Ignatow, G. (2009). Why the sociology of morality needs bourdieu's habitus. Sociological Inquiry, 79(1), 98-114. doi:10.1111/j.1475-682X.2008.00273.x

Much of the scholarship in this area has been heavily influenced by Pierre Bourdieu's studies of culture and social positioning. For example, in a recent study of morality and social class, Sayer (2005) has taken Bourdieu to task for downplaying normative aspects of social judgment. Sayer writes that Bourdieu “recognized the deeply evaluative character of social behavior in terms of how people judge themselves and members of other groups, and the practices and objects associated with them,” yet his interests in social evaluation “lay primarily in the valuation of these things in strategic, functional and aesthetic terms” (Sayer 2005:42). Bourdieu showed little interest in ethical matters, except for a passing reference to ethical dispositions in Practical Reason (Bourdieu 1998). In a discussion of the domestic family, Bourdieu (1998:70) wrote of forces of “dilapidation and dispersion” threatening the family, and of “the ethical dispositions that incline its members to identify the particular interests of individuals with the collective interests of the family.

Sociologists inspired by Bourdieu's work have delved more deeply into everyday ethics and morality. The work of “pragmatic actor” sociologists, including Boltanski and Thévenot (2001), and Lamont (1992), has been especially prominent in this regard. Pragmatic actor theorists have argued that people make moral judgments by choosing evaluative standards from the cultural repertoires available to them, and that they use these standards to draw “moral boundaries” between themselves and members of other groups.

7 Pharo (2004) makes a similar distinction, but organizes his traditions differently. He distinguishes sociocultural theories of morality (Durkheim, Parsons, Bourdieu, Berger, and Luckmann) from action theories (Weber, Garfinkel, Habermas, and Boltanski). As I want to develop moral sociology as a cultural sociology of action, I have no qualms to put Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, Garfinkel, Habermas, and Boltanski in the same basket.