196 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
European academic management journals (Oakes, Townley, and Cooper 1998
is one of just a few notable exceptions).
His writings periodically criticize adopting language as a root metaphor
for social studies, portraying theorizing and academic explanation that is
fundamentally based on linguistic forms of analysis as being overly scholastic
in approach to everyday social practice (Bourdieu 1977, 1998). His antip-
athy towards the linguistic turn, given its popular currency, goes some of the
way towards explaining the comparatively lukewarm reception of his work in
management and organization studies. Nonetheless, Bourdieu is not entirely
alone in being circumspect on the fruitfulness of isolated forms of linguistic
analysis, for instance, Mary Warnock (1966: 144) concludes:
One of the consequences of treating ethics as the analysis of ethical language is, as I
have suggested earlier, that it leads to the increasing triviality of the subject. This is not
a general criticism of linguistic analysis, but only of this method applied to ethics. In
ethics, alone among the branches of philosophical study, the subject matter is not so
much the categories which we use to describe or to learn about the world,as our own
impact upon the world, our relation to other people and our attitude to our situation and
our life.(emphasis added)
Moreover, Bourdieu was never a strong advocate of postmodernist academe,
which contributed further to alienating him from an influential contempo-
rary group of thinkers. Arguably, Bourdieu retained a somewhat traditional
conceptualization of sociological methodology (Bourdieu 1984) at least up
until publication ofMisère du Monde 1999 (Weight of the World). His work,
through all of its phases, consistently portrays the role of the intellectual
as a potential revolutionary force within society, albeit one that does not
strike a chord with either Marxist ideologies or Sartrean existentialist notions
of the free intellectual (Bourdieu 1993a; Sartre 1948). This has rendered
Bourdieu open to criticism from many sides. On the one hand, he can be
seen as a product of the ‘old school’ by failing to understand postmodernist
enthusiasms for portrayal of ambiguities of social identity and fragmentation
of theory. Then, on the other hand, he has been perceived by old school
elements of leftist academe as uncommitted to revolutionary ideology (a
notable exception to this stereotyping is the edited collection by Shusterman
1999).
Bourdieu’s approach seeks to overcome traditional dualisms common to the
social sciences such as the distinctions made between agency and structure or
between individual and collective. He is not alone in this endeavour, however,
his stance has attracted substantial criticism. Mouzelis (2000) censures Bour-
dieu for attempting to transcend the duality of structure and not retaining
a dualistic ontology of social practice. Mouzelis proposes that distinct senses
ofsubjectandobjectshould be maintained in social research and not con-
flated through attempts at theoretical transcendence. Jeffrey Alexander in his