In Chapter Four, I examined how actors undertake strategic action using the gang repertoire. Before expanding the theory to consider further examples of strategy development in the social field, let us look in more detail at the field hierarchy, the actors (or players) and the rules of the game. These dictate how the game is played, how social order is maintained, and how gangs are structured and organised.

The structure of the social field

As identified in Chapter Two, there remains a rather unhelpful binary regarding gang organisation in the UK: gangs are not organised (Aldridge et al, 2008; Hallsworth and Young, 2008; Hallsworth and Duffy, 2010; Hallsworth, 2013); gangs are organised, (Pitts, 2008b; Toy, 2008; Harding, 2012; Densley, 2013).

Field theory (Bourdieu, 1969, 1984; Martin, 2003; Fligstein and McAdam, 2012) dictates that the social field is structured with actors placed by their ‘relative location in the hierarchy of positions’ (Swartz, 1997, p 120), reflecting capital distribution. This concurs with my own findings among gangs in SW9, where organisational levels, where perceptible, relate not to age, as some believe, but to capital distribution. Age is reflected in so far as young people starting out in the social field of the gang possess less capital than those already established.

I also found that in SW9 gangs are moderately organised at the lower level and more organised at the higher level in a common organisational structure that I have termed ‘tiers’. These tiers represent more than capital distribution; they represent differences in use of the repertoires, strategies, types of criminal behaviour, levels of antisocial behaviour, ways of thinking, aspirations and group dynamics. Before further consideration of gang organisation, it is important to examine other organising concepts for the maintenance of social order in the field.

Reconstruction of social order

Social order in the social field relates to the internal field structure and mechanisms for its maintenance. In the social field of the gang in SW9, the evident social order is maintained for one overarching reason: there is no plausible alternative.

Returning to Bourdieu (1991, pp 22-5), we are reminded that the social field retains two key ordering principles: the doxa – the field's deep structure, which dictates the forms of struggle – and the illusio – the tacit understanding of a dominant establishment and subordinate challengers with an internal logic that confirms it is all worth the struggle.