This section discusses Bourdieu’s concepts of social fields and power, and their relevance to a consideration of theory development in general. The value of theory for the mobilisation and coordination of the intellectual resources within a field is highlighted, and illustrated with some brief examples from other disciplines.

Bourdieu’s conception of social structures is a perspective in which social fields are seen as embedded within a broader field of power. Fields can themselves comprise sub-fields and so on, down to whatever level of analysis is selected (Swartz, 1997). In the construction developed in this paper, IS is a sub-field within the field of academic disciplines, themselves embedded within a yet-broader field of education. The endemic underlying struggle for power between individual disciplines is manifest in contemporary experience through competitions for prestige, for new and/or higher quality students, and for funding (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997).

The idea that academic disciplines are in competition with each other is certainly not new. But as tertiary education has come to be seen more as an economic rather than social issue, the issues of relative performance and standing within the academy have assumed far greater salience than previously (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997). Placed in this context, Bourdieuan theory implies that struggles for relative prestige are endemic and inevitable, and that the current focus on economic factors will tend to intensify the severity of the battles being waged. Though such struggles are not necessarily to the death, it is in his view inevitable that the advancement of a field must be at the expense of one or more others (Bourdieu, 1980).

Bourdieu’s approach in this regard is consistent with other findings concerning recognition and the value of image. That a politician’s image is at least as important as the policies he or she stands for has become a commonplace observation in political analysis (Pratkanis and Aronson, 2001). While this trend has been deprecated, it has nevertheless been accepted as a fact of political life, and attention has shifted towards trying to establish principles for the conduct of public debates that will ensure an image is reasonably commensurate with the underlying reality. It is in any case accepted that all political candidates, whatever moral stance they take toward image-making, must ensure that their public image is a positive one (Pratkanis and Aronson, 2001, p. 140).

While the effects of image on the reputation and visibility of an academic field are neither as obvious nor as immediate as in politics, its relevance is easy to show. A review of the literature concerning research methods reveals, for instance, that there is a well-defined hierarchy of disciplines based originally on their relative scientific ‘purity’ (Kline, 1995). In this the natural sciences rank above the social sciences, and physics ranks first among the natural sciences. This has led to a situation where the term ‘physics envy’ has been coined to describe the tendency for researchers in other disciplines to attempt to emulate physicists as closely as possible in their selection of research methods. The endless debates on whether qualitative methods should be deemed adequately rigorous are testament to the power of this particular piece of cultural capital (Sutton, 1997). The need for qualitative researchers to justify their approaches at the most basic level continues to contrast with the lack of such a requirement for quantitative researchers.

Changes in governmental and social perspectives on education have also had an effect in this context. Image becomes a critical issue when performance is judged on the power of the discipline to attract new students, to acquire funding from external sources, and to achieve research targets. All of these issues are affected by the strength and clarity of the discipline’s public profile, which must be sufficiently recognisable to ensure that it is familiar to students, parents, investors, and research participants alike. Introna (2003, p. 236) comments in this regard that ‘the status of IS as an academic discipline is … a political [question] from the start’, and the effects of the political aspect seem indisputable. Academics choose appropriate research topics, seek funding in approved ways, and write appropriate types of research papers in accordance with the need to satisfy externally defined performance targets (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997).