Crisis Related 'Organisational Hysteresis' in the UK Legal Services Sector

Abstract

This thesis explored crisis-related organisational hysteresis in the UK legal services sector, focusing specifically on how the collective crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit, the economic downturn and cost-of-living pressures, accelerated digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption create enduring organisational, operational, and behavioural effects on both organisations and their employees.
Drawing on Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice, the study examined the dislocation between practitioners’ pre-pandemic embodied dispositions (habitus) and the reconfigured organisational field that emerged in response to the collective crisis, and conceptualised hysteresis as a temporal lag between field-level shocks and habitus-level adaptation, manifesting in trauma, innovation, and identity reconfiguration.
While organisational crisis and change management literature has traditionally focused on immediate organisational responses to isolated change events, comparatively limited scholarly attention has been paid to crisis and resulting radical change in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous organisational environment, and the prolonged and residual effects that persist after the initial crisis event. This research addresses that gap by examining the long-term organisational and employee impacts of the collective crisis through the lens of organisational hysteresis.
The study adopted an interpretivist philosophical stance in order to explore the lived experiences and the meaning-making of participants operating within the legal profession during and after the collective crisis. Given the exploratory nature of the research, the study employed an inductive qualitative research design using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as the principal methodological and analytical framework. Data was collected through twenty semi-structured interviews conducted with barristers, solicitors, paralegals, and legal executives across England and Wales. The inductive analysis generated five dominant themes: (1) Adaptation to Crisis-Induced Change (digital efficiency vs. transformational challenges); (2) Operational and Financial Constraints (Brexit revenue loss, court inefficiency, cost-of-living shocks); (3) Employee Opportunities and Challenges (flexibility gains vs. isolation, demotivation, and career delay); (4) Organisational Restructuring and Downsizing (cost-

driven redundancy, office space re-evaluation); and (5) Shifts in Employee Focus and Workplace Dynamics (refusal to return to pre-crisis norms, individualised career strategies).
The findings revealed that crisis-related organisational hysteresis manifested in several interconnected ways across organisations and employees. Hysteresis was revealed to be a dual mechanism which simultaneously enables through the reconciled habitus, digital upskilling and capital re-valuation; and disables through the destabilised habitus, survivor-exit, and spatial trauma. The participants’ narratives also evidenced cleft habitus experiences in the form of internal conflicts between pre-crisis professional dispositions and post-crisis digital expectations. This conflict, as the findings reveal, is resolved through four emergent strategies: abandoned, reconfirmed, reconciled, and destabilised habitus reconfigurations. The study provides new insights into Bourdieusian theory by demonstrating that hysteresis is not merely suffering but a generative rupture that can foster reflexivity, innovation, and new symbolic capital (digital fluency, remote advocacy skills, and AI adoption).
The thesis contributes to academic literature by extending the understanding of hysteresis beyond traditional economic and organisational contexts into the lived experiences of professionals operating within a crisis. The study further contributes to organisational change literature by highlighting the micro-processes of crisis inscription into professional bodies and practices, and proposes an empirically grounded model for understanding the triggers, manifestations, and consequences of organisational hysteresis, while identifying the organisational initiatives capable of mitigating its long-term effects viz. (i) embracing and enhancing digitalisation (with human oversight); (ii) workforce and client (sector-wide) training; (iii) promoting flexible work designs and employee wellbeing; (iv) streamlining resources and operations; and (v) advocacy for easing regulatory and compliance challenges.
The study concludes that managing crisis-related organisational hysteresis requires synchronising technological, spatial, and compliance infrastructures to realign habitus with an evolving field, transforming crisis-related hysteresis to an opportunity for reflexivity, innovation, and the valorisation of new digital symbolic capital.

Date of Award	15 Jun 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Portsmouth
Supervisor	Adele Bezuidenhout (Supervisor), Karen Johnston (Supervisor) & Hamid Foroughi (Supervisor)