Fields, Trajectories, and Symbolic Power

Abstract This chapter demonstrates how Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology can address challenges in research of polycentric governing, such as the blurring of geographical scales, the ambiguous relationship between private and public sectors, and the fluid constructions of authority. Bourdieu’s practice-oriented approach is analytically promising in methodological and conceptual terms. By taking practices as a main methodological entry-point, his account allows researchers to use everyday activities of governing—such as negotiating, mandating a group of experts, and defining benchmarks—as a key to understand social order and change. Regarding concepts, Bourdieu’s vocabulary, particularly his notion of field, provides useful tools to study governing from a relational point of view, which overcomes explanations stuck in an agent-structure dichotomy. Following Bourdieu, a description of emerging trans-scalar and trans-sectoral fields—e.g. of security, human rights, and finance—focuses on knowledge structures, power relations, and practices of in- and exclusion, always in their particular trajectories and histories. Bourdieu’s account addresses power relations comprehensively, allowing for the study of different facets of power that are at work simultaneously. In Bourdieu’s vocabulary, power, legitimacy, and techniques are interrelated, with power as the driving forces that constitutes the means for a wider analysis of domination in distinct fields. However, this strong emphasis on symbolic power and domination implies that the normative dimension of practices and opportunities of reflexivity and critical agency are downplayed. The chapter illustrates these points empirically with reference to different Bourdieu-oriented research examples around security, trade, and health.