Juridical Field or Legal Profession? Comparison of Bourdieusian Theory and Theory of Professionalism for Studies of Legal Community

Abstract

The article looks at how Pierre Bourdieu’s fields theory and the theory of professionalism correlate in the analysis of legal communities. We demonstrate that even though Pierre Bourdieu criticized the notion of profession and called for it to be abandoned, his views regarding the legal field were in fact very close to the concept of professionalism. Based on a number of publications citing both these approaches we can conclude that today researchers hardly ever use both these approaches simultaneously. This means that combining these two methodological approaches has a lot of potential.