Abstract
Using my consulting experience, I offer a practical perspective to problem solving in organization development (OD) interventions, defined as “habitus-oriented consulting” (HOC). Building on Bourdieu’s action theory, HOC frames organizational problems neither only as psychological phenomena derived from individuals’ psychological dispositions, nor only as structural phenomena derived from the social context (defined here as individual and systemic orientations), as mainstream OD often defines them. Instead, HOC frames organizational problems as sociological phenomena, derived from individuals’ social dispositions, or habitus, produced by the organization’s social structure. Using the example of conflict among members of a highly skilled surgical unit in a hospital in Israel, I show how HOC can be used by OD consultants to intervene in organizations by exploring and understanding social structure, participant agency, patterns of habitus, relations between objective positions, and the whole of the organization.
Introduction
In 2010, Prof. Needle, the head of the surgical department in a big hospital in Israel, invited me to help the department solve its intense conflictual interactions. The conflictual interactions, which prevented almost any possible effective communication, according to Prof Needle and to the great majority of the department’s members, were the result of Dr. Goldberg’s “problematic personality” and disruptive, aggressive, communication style. Dr. Goldberg was a significant member of the department. My role, as defined by Prof. Needle, was to help the department develop better interpersonal communication among its members and especially with Dr. Goldberg.
Interviews with all the department’s members (physicians, nurses, and social workers) showed that Dr. Goldberg’s daily communication style with others was indeed very aggressive. Dr. Goldberg approached colleagues with hostility; she resisted changing her behavior when asked, instead responding with public insults and humiliating comments (“I did not study medicine only to wait for an available nurse” 1 ). However, from the interviews I learned that Dr. Goldberg’s behavior is part of a bigger social story, a history of aggressive struggles in the department. As part of these struggles, Prof. Needle, the head of the department, communicates with participants in a one-sided way, promotes and demotes people using hidden and inconsistent criteria and makes decisions in a very centralized way (He consults but always does the opposite . . . [H]e is not consistent but acts according to his changing mood . . . [H]e is very centralized . . .). At the same time, the interviews indicated that the vast majority of the participants engaged intensively in very disruptive communication. Aggressive and hostile letters sent and filed at the Human Resource department, violent ways of talking and personal boycotts are only few examples (“[We] are like a sick person who sees everything as an extreme”).
These struggles, as I found, started years ago, mainly among Prof. Needle, the head of the department, and a group of three important veteran physicians, which I defined as the “founding generation.” The founding generation, caught by nostalgia for a magic past in which, as they frequently mentioned, they and the former head ran the department in a positive climate defined by sharing and cooperation (“we were proud. We loved to come . . . fun to work . . . we were a team”). They thus did not give any opportunity to initiatives promoted by Prof. Needle. They never accepted his leadership. They rarely agreed with the changing power relation in which they were not fully involved in strategic decisions like the tenure position Prof. Needle gave to Dr. Goldberg (A veteran physician: “I blame him for his decision to give tenure to Dr. Goldberg”). Very often they conducted meetings in private houses (with other physicians, nurses, and social workers) aiming at finding ways to get rid of Dr. Goldberg and to make Prof. Needle more cooperative. Prof. Needle, in his turn, as participants repeatedly said, did not find the leadership necessary to establish a new reality that would give the founding generation (and other participants) appropriate work conditions (participation, sharing, and cooperation) that could bring back their sense of belonging and satisfaction (“Prof. Needle is very formal . . . [he] does not care about teamwork . . . [he] does not care how people feel”). This way, I assumed, Prof Needle maintained the founding generation’s attachment to the past and kept up their efforts to recreate that past by getting rid of Dr. Goldberg and by fully participating in the department leadership.
From the interviews I learned that understanding Dr. Goldberg’s disruptive behavior entails focusing not only on her inner psychological dispositions (“problematic personality”), as the department understood them but also, perhaps mainly, on the conflictual interactions and power struggles of the whole department (“[E]every day a new war . . . People get positions only through manipulations . . .”). These power struggles, I claim, produced among the departments’ members, including Dr. Goldberg, a habitus (social disposition) that includes contesting values and norms expressed by an aggressive communication style (“People try to turf (said in English) each other, to control”).
Habitus, as I use it here, following Bourdieu (1989), consists of a set of social dispositions (worldview, schema of thinking, practical knowledge) both internal and external that generate social agents’ thought and behavior. Social agents adopt these social dispositions from the social structures of their family, gender group, ethnic group, and working organization through a process of socialization. Social structures consist of a common language, organizing metaphors, power relations, and control over physical resources. The habitus then is a “structured structure” embedded in the individual (Swartz, 2002, p. 635). However, the habitus is not a passive entity that completely responds to the social structure. It is a “structuring structure,” an active mechanism that from within the individual generates, or structures, new and creative thoughts and behaviors (Bourdieu, 1989).
In other words, people adopt the social structure into their habitus and accordingly develop social dispositions that generate their behavior. Yet, because the social structure is internalized, people control the way in which they apply the habitus; they not only respond to (and reproduce) but also change the social structure (Bourdieu, 1990).
As I found in the surgery department, the participants developed a habitus that corresponds directly with the department’s social structure. It used the accepted ruthless language (from a letter Dr. Goldberg sent to one of the veteran physicians: “you are using violent language toward a doctor . . . I am shocked I got your hate letter”) and “criminal-style” metaphors (“They want to eliminate me”) aiming to change the total control Prof. Needle had over physical resources (A veteran physician: “There was a committee but he decided alone”). However, the members of the surgery department not only reproduced this habitus—they refined it and “improved” its combat properties by sending hostile letters and using violent ways of talking (“Physicians often curse each other in public”). The habitus then represents a collective history integrated cognitively into the self and from there produces and reproduces this specific history.
The understanding of Dr. Goldberg’s (and the rest of the department members’) disruptive behavior not necessarily as a product of inner personal traits but of the department’s constant power struggles defines this article’s goal and theoretical contribution. The goal of the article is to offer a practical framework, (habitus-oriented consulting [HOC]) for the understanding of organization problems. Based on the concept of habitus, this framework searches for the source of organization problems within the individual and in the social context. Habitus is a cognitive construct consisting of individuals’ (and groups’) inner social dispositions—worldview, organizing metaphors, power relations, and practical knowledge all belong to the social context—that generates thoughts and behaviors (Bourdieu, 1989).
In the next two sections, I present organization development’s (OD’s) individualistic and systemic orientations. To be brief, I focus the discussion only on periods and theories that most significantly represent each orientation. In the fourth part, I discuss Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (and the concepts of capital and field) as a point of theoretical departure for the understanding of HOC. In the fifth part, I present HOC in detail. I conclude by highlighting the article’s theoretical and practical contributions.
The Individual Self in Mainstream OD
OD’s emphasis on individuals’ and groups’ psychological dispositions has not developed in a social and cultural vacuum; this emphasis, I claim, represents an individualistic orientation rooted in modern Western social structure. In this structure, engrained in the enlightenment’s rational thought, the individual is an autonomic psychological subject, entitled to self-expression and self-actualization. This individual is therefore the main source of meanings, values, and practical norms (Gergen & Thatchenkery, 1996, pp. 357-358).
We can find examples for the location of meanings and values in the individual self in fields such as education, law, and labor (Gergen, Gergen, & Barrett, 2004). The labor field, which is the social context of this article, uses psychological discourse and practices to define itself as the site in which the individual self can express itself and realize its potential (Rose, 1991). Exchanges such as “what is wrong with me?” “Just focus and everything will go well; it is only a question of how much effort you are willing to invest” reflect such phenomena; the individual is expected to be fully responsible for his or her thought and behavior. These phrases do not consider social structures as responsible for meanings and values or for individuals’ thinking and behavior.
The next source that nourished OD was the individualistic social structure that dominated the United States’ Post–World War II social life that included notions such as equity, freedom, and especially, the heavy emphasis on psychological dispositions and on the development of the individual self: namely, self-awareness, self-growth, self-expression, and self-actualization (Burnes & Cooke, 2012).
Critics claim that by largely using psychological discourse and practices, mainstream OD scholars and practitioners fall into a “reductionist trap” 2 in which they try to change organizations by changing individuals (Bradford & Burke, 2005, p. 199; Edmondson, 1996; Fincham & Clark, 2002). In an interview with David Bradford, Jerry Porras (Bradford & Porras, 2005), claims that OD consultants have always worked on creating direct change in people’s thinking and behavior while neglecting the social context in which these people work in (see also French & Bell, 1999). Porras attributes OD scholars’ and consultants’ individual-orientation to the intensive integration of psychologists into the OD field in the 1950s and 1960s. Organizational psychologists, he says, were trained to see internal motives and personal growth as the main reasons for individuals’ behavior and, therefore, were busy developing ways to change people (Greiner & Cummings, 2005). As a result, says Porras (Bradford & Porras, 2005, p. 51), these consultants did not have “a conceptual framework to guide their work, to help them see the big picture from which they could decide what action to take.”
A clear example is OD’s scholars and practitioners frequent use of medical discourse (Voronov & Woodworth, 2012). Edgar Schein, for example, regularly uses concepts such as “learning anxiety,” “abandonment anxiety” (Schein, 1987b), and “defense mechanisms” (Schein, 1993) as a means to “medicalize” and “remedy” (Schein, 1969, p. 8) the organization. Although OD scholars and practitioners, like Schein (2004), consider the group level, I would argue that when they use medical discourse they are relating more to the individual’s psychological dispositions (anxiety, pain) and less to the organization as a whole. The use of medical language locates the organization’s problems at the individual level and leaves the organization level out of the consulting intervention’s sight (Coghlan, 2012; Mizrachi, 2009; Voronov & Woodworth, 2012).
The Systemic View in OD
Mainstream, perhaps I should say traditional, OD, then, perceives individuals as psychological subjects whose personal development and growth are the main target of the change process. However, critical writing on the individualistic orientation indicates the existence of a systemic orientation. Accordingly, effective organizational change processes entail working on the macro level of the organization, on its technology, structure, and culture (Bradford & Porras, 2005; Greiner, 1972; Greiner & Cummings, 2005; Katz & Kahn, 1966).
In his “field theory,” Kurt Lewin (1939) insists that we view individuals’ (and groups’) behavior as the product of interaction between individuals and forces in the social field (e.g., systems of benefits, norms and values, management styles, and equipment and maintenance; Bargal, 2012). A wide range of post-Lewinian OD models and theories consider the social context as highly important in change processes. These include the system approach (Katz & Kahn, 1966), action research (Coghlan, 2012), organizational design (Greiner & Schein, 1988), Beers’s system approach to OD (Beer, Eisenstat, & Spector, 1990), strategic change (Pettigrew, 1987), sociotechnical systems (Pava, 1986), organizational culture (Schein, 2010), organizational learning (Senge, 1990), storytelling (Boje, 1995), discourse analysis (Barrett, Thomas, & Hocevar, 1995), and sensemaking (Weick, 1995).
All the above approaches encourage OD scholars and practitioners to consider links between organizations’ social context and problems (Burnes, 2014). Beer et al. (1990, p. 5), for example, advocate putting workers into new organizational contexts that “impose” on them new ideas, responsibilities, and relationships. Using the concept of “double loop learning,” Argyris (1982) suggests perspectives and practices that focus on changing individuals’ and groups’ underlying values and assumptions as a way to solve problems (Burke, 2008). Based on wide empirical research, John Kotter (1990) shows that workers often understand the direction of changes generated by firm leaders and are interested in helping to achieve those changes. At the same time, there are problems that prevent change from taking place. Such problems can be within individuals but that is rare. More often, says Kotter, the problems lie in the organization’s structure, which forces people to choose new perspectives at the expense of their own interests (Burnes, 2014; Dent & Goldberg, 1999). For example, narrow job categories can seriously undermine efforts to increase productivity or make it very difficult to consider customers, while performance-appraisal systems make people choose between the new vision and their own self-interest (Kotter, 1995, p. 64).
Supporters of the culture approach see inappropriate organization cultures either as obstacles or as opportunities for change (Burnes, 2014; French & Bell, 1999; Peters & Waterman, 1982). Schein (2010, p. 3), for example, sees organization culture as a pattern of common assumptions that have the potential to reduce organization problems by showing the organization’s members how to perceive, feel, and act to “maintain the social order.”
More recent examples of the systemic perspective are in the research of Noumair, Pfaff, St. John, Gipson, and Brazaitis (2017) in which they consider how covert behavior of social agents in all organization levels, including the entire system, is linked to covert dynamics developed at the organization level. Based on empirical evidence, in Rethinking Culture: Embodied Cognition and the Origin of Culture in Organizations (2017) White presents a new framework of organizational culture, based on cognitive science, in which he shows how culture can be consciously shaped beyond adopted values. Szabla, Stefanchin, and Warner (2014) explore the perceived relationship between change content and change strategy to show the importance of the relationship between organizations’ power-coercive strategies and episodic change events. In revealing articles, Friedman (2011) and Lapidot-Lefler et al. (2015) revisit Bourdieu and Lewin’s field theory to show how the systemic concept of social space can generate thinking about social inclusion and organizational development and change.
Habitus, Capital, and Field: Toward a Theory of Habitus Oriented Consulting
The theoretical stance of this article does not attempt to replace the above two perspectives (the individualistic and the systemic) or to eliminate their relevance in understanding and solving organization problems. In contrast, it offers an alternative way to bring together the individual and the social. To be precise, HOC frames organizational problems not only as psychological phenomena and/or as structural phenomena but as sociological phenomena derived from individuals’ social dispositions, or habitus. By considering both agency and social structure, habitus uncovers the personal and the social roots of consultees’ (and other organization members’) thinking and behavior.
Agent–Structure Theories
The habitus is an organizing concept in Bourdieu’s action theory that sociology categorizes as an agent–structure theory (Archer, 1988; Giddens, 1984). It tries to overcome the tension in the dichotomy between the individual and the social structure. Individual-oriented theories, such as “symbolic interaction,” neglect social conditions; social-oriented theories, such as “structural functionalism,” neglect social agents’ practices. According to agent–structure theories, individuals act in accordance with understandings accepted in the social field in which they live. However, they do not simply enact these understandings but constantly produce and reproduce them; social structures and individuals’ practices are two sides of the same coin (Giddens, 1984).
For example, when I meet with consultees, I usually sit at the side and not at the head of the table. Sitting at the side of the table helps me to produce relations in accordance with OD’s “help philosophy” (Lippitt & Lippitt, 1978; Ottaway, 1983; Schein, 1987a). According to the help philosophy, consultants do not act as experts or as managers who provide solutions from the head of the table, but as process consultants who focus on the consultees’ personal development and growth so they can independently diagnose and develop desired solutions to a given problem (French & Bell, 1999). Agent–structure theories would view my decision to sit at the side of the table as producing and reproducing the help philosophy that structures my relations with my consultees and defines my role as an OD process consultant. From the agent–structure perspective, the help philosophy is not external to the sitting practice—it does not have an independent life, only in the sitting practice itself.
Social practices then are the sites in which social production takes place. Yet agent–structure theories do not offer enough conceptual tools with which to investigate what happens in these sites. Very little is known about what really occurs at that meeting point between structures and practices. Moreover, it is not clear how we can use agent–structure theory in a practical field like OD.
Bourdieu (1989) responds to these challenges using the concept of habitus. For him, the habitus is the internal (cognitive and bodily) social site in which the meeting between structures and practices produces sets of principles that generate action strategies in a given situation. As I show in this section, Bourdieu’s version of agent–structure theory offers a “concern with fields as spaces of powers and struggles and with habitus as generative principles of strategies of action in relation to such fields (Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008, p. 30). I will start first with the epistemological basis of the habitus.
The Epistemological Basis of the Habitus
Bourdieu locates the habitus far from Levi-Strauss’s structuralism and from Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, which dominated the French intellectual world in the 1950s and 1960s (Özbilgin & Tatli, 2005; Swartz, 1997). On one hand, the concept of habitus represents Bourdieu’s criticism of Levi Strauss’s structuralism, according to which normative rules define what social actors should do in specific situations. Based on his research on kinship relations in North Africa, Bourdieu shows that structural explanations give us only an official picture of social reality and social relations. In reality, according to Bourdieu, people negotiate, argue, and compromise with official rules like kinship relations—rules they constantly break in accordance with their own interests and desires. Structural explanations, for Bourdieu, are indifferent to agency and thus do not fully represent the people who are being studied in the structural research. For the concept of habitus, on the contrary, social agents (individuals and groups) do not act in response to an external set of formal rules. Social agents are active producers of meaning using deeply rooted past experiences to improvise action strategies when reacting to constraints and opportunities in the situation they are confronting. The habitus, then, comes from a theory of action that rejects objective views that understand social agents’ behavior as a direct reaction to external conditions, symbolic, and material (Swartz, 2002).
On the other hand, Bourdieu uses the concept of habitus against Sartre’s subjectivism and his existentialist theory. Bourdieu argues against seeing social agents’ behavior as emerging from subjectivity that is not socially affected. For the habitus, on the contrary, social agents do not act in a way that is free from an external set of formal rules. People do improvise action strategies, but they do it within structural opportunities and constraints that they take for granted.
Habitus
Habitus consists of a set of social dispositions both internal and external that generate social agents’ thought and behavior (Bourdieu, 1989). Social agents adopt these social dispositions (worldview, schema of thinking, practical knowledge) from the social structures of their family, gender group, ethnic group, and working organization through a process of socialization. Social structures consist of a common language, organizing metaphors, power relations, and control over physical resources.
As the social structure of the organization is adopted by social agents and becomes part of their habitus (social dispositions), the habitus predisposes their thoughts and behaviors (including resisting behaviors) accordingly (Bourdieu, 1989). From this perspective, I claim that Dr. Goldberg’s resistance to stopping her aggressive communication was not necessarily a result of psychological dispositions—of her “problematic personality” as Prof. Needle and the majority of the participants said. Rather, it was generated primarily by her habitus, the social dispositions she adopted from the department’s stormy social structures (such as a competitive worldview, complete lack of tolerance to the needs of others, and asymmetric power relations). These social structures, as I learned, produced through constant struggles mainly among the agents in power, the founding generation and the head of the department (A veteran physician: “Prof. Needle used to say I hear you but I’m the head of the department and I decide”). Habitus, again, is something people learn, and once it is learned, it “naturally” predisposes the way they think and behave.
Yet because social structures become part of their habitus (social dispositions), social agents control the way they apply these structures. For instance, sports players (like teachers, drivers, or university professors) do not make use only of the social dispositions (such game style or playing by the rules) they acquire in their primary sport socialization. They probably base their game (or professional work) on these social dispositions but enrich them with innovative and creative practices that over time produce and reproduce the game’s social structure (game style, rules; Kitchin & Howe, 2013). As my interviews showed, Dr. Goldberg’s aggressive behavior was not only a direct reaction to the department’s social structures. She was not a powerless agent who simply applied the social structure against her will. Instead, by confronting other participants in a very aggressive and insulting style and by explicitly challenging other physicians’ expertise, she creatively refined and “improved” her habitus and behavior that in its turn reproduced the department’s combative social structure (“She causes competition and jealousy . . .”). Habitus then represents the social structures’ influence on social agents and, at the same time, the influence of social agents on social structures; a process Bourdieu (1990, p. 57) defines as “regulated improvisation.”
Capital
Habitus is always connected to power relations determined mainly by the “capital” social agents have (Bourdieu, 1989). Among the central types of capital are “human capital” (knowledge, skills, and expertise), “symbolic capital” (prestige and reputation), “social capital” (the ability to use capital of other social agents to promote one’s own interests), and “cultural capital” (arbitrary attributions like accepted language). Managers and other dominant agents in organizations, for example, have cultural capital derived from their competencies (language, significant knowledge, and techniques) to run organizations; they also have symbolic capital, prestige, for being the leaders of the organization and social capital, derived from the use of other participants’ capital to advance their own particular interests.
Social agents, however, bring to their habitus not only symbolic capital but also material resources, for example, allocation of resources, control of the organization’s knowledge mechanism. and job rotation. That is, habitus is never simply symbolic or normative; it is also substantive, material, a matter of control over resources and position in the social structure. This makes the habitus a mirror image of the organization’s symbolic and material social structures, and therefore, not only external to the individual but also internal, a cognitive structure that generates social agents’ behaviors, including resisting behaviors.
Based on their control over capital and resources, social agents can reproduce their habitus and position in the organization and exercise a degree of control over social relations in accordance with their specific needs and interests (Neilsen, 1996). This is exactly what I found at the surgery department. The founding generation and the head of the department used their capital resources as official authorities and their position in the department as formal and unacknowledged leaders to impose on the rest of the participants, including Dr. Goldberg, their own competitive worldview and practices—practices such as writing hostile letters and using violent language on the side of the founding generation, and a one-sided communication and nontransparent promotion processes on the side of the head of the department.
Field
Field is a social space in which people play a game according to rules that are different from the rules played in a near space (Bourdieu, 1989). Once adopted, these rules largely direct what people can or cannot do; they become an inner structure, natural and durable dispositions (habitus) that predispose people’s thinking and behavior (Friedman, 2011; Lapidot-Lefler et al., 2015).
Although fields are used by a group with common rules, with a shared interest and habitus, group members are always in a state of struggle and competition over similar sets of material resources (budget, technology) and over different types of capital (symbolic, social, and cultural). The struggle and competition over the field’s resources and capital, in turn, produce and reproduce the social agent’s way of thinking and behavior, including resisting behaviors.
With this in mind, in this article I assert that understanding social agents’ behavior requires us “first to understand the field with which and against which” it has been formed (Bourdieu, 2007, p. 4). Indeed, the more I learned about the struggles in the department, the less I saw Dr. Goldberg’s resistance to changing her aggressive behavior as a psychological construct, a construct in which a single person (Dr. Goldberg), isolated from the social structure, simply did not have the personal skills needed to approach other people effectively. Instead, Dr. Goldberg’s resistance was dynamically formed with and against the department’s conflicted social life as expressed by its stormy social structure (“Their [the physicians] reciprocal intrigues disturb me a lot because they are not accessible”).
This is not all. Bourdieu (1993, p. 82) reminds us that social interactions never take place in a social vacuum. Interactions are not “an empire within an empire.” What happens between two persons, between a house owner and her servant, between two colleagues or between a French speaker and a German speaker is always controlled by the objective relations between the two groups speaking these languages. When a German-speaking Swiss talks to a French-speaking Swiss, according to Bourdieu (1993, p. 82), “it is German Switzerland and Francophone Switzerland that are talking.” From this perspective, I see Dr. Goldberg’s aggressive interactions with other participants as a reflection of the two dominant entities (the founding generation and the head of the department) and their uncompromising competition and constant struggles over resources and control (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 97). I believe that an inspection focused only on Dr. Goldberg’s interactions with others would not have noticed that these interactions were in large part generated by the entire set of relationships in the department’s social field, especially the significant competitive relations between the founding generation and the head of the department (Forson, Özbilgin, Ozturk, & Tatli, 2014).
The Objectives of Habitus-Oriented Consulting
As pointed out in the previous section, habitus dispositions are durable and they tend to reproduce themselves, but they are not perpetual. They are dynamic in nature, adjustable, renewable, and changeable. In Bourdieu’s words (quoted by Garrett, 2007, p. 229), the habitus is [N]ot something natural, inborn: being a product of history, that is of social experience and education, it may be changed by history, that is by new experiences, education or training . . . Dispositions are long-lasting: they are tending to perpetuate, to reproduce themselves, but they are not eternal . . . Any dimension of habitus is very difficult to change but it may be changed through the process of awareness and of pedagogic effort.
In what follows, I invite the readers to think of themselves as OD consultants taking part in a personal or a group “pedagogic effort” aiming to raise consultees’ awareness of their habitus. They are asked to think about their own social dispositions (habitus) and the roots of these dispositions in the social structure and to search for their personal agency and social position in the organization’s social structure (see Table 1).
The Different Objectives of the OD and the HOC.
Note. OD = organization development; HOC = habitus-oriented consulting.
Search for the Social Structure 3
HOC encourages OD consultants to see individuals’ thinking and behavior as a collective phenomenon (Swartz, 2002). That is, they are asked to understand individuals’ behavior not only as a result of inner psychological dispositions but also of the social structure (shared thinking schemes, values, and power relations) as it is demonstrated in the individual’s habitus. From this perspective, I understand Dr. Goldberg’s disruptive behavior as not only a personal but also a social and collective phenomenon, a matter of the department’s stormy social structure as reflected in her habitus (social dispositions).
Search for the Participants’ Agency (and Not Only Self)
HOC encourages OD consultants to help consultees recognize not only their personal self but also their agency. That is, HOC encourages them to see the source of their behavior not only in their psychological dispositions (such as charisma, communication style, and personal commitment) but also in their agency: their capital, resources, and position in the organization’s social structure. From this perspective, I understood Dr. Goldberg’s aggressive behavior not only as an expression of her “problematic personality” but also, and perhaps mainly, as an expression of her weak agency. I claim that as a powerless agent with little social capital and marginal position in the department, an aggressive communication style was almost the only way for Dr. Goldberg to protect her needs and interests.
Search for the Habitus (Structure and Agency)
Helping consultees recognize the social structure in which they live and their agency is not enough. In addition, we want to help consultees recognize the dialectic relationship between the social structure and their agency in their habitus. Furthermore, a focus on the habitus grants consultees a view of both the influence of the social structure on the individuals or groups’ behavior and the influence of their behavior on the social structure. I believe that Dr. Goldberg’s disruptive behavior was generated by the relationship between this specific behavior (disruptive) and the department’s troubled social structure, which encourages aggressive behaviors.
Search for the Relations Between Objective Positions
HOC encourages OD consultants to see the organization’s social reality not only as a network of subjective interpersonal relations (between selves) but also as a network of objective positions (between agents). In such a network, the (objective) specific behaviors do not express subjective interpersonal relations and inner motivations but rather objective positions derived from struggles for control and capital (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 97). For this reason, I suggested that Prof Needle not think of Dr. Goldberg’s behavior only as an expression of her psychological dispositions (her “problematic personality,” low personal commitment, and inner disruptive motivations) but also, perhaps mainly, as a product of the social positions between Dr. Goldberg and others in the department, especially members of the founding generation. These asymmetric positions, I assumed, left Dr. Goldberg almost no option for communicating her opinion and desires except for disruptive behavior.
Search the Whole of the Organization
Using the concept of habitus as a starting point in OD processes enables consultants to focus not only on individuals or groups’ inner motivation but also on the organization as a whole. As a site of interaction between individuals’ behavior and the social structure, the habitus assumes wholeness and totality, since every social structure is embodied in and influenced by its wider social context. The focus on the habitus (on the individuals’ social dispositions adopted from the social structure) in the surgery department helped me understand the participants’ disruptive behaviors, including Dr. Goldberg’s, as partially a reflection, indeed a production, of the department’s social structure.
It does seem important to mention that HOC consultants do not practice in a different way from OD consultants. Both work with individuals’ or groups’ inner world. What is different is their objectives. While OD consultants search mainly for consultees’ psychological dispositions and focus on self-development, HOC consultants search mainly for consultees’ social dispositions and the origins of these dispositions in the organization’s social structure, and focus on organization development.
Concluding Discussion
Prof. Needle and the majority of the participants defined the department’s problem in psychological terms. For them, the department’s intensive conflictual interactions are mainly the result of Dr. Goldberg’ aggressive communication style and her “problematic personality.” However, applying HOC helped me to understand the department’s intensive conflictual interactions, including those practiced by Dr. Goldberg, as a product of the dialectical relations between Dr. Goldberg’s aggressive communication style and the department’s troubled social structure, produced and diffused mainly by the founding generation and the head of the department.
The focus on the habitus enabled me then to encourage the founding generation and the head of the department to take responsibility for the intensive struggles in the department. They both agreed that they were probably mainly responsible for the production of social dispositions (conflictual culture, worldview, schema of thinking, and practical knowledge) that in the form of personal habitus generated an aggressive communication style among the department’s members, including Dr. Goldberg.
HOC, then, does not exclude the individual’s inner world from the consulting process. The individual is still a central character. However, HOC is interested in the individual consultees’ inner world not just for her or his psychological dispositions (such personal communication style). Instead, the HOC searches for consultees’ inner world in order to help them recognize their social dispositions that are the product of the dialectic relations between their own behavior and the social structure.
What are the skills required to operate in accordance with HOC? Some of these skills are similar to those OD requires. Like OD, HOC believes that consultants should acquire psychological therapeutic skills for the establishment of helping relationships with consultees (individuals or groups) and for training consultees to deal independently with organization problems (Schein, 1999). However, HOC recommends that consultants need also to acquire sociological skills. These skills would include mainly a sociological reflexivity that enables the consultant to identify the dialectical relations between social structures (organizing metaphors, practical knowledge, and power relations) and personal behavior (struggle for capital and for material resources) in producing organization problems.
The development of sociological reflexivity, however, is not easy in light of the almost total conquest of the labor field, organizations, and management, by psychological discourse and practices (Costea, Crump, & Amiridis, 2008). The surgery department is just another example: When psychological discourse and practices engage in problem solving, they structure these problems in psychological ways (Rose, 1991). As I found, the participants had never considered the possibility that Dr. Goldberg’s behavior could be the result of a greater game in which the power system (the founding generation and the head of the department) left Dr. Goldberg almost no option but to take an active (often disruptive) role in her struggle over resources, control, and position. As we have seen, the participants structured the department’s intensive conflictual interactions as psychological (personal or interpersonal issues) and accordingly expected me to help Dr. Goldberg improve her communication style. I can only guess that Prof. Needle, like the rest of the participants and perhaps like many OD consultants and others in the individualistic modern Western world, assumed that if people properly “work” on themselves, the outside world will also change (Illouz, 2007).
Effective organizational problem-solving from the HOC perspective involves then improving consultees’ cognizance of the dialectic relations between social structures and participant behavior. In the surgery department, this would include demonstrating an understanding of the relationships between a competitive worldview, a zero tolerance for the needs of others, asymmetric power relations with a one-sided communication style by the head of the department, hostile letters sent to and filed at the Human Resource Department, violent language, and personal boycotts by the members of the department.
When the concept of habitus is put at the center of the problem-solving process, HOC responds to researchers in the 1970s and 1980s who demonstrated the need to develop theoretical and practical ways to overcome the dichotomy between individual and structure in processes of organizational change (Friedlander & Brown, 1974; see Sashkin & Burke, 1990). In the surgery department, the concept of habitus enabled me to overcome that dichotomy by changing the personal behavior of the founding generation, the head of the department, and Dr Goldberg, thereby changing the social structure produced by their behavior.
This article begins a task that requires future development. Future theoretical work can use sociology, as I do in this article, to advance the development of the consulting practice in a way that understands organizations as the product of individual behavior and social structures’ mutual relations. In practice, such an effort should focus on developing training frameworks that use the concept of habitus as an organizing principle for diagnosing and dealing with organization problems. These frameworks would understand organization problems as a product of social dispositions produced through dialectic relations between personal behavior and social structures.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.