Social Fields: Knowing the Water We Swim in

Abstract

While the term ‘social field’ has surfaced sporadically in various disciplines throughout the twentieth Century, it has largely lain dormant as a conceptual framework. In this article, we re-introduce the social field as a foundational concept both for understanding collective lived experience and for developing methodologies to effect systems change. We explore and expand on three inter-related properties that we consider to be phenomena common to all social fields: intercorporeality, autonomy, and affordance. Drawing on recent and emerging intervention methodologies focusing on these properties, we illustrate the potential of taking a social field perspective for both diagnosis and intervention in the change process. We make the case that the social field is a distinct entity and a powerful leverage point for effecting systems change, and that the re-invigoration of social field theory and practice can make a significant contribution to the field of organizational and systems change.