This thesis is an examination of the ways in which, in what Bourdieu theorises as the 'space of literary or artistic position-takings', Gertrude Stein has been continually positioned and repositioned, constructed and reconstructed: by writers in her own period, in modernism scholarship, and, particularly, by writers staking their claim as the literary avant-garde of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.1 Since her recuperation by the Language Poets in the 1970s, and in the literary histories proposed by Marjorie Perloff and others, Stein has been positioned as the originator of an alternative avant-garde genealogy which has resisted the 'institutionalised' modernism of the New Critics. This legacy continues to the present day in claims by writers like Kenneth Goldsmith that she is a precursor for Conceptual Writing. Because they are predicated on Stein's resistance to the institution of modernism, and hinge on her removal from its history, none of these arguments discuss in any detail Stein's relationship to the historical movement which is the immediate context for her work - to the institution of modernism itself or to the institutions with which it engages. My thesis challenges the removal of Stein from her milieu by showing how her textual production must be read alongside her activity on her contemporary scene and her representation of and by other modernists. In the thesis, I re-read Stein's work as a series of explicit interventions in the institutions which form the context of the cultural production of the early 20th Century. In doing so, I consider the motivations for the reconstructions and repositionings of Stein, tracing the historiography of her presentation as an exceptional figure dislocated from her context.

Voluntary service is experiencing transition. This transition is marked by social, symbolic and policy changes that have transformed the relationship between paid and unpaid work, and is reordering the connection between voluntary practice and professional expertise. Giddens (1998) identified this as the third way. Rose (2000) sees this transformation as a strategy embodying a tacit regime around the economic transactions that implicate the agent in self-governance based on normative moral possibilities, thus ordering the moral subject. Research has not yet established the fundamental elements of this transforming logic, or the mechanisms by which oppositions such as paid and unpaid are being resolved by voluntary organisations. The thesis argues that third way commentators’ view of the bureaucratic transformation of voluntary service that examines “historical and social conditions, professional strategies, and disciplinary stakes and constraints…” (Shusterman, 1999: 10) does not account for the nature of service, or the practice and logic of that service. Therefore this study interrogates the notion and logic of service for the nature of the discourse and experience of service at the time of the move toward the third way, the point that voluntary values and practices meeting economic action. This logic is examined and extrapolated by empirical examination of the case service in Rotary and Zonta, organisations whose members are professional and act in voluntary positions. Bourdieu’s (for example 1984[1979], 1998, 2002[1977]) work on the logic of practice (featuring field, habitus and practice) frames the theoretical exploration of the embeddedness and logic of a particular social object in the context of practice. Exploring the field, habitus and practice for aspects of service suggests a multidimensional approach that investigates the discourse, experience, dispositions and contextual practice of service. Thus the study of service is conducted by collecting data from codes of professional conduct and objectives of Rotary and Zonta (the discursive level of interpretation); professionals’ experience and interpretation of volunteering (where the habitus of volunteers is made visible); and observations of practice and order at Rotary and Zonta meetings. The data was collected and analysed using Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical analysis (1969a, 1969b, 1989), Erving Goffman’s footing (Burns, 1992; Goffman, 1981), and Harvey Sacks’ indexicality and membership categorisation analysis (Lepper, 2000; Sacks, 2000[1992]). This study examines and reports on elements and relationships in the service discourse such as expertise, judgment and discretion; aspects of the logic of service exhibited in professional agent’s experience of voluntary service, including agency and professional ethics; and the rituals practiced by professionals in the voluntary context. Many of these elements are contextual components of the opposition between economic and symbolic values in the voluntary setting. Empirical evidence presented in this study suggests that voluntary service when practiced within the new frame of economic rationales and bureaucratic structures does not amalgamate opposing sectors so much as expose a common logic of service.

The present study examines the choice for sociology as a subfield in Swedish higher education. In the Bourdieusian tradition, the theory of social practices – with its relational concepts of field, habitus and capital – was the sociological lens for constructing the object and instruments for tackling it. The emphasis was given to the subjective dimension: how students rationalize and strategize the decision for studying sociology, as a course or a program, in an educational choice that entails a mobilization of resources acquired in the past for anticipating the future. For this, qualitative interviewing enabled the production of narratives of 21 students at different Swedish universities, exploring assumptions and presuppositions deployed in their choice. Results suggest a complex construction of the choice for sociology as a meaningful and suitable decision, producing varied degrees of conviction in the subfield and position-takings in relation to its practice and representations. Different positions can be outlined depending on how sociology is understood: as a capital for a subsequent entry to different fields, a distinction emerges in the mode of appropriation between ‘specialization’ of those investing in programs and ‘generalization’ of those taking freestanding courses combined with other investments; a difference indicating a different degree of belief in the discipline and its inculcation translated into the time devoted for it. When sociology becomes a field, a distinction refers to the practice of sociology between an ‘academically oriented sociology’ concerned with research and teaching, and a ‘socially oriented sociology’ concerned with an engagement and contribution to people outside the academic space. Since sociology is a scientific field with relatively weak autonomy to external forces, a plurality of hierarchies characterizes a stake for defining its ultimate and legitimate value, offering multiple satisfactions according to varied strategies and aspirations. However, this should not conceal the academic roots of a discipline precisely institutionalized at universities and that may influence a hierarchical relation between the social and the academic in the sociological field.

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This study explores the various processes that constructed and transformed the undergraduate curriculum in a Faculty of Education at a South African university. It attempts to delve beneath the representation of post-apartheid curriculum change as a linear process. The thesis argues that scholars should attempt to unravel how the curriculum performs the task of social transformation at the site of the university by empirically investigating how the relationship between structure and action links with the ideals of post-apartheid higher education policy. Theoretically, this study posits that the deficit in the local literature on the use of the structure/agency relationship as a heuristic device for examining institutional change should be addressed with the relational sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. / Sociology / D. Phil. (Sociology)

This study explores the various processes that constructed and transformed the undergraduate curriculum in a Faculty of Education at a South African university. It attempts to delve beneath the representation of post-apartheid curriculum change as a linear process. The thesis argues that scholars should attempt to unravel how the curriculum performs the task of social transformation at the site of the university by empirically investigating how the relationship between structure and action links with the ideals of post-apartheid higher education policy. Theoretically, this study posits that the deficit in the local literature on the use of the structure/agency relationship as a heuristic device for examining institutional change should be addressed with the relational sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. / Sociology / D. Phil. (Sociology)