ABSTRACT
The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu implies that social actors struggle and compete to position themselves in fields with the help of different forms of symbolic and material resources. The field is a social space of relations of dominance, subordinance, or equivalence, rooted in the types and amounts of resources that actors possess. This chapter argues that public relations assist organizations in the struggle for such positions, and a typology of different resource types is developed. It discusses some of Bourdieu's writing on resources, and seeks to develop them further in relation to organizations. The chapter focuses on the importance of institutionalization as a form of capital, alongside economic capital, knowledge capital, social capital, and symbolic capital. For Bourdieu, cultural capital was largely tied to refinement and taste. Bourdieu grappled with the classic antagonism concerning idealism and materialism, giving primacy to the structure or agency between subjectivism and objectivism. Bourdieu's often-impenetrable prose has invited a fair amount of criticism.
