Contemporary Management Issues
WORKERS PLAYTIME? UNRAVELLING THE PARADOX OF COVERT RESISTANCE IN ORGANIZATIONS
Peter Fleming
[email protected]
André Spicer
[email protected]
Department of Management
University of Melbourne
Parkville, Vic 3010
Australia
Chapter for Paradoxical New Directions in Organization and Management Theory. Edited by Stewart Clegg. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
(Second Draft) July 2001
The problem of whether employee resistance is possible under corporate relations of power that target the very hearts and minds of workers has become an increasingly important issue in recent critical organization studies. With the advent of ?cultural cleansing' (Strangleman and Roberts, 1999), ?designer selves' (Casey, 1995) and other forms of ?normative controls' (Kunda, 1992) related to culture engineering and teamwork numerous studies have argued that the very capacity for workers to resist management has been insidiously undermined. In the past workers could usually resist corporate controls because they tended to be less normative but when the very identities of workers are intentionally controlled dissent is all but erased from the discursive landscape (Willmott, 1993). The problem with such a pessimistic reading of new management technologies, of course, is the unwarranted exaggeration of the success of management power and the underestimation of the myriad of ways some workers resist corporate control, even under the most claustrophobic hegemonic conditions (Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995). Just because open, overt and collectivised forms of resistance characteristic of Fordism are less prevalent today does not necessarily mean that the recalcitrant worker has finally been subdued. Indeed, a recent s ...
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