The Social Structures of the Economy by Pierre Bourdieu

Author:Pierre Bourdieu [Bourdieu, Pierre]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

4

A Contract under Duress

After this long detour through the analysis of the structures and the objective relations of force between agents and institutions, we can thus come to what, in good empirical or empiricist method, appears to be the first stage of the research, and often the last: the direct interaction between purchaser and vendor, which can be observed and recorded, and sometimes concluded by a contract. Now, there is no interaction that so well conceals its structural truth as the relation between buyer and seller in the property transaction. And nothing would be more dangerous than merely to take that exchange at face value, as is done, in fact, by some proponents of ‘discourse analysis’ or ethnomethodology, on the pretext of faithfulness to reality and attention to the data, finding support and sustenance for their hyper-empiricist vision (though it hides behind justifications from phenomenology, this is what it must be called) in the latest technological developments – in particular in the tape-recorder and, above all, the video camera; and who, believing they have found in this filmed and recorded behaviour or speech the sacrosanct ‘data’ they can oppose to the statistical tables of the adherents of the ‘quantitative tradition’ that is still dominant today, in fact share with these latter a positivist epistemology of submission to the ‘given’ as it presents itself.

There could be no better time to recall that the truth of the interaction is not to be found in the interaction itself (a two-way relation that is always in fact a three-way relation, between the two agents and the social space within which they are located). Hardly anything of what defines the economics of housing, from the administrative regulations or legislative measures that orient property loans policy to the competition between the builders or banks which underpin these measures and regulations, including, along the way, the objective relations between the regional or municipal authorities and the various administrative authorities responsible for applying the regulations relating to building, is not in play in the exchanges between house sales staff and their clients, but it is invariably expressed (or betrayed) in unrecognizable form. The singular, personalized interactions, precisely located in time and space, between Monsieur S., a visitor to the 1985 Salon de la Maison Individuelle, and a salesman, or between another salesman and a couple (Monsieur and Madame F.) who went along to the Florélites show village one Sunday afternoon with two of their children to choose a house, are merely actualizations at a single point in time of the objective relationship between the financial power of the banks, embodied in an agent entrusted with the task of exerting that power tactfully (to avoid frightening clients, whose only means of expressing their freedom is to leave), and a client defined, in each case, by a certain purchasing power and, secondarily, by a certain power to exploit it, which is linked to his or her cultural capital, itself statistically linked to his or her purchasing power.

Having several times observed

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