Abstract
Abstract This article explores how French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of fields, by encouraging a critical analysis of what the state does and produces, can bring a new perspective to studying the history of public administration. To do so, it explains how the theory can be used to perform historical analysis of public administration, and examine the case of the introduction of the merit system in the Canadian federal public administration to illustrate its perspective. The article concludes that the interplay among the theory’s core concepts – capital, field, and habitus – offers a reconceptualization of the study of administrative history that integrates historical, social, and political elements.
Highlights
The administrative organizations, institutions, and practices of this field, which are the subject of the analysis of administrative history, are the institutionalized outcome of struggles that have taken place in the field among agents who, using their capital, attempted to impose their conceptualization of what service to the public should be
Historians of public administration can establish the necessary critical distance with their object of study and, be in a position to produce an understanding of administrative history that goes beyond formal structures and functions
This approach allows looking at objects that are traditionally at the core of the study of administrative history, such as formal institutions, functions, and employees, in their historical, social, and political context
Summary
To be able to see in what ways the theory of fields can be useful to studying the history of public administration, it is necessary to look both at the theory itself and at the way that Bourdieu and scholars who have followed his intellectual leadership have explained the nature and role of the state and public administration.[6]
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