Habitus emerging: The development of hybrid logics and collaborative business models in the Irish craft beer sector

Abstract

This article analyses data from 25 Irish craft beer entrepreneurs supplemented by associated web and press material, to explore how habitus emerges in a nascent entrepreneurial field. Welter’s frame of entrepreneurial contexts – business, social, spatial and institutional – is combined with Bourdieusian theory to explain the emergence of habitus. Findings show that emerging habitus is enacted through hybridisation of diverse global and local field logics, via the adoption, development and extension of their logics. It is also path-dependent on the life and career histories of a critical mass of habitus members, previously exposed to these fields. The study shows both local and global strategies of collective resource sharing – a novel approach to tackling the resource paucity typically faced by partitioned specialists facing large-scale generalists.