Field Theory

Field theory is an approach to analyzing social relations that was developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002). He conceived of fields as hierarchical social structures in which people try to either preserve or acquire dominance. Fields determine the way people perceive and relate to one another in areas such as politics, business, art, science, philosophy, journalism, and entertainment. Across these areas, fields often overlap with and nest within one another. Within any given field, people's relations and conflicts play out according to specific rules, rewards, and sanctions that are recognized as legitimate by the field's members. Field theory is useful for studying public relations because it can specify how the profession's characteristic activities affect the balance of power throughout society.

Examples of fields include the overall “field of power” in a society, the economic field of capitalist competition, fields of politics at different levels, and various types of what Bourdieu called “fields of cultural production,” for example, academia, the art world, the literary world, popular and classical music, journalism, and other parts of the entertainment professions and communications media.

Fields have a hierarchical structure because their members perceive one another to occupy relatively high or low positions depending on how much of the limited resource of power or “capital” they possess. Capital comes in various forms, and Bourdieu's work usually focuses on three: economic capital, which tends to dominate in the general field of power in capitalist societies; cultural capital, which artists, writers, scholars, and scientists tend to value, and which is under constant threat of being corrupted by economic capital; and a broader type of symbolic capital, which comes in forms such as honor, status, legitimacy, and gender domination. Less frequently, Bourdieu's work also analyzes the workings of social capital, academic capital, and political capital.

Field theory provides a method for studying the interconnections of different parts of society in which different forms of capital are valued. Bourdieu differentiates between fields that are relatively autonomous and those that are relatively heteronomous. A field tends toward autonomy when its members value one well-defined form of capital, such as the economic profit that corporations value or the expressive skills that artists and entertainers value. A field tends toward heteronomy when its members value different types of capital in differing ways. For example, the political field in a democracy becomes heteronomous when its members begin to view fundraising (economic capital) as more important than the ability to unite and mobilize different groups (social capital) or to gain publics’ respect (symbolic capital); the field of professional journalism becomes heteronomous when news organizations value profits and advertising revenue (economic capital) more than they value reporting skills (cultural capital) and professional ideals of public service (symbolic capital).

These concepts of fields and capital have been found relevant to public relations in several contexts. One is the context of how practitioners can help organizations attain dominance within their relevant arenas of competition by acquiring relevant forms of capital. In every field, some people, groups, or institutions will have relatively high amounts of capital (the “dominant”), and others will have relatively low amounts (the “dominated”).

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