hysteresis effect as creative adaptation of the habitus-dissent and transition in postsov ua

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2009 16: 829OrganizationRon Kerr and Sarah Robinson

to the 'Corporate' in Post-Soviet UkraineThe Hysteresis Effect as Creative Adaptation of the Habitus: Dissent and Transition

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The Hysteresis Effect as Creative Adaptation of the Habitus: Dissent and Transition to the ‘Corporate’ in Post-Soviet Ukraine

Ron KerrDepartment of Languages, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Sarah RobinsonOpen University Business School, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Abstract. How might Bourdieu’s concept of the hysteresis effect be operationalized in order to understand dissent from, and compliance with, domination in a specifi c period of social and organizational transi-tion? We employ the Bourdieusian concepts, in particular ‘forms of capital’, ‘hysteresis effect’ and ‘habitus’ to examine the production and reproduction of domination within a British international organization (the ‘Corporation’) operating in transitional post-Soviet Ukraine. Our argument is that the communist-era dissident habitus was better adapted to the changed socio-economic circumstances of postcommunism and was able to creatively adapt to the Corporation through identifying homological processes of domination and adopting homological dissident strategies. The hysteresis effect might therefore provide an explanation of how workers make sense of their new environment based on their habitus, on their capacity to decipher homologies between the previous context and the new one, and on how the dominated that dissent reuse or adapt their strategies in and to this new context. This article makes contributions to the study of domination in organizational contexts at three levels. At the theoretical level, through organizational-based empirical work we build on and develop Bourdieu’s concept of the hysteresis effect by demonstrating the role of the hysteresis

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Organization 16(6)Articles

effect in the creative reproduction of dissent as a habitus. Our substantive contribution adds a new perspective to the literature on ‘transition’, pro-viding a fi ne-grained study of how domination was produced within the Western organization in post-Soviet Ukraine. Key words. dissent; dom-ination; fi eld; habitus; hysteresis effect; transition

This article follows recent recommendations on the potential value of developing and extending a Bourdieusian approach to the study of organ-izations and organizational change (Emirbeyer and Johnson, 2008; Outhwaite, 2007; Robinson and Kerr, 2009; Swartz, 2008). Drawing on the conceptual architecture which Bourdieu began to develop in his studies of societies in transition (in Béarn and in Algeria: Bourdieu, 1997, 2000; Sapiro, 2004), in this article we focus on the concept of the hysteresis effect (understood as a décalage between the habitus and its social context) (Bourdieu, 1980, 2000). We do this in order to address the question: how might Bourdieu’s concept of the hysteresis effect be operationalized in order to understand dissent from, and compliance with, domination in a specifi c period of social and organizational transition?

The context of transition that we focus on is that of a British international organization (the ‘Corporation’) operating in post-Soviet Ukraine, a period of transition from state socialism to oligarchic capitalism (Motyl, 1998). Drawing on data from this period of ‘transition’ from state socialism, before domination within the Western Corporation became (in Bourdieu’s terms) Doxic, we extend Bourdieu’s concept of the hysteresis effect to argue that the practices of domination in the Corporation were recognized as homologous practices to those employed in the Soviet Union by those who had been born, educated and worked in the Soviet Union, in particular those who had developed the habitus of dissidents.

In this case, the hysteresis effect might provide an explanation of how workers make sense of their new environment based on their habitus, on their capacity to decipher homologies between the previous context and the new one, and on how the dominated that dissent reuse or adapt their strategies in and to this new context. This means that those who had operated in the previous system were able creatively to adapt their habitus, whereas some of the younger generation of Ukrainians (those who had been educated and begun to work after the end of state socialism) could not. In addition, as employees who were also academic researchers, we were also able to study the hyteresis effect as it applied to ourselves. We have there-fore employed Bourdieu’s method of ‘participant objectivation’ (Bourdieu, 1993, 2003) to objectivize our own position within the fi eld of power within the fi rm and our own habitus and social trajectory (Bourdieu, 2000).

We use Bourdieu’s conceptual architecture to further the understanding of contexts of transition and domination within organizations. Based on analysis of empirical data, we extend Bourdieu’s theory of the hysteresis



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The Hysteresis Effect as Creative Adaptation of the HabitusRon Kerr and Sarah Robinson

effect to provide new insights into the reproduction and creative adap-tation of the dissident habitus. Our substantive contribution adds a new perspective to the literature on ‘transition’, looking at exactly what was reproduced within a Western organization in the post-Soviet Union, namely domination through material constraint and the practices of inculcation, homologous to those utilized in the Soviet Union. Finally, we make a methodological contribution by using ‘participant objectivation’ (objectivation participante, Bourdieu, 1993, 1998, 2003) to investigate our own and others’ experience as participants in an hierarchical organization, employing Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts to break with ‘common-sense’ ideas of the role of Western organizations in the post-Soviet ‘transition’.

The article is structured in the following way. First, we consider the concept of domination in Weber before outlining Bourdieu’s theoretical framework; we then situate our article in the literatures on the Soviet Union, transition and organizations; we follow this with sections on the article’s data and methodology, on the economic context and on the structure of domination in the Corporation, followed by sections on the homologous practices of domination, including illustrative vignettes. In the discussion section we discuss the role of the hysteresis effect on our position in the Corporation’s fi eld of power. Finally, we present our conclusions and contributions.

The Concept of Domination in Weber and Bourdieu’s Conceptual ArchitectureTo understand the analytical concepts that we use in this article, we need to outline Bourdieu’s conceptual architecture (‘the ensemble of Bourdieu’s thinking’, Swartz, 2008: 45). This is because Bourdieu’s master concepts are interconnected and each concept is best understood in relation to the other concepts (Emirbeyer and Johnson, 2008; Swartz, 2008; and see Bourdieu, 2000 for a discussion of how certain of these concepts have been appropriated individually and modifi ed in meaning).

First, however, we need to clarify what we mean by ‘domination’ in this article, starting with Weber’s concept of Herrschaft. For Weber, Herrschaft is the basic category of superordination in a structure of subordination and superordination (Roth, 1978: xc). Thus, in his English version of Weber, Roth (1978: xciv) translates Herrschaft as ‘domination’ rather than, as in Parsons’ well-known version, ‘leadership’ (see Cohen et al., 1975; Richter, 1995). For Weber, Herrschaft can involve a combination of legitimacy and force (Weber, 1968:53–54). Drawing on Weber, Bourdieu (1992) also understands Herrschaft as ‘domination’ and relates it to modes of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1992: 51).

In Bourdieu’s view social power relations may be based on symbolic violence, i.e. the imposition of and misrecognition of arbitrary power rela-tions (e. g. class, race, gender) as natural relations. Bourdieu also claims that symbolic violence can be recognized in objectifi ed form. Thus for Bourdieu, symbolic violence in everyday life is objectified in three forms: (1) as physical objects, such as books, ornaments or buildings;



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(2) as diplomas, certifi cates, passports and other examples of cultural capital and (3) incorporated in persons as ‘habitus’ (Wacquant, 2002:32–33). The concept of symbolic violence as objectifi ed allows us to analyse power at the level of ‘the cultural confl icts of everyday life’ (Wacquant, 2002: 32–33). For Bourdieu domination is impossible without the submission of the dominated, either through force or through submission to the Doxa, i.e. acceptance of the legitimacy of the established order of domination as natural (Bourdieu, 1992).

The next Bourdieusian master concept is that of ‘fi eld’ (le champ, les champs sociaux) (Bourdieu, 1991) which is defi ned as ‘a kind of arena in which people play a game which has certain rules, rules which are different from those of the game that is played in the adjacent space’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 215). Each fi eld or ‘autonomous universe’ therefore constitutes a social and historical space in which individuals with possibly different upbringing and background (and habitus—see below) interact within the parameters or boundaries of the particular rules of the game that regulate the ways individuals behave and interact (Bourdieu, 1991: 215).

In order to function well in a social space (Bourdieu argues), individuals need to acquire different forms of capital in order to negotiate and establish their positions within a particular fi eld. Thus, cultural capital (knowledge, skills and other cultural acquisitions, as exemplifi ed by educational or technical qualifi cations, also sometimes called capital scolaire), symbolic capital (accumulated prestige or honour; see Thompson, 1981: 14) and social capital (the networks a person can draw on as a resource) are sig-nifi cant in getting on and getting by both professionally and personally. But a large organization (such as the Corporation) can also be seen as a fi eld in itself (see ‘l’entreprise comme champ’, Bourdieu, 2000: 252–254), in which the researcher can analyse ‘the internal government of the fi rm’ including ‘the dispositions of the dirigeants operating within the constraints of the fi eld of power within the fi rm’ and ‘its hierarchy, the extent of bureaucratic differentiation and the role of different forms of capital, e.g. academic (scolaire), technical and scientifi c’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 252).

For Bourdieu, equally important for understanding how to manoeuvre successfully in social space is the concept of habitus (Bourdieu, 2000: 258–64). Habitus is defi ned by Bourdieu as a ‘system of durable dispositions acquired by the individual through socialization’ (in Bonnewitz, 2002: 94). This ‘consists of a set of historical relations “deposited” within individual bodies in the form of mental and corporal schematic perception, appreciation and action’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 16). Bourdieu argues that the capital an individual possesses partly defi nes how well they are accepted and integrated into a particular fi eld and how they are able to position themselves within it. Thus an agent whose habitus is perfectly adapted to the fi eld possesses a sens pratique, defi ned as a ‘feel for the game’, to the extent of their habitus being ‘invisible’ (Bourdieu, 1980: 117).

For Bourdieu, fi elds are relatively enduring but are liable to change internally and therefore the forms of capital that facilitate entry, the required



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ways of behaving and so on also change over time, as does the habitus of the actors in the fi eld. Therefore, as Bourdieu sees it, the fi eld reproduces the habitus and the habitus reproduces the fi eld—although the fi eld does not ‘determine’ habitus, because participants in fi elds retain an (albeit constrained) agency (Sapiro 2004).

However, there are periods of crisis or transition when the old habitus does not ‘fi t’ the fi eld, is not (yet) adapted to the new Doxa and here Bourdieu introduces the concept of ‘the hysteresis effect’ (Bourdieu, 1977, 1980, 2000; see also Mesny, 2002; Grenfell, 2006; Sapiro, 2004). Bourdieu likens this effect to an effect of dissonance, a counter-adaptive ‘lag’ in the habitus that retards adaptation to a changed social context (2000: 262; see also Sapiro, 2004). The hysteresis effect thus means that in the changed circumstances we maintain our already-acquired habitus/dispositions even when they are no longer adapted (what Bourdieu, following Marx, terms ‘the Don Quichotte effect’). Bourdieu (1980: 104–105) refers to ‘the presence of the past’, where the durable practices are not adapted to the changed context and function à contre-temps (Bourdieu, 1980:105). However, Bourdieu (1980) claims that change in the habitus in a period of transition is not a refl exive process, is not done by consciously adapt-ing the sens pratique (see discussion in Mesny, 2002 and also Burawoy, 2008: this is a claim that we return to in our conclusions).

The example that Bourdieu (1980) draws on in elaborating the hysteresis effect is that of Algeria, where Bourdieu himself recorded the ‘discordance between the habitus and the structures of the economy (pre-capitalist and capitalist) “at times even within the same individuals” (‘parfois même à l’intérieur des mêmes individus’)’ Bourdieu, 1977:15). In this article we want to see how the concept of the hysteresis effect might be operationalized in the context of the transition from communism to postcommunism, taking as our example Ukraine in the late 1990s.

The Transition from Democratic Centralism to ‘Being Corporate’: Practices of Domination, ‘Transition’ and the Dissident Habitus

Having reviewed Bourdieu’s framework of theoretical concepts, we now go on to review some of the relevant literature on the context of transition from communism to postcommunism. In particular, we focus on literature that draws on Bourdieu’s work, and we do this in order to identify a gap in the literature on the transition/transfer of domination, namely a consideration of the hysteresis effect in the context of a transition of the practices of domination within a Western organization in the FSU and the responses of the subordinated to these practices.

Outhwaite (2007) provides a Bourdieusian perspective on the political/economic literature on the transition from state socialism and draws attention to the value of a Bourdieusian approach to state socialism and post-communism (Mateju, 2002, cited in Outhwaite, 2007:1.4). Outhwaite notes the continuing relevance of Weber’s model in which ‘classes, status groups and parties’ are seen as phenomena of the distribution of power’.



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(Outhwaite, 2007:5.4, quoting Hölscher and Dittrich, 1999: 4.2) and suggests that Bourdieu’s concepts are well suited to analysing social stratifi cation and cultural capital (the role of technocrats and managers) during the communist period.

Of particular interest to us here is the connection Bourdieu, in his dis-cussion of cultural capital in the SU and the GDR and using forms of capital as a lens, makes between the communist-era ‘nomenklatura elite’ and the role of the intelligentsia, with dissidents as a sub-group of the intelligentsia (Bourdieu, 1994:34–35). In particular, Bourdieu draws attention to the explanatory value of the role of academic capital (capital scolaire) vis-à-vis political capital in understanding the dissident habitus. Here Bourdieu tells us to expect ‘rivalries between the holders of political capital … and the holders of academic capital, technocrats and especially researchers or intellectuals, who themselves come partly from the nomenklatura’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 34). Bourdieu (1994) also notes that ‘the holders of academic capital are those most inclined to be impatient and to revolt against the privileges of the holders of political capital’ (Bourdieu, 1994: 34). Indeed, Bourdieu goes as far as to suggest that the intelligentsia were the only people capable of opposing the system (Bourdieu, 1994:34–35), a connection (between the dissident intelligentsia and the nomenklatura elite), which is also made by Oushakine (2001), who suggests, however, that Soviet dissidents were not resistant or opposed to the system as such, being in fact dependent on the regime (Oushakine, 2001:196), instead using the dis-courses and espoused values of the system as mechanisms to reform the sys-tem from within (i.e. they did not openly or violently oppose the regime).

The habitus of the dissident is one of the main forms of habitus de-veloped in communist societies (Eyal et al., 2003). These forms are (1) ‘the apparatchik mentality which knows how to manipulate the party organ-ization and how to use ideological slogans’; (2) ‘reform communists, especially the technocrats—who think they know how to get things done’ and (3) ‘the habitus of the dissident intelligentsia, which is comprised in the mix of New Left compassion toward the poor and a neophyte com-mitment to the most doctrinaire of neoliberal ideas’. We note, however, that particularly in the Russian parts of the former-SU, culture and religion in the tradition of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, valuing poverty and spirituality played a major part in dissident formation (Boobbyer, 1999; see also Rapoport and Lomsky-Feder, 2002). And we also note the role in the late communist/early transition period of English-speaking evangelical reli-gious ‘compradores’, who later metamorphosed into Corporation employees (at least for a time).

In the case of postcommunism, much of the literature on organizations and change reproduces the attitudes of the Cold War, including its presup-positions about management, culture and organizations, with the West as ‘normal’ and former state socialist organizations believed to be in need of Western ideas in order to manage effectively and effi ciently (see Bryson, 2000; Jankowicz, 1994; Kets de Vries 2000; Kostera, 1995; May et al., 1998: 25; Vlachoutsicos and Lawrence 1990). However, some writers on



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transition question these prescriptive Western approaches (Elenkov, 1998; Fey and Denison, 2003; Holden et al., 1998), while others note a number of critiques of Western approaches as involving ‘paternalism’ or ‘cultural coercion’ (Czeglédy, 1996; Soulsby and Clark, 2007). Outhwaite (2007) provides an overview of the literature on the postcommunist transition (citing Burawoy, 2001; Burawoy and Krotov, 1993; Kennedy, 2002; Mateju, 2003). Outhwaite notes, however, that there is very little in this literature on postcommunist transition that looks at strategies of adaptation at individual and organizational level and thus this article answers his call for ‘a fi ner-grained analysis, perhaps based initially on individual life-histories, of strategies of re-fashioning’ (Outhwaite, 2007: 7.2). It is this gap in the literature that we hope to fi ll with this article (as Wacquant notes, Bourdieu’s analytical concepts are well suited to analysing the ‘cultural confl icts of everyday life’: see Wacquant 2002: 32–33). Given that the hysteresis effect was designed to explain the phenomena of socio-economic transition, how might foregrounding this concept help to provide this kind of ‘fi ner-grained analysis’?

Data and MethodologyThe methodology used in this study is participant objectivation (objectivation participante, Bourdieu, 1993: 9–17, 1389–1424; 2003). This methodology requires that we as researchers obectify ourselves as researchers/subjects and objects of the research process, by explaining who we were in the process and why we were we undertaking the research. We therefore begin by outlining our social trajectory, our habitus and forms of capital (Bourdieu, 1980: 101) by noting that, at the time when we collected the data for this research, we were working for the Corporation as middle-management, English language specialists, working as ‘contractors’ on short-term contracts (two years maximum) and in a 50/50 job-share position (which gave us both time for academic research).

The socio-economic factors that help explain the social trajectory that brought us to the Corporation include our membership of the English language teaching (ELT) diaspora of UK graduates, beginning in the Thatcher years and in the context of large-scale unemployment in the UK, went to work teaching English in commercial schools and in universities, particularly in the then recently democratized countries such as Spain, Portugal and Greece, but also in Japan and the ‘Asian Tiger’ countries. This kind of job was then, particularly after 1989, supplemented by the ‘development’ side of ELT, supported by the UK government’s agencies. This kind of job in China and Central and Eastern Europe was driven by the UK government’s policy objectives and economic aims to integrate former communist states (and China) into the global capitalist economy. However, as the posts were often based in universities or required post-holders to work with academically well-qualifi ed staff, a degree of academic capital was required for those jobs.



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Data collection took place over a period of three years of observation (1998–2001). It was carried out in the relatively small and cramped offi ces and kitchen of the ‘old building’ in Kyiv (September 1998–April 2000), the premises of the ‘new building’ during its renovation (September 1998–April 2000) and the open-plan main offi ces, the large director’s offi ce, the resource centre and the cafeteria of the ‘new building’ (after July 2000). Data collection also took place in the university-based regional offi ces of the organization in Odessa, Lviv, Donetsk and Kharkiv and in overnight sleeper trains and in transit fl ats and hotels.

Observation took place in a variety of contexts, including regular weekly meetings of the management team (1–2 hours per week on Monday mornings over a period of two years, May 2009–August 2001), regular weekly meetings with the three-member English language projects team in Kyiv (1–2 hours per week, October 2008–August 2001), regular monthly meetings with ELT staff in the four regional centres (4 hours per month, October 2008–August 2001). There were also job planning and review meetings (with line managers and as line managers) every six months. Data were also collected from workshops, seminars and conferences: in particular from the Ukraine staff conference (May 2000) and on management ‘away days’ (October 1999, September 2000). We also collected data from conversations with senior Organization managers at a series of annual three-day ELT staff conferences in Graz, Austria (January 1999, January 2000, January 2001, January 2002) and during visits to Kyiv by the Director General (1999), The Chair (2000), the Director Europe (2000) and the Director ELT (2000). We participated in situ in conversations as informal interviews, attended ad hoc meetings and conferences and participated in discussions in the staff kitchen and cafeteria and in local bars and restaurants. Participants, with a total of 60, included the members of the management team in Ukraine (nine British and three Ukrainians over three years); the ELT teams (six British and 32 Ukrainian staff).

The data were recorded in the form of observational fi eld notes in the form of 600 pages of notes in 40-page notebooks. These notes were (usually on the same day) organized chronologically as a research diary and later transferred to computer documents. As Jorgensen (1989) remarks, there is a benefi t in participant observation to having two participants, from both a recording and interpretation point of view, in that one participant can concentrate on recording while the other participates and also in that interpretations can be discussed and tested at the write-up stage. For meth-odological rigour we formalized the process of interpretation along the lines suggested by Czarniawska (2000:5), moving from ‘collecting and pro-voking’ stories, through ‘interpreting and analysing’ to ‘putting together your own story’ (for the uses of narrative methods in management and organ-ization studies see also Boje, 2001; Gabriel, 2000, 2004; Weick, 1995).

Post-hoc we conducted semi-structured interviews with eight key infor-mants, including three people external to the Ukrainian offi ce, who had acted as consultants and were therefore familiar with the context (two Ukrainian,



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four British, two Russians). We conducted these later interviews in order to explore the plausibility of our interpretations, in particular our analytical concepts and narrative reconstructions. These interviews took place in the UK and Russia in 2003–2004. The authors also collected a corpus of over 200 documents, including reports, policy and strategy documents and emailed communications.

Following Bourdieu (1993), this process of data collection and inter-pretation involved the objectivation of the subjects of research (including ourselves as participants) during the process of research. We did this in order to break with the common-sense understanding of our social world (‘to break away from the preconceptions of spontaneous sociology’, Bourdieu, 1998: 221). This self-objectivation, which involved reading our experience through key analytical concepts, led to a self-understanding of our habitus as dominated subalterns and as dissidents (structurally excluded as lacking the required capitals).

This was in effect a hermeneutic process in which we also learned from the insights of our fellow dissidents and helped them to understand the new context and adapt their dissident habitus/practices accordingly through processes of ‘creative transformation’ (Bourdieu, 1977:15).

Our aim in writing this article was therefore to make sense of our ‘dissident’ experience, our sense of our dominated/outsider status within the Corporation, and our relations with the Corporation’s British manage-ment, with our Ukrainian colleagues and with other British colleagues. As Bourdieu notes: ‘one should know the world better and better as one knows oneself better, scientifi c knowledge and knowledge of oneself and one’s own social unconscious advance hand in hand, and that primary experience transformed by scientifi c practice transforms scientifi c practice and vice versa’ (Bourdieu, 2003).

In the sections which follow we fi rst discuss the socio-economic context of Ukraine in the 1990s and the Corporation’s organizational structure, before presenting a series of homologous practices, including theoretically-informed illustrative vignettes, in support of our argument as to how domination was produced and reproduced in the British Corporation in the period of post-Soviet transition.

The Context of Economic Crisis and Material CompulsionPost-Soviet Ukraine in the 1990s, a period that has been characterized as ‘eight years of severe structural and institutional crisis, culminating in 1998 in the most dramatic economic collapse in Eastern Europe’ (World Bank, 2002: ii), provided a context of material compulsion (on the role of economic coercion in the Algerian context, see Bourdieu, 1977: 84).

The precariousness of life in this period (some people lost their life savings twice) saw an investment of belief in the illusio of ‘the West’ (embodied by its ‘experts’) as bringing socio-economic salvation (Kostera, 1995; Motyl, 1998). The precariousness of this period will help us to



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understand the situation in the Ukraine offi ce of the Corporation from the point of view of the Ukrainian staff, who were predisposed to welcome the Corporation and its UK members as embodying their expectations of the ‘West’, as potential saviours and guarantors of their economic sur-vival (Jankowicz, 1994).

In this period, then, Western experts came to Ukraine as religious and economic missionaries, taking advantage of ‘social disarray, political uncertainty, and economic collapse’ (Motyl, 1998) to supplant the scientifi c socialism of the Soviet period with neoliberalism (in the economic sphere) and Christianity (in the social sphere). There was a revival of religion (‘une interpretation magique plutôt que rationelle du monde’: Sapiro, 2004: 61), with Protestant missionaries, especially from the USA, offering salvation (Wanner, 2003). Indeed, some of the SU-period religious dissidents found jobs as guides and translators with the missionaries and then, because they were fl uent speakers of English with academic capital (capital scolaire) acquired though higher education, went on to fi nd posts in the Corporation (see Eyal et al., 2003 on the ability to speak English a ‘positional good’). These Ukrainians had adapted their habitus (embodied symbolic capital) to Western taste in, for example clothes, and could use this knowledge to inculcate other colleagues: by, for example taking one colleague with a notoriously (in British terms) fl amboyant dress sense shopping to point out ‘acceptable’ colours and styles.

Once within the Corporation, however, the Ukrainians found that they could only fi ll subordinate roles and some, in particular those who had acquired the dissident habitus, were able to perceive the homologies between the Corporation’s practices and the familiar practices of the Soviet period. In the following sections we explain why that was the case.

The Structure of Domination in the CorporationThe Corporation is an international organization with its headquarters in London.1 It is partly funded by the UK government, although it operates semi-independently as an agency. At the time of this study, the Corporation had offi ces in about 150 countries. These local ‘country’ operations might be said to form a ‘system of fi efdoms’ (Weber, 1968: 58) or ‘directorates’, each under a potentially powerful Country Director, this being the post title of the senior ‘offi cer’ in charge of the Corporation’s operations in that particular country.

The majority of posts in these Directorates were staffed by ‘local’ nationals, with the notable exception of the ‘senior’ management posts, these being, hierarchically and from the top down, Director, Deputy Director, Teaching Centre Manager and Assistant Directors. These ‘senior’ posts were almost exclusively reserved for UK nationals and in the 1990s these managers were predominantly white and male, distinguished from the non-managers (British and ‘local’) by the possession of diplomatic passports and associated benefi ts.



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The Corporation was also undergoing change (or transition) that meant that a certain kind of academic ‘specialist’ habitus was no longer adapted to the new ‘Corporation’. This is attributable to the end of post-Cold War UK-government funding for transition and ‘development’ in Central and Eastern Europe (the ‘Know-How Fund’). Also, in the late 1990s, the Corporation’s London HQ was trying to control its feudal directorates by introducing elements of the ‘entrepreneurial model’ of the organization, in which the individual’s personal commitment to the fi rm would be shaped and demonstrated through ‘normative identifi cation’ with the organization’s aims (Child and McGrath, 2001: 1143). In addition, in response to the demands of its government funders, the Corporation was introducing more bureaucratic accountability systems, including more ‘transparent’ human resource policies. But although these changes (e.g. promoting ‘diversity’) meant that some of its newly promoted ‘generalist’ senior managers were different in habitus (from Oxbridge to MBAs, from all-male to including a minority of women), the Corporation’s organizational elite was still largely recruited from public school/Oxbridge backgrounds and displayed that habitus (although now incorporating the discourse of New Labour), combining cultural capital (qualifi cations), social capital (who you know) and embodied symbolic power (how you behave).

The structure of domination in Corporation’s Ukraine directorate in the 1990s was: (1) the senior management group (‘generalist’ managers), with a shared habitus and social and cultural capital (public school, Oxbridge) that translated into political capital within the Corporation’s fi eld of power [the class-based, cultural capital of the Corporation’s cadre class, apparatchiks who are ‘nonentities outside the apparatus’ (Bourdieu, 1998: 17), surprised the Ukrainians]; (2) Ukrainian and British subaltern cadres who invested in the illusio, taking the corporate Doxa as natural; (3) Ukrainian and British dissidents, lacking the dominant habitus and symbolic capitals (the British displayed the ‘outsider’ habitus of ‘grammar school’ or ‘bootstrap boys’), but who shared their understanding/experience as academically-qualifi ed ‘intellectuals’ (our capital scolaire), entering the Corporation through an expert rather than a generalist manager, route.

But how did this mode of domination operate, how was it produced and reproduced? First, we have identifi ed the force of compulsion of the eco-nomic/material context that positioned staff in the Corporation. Now we go on to identify a number of organizational practices that allow us to read the Corporation through the homologous practices of the Soviet period, as understood by us, but based on the interpretation of the Corporation’s practices by ‘dissident’ Ukrainian staff members.

In the following sections we therefore discuss these homologous practices and include vignettes illustrative of these practices.

Homologies The notion of homology in Bourdieu’s works is relatively flexible: homologies may vary across levels (Bourdieu, 1996). So in Ukraine there



840


was a homology of position and habitus between the Ukrainian dissidents within the Corporation and ourselves and, in addition (and attributable to their dissident habitus), the Ukrainian dissidents perceived certain homologies between the practices of the SU and the practices of the corporation. In the analysis which follows we therefore use Ukrainian dissident perceptions of homologous practices as ways of understanding the corporation as a fi eld in which mechanisms of domination operated. The mechanisms that they identifi ed are: democratic centralism, inquisition, con-fession and kompromat and the use of consultants as ideological virtuosi.

Homologies: Democratic Centralism and the Corporate Line: ‘Agreeing the Messages’

The Corporation had a (top down) ‘corporate line’, which was (according to Corporation managers) ‘the line to take’ and consisted of ‘agreed messages’ that were part of the Corporation’s interactions with the exterior environment and in particular with the Corporation’s funders in the UK government. This mirrors the concept of the ‘correct Party line’ of the Soviet period, which was produced through the processes of democratic centralism, and by means of which the Party members were deemed to have a voice in the formation of party policy, while having to conform to the policy in word and deed once it had been agreed (Hazard, 1957; Lenin, 1902). But the Corporation, like the Party, wanted to be seen to have ‘consulted’ its staff about policy and strategy, and did so from time to time through questionnaires, meetings, and even Corporation-wide initiatives, as happened, for example during the preparation of its ‘Strategy 2005’ document (this fondness for ‘Five Year’ plans was one of the fi rst discursive signals that alerted the Ukrainian dissidents to the ‘soviet’ side of the Corporation).

One of the ways in which internal compliance with the corporate line was enforced was by means of meetings on new policies and strategies in which the corporateness of the employees could be tested and where public expressions of acceptance of and assent to the line were encouraged (Riegel, 2000). These mechanisms can be understood as practices of symbolic violence operating to enforce public submission to domination. For example, the annual planning process was presented as a process of participation (through meetings, workshops), but one in which the participants (the dominated) had to guess what the dominant wanted (‘guessing what the director wants’) and the system of participation therefore resembled the Soviet Union in combining democratic forms with totalitarian controls (Hazard, 1957: 9).

But as with the ideal Party member, the ideal employee of the Corpor-ation was considered to be ‘corporate’ if they were prepared to suppress their personal, sometimes moral, concerns in taking or submitting to ‘tough decisions’ in order to follow the corporate line. So in a New Year message to country directors (in 2000), a top Corporation offi cer thanked the directors



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for ‘being corporate’ in ‘taking tough decisions’ such as closing offi ces and making staff redundant (‘suppressing posts’ in Corporate discourse). Following the corporate line was one way in which symbolic power was converted into symbolic violence in order to enforce the submission of the dominated. So, for example in the Ukraine offi ce, when members of senior management from HQ were due to arrive, a series of management and team meetings was held to ‘agree the messages’ and to decide what was to ‘be shown’ and what was not to be shown. Scripts were drawn up, rehearsals were held. This way of manipulating appearances for the dominant seemed to some Ukrainian staff to be like the construction of ‘Potemkin villages’ (facades that seemed like villages from the distance) to impress the Empress Catherine during her provincial tours.

Homologies: ‘Inquisition and Confession’: Performance Management in the Corporation

In the Soviet period, a cadre’s commitment to the Party was tested through a series of ‘institutionalized trials’ (Bourguignon and Chiapello, 2005), a ‘hermeneutics of the soul’ led by Party ‘virtuosi’, who in the course of meetings, ‘deliberately cultivate the public confession of sins’ (Halfi n, 2001). These virtuosi acted as ‘spiritual directors (directeurs de l’ame)’ for the cadres through the practices of ‘inquisition by confession’ (chistka) (Riegel, 2000: 23), although such inquisitorial practices involved not only public criticism but also self-criticism (samokritika) (Riegel, 2000: 33). These criticisms and self-criticisms were then documented in the form of a dossier (kompromat) that contained the cadre’s ‘moral identity’ (Riegel, 2000: 34), a biographical dossier which could either serve to ‘create the self’ through a narrative of ‘spiritual growth’ (Halfi n, 2001: 19) or form a ‘guilt-biography’ of the cadre’s ‘moral identity’ (Riegel, 2000: 34).

Kharkhordin (1999) and Dodman (2003) note the similarity between Christian practices of inquisition and practices of the Soviet period and this importation of inquisitorial practices from the religious into the political sphere is paralleled by the introduction of inquisitorial prac-tices into corporations and other organizations in the form of ‘perform-ance management’ (see e.g. Armstrong and Baron, 1998). The aim of performance management (PM) is to align the individual employee with the Corporation’s objectives (‘goal congruence’). From the early 1990s all UK government-funded organizations were required to have PM systems, so when the Corporation set up in post-Soviet countries it brought these practices with it.

PM constitutes a series of institutionalized trials in the course of which subordinates are subjected to symbolic violence. These practices include a series of quarterly performance review meetings between the dominant (line managers) and subaltern employees. In particular, there is an ‘annual review’ meeting, following which the line manager writes a report commenting on and rating the subordinate’s performance. This report then goes into the subordinate’s personnel fi le. Our own performance



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management interviews, for example, probed our loyalty to the Corporation and to the director himself and, although we always publicly adhered to the Corporate line, we discovered from a later director that the director at the time in question had hinted in handover notes (kompromat) that we were ‘not corporate’—which frames the vignette above and the use of performance management interviews as ‘inquisition by confession’ in the vignette which follows.

Vignette: In The Canteen, a Public Trial

It is early in 2001. In the Kyiv offi ce, the Deputy Director (DD) and a Ukrainian staff member (‘Irina’) occupy a table in the staff canteen. It is lunchtime. The canteen is busy. One of the authors occupies the next table. The DD is performing a job review with Irina (in public, although the offi cial Corporation HR department instructions are that this should be held in private). In front of the DD on the table is the staff member’s dossier. The DD goes through Irina’s job plan. As each point is reviewed, I can hear how Irina’s successes and failures are pointed out and discussed. I can hear what is going on, but I am invisible (a silent audience, not expected to protest or to be involved). But the staff mem-ber submits to the institutionalized trial, is compliant, although she could refuse the public forum, protest that it is ‘against the rules’, by her presence and participation she accepts the symbolic violence of the event as legitimate (and so, by my silence, do I). I am horrifi ed but say nothing. This obviously shows on my face. Later Irina passes by my desk and says ‘It’s all right Saritchka (Russian diminutive of Sarah), I’m used to his ways’. I interpret this as a request not to intervene, to do nothing and guard my silent dissidence.

This is a demonstration of the DD’s symbolic power, a public insti-tutionalized trial in which Irina is subjected to symbolic violence. This practice by means of which a ‘record of achievement’ is compiled parallels the practices of the Party that were discussed above. However, corporate inquisitors require more than formal submission, what they want is com-mitment of the whole person (a conversion to ‘new values’: see Kets de Vries 2000: 73). The corporate inquisitor’s demands, in requiring an ‘inner’ metanoia or conversion (Bourdieu, 1991: 211), are therefore closer to those made by the CPSU on its own cadres. Of course this begs the question of how corporate or Party inquisitors can tell the difference between genuine and feigned commitment. One answer to this might be to set up public fora in which the virtuosi can try to identify the ‘false habitus’, the lack of ‘inner’ commitment to the illusio of those who ‘do not fi t in’.

One forum where such processes regularly took place was the weekly Senior Management Team meeting, where colleagues’ motivations and loyalty were questioned (usually without their presence or knowledge).



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So colleagues were drawn to our attention as being ‘Soviet’, understood to mean infl exible, old-fashioned or ‘Russian’ (in the new Ukraine, read as recidivist, mystical, diffi cult).2

In addition to PM, another way of testing was to bring in consultants, who could probe the commitment of staff. This is a practice homologous to the use of ‘ideological virtuosi’ in the Soviet period.

Homologies: Consultants as ‘Virtuosi’: ‘To Accept Criticism of Our Behavioural Weaknesses’

In this section we examine the role of virtuosi consultants in the Corporation (on the Party apparat as a ‘community of ideological virtuosi’: Roth, 1975; see also Weber, 1968: 52). We do this through the example of a leadership development seminar that all Corporation Directors had to participate in (the seminar was generally referred to by the place where it took place, ‘H’, plus the word ‘experience’, so hereafter ‘the H experience’). The seminars’ methodology was based on ‘Management Futures: consultancy for real people’, by Cockman and Evans (1999), who claimed to be able to ‘increase everyone’s commitment to the change; empower people rather than manipulate or coerce them’.3 The consultants therefore claimed legitimacy as virtuosi in ‘change management’ and their role was to get employee’s commitment to ‘the change’ (usually undefi ned: what change? Change from what to what?). So in the following report by one of the consultants, ‘Change’ is used as a legitimation for symbolic violence, capitalized and with deontic modality (‘had to... had to’):

[The consultant] …reminded the Forum that the process of Change was a reality and its effect on staff could either be positive and inspirational, or negative and debilitating. […] Effective leadership was a key to successful transformation. It was no longer suffi cient to manage a steady state, we had to lead transition. The desire for permanence had to give way to the reality of transience.

The external virtuosi played the central role in facilitating and dis-seminating the ‘H experience’, the Corporation’s attempt to inculcate into its senior managers an appreciation that ‘recognising, understanding and addressing people’s feelings is a key skill for successful management and organizational well-being’.4 We note in the following extract from a participant’s account of the seminar the use of ‘inculcate’ (Bourdieu’s term for how the habitus is acquired) and the obligation to be ‘open’, the obligation to express feelings and ‘behavioural weaknesses’ (i.e. to practise public self-criticism):

The course taught us to develop more open relationships where feelings and emotions can be freely expressed. It taught us how to accept criticism of our own behavioural weaknesses as managers and to admit to these openly with colleagues.

As a seminar for senior management at HQ, followed by a series of seminars for the country directors, ‘the H experience’ served within the Corporation



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as a badge, as cultural capital for these from the dominant groups included in the ‘experience’ and therefore as symbolic violence. In staff discussions of the ‘H experience’ it was presented to subordinates as a mysterious, life-changing experience, exclusive and ineffable. Eventually, however, three years after the fi rst seminars, the consultants came to disseminate the ‘H experience’ to the Ukraine directorate. The next vignette is drawn from the seminar in Ukraine.

Vignette: ‘Just Say Anything’

The team of consultants came to disseminate ‘the H experience’ to Ukraine in 2003 (this was their fi rst visit to the country). At the beginning of the seminars there was a struggle over whether English would be used: however, the consultants refused to consider using Russian or Ukrainian (which they could not speak and refused the idea of translation, although English was the offi cial working language, both Russian and Ukrainian were commonly used in the directorate and there had been a precedent of developmental events being in an inclusive language), so an hierarchy of languages (the symbolic power of English) was established as an aspect of the symbolic violence of the seminars. The ‘H experience’ seminars operated as an institutionalized trial in Ukraine, a mechanism for identifying staff members who were not emotionally committed to the Corporation. To demonstrate this, we can compare the fate of two Ukrainian members of staff (‘Olga’ and ‘Masha’) during the seminars.

In the seminar(s) Olga, who had acquired a dissident habitus during the SU (as a member of the intelligentsia, expert, religious) saw through this new corporate doxa (the hysteresis effect) and, rather than adapting/adopting a corporate habitus, re-mobilized the dissident habitus and was able to advise the younger post-SU Ukrainian staff on the need to appear to conform, on how to operate: ‘don’t make waves, don’t draw attention to yourself’ (e.g. by silence). The second staff member, Masha, had been a successful conformist academic in the SU and her invisible, technocrat habitus (‘aloof’, ‘academic’, avoiding controversy and confrontation, speaking English with a deliberate lack of fl uency) had kept her out of the fi ring line during the dangerous period of the previous charismatic directorship (she did not challenge or threaten him, did not join his emo-tional community). But now she did not understand how to ‘play the new game’ by verbally demonstrating her submission to the Doxa in the context of the seminar and participating ‘emotionally’ in the illusio (her English was weak; the consultants refused to use Russian, so English was used as an instrument of symbolic violence). The consultants therefore identifi ed Masha (rather than Olga) as a dangerous dissident and she was positioned as a focus of symbolic violence during the seminar. The consultants reported on her non-corporate behaviour to the new director (who had until then cultivated Masha as not being part



845


of the previous director’s emotional community). This was in spite of Olga’s having to take a risk and reveal her hand during the seminar to protect a colleague in trouble. At one point the consultants were probing the silence of a young male colleague. He was on the point of tears when Olga said quite clearly in Russian ‘just say anything’ (i.e. silence is not acceptable). But lacking the cultural capital (not understanding Russian) the consultants overlooked the signifi cance of this event.

This vignette demonstrates how one of the Soviet-era dissidents was able to survive in the new system by creative reorientation based on the ‘old’ habitus, whereas another without the ‘old/new’ dissident habitus was labelled as dissident. In this case a consultancy intervention that promoted a more ‘open’ organizational culture, a new preferred style for the Corporation, in which leaders would be ‘in touch with their emotions’, and that valued people skills and team working, had, by the time it was disseminated to the dominated cadres, metamorphosed into a ‘hermeneutics of the soul’, a testing for corporate loyalty. The vignette also shows that, from the point of view of the corporate inquisitors, subordinates must be seen to consent by presence and participation to the institutionalized trial. For the Party virtuosi, in seeking out heretics or dissidents, ‘the way in which the words the individual used in accounting for his thoughts and desires’ can be ‘taken as a clue to or symptom of … his inner moral disposition’ (Halfi n, 2002: 7). This means that silence is not an option—silence is taken as evidence of a lack of emotional openness and therefore of inner reservations about and lack of commitment to the Party or the Corporation.

Capital Scolaire and DissentAs already noted, the authors shared an understanding/experience with the Ukrainian dissidents in that we had not acquired the dominant habitus and symbolic capitals and our broader (higher) education was more similar to Ukrainian colleagues’ cultural capital, in this case capital scolaire: we note that a signifi cant number of Ukrainian staff members possessed doctorates, but were not encouraged to use their titles. In this context, Masha was seen as separating herself in using her title of ‘Dr’, while Olga played safe and did not use hers. This mutual recognition of our respective academic/intellectual forms of capital can be seen as another ‘dissident’ characteristic in that academic qualifi cations above Masters’ level and academic practices were not valued within the Corporation (for example, a report produced for the Ukraine senior management was dismissed as ‘pseudo academic’ because it included citations, references and evidence for its conclusions).

This shared respect for capital scolaire may help to explain how quickly the Ukrainian dissidents identifi ed the British dissidents. In fact, one of the authors was the only British member of staff to be openly referred to by her Russian diminutive (normal practice amongst Ukrainian colleagues regardless of the language being used). This was a practice started by ‘Olga’,



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the chief dissident, and was soon followed by others, while other incidents include a comment addressed to both authors (‘you are not like the other British’), which we now take (as well as the complement intended) as a recognition that we were lacking the symbolic capital of the dominant British group.

Blocked in our trajectories from entering the Corporation’s fi eld of power, we shared a similar ‘causality of the probable’ (Bourdieu, 1997) and over time, a close relationship developed between the British and Ukrainian dissidents. In particular, the authors came to work closely with Olga in helping her interpret the meaning, in terms of the Corporation’s history and politics, behind new corporate messages and so recognize coming problems. In turn, Olga helped to interpret for us the habitus of the Ukrainian staff members and of other Ukrainians that we had to interact with. Our ‘dissident’ tendencies were also spotted by other (dissident) British colleagues (teachers), i.e. those possessing the same cultural/academic capital that we did, but with inferior status within the Corporation’s hierarchy, who recognized our difference from the rest of the British management. In this way, the dissident groups might be said to have reinforced each other’s dissidence.

Part of this recognition was accomplished by recognizing and entering into the dissident discourse of those who hid their dissent and disloyalty from those dominants who might overhear by referring to the director and his allies in the Corporation by nicknames: ‘Jeremy and Jemima’ and ‘Big Ted’ and ‘Little Ted’, the names of the dolls from Playschool.5 This use of such (somewhat derogatory) nicknames to protect the speaker from spies and informers when talking about the leadership is a common self-protective tactic in totalitarian states (as observed by, for example Byron, 1981). The practice also serves to belittle and therefore diminish the symbolic power of the names of the dominant, both their personal names and their institutional titles, the cultural capital of which is a form of symbolic violence.

Discussion: Symbolic Violence, Hysteresis and DissentWe can now see how those Ukrainians who were predisposed towards the West in the period of the Soviet Union and therefore sought and obtained employment with the Corporation went through a period of re-adaptation to domination, this time within the Corporation, in which they learned, through the creative use of the hysteresis effect, to redeploy the practices of survival and dissidence developed under state socialism. So rather than learning or unlearning (as in the management consultancy model suggested by Kets de Vries, 2000), there was a creative relearning of old lessons in the context of homologous practices, but learned by using a new language, what might be called ‘corporate discourse’.

The values professed by the West (democracy, freedom of speech, indi-vidualism) were then discovered not to apply within the Corporation, or



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to apply in such a way that they had to be affi rmed while being under-stood as not applying. So working in the Corporation became in part a task of interpreting the signs and the ‘real’ (esoteric) meaning of statements, policies and behaviours—and this is where we were able to help the Ukrainians in reorientating their habitus, where our ‘specialist’ group with its academic capital (in this period) provided a forum for refl ection on the practices of the Corporation.

The reorientation of the habitus was therefore a process of ‘creative trans-formation’, a kind of dance so to speak, in which the dissident Ukrainians tested out the new context and creatively reoriented their habitus, using homologous practices to interpret the operations of domination in the new corporate context. We have therefore not only a hysteresis effect of creative adaptation, but we also have two different processes of transition and therefore different hysteresis effects. There is the society in transition and the organization in transition. Thus the hysteresis effects operate in two ways, as two processes that come together, with the ‘new’ (us) and ‘old’ dissidents (Olga) interpreting the society and the Corporation for each other (what Bourdieu, 2000: 264 calls ‘orchestration d’habitus’). We were thus able to understand as a hysteresis effect the displacement of our own habitus within the fi eld of the Corporation and our social trajectory (Bourdieu, 2000).

In their encounter with the Corporation’s practices, the post-Soviet social actors found that they had exchanged one mode of domination for another (albeit ‘softer’), within which the old habitus and the practices of dissent could be remobilized in order to preserve an ‘inner’ personal integrity (the habitus of the dissident) and also to alert the post-Soviet generation to the corporate social practices by which submission was inculcated and so to transmit strategies/tactics for survival. But dissent is not resistance and so, given the economic consequences of dismissal from their jobs with the Western organization, constrained by economic force and family duty, the corporate dissidents chose dissimulation and/or retreat into the private sphere and the inner ‘self’—or, in the end perhaps, through habituation to symbolic violence, submission to the Doxa.

Does the literature exaggerate the nature of the ‘transition’? If during the Cold War the ‘West’ and the Soviet bloc constructed socio-political imaginaries about the other and about themselves (e.g. the West as ‘good,’ the Soviet Union as ‘evil’ and vice versa), then these competing imaginaries may have served to obscure the practical similarities/homologies of the mechanisms for ensuring submission that are/were central to the production of domination within Western and state socialist organizations.

Of course, we need to remember here that the UK and its organizations were also undergoing a sort of ‘transition’ in this period. Indeed, Outhwaite (2007) argues that in the West we now have undergone a transition to a ‘post-class’ society, where politics has ceased to be class-based and where ‘identity, life-style and issues politics become more important’. This means



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that in the West there is now an ‘organized-class society’ which ‘strongly recalls the world of state socialism’ (2007: 8.2–8.3), so it could be argued that contemporary capitalist and state socialist organizations are in fact not worlds apart.

ConclusionsThe main question we have addressed in this article is: how might Bourdieu’s concept of the hysteresis effect be operationalized in order to understand dissent from, and compliance with, domination in a specifi c period of social and organizational transition? In order to answer this question and provide a fi ner-grained analysis of ‘the cultural confl icts of everyday life’ (Wacquant, 2002: 32–33), we applied Bourdieu’s framework of concepts to the specifi c context of a British organization operating in postcommunist Ukraine.

In addressing the research question, our article makes contributions at three levels in extending the Bourdieusian literature to the study of dom-ination within organizations. At the theoretical level we show the role of economic compulsion and symbolic violence in producing domination, i.e. that we enter the Doxa through economic compulsion. We also contribute to understanding the how domination can be seen to operate in periods of transition, of the role of practices in inculcating compliance with the ‘corporate’ and, in particular, we demonstrate the relevance of Bourdieu’s lesser-used concept of the hysteresis effect in understanding the reproduction and creative reorientation of dissent as a habitus. In so doing, we add to the complexity of Bourdieu’s theoeretical framework. Bourdieu (1980) says that change in the habitus in a period of transition is not a refl exive process and is done not consciously but by adapting the sens pratique. But we have demonstrated that it can be a conscious process, at least in cases when agents have acquired academic capital as part of their habitus (‘Olga’ for example certainly was conscious of the homologies between communism and the Corporation). We also suggest that, when social agents with a differing habitus (discordant to the organization as fi eld) come together within an organization, they are able to use each others’ hysteresis effects in order to interpret the practices of domination as such. So the ability to read the new situation homologously gives us an answer to the question of how the dominated that dissent were able to perceive the mechanisms of domination in the new context.

Our substantive contribution adds a Bourdieusian perspective to the literature on ‘transition’, looking at what was, in some contexts, reproduced in the post-Soviet Union, namely hierarchy and domination within the Western organization. Finally, we make a methodological contribution in using ‘participant objectivation’ (Bourdieu, 1993, 1998) to investigate our own experience by breaking with common-sense ideas of the role of Western organizations in the ‘transition’ to the post-Soviet Union. This methodology,



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employed by Bourdieu and his associates in La misère du monde and discussed by Bourdieu in that volume (Bourdieu, 1993:9–17, 1389–1424), has been criticized as failing to objectify the ‘scholastic’ interviewer as participant (see the discussion of ‘late’ Bourdieu in Mesny, 2002). However, in this case the authors were both participants and academic researchers and such were attempting to use social theory to understand their own position as subjected to powerful social forces of subordination and sidelining (conceptualized as domination and symbolic violence). This research therefore also made us more aware of our own position: our habitus and social trajectory in relation to class structures in UK society and in this process we were also able to draw on the hysteresis effect, namely on the way that our Ukrainian ‘dissident’ colleagues used their experience of the Soviet Union in order to understand the new corporate Doxa. We can thus claim to have used Bourdieu’s social theoretical concepts, in particular hysteresis, in order to understand the social world in which we and our colleagues found ourselves.

Notes1 For the role of the Western states and supra-state actors in the ‘transition’ from

the SU, see Swain (2006).2 This accusatory aspect of ‘transition culture’ is noted by Kennedy: ‘(Transition

culture) also lives in everyday life when, for instance, self-identifi ed entrepreneur in Eastern Europe accuses his employee of having a socialist mind-set’ (Kennedy, 2002: 279).

3 See http://www.managementofchange.com/courses.php?course_id=44 From an account of one of ‘the H experience’ seminars.5 ‘Playschool’ was a popular TV programme for the under-fi ves, shown on the

BBC in the UK, 1964–1988.

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Ron Kerr is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Language Studies at the Open University. His research interests include the study of discourse in leadership and organizational practices and the discourses of knowledge transfer and international development. He has recently published in International Studies of Management and Organisations and Critical Discourse Studies and in recent collections on The New Development Management (Zed Books) and The Politics of Language Education (Multilingual Matters). He has also published (with Lockett, Cave and Robinson) in Entrepreneurship and Regional Development and (with Lockett and Robinson) in International Small Business Journal. Address: Faculty of Education and Language Studies, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. [E-mail: [email protected]]



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Sarah Robinson is a Lecturer in Management Learning at The Open University Busi-ness School. She has a PhD in Management Learning from Lancaster University and has a background in international education development. Her research interests include the transferability of management ideas and concepts, the internationalization of management education, knowledge transfer across fi elds and boundaries and Bourdieusian perspectives on organization studies. She has published on knowledge transfer, leadership development, the internationalization of management education and organizational learning in post-soviet contexts. She also has a publication (with R. Kerr) in Human Relations. Address: Open University Business School, The Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK. [email: [email protected]]



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