The Workings of Social Fields: Poverty, Capital, and Symbolic Violence across Five Domains

This article develops Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of field through an in-depth analysis of persistent poverty in the Netherlands. Drawing on over 200 interviews and eight empirical studies, we reconstruct five interrelated social fields—formal labour market, informal economy, bureaucratic institutions, territorial neighbourhoods, and personal networks—and examine how they operate under conditions of structural constraint. Each field follows its own logic, forms of capital, and doxa, yet poor individuals must navigate them simultaneously, often facing friction, symbolic violence, and failed capital conversion. We show that poverty is not confined to economic deprivation but involves complex inter-field struggles, where dignity, legitimacy, and access are unevenly distributed. A central argument is that poverty deepens when individuals are unable to convert resources across fields—e.g., when symbolic capital in the neighbourhood field fails to yield recognition in the bureaucratic or labour market field. Our Bourdieusian perspective uncovers the moral, institutional and spatial grammars of exclusion and highlights how agency is structured relationally across field boundaries. By moving beyond mono-institutional analysis, this field-theoretical approach offers a powerful tool for understanding social reproduction under constraint. We conclude with implications for both relational sociology and poverty policy, arguing for more field-sensitive interventions that recognise cross-domain inequalities and symbolic barriers.