Field Interconnectedness and Strategic Action in South-African Higher Education

Abstract

The goal of our paper is to provide an account of the relationships between the inter-linkages with proximate fields and strategic action in organizational fields across periods of stability, contention and settlement. We move beyond the extant literature on external jolts by proposing that inter-field linkages are relevant to explain strategic action in periods of stability and conflict. More specifically, we analyse the inter-linkages between the ‘field of power’, a term adopted by Bourdieu to emphasise the state as a social field, and the university field in South Africa before, during and after the breakdown of the Apartheid regime, and the strategic action of two universities, which can be portrayed as incumbent and challenger within the field, by comparing their strategies and responses to external influences across cases and over time. In this way, we provide one of the few empirical analyses of how inter-field linkages are differentially mobilized by actors within a field depending on their positi...