Lesson six

Change stakeholders and resistance

to change
Pierre Bourdieu and organizational
change
Today
• Resistance to change – how can we understand it?
• Introduction to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice
• Resistance to change – a habitus-oriented approach
• Case work
Reframing resistance
to change
Thomas and Hardy (2011).
• There are two dominant and contrasting
approaches to organizational change
resistance: The demonizing and the
celebrating.
• However, none of these approaches pay
adequate attention to power
• Therefore, these approaches raise practical,
ethical and theoretical problems in change
management
Reframing resistance to
change
• The most common approach to change
resistance: Demonizing it, seeing it as a
pathology, as something to be healed
and something to overcome.
• This approach is not interested in the
particular content of resistance.
• It assumes that management / change
agents are ‘doing the right thing’.
 Reframing resistance
to change
Celebrating resistance:
• Resistance should be regarded as in-
put for managers who can generate
better understandings of the
change.
• Resistance can then lead to better
change, even if it challenges the
change agent.
• However, who should decide which
behaviours constitute resistance?
 • The authors: Demonizing and
celebrating approaches both priviledge
Reframing the change agent / manager.
resistance to change • The perspectives of managers and
change agents on the change and the
resistance are priviledged over the
perspectives of employees.
• Resistance is not resistance untill
someone has labelled it as such.
Time for reflection

Which practical, ethical and

theoretical challenges can you
identify with the demonizing
approach?
Pierre Bourdieu
(1930 – 2002)
A theory of practice
 Pierre Bourdieu

• The country boy who against the odds became one of the greatest social
scientists of our time.
• He graduated from the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, which
was then at the apex of French academic life.
• He was a philosopher who turned sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu

• Why the turn from philosophy to sociology?

- Drafted into the French army and sent to Algeria at the height of its
Liberation War (1956–1962).
- There he turned to empirical inquiry, carrying out both ethnographic and
statistical studies of colonial transformation.
- Algeria was under transformation from a rural to an urban society.
- Studied the Kabyle tribe
- Theory has limited value if it is not empirically grounded
 • Was inspired by various intellectuals: for
example, Marx, Durkheim, Merlau-Ponty,
Wittgenstein, Husserl, Weber and more
• Schools of thought ranging from
Bourdieu phenomenology to structuralism
• Worked in a dialectic between theory, empirical
work and back to the refinement of theory
• The approach is called generative structuralism
or constructive structuralism or praxeology
• All these names refer to Bourdieu’s approach to
the agency – structure wicked problem of the
social sciences.
Three pillar concepts

• Field
• Habitus
• Capital
 • One of his core arguments is thus that there is no
opposition between structure and agency.
• Agency is the ability of individuals and groups to
A subjectivity exercise free will and make social change

– objectivity • Structures are the social arrangements that delimit the

freedom af action of individuals and groups.
dialectic • If you want to know more about social structure, you can,
for example, watch this video:
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StMXdmt9etE&t=66s
• Please do also refer to lesson one of this course.
 • No opposition between structure and agency /
objectivity and subjectivity because:
• They mutually determine the nature of the other,
so no phenomena can be adequately understood
in isolation from their environment.
Subjectivity • Formal rules, regulation, influencing factors.
– objectivity • The external is internalized -> The structuring
objective forces are always embedded in the social
dialectic in the shape of the habitus of members of a field
but also in buildings, things and documents.
• But it also work the other way round: The
internalized affect the external. Thus, individuals
and groups affect their worlds.
Structure and agency
 • Action is neither rational – as calculated
Subjectivity – goal- oriented action, nor mechanical
reaction, nor free willed action: Practice has
objectivity an immanent reason whose nature we can
dialectic only understand by looking at it from an
inside perspective and combining it with a
contextualizing and historizing perspective
(Bourdieu, 1990: 50).
Field
• The social space is the overall conception of the social.
• The field is constructed by the researcher.
• Field construction takes its outset in empirical reality - a model of the
real.
• In the social space there are multiple fields. Fields are spaces for
particular activities and interests.
• This interest, which works as an energy or force, means that something
is at stake in a field.
• The field is the immediate context where practice unfolds.
• Every field has a history which influences how present day practice
unfolds in the field.
Pillar concepts: The field

• The field socializes its agents. One learns how to navigate the field.
• The practitioner is thus pre-disposed with an ability to navigate the field
and act in it with competence in taken-for-granted ways.
• Bourdieu explains the interdependence of field, habitus and capital
through the metaphor of playing a game.
The field
• When we enter a particular field we must play by its rules – that is, a
game implies conscious or unconscious acceptance of rules.
• The better we understand these rules, of which many are invisible,
the better we can play the game.
• We can talk about a practical capacity of agents.
• The educational field is field consisting of different forms of
education that are hierarchically related. University education is
highest positioned (because the university student accumulates
theoretical knowledge), but among university educations we can talk
about an internal hierarchy as well.
 Time for • Which fields do you member?
reflection: • Concerning the educational field:
Fields What are its rules? What is at stake?
What is capital?
Pillar concepts: Habitus

• Habitus is precipitated in the body. It is acquired during childhood, yet it is under constant
development.
• Learned, socialized principles for actions and perception.
• While, for example, the nursing practitioner enters the hospital as a work field with socialized
dispositions, this work field, in turn, also socializes the nurse. Habitus is constantly formed in
the daily practices of agents or groups which means that practices are constantly under
construction and re-construction.
• ‘Habitus is the development of a practical capacity to cope with the world and to competent
participation in the games of the field aimed at material as well as symbolic ends’ (Ernst
2016).
Habitus
• Bourdieu’s theoretical intention was thus to create a concept that would neither install
agents as puppets who only act out the structures they carry, nor would it construct them
as omni-empowered and free willed agents. Agency is bounded because it is a product of
socialization and the limits or possibilities set by a certain environment in which the
individual is immersed.
• Knowledgeability in practice is the ability to perform well in the present and anticipate the
immediate future and hence, a knowing of appropriate actions in practice.
• Thus, the habitus concept connects the self and the world, the subjective and the objective.
• Bourdieu names this praxeology.

Nicolas Herriman, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia on habitus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGFdhc75uno&t=26s
 ‘Now, it must be recognized that techniques of the body
constitute genuine systems, bound up with a whole cultural
context’ (Bourdieu 2003, p. 582). See Mahar et al. on symbolic
systems.

Habitus – bodily dispositions

Pillar concepts: Capital
There are three generic forms of capital that stratify agents in the social space:
• Economic: Assets and possessions such as money, buildings, investment papers etc.
• Cultural. There are three forms:
1. Embodied socialized dispositions
2. The objectified: cultural products and practises
3. The institutionalized: Mainly knowledge in the form of education.
• Social: Connections and network of a good quality, which the individual can mobilize if
needed for example in questions of business or in cases of job hunts (think of LinkedIn). In
such networks, people help each other.
Capital
Besides that:
• In the field capital is that which has particular value and which individuals
and groups in the field can acquire and possess.
• Capital can be material or immaterial (e.g. money or possessions versus
knowledge)
• Capital is connected to social value and prestige.
• Which forms of capital structure the organization? Which of these forms is
most important?
Practice

• The practices of a field are legitimate ways to act in it.

• What is legitimate in one field can be illegitimate in another.
• It would for example seem odd if a univervisity professor had posters with
‘fancy’ women in his office, whereas it would seem natural in a typical in
a construction site trailer. We might even expect them there.
• We would also expect different communicative practices between
university professors and construction site workers. Thus, different, yet
invisible, rules apply to the construction site work field and the university
work field.
Practice

• Practices are not driven by logic as a rational logic but by a logic ´which is
throughout practical and which can seem illogical to those who are not
members of the field and who therefore don’t understand its particular
logics.
• Therefore, it seems to the outside observer that people do ‘strange’
things, but things that make sense if you are a part of the field and
subsumed to the conditions that apply to it.
• - > Practice has its own (fuzzy) logic (Bourdieu 1990)
 The symbolic domain

The symbolic properties of -> The social world is

Bourdieu speaks about two
the social have the same equally defined by ‘its
social levels (first order and
world making powers as being perceived’ and ‘its
second objectivity): the
have its material being’ (Wacquant, 1993, p.
material and the symbolic.
characteristics (Bourdieu) 131).

That which has connotative But connotative value is

value often not appreciated.
Artefacts as symbols
• Are office chairs just ‘devices for sitting’?
How can we interpret them as devices for the creation
representation about
an organization or someone in an organiziation?
The symbolic domain

A symbolic struggle is a relational and social struggle to create a differentiation

of reality, which creates ‘real social effects’ as divisions among agents. Thus, it is
the process by which agents or institutions try to impose a particular vision on
the world as the most legitimate in the field, for example, by the use of
particular categories as discursive tools (Wacquant, 1993).
Power and position

• Power is a central concept with Bourdieu.

• Agents are differently positioned in social space and (organizations),
depending on the forms and amount of capital they possess. Thus, capital
yields power.
• Power does not reside with the agent, however, but in the relations
between agents (an agent can be a person or an institution).
• Agents are also positioned and positioning themselves in a field / an
organization in relation to their interest in something at stake for them.
• Agents are stakeholders.
Time to build
some
theoretical
fitness..
Resistance to change – a habitus-oriented approach
Simoni (2017)

• A new way of understanding resistance to change

• Baruch Simoni – An organizational consultant
• The aim of his paper: To present a practical approach to RTC that
overcomes the social – personal dichotomy
• Firm’s diagnosis of poor performance: John and Bill’s stubborn
personalities - > psycological dispositions.
• However, Kimono operated in a stormy social and political context.
• John and Bill were used by each owner group to achieve their particular
aims.
Resistance to change – a habitus-oriented approach
Simoni (2017)
• Time for reflexion: what is the social –
personal dichotomy?
• What is the traditional role of consultants in
organizational change processes?
• Outline the different interests at stake in
this case.
Resistance to change – a habitus-oriented approach
Simoni (2017)

• According to Simoni: An individual’s psycological characteristics should

not be the starting point for understanding RTC.
• Positions employees as subjects who cause problems in organizational change.
• They are problems that need fixing.
• Resistance plays a crucial role in drawing attention to things that are not properly
thought through or simply wrong.
• Resistance should be thought of as feed-back to the change agent
Resistance to change – a habitus-oriented approach
Simoni (2017)

• Western individualistic mode of thought with notions of self and

personal responsibility. It ‘blames’ individuals for their behaviours.
• But these ‘beaviours’ are generated by conditions in the social context,
according to the author.
• Consultancy as therapeutic discourse and group workshops.
• Scholars like Lewin acknowledged context as important for resistance to
change. However, the author is critical of Lewin’s regard for context –
why?
Resistance to change – a habitus-oriented approach
Simoni (2017)

• Simoni:
Resistance […] is not a local reaction to specific change efforts but a social
practice built into the system, produced by social agents’ habitus, historically
developed in dialectical relations between social agents and social
structures. (p.262)
The concept of habitus encourages OD practitioners and researchers to search
for resistance in the entire organization and look for the causes in the entire
organization
Social constructionist approaches ignore the influence of organization’s
material condition on RTC.
Give examples of such material conditions.
Resistance to change – a habitus-oriented approach
Simoni (2017)

• The habitus approach to organizational resistance

entails that we examine the field in which the
organization is embedded and its symbolic and material
structures and how these factors influence change and
resistance.
References not mentioned in your syllabus
• Wacquant, L. (1993). On the tracks of symbolic power - prefatory
notes to Bourdieu State Nobility. THEORY CULTURE & SOCIETY, 10(3),
1-17.
• Bourdieu, P. (2004). The peasant and his body. Ethnography, Vol 5(4).