Translation of the originally Swedish article written by the Swedish educationalist and cultural sociologist Donald Broady, published as an introduction to the multidisciplinary collection of works by Swedish and other Scandinavian specialists in humanities and social sciences, applying the Bourdieusian methodology on their own material. The article explains Pierre Bourdieu' key concepts as field, its two polarities, the various types of capital, habitus, strategy, social space and space of possibilities.
Attention is also paid to the circumstances which determine whether the field has features of autonomy.