
The paper draws a picture of a wider social context of functioning of sociology in Poland. Authors rely primarily on the methodology of Pierre Bourdieu to achieve this aim. In particular they reconstruct the general position of the sociological field in relation to the wider field of power and the specific characteristic of the later. They include, as the authors see them, domination of the cultural capital over the economic capital and the resulting hegemony of the intelligentsia in the field of power. Another important characteristic of the Polish field of power, which seems typical for most peripheral societies, is its division on to one part orientated towards the integration with the global core and its other part challenging the global domination, though, mostly in the cultural sphere. This division is also clearly transmitted into the structure of the sociological field, given its relatively restricted autonomy and results in a strong superiority of public sociology over the weakly developed critical sociology.