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Critiquing – and Rescuing – ‘Character’

A. Sayer

Published 2020 in Sociology

ABSTRACT

The article looks at how sociology might regard the concept of ‘character’, both in terms of the way it is used in public discourse and in its own accounts of social life. In the former, the concept is likely to be regarded with suspicion, especially where it is used to explain individuals’ life outcomes in a way that ignores social structures and depoliticizes inequalities. Such usages are to be found in political discourse on welfare and in the character education movement as a solution to problems of ‘social mobility’. Yet if character refers to individuals’ settled dispositions to act in certain ways, then it has some affinities with the Bourdieusian concept of habitus. The article argues both for developing the critique of ideological uses of the concept and for considering how it might be used in ways that do not misrepresent its explanatory and normative significance.

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