Collective Action and Collective Actors in Fields: Some Ontological Clarification of a Recent Debate in Neo-Institutionalism

The concept of “fields” has a lively history. Starting as one of the crucial concepts in Bourdieu’s theory, it became a foundational concept of sociological neo-institutionalism. Today, different attempts exist to transform it into a general concept of collective action (Hoffman 1999, Fligstein/McAdam 2012). This interesting development is, however, accompanied by some weaknesses: Currently, individuals and collectives, especially organizations, are analyzed symmetrically as actors within fields. Collectives are only described as fields nested within other fields. What is urgently needed is an elaboration on how individual and collective actors are constituted, and how they are related to individual ones.

We take the distinction between agency and actors immanent in theories of practice (especially in the work of Giddens 1984, even Latour 2005), as a point of departure to discuss this problem. Actors – individual as well as collective ones – are special constructions of western modernity (Luckmann 1980, Foucault 1984, Luhmann 1984, Meyer/Jepperson 2000). They are often confronted with the obligation to act consistently in line with different kinds of rationality, often stemming from different field-levels. Agency, in contrast, is the essential possibility to make a difference in the stream of daily activity (Giddens 1984: 9), which is grounded in mental control over bodily activities. Although agency and actors are often actualized in an intertwined form, they sometimes only occur in a loosely coupled way.

Following this conceptualization, we can offer a more complex and clarified picture of individuals and collectives. It allows for a clearer distinction between (a) the properties of individual and collective actors, and between (b) agency and attributed agency. In addition, it allows (c) for a more elaborate description of how fields are nested within fields, for example how agency and actors are constituted by fields at the same time as they constitute them.