Off Field

This article draws on Luc Boltanski’s research on teaching staff at the Institut d’Études Politiques (IEP) in Paris. Boltanski bases his research on a tabular representation of social fields to show that the dominant class is characterized above all by its multi-positioning, that is, its members’ tendency to occupy several positions in several fields. In this article the authors replace Boltanski’s table by a graph of individuals and institutions, which they use to discuss the characteristics and benefits of a sociology of heterogeneous networks.