This article provides an overview and critique of the extant research on work-place resistance. It argues that much of this research has developed around an implicit duality of resistance and control. In other words, critical studies have highlighted either the growing ubiquity and subtlety of managerial control or have privileged workers’ abilities to carve out spheres of autonomy within these control mechanisms. It suggests that, in contrast to this implicit dualism of control and resistance, a dialectical approach better captures the notion of resistance and control as mutually constitutive, and as a routine social production of daily organizational life.
Ackroyd, S., & Thompson, P. (1999). Organizational misbehaviour. London: Sage.
2.
Adorno, T. (1973). Negative dialectics (E.B. Ashton, Trans.). New York: Continuum.
3.
Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy. New York: Monthly Review Press.
4.
Ashcraft, K. L., & Mumby, D. K. (2004). Reworking gender: A feminist communicology of organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
5.
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his world (H. Iswolsky, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
6.
Barker, J. R. (1993). Tightening the iron cage: Concertive control in self-managing teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38, 408-437.
7.
Bell, E. L., & Forbes, L. C. (1994). Office folklore in the academic paperwork empire: The interstitial space of gendered (con)texts. Text and Performance Quarterly, 14, 181-196.
8.
Benson, J. K. (1977). Organizations: A dialectical view. Administrative Science Quarterly, 22, 1-21.
9.
Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge.
10.
Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York: Monthly Review Press.
11.
Burawoy, M. (1979). Manufacturing consent: Changes in the labor process under monopoly capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
12.
Burrell, G. (1988). Modernism, postmodernism and organizational analysis: The contribution of Michel Foucault. Organization Studies, 9, 221-235.
13.
Casey, C. (1995). Work, self and society: After industrialism. London: Sage.
14.
Clair, R. P. (1994). Resistance and oppression as a self-contained opposite: An organizational communication analysis of one man’s story of sexual harassment. Western Journal of Communication, 58, 235-262.
15.
Clegg, S., & Dunkerley, D. (Eds.). (1980). Organization, class and control. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
16.
Cloud, D. (2001). Laboring under the sign of the new: Cultural studies, organizational communication, and the fallacy of the new economy. Management Communication Quarterly, 15, 268-278.
17.
Collinson, D. (1988). Engineering humor: Masculinity, joking and conflict in shop-floor relations. Organization Studies, 9, 181-199.
18.
Collinson, D. (1992). Managing the shop floor: Subjectivity, masculinity, and workplace culture. New York: de Gruyter.
19.
Collinson, D. (1994). Strategies of resistance: Power, knowledge and resistance in the workplace. In J. M. Jermier, D. Knights, & W. R. Nord (Eds.), Resistance and power in organizations (pp. 25-68). London: Routledge.
20.
Collinson, D. (2002). Managing humour. Journal of Management Studies, 39, 269-288.
21.
Collinson, D. (2003). Identities and insecurities: Selves at work. Organization, 10, 527-547.
22.
Deetz, S. (1992). Democracy in an age of corporate colonization: Developments in communication and the politics of everyday life. Albany: State University of New York Press.
23.
Edwards, R. (1979). Contested terrain: The transformation of the workplace in the twentieth century. New York: Basic Books.
24.
Ezzamel, M., Willmott, H., & Worthington, F. (2001). Power, control and resistance in the factory that time forgot. Journal of Management Studies, 38, 1053-1078.
25.
Ferguson, K. (1984). The feminist case against bureaucracy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
26.
Fleming, P., & Sewell, G. (2002). Looking for “the good soldier, Švejk”: Alternative modalities of resistance in the contemporary workplace. Sociology, 36, 857-873.
27.
Fleming, P., & Spicer, A. (2002). Workers’ playtime? Unravelling the paradox of covert resistance in organizations. In S. Clegg (Ed.), Management and organization paradoxes (pp. 65-85). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
28.
Fleming, P., & Spicer, A. (2003). Working at a cynical distance: Implications for power, subjectivity, and resistance. Organization, 10, 157-179.
29.
Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage.
30.
Gabriel, Y. (1999). Beyond happy families: A critical reevaluation of the control-resistance-identity triangle. Human Relations, 52, 179-203.
31.
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.
32.
Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and contradiction in social analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.
33.
Gottfried, H. (1994). Learning the score: The duality of control and everyday resistance in the temporary-help service industry. In J. M. Jermier, D. Knights, & W. R. Nord (Eds.), Resistance and power in organizations (pp. 102-127). London: Routledge.
34.
Graham, L. (1993). Inside a Japanese transplant: A critical perspective. Work & Occupations, 20, 147-173.
35.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith, Trans.). New York: International Publishers.
36.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). The phenomenology of spirit (A. V. Miller, Trans.). New York: Oxford University Press.
37.
Hodson, R. (1991). The active worker: Compliance and autonomy at the work-place. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 20, 47-78.
38.
Hodson, R. (1995). Worker resistance: An underdeveloped concept in the sociology of work. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 16, 79-110.
39.
Hodson, R. (1999). Organizational anomie and worker consent. Work & Occupations, 26, 292-323.
40.
Holmer Nadesan, M. (1996). Organizational identity and space of action. Organization Studies, 17, 49-81.
41.
Holmer Nadesan, M. (1997). Constructing paper dolls: The discourse of personality testing in organizational practice. Communication Theory, 7, 189-218.
42.
Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (1988). Dialectic of enlightenment (J. Cumming, Trans.). New York: Continuum.
43.
Jermier, J. M., Knights, D., & Nord, W. R. (Eds.). (1994). Resistance and power in organizations. London: Routledge.
44.
Kerfoot, D., & Knights, D. (1996). The best is yet to come? The quest for embodiment in managerial work. In D. Collinson & J. Hearn (Eds.), Men as managers, managers as men: Critical perspectives on men, masculinities and managements (pp. 78-98). London: Sage.
45.
Knights, D. (1990). Subjectivity, power and the labor process. In D. Knights & H. Willmott (Eds.), Labour process theory (pp. 297-335). London: Macmillan.
46.
Knights, D., & McCabe, D. (2000). Ain’t misbehavin? Opportunities for resistance under new forms of “quality” management. Sociology, 34, 412-436.
47.
Knights, D., & Vurdubakis, T. (1994). Foucault, power, resistance and all that. In J. M. Jermier, D. Knights, & W. R. Nord (Eds.), Resistance and power in organizations (pp. 167-198). London: Routledge.
48.
Kondo, D. K. (1990). Crafting selves: Power, gender, and discourses of identity in a Japanese workplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
49.
Kunda, G. (1992). Engineering culture: Control and commitment in a high-tech corporation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
50.
Lukács, G. (1971). History and class consciousness: Studies in Marxist dialectics (R. Livingstone, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
51.
Marx, K. (1967). Capital (S. Moore & E. Aveling, Trans.). New York: International Publishers.
52.
May, T. (1999). From banana time to just-in-time: Power and resistance at work. Sociology, 33, 767-783.
53.
Murphy, A. G. (1998). Hidden transcripts of flight attendant resistance. Management Communication Quarterly, 11, 499-535.
54.
Prasad, A. (2003a). The gaze of the other: Postcolonial theory and organizational analysis. In A. Prasad (Ed.), Postcolonial theory and organizational analysis: A critical engagement (pp. 3-43). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
55.
Prasad, A. (Ed.). (2003b). Postcolonial theory and organizational analysis: A critical engagement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
56.
Prasad, A., & Prasad, P. (1998). Everyday struggles at the workplace: The nature and implications of routine resistance in contemporary organizations. In P.A. Bamberger & W. J. Sonnenstuhl (Eds.), Research in the sociology of organizations, 15: Deviance in and of organizations (pp. 225-257). Stamford, CT: JAI.
57.
Prasad, P., & Prasad, A. (2000). Stretching the iron cage: The constitution and implications of routine workplace resistance. Organization Science, 11, 387-403.
58.
Prasad, A., & Prasad, P. (2003). The empire of organizations and the organization of empires: Postcolonial considerations on theorizing workplace resistance. In A. Prasad (Ed.), Postcolonial theory and organizational analysis: A critical engagement (pp. 95-120). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
59.
Reed, M. I. (2000). The limits of discourse analysis in organizational analysis. Organization, 7, 524-530.
60.
Rosen, M. (1985). Breakfast at Spiro’s: Dramaturgy and dominance. Journal of Management, 11, 31-48.
61.
Rosen, M. (1988). You asked for it: Christmas at the bosses’ expense. Journal of Management Studies, 25, 463-480.
62.
Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
63.
Sotirin, P. (2000). “All they do is bitch bitch bitch”: Political and interactional features of women’s officetalk. Women’s Studies in Communication, 23, 19-25.
64.
Sotirin, P., & Gottfried, H. (1999). The ambivalent dynamics of secretarial “bitching”: Control, resistance, and the construction of identity. Organization, 6, 57-80.
65.
Taylor, J. R., Flanagin, A. J., Cheney, G., & Seibold, D. R. (2001). Organizational communication research: Key moments, central concerns, and future challenges. In W. Gudykunst (Ed.), Communication Yearbook 24 (pp. 99-137). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
66.
Thompson, P., & Ackroyd, S. (1995). All quiet on the workplace front? A critique of recent trends in British industrial sociology. Sociology, 29, 615-633.
67.
Townley, B. (1993). Performance appraisal and the emergence of management. Journal of Management Studies, 30, 221-238.
68.
Townsley, N. C., & Geist, P. (2000). The discursive enactment of hegemony: Sexual harassment and academic organizing. Western Journal of Communication, 64, 190-217.
69.
Trethewey, A. (1997). Resistance, identity, and empowerment: A postmodern feminist analysis of clients in a human service organization. Communication Monographs, 64, 281-301.
70.
Trethewey, A. (1999a). Disciplined bodies. Organization Studies, 20, 423-450.
71.
Trethewey, A. (1999b). Isn’t it ironic: Using irony to explore the contradictions of organizational life. Western Journal of Communication, 63, 140-167.
72.
Tucker, J. (1993). Everyday forms of employee resistance. Sociological Forum, 8, 25-45.
Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labor: How working class kids get working class jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.
75.
Willmott, H. (1990). Subjectivity and the dialectics of praxis: Opening up the core of labor process analysis. In D. Knights & H. Willmott (Eds.), Labour process theory (pp. 336-378). London: Macmillan.
76.
Willmott, H. (1993). Strength is ignorance; slavery is freedom: Managing culture in modern organizations. Journal of Management Studies, 30, 515-552.
77.
Willmott, H. (1994). Bringing agency (back) into organizational analysis: Responding to the crisis of (post)modernity. In J. Hassard & M. Parker (Eds.), Towards a new theory of organizations (pp. 87-130). London: Routledge.
78.
Witten, M. (1993). Narrative and the culture of obedience at the workplace. In D. K. Mumby (Ed.), Narrative and social control: Critical perspectives (pp. 97-118). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
