Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for January 2021, Geoffrey Mead (School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia). His article for Current Sociology, Proper recognition: Personhood and symbolic capital in contemporary sociology, is Free Access this month.

Geoffrey Mead

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

G. Mead: I came to sociology through a PhD program with a heavy focus on theory. I was initially taken by the broad acceptance within sociology of the view that institutions are fragile accomplishments and humans are vulnerable and profoundly dependent on each other, something I explore in this article. As for what I have come to research, I became interested in the theoretical assumptions underpinning our disciplinary tools (as they manifest themselves in the concepts we deploy and the metaphors we often unknowingly use).

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “Proper recognition: Personhood and symbolic capital in contemporary sociology”?

G. Mead: Taking the aesthetic or sensory dimension of social life as something very serious and not at all superficial, I was interested in the role that it plays in something as profound – and seemingly not superficial – as what constitutes a person. This happened to converge with research in recent decades on the “new economy”, dominated by service work, “immaterial labor”, and aesthetics. Here it’s argued that what makes a person is now less their intrinsic properties and capacities and more what others (especially customers), based on their experience and perception, are able to attribute to them. I thought that this appears to correspond to Pierre Bourdieu’s relational sociology and his notions of recognition and “symbolic capital”, despite the aversion of this approach to Bourdieu’s work. So, I wanted to take the opportunity to clarify the commonalities and differences, as well as gain some sense of the role that Bourdieu thinks everyday aesthetic experience plays in his sociology.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

G. Mead: As it’s a theory-driven article, I was interested in exploring how these pieces fit together. This began with some clarification of symbolic capital, a notoriously ambiguous concept. Taking Bourdieu’s body of work as a whole, I tried to discern what thread links the various manifestations of symbolic capital together. Basically, this derives from a consistent stance on Bourdieu’s part not only that humans don’t “live by bread alone”, but that the kind of immaterial sustenance we desire is that of others’ recognition. Since this amounts to an anthropological argument, applicable to the “old” as well as the new economy, the article then explores the implications of the claim that the person is defined by their relations to others. The properties that supposedly comprise the person are only theirs inasmuch as others recognize and experience these properties.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

G. Mead: There is potential in this approach to appreciate the political importance of aesthetics. Again, aesthetics is not something simply superficial, but indicates the primary way that humans engage with the world (how things appear to us through our senses). One way to approach people’s purported decline in faith and trust in institutions is to consider these institutions as aesthetic objects in people’s experience or anticipated experience. Based on their experiences, people are more or less likely to experience them as legitimate or authoritative, or alternatively to feel a kind of disaffection or revulsion towards them.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

G. Mead: The article was written in imaginary conversation with a number of stimulating books and articles, and others might like to engage with these and come to contrary conclusions. First, I would mention John Levi Martin’s Explanation of social action (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Lisa Adkins’ “The new economy, property and personhood” (Theory, Culture & Society, 2005, vol.22, n.1, pp.111-130). More recently, Barbara Carnevali’s Social aesthetics (Columbia University Press, 2020) approaches the aesthetic dimension of social life from a philosophical angle and reaches a very different interpretation. Finally, I would like to recommend a classic article, Loïc Wacquant’s “Symbolic violence and the making of the French agriculturalist” (Journal of Sociology, 1987, vol.23 n.1 pp.65-88), which takes us through many of the political issues surrounding symbolic capital in relation to a concrete case of delegating one’s voice to political representatives.