The Dialectical Sense of Humour: Routine Joking in a Taylorized Factory

Abstract

Starting from the premise that context is central to understanding humour, the paper examines humour in three key contexts of the workplace – the labour process, control relations and peer relations. The paper argues that there have been important studies which have shown humour embedded in control relations and peer relations, but the way in which humour may be embedded in the labour process has not received the same sustained attention. The paper reports on a participant-observation ethnography in a Taylorized blinds factory in which humour embedded in the labour process was the central form of humour. Particularly important were forms of humour categorized as ‘routine humour’ and ‘routine absurdity’ in which workers played with the routine labour process. Overall, the humour in this factory primarily had resistive meanings, and contributed to an autonomous shopfloor culture which informed acts of informal collective resistance. At the same time, much of the humour lubricated the enactment of the labour process. The paper contributes to knowledge by drawing on Bergson to offer a theoretical framing for, and extending our understanding of, humour embedded in the labour process. Specifically, it suggests the importance of the dialectical sense of humour – humour which enacts the labour process, while having implicitly resistive meanings.