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What is A (social and technical) ‘field’

Chapter 31
Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems
Bourdieu developed the concept of the ‘field’ to denote the fact that agents act in social situations which are governed by objective social relations (Bourdieu, 1993) between people. McNay notes that modern society in increasingly differentiated into distinct fields (McNay, 1999). According to Sterne (2003), we might consider a field as being where technological production and consumption come together—as with a mutually constitutive technical and social system. Social formations are structured by a series of fields (such as the cultural, educational and political), with each being a structured space with its own rules or laws which require mastery (Bourdieu, 1993). In any given field, there is social struggle and competition, where agents vie for control of ‘capital’ (op. cit.).
Published in Chapter:
Applying Bourdieu to eBay's Success and Socio-Technical Design
Rebecca M. Ellis (University of Essex, UK)
Copyright: © 2009 |Pages: 18
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-264-0.ch031
Abstract
This chapter introduces the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his concepts of “the field” and “capital” in relation to eBay. In any given field, there is competition for various sorts of “capital”—power and resources. This chapter considers eBay to be a “field” in its own right—a socio-technical system with its own set of social norms and rules. eBay is used as a case study of the importance of applying a Bourdieuean approach to create successful socio-technical systems. Using a study of eBay users as empirical illustration, this chapter argues that much of eBay’s success is in the affordances for social translucence of eBay’s Web site in supporting the Bourdieuean competition over capital and status. This exploration has implications for socio-technical systems design— in particular, the importance of creating and maintaining socially translucent systems, informed by Bourdieu’s theoretical insights, which support competition for “capital” and status.
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