The economic field

Abstract

Taking the research carried out on the economy of the household, the author has attempted to construct an economic theory more respectful of the practical logic of the actors and which integrates the economic and social conditions that give rise to the economic arrangements. This requires conceiving the “market” that is usually presupposed by orthox economics as the product of a social construction. The economic field is a world governed by specific laws stemming form a process of historical differentiation, primary among which is the pursuit of properly material interests. Contrary to what is implied by a mechanistic vision, here the economic actors make their field one of forces by deforming, to various degrees, their neighborhood, as in Einsteinian physics. The principle of these economic actions and the agents’ room for manoueuvre lie - as the Harvard tradition teaches – in the structure of the field, i.e. in the way the distribution of the different capitals is structured and in the correlative power relations, which cannot be reduced to interactions or to mechanical adjustments. The economic field is one of struggle in which prices are both the object and the weapon of company strategies (set out in management theories), which depend on the structure of the field and in particular on that of the relations of domination which characterize it. Technological capital plays an important role in subverting established hierarchies, notably by contributing to redrawing the boundary lines between fields. But the companies themselves are the site of struggles which help determine their strategies and which depend on both the structure of the distribution of the capital among the decision-makers and the company’s position in the field. A firm’s strategies also strongly depend on the homology relations that grow up between its position in the field of production and that of its clients in the social space: all of which makes economic competition a destructive but indirect conflict. The notion of habitus allows the author to replace the scholastic construction of homo oeconomicus with a realistic conception of economic practice: this is the product of reasonable anticipations based on the obscure relationship between dispositions and a field. This practical adjustment makes “neo-classic” theory a well-founded illusion which finds additional validation in the social power conferred on this discourse. By providing economic theories with an anthropological grounding which attributes a central position to the social origins of dispositions, like economic rationality, the author contributes to restoring economic to its true function as a historical science. Keywords: economic field; economic arrangements; habitus; State; market; power