Social theory has a problem that refuses to go away. If people are deeply shaped by society, how can they ever act differently enough to change it? Pierre Bourdieu and Margaret Archer offer two influential but sharply different answers. Bourdieu emphasizes habitus, the socially acquired dispositions that make action feel natural and practical. Archer gives greater weight to reflexivity, particularly the internal conversations through which people deliberate about their circumstances and decide what to do.
Their disagreement goes to the heart of the classic sociological problem of structure and agency.
Bourdieu: action before reflection
For Bourdieu, much social action does not begin with conscious calculation. Through family life, education, class position, institutions, and repeated experience, people acquire a habitus: durable dispositions shaping what seems possible, desirable, embarrassing, risky, or simply appropriate for “people like us.”
Habitus does not mechanically determine behavior. It operates as a practical sense, a learned capacity to navigate a social field without consciously formulating its rules. Someone familiar with academic life, for example, usually does not calculate every gesture required at a seminar or conference. Much of the game is already in the body.
The interesting problem appears when the game changes.
Bourdieu’s concept of hysteresis describes a lag between dispositions formed under earlier conditions and a field that has subsequently changed. A career strategy, political instinct, or educational expectation that once worked may survive after the conditions that made it sensible have disappeared. Hysteresis is thus a breakdown of practical fit: the habitus continues playing yesterday’s game.
Archer: reflexivity and the internal conversation
Margaret Archer pushes harder on what happens next.
Her morphogenetic approach analytically distinguishes structure from agency in order to examine their interaction through time. Existing social structures predate particular actions and condition what actors can do. Those actors then interact with those conditions, sometimes reproducing them and sometimes transforming them. Archer calls structural reproduction morphostasis and transformation morphogenesis.
Her distinctive contribution is the concept of the internal conversation. Human beings reflect upon what they care about, interpret their circumstances, formulate projects, and decide how to respond to constraints and opportunities. For Archer, reflexive deliberation is a crucial mechanism mediating social structure and human action.
This becomes especially important under rapid social change. Archer argues that when inherited routines cease to provide adequate guidance, reflexivity becomes increasingly necessary. In fact, she explicitly questions whether habitus retains the explanatory power Bourdieu gives it under conditions of accelerated change.
Does hysteresis produce reflexivity?
Here the two theories almost meet.
Bourdieu’s hysteresis identifies situations in which the fit between habitus and field breaks down. Archer’s theory explains why such situations might force actors into conscious deliberation.
Yet combining them too easily creates another problem. Archer risks making people appear capable of standing outside their social formation and reasoning freely about their circumstances. A strict Bourdieusian response would insist that reflection itself has a social history: what people notice, fear, desire, or regard as possible is already structured by previous experience.
This disagreement has generated a substantial sociological debate. Dave Elder-Vass has argued that dispositions and reflexive decisions can be incorporated into a broader theory of action, while Sadiya Akram and Anthony Hogan suggest that reflexivity occurs within a background of habitual action, rather than replacing it.
The real difference between Bourdieu and Archer, then, is not whether human beings can think about themselves. It concerns how much explanatory weight such thinking should carry.
Bourdieu reminds us that history acts through us before we consciously interpret it. Archer reminds us that when inherited expectations stop working, people may have to become interpreters of their own circumstances. Social change often begins in the uncomfortable interval between the two.
