Varieties of Sociological Field Theory

Abstract

The explanation of social action in sociological theory has traditionally focused on either macroor micro-level analyses. Field theory offers an alternative view of social life. It is concerned with how a set of actors orienting their actions to one another do so in a meso-level social order. Field theory implies that there is something at stake in such an order, that there are rules governing the order, that actors have positions and resources, and that actors have an understanding of the order that allows them to interpret the actions of others and frame a response. Fields, once formed, are the arenas where the sociological game of jockeying for position constantly plays out.Our purpose in this chapter is to review contemporary fi eld theory as articulated in three major theoretical statements in sociology. 1 We begin with a brief description of the core tenets of any contemporary sociological fi eld theory. We then discuss fi eld theory's intellectual roots, 1 We only review theories that explicitly invoke the fi eld concept. There are a great many perspectives in sociology that appear compatible with fi eld theory, for example, network analysis (White 1992 ) and the institutional logics perspective (Thornton et al. 2012 ). But these perspectives eschew fi eld as a central concept and are not discussed in this chapter.paying particular attention to the infl uences of Max Weber and Kurt Lewin but also phenomenology and symbolic interactionism. We next provide an overview of three of the most developed elaborations of fi eld theory from the last half-century -Pierre Bourdieu's theory of fi elds (1992), the neo-institutional approach to "organizational fi elds" (DiMaggio and Powell 1983 ), and the model of "strategic action fi elds" recently proposed by Fligstein and McAdam ( 2012 ). We follow these overviews with a more detailed examination of how each of these theories addresses two of the most fundamental problems in sociological theory: (1) how social fi elds emerge, reproduce, and change, and (2) how to conceive of agency and actors.We spend the bulk of our essay discussing key differences between the three approaches on these issues. Although there are some commonalities across the varieties of fi eld theory, there are also some clear differences of opinion. Drawing its model of social action from Berger and Luckmann ( 1967 ) and phenomenology, foundational neo-institutional theory downplays the exercise of power in fi elds and offers us a view of actors who tend towards habit and conformity in their actions and rely on cues from the fi eld to legitimate their actions. In contrast, Bourdieu's theory emphasizes the role of power in fi eld construction and focuses on how the structuring of the fi eld gives more powerful actors the tools by which to consistently win the

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