Social fields are environments in which competition between individuals and between groups takes place, such as markets, academic disciplines, musical genres, etc.
Instead of confining his analysis of social relations and change to voluntaristic agency or strictly in terms of the structural concept of class, Bourdieu uses the agency-structure bridging concept of field: any historical, non-homogeneous social-spatial arena in which people maneuver and struggle in pursuit of desirable resources.
Much of Bourdieu's work observes the semi-independent role of educational and cultural resources in the expression of agency.
[citation needed] Unsurprisingly given his historical and biographical location, however, Bourdieu was in practice both influenced by and sympathetic to the Marxist identification of economic command as a principal component of power and agency within capitalist society,[6] in contrast to some of his followers or the influential sociologist Max Weber.
This means that fields are not strictly analogous to classes, and are often autonomous, independent spaces of social play.
According to these rules, activity develops in the field, which works like a market in which actors compete for the specific benefits associated to it.
The extent to which participants are able to make an effective use of the resources they are endowed with is a function of the adaptation of their habitus in this specific field.
Agents subscribe to a particular field not by way of explicit contract, but by their practical acknowledgement of the stakes, implicit in the very "playing of the game."