BOURDIEU'S RELATIONAL METHODIN THEORY AND PRACTICE

John W. Mohr

Department of Sociology

University of California, Santa Barbara

Paper Presented at the

American Sociological Association Meetings,

Washington D.C., August 2000

In a Special Session organized by David Swartz

entitled "Cultural Producers and Politics:

The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu"

.

* Thanks to Roger Friedland and Marc Ventresca for helpful insights and discussion on

the arguments presented here. Research on this paper has partially been supported by a

grant from the UCSB Institute for Social and Behavioral Research. Contact info:

mohr@sscf.ucsb.edu

Abstract

A key tenet of Bourdieu's project is his rejection of what he refers to as "substantialist"

approaches to social science which he identifies with positivistic formal methodologies.

In place of this, Bourdieu makes a compelling case for the use of a relational

methodology in analyzing social life. His theorization of relationism is both

sophisticated and far-reaching and it provides the foundation for many of his theoretical

constructs. In spite of the richness of these theoretical formulations, however,

Bourdieu's actual research practice tends to come up short, often reflecting the same sort

of linear methodological presuppositions which he has otherwise so eloquently

dismissed. Drawing upon an approach to relational analysis that takes inspiration from

the American network analytic tradition, I seek to demonstrate in this paper how

Bourdieu's research practices are far less relational than his theoretical statements would

seem to suggest. I emphasize a close reading of two different elements of Bourdieu's

work, his research on cultural capital and his work on the analysis of institutional fields.

Bourdieu's Relational Method in Theory and Practice

John W. MohrDepartment of Sociology

University of California, Santa Barbara

One of Pierre Bourdieu's key meta-theoretical assertions is that sociologists

should embrace a relational rather than a substantialist approach. A substantialist

approach privileges things rather than relations and, as such, has a tendency to reify the

social order and to embody a positivist orientation to social research. In contrast,

Bourdieu holds up the ideal of a relational analysis. A key tenet of such an approach is

that objects under investigation are seen in context. Their meaningfulness is determined

not by the characteristic properties, attributes, or essences of the thing itself, but rather

with reference to the field of objects, practices, or activities within which they are

embedded.

In this paper I argue that Bourdieu's conception of relational analysis is extremely

important for three reasons: it emphasizes the interpretative character of institutional life,

it relies on a structuralist method of interpretation, and it provides an empirical

mechanism for linking the duality of culture and practice. I also argue that Bourdieu's

theory is better than his practice. Specifically I look at the way in which he seeks to

operationalize his conception of relational analysis and I argue that though his methods

are in some respects quite well crafted (because they emphasize the significance of

analyzing the duality of culture and practice) they are in other respects quite limited. This

is because they are founded upon the methodological habitus of mainstream social

science which imposes measurement practices that reflect what Andrew Abbott (198x)

has described as a General Linear Reality. I argue that though a linear (dimensional)

orientation has many useful purposes it may not be well suited to describing the kinds of

relational processes that Bourdieu's theory of relational analysis brings to the fore.

Instead, I suggest the use of a more topological model of space such as that developed by

network theorists. At the end of the paper I offer some examples of what this might look

like.

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Bourdieu's Theory of Relational Analysis

Bourdieu's embrace of a relational as opposed to a substantialist mode of analysis

is a reflection of his debt to structuralism. It was, after all, the principal accomplishment

of Saussure (19x) to have initially made this move in linguistics. The foundation of

Saussure's accomplishments was his insight that meaning is patterned out of systems of

similarity and difference . The ability to discern differences in sounds depends upon the

repertoires of sound distinctions that operate within a larger system of language. One

important implication is the arbitrariness of the sign. According to Saussure meanings are

not linked to any essential characteristic of the sounds to which they are associated.

Instead, meanings are built up out of patterns of difference between alternative

signifieds. This is, in simple terms, precisely what Bourdieu embraces with his argument

about the need for relational analysis.

But it is important to put this intellectual maneuver in context. For one very

significant implication is that Bourdieu intends by this maneuver to signal his concern for

the inherent meaningfulness of social forms and the concomitant demand that

sociological research be grounded in an interpretative approach. Institutions, according

to Bourdieu, can be (and indeed, must be) read like a language. This is perhaps the most

important implication of Bourdieu's embrace of a relational mode of analysis.

But it is also important to see how his reliance on a structuralist theory of

interpretation matters. It has always been an important virtue of structuralism that

meanings are treated as data to be analyzed in accordance with a set of formal theories

and methods. Another highly significant feature of Bourdieu's work is his ongoing

embrace of a particular kind of empirical social science. Indeed, for my taste, it is this

insistence of Bourdieu on the need to combine an ongoing and reflexive theoretical

stance with a relentlessly empirical and data oriented research program that makes his

work so very appealing. I would submit that the use of a structuralist model of

interpretation (with its emphasis on meanings as being constituted through and by

systems of difference ) is another critical element of Bourdieu's orientation because it

provides a vehicle through which Bourdieu's concern with formal analysis can bee

brought together with his framing of institutional life as meaningfully constituted.

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However, it should also be said that Bourdieu is also not a structuralist in the

older sense of the term. Structuralism in the traditional sense, the structuralism of

Suassure, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, and the like, had some very significant and ultimately

critical flaws. The most damaging of these, I believe, is the problem of the what might be

called the infinite textuality of social life. Here is where Derrida and the post-

structuralist settled in with a most devastating impact. Wherever a meaning can be

deduced in the structuralist sense through its location within a systems of differences, so

too can an infinity of other differences be identified that leave the meaning to be seen as

arbitrary and imprecise. Any pretense toward certainty of interpretation is by this logic

and inherently hegemonic effort of imposing one difference as primary over and against

others. The implications of this are potentially devastating for any sociological project

that both privileges meaning while also hoping to advance a more scientific or, more

formally grounded style of investigation.

While post-structuralism as an intellectual movement swept across Europe and

eventually, across the humanities in the United States as well, Bourdieu refused to make

that that turn. And indeed, it was here, probably more than anyplace else that Bourdieu

has made what I think is probably his most important contribution to an empirical

sociology of culture. It is through the development of practice theory that Bourdieu

accomplishes this and provides something of a barrier against the infinite textuality of the

world. He does by asserting that meanings are always and invariably embedded within

domains of practical activity. Thus to know something is to know it from the perspective

of its locatedness within a material and sensual world. Meanings live in the world

because they derive from the material experience of the world. It is this maneuver that

allows him to slip the noose of structuralist methodology. By anchoring his interpretative

approach in a theory of practice, Bourdieu provides us with a reason to see some

meanings as more valid, more meaningful, more empirically measurable than others. It is

because they are linked through forms of practice that any particular set of differences

should be seen as meaningful, and thus as being constitutive of a given discursive form.

This does not imply, however, a determinancy of the material over the ideal.

Rather, for Bourdieu, the two domains are mutually constitutive. Practices are equally

dependent upon and constituted by ways of knowing and understanding. To engage in a

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practice is always to put in place a frame of understanding, a set of ideas, a cultural text.

Indeed, it is the intrinsic duality of these two domains — of the cultural and the practical

— which completes Bourdieu's transformation of a structuralist method of interpretation

into his own approach to relational analysis. It is not just that features of institutional life

are meaningful because they are constituted through systems of difference, they are

meaningful because they are implicated in forms of practice and through that implication

their intrinsic institutionally specific differences are constituted. If institutions can be

read like a language, it is only by looking for them in the texts of institutional practice.

Bourdieu's Relational Analysis in Practice

Bourdieu is not simply an advocate for a relational analysis, he is an

accomplished practitioner. Indeed, it is in the doing of empirical work that his most

sophisticated meta-theoretical concerns have emerged. Consider, for example,

Bourdieu's analysis of the relationship between cultural capital and class structure. In a

long series of work stretching back to the early 1960's Bourdieu has sought to criticize

the seemingly objective character of the French system of educational stratification. For

Bourdieu, the system is neither objective in the sense of being universalistic and

unbiased, nor is it objective in the Marxist sense of being driven purely by the materiality

of class hegemony. Rather Bourdieu shows that the educational system is founded on an

implicit system of reward according to which those students who are able to successfully

participate within the refined nuances of elite culture are accorded greater respect,

intellectual resources, and institutional success.

His work on cultural capital is an example of the way that Bourdieu treats

institutions as interpretative domains. It is meanings that are at work here. The process by

which students' stock of cultural capital is transmuted into institutional success relies on a

communicative system of understanding. Students share meaning with teachers and other

mentors. Important educational tasks are geared toward demonstrations of the very sort

of cultural refinement that a familiarity with the form and content of high culture can

provide. Moreover, aside from the type of intellectual mastery that is involved, there is a

far more basic social process at work. Students with high levels of cultural capital are

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able to incite a common sense of identity and co-membership with key institutional

gatekeepers.

This is also a good example of how Bourdieu treats culture and social structure as

dually constituted. It is one's orientation toward culture that produces the objective

outcomes of one's educational outcomes and class trajectory. Thus, culture produces

social structure. But it is one's class origins that produce the sorts of fundamental

orientation and cultural habitus that shapes one's stock of cultural capital and determines

one's likelihood of success within this institutional sphere. Social structure produces

culture.

There is another level of practice involved in this research as well, it is the

practice of empirical analysis and the evaluation of social data which Bourdieu uses to

test and demonstrate the broader sociological arguments highlighted in this discussion.

One can see this, for example, in Distinction, Bourdieu's book on class culture and taste

in France. I have included here (see figure 1) one of Bourdieu's classic figures from

Distinction in which he superimposes two graphs, one which represents the space of

social positions and the other the space of cultural tastes. The figure is constructed in

such a way that the space is organized along two dimensions, a vertical dimension

representing the overall volume of capital (from low to high), and a horizontal dimension

representing the overall composition of capital. This latter dimension runs from a

measure (on the left) of a high proportion of cultural capital and a low proportion of

economic capital to (on the right) the inverse measure reflecting a low proportion of

cultural capital and a high proportion of economic capital. This space is then used to

identify the social location of different groups (or what Bourdieu describes as class

factions). Private sector executives are located toward the right side of the graph (because

their capital is largely economic) and towards the top (because they possess a lot of

capital). Artistic producers are located at about the same point on the vertical dimension

(because they too have a lot of capital) but they are off to the far left because their capital

is largely composed of cultural (rather than economic resources).

Here again, we see Bourdieu's relational analysis expressed in the practice of his

sociological research. Class locations are defined relationally within a space that is

defined by one's orientation toward culture. And, here, in the same space we see

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superimposed both a mapping of class locations and a mapping of cultural tastes. As

with his work on education, Bourdieu's argument is that class and culture are mutually

constitutive. One's class location is defined by one's relationship to culture and culture is

defined by the social organization of class positions.

Finally, consider the more generalized concept of field as developed by Bourdieu.

The basic arguments here are the same. Indeed, it is possible to trace out a clear line of

development from Bourdieu's early work on educational stratification and cultural

capital on to the more generalized analyses of a wide array of institutional fields. The

concept of the field is ubiquitous in Bourdieu's work (though it was largely absent from

his earlier writings). Fields are “relatively autonomous social microcosms”

corresponding to regions of institutional life. Examples include the field of art, academia,

the religious field, the legal field, and so on (Bourdieu, 1983, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1991).

Bourdieu defines the concept of a field in such a way as to embrace and express his

notion of relational analysis. Each field is defined by a set of social relationships (or

social locations) that are organized according to a shared understanding about the

meaning of what goes on inside the field or, as Bourdieu puts it, each field consists of

“spaces of objective relations that are the site of a logic and a necessity” (Bourdieu and

Wacquant, 1992, p. 97).

Here, the duality of culture and practice is very much in evidence. According to

Bourdieu, one’s position within a field is determined by one’s relationship to the system

of meaning that is operating there (one’s stock of field specific capital). At the same time

the system of meaning that provides the foundation for the habitus of action within a

field is itself determined by individuals and groups who occupy positions which enable

them to shape and determine the character and contours of the meaning system which

dominates the field. In this sense the concept of a field is very much driven by

Bourdieu's concern with developing a relational analysis. Every field is a site within

which some type of capital operates and, thus, each field includes a fundamental metric

according to which any given individual (or group or profession, or class fraction) can be

assessed vis-à-vis others according to their relative possession of field specific capital. It

is this which determines their likelihood of having power and success within that sphere.

For Bourdieu, fields are always arenas of conflict. Individuals and groups struggle for

7

objective locations within the field which enable them to determine the meanings which

will come to be recognized as legitimate. Thus, "(t)he juridical field is the site of a

competition for monopoly of the right to determine the law" (Bourdieu, 1987, p. 817).

The Limitations of Bourdieu's Practice

Bourdieu, of course, has many critics, and I am one. Unlike most critics, however,

my concern is less with Bourdieu's theoretical orientation which, quite frankly, I find to

be just about as impressive as any contemporary sociologist that I can think of, but rather

with his practice. In other words, it is not with his ambitions for a relational analysis that

I find fault, but rather with his method of operationalizing the theory, his practical use as

an empirical sociologist. Of course, if we are to accept Bourdieu's argument about the

duality of culture and practice, and I do, then it is in some sense impossible to be critical

of his method and not also be critical of his theory at the same time and that will also be

true in this case. Nonetheless, it is the methodological part of his work with which I am

most concerned.

My concerns have to do with the way in which Bourdieu's relational analysis is

operationalized through measurement and specifically, through the imposition of the

kinds of assumptions that derive from what Andrew Abbott (19xx) has described as

sociology's general linear reality. Consider again the model of social space depicted in

figure 1. As I've already noted, this model has a number of virtues. It treats institutional

domains as meaningful space. It invokes a structuralist method of interpretation in the

sense that it is the system of differences between social locations that is seen as being

meaningful and it captures the duality of culture and practice by locating class fractions

according to their stance vis-à-vis cultural capital and cultural lifestyles at the same time

that the meaning of cultural goods is in some sense defined by their appropriation by

class fractions. However, there is also something very limiting about this model and it

has to do with the fact that similarities are always ordered in a linear relationship, in this

case defined by two dimensions of capital volume and capital composition. I see two

problems with this.

First, other cultural logics and orientations are simply absent from the

measurement of this space. Everyone, no matter who they are or where they are assessed

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in accordance to their degree of possession of the cultural styles and knowledge of the

elite class fractions. While Bourdieu uses this metric quite self-consciously as a way of

highlighting the ways in which power is manifest within the space, the conceptual

demands are, I believe, ultimately too severe. Other forms of cultural mastery, other

styles of communicative knowledge, other caches of culturally specific skills are simply

erased from the model.

Second, the field is seen to be driven entirely by the logic of the macro-level

struggle over the defining dimensions of this space. It is one's orientation toward the

dominant culture and one's struggle to locate ones' self there that is seen to be relevant.

Other conflicts, other engagements and, especially, more localized struggles over

resources and positions are not taken into account in this model. And yet a field is

always composed of many alternative battles and competitions, not only those that

concern the dominant forms of capital.

Of course these types of critiques are not new. Others have made much of these

types of problems in Bourdieu's work. However my emphasis again is not on the way in

which Bourdieu's concepts (of cultural capital, fields, and relational analysis more

generally) have been specified but the ways in which he has been driven to operationalize

them in these types of linear models. What I propose is that we re-think the concept of a

measurement space in terms of a non-linear analytic and, in the process, we go back to

consider what Bourdieu's theoretical constructs might look like in such from the

perspective of such an analytic orientation.

Kurt Lewin's Concept of Field Space

As a way to develop this argument I would like to go back to consider the work of

social sciences' original field theorist, Kurt Lewin. Lewin adapted the concept of field

space from its origins in theoretical physics to his research on social cognition. A

member of the Berlin gestalt psychology group, Lewin was familiar with the work of

Kohler and Koffka on perceptual totality (the preeminence of the whole over the parts)

and their use of the concept of “field” as an organizing principal. But Lewin differed

from the gestalt theorists in several ways. He was more curious about human motivation

9

than he was about perception and more interested in how social situations affected

cognition than in how the mind itself functioned. These differences increased when

Lewin fled Hitler’s Germany in the early 30’s, took a position as director of the Child

Welfare Research Station at the University of Iowa, and began studying interaction in

children’s play (Deutsch and Krauss, 1965; Mey, 1972).

Lewin was both impressed by the complexity of the phenomena he set out to

study and convinced that a more methodologically rigorous approach was needed. He

turned to the natural sciences for inspiration and found it in Einstein’s discussion of field

space as a "totality of coexisting facts which are conceived of as mutually

interdependent" (Lewin, 1951, p. 240). Lewin began to use this concept to construct

models of an individual’s “life space” which he described as “the person and the

psychological environment as it exists for him” (Lewin, 1951, p. 57). These were

essentially cognitive maps of individual’s choice situations. They included “specific

items as particular goals, stimuli, needs, social relations, as well as more general

characteristics of the field as the atmosphere (for instance, the friendly, tense, or hostile

atmosphere) or the amount of freedom.” The definition was pragmatic. The life space

included within it “everything that affects behavior at a given time” (p. 241).

The most distinctive feature of Lewin’s concept of a field was the type of

mathematics which defined it. Inspired by the work of the German philosopher Ernst

Cassirer, Lewin was convinced that life spaces were essentially relational systems.i

Objects in the life space stood in particular relation to one another but their location could

not be defined in precise metric terms. Thus it was impossible to specify precise

dimensions, linear measurements, or definable coordinate systems within which objects

could be located inside an individual’s life space.

Topology theory, a branch of mathematics concerned with the formal analysis of

relational systems, provided Lewin with a rigorous foundation for conceptualizing such a

space. Lewin used topology theory to construct a spatial model which possessed neither

metric extension nor dimensional orientation.ii Rather, he saw the life space as a

collection of regions, each of which represented a relevant element of the individual’s

experience (see figure 2). The “meaning” of each region was defined by its location vis-

à-vis the other regions within the life space. The individual, represented as a

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dimensionless “point-region” in the space, was seen as affected by objects (spatial sub-

regions) that exerted positive and negative forces.

Perceived goal objects have a “demand-character.” Food is “inviting”; itseems to say “Come on.” Punishment is “repellent,” and things that lead toit seem to “force us away.” Hence the goal objects themselves exert field-forces and they are said to have either a positive or a negative valence(Allport, 1955, p. 152).

Behavior is caused by an individual’s “locomotion” through the field which is determined

by tensions associated with various regional boundaries, barriers, vectors, and fields of

force.

Though he drew heavily upon topology theory, Lewin ultimately found these

mathematical conventions to be too constraining. In particular he felt the need to be able

to superimpose indicators of direction, force, and distance traveled on top of the more

purely relational topological framework in order to capture the complex dynamics of

objects within his space. He called the resulting amalgam “hodological space” and

claimed that this was a space that “permits us to speak in a mathematically precise

manner of equality and differences of direction, and of changes in distance, without

presupposing the 'measuring' of angles, directions, distances, which is usually not

possible in a social-psychological field" (1951, p. 150-151).

His attempt to represent complex social phenomena inside the parameters of

hodological space were sometimes complicated and obscure. But this was a result of his

insistence on tackling the enormous complexities of social existence in a fashion that was

unfailingly concrete. Rather than moving to higher levels of abstraction, Lewin insisted

on staying at the level of concrete situations which he sought to represent in relational

terms. Everything that mattered was present and visible and precisely located with

respect to everything else in the field space.

In a sense Bourdieu is the most important contemporary successor to Lewin's

project. Bourdieu’s linkage to Lewin is rather tenuous; he was not one of Lewin’s

students and Lewin was only one of many intellectual inspirations for Bourdieu’s work.iii

Nonetheless, Bourdieu’s research exemplifies the principles enunciated by Lewin. He is

an eloquent advocate for the necessity of seeing the duality of subjective and objective

social phenomena, he insists upon the importance of a “relational mode of thinking,” the

11

concept of “field” is central to his research, and he consistently grounds his empirical

work in formal measurement and analysis. However, there is no trace of Lewin's

measurement space (his hodological approach) in Bourdieu's operationalization of the

concept of field. In a sense this is not very surprising. Hodlogical space was surely an

anachronism and a rather clumsy analytical tool to wield. However the limitations of

hodological space need not drive one to the kind of linear measurement strategies

employed by Bourdieu. This is because other developments, after Lewin, point to a

different way of measuring space that preserves the topological orientation that was so

critical to Lewin's project.

Lewin had an enormous impact on U.S. social science even though the

hodological approach to field theory practically disappeared after his death. Evidence of

his influence is widely scattered. In psychology, the idea of cognitive dissonance (an

outgrowth of Lewin’s ideas about the reduction of cognitive tension) was developed by

his student Leon Festinger (Deutsch and Krauss, 1965). In sociology Katz and

Lazarsfeld drew upon and popularized Lewin's concept of channels and gatekeepers in

their book, Personal Influence,iv and Richard Emerson's work on exchange theory derives

in part from Lewin's conceptualization of power.v The single most important legacy of

Lewin’s work, however, was social network analysis. Like Lewin’s field space, network

models are topological. Elements are defined relationally according to the pattern of ties

which exist between them. There is no metric extension in this space (distance is

calculated by the number of links separating two nodes) and no dimensional orientation

(for example, up, down, right and left are undefined).

While a number of intellectual antecedents to modern network theory can be

identified,vi Lewin’s early use of topological mathematics was clearly one of the most

significant.vii It was Lewin’s student, Alex Bavelas (1948), who developed one of the

first mathematical approaches to analyzing the network structure of groups by

formalizing and extending Lewin’s (1938) concepts of centrality and distance in

hodological space. When Dorwin Cartwright succeeded Lewin as Director of the

University of Michigan’s Research Center for Group Dynamics he initiated a

collaboration with Frank Harary, a mathematician, to evaluate the potential usefulness of

"hodological space" in research on social systems. Harary found that basic concepts of

12

the Lewin-Bavelas formalization were equivalent to those in a young branch of

mathematics known as "graph theory" (Harary and Norman, 1953). This discovery put

Lewin's hodological space in a broader intellectual context (Harary, Norman and

Cartwright, 1965). It also stimulated the use of these models in research on a variety of

social phenomena including Bavelas’ (1950) work on patterns of communication in task-

oriented groups, Cartwright’s (1959b) use of graph theory in organizational analysis, and

French's (1956) formalization of the concept of balance in cognitive or social structures.

From these early developments the field of network analysis exploded into a far-

flung and innovative set of methodological and theoretical tools for the analysis of social

relationships. Much of what happens in network analysis is, however, from Bourdieu's

perspective quite limited. Indeed, Bourdieu has criticized the project quite forcefully

(e.g., Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 114). But in his rejection of network analysis,

Bourdieu has missed the important possibilities that the topological approach to formal

analysis might be able to afford him.

Topological Space and the Concept of Field in the New Institutionalism

One way to consider the possibility of how network ideas might be combined

with a more updated approach to field theory is to examine the alternative model of field

space that has grown up in the institutional study of organizations. In this literature the

term “organizational field” is widely used. It has emerged as the principal spatial

metaphor for the new institutional school of organizational analysts, a group of scholars

who seek to explain the character of markets and industries by identifying the impact of

taken for granted institutional systems of ideas, rules, practices, and conventions. Most

contemporary usage of the term can be traced back to the agenda setting article by

DiMaggio and Powell (1983). In this essay, concepts from the networks literature and

from Bourdieu were added to Roland Warren’s original adaptation of Lewin's ideas to

describe an organizational field.viii The resulting construct provides a tool for analyzing

markets and industries that carries forward many of Lewin’s original ideas about how to

study social environments.

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According to DiMaggio and Powell, an organizational field consists of “those

organizations that, in the aggregate, constitute a recognized area of institutional life: key

suppliers, resource and product consumers, regulatory agencies, and other organizations

that produce similar services or products” (1983, p. 148). An important feature of this

definition is its concreteness. Much as Lewin considered the life space to include

“everything that affects behavior at a given time,” so too do DiMaggio and Powell define

an organizational field so as to include every relevant organization. As they note in an

early draft of their essay, this is notably different than the ecologists’ approach to

organizational space because:

“(u)nlike the organizational-population approach, which usually connotesa set of organizations with the same formal purposes and treatsorganizations that supply resources, purchase outputs, and regulateactivities as the selecting environment, the field perspective rejects theoften artificial distinction between organization and environment andviews these organizations as part of the system to be analyzed” (1982, p.11).

Thus, just as Lewin insisted upon treating all objects within a defined life space as being

visible, concrete, and relationally located vis-à-vis one another, so too do DiMaggio and

Powell consider the field space of a specific market or industry to consist of “the totality

of relevant actors” (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983, p. 148).

Like Lewin, DiMaggio and Powell see this space as being relationally defined.

Their use of concepts from the networks literature is especially apparent here. DiMaggio

and Powell invoke two network ideas, the “connectivity” between organizations and the

notion of organizations standing in “structurally equivalent” positions, as part of their

discussion of why the concept of the field is the appropriate way to understand

organizational environments. Moreover, their most important theoretical contributions,

such as their arguments about isomorphism, are grounded in network imagery.

Isomorphism refers to processes that promote sameness in organizations within a

field. DiMaggio and Powell identify three field-level processes that generate such

changes, each evidence of a different type of network interaction. Coercive isomorphism

derives from “both formal and informal pressures exerted on organizations by other

organizations upon which they are dependent.” Normative isomorphism focuses on field

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level channels through which personnel (especially professional staff) flow between

organizations. Mimetic isomorphism concerns the process by which agents within

organizations regard one another, with successful organizations serving as models for

others.

Thus, DiMaggio and Powell’s model of organizational fields is strongly rooted in

a topological metaphor of space. There are no coordinates, no dimensional orientations,

no regions defined by qualities separate from the organizations contained within them.

Instead they describe organizational space as a communicative medium, a place through

which ideas, symbolic gestures, and collective norms flow along three different types of

structural pathways. A field with high structuration is one in which these communicative

conduits are extensive and effective and, as a consequence, the organizations within the

field demonstrate a high degree of similarity to one another.

Topological Space and the Duality of Culture and Practice

Contrast the kinds of social processes that are suggested by Bourdieu's

field model and that of the new institutionalists. For Bourdieu, field space is describable

in terms of specific (but abstract) dimensions and, thus, one’s position in space is

determined by the levels of those abstract qualities that one possesses. All locations

within Bourdieu’s field space are thus defined in accordance with these abstract qualities.

In practice, this means that all forms of interaction, identification, contestation, and social

conflict must be represented in terms that reflect the hegemony of those who possess and

define cultural capital. Many of the criticisms that have been leveled against Bourdieu

(see, for example, Calhoun, et. al. 1993) can be traced back to the limitations imposed by

this spatial orientation.

The field space of the new institutionalist, on the other hand, focuses attention on

how ideas about organizational success, critique, and evaluation are developed, diffused,

and determined as normative. Many localized sites of conflict are imaginable and even

measurable within this space. The field as a whole is describable in general terms (as

possessing higher or lower levels of structuration) but particular locations are defined not

in terms of general linear dimensions but rather in terms of localized patterns of contact,

exchange, and competition.

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This is not to say, however, that Bourdieu is wrong and the new institutionalist are

right. While their approach to the measurement of field space strikes me as being more

consistent with the theory of relational analysis that Bourdieu has advocated, there are

some very significant limitations to how institutional approaches to field space have been

constructed. Specifically, the new institutionalists have lost the important thread of

analyzing the duality of meaning and social structure that is such a defining characteristic

of Bourdieu's own work. But notice that this type of duality was actually present in the

original work by Lewin.

Recall that Lewin was trying to understand the social psychology of human

motivation. To properly represent these types of problems, Lewin was convinced that

both subjective and objective factors had to be brought to bear. In other words, to explain

social behavior Lewin believed that it was necessary to understand how objective features

of the social world and individuals’ meaningful representations of those phenomena were

combined together within the same relational field space. Indeed, Lewin believed that

there was an inherent duality between the two domains.ix In Lewin’s terms,

… one can say that behavior and development depend upon the state ofthe person and his environment, B = F (P, E). In this equation the person(P) and his environment (E) have to be viewed as variables which aremutually dependent on each other. In other words, to understand or topredict behavior, the person and his environment have to be considered asone constellation of interdependent factors (Lewin, 1951, p. 239-40).

The question of how to analyze this interdependency within the framework of an

empirically rigorous and mathematically grounded social science was the central question

which Lewin pursued throughout his career and a significant catalyst in his turn to a

topologically defined measurement space.

This component of Lewin’s work was abandoned by the early network theorists

who sought to focus exclusively on the relational properties of social structure.

Subjectivity and agentic behavior were viewed as derivative of network processes. In a

sense, the return to a one dimensional model of social action was the cost that was paid

for substituting the elegant framework of graph theory for the relatively clumsy

mathematics of hodological space.

16

More interesting perhaps, in spite of their theoretical emphasis on institutionally

shared meanings, the new institutionalists have been equally shy about grounding the

analysis of meaning inside their model of field space. Similarities and differences in the

structure of organizations, their goal statements, their ideologies, and the practices that

they employ are measured and compared but the ideas themselves, the meanings which

are embodied in these institutional rules and are expressed by all these homogeneous

organizational structures are absent from analysis.

Consider DiMaggio and Powell’s (1983) description of the structuration of an

organizational field. The concept of structuration is borrowed from Bourdieu by way of

Giddens (1979) who uses the term to describes the process by which social actions and

social structures are mutually constituted. In brief, Giddens argues that social action, as

derived from repertoires of practice, is constituted through meaning. Meanings and

practices are embedded within social structures which are in turn continually reproduced

through action. It is thus the connection between meaning and practice that transforms the

fluidity of actions into the stability of structures.

DiMaggio and Powell’s use of the concept of structuration reflects their

recognition that meanings and practices are co-constitutive. Informational conduits don’t

exist without the information that flows through them nor does the informational flow

exist without those conduits. Yet, in their essay, DiMaggio and Powell define

structuration in a way that emphasizes structures and minimizes meaning. They identify

four components of structuration: (1) “an increase in the extent of interaction among

organizations in the field,” (2) “the emergence of sharply defined interorganizational

structures of domination and patterns of coalition,” (3) “an increase in the information

load with which organizations in a field must contend,” and (4) “the development of a

mutual awareness among participants in a set of organizations that they are involved in a

common enterprise” (1983, p. 148). These definitions imply and have generally been

interpreted to mean that the structuration of an organizational field refers to an increasing

level of communicative connectivity. This shifts the focus of research toward a concrete

mapping out of the communicative pathways through which meanings flow. Thus

DiMaggio and Powell’s appropriation of the concept of structuration quickly drifts away

from meaning toward structure.

17

I see this as emblematic of the way in which the metaphor of field space has

developed in institutionalist practice. While the project as a whole is conditioned on the

assumption that it is the meaningfulness of space that matters, in its implementation, it is

the space itself (seen now as system of communicative structures) which is actually

revealed through empirical analysis. Demonstrations of the homogenization of

organizational structure is used again and again as a way to prove the existence and

efficacy of these communicative pathways. The meanings embedded inside these

institutional objects are left unexamined. The institutionalists have thus created a spatial

metaphor which privileges the structures of communication, over the actual meanings

that flow through these structures. As a result, the communicative channels in an

organizational field are not analyzed in a way that enables these meanings to be treated as

constitutive of the field itself.

An Alternative Approach to Measuring Fields

Neither Bourdieu nor the new institutionalists have gotten it right. Bourdieu is

right insofar as he insists on the construction of models of field space which include at

their very core, both meaning and practice, subject and object, social structure and forms

of interpretation. But he is wrong in his attempt to locate these phenomena in a linear,

dimensional space. The new institutionalists have a much more pliable model of field

space which is able to incorporate the kinds of relational analysis that Bourdieu has called

for. Locations within the space are defined relationally one unto the other as a system of

differences . These patterns of difference are far more reminiscent of the sort of

structuralist analyses that characterize traditional approaches to structural interpretation.

This is really not surprising once one considers the historical parallels between European

structuralism and American style network analysis (Mohr, 2000). However, the

institutionalist model of the field lacks the integral combination of meanings and social

structures that is such an important part of Bourdieu's rethinking of traditional

structuralism.

As a way to offer something other than mere critique I will close by showing one

final example of a model of field space. This last example comes from my own research

(Mohr and Guerra-Pearson, forthcoming) concerning the social organization of

18

organizational fields within the social welfare sector at the turn of the century (see figure

3). In this analysis we have located organizations (represented as small circles) in a

relational space as defined by pairwise similarities and differences according to how

these organizations go about naming and defining the character of their institutional

niche. In other words, like Bourdieu, we see field space as being meaningfully

constituted. Organizations are located in the space according to how they talk about the

character of the institutional domain. But unlike Bourdieu we have not sought to impose

a uni-dimensional metric according to which these systems of meanings need to be

represented. Rather, like network scholars and the new institutionalists we see the space

as being topologically defined, as a series of localized interactions between organizations

that share and contest the character of meanings appropriate for a given set of

institutional tasks.

Conclusion

In this paper I have sought to argue that Bourdieu's relational approach to

sociological investigation is an important largely accurate theorization of how to study

social institutions. But I have argued that Bourdieu's theory is better than his practice.

While he has made important advances in terms of thinking about how to improve upon

traditional structuralist measures of meaning (through the duality of culture and practice)

his use of linear metaphors for measuring this field space is a problem. It is a problem

because it limits the ways in which a genuinely relational analysis can be carried out. By

imposing the methodological hegemony of linear dimensions on a complexly

differentiated social space, important social processes are lost. Specifically, the use of a

linear space as a way of representing fields tends to subject all social interactions to the

tyranny of a particular interactional system, a logic of the dominated class fractions over

all the rest.

I have sought to suggest that there are alternatives to this way of measuring fields.

Drawing on the original conception of a field by Kurt Lewin and showing how his

approach to hodological space was transformed into network analysis and, eventually,

into the concept of a field as represented by contemporary institutional scholars, I have

argued that a more topological approach to the measurement of field space would be

19

more properly suited to the kinds of institutional phenomena that Bourdieu has set out to

describe.

However, I have argued that doing so will require the development of new

understandings about how to measure fields empirically. This is because the application

of topological measurement strategies to the study of organizational fields has left behind

Bourdieu's ever so important corrective to structuralist methods of interpretation, the

assertion that culture and practice, the social space and the interpretative space, are

mutually constitutive and dually structured.

20

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DiMaggio, Paul J. and Walter W. Powell. 1983. "The Iron Cage Revisited: InstitutionalIsomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields." AmericanSociological Review 48: 147-160.

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Figure 1. Bourdieu's Model of Field Space

24

Figure 2. Lewin's Conception of Hodological Space

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Figure 3. Organizational Forms in Field Space (1888)

-2.5

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-1.5

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0.5

1.0

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2.0

2.5

-2.5 -2.0 -1.5 -1.0 -0.5 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5

Dispensary

Dietkitchen

DayNursery

Lodging

IndSchool

Shelter

Mission H.

Youthclub

MR Assoc.

Benevolent

SWrkBurcy

Missionary

Church

Other

26

i See Mustafa Emirbayer (1997) for an insightful discussion of Cassirer’s influence

on American social science.

ii Mansfield describes the essential features of topological mathematics with the

following example, "if a rubber doughnut is stretched and bent without tearing, the

resulting object always has a hole in it. The hole of a doughnut is thus an intrinsic

qualitative property of the doughnut. In fact a rubber doughnut can be stretched and bent

without tearing into the shape of a coffee cup (the hole in the doughnut forms the handle

of the coffee cup). One would expect, therefore, that the intrinsic qualitative properties of

a doughnut are identical to those of a coffee cup. Indeed, a topologist has been described

as a man who doesn't know the difference between a doughnut and a coffee cup" (1963,

p.1).

iii Although Bourdieu did cite Lewin as an inspiration, especially in his earlier work

(Swartz, 1997, p. 123), Bourdieu himself says that it was Ernst Cassirer who served as

the most important influence on the development of his commitment to a relational

thinking (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 97; Swartz, 1997, p. 61).

iv Juan Linz (personal communication) reports that Lewin's ideas had a profound

impact on his cohort of graduate students in sociology at Columbia during the 1950's.

27

v Many other examples can be pointed to; Harald Mey (1972) provides an extensive

catalogue. See also Cartwright (1959a).

vi Commentators on the origins of social network analysis cite many different

influences. In the 1930’s, Jacob Moreno, a psychiatrist by training, developed

“sociograms” for representing the interpersonal structure of groups and, along with his

co-author Jennings began developing quantitative measures of network structure. British

urban anthropologists such as J.A. Barnes and Elizabeth Bott published influential work

in the 1950s. In his early work, Harrison White (1963) drew heavily upon the work of the

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Other psychologists, including the Gestalt

theorist, Fritz Heider, made important contributions in the 1940’s and 50’s. See

Wasserman and Faust (1994) for a useful summary of these issues.

vii My discussion of Lewin’s relationship to early network theory in this paragraph

draws extensively upon suggestions generously offerred by Dorwin Cartwright.

viii Although DiMaggio and Powell invoke the concept of field without any explicit

citations in the 1983 version of their article, an earlier version of the paper (1982) lists

both Bourdieu (1971) and Warren (1967; Warren et. al. 1974) as inspirations. Also cited

are Howard Aldrich and Albert Reiss’s (1976) article on community ecology as well as

Herman Turk’s (1970) work on organizational networks.

ix Lewin’s focus on relational dualities is not accidental. In Gestalt psychology, a

key issue had always been how to understand the dualistic relationship between the

conscious and the physiological components of perception. As Lewin shifted his attention

to problems in social psychology, he turned this interest into a concern with the dualistic

relationship between self and society.

28