Shaping and being shaped: Extending the relationship between habitus and practice

The focus of this chapter is on practice and what informs it – the influence that Pierre Bourdieu names as the ‘habitus’ – but also on how practice forms the habitus. In making explicit the potential influence of practice on habitus, we seek to extend Bourdieu’s account of how the habitus is shaped and reshaped. We illustrate these issues within the context of prescribed approaches to accountability within academic research.