Caught between Times: Explaining Resistance to Change through the Tale of Don Quixote

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