Self-management is widely promoted in Western health care policies as a way to address the impact of increasing rates of chronic conditions on health care systems. Mostly informed by psychological theories, self-management frameworks and interventions tend to target individual behaviours as demarcated from the many aspects of social life shaping these behaviours. Using Bourdieu’s theory of practice, we develop four propositions for a relational and socially situated (re)conceptualisation of self-management. First, self-management is a field with its own distinctive logics of practice; second, self-management goals are social practices, emerging through co-constituted patient–professional interactions; third, self-management is energised by legitimised capital; and fourth, what goals feel possible are shaped through embodied knowledge and lived experience (habitus), linked to capital. Collectively these propositions enable focus on both the meanings and resources patients and professionals bring to self-management, along with the dynamic and relational ways goals are produced through patient–professional interactions within the broader field of health care.

自我管理在西方医疗保健政策中被广泛提倡，作为解决慢性病发病率增加对医疗保健系统的影响的一种方式。主要受心理学理论、自我管理框架和干预措施的启发，往往针对个人行为，这些行为与塑造这些行为的社会生活的许多方面不同。使用布迪厄的实践理论，我们为自我管理的关系和社会定位（重新）概念化提出了四个命题。第一，自我管理是一个有着自己独特实践逻辑的领域；其次，自我管理目标是社会实践，通过共同构成的患者-专业互动而出现；三是合法化资本为自主经营注入活力；第四，什么样的目标可能是通过与资本相关的具体知识和生活经验（习惯）来塑造的。总的来说，这些主张使人们能够关注患者和专业人士为自我管理带来的意义和资源，以及通过更广泛的医疗保健领域内的患者与专业人士的互动来产生目标的动态和相关方式。