The Construction of the Organizational Object in Organization Studies: An Invitation to Epistemic Reflexivity with Bourdieu

Abstract

With reflexivity becoming an increasingly important theme in organization studies (OS), this article extends an invitation to consider how researcher reflexivity can become a conceptual resource for developing organizational research designs. Engaging with and adding to current theoretical debates on reflexivity, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory and career as exemplars in proposing the importance of ‘epistemic reflexivity’, which we suggest has untapped potential to further theorizing and address scholastic biases. We discuss how reflexivity can be translated into an orientation to research that guides methodological awareness and leads to epistemologically robust research designs, encouraging new and more diverse theory generation that seeks to liberate itself from tradition and power structures within the field. Building on Bourdieu, we identify three interrelated principles of epistemic reflexivity for the construction of the organizational research object: (1) breaking with pre-constructed categories and research objects with consideration of the choices made in the research process; (2) reflecting on the researcher’s social origin and position in the academic field; and (3) the positioning of the research vis-a-vis other studies and academic traditions in the OS field . We further argue that these principles are developed throughout the researcher’s career, contributing to the construction of an embodied ‘reflexive researcher habitus’. We suggest that this reflexive research orientation to research object construction helps in moving the OS field towards heightened research transparency and methodological rigour for the development of research objects that capture the complexity of organizational phenomena and their diverse contexts.

Introduction

The development of theory and method is important for the legitimacy of any research field. Writing in this journal, Cornelissen et al. (2021) argue that the field of organization studies (OS) has a unique opportunity to foster a climate in which diverse theoretical perspectives can thrive and which can inspire novel theoretical developments. This, it has been suggested, can be achieved through reflexivity and through debate on the engagement of research with the empirical as well as with the theoretical (Carter & Spence, 2019; Cutcher et al., 2020). Reflexivity as a guiding principle requires that, as researchers, we approach unfamiliar perspectives with openness and that we ‘not only see the value of other traditions but also start to recognize how different forms of theorizing play distinct roles and complement each other in the pursuit of knowledge’ (Cornelissen et al., 2021, p. 15). This, we argue, requires researchers to develop awareness of how they construct their research objects and how this, in turn, is influenced by how they are personally positioned within their academic discipline or sub-field, where that is positioned within the wider academic field and how all this (sometimes unknowingly) affects the research they do and how they approach and develop their research objects, a topic still under-discussed within OS.

Addressing this gap, we present and discuss the concept of ‘epistemic reflexivity’ (Bourdieu, 2003; Bourdieu et al., 1991). In so doing, we add depth to ongoing debates on reflexivity in OS. In focusing on researchers’ epistemic reflexivity as a career-long project of learning, we demonstrate how Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts of habitus, field, capital and illusio and his reflexive methodological approach are intricately connected. Taking inspiration from Bourdieu et al.’s (1991) declaration that ‘I believe more than ever that the most important thing is constructing the object. . . All through my work, I’ve seen how everything, including the technical problems, hangs on the preliminary definition of the object’ (p. 252), we discuss how the construction of a successful organizational object needs to be connected with the researcher’s active reflexive research processes. We believe that a grounding in Bourdieusian social theory can offer an important alternative to more conventional approaches to reflexivity in OS.

Bourdieu took issue with research objects that are generated through scientific habit and common sense rather than through reflexive engagement with the ‘preconstructions, prenotions and spontaneous theory’ that haunt all scientific research, and with the ‘typical scholastic tendency’ to describe research retrospectively (Bourdieu, 2004, p. 2; Bourdieu et al., 1991, p. 249). For Bourdieu, the researcher’s constructions are always the products of the professional socialization the researcher has received, that is, the modes of research conduct that have become embodied and naturalized in the habitus working in tandem with the forms and amounts of capital the researcher has acquired. Furthermore, the researcher’s position and positioning strategies within a structure of power relations and dynamics are grounded both in the disciplinary field in which the researcher is immersed and in the academic field overall (Bourdieu, 1984). These fields are structured by the rules of the academic game to which researchers must adhere, or at least engage with strategically, if they wish to harvest the capitals of their field. Bourdieu (1998) calls this commitment to the field illusio: one’s investment in a field and belief in the value of its forms of capital.

In addition, academic fields as social spaces are impacted by the interests and powers of those who fund university systems, and constrained and facilitated by national and international macro structures and processes that contribute to defining a ‘research problem’. Therefore, the construction of the organizational object should, we argue, necessarily emerge from the researcher’s reflexive research processes. So, taking Bourdieu’s career as an exemplar, we aim to demonstrate how a Bourdieusian reflexive orientation to the construction of the research object has the potential to stimulate further theoretical and methodological developments in the OS field and contribute to debates on how we enhance the quality of OS research designs and theorizations.

We thus suggest that the construction of the organizational object involves the unfolding of three concrete yet overlapping principles of epistemic reflexivity: (1) the performance of epistemological breaks with the taken-for-granted ideas and wisdom of the social world, which involves a confrontation with ‘the social and intellectual unconscious embedded in analytic tools and operations’ (Bourdieu, 1989; Bourdieu & Zanotti-Karp, 1968); (2) the objectification of the researcher’s position within the academic field (Bourdieu, 2003, 2004; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992); and (3) positioning the research vis-a-vis other studies and academic traditions in the scientific field (Bourdieu, 2004; Bourdieu et al., 1991, p. 248). While we separate these principles analytically, they should be understood as both discrete and interrelated. Performed and nurtured together, these principles of epistemic reflexivity are, we suggest, all part of the development of the reflexive habitus of the researcher.

Our contribution to OS and organization theory (OT) is as an invitation to OS researchers from different theoretical backgrounds to demonstrate how researchers may nurture a ‘reflexive researcher habitus’ by bringing together the full range of reflexive principles that Bourdieu developed, with the purpose of constructing ‘more adequate’ research objects, to use Bourdieu’s own term (Bourdieu, 2004; Bourdieu et al., 1991, p. 186).

The article proceeds, first, by reviewing the contribution of OS scholars from different methodological traditions in relation to our understanding of researcher reflexivity. Then, based on a reading of Bourdieu’s work and accounts by collaborators (Boltanski, 2008; Boltanski et al., 2024; Lagrave & Encrevé, 2005), we revisit Bourdieu’s 40-year-long career as a collaborative researcher and research team leader. We track the genesis and core tenets of Bourdieu’s engagement with ‘scientific knowledge’, including the development of his key concepts through his relational mode of analysis and discuss what reflexivity following this perspective implies. We then develop a Bourdieu-inspired reflexive framework for constructing the organizational research object, demonstrating how its application links to theory development.

Research Reflexivity in the OS field

Many OS scholars suggest that reflexivity ought to be a core focus of research practice in terms of quality improvement (Alvesson et al., 2022; Gabriel, 2015; Hardy et al., 2001). That is, researchers should question their positions, their assumptions and prejudices, as well as the way research subjects are shaped by researchers, research communities and funding institutions, all of which may lead to scholastic biases (Cunliffe & Karunanayake, 2013; Cutcher et al., 2020; Grodal et al., 2021; Hardy et al., 2001; Hibbert et al., 2014; Splitter & Seidl, 2011). It is argued that a heightened awareness of reflexive research practice within the OS field could address what have been identified as weaknesses in some OS research. For example, although empirical phenomena often need a reduction in complexity to be comprehensible and analysable, the OS literature has been criticized for oversimplifying empirical complexity and so obscuring important analytical insights (Atkin et al., 2007; Corley & Gioia, 2011; Green, 2012). This may, in turn, lead to theoretical reductionism, rather than fostering theories that are contextualized and enriched by complexity (Tsoukas, 2017). Also, in terms of research practice, there is a need for reflexivity and greater awareness of scholastic biases (Alvesson et al., 2022; Cunliffe, 2016; Hardy et al., 2001) to reduce gaps between research and practice (Splitter & Seidl, 2011). Reflexivity, it is increasingly argued, is a requirement for qualitative researchers to ensure the quality of research and is in part a defence against attacks from the positivist scholarly tradition (Cunliffe, 2003).

The importance of researcher reflexivity is thus well recognized within the OS literature (Cunliffe, 2016; Gabriel, 2015; Hardy et al., 2001; Rostron, 2024), resulting in several debates in the field (Cutcher et al., 2020; Maton, 2003; Sandberg & Alvesson, 2021). We identify some broad (and occasionally overlapping) foci of this literature that show the directions of these ongoing debates. First, reflexivity is, to a large extent, understood as self-reflexivity, where authors show awareness of their own position in relation to others or based on intersubjective worldviews of different organizational groups (Alvesson et al., 2008; Cunliffe, 2002; Cunliffe & Karunanayake, 2013; Guttormsen & Moore, 2023; Hibbert et al., 2014). These are often seen as an alternative to objectivist approaches (Hibbert et al., 2014) and can be related to an increasing recognition that researchers may influence the empirical reality they study. Second, some researchers foreground their research participants (Cassell et al., 2020; Cunliffe & Karunanayake, 2013; Rostron, 2024), meaning that authors make their knowledge claims available for scrutiny by positioning themselves in relation to those whom they study or by actively using participants’ reflexive thinking (Cassell et al., 2020). However, these studies largely omit consideration of the field in which the research is taking place, that is, the researcher’s own field, with its established norms and embedded structures which, consciously or not, will shape the researcher’s practice (Daly & Larsen, 2026; Hardy et al., 2001).

This omission is addressed by a third group of studies that foregrounds researchers’ relations with the entirety of the objects they study and recognizes scholastic biases (Alvesson et al., 2008; Carter & Spence, 2019; Gomez, 2010; Hardy et al., 2001; Maton, 2003; Splitter & Seidl, 2011). This, we argue, offers a necessary first step in recognizing the influence of the field on research practice.

These studies include a cluster of papers from strategy-as-practice scholars engaging more or less deeply with Bourdieu as a practice theorist alongside practice theorists such as Giddens and Schatzki. For example, Sandberg and Tsoukas (2011), while citing Bourdieu in addressing the ‘theory–practice gap’, rely heavily on Heidegger. Splitter and Seidl (2011) advise management science academics to take a ‘Bourdieusian perspective’ to epistemological questioning in relation to ‘bridging’ academics and practitioners. Gomez (2010), in her chapter on Bourdieu in the Handbook of Strategy as Practice, through reviewing papers that take Bourdieusian perspectives on strategizing, specifically includes a section explaining the potential of Bourdieu’s approach to reflexivity.

In foregrounding researchers’ relations with the entirety of their research objects, some authors suggest that researcher reflexivity concerns the researcher’s textual and discursive practices (Alvesson et al., 2008; Cutcher et al., 2020). For example, Cutcher et al. (2020) are concerned with how OS researchers communicate their reflections on theory generation to each other in the field’s academic journals, while Alvesson et al. (2008) provide a conceptual analysis of four textual practices that researchers use in writing up research. They suggest that reflexivity is a construct shaped and institutionalized by the textual practices that researchers in a community accept as reflexive and further argue that, without critical examination, reflexivity risks becoming merely a ceremonial mode of academic legitimation.

What the extant literature has focused on less is the embodied practices involved in conducting empirical research. In this regard, Carter and Spence (2019) advocate an increased reflexive focus on empirical phenomena. With others, they point out that the OS field is very focused on the status of ‘making a theoretical contribution’ (Carter & Spence, 2019; Corley & Gioia, 2011; Lounsbury & Beckman, 2015; Prasad, 2023), which may be at the expense of empirical novelty (Carter & Spence, 2019) and may lead to theory building that lacks contact with empirical objects (Prasad, 2023).

Concretely, Carter and Spence (2019) advocate for the construction of appropriate research objects through a reflexive mode of thinking inspired by Bourdieu’s notion of epistemic reflexivity. They do so in arguing that the OS field’s focus on theory rather than empirics will often lead to pre-constructed categories of social units (people, institutions, and so on). Thereby, researchers come to rely on socially agreed problems and definitions of them that may obscure empirical reality (we elaborate on this point later in this article). With Bourdieu, Carter and Spence (2019) argue that reflexivity also concerns ‘adequacy on the level of meaning’ of the research objects we construct (Bourdieu et al., 1991, p. 186). While we take their point, we also note that they do not elaborate on how reflexivity could be specifically practised.

We therefore propose the full range of interrelated principles of Bourdieu’s epistemic reflexivity that focus on the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of reflexivity. In doing so, we suggest that more emphasis could be placed on what we term the cultivation of ‘a reflexive researcher habitus’ as embodied dispositions for more epistemologically robust research object construction, and so for the development of the OS field by bringing a more overt and reflexive dimension to our role and practice as socially relevant and critical researchers. We explain this approach in the coming sections.

Research reflexivity in OS – turning towards Bourdieu

Recent years have seen an increasing number of studies using Bourdieu’s conceptual architecture (Robinson & Kerr, 2009) to examine issues related to organizations, management, work and workers (see the review in Robinson, Ernst, Larsen, & Thomassen, 2022). However, while Bourdieu’s concepts are often cited (Golsorkhi & Huault, 2006), they are rarely used in conjunction with researcher reflexivity (Townley, 2014).

While the purpose of reflexive stances is not always accounted for in the field and therefore comes to stand as an end in itself (Weick, 2002), epistemic reflexivity for Bourdieu et al. (1991) explicitly concerns the construction of research objects as ideal types that approach real phenomena as closely as possible. In constructing the research object, researchers must engage with their own role and position in the field (Alvesson et al., 2008; Carter & Spence, 2019; Hardy et al., 2001) to nurture an awareness of how such positionality influences the choices made in research. It also involves researchers showing awareness that their position is different from that of the research participants. Indeed, the researcher is not embedded in the field of study, that is, in the studied field’s illusio, and they should therefore strive to objectify it (Bourdieu, 2003). Thereby, a Bourdieusian approach differs from that of social constructionism, where ‘the researcher is part of the research project, a subject just like any other’, and where the researcher’s being equal to her participants is seen as a striving for authenticity (Alvesson et al., 2008, p. 483).

Bourdieu’s brand of epistemic reflexivity is, however, not targeted towards the individual academic and researcher, and reflexivity does not evolve in the minds of individual researchers. Rather, it is targeted towards entire research communities and fields because every academic, whether working alone or as part of a collective, in academic microcosms, is socialized with the beliefs, assumptions and values of different fields or ‘the key filters that alter sociological perception’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 35). This underlines the need for scholars to challenge the taken-for-granted presuppositions of their field or sub-field. The primary target of epistemic reflexivity concerns all that ‘which represents itself under the cloak of the self-evident’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 252). We aim to expand and contribute to the extant literature by suggesting that researcher reflexivity comprises the engagement with three interrelated principles of researcher reflexivity that concern potential corresponding scholastic biases: (1) the performance of epistemological breaks with taken-for-granted ideas and wisdom of the social world. This principle concerns intellectual biases, where researchers fail to question the presuppositions inscribed in the social (organizational) world itself. (2) The objectification of the researcher’s position within the OS field, which concerns the social bias given by the habitus and social position of the researcher (including class, gender and ethnicity); and (3) positioning the research vis-a-vis other studies and academic traditions in the scientific field, which concerns the scholastic bias based on the relational positioning of the research (Bourdieu, 2003; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). The first principle, which concerns how the researcher breaks with the native relation to the world, ‘the epistemological rupture’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), seems overlooked in the literature. In addition, while the second principle is often mentioned in the literature – the researcher as a subject who objectifies herself in relation to her research object – the third, concerning the academic microcosm in which the researcher is immersed and the wider academic field, is more rarely mentioned. We return to the consequences of these omissions later in this article.

In proposing to build on Bourdieu’s work, we draw attention to the relation between epistemic reflexivity and the concepts of habitus, field, capital and illusio. This offers the opportunity for OS researchers to explore the construction of their organizational research objects as part of their reflexive research practice and enables them to account for how such construction evolves during their career and is informed by their position within fields. This is apposite, not least in a context where challenges to OS as a field are emerging regarding the effects of dominant Western expectations and theoretical perspectives. These concerns relate to language, style and genre more widely, and have been raised by, for example, the Academy of Management Review editors (Lam et al., 2024) and by Barros and Alcadipani (2023, p. 580), who write: ‘For academics from the peripheries, the (publication) process involves learning a language, a style, hierarchized relationships, and material costs. Alternative ways of understanding a phenomenon do not emerge, and other epistemologies are silenced.’ Epistemic reflexivity, we suggest, might help here in terms of questioning our positions within the field, and the position of our field within broader internationalized academia and its institutionalized power.

In the following sections, we outline how Bourdieu’s conceptual innovations are intimately connected to his engagement with the production of reflexive research and his interest in epistemological problems, including the connection between methods and theory. Such problems arose from engagement with specific empirical contexts that instantiate a series of dominating macro structures and processes and their effects on the academic fields in which he was operating. These are: first, the encounter between peasant societies and modernity; then the reproduction of social inequality through culture and education; and finally, the dominance of neoliberal economics in late 20th-century politics and society. To demonstrate this, we next turn to an examination of Bourdieu’s career trajectory, focusing on his development of epistemic reflexivity.

The Core Tenets of Bourdieu’s Engagement with Scientific Knowledge

Relational sociology and a theory of fields as the fundation of epistemic reflexivity

Bourdieu suggests a very detailed, particular kind of reflexivity based on his life-long work. His theoretical and methodological contributions emerged through what he calls ‘dirtying his hands’ with the empirical world and its problems (Bourdieu, 1979, p. 598; our translation). Thus his earliest theoretical innovations, in particular the concept of habitus, had their roots in two ethnographies conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, one on the Kabyles in colonial Algeria (Bourdieu, 1958, 1972), where Bourdieu was posted during his military service, and the other in his home region in Béarn, in rural south-west France (Bourdieu, 1962). In methodological terms, the latter study was based on a process of uprooting himself from a familiar world, whereas the former was a process of familiarizing himself with an unfamiliar world (Bourdieu, 2017). Both involved epistemic reflexivity as a response to scholastic biases (Bourdieu, 2004; Bourdieu et al., 2003; Golsorkhi & Huault, 2006).

Situated in the academic field in Algeria in the years 1957 to 1961, Bourdieu was a newcomer and an outsider. He first had to position himself against the dominant far-right-wing pro-colonial academics in the Université d’Alger (Yacine, 2004). Then, within the wider transnational academic field, he had to break with the ‘colonial hierarchy in the intellectual order’ (Yacine, 2004, p. 492) that distinguished sociology (studying ‘western’ people) from orientalism (studying cultures with universal religions) and ethnology (study of ‘primitive peoples’).

The challenge Bourdieu then faced related to the research object: ‘How to make the object “Algeria” exist, to render it visible and intelligible in the chaos of a war denied and euphemized by colonial ideology under the term “events”?’ (Yacine, 2004). That is, the Algeria of the colonial imagination had to be deconstructed and reconstructed as an object of research. Bourdieu applied the same process in researching his home region of Béarn. In this project, Bourdieu (2003) used his ongoing research in Algeria to question his own pre-existing experiences and pre-reflexive knowledge.

Subsequently, after obtaining a sociology post in France, Bourdieu brought together a team that undertook intensive research into the role of culture and taste in social relations, including studies of photography (Boltanski et al., 1965) and museum attendance (Bourdieu & Darbel, 1966). This culminated in the publication of La Distinction (Bourdieu, 1979), the classic study of the role of cultural capital in reproducing class inequality. Simultaneously, through his studies of scientists (Bourdieu, 1975) and of intellectuals (Bourdieu, 1969), Bourdieu demonstrated how researchers could reflect on their position within their own discipline and within academia more widely. Through these studies and the development of his early career, he demonstrated how epistemic reflexivity becomes a continuing process of questioning. This is reflected in his early career trajectory, where resituating himself within the academic microcosm, he transferred from philosophy to ethnography before settling in the field of sociology.

Bourdieu saw the social world as having a double objectivity in that its structures exist twice. In the first order, inspired by the structuralist tradition, the social world is grasped from the outside. Hence, what Bourdieu (1989) emphasizes as the major contribution of structuralism is its application of the relational mode of thinking that focuses on relations rather than substances (Bourdieu, 1979, 2022). Bourdieu was also drawing on Ernst Cassirer’s (1976) rejection of ‘substantialism’ to claim that ‘the scientific (i.e. sociological) object is a system of relations’ (Bourdieu, 2004, bracket added). Bourdieu (1980) used this relational principle to develop a theory of fields, understood as social spaces in which dominant and dominated social agents compete for the accumulation of different types of capital.

Generically, forms of capital can be economic capital; cultural capital, i.e. knowledge, skills and other cultural acquisitions, as exemplified by educational or technical qualifications; social capital, which is a resource connected with group membership and social networks i.e. the networks a person can draw on to further their interests (Bourdieu, 1979; Bourdieu et al., 1991); and symbolic capital, i.e. accumulated prestige or honour, into which any of the other forms of capital can be converted (Wacquant, 1993). Cultural capital can take other forms and is always specific to a field. Fields, such as the academic, can be mapped in terms of the forms of capital that are active in it, which tells us what structures the field and how reward mechanisms are built within it. Through his concept of illusio Bourdieu (1998) describes social actors’ investment in their field and its associated forms of capital. These conceptual innovations emphasize the power of the symbolic in understanding social domination.

The academic field as a social microcosm

Each disciplinary field can thus be understood as a social microcosm (Bourdieu, 1990, 2013) that comes with its own power struggles and field-specific forms of capital. The academic field, which Bourdieu (2004) also termed the ‘scientific field’, is a microcosm with its own logic of domination and particular form of scientific capital, yet it is not autonomous from the field of power, which structures its education systems, as well as its access to students and economic resources (Robinson et al., 2022). Bourdieu (2004) defined ‘scientific capital’ as the properties that have emerged in the field through the particular practices of science and that are recognizable by members of the field (only) because they possess the ‘categories of perception’ that allow them to make assessments and distinctions in accordance with the criteria embedded in this capital (p. 55).

Within the academic field, academics and researchers are subject to field logics of domination and competition as structuring forces, where universities, university departments, research groups and individual researchers compete with other universities, departments and peers for various achievements that count as symbolic capital in the field (Bourdieu, 1984), such as funding and publications in prestigious journals (Bourdieu, 2004). The acquisition of such symbolic ‘prestige’ capital leads the way to titles and tenure; academic scholars have to ‘make a name’ for themselves (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 11). Embedded in these logics lies the danger of reifications and scholastic biases for research and theory (Bourdieu, 2003; Golsorkhi, & Huault, 2006).

In building his understanding of the academic field, Bourdieu relied on his own experiences in French academia in the early 1970s. For evidence of the power struggles he undertook, we turn to Boltanski’s (2008) valuable insights. Boltanski, one of Bourdieu’s key collaborators at the time, identifies sociology as an ‘insurgent’ (Bourdieu calls it ‘stigmatised’) discipline in relation to the dominant established position of philosophy; he notes the consequent difficulties of publication for sociologists, in particular the slowness of the review process, and the obstructive role of les gardiens des normes (gatekeepers) (Boltanski, 2008, p. 10). To escape this blockage and establish their heretical sociological position in the academic field (Bourdieu, 1984), Bourdieu and his research group founded their own journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, that challenged the conventions of the field (emphasis in original): ‘there were NO word limits and one could publish non-conventional material including pictures, art, and news clippings’ (Leander, 2008, p. 11). Bourdieu and his team thus aimed to evade the restrictive doxa of the field, situating the journal at the heretical fringe, where it could be open to innovation and experimentation at different levels, theoretical, methodological, textual (Boltanski, 2008), and also challenging North American expectations of literature reviews as obligatory in sociology journals (Boucher, 2024).

The academic field, then, comes with its specific thinking patterns, its own rituals, norms and values, its orthodoxy, and all these potentially prevent innovation and theoretical breakthroughs (Bourdieu, 2003; Bourdieu et al., 1991) that could represent heretical positions in the field and challenges to accepted modes of thinking (Bourdieu, 1977). In his critical book Homo academicus on the French academic field (Bourdieu, 1984), Bourdieu warned against several pitfalls: petty strategies to accumulate symbolic capital (p. 127), the tendency of scholars to wish to appear distant from the empirical object, their rejection of indigenous knowledge, and their failure to objectify themselves while they objectify others. As Bourdieu et al. (2003) later added, scholars refuse to see the lenses they use and that influence what they see, and ‘what they see only’ (p. 10). However, Bourdieu’s stance towards methods is far from prescriptive. His ethnographic research (Bourdieu, 1959; Bourdieu & Sayad, 1964; Bourdieu et al., 1963) employs statistics, charts and documents as well as extended interviews, direct observation and photography.

Epistemic reflexivity and habitus

In addition, as a critique of certain common practices among ethnologists, Bourdieu suggests going beyond ‘observing the observer’. Equally, he warns against the other extreme of ‘narcissistic’ reflexivity and ‘libido academica’ (Bourdieu, 2003), referring to inward-looking disclosures of textual reflexivity, which, in his opinion, have little scientific value because such disclosures ‘tend to substitute the facile delights of self-exploration for the methodical confrontation with the gritty realities of the field’ (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 282). Bourdieu recommends attending to different levels of reflexivity, that is, the researcher’s own conditions of possibility in the field as the social space of our activity. Namely: how we got there, whom we are associated with, how we are positioned – in the wider academic/scholastic universe and in relation to global structures and processes that affect who or what we research (Bourdieu, 2022). So, the choice of the object of study is not fortuitous; it also tells the researcher something about herself and her social position in relation to others in the field and to the research object (Bourdieu, 2015). While drawing attention to the positionality of the researcher, Bourdieu also argued for the need for ‘epistemological vigilance’ (Bourdieu & Zanotti-Karp, 1968), a concept that later became epistemic reflexivity, and aimed to prevent or reduce scholastic biases.

Academic practices are constantly mediated between the social space of the production of what Bourdieu (1990) termed ‘the rules of the game’ (within the field) and the socialized dispositions for navigating the field’s rules (the researcher’s habitus). Every practice in the academic field should thus be understood as a meeting between the researcher’s habitus and the forces that structure the field – or the objective in the subjective (Bourdieu, 1990), which results in particular dispositions for academic practice. The concept of habitus was, for Bourdieu, the theoretical means for overcoming subjective and objective binaries as a concept that traverses these levels. The concept was adopted from Merleau-Ponty and first used, although not fully developed, in Bourdieu (1962). For Bourdieu, habitus is the embodiment of historical relations that, as schemata of perceiving and acting in the world, assign meaning to the world. Habitus is inculcated through family background (habitus primaire), education and forms of experience (habitus secondaire) and can be identified by tracking the social trajectory of members of, or into, a particular field.

In connecting habitus with scientific practice, Bourdieu emphasized that good academic practice is an embodied craft:

To reintroduce the idea of the habitus is to set up as the principle of scientific practices, not a knowing consciousness acting in accordance with the explicit norms of logic and experimental method, but a ‘craft’, a practical sense of the problems to be dealt with, the appropriate ways of dealing with them, etc.

and something that can only be learned by example and experience (Bourdieu, 2004, p. 38). The academic is invested in this game through their illusio, that is, their shared beliefs and practices within their field and sub-field.

In summary, through his programme for a reflexive sociology (Bourdieu, 2003; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), Bourdieu calls for a ‘more practically adequate and epistemologically secure’ (Maton, 2003, p. 53) account of the process of research object construction, through nurturing a reflexive researcher habitus ‘that thinks in action’, which includes the objectification of those who objectify. This is where the strength of the peer-reviewed system of publication threatens to become a weakness. The power of gatekeepers and journal rankings, related to cultural and symbolic capital in the field, threatens exclusion of heretical points of view, a consequent reduction in diversity and the danger of a research monoculture.

Epistemological rupture: Constructing and conquering the research object

In the second order of objectivity, which is the level of subjective reality constructions, Bourdieu (2015) broke with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, arguing that the valorization of everyday worldly experience does not suffice for the creation of sound scientific objects. In questioning what seems apparent or unquestionable, Bourdieu worked from the foundation of the French epistemological tradition, represented by Bachelard, Canguilhem and others (see e.g. Canguilhem, 1968). The key concept here is that of ‘epistemological break or rupture’ that calls into question the accepted – normalized – or dominant categories of everyday life, what Bourdieu et al. (1991) termed ‘folk theories’, referring to the apparent ‘truths’ of the social and all that which people believe in (p. 248). As Bourdieu (1973, p. 63) explains, ‘theoretical knowledge can only be constructed and conquered against practical experience’.

While the principles of the construction of the object imply that researchers ‘dirty their hands’ by becoming involved with the empirical research object, Bourdieu’s perspective stresses the involvement of the researcher as one of attention and awareness: ‘all kinds of distortions are embedded in the very structure of the research relationship. It is these distortions that have to be understood and mastered as part of a practice which can be reflexive and methodical without being the application of a method or the implementation of a theory’ (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 608).

Bourdieu was thus keenly concerned with how research operations will allow researchers to make claims to knowledge. Epistemological rupture fundamentally concerns ‘the very act of constructing the object’ because only through this rupture will the object become a true scientific object (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 40; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). The principle of epistemological rupture (principle one) is thus activated by the researcher when the commonsensical or doxic experience of the world as expressed by research participants and others (such as journalists and the public) is objectivated and understood as an experience that is determined by and depends on the relationally constituted forces that apply to a particular social milieu (Vandenberghe, 1999). Bourdieu’s reflexivity, then, is epistemic because it is not content with objectifying the researcher’s position in the field and the social relations of particular scientific fields (principle two) – it also wants to generate knowledge. In realizing this, the researcher must construct the system of relations of a research object that connects the objective and subjective structuring forces that are operative in it, including the forms of capital (Vandenberghe, 1999) (principle one). Finally, the researcher must construct ‘the game as a whole’, by which Bourdieu refers to the objectification of the researcher’s position within the academic field (Bourdieu, 1984, 2004), (principle two), as well as the positioning of the research vis-a-vis other studies and academic traditions in the field (Bourdieu, 2004; Bourdieu et al., 1991, p. 248) (principle three).

It is the reflexive researcher habitus that overcomes the challenges of object construction when the learned and nurtured principles of researcher reflexivity are realized in researchers’ bodies, in the shape of dispositions for reflexive research object construction. An important part of the researcher reflexive habitus is its ability to recognize the illusio, that is to say, understanding their investment in and commitment to the game and how this affects their (research) practices.

Epistemic Reflexivity and the Construction of the Organizational Object

Thinking reflexively and relationally about the object under construction

The notions of reflexivity and participant objectivation emerge as central to the research process early in Bourdieu’s work. It is already evident in his introduction to the collaborative work on photography in Algeria (Bourdieu & Sayad, 1964). As both a photographer and as a researcher Bourdieu was at this time prompted to reflect on his colonialist and/or class-based position in relation to the photographic subject, with the conclusion that the photographer/researcher’s task is to break not only with the taken-for-granted preconstructions of the agents she studies but also with her own preconstructions and assumptions about them and the field in which they are immersed. Bourdieu also warns about the dangers of defining a field a priori, as any given field needs to be discovered empirically.

In constructing the object through concrete research operations, Bourdieu advises researchers to begin with reflections on how the field is positioned vis-a-vis other fields that structure it by holding the power to define the stakes of these adjacent fields. The concept of field will then act as ‘a theoretical shorthand of a mode of construction of the object’ to guide the choices that must be taken in the research process (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 228), and also as a way of working that may allow the researcher to generalize the findings of the research to other fields. The field concept helps the researcher in outlining the research object relationally; one seeks to identify the field in question, the forces that structure the field, the habitus of the different actors in the field, and the capitals possessed by groups and individuals that point to their positions in the field and their interrelations (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). The field concept forces the researcher to think reflexively about the object under construction:

This notion tends to exclude those partial and unilateral objectifications of the unconscious of other people, which characterize the sociology of intellectuals and which differ from the folk-sociology of intellectual gossip only in their claims to the ‘ethical neutrality’ of science. (Bourdieu, 1988, p. xvi)

The relational principle means that, instead of viewing an organization as a bundle of individuals, we should view it in terms of relations between individuals and groups determined by the capital they possess. Those possessing dominant forms of capital can be located within the field in relation to the peripheral position of ‘heretics’ (Bourdieu, 1977). This epistemological principle, which is also supported by other perspectives in the OS field such as discursive and Foucauldian approaches (see also Özbilgin, 2006), is consequential for organizational analyses because it is a ‘meta-principle for the construction of the object’ (Schmitz, 2018, p. 114) in undergirding the reflexivity principle of the epistemological break or rupture, as discussed above.

The process of reflexive and relational object construction emerges clearly in the study of the property market in France by Bourdieu and colleagues, described in The Social Structures of the Economy (Bourdieu, 2005), where they consider organizations as fields. That is, like social fields, organizations have hierarchies and positions, and manoeuvrings for domination between, for example, ‘creatives’ and ‘bean counters’.

To understand how the property market functions, Bourdieu and his colleagues began by unravelling the history of housing policy in France and mapping its key agents, defined as ‘effective agents’ who had ‘sufficient influence to orient housing policy’ (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 99). They then move on to examine the nature of the groupings of social agents in the field, their similarities and the factors dividing them in an analysis of ‘the field of forces’. The researchers use a theorization of ‘game playing’ to understand when these groups play by the rules of the social field of housing or when they bend the rules. This reflexive posture in their construction of the housing market allowed Bourdieu and his team to capture and thus explain the complex process of changing regulatory techniques in the French housing market through innovation by new entrants in the field, which happened in spite of the old-established bureaucratic capital that was still powerful in the field. The research team conceptualized this as an opposition between ‘administrators and innovators’ (Bourdieu, 2005, pp. 110–122).

Bourdieu (1984) thus advises paying attention to issues of history over time and how crises at the structural level are transposed into and disrupt social fields (Sapiro, 2013). That is, as part of the epistemological rupture (principle one), we need to consider ‘general factors contributing to the transformation of the social space (demography, economy, education, etc.) and the evolution of the different fields that compose it’ (Sapiro 2013, p. 266). We saw a good example of structural disruption of the organization field during the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced organizations to reinvent themselves. Simultaneously, researchers were themselves part of the phenomenon they studied, with the risk of ‘getting caught’ by their research object, which could mean, for example, that the brutality of the pandemic would overshadow the fact that it also represented a moment of opportunity for many organizations and researchers.

Object construction challenges for OS researchers

As Bourdieusian-inspired OS researchers then, we should pay attention to the mechanisms by which organizational groups come to be made and unmade, and how the boundaries of given fields are to be determined empirically, although there may well be homologies of positions across fields (Bourdieu, 1989).

In the construction of the OS research object, the researcher maps and examines the structuring forces of the field in question and the field-specific capitals at stake in it. Principle one concerns breaking with the world as it naturally appears by the field’s social agents and perhaps by the researcher at first sight. It also concerns the intuitive understanding that an organization or an organizational phenomenon can be studied as it immediately appears, which is the same as taking its own definitions of its problems and stakes unquestionably as the researcher’s constructs. Definitions from the field may include how the organization is defined, what it is part of, its products, values, economy and classifications such as its partners versus its competitors as well as the logics and beliefs upon which it rests.

For example, many research objects within OS are constructed in accordance with the concepts of sector and industry. Yet, these are socially created delimitations that may not be of real importance for the problems we study or may even hinder a recognition of what is at stake in them. Therefore, the researcher should question such pre-delimitations rather than take them for granted. In Bourdieu’s terms, this means that OS researchers reflect on the connection between the subjective experiences they observe in a given study and how these experiences are shaped by something that resides outside these experiences themselves in the structuring forces of the field in which the organizational phenomenon is embedded. Context is thus an important dimension to consider when constructing the object, one which OS researchers risk taking for granted, either by leaving it out of their studies or by not explaining how the context was constructed (Guttormsen & Moore, 2023).

This construction work will remain open to continuous corrections throughout the research process as the researcher learns more (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). The object under construction often changes when the researcher questions the methodological tools she puts to use in her investigations, brings her own preconceptions to the fore (principle two) and begins to question her delimitations of the object by making these decisions explicit and assessing the degree to which they are part of collective scientific practices, norms and power structures (principle three).

For example, in their Bourdieu-inspired exploration of the diversity management field, Özbilgin and Tatli (2011) demonstrate the value of reflexive research object construction (although they do not name their enterprise as such) when they show that both the practical field and the research field of diversity management tend to rely on pre-constructed categories of diversity that are not connected with their temporal, cultural and geographic contexts, which results in static accounts of the problems related to organizational diversity. By breaking with such pre-constructed assumptions, the authors show that diversity problems are context specific and the relevant categories for examination and assessment should be produced through engagement with empirical data. Their reflexive practice allowed the researchers to capture the logic of the practice they observed in their study. This is a point which is also stressed by other scholars (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2018; Splitter & Seidl, 2011). In a recent empirical example, Daly and Larsen (2026) employ Bourdieusian reflexivity of position and field analysis combined with Cunliffe’s social constructionist approach (and drawing on Cunliffe (2022), in this journal), to provide an autoethnographic-inspired study that demonstrates the benefits of reflexivity and awareness of field position for academics in an increasingly unstable academic world. The authors suggest that academics slow down and dedicate time to academic reflexivity via dialogue with peers, turning the critical gaze upon themselves.

We now discuss how epistemic reflexivity could be useful in addressing problems that are endemic to the academic field, namely the strong focus on novelty, contribution and scientific profit.

Discussion

The importance of reflexivity for generating epistemologically robust OS objects

In proposing three reflexive principles for the construction of OS research objects, we speak to the challenge of generating epistemologically robust research objects in OS (Alvesson et al., 2022; Cunliffe, 2016; Gabriel, 2018; Hardy et al., 2001). We suggest an approach to researcher reflexivity that builds on the full range of principles encompassed by Bourdieu’s notion of epistemic reflexivity. For Bourdieu (1998), theory is generated in contact with empirical objects. Therefore, the relation between reflexivity and theorizing is a topic that could receive more attention from researchers, as argued by some OS scholars (Carter & Spence, 2019; Cutcher et al., 2020; Tsoukas, 2017). Interestingly, however, in their article on reflexive traditions in OS in this journal, Cutcher et al. (2020) make no reference to Bourdieu-inspired reflexive research. This is an oversight that in itself points to an area of opportunity for OS researchers to further develop their approaches, and for which we have suggested some ways forward in this article.

The OS field was developed and taught within business schools that traditionally had a close connection to corporate stakeholders. This drove research in the direction of a managerialist perspective, cultivating prescriptive and relatively simplistic approaches that could be immediately applicable in solving corporate problems (Green, 2012; Wetzel & Van Gorp, 2014). As Corley and Gioia (2011) point out, the field has developed considerably from the 1970s to become more conceptually and empirically rigorous. However, scholars associating themselves with diverse theoretical directions have argued that the field still suffers from drawbacks concerning the kind of knowledge it draws on, how knowledge is legitimized and how new knowledge is produced (Amis & Silk, 2008; Corley & Gioia, 2011; Suddaby et al., 2011).

For example, the prevalence of substantialist approaches leaves the misleading impression that examination of an organizational phenomenon can be limited to the organization itself. But for Bourdieu, substantialist approaches ‘privilege things rather than relations and, as such, have a tendency to reify the social order, to essentialize social phenomena, and to embody a positivist orientation to social research’ (Mohr, 2013, p. 101). From a Bourdieusian perspective, however, organizations are seen not as homogeneous entities but as spheres of work held together by a common idea. They are inhabited by agents who are constituted both through their relations internally within the organization as well as externally in the field via their connection to groups and institutions in the wider field (Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008; Ernst & Jensen Schleiter, 2019) and via their belief in the game (Bourdieu, 1990). Bourdieu’s concept of illusio can help here to further illuminate how organizational scholars participate in and reproduce field-specific assumptions. We have highlighted the importance of researchers’ reflexive awareness of these field illusios – an awareness which enables them not to get caught by them but to construct and conquer theoretical knowledge against them (Bourdieu, 1973). This stresses the point that fields are not pre-given but are actively constructed by the researcher as part of the (organizational) research object, as Bourdieu did in his own empirical work starting in Algeria (Yacine, 2004).

Theory generation in OS

Applying the three principles of epistemic reflexivity speaks to problems raised in the OS literature of oversimplifying empirical complexity and unknowingly importing scholastic biases (Alvesson et al., 2022; Atkin et al., 2007). We argue that they help address concerns regarding the adequacy of the constructed research objects, which may stand in the way of theory development (Amis & Silk, 2008; Hibbert et al., 2014; Prasad, 2023; Sandberg & Alvesson, 2021). When research is confined to established templates or ways of thinking about research in the field, it may represent a constraint on theoretical creativity, insight and development, leading to theoretical reductionism (Carter & Spence, 2019; Prasad, 2023).

The construction of robust research objects relies on researchers’ awareness of, and reflections on, why they use certain methods rather than others and why they perform certain research operations rather than others, as well as how they move from data to theory (Ashworth et al., 2019). It should also be recognized that the choice of research object is not always a free choice by the researcher. Funding institutions, politicians, interest groups, lobbies, academic journals and university management may be influential in deciding what is worthwhile in terms of research topics, and thus they hold structuring power in and over the construction of research objects. Reflexivity principles 2 and 3 could therefore guide researchers in identifying the objective social structures and the social positions pertaining to particular research objects. Such analysis enables identification of connections between the meta-field of power and social fields and sub-fields (Bourdieu, 2013), including the relation between funding availability and the choice of research objects in academic fields.

In proposing that researchers nurture a reflexive researcher habitus to produce robust research objects, we have emphasized that reflexivity is a collective rather than an individual endeavour. Such a perspective is anchored in Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field and ties the individual researcher to their collective socialization in a field and collective and collaborative research practices (i,e. their illusio). Throughout his career, Bourdieu promoted research collaborations; his conceptual language is cross-disciplinary and helpful in studying phenomena of interest to different research sub-fields, for example, social movements, educational systems, industries or the wider field of art.

Reflexive practice is also textual in that research involves processes of coding and categorization (Alvesson et al., 2008; Bowker & Star, 1999), and while most are aware that their methodological operations should be transparent to their peers, the constraints of the journal article genre may counteract researcher reflexivity, with positivist-inclined editors calling for (an illusion of) objectivity – even from qualitative researchers. Moreover, the limited space allocated for methodology sections in journal articles may lead to an increasing preference for off-the-shelf methods (e.g. Gioia et al., 2013) that count as proven templates that are sanctioned by the research community (Carter & Spence, 2019; Grodal et al., 2021; Hibbert et al., 2014). However, despite their merits, these do not necessarily constitute the best fit for every study. In fact, they may, as Grodal et al. (2021, p. 592) put it, structure the research in a way that is ‘a far cry from the researcher’s actual analytical process’. This situation presents authors with methodological dilemmas: The need to give the impression of objectivity through the field’s approved methods and ‘names’ means that reflexivity may be excluded through the reviewing and submission processes.

Conveying how reflexive practice works is thus often inherently problematic because the power structures of the academic field can militate against reflexivity. Bourdieu went to great lengths to explain that the academic field is itself a field of interests, struggle and competition for scientific domination and status. The legitimacy of certain problems, certain theories and certain modes of investigation and analysis is constructed, and every choice the researcher makes is ‘a political investment strategy, directed, objectively at least, towards maximisation of strictly scientific profit’ (Bourdieu, 1975, p. 23, 2004). Researchers thus compete with peers for various achievements that count as capital in the field, such as funding and publications in prestigious journals (Bourdieu, 1984), which may result in symbolic ‘prestige’ capital and lead to academic titles and tenure. In the publication process, OS scholars risk being directed by gatekeepers into a narrowing focus on ‘theory’ and ‘making a contribution’; that is, to a view of knowledge of organizations and society as ‘cumulative’ and/or ‘generalisable’, with the concomitant danger of establishing an organizational research monoculture, dominated by a few ‘top’ journals (Prasad, 2023).

Therefore, as we see it, scholars could, as part of their reflexive research practices, benefit from paying attention to how orthodoxies in the field define what is currently considered good theory and, on a broader scale, what is considered socially relevant research; and in turn, how breaking with such prevailing orthodoxies becomes possible. Thus, scholars who have achieved a powerful position in the field may find it less risky to propose new ‘heretical’ practices (Bourdieu, 1977) because ‘the scientific field gives credit to those who already have it’ (Bourdieu, 2004, p. 56).

The topic of arbitrary academic constraints, and how power structures in the field of OS influence the field’s theoretical and methodological development, has been discussed by a number of scholars who have criticized the domination of particular theoretical approaches in OS (Carter & Spence, 2019; Sandberg & Alvesson, 2021; Whitaker & Atkinson, 2021), showing the influence of these approaches on research design, and on outcomes and careers. For Amis and Silk (2008, p. 458) pressures to publish had the consequence that these authors could not always be true to their own beliefs nor to the empirical, as ‘our research programs have been influenced by pressures to publish (and not perish!) in disciplines that have not always been receptive to the epistemological positions with which we have at times been most comfortable’.

For OT, then, reflexivity concerns the type of research questions asked and their content (Bitektine & Miller, 2015). It also concerns how researchers build their research objects (Carter & Spence, 2019; Cronin, 1997), as well as encapsulating what they are trying to prove (Carter & Spence, 2019) or explain (Sandberg & Alvesson, 2021), or how they want to fit into particular discussions and fields (Whitaker & Atkinson, 2021). Our discussion of the value of an approach that considers Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital, reflexive researcher habitus and illusio illuminates how OS scholars may participate in and reproduce field-specific assumptions, often operating within a field governed by an unexamined illusio. In this way, we hope to reinforce calls for deeper reflexivity in the OS field and offer some potential ways forward.

Conclusions

In proposing a Bourdieusian reflexive stance, we have drawn not only on Bourdieu’s published work but also on his research practice and commitments throughout his career. We suggest that nurturing a reflexive researcher habitus as an orientation to research has the potential to address scholastic biases and enable further theorizing.

We thus add to the OS/OT literature on reflexivity by formulating the construction of the organizational object through three interrelated principles of epistemic reflexivity: (1) breaking with pre-constructed categories and research objects with consideration of the choices made in the research process; (2) reflecting on the researcher’s social origin and position in the academic field; and (3) the positioning of the research vis-a-vis other studies and academic traditions in the OS field. This is an approach that moves beyond typical social constructionist approaches in that the researcher is not embedded in the field of study, that is, in the studied field’s illusio. Rather, the researcher should examine the field’s illusios to understand what is at stake in it and be able to use this understanding actively in object and theory construction.

We offer these three principles of epistemic reflexivity as a way for scholars to fully grasp the complex phenomena and problems of contemporary organizations. We further argue that these principles develop throughout the researcher’s career, contributing to the nurturing of an embodied reflexive researcher habitus. As part of the researcher’s learning, it becomes crucial to break with internalized presuppositions and pre-reflexive experiences of the social world (habitus), challenge the illusio of the field and cultivate the reflexive researcher habitus, thereby benefiting from more engaged and participatory research. We therefore suggest that such a reflexive orientation to research object construction might help in moving the OS field towards heightened research transparency and methodological rigour and in developing theories that capture the complexity of organizational phenomena and their diverse contexts.

We have argued that such a reflexive stance is appropriate for researchers interested in research object construction and how their constructions are influenced by social relations of power in their research fields and their own positions within them. This proposition is not prescriptive but rather an invitation to consider adopting and practising the three principles of epistemic reflexivity. A limitation of this approach to reflexivity could lie in the wide and diverse disciplinary, theoretical and methodological traditions within the field of OS. While epistemic reflexivity as an orientation to research can be practised broadly, different sub-fields will naturally lean towards different reflexive approaches, that reflecting the theoretical pluralism in the field.

Epistemic reflexivity might, however, help us to identify common biases in our fields (and sub-fields) that influence how we understand research problems, issues of power and engagement, and as researchers, team leaders, editors and reviewers challenge and counteract them in our research practice in terms of what we study, how we study it and how we interact with the empirical. We therefore hope that our contribution adds a voice to recent reflections by journal editors and others in terms of keeping the field open to innovation and creativity. As Boltanski writes, concerning the founding of the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, academic constraints that are seen as inevitable and unchallengeable can be challenged as arbitrary – an accepted reality can be ‘rendered unacceptable’.

In conclusion, we concur with Cutcher et al. (2020) that reflexivity is essential for OS researchers to discuss what ‘they think of their discipline’, and therefore vital to understand the future of the field and where it sits (and where within it they are situated) in relation to power structures locally and internationally. Can we afford to divorce inquiry in academia from crisis at the political and geopolitical levels or from economic forces? We believe that this is an urgent question, given current political attacks on higher education, its values and its practices in many national contexts. Understanding your illusio might also involve understanding what you owe to your field and how you can both protect and advance it.