Entrepreneurial Agency and Field Relations: A Realist Bourdieusian Analysis

This article addresses the problem of understanding and assessing how entrepreneurial and self-employed workers engage with economic fields as they pursue their interests. It considers the differing experiences of entrepreneurial workers by developing a transferable approach to studying the relations between their environments, practices and values. The approach developed combines Bourdieusian and critical realist scholarship to explore qualitative data about the networking practices of 25 self-employed and entrepreneurial human resource consultants who competed in a conurbation in the North of England. We argue that the form of analysis that develops, which we call Realist Bourdieusian Analysis, reveals more about the causal properties of the social formations entrepreneurial workers navigate than analyses that are limited within each lexicon. Arguably, combining Bourdieusian analysis and critical realism enriches our understanding of the constituent parts of economic fields, the resources entrepreneuria...