Beyond Constructivism: The Political Sociology of an EU Policy Field

Abstract

This article applies a political sociology of knowledge to an EU social policy field. Taking the case of poverty and social inclusion policy, it shows that European social policy has found a raison d'etre alongside national social policies, feeding into EU member states’ national policies and producing comparative policy-relevant knowledge based on a genuine set of resources. Going beyond constructivist approaches, this article contends that the establishment of these resources can be reconstructed productively as the establishment of a transnational field in Pierre Bourdieu's sense of the term. In a process stretching over more than four decades, the EU's rudimentary policy for tackling poverty in the 1970s has evolved into a semi-autonomous field of social inclusion policy. This field encompasses monitoring capital, social capital, officializing capital, scientific capital, and informational capital, all of which EU-level actors use in different ways to position themselves against other actors in this transnational field. Thus, a complex and dynamic configuration arises that consists of actors, institutions, and ideas. The article concludes that while there are many affinities between constructivism and political sociology, the latter can go further in analyzing and theorizing phenomena such as ideas and discourses.