Introduction

The concept of field is being used globally more and more today. This chapter reviews Bourdieu’s understanding of the concept and key elaborations and applications found today in the Anglo-Saxon social scientific literature. The concept now appears in numerous substantive areas of investigation. While by no means an exhaustive review of all the work inspired by Bourdieu’s concept, this chapter offers illustrative references for a diverse range of substantive areas, such as culture, education, economics, intellectuals, media, organizations, politics, religion, social movements, stratification, and globalization. The chapter opens with a brief discussion of the origins and key characteristics of the concept. It then illustrates how Bourdieu and others have used and elaborated the concept of field in selected substantive areas of investigation. For each substantive area we identify those writings of Bourdieu that have been most relevant.

Overview of the Concept

The concept of field originates in the physical sciences where one finds varied expressions in electromagnetism, Newtonian gravitation, and Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The concept describes motion among objects without some substantive medium such as through the forces of gravity, electricity, or magnetism. Unlike the conventional understanding of causality where variable A directly impacts B, field theory understands motion as structured by a set of forces whose relations create effects that do not reduce to the properties of individual units. In his philosophy of science, Cassirer (1953) best articulated this shift from substantialist to relational thinking in modern science where the object of investigation becomes the system of force relations rather than the properties of particular substances. Martin (2003) offers an analytical review of field perspectives in which he identifies and discusses three major and distinct if overlapping variants of field theory in the social sciences: the social-psychological perspective of Gestalt theory associated with Lewin (1951), the stratification and domination emphasis in Bourdieu’s field theory, and the interorganization relations institutionalism associated with DiMaggio and Powell (1983). The latter is a benchmark statement identifying reasons for transorganizational consistencies that renewed institutional analysis in the study of organizations. While the DiMaggio and Powell paper exercises considerable influence in organization studies and draws upon Bourdieu, it is Bourdieu’s conceptualization that currently informs the broadest range of substantive areas of sociological investigation. Moreover, as Martin and Gregg (2015) argue, it is Bourdieu more than anyone else who offers an exemplary field theoretic framework for research in the social sciences today. Martin (2003) identifies the formal properties of field analysis, highlights Bourdieu’s field analytical approach, both its strengths and weaknesses, and compares fields to institutions. His central concern focuses on the nature of social scientific explanation offered by field theory, which he finds superior to conventional approaches for understanding the regularity of human behavior.

Bourdieu’s Conceptualization of Field

Field (champ) is a key spatial metaphor in Bourdieu’s sociology (see also Wacquant in this volume). Compared to his widely recognized conceptual language of cultural capital, habitus, practices, strategies, and reproduction, Bourdieu formalized somewhat later in his work the concept of field. Bourdieu first applied the concept to the French intellectual and artistic worlds as a way to call attention to the specific interests governing those cultural worlds of disinterest (Bourdieu 1971, 1983, 1985). The concept is developed from the conjuncture in the late 1960s of Bourdieu’s research in the sociology art with his reading of Weber’s sociology of religion (Bourdieu 1991), particularly the idea of independent “spheres of value.” Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 97) defines a field as “a network, or configuration, of objective relations between positions. These positions are objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations they imposed upon their occupants, agents, or institutions, by their present and potential situation (situs) in the structure of the distribution of species of power (or capital) whose possession commands access to the specific profits that are at stake in the field, as well as by their objective relation to other positions (domination, subordination, homology, etc.).” For Bourdieu, fields denote arenas of production, circulation, and appropriation and exchange of goods, services, knowledge, or status, and the competitive positions held by actors in their struggle to accumulate, exchange, and monopolize different kinds of power resources (capitals). Fields may be thought of as structured spaces that organize around specific types of capitals or combinations of capital. Fields are structured to a significant extent by their own internal mechanisms of development and thus hold some degree of autonomy from their external environments. But their autonomy is usually relative, checked by heteronomous forces often economic or political in nature. In fields actors strategize and struggle over the unequal distribution of valued capitals and over the definitions of just what are the most valued capitals. Like a magnetic field, the effects of social fields on behavior can be far reaching and not usually apparent to actors.

A field perspective stands in sharp contrast to broad consensual views of social life even though actors within a field share common assumptions (the Doxa) about the worth of the struggle and the rules by which it is to be carried out. The concept of field stands as an alternative analytical tool to institutions, organizations, markets, individuals, and groups though all of these can be key components of fields. Field analysis brings these separate units into a broader perspective that stresses their relational properties rather than their intrinsic features and therefore the multiplicity of forces shaping the behavior of each.

For Bourdieu, field is an abstract concept—a heuristic tool—that permits the researcher to construct methodologically a space of activity that emerged historically and is structured by opposing positions in function of specific types of capital (power resources) and by a dynamic of struggle among the occupants of those positions. The positions are defined relationally by structured oppositions that distribute across different types of capital. Bourdieu (1993b: 72) speaks of the “invariant laws” or “universal mechanisms” that are structural properties characteristic to various degrees of all fields. Bourdieu’s concept of field obtains its full significance within a broader conceptual program that includes the ideas of habitus, capital, social space, field of power, doxa, and illusio. Embedded in the concept is a critical methodology, a view of action, a view of power, and a political vision for sociology absent from other social scientific approaches using the language of field. Swartz (2013a) elaborates this understanding by showing how Bourdieu’s concept of field is situated within a broader theoretical framework of metaprinciples that guide how Bourdieu thinks sociological analysis should be undertaken. A special issue of Bourdieu’s journal Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (December 2013) includes transcripts of some of Bourdieu’s lectures on the concept. Presentation of key features of the concept can be found in Swartz’s (1997: 117–142) widely cited introduction to Bourdieu’s sociology, which identifies the structural properties of fields and the methodological orientation Bourdieu uses in constructing them. In The Logic of Fields, Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992: 94–115) offers in a readily accessible interview format responses by Bourdieu on how he has employed field analysis in his own research. It gives a good sense of the structural properties of fields and the methodological techniques employed in their construction. Finally, besides the current volume, one of the best English language collections of field analysis is (Hilgers and Mangez 2015) that reviews and critically assesses the theoretical background of Bourdieu’s field analyses and offers several illustrative field analyses of culture, education, literature, and state formation and public policy.

Cultural Fields in Bourdieu’s Work

Cultural production is where Bourdieu elaborated his field analysis most fully. He first forged his concept of field for the literary sphere (Bourdieu 1971) but went on to develop an analysis of the religious field before applying the concept to the scientific world (Bourdieu 1975) and then other spheres of cultural production, especially the worlds of art and literature (Bourdieu 1983, 1985, 1993a, 1996[1992]). Bourdieu (1975) proposes a field analysis of science that offers a more differentiated and conflict-laden view than found in the standard sociology of science (see also Münch in this volume). In (Bourdieu 1971) he formulates intellectual field analysis in contrast to the traditional focus by art historians on individual biography to understand the origins of artistic expression. Bourdieu (1996[1992]) is his best-known analysis of the origins and structure of the French literary field, notably his analysis of Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, and includes pointers for a social scientific analysis of works of art more generally. Here Bourdieu develops his field perspective for the artistic field but makes it clear that this approach should apply to other kinds of fields as well. Bourdieu (1983) situates the field of cultural production within the “field of power” (described below under “Stratification, Field of Power, and the State”). Two opposing dynamics characterize fields of cultural production: the struggle for cultural autonomy (e.g. art for art’s sake) against the heteronomy of commercial interests. He thus describes the different interests and dynamics characterizing fields of cultural production for restricted audiences compared to those for mass audiences (1985). In doing so, he (1993a) brings together some of his most important writings on the sociology of cultural production, Flaubert and the French literary field, and the sociology of artistic perception.

Cultural Field Analyses

Bourdieu’s work has inspired hundreds of cultural studies. The few studies mentioned here elaborate fairly closely Bourdieu’s model and illustrate the diversity in potential application. Heise and Tudor (2007), for example, take a comparative look at the film-as-art movements in the 1920s and 1930s in Brazil and Britain. The study finds that the consecration of art and artists is much more centralized under authoritarian regimes in Brazil at that time and more diverse in Britain. The heteronomy/autonomy opposition is found to be useful, though in Brazil the heteronomous forces are more political than in Britain. Anheier et al. (1995) finds that German writers and literati in the city of Cologne are differentiated in their literary field positions particularly by amounts of social and cultural capital. The authors use blockmodeling procedures and make a connection between field as a social topography and the concept of structural equivalence in network analysis. They find that elite and marginal writers are sharply differentiated relative to social and particularly cultural capital, which further separates high and low culture in the periphery sector of writers. Economic capital plays a lesser role. Ley (2003) examines the role of artists in contributing to gentrification in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Lipstadt (2003) offers one of the few field analyses in architecture, where she examines the field effects of several architectural competitions from 1401 to 1989. Meuleman and Savage (2013) explores Dutch cosmopolitan cultural tastes in music, films, and books. The study shows that taste for cosmopolitan items is multifaceted with distinct social differences among respondents for specifically Dutch cultural items, European forms of culture, and American popular culture. Oware (2014) examines the position of rap music in the field of cultural production and finds that underground rap music blurs the boundaries between restricted and large-scale production as represented by noncommercial and commercial rap respectively. Sapiro (2003) looks at the historical change in relationship between the French state and literary market, and Sapiro (2010) brings a field perspective to the globalized market of literary translations in the United States and France. Savage and Silva (2013) introduce a special issue of Cultural Sociology on field analysis and identify key features and central ambivalences of the concept of field for cultural analysis, particularly in the case of newly emerging popular forms such as pop music, and comedy. Finally, Heilbron (2015), in this award winning book, employs field as a heuristic framework for analyzing the history of French sociology. He is able to show the advantages of a field perspective over systemic, interactionist, and institutionalist accounts of knowledge production. Stressing field relationality, Heilbron shows how French sociology is shaped by the national systems of higher education, research, and publishing and the international circulation of ideas.

Food

The production and consumption of food can take on cultural field–like properties as has been the case of gastronomy (the pursuit of culinary excellence) in France. Ferguson (1998) and Ferguson (2006) examine the historical rise in the nineteenth century of French gastronomic practices and their elaboration in the twentieth century. These works show the analytical distinctiveness of the concept of field in comparison to related notions of ‘culture’ and ‘world’. The 2006 book elaborates well beyond the 1998 work by showing the importance of writings and texts in the formation of an expansive and nationalized culinary discourse of enduring significance. Fantasia (2010) explores the more recent trends in which the field of haute cuisine grows in autonomy as a cultural field yet is increasingly oriented by big business concerns. He documents the recent interpenetration of ‘industrial cuisine’ and ‘haute cuisine’ so that the traditional autonomy associated with the latter takes on more and more today a symbolic facade.

Economic Sociology

Some of Bourdieu’s (e.g., Bourdieu 1964; Bourdieu and Sayad 1964) earliest work that employs his concepts of habitus and capital enters into critical dialogue with economic views of action and markets (see also Schmidt-Wellenburg in this volume). But it is his concept of field that is receiving considerable attention today in economic sociology. In his posthumous book on the French housing market, Bourdieu (2005[2000]) situates his thinking relative to key perspectives in contemporary economic sociology such as network analysis and the embeddedness of action. He challenges fundamental assumptions of orthodox economics and proposes a broader constructionist sociology and anthropology of economic transactions. The key conceptual section “Principles of an Economic Anthropology” in (Bourdieu 2005[2000]) outlines how he conceptualizes the economic field. That book also offers an empirical analysis of public policy and the housing market in France. Bourdieu (1996[1989]: 300–369) looks at the social and educational background of big business CEOs and their role in the field of economic power in France. Swedberg (2011) reviews the ensemble of Bourdieu’s writings for relevant economic sociology topics, particularly interactions between sellers and buyers, and notes how he subordinates the logic of markets to that of fields. In a widely cited work, Fligstein and McAdam (2012) draws some inspiration from Bourdieu to formulate their own general field framework, however they tend to conceptualize fields first and foremost from the actors’ points of view. Hanappi (2011) outlines the key theoretical assumptions of Bourdieu’s field and habitus approach to the economy and relates it to the embeddedness tradition in economic sociology. In particular, his paper examines how to conceptualize economic agency, including different notions of uncertainty, in light of Bourdieu’s conceptual framework.

Education

The concepts of cultural capital, forms of symbolic power, and habitus have been the most influential of Bourdieu’s concepts in educational research (see also Wacquant and Munk in this edited volume). Still, Bourdieu (1988[1984], 1996[1989]) employed the concept of field in key analyses of French education and the concept now inspires considerable educational research. The 1988 work offers a field analysis of the French university professorate at the time of the May 1968 student revolt. The 1996 book gives a conceptual and detailed empirical analysis of the relationship between the elite French grandes écoles, the field of power, and big business leadership. The growing interest in employing the concept of field in the sociology of education is illustrated by the numerous papers in the British Journal of Sociology of Education since 2000 (see in particular Grenfell and James 2004). Karabel’s (2005) landmark book on elite college admissions offers a social and cultural history that employs the concept of field to analyze the struggle over admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton that was formative of the particular system of college admissions in the United States today. Brosnan (2010) argues that medical education in the United Kingdom can be conceptualized as a field within which medical schools compete for different forms of capital, such as students, funding, and prestige. Competition within the field helps to maintain inter-school differences with respect to curricula, reputations, and types and levels of resources. Ferrare and Apple (2015) argues for connecting the micro experiences of actors to the macro structures of educational fields. The focus is on how students construct, experience, and struggle over meaning relative to perceptions of track/curriculum choices in the local contexts of schools and universities as shaped by macro structures. By contrast, Rawlings and Bourgeois (2004) uses field analysis to explore institutional niches of agriculture schools in US higher education.

Intellectuals

The sociology of intellectuals represents a central concern in Bourdieu’s sociology (Swartz 2013b). Intellectuals occupy an important if dominated field within the broader field of power. In one of his earliest formulations of the intellectual field, Bourdieu (1971) examines the historical emergence of intellectuals as they gain relative autonomy from external influences, the internal differentiation among intellectuals as they struggle for cultural recognition and authority, and the ways that certain types of intellectuals intervene in the public arena. Ringer (1992) compares German and French humanists and social scientists around 1890–1920 through the lens of different national intellectual fields. The differences in educational ideals and practices are attributed to differences in intellectual fields and the composition of the two middle classes. Sapiro (2004) employs the concept of field to examine the types of political activism employed by French writers in the twentieth century. She correlates the writer’s cultural field position with his conception of literary work and form of politicization and identifies four types of political expression among French writers: ‘notabilities’,‘esthetes’,‘avant-garde’, and ‘writer-journalists’. And Swartz (2003, 2013b) examines Bourdieu’s own political activism in his later years relative to his professional career and the changing character of the French intellectual field in relationship to politics and the mass media. His 2013 book offers a field analysis of Bourdieu’s own political activism as an engaged sociologist.

Law

Apart from a long theoretical paper, Bourdieu (1987a) published relatively little on law. In that paper he applies the properties of field to jurisprudence to describe it as the site of competition to monopolize the right to determine the law. However, Bourdieu (2014) does devote considerable attention to the historical role of jurists in the development of the modern state. This collection of 23 lectures includes numerous passages where through secondary analysis of several historical studies of modern state formation Bourdieu identifies the key role played by lawyers and law in the development of the modern state as a field of contention to monopolize the means of symbolic as well as physical violence. His field perspective on law has generated some ground-breaking research in that substantive area. Vauchez (2008) looks at the central role played by law and lawyers in the construction of the European Union as a field.

Mass Media

In On Television (Bourdieu 1998[1996]), an explosive, polemical, and widely read indictment of media journalism in 1996, Bourdieu clearly marked his interest in the mass media. In that book, he argues that all of the fields of cultural production, including the fields of science, law, and politics, have come to be structurally constrained by the journalistic field which is today dominated by television. Media visibility has come to be a key and constraining standard for modern cultural and political life. As Benson (1999) shows, the concept of field proved to be key in shaping what might be called the distinctly Bourdieusian approach to media sociology. Benson and Neveu (2005) offers the most elaboration and critical evaluation to date of the application of field theory to the mass media in both France and the United States. This book demonstrates methods for measuring field autonomy and spatially mapping journalistic fields and discusses similarities and differences between field theory, new institutionalism, hegemony, and differentiation theory. Couldry (2003) invites consideration of how both the mass media and the state intersect in the field of power. He develops the idea of “media meta-capital” as a conceptual tool for understanding how mass media along with the state exercises power over the rules of the game in the field of power. Krause (2011) applies Bourdieu’s idea of fields of cultural production to the history of US journalism. This field analysis historicizes the journalistic ideals of public service through news gathering and reporting as a distinctive cultural practice and identifies their institutional foundation. It examines the changing degree of autonomy of the American journalistic field relative to business interests and politics. And it examines multiple media forms and compares the field properties of journalism to other fields, notably the economic and political fields.

Organizations

Bourdieu’s concept of field has found its way into organization sociology largely through the landmark work of DiMaggio and Powell (1983), which draws upon the idea of field in formulating the authors’ widely influential neo-institutional perspective. This view offers an expanded view of Bourdieu’s concept though one that downplays the dimensions of power and competition (see also Baier and Schmitz, in this volume, for an illustration of field analysis in organizational sociology). Fligstein and McAdam (2012) likewise draws some inspiration from Bourdieu’s concept in using the language of field to analyze meso-level organizational realities rather than focusing on just individual organizations as units of analysis. By contrast, Emirbayer and Johnson (2008) offers a more thorough Bourdieusian perspective for analyzing organizations as fields and organizations as units within larger fields. The authors draw on all three of Bourdieu’s pillar concepts (habitus, capital, and field) and propose a relational approach to the study of organizations. They argue that field analysis with inattention to habitus and a relational perspective offers a very impoverished view of fields. Using all these concepts, the authors reframe existing thinking about organizations, particularly from the neo-institutional and resource dependence schools. They recommend studying both organizations-in-fields and organizations-as-fields.

Political Field

Bourdieu (1991[1981], 2000) identify the political field as a relatively autonomous subfield within the field of power and distinct from the state. Bourdieu (1991[1981]) identifies distinctive features of the political field and political capital and the problems that professionalization of political leadership pose for genuine democratic representation. Here Bourdieu distinguishes between a political field and an apparatus. Eyal (2005) elucidates the concept of political field for the purpose of analyzing post-communist politics in Czechoslovakia. The empirical analysis focuses on the round-table negotiations between the regime and the opposition in 1989 and the polarization of the political field between the Czech right wing and left wing. Mudge (2011) brings a field perspective to shifts in the traditional left-right political party spectrum in Western democracies due to the rise of neoliberalism. Using an index of neoliberalism based on policy positions, she finds that this historical shift has occurred across the left-right spectrum among mainstream parties and this move has been particularly the case in ‘third wave’ policies of left parties. The field perspective highlights how political categories in electoral politics are contested and whose historical meanings can shift over time, most notably in what it means to be ‘left’ politically. And Ray (1999) uses the concept of political field to illuminate differences in women’s protest movements in Calcutta and Bombay. She finds that differences in ideology, mobilization issues, tactics, and successes are better explained by a field analytical framework than by opportunity structures or general structural trends such as general living conditions (similar for women in both cities), modernization, and demographic variables like education, fertility, and labor force participation.

Religion

While Bourdieu drew extensively from Marx’s, Durkheim’s, and Weber’s respective analyses of religion to develop his sociology of culture (Dianteill 2003; Rey 2007; Swartz 1996), he himself wrote only ten texts that address religion more or less centrally. The conceptually most important are Bourdieu (1987b, 1991). In the 1987b text Bourdieu reconceptualizes Weber’s classic types of religious leaders (prophet, priest, and magician) to show that their interactions need to be understood in terms of their structured interests in the religious field. The 1991 text is Bourdieu’s most widely cited analysis of religion. It examines the historical origins of an autonomous religious field and explores its structure and social functions. Bourdieu and de Saint Martin (1982) is the most extensive empirical study in religion. This study offers a field analysis of French Catholic bishops and documents, despite official claims of unity, a fundamental polarity between those for whom the church provides a channel for upward social mobility and those who enter their religious vocation as heirs of considerable social and cultural capital. The former identify more with the institution than the latter. Nonetheless, the sociology of religion has drawn significantly from Bourdieu’s writings including his concept of field. Dianteill (2003) documents the origins of Bourdieu’s concept of field in Weber’s sociology of religion and explores the way it was employed by Bourdieu in his analysis of institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, and how Bourdieu’s thinking can be a rich source of theoretical inspiration for students of religion. Rey (2007) introduces Bourdieu’s theory of practice as it pertains to the study of religion and includes a detailed discussion of the religious field with a substantive example from colonial New England. Swartz’s (1996) essay examines key features of Bourdieu’s sociology of culture, particularly how he elaborates from Marx’s and Weber’s sociologies of religion, to offer a political economy of religious practices. Particular attention is given to the concept of field as the most relevant of Bourdieu’s concepts for this undertaking.

Social Movements

Bourdieu did not systematically engage social movement research with his concept of field, though social movements and a field perspective did inform his political activism (Bourdieu 2008). Nonetheless, several features of his field perspective are applicable to social movement research, as the programmatic article Esquisse d’une théorie de la contestation: Bourdieu et le modèle du processus politique by Ancelovici (2010) suggests. Ancelovici brings the concept of field to the political opportunity/process framework of social movements as developed by Sidney Tarrow, Charles Tilly, and Doug McAdam. The concept of opportunity structures is redefined as “field opportunity structures” to permit their application to a far greater range of sites of social mobilization, such as religion, that are carriers of political consequences but not directly linked to the state or political field. Crossley (2003) sees fields of protest as emerging around specific forms of capital that actors use to launch campaigns directed at other fields. Fields of protest are also important sites of socialization for movement activists. Yadgar (2003) offers an interesting field analysis of the SHAS political/religious movement in Israel. Fligstein and McAdam (2012) draw on selected features of Bourdieu’s concept to analyze the civil rights struggle for racial equality in the United States. Bloemraad (2001) applies the concept to the 1995 Quebec independence movement to develop the idea of “mobilization playing fields” to argue that collective identity cannot be separated from political mobilization. And Ray (1999) finds that differences in ideology, mobilization issues, tactics, and successes of women’s protest movements in Bombay and Calcutta are better explained by a field analytical framework than by the popular opportunity structures framework in social movements or by general structural trends that are popular in modernization perspectives, such as general living conditions (similar for women in both cities) and demographic variables like education, fertility, and labor force participation.

Stratification, Field of Power, and the State

Bourdieu’s sociology is having a growing influence on social stratification research, particularly his landmark book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Bourdieu 1984[1979]) and his study of elite educational institutions in relation to structures of power, The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (Bourdieu 1996[1989]). Distinction is the most detailed empirical field analysis of social class lifestyles in France and considered one of Bourdieu’s most significant contributions to stratification research. One of Bourdieu’s most cited works, Distinction lays out his conception of the social class structure as a multidimensional social space, which he also considers as the field of social classes. Fields also designates arenas of taste that mediate social class relations.

Both Bourdieu’s field of power and his view of the modern state are central to how he thinks power is distributed in modern stratified societies. The field of power is conceptually elaborated and empirically informed in Bourdieu’s (1996[1989]) analysis of the grandes écoles and corporate elites in France. In this book Bourdieu replaces the language of “dominant class” or “upper class” with “field of power” to offer a more differentiated and multidimensional view of the concentrations of power in modern societies. The field of power is that arena of struggle among the different power fields themselves (particularly the economic and cultural fields) for the right to dominate throughout the social order. In modern capitalist societies the field of power is bifurcated by the poles of economic and cultural capital. In an interview with Wacquant (1993), Bourdieu identifies key features of the field of power and specifies the central role that elite educational institutions (grandes écoles) play in the field of power in France. The field of power informs Medvetz’s (2012: 23) study of the historical formation and current form and functioning of think tanks as “a constitutively blurry network of organizations, themselves internally divided by the opposing logics of academic, political, economic, and media production.”

Bourdieu (1994[1993], 2014) theorizes a field perspective on the modern state as that ensemble of bureaucratic fields that monopolizes the means of symbolic as well as physical violence and regulates relations within the field of power. The 1994 text conceptualizes the state as an ensemble of bureaucratic fields of struggle among different governmental agencies rather than as a unitary actor. The 2014 book assembles Bourdieu’s 1989–1992 Collège de France lectures on the rise of the modern state, its field structure, and social functions. Bourdieu (1996[1989]) conceptualizes and empirically analyzes the central place of the French state in providing elite educational channels and social networks in the formation of public leadership in France. Swartz (2013b) shows the relevance of Bourdieu’s field analysis of the modern state for political sociology.

Transnational and Global Fields

Bourdieu himself confined most of his empirical research employing the concept of field to France but offered suggestions here and there in his writings for how the concept of field might be applied beyond national borders (see, for example, Bourdieu 2005[2000]) where in sharp criticism of globalization he sees national economic fields increasingly subordinated to a “global financial field” largely controlled by American financial institutions). As Sapiro (2014) points out, while Bourdieu usually employed his concept within the framework of a single national state, nowhere in his writings does Bourdieu delimit the concept of field by a methodological nationalism.

Numerous scholars have explored how fields of power transcend national boundaries. Cohen (2011) applies the concept of the field of power to the “expanding constellation of national and supranational institutions and agents” that are forming a “nascent European field of power.” To use Bourdieu’s terminology these agents are engaged in the struggle over the “dominant principle of domination” or the “legitimate principle of legitimation” at the level of the European Union. Cohen (2013) stresses the strategic role of elites, particularly professionals of politics/law, in shaping an emerging European field of power at the expense of traditional political monopolies. Kauppi (2003) applies the concept of political field and political capital to the European Union. He argues that the European Union is a transnational political field in formation, taking on some of the functions of the nation-state but slow to develop a European civil society and effective democracy. Dezalay and Garth (2002) shows how the imperial processes of exporting neoliberal economics and the US concept of the rule of law (an independent judiciary) to Latin America are mediated by national fields of struggle for state power. In what they dub “palace wars,” Dezalay and Garth examine intertwining power struggles within national fields and between national fields as elites pursue multifaceted strategies of internationalization and nationalization. This work looks at the case of the field strategies of North American lawyers and economists in four Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Go (2008) proposes the idea of “global fields” to compare and contrast two hegemonic empires, that of Great Britain in the nineteenth century and that of the United States in the post–World War II period. Steinmetz (2007) uses the German case to examine the colonial state in relation to the metropolitan country. This work applies the concept of field to study the colonial state in southwest Africa, Oceania, and Qingdao (Kiaochow in China) under imperial Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Steinmetz (2017: 376) extends the field concept to colonial states and empires while noting that the latter are “not unified fields but congeries of fields that coexisted in less integrated formations that I will call imperial spaces (following Bourdieu’s distinction between social space and social field).” Go and Krause (2016) offers a collective of original essays that draws explicitly on the Bourdieusian concept of field to explore transnational social spaces of exchange, struggle, and interaction that are not monopolized by states. Several cases explore the emergence, extension, effects, and limits of the concept. And Adler-Nissen (2012) shows how a Bourdieusian field perspective can enrich international relations theory.

Conclusion

These selected works employing Bourdieu’s concept of field are but illustrations of the rapidly expanding use of Bourdieu in the Anglo-Saxon world. These English language publications are increasingly being complemented by works in several other languages,—not withstanding French - such as German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese. Bourdieu’s concept of field is indeed finding global application. While there is debate over whether Bourdieu’s original formulation and application privilege the nation-state as a unit of analysis, clearly researchers are elaborating and deploying the concept in a wide variety of other national contexts and cross-national relations. As research moves forward more attention will be given to the issues of boundaries between fields, how fields intersect and overlap, and the social spaces constituting the interstitial holes between fields—all issues that illustrate the fecundity of Bourdieu’s original thinking for advancing new social scientific investigations.