rule and thereby save the essential part of what the rule was meant to guarantee’ (Lamaison, 1986: 113).

Bourdieu further argued that ‘habitus is the source of most strategies’ (Lamaison, 1986: 114). Habitus, he argued, was ‘a system of schemes of perception and thought’ (Bourdieu, 1972: 18) which nurtures particular ways of thinking, understanding and interpreting the world and in turn generates an unconscious, practical sense of what to do. Once researchers have identified these strategies it is possible to explore the individual habitus and universal doxa that may account for them. This paper argues that we need to apply research methodologies that can identify strategies, that is, unstated, unconscious and less visible practices, so that researchers can ask why these practices are so difficult to access and why people do what they do, in this case, secondary school principals.

In terms of research into the practices of secondary school principals, Bourdieu’s distinction between rules and strategies suggests that a focus on practice, that is strategies, has the potential to provide more meaningful understandings about what secondary school principals are doing in particular situations, times and places, and why. The next section examines how other scholars have applied and advocated for the value of Bourdieu’s theory of practice for their studies of secondary school leadership and challenges the approaches they have taken, that is, underplaying the value of Bourdieu’s thinking about strategies as an entrée to research into secondary principal practice.

Bourdieu’s theory of practice and secondary school principal practice: a review of the literature

The review of Educational Management Administration and Leadership publications between 1980 and 2013 demonstrated that researchers of secondary principal practice had not applied Bourdieu’s distinction between rules and strategies to their investigations and understandings of secondary principal practice. The following wider review of the literature identifies ‘a small but significant body of literature that is productively utilizing Bourdieu’s concepts such as field, habitus, capital and strategy to explore educational leadership’ (Wilkinson, 2010: 42). Only a few of these scholars have applied Bourdieu’s theorising to research into secondary principal practice, and of these, the concepts of field, habitus and doxa were the most frequently applied. When Bourdieu’s conceptualising of strategies and his feel for the game were discussed it was alongside his other “thinking tools” (for example, Addison, 2007; Eacott, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c, 2011a, 2011b; Gunter and Fitzgerald, 2008; Gunter and Forrester, 2010; Lingard et al., 2003; Thomson, 1999, 2001, 2005, 2010), not a primary focus of either investigations or analyses of secondary principal practice. Thus, to my knowledge, Bourdieu’s distinction between rules and strategies has been underplayed as an analytical tool and not applied yet as a focus for research into everyday secondary principal practice, and certainly not in principalship studies in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

This review did reveal some scholars who have used Bourdieu’s theory of practice for their research into secondary principal practice. In their longitudinal study of school reform in Queensland, Lingard et al. (2003) focused on Bourdieu’s theorising of field, habitus and doxa ‘to interrogate their data’ (p. 61) and to make a case for ‘leadership habitus’ (p. 73). This ‘productive leadership habitus’ (p. 73), positioning principals, including secondary principals, as leaders of learning (p. 14) called for principals to develop a reflective disposition which would enable them to gain a feel for the leadership game and an ability to work with and around educational policy agendas; keep educational values as the focus of their leadership; and take a holistic approach to their leadership, juggling multiple and conflicting agendas while maintaining their focus on leading learning. This suggests that despite the impact of the neoliberal reforms, school leaders could and should be able to negotiate around the new rules of practice and keep their focus on education.

Also in Queensland, Addison argued that applying Bourdieuian theory helped to ‘de-mystify the multi-faceted nature of contemporary principal practice’ (Addison, 2007: 74). He analysed the interactions between habitus, field, capital and doxa to reveal the distinct differences between the habitus of a Grammar school head and the habitus of a State High School principal, and the ‘myriad manifestations which shape how the “rules of the game” are interpreted, implemented and modified’ (p. 83). Despite the impact of the neoliberal reform doxa on secondary principal practice, creating ‘an educator-in-chief element operating alongside the principal as CEO mantra’ (p. vi), Addison claimed that secondary principals could still act ‘spontaneously and innovatively’ (p. 83). Both these Australian studies provided a sense of optimism about the ability of secondary principals to act with a degree of autonomy despite the multiple and competing agendas they had to juggle, suggesting that where they had a feel for the game of leadership they were able to negotiate, improvise and even work with the rules in the interests of their schools and themselves as leaders. While these studies engaged with Bourdieu’s theory of practice, his conceptualising of strategies was not a significant part of either their investigations or analyses of secondary principal practice.

On the other hand, scholars from the United Kingdom and the United States who applied Bourdieu’s theory of practice to their studies of secondary principal practice tended to be less optimistic about the degree of autonomy principals could exercise under neoliberal policies. In her early study, Thomson (1999) focused on Bourdieu’s theorising of field and habitus to explain leadership practice as a game in which the players, secondary principals, had to play according to the rules of the neoliberal doxa in order to be able to practise as school leaders. Thomson argued that despite these constraints, principals could still ‘make strategic moves’ (no page number). Two years later she took a similar stance, arguing that ‘principals and their associations must adhere to, even if and as they struggle against, the rules’ (Thomson, 2001, no page number) because they had to act in the interests of both themselves and their schools, and that any agency they had was only within the constraints of the prevailing neoliberal regime. Again in 2005 Thomson argued that principals could not escape the demands of the neoliberal regime because ‘school principals are held to account by a policy inspectorate’ (p. 754). In a later study of the impacts of the neoliberal policy reforms on secondary headteacher practice Thomson (2010) applied Bourdieu’s ‘methodological toolkit’ (p. 5) focusing on the interrelationships between field, habitus and capital to explain that headteachers played the school leadership game ‘according to its rules and narratives of truth’ (p. 14) to ensure they maintained access to the capital (such as knowledge, credentials and networks) that advanced the interests of their schools, their students and themselves. She touched on Bourdieu’s strategies, acknowledging that headteachers used strategies ‘in their own interests’ (p. 14), that is, headteachers had to manage the tensions between exercising autonomy to position their schools as favourably as possible in a competitive school environment and playing by the codified rules of practice inherent in the neoliberal reform agenda.

Evoking Bourdieu’s concept of misrecognition, Thomson (2010) explained that in striving to do the best by their schools, principals also helped to keep the neoliberal doxa intact, and while they might be able to negotiate and mediate the impact of policy, this in itself was influenced by how much principals were prepared to undermine their own positions. Thomson concluded that secondary principals did have the ‘capacity to act’ (p. 17) but only within the confines of the neoliberal agenda, stating that ‘the game is too big and too far out of reach of any agent or set of agents’ (p. 17) for secondary principals to have much room to move (p. 17) and that headteachers were more likely to conform to the rules or improvise around them than try to change the rules. Thomson also called for further empirical research to test out her conclusions as she had done in her 2000 study, arguing for principal practitioner research that put greater value on the principals ‘insider’ views (p. 726). The position in this paper is that a focus on strategies, as distinct from field, habitus and doxa, would get researchers closer to secondary principal practice and has the potential to reveal some of the less obvious ways in which secondary principals may, or may not be, be playing the leadership game.

Although much of her research has been in higher education and education policy analysis, Gunter has also applied Bourdieu’s theory of practice to her work on school leadership. In presenting their arguments for ‘an emergent field of effective leadership of schools’ Gunter and Fitzgerald (2008: 261) applied Bourdieu’s theorising of field to argue that to enable the delivery of government policies school leadership had become rule and compliance driven, positioning the headteacher as key to school improvement and prescribed within an official ‘development framework’ (p. 269). While suggesting that there was still room for interpretation and professional judgment, they concluded that the effective leadership concept should be opened up to question rather than accepted.

Bourdieu’s concepts of disposition and doxa were evoked to demonstrate how the reforms in education had created a doxa of ‘good leadership practice’ (Gunter and Forrester, 2010: 56). This leadership doxa established new rules of practice for school leaders, positioned principals as the leaders of the reforms and ensured that playing the game was the ‘only thing for principals to do’ (p. 61). Despite this, their research concluded that some school leaders did ‘work around’ (p. 65) policies by maintaining their professional doxa and keeping the focus on student learning. While all of these principals worked within the neoliberal doxa, ‘practice is varied’ (p. 65) despite the rules around ‘preferred leadership practice’ (p. 66). However, Gunter and Thomson (2009, 2010) argued that if headteachers did not practise these new leadership rules through which their performance was audited they could ‘suffer the consequences of naming and shaming, or being summarily removed from post’ (Gunter and Thomson, 2009: 474).

In her more recent publication Leadership and the Reform of Education (2012), Gunter used Bourdieu’s theorising to develop her argument for ‘the leadership of schools game’ (p. 3). She demonstrated how the weaving together of habitus, field, doxa, the analogy of the game and misrecognition offered explanations for principal practice, concluding that school leaders had to subscribe to the rules of leadership practice which had been codified under the neoliberal agenda despite any discomfort they had with them. This officially sanctioned leadership game was presented as ‘worth playing, indeed, the only game worth playing’ (p. 7), and it was therefore difficult for school leaders to see the extent to which their own professional practice had been shaped by the official rules of leadership practice.

In a similar vein, English’s (2012) study of leadership standards in the United States used Bourdieu’s concepts of misrecognition and field to argue that these leadership standards were a ‘behavioural skills set embedded in a market-orientated neo-liberal perspective’ (p. 165). While they were presented as integral to school reform and transformation, English argued that they only served to reproduce ‘the status quo, inequities [and] achievement gaps’ (p. 170). These leadership standards, he explained, were about ensuring there was conformity with the neoliberal doxa by ensuring there were no ‘competing voices’ (p. 157), and concluded that resistance to these standards was unlikely.

The studies in this second literature review focused on scholars who applied Bourdieu’s theory of practice to their research on secondary principal practice. These studies revealed some commonalities with the themes in the first Educational Management Administration and Leadership review, for example the impact of neoliberal policies on the purposes and practice of secondary school leadership and the subsequent rules of practice for secondary principals’ leadership. In both reviews there were scholars who discussed the degree of agency secondary principals could exercise in their roles. The Bourdieuian scholars, while mostly optimistic, argued that while there was room for principals to manoeuvre it remained largely within the rules of practice set out under the neoliberal doxa. In both reviews Bourdieu’s distinction between rules and strategies was not applied as a primary focus of research or as a focus for the analysis and interpretation of research data. Most of the Bourdieuian scholars engaged with the doxa of the neoliberal regime and the rules embedded within this, but there was much less focus on identifying and explaining the strategies that secondary principals might or might not be using as they worked with and around these rules.

Bourdieu’s conceptualising of strategies appears to have been underplayed as a way of both investigating and of analysing secondary leadership practice, despite Bourdieu’s stance that researchers should move away from the importance given to rules in research, in favour of approaches that could get closer to ‘the realities of practice’ (Lamaison, 1986: 115), that is, a focus on strategies. As Eacott put it, ‘the failure to investigate leadership strategies limits much of the work for the field to “thin” description, whereas we should be aiming for “thick” description’ (Eacott, 2010a: 269).

Conclusion

Bourdieu advocated for research methodologies that could identify strategies as a means to uncover actions that are intuitive, unreflective and ‘second nature’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 63), including what he described as ‘second order strategies’ designed to disguise improvisation and self-interest (Bourdieu, 1972: 43). There is a need for approaches to research that can better reveal unconscious, taken for granted, and silent leadership practices, ‘to make the previously invisible visible’ (Eacott, 2010c: 227). As Bourdieu explained, a focus on strategy reveals the practical mastery that people develop in their social settings, gaining a sense of what to do and when to do it based on life experiences and practice. This feel for the game, he explained, ‘presupposes a permanent capacity for invention, indispensable if one is to be able to adapt to indefinitely varied and never completely identical situations … and is not ensured by mechanical obedience to the explicit, codified rule’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 63). This suggests that despite the debate that the current prescriptive leadership doxa is constraining leadership agency, Bourdieu’s theory is that there is a persisting capacity for improvisation.

Unlike most Bourdieuian scholars who used habitus or field as their entrée to investigating and analysing secondary principal practice, the assertion in this paper is that studying strategies should be the initial focus. This puts everyday leadership practice in the foreground of an investigation, and applying Bourdieu’s thinking tools will provide the explanatory resources for the “why” of principal practice. As Jenkins put it, ‘Bourdieu provides both a conceptual lens through which to investigate, combined with the thinking tools needed to explain’ (Jenkins, 1992, cited in Gunter, 2001: 12).

This paper has used the understandings gained in this review of selected literature to argue for further development of a Bourdieuian research framework that uses Bourdieu’s thinking about strategies as a primary investigative tool that can assist a focus on identifying the practical mastery that secondary school principals apply in their everyday work. If we really want to find out what secondary school principals do and why they do it, then we need to go about identifying and recording ‘the enactment of leadership actions within a social space and particularly the timing of those actions’ (Eacott, 2010a: 275). This is ‘consistent with the Bourdieuian notion that the logic of practice is not directly accessible’ (Eacott, 2011a: 40), because what principals do will not be fully explained by interviews, observations and questionnaires. It is indeed time to take up Eacott’s challenge to undertake research into the everyday leadership strategies of secondary principals in Aoteroa New Zealand so that current secondary principal practice can be illuminated.