Social inertia
Through the individual's engagement in the social space, he or she develops a set of behaviors, lifestyle and habits (which Bourdieu referred to as habitus) which often serve to maintain the status quo.
Thus, people are encouraged to "accept the social world as it is, to take it for granted, rather than to rebel against it, to counterpose to it different, even antagonistic, possibles.
While President Barack Obama reaffirmed America's commitment to equal opportunity in his second inaugural address, Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz believes it is a myth that modern society offers equal opportunity and high social mobility through mechanisms such as formal education.
In the culture of honor, violence is seen as an acceptable way of responding to insults or threats to a person's self, family, property, or reputation.
[8] Scott used Bourdieu's notion of social inertia to suggest that students who were drawn to the non-commercial nature of creative fields came from families with low socioeconomic status and whose parents had not been able to develop a career themselves.
Specifically, social inertia has been defined as a measurement of how likely people are to continue collaborating with previous partners or members of the same team.
Researchers have hypothesized that this "inertia effect" is due to participants' psychological commitment to their initial judgments.
[11] Researchers believe that one reason for this effect is that living together increases the inertia of the relationship – i.e. the likelihood that a couple will continue to stay together vs. break up.
[12] Inertia in cohabiting couples occurs because living together imposes constraints on a relationship (a shared lease, etc.)
Because living together represents an ambiguous form of commitment compared with marriage, cohabiting may not increase the levels of dedication in either partner.
[20] The psychologist Michael Zarate has coined the term "cultural inertia" to refer to reactions to social change, such as those caused by immigration.
