Field theorists have long insisted that research needs to pay attention to the particular properties of each field studied. But while much field-theoretical research is comparative, either explicitly or implicitly, scholars have only begun to develop the language for describing the dimensions along which fields can be similar to and different from each other. In this context, this paper articulates an agenda for the analysis of variable properties of fields. It discusses variation in the degree but also in the kind of field autonomy. It discusses different dimensions of variation in field structure: fields can be more or less contested, and more or less hierarchical. The structure of symbolic oppositions in a field may take different forms. Lastly, it analyses the dimensions of variation highlighted by research on fields on the sub- and transnational scale. Post-national analysis allows us to ask how fields relate to fields of the same kind on different scales, and how fields relate to fields on the same scale in other national contexts. It allows us to ask about the role resources from other scales play in structuring symbolic oppositions within fields. A more fine-tuned vocabulary for field variation can help us better describe particular fields and it is a precondition for generating hypotheses about the conditions under which we can expect to observe fields with specified characteristics.

We live, we are told, in a world that is urbanizing and that is urbanizing at a rapid pace. It is often cited that, according to the United Nations, about half of the world's population is now living in cities. By 2050 "the world population is expected to be 67 per cent urban" (UN2011). According to Edward Soja and Miguel Kanai "the spatial reach of city-based societies, economies and cultures to every place of the planet" is unprecedented (Soja and Kanai 2007: 54). "More than ever before it can be said that the Earth's entire surface is urbanized to some degree, from the Siberian tundra to the Brazilian rainforest to the icecap of Antarctica, perhaps even to the world's oceans and atmosphere we breathe. ... (Soja and Kanai 2007: 62)." These numbers, and the diagnosis of urbanisation, are used to underscore the importance and urgency of scholarly and policy initiatives on 'urban' themes. They are also used to legitimate discussing all types of social problems as urban problems: It is currently fashionable to discuss, for example, infrastructure as "urban" infrastructure, disasters as "urban" disasters, and social justice as the right to the city. This lens of "urbanization" invites us to analyse change, the emergence of something we do not (yet) know, as the expansion of one thing we already think we know, the city. The notion of the "city" and the "urban" have come to function as a place-holder for a bundle of assumptions about specific kinds of places and specific lifestyles, usually opposed to the "rural", closely associated with assumptions about modernity, and capitalism, usually opposed to the pre-modern or traditional. The bundling of assumptions about the urban tends to be rather similar, whether urbanization is then seen as a 'good' thing or a 'bad' thing. But this paper argues that to fully make sense of current socio-spatial transformations, it is worth at least trying out the opposite perspective, and analyse them from the perspective of that which is supposedly acted upon, or being transformed. To take a simple example from discourses about urbanization, as we see people move into cities why do we assume only the people to change? Conversely, if we see people who live in cities visit the countryside, why do we expect only the countryside to change? If the city is endless, as is claimed, for example, in the title of a recent publication by the LSE's Urbanage Project (Burdett and Sudjic 2007), it is also the countryside. If the whole world is urbanizing, it must also be ruralizing.

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How have journalistic ideals of public service arisen? To what extent do journalists live up to these ideals? Can we make any claims as to the social conditions that this performance depends on? Using Bourdieu’s theory of fields of cultural production, this article addresses these questions with evidence from the history of journalism in the United States. What is most distinctive about modern journalism is a specific practice: active news-gathering or reporting. This practice became common in the 1860s and 1870s with the emergence of journalism as a field with its own stakes, relatively independent from political advantage or literary merit. The power of field-specific capital to organize practices in the media has varied since then. The field consolidated in the era from 1890 to 1914, with the newspaper industry expanding. In the interwar years, the boundary between PR and journalism became blurry and the institutional basis for active news-gathering declined. Under favorable economic and political conditions reporting practices, including local and investigative reporting, flourished between 1945 and1970 across media forms. In the past 40 years the importance of active news-gathering has declined.

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