Symbolic Violence and the Violation of Human Rights: Continuing the Sociological Critique of Domination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the conceptual underpinnings of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “symbolic violence” as a recent entry in the sociological tradition that is concerned with the critique of domination. The concept is a source of some debate and confusion and there is an attempt to clarify its meaning and usage through analysis and examples. The paper also considers the usefulness of the concept in examining forms of domination emerging in the present crisis phase of post 9/11 neo-liberalism, and calls for the application of the concept in analyses of human rights violations. It is also proposed that there is a dialectical relationship between symbolic violence and the perpetration of repressive physical violence. Both symbolic violence (soft) and concrete (hard) violence are understood sociologically as forms of social control, and not as biological or psychological expressions of human aggression. The paper reminds the reader of the various challenges in defining violence more generally and also that the way we understand violence has implications for its amelioration.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".