Pierre Bourdieu in Studies of Organization and Management

Societal Change and Transforming Fields

Sarah Robinson, Jette Ernst, Kristian Larsen, Ole Jacob Thomassen, Sarah Robinson, Jette Ernst, Kristian Larsen, Ole Jacob Thomassen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000457544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sviluppo organizzativo
• Index: Business

There is increasing academic interest in how Pierre Bourdieu's sociology can be applied to management and organization studies (MOS). In a context of increasing complexity faced by organizations and those who work in them due to globalization, neoliberalism, austerity, financial crisis, ecological issues, populism and developing technologies, there is untapped potential to use Bourdieu's theoretical inventions to arrive at greater understandings of how change, transition and crisis shape work, organizational life as well as relations between different organizational and sectorial fields.

This book aims to take a specific focus on the relational nature of Bourdieu's work and its relevance for contemporary organizations. It provides empirically-grounded examples that showcase the explanatory strength of Bourdieu´s intellectual concepts, such as field, habitus, capital, hexis, hysteresis, symbolic power, symbolic violence, doxa, illusio as applied to the current challenges within MOS. Such challenges include issues resulting from globalization, neoliberalism, financial crisis, ecological crisis, populism and developing technologies, to name but a few; and added to those, a global pandemic. The twelve chapters presented in this book study a great variety and range of organizational phenomena that are organized into three thematic sections: 'Neoliberalism, fields and hysteresis', 'Global and national movements as sites for competition and symbolic domination' and the 'The emergence and transformation of professional fields'. The chapters show a concern with the challenges and opportunities such developments offer to MOS scholars and to managers and employees in public and private sector organizations.

It will be of interest to researchers, academics and students in the fields of organizational studies, critical management studies, human resource management and sociology.

Part I
Neoliberalism, Fields and Hysteresis

1 Caught between Times

Explaining Resistance to Change through the Tale of Don Quixote

Henrik Koll and Jette Ernst

DOI: 10.4324/9781003022510-3

Introduction

The chapter investigates the responses of front-line managers and technicians to organisational change in a Scandinavian telecommunications company, Telco (pseudonym). Based on an ethnographic study, 25 years after the privatisation of the company, we investigate how deeply ingrained temporal assumptions formed managers’ and technicians’ responses to change in the company’s operations department and we show how experiences of time impact processes of organisational change as well as perceptions of work life quality. By adopting a temporal lens and addressing time as a focal explanatory factor of our study, it is our aim to shed light on the ways in which different temporal assumptions intrinsically inform the practices of managers and technicians (Dawson, 2014; Huy, 2001; Purser & Petranker, 2005).

We are inspired by Bourdieu’s theoretical construction of the temporalisation of practice through the concepts of habitus, field, objective social crisis, hysteresis, capital and doxa (Bourdieu, 2000; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). We suggest that by understanding how time is perceived by organisational agents, and how it works as both a structured and a structuring structure (Bourdieu, 1990), we are better able to understand what is often perceived as resistance to change. Thus, like a farmer whose work is structured according to the rhythm of the seasons, or a teacher whose work is divided into semester-long blocks, temporal structures become so closely associated with certain organisational practices that they become deeply rooted assumptions (Orlikowski & Yates, 2002) and structuring forces of organisational life (Holt & Johnsen, 2019).

We suggest that our analytical framework holds the potential to extend prior efforts to bridge the gap between objective time and subjective time (e.g. Orlikowski & Yates, 2002), that is, time as an absolute metaphysical phenomenon or time as an interpretive, experienced social construction (Shipp & Cole, 2015). Thereby, it allows us to explain the responses of technicians and managers to organisational change as the product of a complex dialectic between time as experienced and constructed in day-to-day organisational life and time as imposed from the wider forces of the field, while responding to calls for ‘temporal awareness’ within the change management research field (Dawson, 2014; Dawson & Sykes, 2016).

Telco was privatised in the early 1990s following the liberalisation of the European telecommunications market to increase competition and internationalisation (Greve & Andersen, 2001). All state-owned telecommunication organisations in the Nordics were privatised, followed by the implementation of extensive restructuring and rationalisation measures throughout the sector in the region (Jordfald & Murhem, 2003). For Telco, the transformation from state-owned monopoly to shareholder-owned enterprise in an international market altered the ‘logic of practice’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 8) for managers, technicians and the latter’s union alike as the ongoing competitiveness and profitability of the company became decisive criteria for company operations and existence. In the operations department, implementation of performance management was initiated, carrying with it a capitalist conception of time as a commodity that needs to be controlled and managed (Thrift, 1981). Moreover, the department had been presented with a threat of being outsourced unless it was able to comply with certain performance standards within a set timeframe.

We put forth that Bourdieu’s aspiration to develop a radically temporalised theory of social life (Gorski, 2013) founded upon the identification of social being with time (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) is an overlooked dimension of his work. Since Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts integrate subjective and objective structures, we are able to unfold an alternative understanding of time that transcends the dualism between objective and subjective conceptions of time (Holt & Johnsen, 2019; Koll & Jensen Schleiter, 2020), which has previously informed the organisational change management literature (Dawson, 2014; Dawson & Sykes, 2016; Huy, 2001).

Theoretical Framework

Organisational Change and Time

Time is inherent in the very definition of change and thus it underlies any change process. Yet, the role of time in organisational change management research has often been that of an implicit backdrop considered to be of inferior conceptual importance (Huy, 2001; Noss, 2002; Wiebe, 2010). However, following an increased awareness of the necessity to incorporate time as a focal subject matter in organisational analyses (Ancona, Goodman, Lawrence, & Tushman, 2001; Roe, Waller, & Clegg, 2009; Shipp & Cole, 2015), change management scholars have also turned their attention to the ontological constitution of time and its potential as a vital component in understanding processes of change in organisations (Huy, 2001; Pettigrew, Woodman, & Cameron, 2001; Purser & Petranker, 2005). A recurrent theme in these discussions concerns the constitution of time as either objective or subjective or, in other words, as clock time or event time (Dawson, 2014; Dawson & Sykes, 2016). Clock time is also conceptualised as quantitative time derived from Newtonian assumptions of time as absolute, exogenous, linear and mechanical (Orlikowski & Yates, 2002). Organisation and management studies have often associated clock time with time commodification and assumptions about time as a thing to be controlled and managed (Wiebe, 2010). In contrast, when conceptualised as event time, time is perceived as qualitative – a social construction of interpretive value and context dependent (Orlikowski & Yates, 2002). In this view, time does not exist externally to phenomena but is entangled with and unfolds with social events that are defined by organisational members (Adkins, 2009). Time, thus, becomes a product of social practices (Orlikowski & Yates, 2002).

We join this discussion by responding to calls for increased temporal awareness in organisational change studies (Dawson, 2014), that is, an approach defined by an explicit focus on the ways time and temporality are used and conceived by organisational agents, and by a conscious effort to integrate both objective and subjective time in theory development. The latter is reflected in the recognition of how forms of objective time, for example, clocks and calendars, are embedded in organisational change practices and, at the same time, how forms of subjective time, for example, the way agents respond to change, will differ according to the temporal assumptions of these agents (Dawson, 2014).

Inspired by the ‘practice turn’ in organisation and management studies (Schatzki, Cetina, & Von Savigny, 2001), others have looked to bridge the objective–subjective dualism by approaching time as an enacted phenomenon and examining how time is used to structure social practices (Dawson & Sykes, 2016). A particularly noteworthy contribution is the framework of ‘temporal structuring’ outlined by Orlikowski and Yates (2002), where agents’ engagement in the world is seen to transpire through ongoing production and reproduction of temporal structures that guide and orient their daily practices. In this sense, the framework elucidates how practices simultaneously shape and are shaped by temporal structures, which make time itself both a medium and a product of practices (Orlikowski & Yates, 2002). Thus, in this view, time is perceived as an organisational force constituted in and constituting of human action and consciousness (Holt & Johnsen, 2019). By bringing objective and subjective structures dialectically together in practice, the framework bares many resemblances to Bourdieu’s ideas about temporality. However, we believe that an analytical framework based on Bourdieu’s temporal conceptualisation of practice offers more comprehensive explanations of this dialectic and its impact on agents’ responses to organisational change (Koll, 2020). The concept of hysteresis, particularly, allows us to extend Orlikowski and Yates’ (2002) notion of temporal structuring by theorising those instances when the routine adjustments between subjective and objective structures are disrupted as well as the consequences of this disruption over time (Bourdieu, 2000; Koll, 2020, 2021). Hence, by operationalising the concept, we shed light on the embodied and embedded temporal dimensions of practice and tie these dimensions to the temporal experiences of agents. Our theoretical framework is explained in the following.

Bourdieu and the Temporalisation of Practice

Inspired by Husserl’s concepts of foresight or protention, Bourdieu sees overall being in fields as temporally constituted (Atkinson, 2018). Foresight is the sense for what can be expected from the future grounded in one’s experience of the past and, thus, it intersects past, present and future (Bourdieu, 1963). The temporal structuring of consciousness arises through a habitus socialised in the field that allows doxas to develop through a relative stability of that which is considered true, important or valued in a field. Bourdieu sees doxas as sets of taken for granted assumptions – an adherence to the self-evidence of the social world that can be recognised both in institutionalised, that is, objectified discourse about the world and in the practices instituted within it (Bourdieu, 1985). Hence, social life in fields transpires through the routine adjustment of subjective and objective structures that continuously maintains doxas and thereby constantly confirms that what we believe and experience as being true and important about the world is true and important (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992).

The concept of foresight concerns ‘the feel for the game’ and the everyday moves through which agents engage in everyday life and struggles over that which is valued in the field (Atkinson, 2018, p. 4; Jensen Schleiter & Ernst, 2020). It explains their temporal navigation in the field and why some practices are chosen over others at particular points in time – without reflexive consciousness. The latter is important since Bourdieu (1990) emphasised that the actions of agents, rather than being purposeful and pre-planned, are the products of the pre-verbal and embodied feel for the game. In other words, the practices and strategies guided by the feel for the game are products of temporalisation through which agents ‘transcend[s]‌ the immediate present via practical mobilization of...