Making a Field amid Crisis:Field Theory and the General Advisory Council of 1910

Pierre Bourdieu has been "rediscovered" as “a theorist of change” by historical sociologists. This paper examines the applicability of field theory in contexts of significant societal disruption. In particular, it investigates whether institutions emerging in transformative phases can be conceptualized as nascent fields, and what implications this has for the actions of individuals within these institutions. Analyzing the Government Advisory Council, an experimental legislative body established in the final year of the Qing Dynasty, I show the Council as an emerging field in which novel political practices are being learned and invented. Computational textual analyses to the minutes of the Council’s First Annual Meeting present three preliminary findings. First, members selected into the Council through different channels behaved differently during the Meeting. Second, procedural rules were the central concern of Council members, especially when the substantive discussion was high-stakes. Third, members fought hard for autonomy from the political forces that represented the power center of the old regime.

These observations suggest that the Council’s members engaged in deliberate efforts to construct a field through discussion and debate. In this unprecedented democratic experiment, members struggled to define the source of legitimacy, the rules of the game, and the boundary of power within the nascent field. This paper makes three contributions to the existing literature. Empirically, my findings illustrate that, contrary to conventional narratives dismissing the Council as insincere, the participants earnestly engaged in this early attempt at democratic governance. Methodologically, the analysis is one of the earliest to apply computational textual methods to Chinese archival data. Theoretically, this paper evaluates the utility of field theory in examining episodes of transformation, focusing specifically on how a certain field can come into being from a structural crisis.