Bourdieu and Privacy as Contextual Integrity

Below is the introduction from my module 1 paper. I invite you to read it here (paper is available here). Comments are welcome!

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The development of privacy theories has been predominantly tied to North American legal theoretical traditions. From Warren and Brandeis’ (1890) pioneering ‘Right to Privacy’, Alan Westin’s (1967) claims of informational privacy, to Richard Posner’s (1978) understanding of privacy on economic-institutionalist terms, these cornerstones of privacy thought all maintain close ties with their liberal-democratic legal and economic foundations.

It comes as little surprise, then, that theories of privacy have rarely been explored through the epistemological lineages of European social theory. Indeed, social theory of all forms is underrepresented in the realm of privacy. Accordingly, this paper takes up the opportunity to bridge privacy literatures with European social theory. Helen Nissenbaum’s notion of “privacy as contextual integrity” provides an excellent entry point for an exploration of privacy through the lens of social and political philosophy.

Nissenbaum does not seek to develop a full theory of privacy; rather, she provides a theoretical account of a right to privacy as it applies to the cultural values of information sharing between individuals. Nissenbaum’s argument borrows heavily from Pierre Bourdieu’s trademark social theoretical concepts of social space as field, domains and contexts (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). On this basis, Nissenbaum’s argument is more concerned with the spatially bounded normative implications of information exchange and how normative positions concerning privacy are themselves culturally produced, stratified, differentiated, and also (crucially) context-specific.

In addressing the underrepresentation of social theory in privacy literatures, this paper engages in a critical social theoretical analysis of Helen Nissenbaum’s notion of privacy as “contextual integrity”. I begin with a brief summary of Helen Nissenbaum’s idea of “privacy as contextual integrity,” drawing significantly on social theoretical ideas of context, spheres, or fields. This section details the two main normative principles that Nissenbaum argues regulate acceptable modes and practices of informational exchange.

I follow up Nissenbaum’s account by returning to the roots from which it draws most heavily: the core concepts comprising Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social practice. In this section, I unpack Bourdieu’s notion of social practice, formulaically expressed as, [(habitus)(capital)] + field = practice. After briefly exploring habitus, capital and field respectively, I examine how Nissenbaum’s argument of privacy as contextual integrity aligns with Bourdieu’s theory of social practice. Here, I argue that Nissenbaum’s “privacy of contextual integrity” could be further supplemented by the concept of symbolic, cultural and economic capital that was also so central to Bourdieu’s theory of social practice. I argue that Nissenbaum’s selective reading of Bourdieu leads to a limited account of ‘context’, subsequently leading to a reductionist account of “privacy as contextual integrity”.

Subsequently, I argue a return to the social and philosophical foundations of Nissenbaum’s own argument reconfigure our understanding of privacy as contextual integrity. The discussion in the final section raises both theoretical and substantive implications of how Nissenbaum’s approach be reconfigured on Bourdieusian terms. In the conclusion, I address how this speaks to the overall role of critical social theory in informing theoretical approaches to privacy.