ABSTRACT
Just as the social world is significant to its inhabitants because it is where the institutions operate that guide and frame agents’ actions in both their personal routines and the spheres they frequent, the same can also be said about the internal organisation of fields. As Bourdieu rightly noted, one of the key characteristics of any field is that it has its own rationality because institutions, understood in a broad sense that needs to be defined, play a role in ordering their internal logic of operation (Bourdieu 1984b). In the case of the political field, this logic is not only expressed in what agents do there based on the pre-reflexive operation of the habitus in normal political times, the true matrix of generation of practices that is driven by agents’ interaction with the field’s rules as they cooperate and compete with each other. When agents act in the field in the expectation of making sense to others and influencing political interactions (or, in other words, obtaining the small and large victories that are the source of the original accumulation of political capital), it is because they have assimilated its rationality. This, in turn, presupposes that they have internalised the signals, conventions, rules and objectivations (that is, institutions) that make up the social substratum of the field’s operation (on the substratum and social life of the political field, see Vommaro and Gené 2016). This implies something that is actually quite obvious: we can talk about a logic of the field’s operation largely because its rationality operates through the institutions that organise its internal life, giving it a structure without which agents’ actions would lack meaning, and their coordination in a common field of competition would not be possible. Institutions are, in other words, crucial because they form a social framework that provides stability and underpins the reality in which agents go about their activities.
