TOAST THEORY

​The term Production Habitus refers to the composite creation of the producer when they ‘write’ the logistical production process; assemble the team with their internalised domains, doxa and inherent capital; stimulate creative motivation in the participants; form and manage the social environment and micro culture surrounding a project; and select, design or manipulate the physical production spaces. It involves a conceptual bubble that surrounds a project; notions and ideas that permeate it; capital and habitus that are expressed within it; emotions that the participants feel whenever they interact with it. It affects their motivations, cognitive processes, behaviours and contributions in a way that the essence of the Production Habitus becomes embedded in the final product. It is useful here to consider John-Steiner’s integrative type of collaboration (2000, p.213), which describes an intense, short lived form of collaboration based on commitment to a shared vision. In many fields the social rules and cognitive processes attached to these collaborations emerge organically. The notion of a Production Habitus in music production describes the deliberate shaping of these factors to create an aesthetic quality to the collaborative project that becomes embedded in the resulting product. For Burgess’ (2013) Enablative or Consultative producer types who are characterised by a hands-off role when it comes to the composition, performance or engineering of a project, and who are more concerned with “…sourcing the talent and material and creating conditions in which a successful recording could take place” (Burgess 2013, p.15), the creation and maintenance of the Production Habitus could be their primary, and crucial creative contribution.

 

However, if the producer wishes to create the best conditions for creative contributions within the Production Habitus of a project, they will need to consider wider theories of creativity beyond the individuals involved, their nested creative systems, and the effects of capital and doxa.

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Bourdieu and Habitus

To examine the relationships between the skills, habits and dispositions of each collaborator, and the culture that is set up by the producer for a project, we can use Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of habitus (1977), briefly summarised by Costa & Murphy:

 

Habitus is socialised subjectivity that agents embody both individually and collectively, through the interrelationships they establish in the social spaces to which they belong. Habitus encapsulates social action through dispositions and can be broadly explained as the evolving process through which individuals act, think, perceive and approach the world and their role in it. Habitus thus denotes a way of being.

(Costa & Murphy 2015, p.7)

 

Bourdieu proposes habitus as a model for understanding society, a construction of how society in all its structuring rules and prevailing habits operates between people. It refers to “the set of dispositions and meanings that people gain through socialisation” (Gaventa 2003, p. 8). It is in the relationship between social structures and the tendencies of behaviour and thought that exist within them:

 

[Habitus…] expresses first the result of an organising action, with a meaning close to that of words such as structure; it also designates a way of being, a habitual state (especially of the body) and, in particular, a predisposition, tendency, propensity, or inclination.

(Bourdieu 1977, p.214)

 

As such we can understand habitus in terms of the relationships between a person, the rules of the social environment they inhabit, and others operating in the same group. The shared actions, conceptions and world-view that emerge from the rules of the social structure have an effect on emerging dispositions of those in the group (Smith 2020). As a leading interpreter of Bourdieu’s work, Wacquant describes the concept as a mediating construct, that is “the ways in which the socio-symbolic structures of society become deposited inside persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and patterned propensities to think, feel and act in determinate ways” (Wacquant 2016, p.65).

 

Our music producer, in drawing together the collaborators and organising the spaces and resources of a project is in effect arranging a micro-socio environment where the effects of habitus can be considered to shape the aesthetic of the project. Although Wacquant makes it clear that habitus “is not a self-sufficient mechanism for the generation of action” (2016, p.64), the producer can have an awareness of the existing effects of habitus in their collaborators and make their production decisions accordingly, and creatively.

 

Wacquant identifies and examines two types of habitus. Primary habitus is to do with early childhood experiences and the social habits, knowledge and understanding that is acquired through immersion in familial environments with no deliberate effort of learning. A secondary habitus on the other hand, is “any system of transposable schemata that becomes grafted subsequently, through specialised pedagogical labor that is typically shortened in duration, accelerated in pace, and explicit in organisation” (Wacquant 2014, p.7), such as the habitus acquired through studying and practicing music technology. This secondary habitus will be crucial to the music producer as they selectively assemble their actors.

 

For Bourdieu, a core concept of habitus is the capital that exists in social resources, be it material, cultural, social or symbolic capital (Navarro 2006). A resource that has a social power value or status, functions as capital. If it has a cultural or symbolic significance that affects the social structures and the way people operate around it, it has capital. For example, Abbey Road Studios has a cultural capital that affects the behaviours of musicians that record there. A well-connected music manager could have social capital due to the network of influential people they have access to. Social and cultural capital are significant in a competitive society as non-economic forms of power, and for Bourdieu the struggle for power is central to all social arrangements (Navarro 2006). Therefore, a music producer with an awareness of the capital inherent in their collaborators, and in the objects, institutions and physical environments brought into a project, can have an influence in shaping behaviours and creative responses. This includes the channels selected for communicating messages within the project, as some messages benefit from the weight they acquire when communicated on an emailed document with a well formatted header due to the inherent symbolic capital. Other messages will be better communicated with the less formal, lighter touch of a personal text message, where the deliberate absence of certain types of capital communicates its own meaning that extends the words in the message.

 

Capital and how it is awarded value and distributed in a social group is an important structuring element in defining one grouping as distinct from another. This is another part of Bourdieu’s theory, the idea of ‘fields.’ These are the social and institutional arenas in which people compete for capital, and where they exhibit the dispositions of their habitus (Gaventa 2003, p.9). For example, a successful music producer may have cultural and social capital in the field of the music industry, earned through a catalogue of respected work and the network of contacts they have built up throughout their career. They would hold a power that other members of the field, other people working in music production, would recognise and respond to. The same person would be unlikely to hold the same capital when operating in a neighbouring cultural field, say that of television production, and so the limits of the capital, or power distribution, can define the limits of the field.

 

Related to habitus is Bourdieu’s understanding of ‘doxa’ which refers to taken-for-granted norms and beliefs, or ‘common sense.’ As a set of unchallenged assumptions, doxa is both a source and a manifestation of power (Gaventa 2003). It happens when the limits of power are constantly encountered through life and so become social divisions, ingrained patterns of thought that inscribe as a social order, “a ‘sense of one’s place’ which leads one to exclude oneself from the goods, persons, places and so forth from which one is excluded” (Bourdieu 2010, p.473). For Bourdieu, doxa is “an adherence to relations of order which, because they structure inseparably both the real world and the thought world, are accepted as self-evident”. If habitus is a construction of how society operates and the way people operate within it, doxa can help us understand why.

 

In his research into creativity and popular music McIntyre (2009, 2019) uses ‘habitus’ in relation to the specialist internalised habits and knowledge an individual has acquired, much like Wacquant’s secondary habitus, and the opportunities to apply them in a ‘field of works.’ He presents it as a similar concept to the individual being immersed in the body of knowledge of a domain in Csikszentmihalyi’s systems model. However, the notion of a short-lived secondary habitus is also useful to us at a micro level in conceptualising the production culture that emerges for a single specific project, and that the producer attempts to shape. The overall creative social space generated in which participants become aware of ‘ways of doing things’ that pervade the project and in a large sense, define it. In using habitus and Bourdieu’s related concepts of capital, fields and doxa as tools to explore the production culture of a project we can scrutinise the multiple agents, systems and holons at play, “…taking into consideration its complexity as a container of practices imbued in the objective and subjective contexts of the phenomenon under study” (Costa & Murphy 2015, p.8).