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Prevailing theories of poverty governance emphasize how political and economic constraints associated with urban neoliberalism have led to the retraction of protective welfare commitments and an increased criminalization of poverty. While research on this "disciplinary turn" has been generative, it tells us little about countervailing trends or how institutional responses to poverty change over time. Addressing these gaps, this article offers a case study of the emergence and acceptance by the business community of a supportive Housing First and harm reduction initiative called JustCARE—a distinct technique of poverty governance not readily explicable within existing theoretical frameworks. By situating JustCARE within a wider strategic action field of poverty governance, we reveal the macro-, meso-, and micro-level dynamics that together facilitated its inception, growth, and eventual embrace by members of the formerly hostile business establishment. Specifically, we underscore how two exogenous shocks (COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter [BLM] uprisings) enabled a well-positioned advocacy organization to articulate and implement a non-punitive homelessness response alternative. We conclude that field-based scholarship centering "theoretically deviant" cases can reveal how the contradictions and failures of neoliberal poverty management can generate unique opportunities for meaningful institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study utilizes the Strategic Action Field (SAF) framework as a lens to study implementation effectiveness of Ohio START, a multiactor and multilevel implementation process. We examine the extent to which perceptions of successes and challenges vary across organizational roles in county-level child welfare agencies during Ohio START implementation. Preliminary findings reveal that perceptions of implementation effectiveness differ based on organizational role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broad higher education contexts shape how community college students and postsecondary personnel approach transfer from community colleges to baccalaureate-granting institutions. We leverage the concept of strategic action fields, an organizational theory illuminating processes that play out as actors determine "who gets what" in an existing power structure, to understand the role of political-ecological contexts in "vertical" transfer. Drawing on interviews with administrators, transfer services personnel, and transfer-intending students at two Texas community college districts and with administrators, admissions staff, and transfer personnel at public universities throughout the state, we examine how institutional actors and students create, maintain, and respond to rules and norms in the community college transfer field. Our results suggest university administrators, faculty, and staff hold dominant positions in the field, setting the rules and norms for credit transfer and applicability. Students, who hold the least privilege, must invest time and energy to gather information about transfer pathways and policies as their primary means of meeting their educational aspirations. The complex structure of information—wherein each institution provides its own transfer resources, with little collaboration and minimal alignment—systematically disadvantages community college students. Although some community college personnel voice frustration that the field disadvantages transfer-intending community college students, they maintain the social order by continuing to implement and reinforce the rules and norms set by universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores the field dynamics that facilitated the emergence of a dominant understanding of business' role in sustainable development (SD). Based on a study of the U.N. Earth Summits, we examine how actors meet every decade to battle for definitional control of what SD means for business, and what business means for SD. Through a discourse analysis of texts from business, policy, and civil society actors during each Summit, we illustrate how an ensuing discursive struggle shifts the role of business in SD from being largely undefined in 1992, to being considered an SD partner in 2002, and finally to becoming a driver of SD by 2012. We contend that these shifts occurred largely due to two field dynamics: (a) rearranging of field boundaries and (2) forming of a discourse coalition. Accordingly, our study highlights how disparate actors coalesce around a shared-meaning system and collectively shape the role of business role in SD. However, we argue that despite the allure of a unified meaning-making process between once antagonistic actors, business–SD relations are underpinned by politicized interaction where certain actors come to dominate, and, in doing so, marginalize others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative circles theory explains how innovative small groups develop and win acceptance of their creative work but assumes a single type of circle and would benefit from considering how circles are affected by the strategic action fields in which they operate. We do so by synthesizing research on art, science, philosophy, and social movements to identify five field characteristics that influence circles and their creative potentials (i.e., attention space, consensus, social control, resources, and organizational and geographical contexts). We then use primary and secondary data on science circles (the Resilience Alliance and Phage Group), combined with previous research on circles and group creativity, to show how field-level differences explain systematic variations in the structure and dynamics of art and science circles. We close by arguing that there exists of a family of circles operating in different fields, formulating a refined definition of circles, and postulating four propositions informing future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how consumers may work strategically to alter market dynamics through formally organized activities. We address this issue in the context of the Danish beer market and its evolution over the last two decades, with a specific empirical focus on the role of a formally organized consumer association. We draw on key tenets of recent advances in sociological field theory, which views social order as comprising multiple and related strategic action fields. From this perspective, we describe the Danish beer market and its transformation, with an emphasis on how Danish beer enthusiasts played a significant role in altering the logics of competition in the market, but also played a significant institutionalized role within the field itself. We theorize this activity as consumers’ collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature suggests that elites are increasingly fragmented and divided. Yet there is very little empirical research that maps the distinctions between different elite groups. This article explores the cultural divisions that pertain to elite factions in two distinct but proximate Strategic Action Fields. A key insight from the article is that the public sector faction studied exhibits a much broader, more aesthetic set of cultural dispositions than their private sector counterparts. This permits a number of inter-related contributions to be made to literature on both elites and field theory. First, the findings suggest that cultural capital acts as a salient source of distinction between elite factions in different Strategic Action Fields. Second, it is demonstrated how cultural capital is socially functional as certain cultural dispositions are strongly homologous with specific professional roles. Third, the article demonstrates the implications for the structure of the State when two culturally distinct elites are brought together in a new Strategic Action Field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The legalizing of agency work in Germany is used as an illustrative case for exploring and theorizing how contests about regulating organizations’ labor practices are played out through the politics of boundary work. By combining the idea of inter-field relations from the theory of strategic action fields with considerations about boundary work within and between organizational fields, this paper explains the recent proliferation of agency work as the outgrowth of a long-term legalization contest. By taking a historical perspective, it illuminates how the boundary work of (former) incumbents and (new) challengers modulates institutional dynamics. Based on qualitative primary and secondary material, the findings reveal how the politics of boundary work facilitate power reversals in organizational fields by allowing defeated parties to survive in a field’s niches, to cross a field’s boundaries, and to rebuild their intervention capacity as well as by making incumbent coalitions erode over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with professor Neil Fligstein of the University of California, Berkeley is presented. Fligstein discusses the concept of social structure and the theory of conventional opposition on macro-social and micro-social orders. He views the discovery of the idea of strategic action field as organizational sociology in the politics and economics of U.S. government. He also outlines the benefits of large corporations in the economic development of the country.

An interview with sociologist Neil Fligstein is presented. Topics include the discovery of the strategic action field (SAF) idea across political science and economics, the role of social skill in function of SAFs, and the interdependence of fields within broader environment as stated in the book "A Theory of Fields."

This study addresses how multinational corporations and protesters in an environmental struggle learn from the proximate struggles within the same field and how they structure the broader institutional field. Drawing on the literature integrating the social movement and new institutional theory, particularly the “strategic action fields” (SAFs) approach of Fligstein and McAdam, the authors comparatively study the interactions in and between two sequential environmental struggles in the field of gold mining in Turkey. The findings suggest that the interactive processes in an SAF and their consequences are largely built on the lessons drawn from both “successes” and “failures” in the proximate SAF that preceded it. Furthermore, those actors that act proactively are more likely to stabilize the SAF according to their interests. Finally, state interventions from the outside create temporary stability that involves the acquiescence of challengers, whereas the consent-seeking actions of incumbents are more likely to generate a permanent stability, stabilizing the broader field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]