“For Jürgen Habermas, the lifeworld is more or less the ‘background’ environment of competences, practices, and attitudes representable in terms of one’s cognitive horizon. Compared to Husserl with his focus on consciousness, however, Habermas, whose social theory is grounded in communication, focuses on the lifeworld as consisting of socially and culturally sedimented linguistic meanings. It is the lived realm of informal, culturally-grounded understandings and mutual accommodations. Rationalization and colonization of the lifeworld by the instrumental rationality of bureaucracies and market-forces is a primary concern of Habermas’s two-volume Theory of Communicative Action”.

Wiki