Fields and Consumer Groups: The Layered and Overlapping Roles of Culture

The first essay investigates Bourdieu’s conceptualization of fields and its use in the marketing literature. It suggests that fields do not exist in isolation, but rather work together in a number of different possible configurations. Fields are reconceptualized as dominated, overlapped, unrelated, contrasted, and co-constituted, rather than completely distinct and opens a new theoretical space for interpretive researchers in marketing. The second essay is a descriptive ethnography of a local fab lab. The essay describes in rich detail the ways in which new skills are developed in a shared work environment, and contextualizes the findings using practice theory as a lens. The essay serves to highlight the co-productive nature of the workshop as well. The final essay merges the theory development from essay one and the context and data collection of essay two to create new insights into the nature of layered fields. The essay demonstrates meaningful connections between disparate cultural fields using the cultural context of computer construction. In doing so, the essay demonstrates the real-world effects of overlapping and layered fields, and how the social structure plays out within the space of personal computer builders. Depending on how the field is configured, the layered fields allow for transfer of capitals, a better understanding of liminality, and important insights into the social structure and institutional nature of the field