There is a tendency to treat African journalism fields as insignificant to scholarship unless the scholarly focus is on “improving” or “modernizing” them. This chapter argues against this tendency by arguing that African journalism is engaged in knowledge production and all its attendant politics. It argues that by taking a conflict such as Darfur as a locus, scholars can excavate the multiple discursive struggles over questions such as the role of African journalism, the place of African news organizations in global narrative construction about Africa, and the politics of belonging in which African journalists debate what it means to be African. Relying on field theory, postcolonial theory, and the sociology of knowledge, this chapter argues for a de-Westernization of journalism studies while cogently locating the origins of field theory in Algeria; thus connecting it not just to the colonial project but specifically locating field theory with a larger discourse of postcoloniality.

The closing chapter aims to sum up some of the experiences, albeit in a rather overarching way. It is emphasized that, while the book spans rather widely, much of what has been presented is a bit like scratching the surface. Still, the tools developed should form a good basis for further work within quantum sciences. And, hopefully, the book has worked as a way of getting to know a bit of the quantum nature of the micro cosmos. In the preceding chapters, questions related to quantum foundations have, to a large extent, been evaded. Addressing the measurement problem and alternative interpretations attempts to mitigate this. A few topics are listed which are essential to quantum physics but are not properly addressed in this book. This includes quantum field theory, perturbation theory, density functional theory and quantum statistics. Finally, there are provide suggestions for further reading.

An introduction to field Lagrangians for scalars, vectors, and the Einstein–Hilbert Lagrangian for gravity provides a venue to think about coupling together different field theories. The natural expression of that coupling comes from an action, and we show how the “Euler–Lagrange” field equations enforce the universal coupling of all physical theories to gravity. As an example, the combined field equations of electricity & magnetism and gravity are solved in the spherically symmetric case to give the Reissner–Nordstrøm spacetime associated with the exterior of charged, massive, spherically symmetric central bodies.

Chapter 9 demonstrates how RIO facilitates a field-theoretic approach to regression models. The chapter draws parallels between the data representations made possible by turning regression models inside out and the geometric data analysis (GDA) that is central to field theoretic approaches to social research.

Gestalt psychology originated as a German intellectual movement heavily influenced by the precedents of the Würzburg school and phenomenological approaches to science. The early Gestaltists directly challenged Wundt’s structural psychology and were largely successful in pursuing the traditions of Brentano and Stumpf. Originating in Wertheimer’s research on apparent movement, or the phi phenomenon, the Gestalt principles were founded on the assumption of the inherent organization of person-environment interactions. The writings of Köhler and Koffka expanded the perceptual basis to formulate a comprehensive system of psychology especially amenable to higher thought processes of insight, understanding, and productive thinking. When the movement was threatened with destruction by the intellectual sterility of Nazi tyranny, the leaders fled to America. Unfortunately, the Gestalt movement was out of tune with the prevailing behavioristic character of American psychology. However, the Gestaltists assumed an important role in broadening the basis of behaviorism to foster a complete view of learning processes. One application of Gestalt views, contained in Lewin’s field theory, met with success in providing an empirical model of personality and social activities. The Gestalt movement, although it did not retain a separate identity, contributed greatly to the reformulation of psychology.

Part II looks at the position of fixers within the larger field of journalism. The newsmaking process can be understood as a series of mediations between successive contributors along a chain that stretches from local sources all the way to foreign audiences. “Fixers,” “translators,” “producers,” and others engage in similar journalistic activities along that chain, but news contributors nonetheless draw – and police – important distinctions among these various labels. To rise in status above “translators” and perhaps be recognized as “producers,” fixers try to present themselves as objective professionals and avoid the appearance of local allegiances. Yet local connections are, paradoxically, also their greatest asset for serving client reporters’ needs. Through accounts of reporting on events from the 2014 Soma mine disaster to the Syrian and Afghan refugee crises in Turkey, these chapters illustrate fixers’ ambiguous place in journalism’s hierarchical division and their efforts to claim high-status roles and labels.

Chapter 1 lays out the cornerstones of our argument. We highlight how power is multidimensional and is related to network position. We review several works on field theory, contest arenas, and social spaces to highlight how analysts can theorize political action in multimodal settings. Then we explain why communities are a key concept for theory and research in political networks: how they can be identified, how they are created, and what effects they have on individual-, community-, and systemic-level outcomes. Last, we show that while some researchers have studied multimodal social networks (particularly 2-mode networks), few have conducted systematic treatments of multimodal political networks.

"When the first underground and submarine telegraph cables were laid around 1850, engineers noticed that sharp signals sent in at one end emerged at the other badly blurred and appreciably delayed. This “retardation” grew worse on longer cables and threatened to make operation of the proposed 2000-mile Atlantic line unprofitably slow. Retardation presented British physicists and engineers with both an intriguing physical phenomenon and a serious practical problem, and they studied it closely from the 1850s on.

Latimer Clark, a prominent British cable engineer, brought retardation to Michael Faraday’s attention late in 1853, and Faraday’s published account of the phenomenon served to publicize both retardation and the ideas about the electromagnetic field that he invoked to explain it. Faraday’s paper led William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) to reprint two papers on field theory he had written in the 1840s, and later in 1854 a related cable question prompted Thomson to work out what became the accepted mathematical theory of signal transmission. Moreover, it was at just this time, and largely under Thomson’s guidance, that James Clerk Maxwell first took up the study of electricity, with results that were to transform electromagnetic theory."

James Clerk Maxwell’s field theory of electromagnetism had important and previously unrecognized roots in the cable industry of the mid-nineteenth century. When he took up electrical physics in 1854, the subject was permeated by a concern with cable problems. Guided by William Thomson, Maxwell soon adopted Faraday’s field approach, which in 1861 he sought to embody in a mechanical model of the electromagnetic ether. Seeking evidence to bolster the electromagnetic theory of light to which this model had led him, Maxwell joined the British Association Committee on Electrical Standards, which had been formed in 1861 largely to meet the needs of the submarine telegraph industry. Maxwell’s work on the committee between 1862 and 1864 brought home to him the value of framing his theory in terms of quantities he could measure in the laboratory—particularly the “ratio of units”—rather than relying on a hypothetical mechanism. Maxwell’s shift from his mechanical ether model of 1861 to his seemingly abstract “Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field” of 1864 thus reflected the often overlooked role concerns rooted in cable telegraphy played in the evolution of his thinking.

This chapter considers the question of journalists’ purposes. Matthew Powers and Sandra Vera–Zambrano argue that transformations in media and public life (e.g., distrust in news media, distressed business models) make revisiting the question especially urgent. Where scholars typically answer the question normatively, the authors suggest the question can also be analyzed empirically. Drawing on research in France and the United States, they argue that journalists reproduce and legitimate existing social hierarchies, with individuals from lower middle–class backgrounds producing practical information for popular audiences, while those from upper middle–class backgrounds tending to orient themselves toward civic aims for audiences with higher volumes of economic and cultural capital. They suggest that both the question and this answer can link scholarship on media and public life to a rich array of theoretical debates often ignored in contemporary debates that emphasize chaos, fluidity, and disorder in journalism – long focused on the establishment and maintenance of social order, the hierarchies that these orders legitimate, and the inequalities they help reproduce.

The C40 city-network claims a position of global leadership in the governance of climate change. This chapter provides a brief overview of the history of the network, its member cities, and their collective aims and objectives. The chapter introduces the empirical puzzle around which the book is organized, namely the ability of the C40 to achieve coordinated action from a diverse collection of cities despite relying on voluntary participation and engagement. The ability to do so sets the C40 apart from other similar city-networks and begs the question as to how it has been able to achieve coordination and collective effort. The chapter asserts that such voluntary coordination is only possible through the formation of a collective identity and draws on ideas from the scholarship on social fields, social constructivism, and social movements to develop a theory of global urban governance fields that explains when, how, and why the C40 has managed to generate convergence around a set of governance norms and a shared governance identity.

While voluntary city-networks lack formal mechanisms of coercion, they remain subject to complex political and power relations that shape their capacity to produce collective efforts. This chapter develops a general theory of global urban governance fields that brings to light the ways in which power is present in city-networks like the C40. The chapter starts from the premise that coordination in these networks requires convergence around a shared sense of what it means to “be” a global urban climate governor. While multiple actors – not only cities but also private corporations, philanthropic foundations, civil society organizations, and international organizations - seek to shape the content of field norms, practices, and collective identity, in newly created governance fields the authority to do so is contested. Actors make particular claims to authority, based on material resources, expertise, reputation, and institutional position, but only through the mechanism of recognition are these acknowledged as authoritative. The ability to secure recognition for the members of the governance field enables those actors to secure deference to particular terms of recognition (the governance norms, practices), shaping how governance is understood and practiced by those within the field.

Field theory is a promising and flexible framework for understanding social order and change with broad applicability to the concerns of political sociologists. While many in the subfield are rightly concerned with the relationship between “the state” and civil society, the implicit definition of political sociology as “the sociology of the state” has foreclosed opportunities for understanding how states, markets, firms, nonprofit organizations, and uninstitutionalized politics that include social movements are connected. This chapter presents field theory as a generative approach to understanding political phenomena that moves beyond the limitations of state-based approaches to political sociology, providing opportunities for sharing theoretical insights across subfield boundaries.