Fielding transnationalism: an introduction

Abstract

The new interest in transnational phenomena since the 1990s has produced a wide range of studies across the social sciences.In the discipline of history, Akira Iriye (1989: 2) has called for historians to 'search for historical themes and conceptions that are meaningful across national boundaries', a call echoed by the new global and transnational history.In sociology, agendas for a 'global sociology' have come from former President of the American Sociological Association, Michael Burawoy (2000; 2008) and prominent European theorist Ulrich Beck (2006), among others.Meanwhile, Immanuel Wallerstein has long urged social scientists to 'unthink' statecentrism and theorize on a more global scale (Wallerstein 2001) The intellectual space constituted by this work has been interdisciplinary.It has also sometimes been 'undisciplined' in its use of diverse concepts, theories and literatures.Rather than overarching theoretically-guided research programmes, we find disparate areas of research: studies of immigration, global cities, neoliberalism, neoimperialism, the global diffusion of organizational forms, and so on.The interdisciplinary and undisciplined nature of this space has had its advantages.It has led, for example, to surprising dialogues across the boundaries that sometimes separate theoretical schools within disciplines.It also brings with it potential disadvantages: It might mean, among other things, that the full potential of any one theoretical approach is not fully explored.Each of these empirical areas are rich but they have yielded, and engage with, separated theories of the middle-range: e.g.theories of immigration, theories of global cities, theories of 1 The editors thank the Department of Sociology at Boston University and the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University for funding the workshop on 'Fielding Transnationalism' during which contributions to this volume were discussed.Monika Krause would like to acknowledge support from a Future Research Leaders Grant awarded by the Economic and Social Research Council.The authors also thank the participants of the workshop and the contributors, especially Larissa Buchholz, Angéle Christin, and David Swartz, for their comments.Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for SR for their suggestions.global culture, and so on.Besides a few exceptions, to be discussed below, shared theoretical frameworks or concepts on transnational processes across the subfields are comparably lacking.The papers in this collection specifically explore the potential of the concept of the 'field' in the Bourdieusian tradition for analysing transnational processes.Throughout his career, but especially in his latter half, Bourdieu theorized 'field' as an important part of his overarching theoretical corpus, alongside and part of concepts like practice, habitus, and capital (Swartz 1997: 117-142).He explored a diversity of fields, starting from the religious field (Bourdieu 1991b) and then to the political, artistic and literary fields (Bourdieu 1993), and the intellectual and academic fields (Bourdieu 1984a), among others (Bourdieu 2005).Bourdieu did not systematically examine field dynamics or processes at non-national scales.Early in his career (Bourdieu 1959), he was prompted by his work in Algeria to theorize cross-cultural relations wrought by colonialism, but he did not employ the field concept.His latest work only alluded to a global economic field of neoliberal capitalism (Bourdieu et al 2000;Bourdieu 2003).In between, he wrote about the transnational circulation of ideas (Bourdieu 2002), the 'possibility of a field of world sociology' (1991a), and briefly referred to globalization and culture in his book on television (1999).But in both instances he focused on intellectual fields rather than other types of fields, and he did not identify transnational or global logics.He argued instead that, for the time being at least, national fields were impeding the construction of transnational or world intellectual fields.A full systematic consideration of transnational and global fields in the work of Bourdieu himself eludes us.As we will develop in more detail below, we suggest that field theory offers a set of concepts especially generative for analyzing transnational processes and relations.It gives us a lens through which we can inquire about patterns and institutions in the social world in a way that does not privilege the national state a priori, and in a way that transcends the opposition between 'national order' on the one hand and 'global flows' on the other hand.This project of 'fielding transnationalism' -and 'transnationalizing fields' -is a collective one.This volume builds on recent work in sociology, IR and history by some of our authors and others.2 Fielding Transnationalism is a work in progress and one that we hope will be sustained in the future.Together the papers in this volume show the strengths of field theory for apprehending transnational processes and relations, even as they also raise questions for future work.In the spirit of Bourdieu's own work, the papers are grounded in fine-grained empirical research, and the empirical range is wide.Some speak to institutions that are or could be central to discussions of the transnational in political science -such as the European Central Bank (Mudge and Vauchez, this volume), the US government (Stampnitzky, this volume), the British and the German empire (Wilson this volume, Steinmetz this volume).Others show their sociological heritage by also paying attention to cultural production (Buchholz, this volume), to academic disciplines (Steinmetz and Krause, this volume), and to journalism (Christin, this volume).Empirically, of course, there are many further areas of inquiry that could benefit from a field-analysis.We could learn from a wide range of historical and contemporary cases.These papers offer a starting point.3 There is also more work to do theoretically.One motivation for bringing these papers together is that they all are deeply engaged with a similar set of theoretical resources, organized around Bourdieu's thinking, which we do think are very useful.Precisely because of this, the work also shows productive tensions, fault lines and building sites for future theoretical work.There is more work to be done, for example, concerning the implications of different versions of field-theoretical approaches and concerning the way field theory can be used while also dealing with issues that have traditionally been outside its focus, such as technologies and territory.Still, we hope this volume is

Cite this

Julian Go, Monika Krause (2016). Fielding transnationalism: an introduction. The Sociological Review Monographs. https://doi.org/10.1002/2059-7932.12000

@article{julian2016fielding,
  title  = {Fielding transnationalism: an introduction},
  author = {Go, Julian and Krause, Monika},
  year   = {2016},
  journal = {The Sociological Review Monographs},
  doi    = {10.1002/2059-7932.12000}
}

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