Abstract
Despite some promising steps in the right direction, organizational analysis has yet to exploit fully the theoretical and empirical possibilities inherent in the writings of Pierre Bourdieu. While certain concepts associated with his thought, such as field and capital, are already widely known in the organizational literature, the specific ways in which these terms are being used provide ample evidence that the full significance of his relational mode of thought has yet to be sufficiently apprehended. Moreover, the almost complete inattention to habitus, the third of Bourdieu’s major concepts, without which the concepts of field and capital (at least as he deployed them) make no sense, further attests to the misappropriation of his ideas and to the lack of appreciation of their potential usefulness. It is our aim in this paper, by contrast, to set forth a more informed and comprehensive account of what a relational – and, in particular, a Bourdieu-inspired – agenda for organizational research might look like. Accordingly, we examine the implications of his theoretical framework for interorganizational relations, as well as for organizations themselves analyzed as fields. The primary advantage of such an approach, we argue, is the central place accorded therein to the social conditions under which inter- and intraorganizational power relations are produced, reproduced, and contested.
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Notes
It was DiMaggio, instrumental in interpreting Bourdieu’s work for American sociologists before the translation of Distinction in 1984, who was the first to use the concept of organizational field. In an early article (1983: 149), he proposed that the organizational field be thought of “in the dual sense in which Bourdieu uses ‘champ,’ to signify both common purpose and an arena of strategy and conflict.” Though the concept is now widely used in organization theory, few scholars besides DiMaggio have acknowledged the original connection between Bourdieu’s field concept and that of the organizational field, and almost none has used the concept as part of the theoretical triad to which it belongs.
By the “neo-institutionalist” tradition, we mean the approach to organizational analysis first articulated in the 1970s and 1980s by scholars such as DiMaggio and Powell (1991a [1983]), Meyer and his collaborators (e.g., Meyer and Rowan 1991 [1977]; and Meyer and Scott 1983), and Zucker (e.g., 1977, 1983), who were themselves building on the earlier institutionalism of Dalton (1959), Gouldner (1954), and Selznick (1949, 1957). We also mean more recent work by the above (e.g., DiMaggio 1991; Meyer 1994; Meyer et al. 1994; Powell 1991; Scott 1991; 1994a) as well as by scholars who subsequently expanded upon the initial neo-institutionalist formulations (e.g., Dobbin 1994a, 1995; Fligstein 1990, 2001; Guillén 1994, 2001; Hoffman and Ventresca 1999; Mezias 1990, 1995). By the “resource dependence” tradition, we mean the approach to organizational analysis originally articulated by Pfeffer and Salancik (2003 [1978]) and subsequently expanded by organization theorists such as Burt (1982), Mizruchi and Stearns (1988), and Gulati and Gargiulo (1999).
The approach we are advocating points beyond the limitations of “middle-range” theories, for a key feature of relational thinking is its refusal to remain content with formulation of small or partial “laws of the middle range,” the mode of theorizing so dear to Merton: scientific propositions have significance “only within the theoretical system they constitute, not in isolation. Science admits only systems of laws” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 96).
Bourdieu calls the limit case of fields in which struggles over power have largely been extinguished apparatuses; he suggests that Luhmann’s systems theory pertains more to the latter than it does to fields proper. He adds, however, that the limit of apparatus “is never actually reached” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 102). Moreover, the degree to which a given configuration of relations has field-like—as opposed to apparatus-like—properties is strictly a matter for empirical investigation. Historical sociologists of organizations can sometimes even discern a historical transition from the one state to the other, as in the cases of French painting during the mid-nineteenth century, when the apparatus-like ascendancy of the French Academy was broken by the symbolic revolution of Manet (Bourdieu 1993b), or of American sociology during the mid-twentieth century, when the “Capitoline” ruling triad of Parsons, Merton, and Lazarsfeld was supplanted by the warring theoretical and methodological tendencies of the 1970s and thereafter (Bourdieu 1991).
In the importance to Bourdieu’s field concept of struggles for dominance, one can see similarities to a number of past organization-theoretic approaches that likewise emphasized competition and struggle. Examples include Zald’s (1970) concept of “political economies” (see also Wamsley and Zald 1973 and Benson 1975); Levine and White’s (1961) concept of “interorganizational exchange”; Yuchtman and Seashore’s (1967) “system resource” approach; Warren’s (1967) concept of “interorganizational field”; and Pfeffer and Salancik’s (2003 [1978]) “resource dependence” approach. The rise of the neo-institutionalist paradigm, however, tended to draw attention away from conflict both within and between organizations, as neo-institutionalists themselves (e.g., Brint and Karabel 1991) came to recognize. We believe that the renewed attention to struggle and conflict stimulated by a Bourdieu-inspired approach goes far toward answering recent calls (e.g., Morrill et al. 2003) for a renewal of the attention to conflict so central to those earlier organization studies.
Social network analysis, at least since its early elaboration by the Manchester school of social anthropology (e.g., Barnes 1954; Mitchell 1956), has recognized with great clarity this issue regarding the demarcation of boundaries. However, it has not always taken sufficient account of the accompanying issue of contestation and struggle. In Bourdieu, these two issues always and necessarily go hand in hand. We shall have more to say shortly about the social networks tradition.
For an overview of the state of, and relations among, the academic disciplines engaged in the study of opera organizations, see Johnson (2007a). While it is difficult to imagine sophisticated practitioners of organizational analysis making such an error, disciplinary specialization means that scholars studying organization-based phenomena in many fields, not just musicology, are, in fact, often susceptible to such naivete.
Organizational fields sometimes, of course, include individual actors who act in the absence of organizational affiliations. Just as the presence of such actors has correctly been acknowledged in past research that relies on the concept of organizational field, the field-theoretic approach here under consideration requires that we not presume that the fields in which organizations are active are composed entirely of organizations. It does, however, require that we approach individual actors in a fundamentally relational manner, ascertaining in each case their positions in and trajectories through the fields in which they are active. We have in The Rules of Art, in fact, a book-length template for studying the impact of a single actor (the novelist Gustave Flaubert) on a field composed in part of organizations (the literary field in nineteenth-century France). It should be noted, however, that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the impact of individuals in these fields from the impact of the organizations they head. How, for example, are we to distinguish the influence of Donald Trump’s person from that of his companies when examining the organizational fields in which Trump himself is active? How, similarly, can we explain the appearance of a nineteenth-century Russian novel (Anna Karenina) at the very top of the U.S. best-seller list in 2004, just 1 week after Oprah—an individual social actor, but also the head of an entertainment company whose name is, tellingly, her own first name spelled backwards—announced it was “her” new book selection?
While this approach to locating the boundaries of the field superficially resembles network-analytic methods insofar as the latter proceed by means of an empirical mapping of relations between organizations rather than a nominalist imposition of boundaries around a population of organizations (see, e.g., Lincoln and Gerlach 2004), the emphasis of network analysis on concrete ties clearly distinguishes it from Bourdieu’s focus on relations among organizations that may have no concrete ties to one another but that are, nevertheless, participants in the relations of force and contestation structuring the field as a whole.
Under pressure to bound populations for the purpose of empirical research, organizational scholars frequently sidestep the lengthy inquiry that would in fact be required to reconstruct thoroughly the (shifting) power relations that allow certain players in the field to impose their own conception of the field on other participants. Among neo-institutionalist theorists who have acknowledged the delicacy of demarcating boundaries are DiMaggio (1983, 1986) and Fligstein (1990).
One notable exception is Baker et al.’s (1998) theoretical and empirical synthesis of dimensions of organizations often studied independently—namely, competition, power, and institutions.
Brass et al. (2004) provide a useful overview of the current state of network-analytic research on organizations.
Bourdieu has by no means been alone in levying such criticisms. Others have similarly argued, but from a resource dependence perspective, that network analysis has focused too often on observed interactions, while failing to analyze “the context of institutions, including rules and roles,” in which interaction takes place (Salancik 1995: 2).
The final part of this sentence is a paraphrase of one of Bourdieu’s own favorite formulations. Bourdieu’s statements of this formulation, it should be pointed out, never include the words “at least partly.” His way of stating the matter, in contrast to our own, arguably exposes Bourdieu to the charge that, in the end, he replaces the interactionist fallacy with an equally problematic structuralist fallacy. Does he not fall short of his own dialectical standards by insisting so one-sidedly on the priority of structure over interaction? This is one respect in which Bourdieu’s theoretical framework quite possibly requires careful reconstruction.
A substantive illustration of this point—and of much of the rest of what is discussed in this section—can be found in Emirbayer and Williams (2005).
Here again one can see how Bourdieu’s field concept could reinvigorate useful work initiated by earlier theorists of organizations, in this case, work regarding interorganizational struggles over the power to determine the structure, membership, and boundaries of organizational “environments” or “domains.” Most prominently, these earlier theorists included Blau (1955, 1964; see also Blau and Scott 1962), Thompson (1967), Aldrich (1971, 1979), and Pfeffer and Salancik (2003) [1978]. More recently, Fligstein (1996) has elaborated a model closely analogous to Bourdieu’s, one that focuses on the tensions between “incumbents” and “invaders.”
The phrases “goodwill investment” and “brand loyalty” appear in English in the original.
Contributions that might prove particularly useful in exploring the concept of symbolic capital on the organizational level have come from scholars working on the related but distinct topics of reputation, status, prestige, legitimacy, and branding. Key studies on reputation, which has to do with outside assessments of an organization’s past performance, include Shrum and Wuthnow (1988), Zajac and Westphal (1996), Staw and Epstein (2000), and Whetten and Mackey (2002); on status, which refers to an organization’s position in a network or other social structure, see, e.g., Podolny (1993), Stuart et al. (1999), and Jensen (2003); on the closely related concept of prestige, see Perrow (1961), Thompson (1967), Pfeffer (1981), and D’Aveni (1990); on legitimacy, which refers to the normative approval or cognitive acceptance of an organization’s purpose and practices, see Meyer and Rowan (1991 [1977]), DiMaggio and Powell (1991a [1983]), Ruef and Scott (1998), Glynn and Abzug (1998), and Lounsbury and Glynn (2001); finally, on branding, a process through which organizations consciously attempt to enhance their reputation, status, prestige, or legitimacy, see especially Aaker (1991, 1992).
While we cannot specify an instance in which Bourdieu deploys the concept of a “field of power” at the meso-level of organizational fields (although he does come close in his analysis of the organization of the field of institutions of higher education in France according to the division between the grande porte and the petite porte [Bourdieu 1996a (1989): 142–52]), we feel justified in extending this idea to the meso-level because of (a) the general logic of Bourdieu’s theory of fields; and (b) his own use of this very concept in speaking of even more circumscribed fields, namely, what we shall go on to term organizations-as-fields: “We can speak of the logic of the struggle within the field of power in the firm, that is to say, the competition between those holding one of the relevant powers. Everything [takes] place as if the structure of the field of power was organized at every moment in terms of different oppositions which, particularly in moments of crisis, could crystallize into strategic alliances among the holders of the various different forms of power” (2005 [2000]: 218). However, despite this usage on the part of Bourdieu himself, we carefully refrain in what follows from speaking of an organizational “field of power” because we do not wish to confuse it with the macro-level arena of struggle to which he more commonly applies the term. We speak instead of a “space of struggle for organizational power,” or at most of an organization’s “internal field of power,” thereby sacrificing elegance of style and economy of language for what we believe is a gain in conceptual clarity.
One potentially important way in which Bourdieu’s framework could be further elaborated and reconstructed is by adding to these analytic domains of social relations and culture a third homologous domain of collective emotions, also understood in semiotic terms as a space of relations of opposition and difference. There is much in Bourdieu that already makes such a step both feasible and desirable, in particular his keen attentiveness to the affectual dimensions of life, which, as he makes clear, are a terrain for socioanalysis every bit as much as for psychoanalysis (see Emirbayer and Goldberg 2005). Theoretical and empirical work has already begun along these lines, often but not always aligned with work on gender in organizations (Fineman 1993; see also Albrow 1997). In what follows, we restrict our attention to social relations and culture, to positions and position-takings, leaving for future work the pursuit of this additional and, we feel, highly intriguing possibility.
For example, he asserts that “in a situation of equilibrium, the space of positions tends to command the space of position-takings” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 105; italics in original).
Besides organizational ecology, there were two other strands emerging around this time that evidenced a greater sensitivity to historical questions than most organizational research. Work on labor relations by scholars such as Marglin (1974), Goldman and Van Houten (1976), Jacoby (1978), Edwards (1979), and Burawoy (1979) was firmly grounded in a neo-Marxist concern with the long sweep of capitalism. And studies of authority and managerial control—inspired by Bendix’s (1956) classic comparative-historical study of industrialization and labor, as well as by Chandler’s (1962, 1977) profoundly influential work on the rise of managerial capitalism in the United States—examined historical transformations in organizational control structures. (Among the latter were Rumelt 1974, Williamson 1975, and Barley and Kunda 1992.) Such historically informed research, however, was overshadowed by the contemporary focus of most organizational analysis.
In addition to the classic studies (e.g., Zucker 1991 [1977], 1983 DiMaggio and Powell 1991a [1983], and Meyer and Rowan (1991 [1977]), more recent work on managerial fads (e.g., Abrahamson and Fairchild 1999, Abrahamson 1991, and Barley and Kunda 1992) has underscored this point forcefully. Likewise, debates in the field of corporate governance over precisely what goals organizations actually pursue, and how they do so, have enriched our understanding of the non-rational dimensions of organizational behavior; for an overview of this debate, see Mizruchi (2004).
Here we are advocating an approach quite similar to that taken by Stark and Bruszt in their study of post-Communist East Central Europe, a region that, they argue, “must be regarded as undergoing a plurality of transitions in a dual sense: Across the region, we are seeing a multiplicity of distinctive strategies; within any given country, we find not one transition but many occurring in different domains—political, economic, and social—and the temporality of these processes is often asynchronous and their articulation seldom harmonious” (Stark and Bruszt 1998: 81).
One might also bear in mind here that changes in organizational fields exert as well, for their own part, significant pressures on spaces of societal actors, dispositions, and position-takings.
A Bourdieu-inspired program of inquiry can learn much in this respect from the growing wave of research on race, class, and gender within the social sciences in general and, admittedly still to a more limited extent, within organizational studies in particular. The neo-Marxist tradition in organizational studies (e.g., Burawoy 1979) always highlighted class relations within organizational life. More recently, authors such as Acker (1990) and Martin (2003)—inspired by the seminal work of Kanter (1977)—have devoted increasing analytic attention to gender-based relations. Still somewhat weak in organizational analysis, by comparison, has been the investigation of race and the study of intersections among class, gender, and race.
As Baker and Faulkner (2004) point out, for example, social network analysts disagree among themselves about the conditions under which network ties give rise to the positive effects associated with the concept of social capital and those under which such ties are actually the source of harm or exploitation. The approach we are advocating suggests that such issues can never be completely resolved until researchers conceive of networks and capital as deriving their value and producing their effects through the structure and dynamics of the field(s) in which they are embedded. On the other hand, of course, one must be careful not to move so far in this structuralist direction that one also loses sight of the (dialectically equally significant) moment of interaction.
A substantive illustration of this point—as indeed of much of the rest of what is discussed in this section—can once again be found in Emirbayer and Williams (2005).
Relevant in this context as well are the Manchester school’s early applications of social network analysis to the challenge of demarcating boundaries (see footnote 9). Whether the concrete object to be investigated is tribal societies or (post-) modern organizations-as-fields, the theoretical challenges involved remain much the same.
It is important to note here that just as a network-based approach to the relationships of individual actors by no means goes hand in hand with the more deeply relational way of thinking that we lay out early in this article, neither does a network approach to interorganizational relations entail such a perspective. The analysis of inter-firm networks is, of course, in the most superficial sense the analysis of a set of relations. However, in the absence of a framework (e.g., the concept of the organization-as-field) for understanding the creation and reproduction of the worth or value of organizational posts or organizational resources, network analysis will tend to divorce the structure of intraorganizational groups and units from the larger societal contexts—organizational and other kinds of fields—through which this structure is produced in the first place.
For a useful general discussion of the relevance of Durkheim for the study of organizations-as-fields, see Lincoln and Guillot (2004).
The idea of a space of position-takings opens exciting possibilities for a creative dialogue between Bourdieu-inspired organizational analysts and the considerable number of researchers who have already been contributing to the study of organizational cultures and subcultures. (We mentioned in an earlier note that configurations of collective emotions can be subsumed as well under this idea of a space of position-takings: see Emirbayer and Goldberg 2005.) For comprehensive surveys of the literature on organizational culture, see Smircich (1983), Martin (1992, 2001), Barley and Kunda (1992), and Dobbin (1994b); for perhaps the best-known empirical study of organizational culture, see Kunda (1992).
Despite important differences in their theoretical frameworks, Bourdieu’s emphasis on the link between actors’ external trajectories and their position-takings within an organization is anticipated by Crozier’s (1967) analysis of the relation between employees’ extra-organizational “social status” and their attitudes toward their work in a French clerical agency. Likewise, Bourdieu’s approach to the analysis of conflict at the heart of the cement company calls to mind Crozier’s (1967) inquiry into the power struggles among the managers of an organization he labels, for purposes of anonymity, “the Industrial Monopoly.”
“In the particular (and particularly frequent) case in which the habitus is the product of objective conditions similar to those under which it operates, it generates behaviors that are particularly well suited to these conditions without being the product of a conscious, intentional search for adaptation” (Bourdieu 2005 [2000]:213–214).
Needless to say, these methods are not necessarily mutually exclusive. What Bourdieu derides is the tendency of many researchers to act as if they were: “Thus we will find monomaniacs of log-linear modeling, of discourse analysis, of participant observation, of open-ended or in-depth interviewing, or of ethnographic description. Rigid adherence to this or that one method of data collection [and analysis] will define membership in a ‘school’” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 226).
In The State Nobility (1996 [1989]: 197–214), Bourdieu does provide two illustrations of how “structural histories” of specific organizations can be produced while still remaining within a broader field-theoretic framework, thereby transcending the usual dichotomy between particularizing and generalizing strategies: see his extended discussions of the École des Hautes Études Commerciales and of the École Nationale d’Administration.
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Acknowledgments
We wish to thank the following persons for their very helpful comments: Wayne Baker, Neil Brenner, Michael Cohen, Matthew Desmond, Jane Dutton, Joseph Galaskiewicz, Michael Jensen, Shamus Khan, Jason Owen-Smith, Erik Schneiderhan, David Stark, Klaus Weber, Mayer Zald, and the participants in the ICOS Seminar at the University of Michigan.
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Emirbayer, M., Johnson, V. Bourdieu and organizational analysis. Theor Soc 37, 1–44 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9052-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-007-9052-y