What is resistance to change? A habitus-oriented approach

In this paper I use Bourdieu's concept of habitus to offer a new way to understand resistance to change (RTC) in organizations. The three most prevalent perspectives in mainstream organization development (OD) literature understand resistance as something within the individual's psychological disposition, in the social context, and between change creators and acceptors. The habitus-oriented approach presented here, on the contrary, understands resistance as a social practice built into the system and produced by social agents' (individuals and groups) habitus, a cognitive construct that represents not the personal or the social roots of resistance but the combined dialectic roots of the two.