Habitus, Hysteresis and Organizational Change in the Public Sector

Peggy McDonough · Jessica Polzer

56 citations0/0 files storedThe Canadian Journal of Sociology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Public Policy and Administration Research Employment, Labor, and Gender Studies Management and Organizational Studies

Abstract

This paper examines the daily struggles of unionized employees whose municipal workplace was undergoing major change influenced by New Public Management. In-depth interviews with 45 front-line service providers revealed widespread frustration with working conditions and relationships with management. We interpret this response as an embodied expression of hysteresis, a term that Bourdieu used to describe the gap between changing field conditions and habitus. We argue that organizational change posed challenges for these workers because it produced a rupture between their taken-for-granted ways of being a “good” public servant (i.e., public service habitus) and what was expected of them after restructuring. Moreover, on the basis of gendered occupational class differences in employees’ practices, we suggest that hysteresis is itself a socially-structured phenomenon that reflects the tacit calculation of what was possible (or not) for workers occupying specific positions within the stratified order of the organization.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 56 citations exist upstream.

References

1993Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques 2000Pascalian meditations 2002Professionalism: The Third Logic 1999Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action 2008Bourdieu and organizational analysis 2005Theorizing the Micro-politics of Resistance: New Public Management and Managerial Identities in the UK Public Services 1997Antecedents of Public Service Motivation 2009New Professionalism and New Public Management: Changes, Continuities and Consequences

Cited by

2017New Game, Old Rules? Mechanisms and Consequences of Legitimation in Boundary Spanning Activities 2020Hysteresis and the sociological perspective in a time of crisis 2020Negotiating a coach identity: a theoretical critique of elite athletes’ transitions into post-athletic high-performance coaching roles 2015Differences between Public and Private Sectors Employees Following the Managerial Turn in European States 2019Navigating complex social landscapes: examining care experienced young people’s engagements with sport and physical activity

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.