Search

The immersive ethnographic tradition has strong potential to contribute to a deeper sociological understanding of the construction, maintenance and processes of powerful groups. However, ethnography as a method – and sociology as a discipline – has tended to focus more on developing techniques and toolkits for studying what Bourdieu and Wacquant call a "poverty population" rather than elites systems of power. In response, this article builds a much needed 'toolkit' for would-be-ethnographers, examining how ethnographic methodologies can be adapted to critically examine the elite cultural fields. It does so by adapting Desmond's four foci of relational ethnographic: fields, boundaries, processes and cultural conflict. Adopting a relational orientation, this article provides an illustration of how ethnography can be used in the study of powerful cultural fields, using the context of the City of London, and thereby forming the basis for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a four-step process to studying field that, in unpacking the field of finance and the City of London, offers a theoretical and methodological resource of Bourdieu's field analysis. The task of identifying and exploring the field is concerned with how social relations are positioned within a spatial metaphor that leads to a conceptual vision of a social reality (Harquinet et al., 2012). Developing on this, this paper presents a visual construction of a social space that, in the context of urban analysis, lends itself directly to mapping a conceptual visualisation of a social space in order to both explore and evaluate the underlying and hidden framework of action that constructs and shapes social experience. This piece is my first submission from my doctoral thesis which I am hoping to get published. It is taken from my first empirical chapter, using a range of non-participant observation, photographic representation and in-depth interview analysis. The primary focus of this chapter however is on the first two, using Bourdieu's field analysis as a lens to unpack my argument. As my first submission any positive or constructive feedback would be most appreciated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]