and organizations, and in which the position of any agent or organization depends on the type and quantity of resources or ‘capital’ they have at their disposal. Any social arena – a business sector, a sphere of education, a domain of sport – can be treated as a field in which agents and organizations are linked together in relations of cooperation, competition and interdependency. Markets are an important part of some fields, but fields are always more than markets. They are made up of agents and organizations, of different kinds and quantities of power and resources, of a variety of practices and of specific forms of competition, collaboration and reward.
There are four reasons why the concept of field helps us to understand the world of publishing. First, it enables us to see straightaway that the world of publishing is not one world but rather a plurality of worlds – or, as I shall say, a plurality of fields, each of which has its own distinctive characteristics. So there’s the field of trade publishing, the field of scholarly monograph publishing, the field of higher education publishing, the field of professional publishing, the field of illustrated art book publishing and so on. Each of these fields has its own peculiar traits – you cannot generalize across them. It’s like different kinds of games: there is chess, checkers, Monopoly, Risk, Cluedo and so on. To the outside observer they may all look similar – they’re all board games with little pieces that move around the board. But each game has its own rules, and you can know how to play one without knowing how to play another. And publishing is often like that: people who work in the business tend to work in one particular field. They become experts in that field and may rise to senior positions of power and authority within it, but they may know nothing at all about what goes on in other fields.
The second reason why the notion of field helps is that it forces us to look beyond specific firms and organizations and makes us think, instead, in relational terms. The notion of field is part of a theory that is fundamentally relational in character, in the sense that it assumes that the actions of agents, firms and other organizations are oriented towards other agents and organizations and predicated on calculations about how others may or may not act in the field. Agents, firms and other organizations never exist in isolation: they are always situated in complex relations of power, competition and cooperation with other firms and organizations, and the theory of fields forces us to focus our attention on this complex space of power and interdependency. The theory constantly reminds us that the actions of any particular agent or organization are always part of larger whole, a system if you like, of which they are part but over which they do not have any overall control.
The third reason why the notion of field helps is that it calls our attention to the fact that the power of any agent or organization in the field is dependent on the kinds and quantities of resources or capital that it possesses. Power is not a magical property that some individual or organization possesses: it is a capacity to act and get things done that is always rooted in and dependent on the kinds and quantities of resources that the agent or organization has at its disposal.
So what kinds of resources or capital are important in publishing fields? We can see, I think, that five types of resources are particularly important in publishing fields: what I shall call ‘economic capital’, ‘human capital’, ‘social capital’, ‘intellectual capital’ and ‘symbolic capital’ (figure 1).2 Economic capital is the accumulated financial resources, including stock and plant as well as capital reserves, to which publishers have access, either directly (in their own accounts) or indirectly (through their ability to draw on the resources of a parent company or raise finance from banks or other institutions). Human capital is the staff employed by the firm and their accumulated knowledge, skills and expertise. Social capital is the networks of contacts and relationships that an individual or organization has built up over time. Intellectual capital (or intellectual property) consists in the rights that a publisher owns or controls in intellectual content, rights that are attested to by their stock of contracts with authors and other bodies and that they are able to exploit through their publications and through the selling of subsidiary rights. Symbolic capital is the accumulated prestige and status associated with the publishing house. The position of any publishing house will vary in the social space of positions, depending on the relative quantities of these five forms of capital they possess.
Figure 1 Key resources of publishing firms
It is easy to see why publishers need economic capital: as the principal risk-taker in the publishing chain, publishers must be able to draw on their financial resources (or those of financial agents and institutions to which they are linked, such as banks or parent companies) at various stages in order to finance the production and publication of books and in order to build and expand the business. Early in the publishing cycle they must be prepared to pay an advance on royalties to an author or an author’s agent. At later stages publishers must invest in the production of the book, paying the bills of copy-editors, typesetters, designers, printers, etc., and tying up resources in stock which may or may not be sold, and they must invest in marketing and promoting the book. The larger the capital reserves of the publisher, the larger the advances they are able to offer in the highly competitive game of acquiring content, the more they are able to invest in marketing and promotion and the more they are able to spread the risks of publishing by investing in a larger number of projects in the hope that some will bear fruit.
It is also easy to see why publishers need human capital: like other organizations, publishing firms are only as good as their staff. A highly trained and highly motivated workforce is a vital resource for a publishing firm and in many ways the key to its success. This is true at all levels, but particularly true at the level of editorial staff, since this is the creative core of the publishing firm. The success of the firm depends crucially on the ability to attract and retain highly motivated editors who are able to identify and acquire the new projects that are likely to be successful and are able to work effectively with authors to maximize the potential of these projects. In the highly competitive field of trade publishing, an editor is as good, and only as good, as the track record of the books that he or she has acquired and published over the years: this record is his or her CV. Editors who have the right combination of judgement, taste, social flair and financial nous are highly valued assets, and their ability to spot successful books becomes vital to the overall success of the firm. But the other side of this equation is that an editor who greatly overpays for a book that flops, or who buys a string of books that perform below expectations, may come to be seen as more of a liability than an asset and may find that their judgement is called into question, their job is in danger and their career is at risk.
However, even the best editors do not work on their own: they need good contacts. Much of their time is spent cultivating relationships with agents on whom they are largely and increasingly dependent for the supply of new book projects: the famous publisher’s lunch is not just a pleasant perk of the job but a necessary condition of doing the job effectively, precisely because this is a field in which networks and relationships – i.e. social capital – is crucial. The importance of relationships applies to other sides of the business too. Publishing houses invest a great deal of time and effort in developing close relationships with suppliers and retailers and they work hard to manage and protect these relationships because they are vital to their success. And the larger the publisher is, the more they may be able to call on their business partners to do favours for them – for example, ask a printer to prioritize an important reprint and deliver it within three or four days, or call up the product manager at a major retailer and ask them to pay special attention to a book that the publisher regards as a key title.
Publishers possess another kind of resource that is vital to their success: intellectual capital (or what is often called intellectual property). The distinctive feature of the publishing firm is that it possesses the right to use and exploit intellectual content, to ‘publish’ or make available this content in forms that will generate a financial
