From glass to pixel: Field restructuring, habitus crisis, and the revaluation of data in contemporary anatomic pathology—a sociological and autoethnographic perspective

Abstract

The digitalization of anatomic pathology is a profound restructuring of the medical field — not merely a technological upgrade. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of field and habitus, this work argues that nearly two centuries of methodological stability have produced a deeply sedimented professional habitus whose symbolic authority is now challenged by the emergence of technological, informational, and algorithmic capital. Resistance to digital transition is not technophobia. It is a structural response to the redistribution of historically accumulated professional capital — a phenomenon Bourdieu calls hysteresis. The traditionally unstructured narrative pathology report, long the primary vehicle of diagnostic authority, is simultaneously being displaced by structured data as a new form of capital. This process is not epistemologically neutral: controlled terminology systems such as Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine — Clinical Terms, natural language processing-based tools, and artificial intelligence algorithms construct rather than merely capture biological truth. Autoethnographic reflection from the author's dual practice — more than fifteen years as a pathologist and concurrent training as a medical informatics specialist — provides first-person evidence of this structural mismatch. The framework presented here is theoretical and autoethnographic in nature; it invites empirical follow-up. The future of the pathologist depends not solely on technological adaptation, but on the capacity to redefine symbolic capital at the convergence of morphology, structured data, and algorithmic interpretation.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Academic Pathology, 2026 · DOI ↗