A Four-Step Process to Studying the Field through the City of London

Drawing on the theoretical framework of Bourdieu's field theory, this paper builds up a conceptual visualisation of the City of London as a bounded site of market action, in which it is possible to explore the social and physical constructions that both surround and sustain economic life. The concept of the field remains crucial to a fuller understanding of cultural experience and practice yet, as argued by Swartz (1997), it has been given relatively little attention and remains under theorised. This paper seeks to reinvigorate an engagement in field theory by exploring and evaluating the underlying and hidden framework of action that constructs and shapes social experience within the City of London.