Appropriating the Past in Organizational Change Management: Abandoning and Embracing History

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.