These struggles are primarily fought between ‘incumbents’ and ‘challengers,’ and are regulated by ‘governance units’ that control a field's functioning and generally tend to conserve the existing power relations in the field. In the case of declared conflicts, struggles are liable to bring about a new order. The fields may be ordered along a continuum based on their degree of consensus. However, these strategic action fields are less stable than the fields in Bourdieu's theory their boundaries shift depending on the definition of the situation and the issues at stake in the field. From the Bourdieuan conception, Fligstein and McAdam retain the ideas of a field's specific issues at stake, rules of the game, the unequal positions of agents and the link between these unequal positions and agents' vision of the world. Largely fueled by Bourdieu's field theory, the concept of ‘strategic action field’ developed by Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam (2012) combines the neoinstitutionalist approach with collective action theories in order to consider reproduction and change on the mesolevel of social order. DiMaggio also created the notion of ‘institutional entrepreneur,’ which refers to the foundational figures in emerging fields. ![]() The empirical studies upon which sociologists have formed their analysis are the organizational models used for the production of high-end cultural services, models that appeared in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century ( DiMaggio, 1981), and the progressive homogenization of American academic publishing ( Coser et al., 1982). It is therefore possible to predict this tendency for resemblance based on the type and degree of dependence between organizations within the same field, the degree of uncertainty as regards ties between means and objectives, and the degree of social recruitment of professionals with the same academic training and/or the same engagement with professional bodies. Constraint (via authoritarian means, the legal system, or orders) imitation in situations of uncertainty and normative pressure linked to professionalization are the three mechanisms that favor these fields' homogenization. According to DiMaggio and Powell, the processes of rationalization such as Weber described is less dependent on competition and the search for efficiency as on specifically institutional factors. The neoinstitutionalist theory of ‘organization fields’ developed by Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell (1983, 1991) aims to show the phenomenon of institutional isomorphism between organizations within the same field. ![]() The concept of field has met with two main theoretical redevelopments more or less inspired by Bourdieu's theory, around the notions of ‘organizational fields’ and of ‘strategic action fields.’ Gisèle Sapiro, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015 Organizational Fields and Strategic Action Fields
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