Why do we need the concept of social field?

By John Postill & Media and Anthropology 
October 22, 2013

An additional note by John Postill on the concept of social field. To appear in forthcoming volume by V. Amit (ed.) Concepts of Sociality: An Anthropological Interrogation. Oxford: Berghahn.
See also Postill, J. forthcoming. Fields as dynamic configurations of practices, games, and socialities. In V. Amit (ed.) Concepts of Sociality: An Anthropological Interrogation. Oxford: Berghahn.
NB – This is work in progress. For the final version, please refer to the published volume in due course. Last updated 23 October 2013.

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A social field is an organised, internally differentiated domain of practice or action in which unequally positioned social agents compete and cooperate over the same rewards. Commonly associated with the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the concept of field is, in fact, of diverse ancestry.  Any comprehensive account of its history must consider at least three other lineages, including inter-organisational theory (DiMaggio and Powell), social psychology (Lewin), and the Manchester School of anthropology (Gluckman, Turner) (Postill forthcoming).
This concept deserves inclusion in a volume devoted to sociality for the following four reasons. First, because it broaches a central problem in social theory since Durkheim and Weber, namely the growing complexity and differentiation of modern societies into specialist domains such as politics, law, journalism, or sport (Benson and Neveu 2005). Moreover, in contrast to differentiation theory concepts such as Luhmann’s societal ‘subsystems’, the notion of field (a) does not make the deterministic assumption that modern fields will always tend towards greater differentiation; in some cases, the opposite is true, for instance, when a field like academia becomes less autonomous from the field of government (Hallin 2005), and (b) human agency and sociality are integral to the concept of field, they are not erased as occurs in Luhmann’s highly abstract systems theory (Gershon 2005).

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