Contemporary Social Science

Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences

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Sociological biography and socialisation process: a

dispositionalist-contextualist conception

Bernard Lahire

To cite this article: Bernard Lahire (2019) Sociological biography and socialisation process: a
dispositionalist-contextualist conception, Contemporary Social Science, 14:3-4, 379-393, DOI:
10.1080/21582041.2017.1399213

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2017.1399213

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CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL SCIENCE
2019, VOL. 14, NOS. 3–4, 379–393
https://doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2017.1399213

Sociological biography and socialisation process: a

dispositionalist-contextualist conception
Bernard Lahirea,b
a
Département de sciences sociales, ENS, Lyon, France; bInstitut Universitaire de France, Centre Max Weber,
Lyon, France

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Within a dispositionalist-contextualist conception of socialisation, Received 28 June 2017
the sociological biography seeks first and foremost to reconstruct Accepted 25 October 2017
the successive or parallel socialising experiences through which
KEYWORDS
the respondent has been constituted and which have settled in Sociological biography;
them in the form of schemes or dispositions to believe, see, feel socialisation; dispositions;
and act. In our societies, the family comes first in the order of existential issue
experiences and that are based the subsequent experiences
(notably educational and professional experiences). But if family is
the first ‘psychological agency of society’, it is not the only one
and individuals experience various other ‘agencies’ throughout
their lives (school, the professional environment, the political
party, the union, the religious institution, the cultural association,
the sports club, etc.). Therefore, only the sociological biography
allows us to grasp the successive or combined effect of the
different socialisation frameworks frequented by individuals.
Finally, sociological biography enables the establishment of
elements of what can be called the ‘existential issue’ of each
individual, which the biographical path has gradually contributed
to form.

Introduction
Based on a dispositionalist-contextualist conception (Lahire, 1998, 2002, 2010), the socio-
logical biography seeks first and foremost to reconstruct the successive or parallel socialis-
ing experiences – family, educational, professional, sentimental, political, religious and
sports, etc. – through which the respondent has been constituted and which have
settled in them in the form of schemes or dispositions to believe, see, feel and act.
A certain mistrust of biographical methods in sociology stems from the fact that it is
often seen as a way of isolating the individual, of enclosing it in a singular destiny, of
which they would be a bearer from the beginning and that they would follow along a
linear trajectory (Bourdieu, 1986). Yet, the biography can be the best way to reconstruct
all the links that connect or that have connected a given individual to other individuals,
groups or institutions and reconstruct the tight network of internal (dispositional) and exter-
nal (contextual) constraints that weigh permanently on their actions, feelings or thoughts. It is
also a way to grasp the experiences in the chronological order of their effects.

CONTACT Bernard Lahire [email protected] Institut Universitaire de France, Centre Max Weber (UMR
5283 CNRS), 47 rue Lortet, 69007 Lyon, France
© 2017 Academy of Social Sciences
380 B. LAHIRE

In our societies, the family comes first in the order of experiences and that are based the
subsequent experiences (notably educational and professional experiences). But the
family environment is not a socialisation framework like any other. Unlike other socialisa-
tion frameworks, it is not specialised in the sense that the child learns in it all the dimen-
sions of existence: how to speak, moral, food or clothing tastes and cultural preferences,
relation to power, to the body, to money, to time, to knowledge, etc. Through the family, it
is all sectors of society that refract according to the social characteristics, and particularly
dispositional, of the parents and all the other members of the family constellation in
relation to the child. As psychoanalyst Erich Fromm emphasised:
Psychoanalysis explains impulse destiny based on the destiny of an existence in the early years
of childhood, from a period when the individual is hardly yet dealing with ‘society’, but lives
almost exclusively within the circle of the family. Certainly, the first decisive influences on the
growing child come from the family, but all the typical affective relationships that are formed
within it, and all the pedagogical ideals it represents, are themselves conditioned in turn by
the social class background of the family, by the social structure from which it originates.
[…] The family is the intermediate link through which the society or the class imprints onto
the child, hence onto the adult, the structure to which they correspond and which is specific
to them: the family is the psychological agency of the society. (1973, p. 152)

But to be more accurate, one should say that the family is the first psychological agency of
society and that it conditions the type of experience that children can experience in the
various other ‘agencies’ they will have to contend with throughout their lives (school,
the professional environment, the political party, the union, the religious institution, the
cultural association, the sports club, etc.). Therefore, only the sociological biography
allows us to grasp the successive or combined effect of the different socialisation frame-
works frequented by individuals.
Finally, sociological biography enables the establishment of elements of what can be
called the ‘existential issue’ of each individual, which the biographical path has gradually
contributed to form. As Norbert Elias said, one can say that to understand an individual,
one must know what ‘predominant desires’ they aspire to satisfy and what problems
they have to face. But neither these desires nor these problems are inscribed in them
before all experience. They are formed from the earliest childhood under the effect of
coexistence with others and continue to be formed and transformed throughout life
(Elias, 1991b, p. 14). Such an approach has nothing in common with the anecdotal and
event-based biography, which knows only the succession of events, and which is
devoid of any ambition to uncover the structures of action, socialisation and behaviour,
sensitivity or personality.

Socialisation: the social construction of individuals

Sociological biography can be defined as the history of socialisation and its more or less
lasting effects on the individual. From this point of view, an individual is characterised
by what their different socialising experiences have made of them. In sociology, the
concept of socialisation refers to the movement by which the social world – this or that
‘part’ of it – shaped – partially or globally, punctually or systematically, in a diffuse way
or in an explicitly and consciously organised way – individuals living within it (Lahire,
2007). If we start with individuals, we can say that socialisation is the process by which
 CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL SCIENCE 381

a biological being is transformed, under the effect of the multiple interactions (Bruner,
1991; Dornes, 2002; Stern, 1989) that they maintain, from their birth, with other individuals
and with a whole material world based on a historical background into a social being
adapted to a given socio-historical universe. This socialisation process does not stop at
adolescence or when we become an adult: it begins at birth and ends only when we
die, and we can say that moments of retreats are moments of transformation, as much
as the period of childhood.
Durkheimian and Weberian sociologies, too often presented as opposites for suppo-
sedly pedagogical reasons, share the same main objective: to understand how more or
less durable social forms of life produce different ‘types of human beings’ (Max Weber),
‘social beings’ adapted to a given society and, even more precisely, to the ‘special environ-
ments’ for which they are intended (Emile Durkheim). As a sociologist of religions attached
to explaining the modes of production and reproduction of beliefs, Weber has in this way
at length analysed the systematic and methodical nature of the ethical training which
ascetic sects have imposed on their members (1964, 1996). Durkheim, for his part, has
put more emphasis on the role of the family and school, defining education as ‘a metho-
dical socialisation of the younger generation’ (2005).
However, to have a true sociological utility, the notion of socialisation must be suffi-
ciently precise and require an empirical approach. Simply saying that the actors of a
society are socialised or that they are the product of a socialisation is only a way –
altogether rather vague – to take the opposite view of the conceptions of the innate or
naturalist human being, but it is not enough to make the notion of ‘socialisation’ a
useful concept, that is, a tool which forces one to imagine precise research operations,
to conceive investigations which, without it, would simply not have been thinkable. In
order not to make the notion of socialisation an ‘amorphous’ concept (Weber), purely dec-
orative or rhetorical, that would only recall the socially constructed character of individual
actors, we must, therefore, specify – describe and analyse – the frameworks (universes,
authorities and institutions), modalities (ways, forms, techniques, etc.), time (time in an indi-
vidual journey, duration of socialising actions, degree of intensity and rhythm of these
actions) and effects (dispositions to believe, to feel, to judge, to represent itself, to act,
more or less lasting) of socialisation.

Primary and secondary socialisation

Studies on socialisation have never really been organised into a specialised field of soci-
ology. It is a socio-genetic approach of the actors which concerns sociologists of religion,
politics, sport or work as well as those of education or family (Darmon, 2016). However,
many sociologists, since the great founders of sociology, have sought to grasp how the
most varied socialising experiences are settled in more or less lasting ways of seeing,
feeling and acting (that is, propensities, inclinations, persistent or permanent ways of
being, habits, ethos, habitus, dispositions, schemas or perspectives), and how these products
of the past, more or less homogeneous or heterogeneous, incorporated by the socialised
ones partly determine their actions and reactions in various contexts of present action.
We know that the different moments of socialisation in the life of an individual are not
equivalent. Thus, sociology has endeavoured to differentiate the times and the frame-
works of socialisation by separating in particular the period called ‘primary’ socialisation,
382 B. LAHIRE

essentially familial, from all those following and which are called ‘secondary’ (school, peers,
professional universes, political, religious, cultural, sports, etc.). This distinction is impor-
tant, in that it recalls that in the early stages of socialisation, the child incorporates, in
the greatest socio-affective dependence on the adults around them, ‘the world, the
only existing and conceivable world, the world itself’ (Berger & Luckmann, 1986, p. 184)
and not a universe perceived as relative. The impossibility of becoming aware of the socia-
lising influences is all the greater because socialisation is precocious and without compari-
son. We are talking here about a true ‘amnesia of the genesis’ (Pierre Bourdieu). The fact
that family socialisation is both early, intense, lasting and, for a relatively long time, without
competition, explains the weight of social origin (even when it is roughly apprehended
from the socio-professional category of the parents) in a large number of behaviours or
preferences studied (educational, professional, cultural, sportive, dietary, aesthetic, etc.).
That is why we cannot approach habitus with lightness to explain any effects of socialisa-
tion. To talk about militant, catechetical, pugilistic or educational habitus, as we talk of class
habitus, is ignoring the theoretical ambition of the concept of habitus, designating a
system of durable and transferable dispositions. The constituted dispositions are strong
or weak, durable or ephemeral, etc. Under the effect of permanently unfavourable con-
texts, some dispositions may ‘get tired’ (C. S. Peirce) for lack of training. Habitus is, there-
fore, if one respects the most precise definition of it, an extremely peculiar and rather rare
case in the whole possible set of dispositions.
Even if its monopoly on infantile education is constantly diminishing, the family is never
inert compared to other potential socialising frameworks: it can be more or less controlling
in terms of ‘attendance’ and outings (controlling composition of the group of respectable
peers and limiting the time spent outside of any family control), to act as a filter with
respect to the media and to various cultural bodies outside of the family environment
and to undertake more generally a job, insensitive but permanent, of interpretation and
judgement on all areas of social life. Even child and adolescent professionals (teachers,
paediatricians, psychologists, dieticians, social workers, etc.) participate in the child socia-
lisation only through the intermediary of parents who very often have the power to take
this with a pinch of salt, to resist more or less consciously to external injunctions and to
retrace the norms that more or less explicitly one tries to impose on them regarding
child education. Durkheim had already emphasised in De la division du travail social
(1991) the total and enveloping character of the family universe whose members ‘share
the totality of their existence’ while the members of a corporation, for example, share
only ‘their only professional concerns’. The family forms ‘a sort of complete society
whose actions extend as much on our economic activity as on our religious, political, scien-
tific, and other activity. Everything we do, even if of little importance and outside the
house, echoes and causes appropriate responses. The sphere of influence of the corpor-
ation is, in this sense, more restricted’ (Durkheim, 1991, p. XIX).

Socialisation, re-socialisation
But the biographical distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ socialisation is not
without its problems. It often leads one to imagine the individual journey as a passage
from the homogeneous family universe, constituting the most fundamental mental and
behavioural structures, to the multiple social universes that an already constituted social
 CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL SCIENCE 383

being subsequently frequents and who strongly resists – because of the conservation
instinct – to the forces of modification. ‘The particular weight of primitive experiences’,
wrote Pierre Bourdieu,
results essentially from the fact that the habitus tends to ensure its own consistency and its
own defence against change through the selection it makes between new information, by
rejecting, in case of accidental or forced exposure, information capable of challenging the
accumulated information and especially by disadvantaging exposure to such information.
(Bourdieu, 1980, p. 102)

However, different empirical facts contradict this scheme. First of all, the homogeneity of
the family universe is too often presupposed and rarely observed. Yet, whether the hetero-
geneity is relative or leads to the most exacerbated contradictions – family conflicts, it is
always irreducibly present at the heart of the family configuration which never succeeds in
being a ‘total institution’ of socialisation (Lahire, 1995). The family is very often made up of
different heritages, sometimes contrasted, between the spouses who rarely share the
same social properties (social and cultural origins, social positions, education level or
type of diploma, etc.) and this is not without consequence from the point of view of
the socialisation of children.
Moreover, primary-secondary succession is often questioned in practice by the very
early (and, in some cases, increasingly early) socialising action of different social universes
from the family universe or of actors external to the family universe. And so it is with the
experience of the nanny, the kindergarten or the pre-school, whose necessity has been
gradually imposed with the increasing access to the world of work for women, though
it is impossible to pretend that the implicit socialisation programmes of these different
social actors or social universes are systematically harmonious in relation to the family uni-
verse. Sent to kindergarten very early, the child learns from the first months of his life that
we do not expect exactly the same things from them and that they are not treated iden-
tically ‘here’ and ‘there’. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, referring to the case of a
nanny who comes from a very different social world than that of the child’s parents,
even considered the possibility of a ‘failed socialisation’ resulting from the ‘mediation of
highly contradictory worlds by the other significants during the primary socialisation’
(Berger & Luckmann, 1986, pp. 229–230).1 Nevertheless, it is clear that the world plurality
experience has every chance, in highly differentiated societies, of being experienced
precociously.
Two opposing and mutually reinforcing errors are generally committed by sociologists
who study these questions of socialisation on a biographical path scale: (1) the study of
secondary socialisations without considering the effects of previous socialisations;
(2) the study of secondary socialisations as simple actualisation areas or spaces for the ful-
filment or expression of the dispositions previously acquired.
The first case is favoured by a certain interactionist tradition, which is not indifferent to
the processes of learning, internalisation and even sometimes the phenomena of skills
constitution, ‘categories systems’ and social dispositions, but which begins the study of
these processes with the beginning of a career, whether delinquent, sporting, militant
or that of a marijuana smoker. The ‘career’ is only the stretch of a social trajectory (and
of socialisation) which begins, particularly, within familial and educational socialisation fra-
meworks.2 As much as the interactionism can be attentive to detailing the processes and
384 B. LAHIRE

the different phases constituting a career, so can it remain silent on the social conditions of
possibility of entry into career. It is then all the social dispositions which make it impossible
to arrive in a field of work or practice entirely by chance, and which often continue to
orient the style of practices which are missing in the sociological explanation. The same
error leads to begin the study of militant, sports or delinquent careers with the first
passage to action without taking into consideration the previous social experiences
which, even when they seem very far from the practices studied, can play a role in the
present course of action.
Inversely, a too mechanistic dispositionalism would lead to underestimating the trans-
formation or renewal part that the new socialisation frameworks can generate. If disposi-
tions may be involved – in dynamic interaction with contextual constraints – of entry into a
specific career, they do not necessarily form the whole of the dispositions that are solicited
by this context. Therefore, it is necessary to clearly distinguish between the favourable dis-
positions to entering a career and those which are specifically constituted in the new
context of action in question. For example, in sport sociology, researchers have often
worked more on social dispositions (socially differentiated relation to the body) that
lead practitioners of very different social origins to move towards a particular sport than
to the socialisation processes and the specifically sport dispositions.3 A too mechanistic
dispositionalism could go so far as to claim that everything is constituted – or at least
in germ – from the beginning.4 The caricature of such a dispositionalist drift is given by
the image of the revolver bullet, whose trajectory can be precisely calculated to the
point of impact by knowing where it starts, what the propulsive force to which it is sub-
mitted is and what the firing angle is. The biographical paths would then be only a
series of predictable passage points.
However, even in certain balanced formulations where Pierre Bourdieu evokes the dia-
lectic of dispositions and contexts (institutions or fields), everything happens as if the dis-
positions were independently constituted from their relations to the context of considered
action, that is before his meeting. The only questions addressed are those of their satisfac-
tion or their expression within the framework of the institution or field, but never that of
their possible transformation within this institution:
How the dispositions (as potentialities) reveal themselves in relation with certain institutions
or, better even, certain fields (as spaces of possible); how agents exploit institutions to satisfy
their urges and how institutions, conversely, put the agents’ urges to serve their objectives.
The different agents invest, per their own history, and therefore their dispositions, the mean-
ings proposed by the institution, among which they prioritize certain ones. For its part, the
institution or, better, the field offers a space of pre-constituted possibilities; it regulates the
dispositions, that is, it constrains them and censures them at the same time as it opens
them new ways. (Bourdieu & Maitre, 1994, pp. V–XXII)

Even if the nature of the ‘secondary’ socialising frameworks invested by individuals

depends in part on the social dispositions previously established within the family,5
research shows that one can never neglect their own power of inflecting or modifying,
with varying effect, the products of past socialisation or even their capacity to produce
new mental and behavioural dispositions among those who are induced, voluntarily or
by obligation, to frequent them durably. This is true of academic experiences, professional
universes, sociability networks and conjugal life framework (Berger & Kellner, 2007), as well
as sports, religious or political institutions. Even in different socio-affective conditions,
 CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL SCIENCE 385

secondary socialisations can more or less deeply put into question the central role of famil-
ial socialisation. For example, cases of ‘socially misclassed,’ from the ‘top’ as well as from
the ‘bottom,’ show that depending on the area of practice considered, individuals can
implement family-acquired dispositions or academically and professionally acquired dis-
positions (Hoggart, 1991; Pasquali, 2014). But the study of cases of major biographical
breakdowns or significant changes in social roles (people in professional breakdown,
former communists, former prisoners, ex-prostitutes, transsexuals, former members of reli-
gious orders, etc.) clearly shows that socialisation and re-socialisation work is a lifelong
process (Denave, 2015; Ebaugh, 1988; Leclercq, 2008).
In the end, the question of the structuring type within each individual of the different
socialising experiences depends on the more or less heterogeneous nature of these
experiences. Individuals in highly differentiated societies, who live in an educational com-
petition regime and who confront themselves more or less precociously with very different
socialisation norms, are thus more likely to have constituted a patrimony of hetero-
geneous incorporated, and sometimes contradictory, dispositions, than individuals
living in traditional societies, demographically more restricted and infinitely less differen-
tiated (Lahire, 1998, 2004, 2012). And the more heterogeneous and split the individual
patrimony of dispositions is, the more the question arises as to which dispositions are acti-
vated and which dispositions are inhibited or simply put aside in different contexts of
action. These contexts can vary from the broadest field of practice to circumstantial inter-
action within a given domain.
The complexity of the socialising experiences and of the foliated structure of the patri-
monies of dispositions allows us to question deeply the model of the perfect adjustment
of the habitus to the contexts in which they are brought to evolve. There are rarely ideal
correspondences or ontological complicity between incorporated mental and behavioural
structures and contextual structures. The survey (Lahire, 2002) shows that, in any field of
practice, there is a mix of favourable and unfavourable conditions to the dispositions of
those who enter activity individual heritages of dispositions and skills (rather than
habitus) are subject to variable constraints depending on the contexts of action. They
are approached differently by the different properties of the same contexts. This explains
why the feeling of perfectly sticking to the set of expectations, of being perfectly adjusted
to situations or positions, of being ‘like a fish in water’, of being the ‘situation made
woman’ or the ‘institution made man’ is rather rare and that each context often involves
as many inhibited, frustrated, unsatisfied dispositions as well as fulfilling dispositions.
Therefore, biographical paths are not linear trajectories where each point is experienced
systematically by individuals on the mode of ‘this goes without saying’.
These tensions, maladjustments or inadequacies between the dispositions and the con-
texts of their implementation, whether small or big, illustrate the fact that highly differen-
tiated societies, as justly qualified by Elias (1991a), are prone to frequent crises from the
individuals and, therefore, to the ordinary reflexivities that are the consequences. It is
(1) because each of us can carry a multiplicity of dispositions that do not always find
the context of their actualisation (unappeased internal plurality), (2) because we can be
devoid of the right dispositions allowing us to face certain situations, avoidable or not,
that are part of our multi-differentiated social world (problematic external plurality) and
(3) because the multiplicity of objectively possible social investments (family, work, friend-
ship …) can ultimately become incompatible (problematic plurality of investments or of
386 B. LAHIRE

commitments), so that we can experience discomfort, crises or personal disconnections

with the social world.
First, feelings of solitude, incomprehension, frustration or uneasiness can be the result
from this (unavoidable) gap between what the social world allows us to express objec-
tively at a given moment in time and what it has instilled in us through our past socialisa-
tion. Because we carry dispositions, capacities, knowledge and know-how that must
sometimes be durably put on standby for objective social reasons, we can feel discomfort
or frustration that usually translates into the illusion that our ‘authentic self’ (‘personal’,
therefore, thought of as asocial) would not find its place within the restrictive frame of
society (assimilated to an ensemble of social norms foreign to itself). This situation is
favourable to the reinforcing of the illusion of the existence of a ‘within my heart’ place
or of an ‘intimate self’ (authentic) independent of any social frame, when in fact it is the
gap or the disjunction between what the social world has instilled in us and what it
offers as possibilities for enabling our dispositions and our diverse capacities at a given
moment in time that creates such a feeling.
But inversely, crisis situations can be produced by the multiple occasions for maladjust-
ment, for a disassembly between what we have incorporated and what the situations
require from us. Those are crises of the complicity or of the ontological collusion links
between the consumed past and the new situation. This type of situation can lead one to
think that, instead of offering a priori and once and for all the existence of a singular practice
theory, which leaves more or less room for reflexivity, it is preferable to reconstitute, according
to the social environments and surroundings, according to the types of actors and of
actions, the different times of action and the different logics of action: the time of concilia-
tion, deliberation, preparation, and planning, the time for putting forth action schemes
incorporated within the relative urgency – based on the nature of the action – sometimes
accompanied by a time for rest, for reflection and correction, the time for reviewing the
action, for reflecting upon oneself, etc. In short, it is about developing a sociology of the plur-
ality of the effective logics for action and of the plurality of the forms of rapport (more or less
reflective) to action, which can only be apprehended on the individual scale.6
At last, without possessing the gift of ubiquity, the individual can suffer from the mul-
tiplicity of social investments that are presented to them and that can end up being trans-
formed into a competition or a contradiction. For example, a lot of research work into the
trajectory of political militants shows that political engagement and disengagement pro-
cesses can only be understood if we do not dissociate them from other types of engage-
ments (family, sentimental, professional, etc.) of the individuals (Fillieule, 2001).

Hesitations, bifurcations, biographical rupture

Jean-Claude Passeron insisted that regarding biographical method,
the effort of invention of new methodologies adapted to the concern of individual case, and
the writing ease which merely renames “biographical method “a slight grooming of the
proven recipes of the romantic, hagiographic or epidictic biography, coexist and sometimes
intermingle. (1991, p. 185)

Thus, he points to the risk of the ‘utopian aim of exhaustiveness’ which can be translated in
the ‘interminable’ project, such as Sartre in L’Idiot de la famille, which aims to ‘clarify an
 CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL SCIENCE 387

individual path […] in all its dimensions, in its existential choices’ (Passeron, 1991, p. 187 et
p. 192).
Madelenat (1984) has clearly revealed the temptation that every author of biography
must face: to enclose in a noun or an expression the key, the essence, the formula, the
password, the intelligible focus, the dominant impulse, the irradiating centre, the main
unit, the central feature, the system, the organising structure, the intimate law, the ulti-
mate principle or the profound motor of a life or of a personality. Thus, the dream of
many biographers is to condense to the extreme, in a single formula, even in a single
word, the key elements of a journey or of an individual character. In seeking to name
the generative formula of all the practices of a group or of an individual,7 the sociologist
takes over, without always knowing, the most classical literary gesture, which is to reduce
an (individual) life to a single principle. A literary, philosophical and fascinating pretension
for the reader, it becomes a demiurgic pretension when it animates the scientific interpret-
ation of the biographical facts.
One says that arriving after the ‘battle’ (after indecision, ambivalence, oscillation, hesi-
tation, moments of strong tension, even crisis), which is never won in advance and of
which the outcome remains uncertain – what the sociologist almost always does when
he asks to the respondent to ‘tell their life’ or to recall moments from their past (familial,
educational, professional, cultural, matrimonial, friendly …) – helps to draw a trajectory
which, at the same time, can be taken for granted. It may then be assumed that it is
obvious that in the trajectory ‘T’ of the individual ‘I’, I pass from T1 to T2, then from T2
to T3, etc … Theoretical traditions may be used to refer the calculation (cost/benefit) or
pre-reflexive adaptation to an objective situation (subjective expectation or the ‘project’
being perceived as the internalisation product of objective probabilities in the form of
an ‘it is (or is not) for me’ (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970, pp. 190–193), according to the
model of necessity made virtue or to the sense of the game). As Howard S. Becker
wrote, ‘To understand the behaviour of an individual, one must know how they perceived
the situation, the obstacles they thought they had to face, the alternatives they saw open
to them’ (1986, p. 106). Rather than considering each moment of the individual trajectory
as a logical sequence in a linear path, by assuming that not only each individual can be
characterised by a single formula (rather than by several complementary or competing for-
mulas) generating their behaviours, choices and decisions, but are subjected to social
forces which are not necessarily coherent when they are obliged to make a choice of
studies, to choose a career, to decide on the place and the type of their holidays … , bio-
graphical interviews can be a good mean to challenge coherent and stable personality
models associated with decision models without uncertainty.
Considering that each point on the trajectory may have been the moment of a crisis, a
negotiation, a doubt, a hesitation between several possibilities, a resistance or a constraint
(eventually accepted and lived as such), we are giving ourselves the possibility of redisco-
vering the share of incorporated heterogeneity of the individual caught up in constella-
tions of individuals (linked by interdependence relations) each time specifically. It is
particularly important that the respondent talks about the ‘biographical ruptures’, of
change or modification moments, even slight ones, in the trajectories or careers (edu-
cational orientation moments, ‘choice’ to finish studying, to leave the family house,8
spouse’s choice, divorce, remarriage or to start again, the choice or cessation of such cul-
tural, sports activity, hobby, first-job, first fixed-term work, lose one’s job, the first child, the
388 B. LAHIRE

second, major health problems, deaths in the entourage, etc.). As these are times when the
dispositions may be in crisis or may be suddenly reactivated while they were on standby.
The risk that these moments (which Jean-Claude Passeron calls ‘knots’ or ‘bifurcations’
(Passeron, 1991, p. 202)) are only those that the respondent can reconstruct at the
point of the trajectory in which they are (the respondent would forget important
moments that time would have erased) can be counterbalanced by a systematic work
of examination and role-playing. The questions (especially precise, contextualised,
rather than general and abstract) are useful triggers of memory that allow the anamnesis
of very old scenes and experiences.
One can imagine that in each ‘choice’ or each new stage that appears in a biographical
path, part of the individual’s dispositions is put on hold more or less lastingly. It is as if indi-
vidual parts were ‘muted’ or extinguished for a short or long time. We can think about the
theory on the social deaths suggested by Erving Goffman regarding the different types of
‘failures’ or ‘deceits’ and how to ‘cool the mark out)’. Goffman writes:
A gullible fool who needs to be calmed can no longer hold one of their social roles. They are
about to be deprived of it, it is someone who is about to lose one of their social lives, to die one
of their deaths. This leads us to study our ways of going – or being sent – to death in each of
our social faculties […]. (1988, pp. 297–298)

He adds that from this perspective one can analyse

the social processes of expulsion and dismissal; of voluntary or forced retirement; of farewells
and separations; of deportation, of excommunication, of incarceration; from defeat to play, to
competitions, or to war; the abandonment of a circle of friends or an intimate social relation-
ship; the bankruptcy of the retirement of old people; and, finally, the dead who spark interest
in their heirs. (Goffman, 1988, p. 298)

To continue Goffman’s reflection, we may think that the moments when certain disposi-
tions, certain skills are put on hold (because circumstances force us to make a ‘choice’
among others possible) can be followed by ‘protective rationalisations’ (Goffman, 1988,
p. 279). And it is the fruits of such ‘protective rationalisations’ that the sociologist can
gather in the interviews. The dispositions put on hold, the ‘partial social deaths’
(Goffman is thinking in terms of roles and not dispositions) are too difficult (from a mne-
monic point of view) or too painful to evoke and the respondent can themselves, if one
does not explicitly ‘seek’ them on this ground, carry out a ‘naturalisation’ work of his bio-
graphical path, which then appears as obvious. In such a situation, the respondent contrib-
utes in large part to a univocal and linear deterministic vision of their biographical path.
Executing by anamnesis a return on the plurality of possible choices and indecisions of
the past is to bring back to consciousness the existence of dispositions, inclinations, com-
petences … which have been put on hold and which remind us that life could have been
quite different. We should study each biographical path thinking of all the moments in
which change could have taken place.

Sociological biography and existential issue

Finally, I mentioned in the introduction the fact that sociological biography could also
allow the reconstruction of the ‘existential problem’ of the respondent. This expression
refers to all the problems, worries and concerns, more or less conscious, that each
 CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL SCIENCE 389

individual must face at each moment given their history; history which is itself dependent
on that of the groups and institutions that the individual frequents or has frequented in a
more or less remote past (family, friends, school, church, company, party, union, clubs or
associations, etc.). To understand the existential problems that individuals have to deal
with, it is necessary to implement sociological methods of objectifying biographical
paths, rather than relying on existential philosophies.9
If social investigators have succeeded in sociologising a notion like ‘suffering’ (Bourdieu,
1993; Dejours, 1998; Renault, 2008), they have almost entirely abandoned the question of
‘worry’ (Sorge) or ‘concern’ (Besorgen) to the derealising philosophy of Heidegger (2011),
even though the German philosopher wished to clearly point out a distance between his
conception of ‘concern’ and the ‘life concerns’ of individuals living in society, to which the
social sciences should be primarily interested. Despite its philosophical connotations, the
‘existential’ description of the notion of ‘existential issue’ does not refer to anything other
than ordinary, prosaic existential problems and the real coexistence of individuals.10
The existential issue of an individual is the constellation of more or less articulated pro-
blems that they are faced with and which evolve throughout their biographical path.
These problems, initially anchored in the family configuration, and which are likely to
appear or to be transformed at each stage of the life cycle and on the occasion of bifur-
cations or biographical changes of greater or lesser breadth, are sometimes linked to
embarrassing dispositions (anxious, fearful, depressive, self-guilty, self-depreciation dispo-
sitions, etc.), and sometimes to conflicts between opposite dispositions (which lead to per-
manent tensions or doubts), sometimes even to crises caused by the misalignments
between dispositions and life contexts (frustrated, annoyed, unsuitable dispositions with
a sense of failure, shame or discomfort). But these are often problems related to activity
fields, social life dimensions, relationship types or specific situations types: relation to
women or men, relation to authority, inferiority or superiority complex in a given field,
relation to sexuality, relation to disease, to the body, etc.
I was initially led to forge the expression ‘existential issue’ to justify the logics of the lit-
erary creation of Franz Kafka by putting them in a biographical path (Lahire, 2010). The
writer is worried about a series of problems related to his father, his creation, his relation
to women and marriage, the tensions between professional requirements and creative
work, his Jewishness, etc. His heady existential questions, his internal tensions, his feelings
of guilt and oppression, Kafka translates them into his texts, practising literature as a lib-
eration enterprise aimed at unravelling its contradictions. But the different elements of his
existential issue are expressed both in his daily behaviour and in his literary productions.
If we want to understand what ‘animates’ individuals, what drives them to act as they
do, to dedicate themselves to one domain rather than another, etc., it is necessary to learn
to know the predominant desires and preoccupations which they have been led to forge
during their history. To this end, the sociological biography, as an objectification of differ-
ent times, frameworks, modalities and socialisation effects throughout the individual’s
journey, is an indispensable tool available to researchers.

Conclusion
It is without a doubt Pierre Bourdieu who crystallised the loudest critiques addressed to
the biographical method (or we must say, to be fair, to certain uses of biography in
390 B. LAHIRE

social sciences) (Bourdieu, 1986). However, rejecting the biographical method, which is
perceived as a method for isolating the individual, for withdrawing them into themselves,
for seizing them in their free or voluntary acts or to make it seem as though their journey
was the linear progression of a kind of singular destiny present from the beginning, seems
to be in total contradiction with the theory of the habitus, which can be put forth empiri-
cally in a precise manner only by the rigorous practice of the biographical method. Why
would the biography isolate the individual if the researcher uses it as the instrument
through which he progressively reconstructs all the links, direct or indirect, that connect
the individual in question, throughout their life, to other individuals, places, groups or insti-
tutions? If Bourdieu’s intention was not to reduce the determinants of individual beha-
viours to the effects of direct interactions with other people,11 this does not change the
fact that the individual constructs their dispositions not by way of a miracle, but
through experiences lived with other people, with objects, through texts, etc. The fight
against interactionalist positivism – which reduces socialising effects to those produced
through direct contacts with face to face interactions – should not lead to a magical
and abstract vision of the social construction of individuals, of their categories of percep-
tion and appreciation, or of their behavioural dispositions.
Why cannot sociological biography be used to study the constitutional elements of the
psychic economy of an individual, of their desires, of their obsessions or of the problems
they have had to face or to solve throughout their existence if they restore the social con-
ditions of construction and they do not make it a fact that would have been instilled in
them right from their origins? Why would the biographical approach necessarily
promote personal will and choices that are free of any constraint while it is still the best
way to examine the tight network of constraints (internal and external) that constantly
weigh over an individual’s actions?
Why, then, miss the occasion, through precise biographical studies, to establish the link
between sociology and psychoanalysis or, at the least, to observe in a precise and
thorough manner, the constituent social relationships of the individual, which are not
limited to their relationships with other ‘field agents’, but that of course begin at the
heart of the family universe – a favourite study field of psychoanalysis – and keep evolving
through school, within groups of friends, within the professional environments, etc.? Even
though he does recognise the importance of psychoanalysis, even calling for sociology
and psychoanalysis to ‘unite their strengths’ by ‘overcoming their mutual preventions’
(Bourdieu, 2000), Pierre Bourdieu, however, mostly reduces the actors to the position
they occupy in a field and to some synthetical elements concerning their trajectories,
their objective social attributes and their dispositions so as not to give the impression
of giving in to the ‘biographical illusion’. The ritual fear of a biographical method,
further imagined or preconceived than actually practised by social sciences researchers,
ends up constituting an asylum ignorantiae and prevents the researcher from seriously
considering the socialising experiences of the actors and their effects. Instead of this, Bour-
dieu excludes the biographical and neglects the requirements that a socio-genetical
approach of the habitus should promote.
For example, in his study of Flaubert (Bourdieu, 1996), Bourdieu gives priority to the
‘field’, to Flaubert’s position in this field, and neglects the constitutive elements of what
the author was and how important he was within the literary universe. He ‘explains’ the
work by the perception that an author occupying a given position in the field (as a
 CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL SCIENCE 391

space of positions) can have room for thematic and stylistic stances, therefore bringing lit-
erature back to a game of actions and reactions that are purely internal. Literature never
appears as a locale where authors pose, witness, expose, work on and reformulate existen-
tial questions. He reduces Flaubert to a few synthetic properties, instead of reconstructing
the most constitutive and structuring elements of his social experience or of his successive
social experiences.
If we are trying to update the mental and behavioural structures of an individual, their
most singular and general inclinations, the most important problems that their past and
present conditions of existence and coexistence have led them to consider and to take
on, then only their sociological biography allows for a precise understanding of the
social frames they have attended and the traces that have been left within them. There-
fore, there is no illusion in proceeding to a biographical analysis if we assign it the role
of seizing the nature of the experiences engrained in a given individual.

Notes
1. Such socialisation can only be called ‘failed socialisation’ in relation to the expectations of
social reproduction that are more or less consciously nourished by parents.
2. There is also a tendency to reduce interactionism to a certain subjectivism, whereas the way in
which an author as Hughes (1996) thinks of social trajectory combines in a balanced way the
objectivist and subjectivist points of view.
3. Bertrand (2012) worked to correct this trend in his thesis, without neglecting previous socia-
lisations studies.
4. Such a drift is observed in certain psychological works which affirm that ‘everything is played’
before three years. We shall read the criticism of such theses in the work of Bruer (2002).
5. It is for this reason, among other things, that sociologists should not totally ignore the psycho-
analytic clinical works such as those of developmental psychologists.
6. On the question of reflexivity, I refer to « Reflexivities and Logics of Action » (Lahire, 1998,
pp. 119–188).
7. Pierre Bourdieu defined habitus as a generative formula of practices.
8. Considéré par Blöss, Frickey, and Godard (1990) comme une « conjoncture de l’existence où se
condensent des événements décisifs dans le passage à l’“état adulte” ».
9. « One can see the difficulty to explain to later generations, for example in a biography, the
existential problems of an individual, as incomparable as his personality and his creation
could have been, without mastering the sociologist technique » (Elias, 1991b, p. 24).
10. It is rather surprising that terms such as those of ‘existence’ or ‘existential issues’, which should
refer to the concrete aspects of the daily life of individuals in society, now seem to echo purely
philosophical questions, in relation to being-in-the-world, the meaning of life or death. The
social sciences must, therefore, reinvest these questions monopolised by metaphysics, phe-
nomenology or existentialism.
11.

Thinking in terms of field necessitates a conversion of the whole ordinary vision of the
social world which is only attached to visible things: to the individual, ens realissimum to
which we associate a kind of ideological and primordial interest; to the group, which is
only apparently defined by the relationships (temporary or durable, informal or institu-
tionalised) between its members; even to the relationships considered as interactions,
i.e. as properly accomplished inter-subjective relations. In fact, as much as the Newto-
nian gravitational theory could only be built by breaking up with the Cartesian realism
which accepted to recognise no other physical action mode than the clash or the direct
contact, the notion of field supposes a rupture with the realist representation which
392 B. LAHIRE

tends to reduce the effect of the environment to the effect of a direct action that
happens within an interaction. It is the structure of relations that are constitutive of
the space of the field which commands the shape that can take the visible relations
of interaction and the content of the experience that agents can have. (Bourdieu,
1982, pp. 41–42)

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Bernard Lahire is Professor of sociology at the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon (France) and senior
member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He is the editor of the series « Laboratoire des
sciences sociales » at the Éditions la Découverte. He has published around 20 books, which
include The Plural Actor (Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 2010). His last book is a public defence of soci-
ology (Pour la sociologie. Et pour en finir avec une prétendue « culture de l’excuse », Editions la Décou-
verte, 2016). He was the award winner of the CNRS silver medal 2012 for the human and social
sciences.

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