ABSTRACT
The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu implies that social actors struggle and compete to position themselves in fi elds with the help of different forms of symbolic and material resources (capital) (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). The eld is a social space of relations of dominance, subordinance, or equivalence, rooted in the types and amounts of resources that actors possess. Here, it is argued that public relations assists organizations in the struggle for such positions, and a typology of different resource types is developed using examples from the political eld of energy and the environment. Extending the sociology of Bourdieu in this way means that a more realistic perspective of public relations than that provided by prevailing theories of the discipline can be obtained.
