This chapter investigates the responses of front-line managers and technicians to organisational change in a Scandinavian telecommunications company from a temporal perspective. Based on an ethnographic study in the company’s operations department 25 years after the privatisation of the company, it shows how temporal assumptions impacted managers’ and technicians’ responses to change and their experience of work life quality. Drawing on Bourdieu’s temporalisation of practice, the chapter unfolds an alternative understanding of time as both a structured and a structuring structure and it demonstrates how Bourdieu’s temporal epistemology offers an alternative theorisation of the responses of workers and managers to sweeping organisational change. The chapter asserts that the temporal dimension of Bourdieu’s work deserves more attention in organisation and management studies.

Conventionally, organizational change research has viewed history as objective facts associated with path dependencies, making change difficult. However, started with the work of Suddaby et al. (2010), a different stance has emerged, viewing history as a subjective, narrative construction that can be utilized to facilitate change. This paper responds to calls for ways of bridging these two perceptions and increasing historical consciousness in organizational change studies. To these ends, the paper explores the capacity of Bourdieu’s construct of hysteresis as a bridging construct. Based on an ethnographic study, the paper operationalizes hysteresis to analyze the response strategies of technicians and shop stewards to organizational change following privatization in a Scandinavian telecommunications company. The paper argues that hysteresis constitutes a valuable alternative to bridging constructs available in extant literature and holds the potential to open new avenues for exploring the implications of history for organizational change.

In this paper, we explore the idea of managerial struggle and pedagogy as modes of manoeuvring in our examination of prolonged organizational transition and change inertia in the wake of privatisation of a Scandinavian telecommunications company (Telco). There is a lack of studies that, from the perspective of (middle) managers, attempt to understand seemingly inefficient leadership and how managers manoeuvre the complexities of change inertia, including how managers seek to gain control when they face difficult and complex and paradoxical conditions of leadership (Denis et al., 2010; Lüscher and Lewis, 2008; Filstad et al., 2020; Gatenby et al., 2015; McCabe, 2014; Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003). We suggest a Bourdieusian conceptualisation of manoeuvring using Bourdieu’s (1990) concepts of field, habitus, symbolic violence and pedagogy, where we see pedagogy as an overlooked part of managers manoeuvring practices that emphasises the use of power and relations of power in managerial practice (Kamoche and Pinnington, 2012; Tomlinson et al., 2013). We develop our arguments through empirical studies of seemingly inefficient leadership by a team of frontline managers in the operations department of Telco. Comprising 185 hours of participant observation studies and 25 interviews with the regional director, frontline managers, and technicians, our study examines how the frontline managers struggle to manage during prolonged attempts at organisational transition from state-owned monopoly to shareholder-owned corporation. The capitalist visions and ideas of the American owners contrast sharply with the socalled Nordic Model of work and welfare according to which the company had been run and whose central features are a high rate of unionization among employees, a national hierarchical system of collective bargaining, and the powerful presence of trade unions at workplace and national policy making levels (Ervasti et al., 2008; Kettunen, 2012). The shift to a more active and intervening role has placed the frontline managers in the eye of a storm. We show how the frontline managers perceive themselves as tasked with supplying the technicians with the understandings, beliefs and dispositions for action that will enable them to meet demands associated with corporate neoliberal capitalism (Visser, 2020; Arturo, 1994) and how they must respond to outspoken yet subtle contradictions in their manoeuvring space (Filstad et al., 2020) or their possibilities for ‘playing the game’(Bourdieu, 1990). The idea of managerial pedagogy as practices of inculcation of beliefs and dispositions, in particular, and its connection to relations of power and symbolic violence (Lakomski, 1984; Tomlinson et al., 2013; Kerr and Robinson, 2009; Kamoche and Pinnington, 2012), allows us to extend the use of Bourdieu in studies of management and organization when we provide new insights into prolonged organizational change inertia and managerial struggle. We argue that pedagogy, as part of middle managerial manoeuvring, enables a vision of the multitude of power relations at play in organizational change, and beyond, including the fastening of these power relations in structural and historical conditions of the field in which the organization is embedded.

This chapter offers an analysis of organizational change management in a Scandinavian telecom from a historical perspective. Based on an ethnographic study, we investigate how the past was appropriated by managers for the purpose of implementing performance management in the company’s operations department. By combining Bourdieusian theory with a narrative approach to analysis, the chapter provides an alternative view on the impact of history to organizational change management studies by bridging objective and subjective elements of history. This is achieved by illustrating how practice brings together two modes of existence of history in action—that is, how habitus and field dialectically adjust to each other while endowing actors with a “practical sense” that allows them to appropriate history in practice. We show how actors’ inclination to appropriate and narrate history in certain ways was itself a product of historical acquisition derived from their experience in the departmental field of struggle

This research commentary introduces a Bourdieusian perspective to studying the strategic organization of time in organizations. Since the millennium, time, temporality, and historyhave moved from backstage to frontstage in organization and management research. Particularly ,studies ascribing to a strategic organization of time perspective have made important strides in moving the research field beyond objective notions of time as clock-time towards more subjective notions of time. Practice-based perceptions of time have contributed significantly to these promising developments. However, more work remains to be done and Bourdieu’s conceptual framework has, so far, remained underutilized. This article, therefore, discussesthe potential of Bourdieu’s work to advance strategic organization of time research within four significant areas, integration of subjective and objective time, temporal experience, embodied history, and reflexivity. The article places emphasis on Bourdieu’s constructs of habitus, field, hysteresis, practice as temporalization, temporal logic of practice, and participant objectivation.