conditions transform particular intellectuals into public intellectuals. Theory of habitus Bourdieu developed a theory of the action, around the concept of habitus, which exerted a considerable influence in the social sciences. This theory seeks to show that social agents develop strategies which are adapted to the structures of the social worlds that they inhabit. These strategies are unconscious and act on the level of a bodily logic. In Bourdieu's perspective, each relatively autonomous field of modern life (such as economy, politics, arts, journalism, bureaucracy, science or education), ultimately engenders a specific complex of social relations where the agents will engage their everyday practice. Through this practice, they develop a certain disposition for social action that is conditioned by their position on the field. This disposition, combined with every other disposition the individual develops through their engagement with other fields operating within the social world, will eventually come to constitute a system of dispositions, i.e. habitus: lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought and action. Habitus is somewhat reminiscent of some preexisting sociological concepts, such as socialization, though it also differs from the more classic concepts in several key ways. Most notably, a central aspect of the habitus is its embodiment: habitus does not only, or even primarily, function at the level of explicit, discursive consciousness. The internal structures become embodied and work in a deeper, practical and often pre-reflexive way. An illustrative example might be the 'muscle memory' cultivated in many areas of physical education. Consider the way we catch a ball—the complex geometric trajectories are not calculated; it is not an intellectual process. Although it is a skill that requires learning, it is more a physical than a mental process and has to be performed physically to be learned. In this sense, the concept has something in common with Anthony Giddens' concept of practical consciousness. The concept of habitus was inspired by Marcel Mauss's notion of body technique and hexis, as well as Erwin Panofsky's concept of intuitus. The word habitus itself can be found in the works of Mauss, as well as of Norbert Elias, Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, and Alfred Schutz as re-workings of the concept as it emerged in Aristotle's notion of hexis, which would become habitus through Thomas Aquinas's Latin translation. Disposition "Disposition"—a key concept in Bourdieu's work—can be defined as a sense of the game; a partly rational but partly intuitive understanding of fields and