Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus

>> The concept of habitus is understood as being linked to a form of knowledge that individuals have acquired during their socialization and depending on their environment (e.g., group-, context-, or milieu-specific knowledge) and that has a characteristic impact on the actions they perform. However, the habitus develops largely unconsciously during the course of socialization. In the analysis of habitus, three types of schemata are distinguished that influence the action level:
(1) Perceptual schemes that structure the everyday perception of social reality,
(2) thought patterns by which these perceptions are organized and interpreted (e.g. implicit ethical norms),
(3) Schemas that guide the production of actions. These individual dimensions are interconnected in social action (Fuchs-Heinritz and König 2014).

Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus thus focuses on the insight that individual adaptations to the social environment lead to specific patterns of behavior and attitudes, and that habitus is thus socially predetermined. Habitus imposes certain limits on actors that make certain actions impossible. Within these limits, however, actors are certainly innovative, and reactions are not necessarily predictable (habitus as a generating principle).
In order to explore and reconstruct the habitus as a structured and structuring structure, approaches such as the documentary method can be used in health services research. This method was developed on the basis of central habitus theory and sociological assumptions of modern empirical social research (e.g., Mannheim, Bourdieu, Bohnsack, Kleemann). However, one difference between the documentary method and Bourdieu's conception of habitus can be found in that, in contrast to Bourdieu's, the documentary method focuses its analysis on the connecting elements between the actors within a group (conjunctive or shared experiential space), whereas Bourdieu focuses on the distinct elements of the habitus between different groups.
The application of the documentary method in health services research enables, in particular, an understanding of how a specific habitus can develop (e.g. of different health professions), what effects this can have on the practical actions and social interactions of the actors, and how this influences the implementation of innovations in the health care system (see Fig. 1).
The following section describes the sociological embedding of the documentary method.
The documentary method as an approach to exploring habitus
The basic assumptions of the documentary method are based on the theories of the sociology of knowledge by Karl Mannheim (1928), the ethnomethodological assumptions of Harold Garfinkel (1968), and the social phenomenological assumptions of Alfred Schütz (1971). The qualitative analysis procedures of this method provide access not only to the reflexive but also to the action-guiding knowledge of the actors and thus to their practice. Based on these approaches, the documentary method developed a praxeological sociology of knowledge (Bohnsack et al. 2013).
The practice of action, as well as of speaking, representing, and arguing, are central research subjects here. The reconstruction of action practice aims at the habitualized and partly incorporated orientational knowledge underlying this practice, the "practical logic," which structures this action and is independent of the subjectively intended meaning of an action. In Mannheim's sociological approach to knowledge, a central premise is not to abandon the empirical basis of actor knowledge, but to achieve methodically controlled access to the "unknown world" of knowledge of the group under study. This particular observer perspective distinguishes the documentary method from objectivist approaches that seek overarching action structures of the actors.
The analysis allows for the reconstruction, in methodically controlled steps, of the implicit knowledge held by the actors themselves and the description of the shared experiential space of conjunctive, atheoretical knowledge. Mannheim's sociology of knowledge distinguishes between two different forms or layers of knowledge: the communicative or conjunctive form of knowledge and experience (see Figure 1).
Communicative knowledge includes institutionalized concepts as common-sense theories or knowledge about (socially) institutionalized concepts (e.g., organizational rules and structures in hospitals). Conjunctive knowledge includes knowledge about the involvement of actors in concrete forms of practice and within specific conjunctive experiential spaces (e.g., how specific action practices emerge by translating organizational rules into action practices).
These conjunctive experiential spaces connect the actors (e.g. doctors, nursing staff) due to their “structurally identical” experiences and lead to the formation of a collective or organizational habitus, which can also develop independently or beyond the organizational rules or “structures”.
Application in health services research
Vogd (2004) applied the documentary method in a hospital setting in the German context. Within the framework of a newly emerging debate on documentary organizational research, the focus is on how the practices of actors in organizations are shaped, for example, how they deal with framing conflicts or how certain ways of resolving conflicts become habitualized (Amling and Vogd 2017). In the study by Söling et al. (2020), the documentary method was used to examine the habitus of primary care physicians. Based on the theory, the authors concluded that the various dimensions of habitus (knowledge, ethics, experience) have either a hindering or a supportive effect on the implementation process of a new form of care.

Amling, Steffen; Vogd, Werner (2017): Documentary Organizational Research. Perspectives of the Praxeological Sociology of Knowledge. Opladen: Verlag Barbara Budrich.
Bohnsack, Ralf; Nentwig-Gesemann, Iris; Nohl, Arnd-Michael (eds.) (2013): The Documentary Method and Its Research Practice. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1974): Habitus as a Mediator between Structure and Practice. In: On the Sociology of Symbolic Forms, pp. 125–158.
Bourdieu, P., & Seib, G. (1987): Social Sense: A Critique of Theoretical Reason: Suhrkamp Verlag. Available online at https://ixtheo.de/record/027377423.
Fuchs-Heinritz, Werner; König, Alexandra (2014): Pierre Bourdieu. An Introduction. 3rd, revised edition. Konstanz: UVK-Verlagsgesellschaft (UTB, 2649).
Garfinkel, H. (1968): Aspects of the problem of common-sense knowledge of social structures. In: Gordon, Ch., Gergen, KJ (eds.): The Self in Social Interaction. Vol. I: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 71–74. Available online at https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-fromm/frontdoor/index/index/docid/10331.
Kleemann, Frank, Uwe Krähnke, and Ingo Matuschek (eds.) (2009): Interpretive Social Research: A Practice-Oriented Introduction. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
Mannheim, Karl (1928): The Problem of Generations. In: Cologne Quarterly Journal of Sociology 7 (2), pp. 157–185.
Reckwitz, Andreas (2008): Subject. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Schütz, Alfred (1971): The Problem of Social Reality. In: Martinus Nijhoff (ed.): Collected Essays 1. The Problem of Reality.
Söling, Sara; Köberlein-Neu, Juliane; Müller, Beate Sigrid; Dinh, Truc Sophia; Muth, Christiane; Pfaff, Holger; Karbach, Ute (2020): From sensitization to adoption? A qualitative study of the implementation of a digitally supported intervention for clinical decision making in polypharmacy. In: Implementation science: IS 15 (1), p. 82. DOI: 10.1186/s13012-020-01043-6.
Vogd, Werner (2004): Medical Decision-Making in Hospitals. Complex Case Problems in the Tension Field of Patient Interests and Administrative-Organizational Conditions. In: Journal of Sociology, Vol. 33 (1), pp. 26–47.