Operationalizing Bourdieu in Management Research: A Relational, Power‐Aware Toolkit

This commentary turns Bourdieu’s theory of practice into a usable, power-aware methodology for management research. It defines three “methodological moments”—mapping the field, capturing habitus, and tracing capitals—and supplies practical tools: an interview guide aligned to field–habitus–capital–nomos, indicators to identify/weight forms of capital (including gender capital), and procedures to integrate interviews, archives, and observations. It details complementary analytic options (thematic analysis, Gioia-style inductive coding, and critical discourse analysis) and embeds validity safeguards such as triangulation, audit trails, and positionality memos. Extending prior work, it foregrounds boundary spanning as a mediating practice across fields and proposes a multi-cycle, practice-based participatory action research protocol. Overall, it shifts Bourdieusian research from justification to step-by-step application.