ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship has successfully shown that the concept of field can be useful to analyse transnational as well as national cases. Building on this work, this paper asks what we can learn from this attention to transnational cases for the general theory of fields. It offers some observations about what abandoning methodological nationalism means specifically for the formal description of particular fields. By highlighting the complex ways in which any given field coexists with other fields on different scales, attention to transnational fields encourages us to ask new questions about fields on any scale, about national fields as well as transnational ones, particularly concerning the specific form a field's autonomy takes and the way a field is structured symbolically. A more fine-tuned vocabulary for describing fields along these lines is a precondition for generating hypotheses about how fields with specified characteristics relate to outcomes that might be of interest; it is also a precondition for generating hypothesis for the social conditions under which we can expect to observe fields with specified characteristics.
