Bourdieu, Representational Legitimacy, and Pension Boardrooms: A Contested Space?

Drawing on Bourdieu’s social theory this chapter aims to extend the debates about concepts of legitimacy and representation in UK pension schemes boardrooms. Generally the field of board management has its own norms and behaviours where actions and manners are reproduced through generations of boardroom activity. However, representational legitimacy has helped increase the diversity of board composition by bringing trade union representatives or members who choose to stand for election, into the mix of employer/sponsor representation and employee representation. Using the conceptual tools of field, habitus, practice, capital, illusio, and doxa provided by Pierre Bourdieu the legitimacy that these more diverse pension board members bring to the field of the boardrooms will be investigated to establish how this is being reshaped into a board image that fits with the dominant norms, expectations and attitudes of the boardroom