ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to meet Helen Dickinson’s outline for the future of boundary-spanning research by exploring what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of fields and elements of Giddens’ structuration theory, both theories that deal with structure-agency dualism, can contribute to current understandings of boundary spanners in practice. It explains the perspective that the way that boundary spanners change, shift or progress their fields of influence reveals the sorts of boundary spanners that they are, and their motivations for engaging with boundary spanning at an activity. The chapter describes a theoretical typology of boundary-spanning individuals which theorises why and how different boundary spanners operate and the likelihood that they produce institutional gains. The act of boundary spanning is done for the purpose of opening future personal opportunities rather than with the goals of creating change in the doxa of a field. ‘Pushing the ideas’ boundary spanners are primarily concerned with the advancement of a set of ideas or principles.
