Reviewing Social Order and Change: Field Concepts in Political Analysis

*Section sponsored by the ECPR Standing Group on Political Sociology* The concept of field has become an important theoretical tool in social and political analysis. Studying field dynamics situates the analysis at a meso level and promises to bring together macro-structural and micro-sociological perspectives. It means explaining social order and change as relational. Scholars have suggested different concepts account for this relational dimension: field, organisational fields, sector, arena or strategic action field. Despite their conceptual differences, all these approaches are concerned with locating actors relative to other actors and raise the question of institutionalising these locations. Furthermore, according to all concepts, units or collections of social locations are considered as structures, while processes of conflict and competition are seen as crucial to understanding the evolution of these collections of social actors. This section provides an opportunity to discuss the progress of field approaches in political sociology. While theoretical contributions to the theory of fields are welcomed, the section encourages contributions that use field-level analysis in empirical case studies. Questions addressed could be: 1) on a theoretical level, the different conceptual notions (such as field or arena) refer to different ways of empirical object constructions and, ultimately, different theories of action. What do empirical case studies tell us about action logics? 2) On an analytical level, how does one identify fields, its boundaries and its action logics, capitals, actors? Do all participating actors share the same representations of these boundaries and of the logics that govern a field? 3) How do fields emerge, change, divide into sub-fields, or collapse? The section encourages papers that cover a broad variety of political processes, such as the rise of public problems, the analysis of public policies, the sociology of the state, supranational and transnational political institutions and actions, or social movements.