ABSTRACT
Field analysis is a method that takes as its object the formal and informal practices within a structured, rule-governed, objective social sphere that is not pre-determined by institutional or national boundaries, but share a logic, or a sense of the rules of the game. Fields are constituted by sets of relations and positions in a given social sphere (such as security, academe, religion); social, symbolic, culture, and economic capital are up for grabs within the field. Multiple relations may be competitive, cooperative, hegemonic, and transversal (in relation to other fields), but all agents recognize that the field has a determinative effect on their positions and those relations – they are all playing the same game. The objective structure of the field is made practical by the habitus, the internalized and informal subjective dispositions of its embodied agents: the strategies, tactics, norms, best-practices of the game. Practices are most often studied through participant observation, wide-ranging interviews that seek background or tacit knowledge, and discourse analysis, particularly understood as discourse as a kind of practice.
