Abstract
In an age in which surveillance technology within (and outwith) the workplace is commonplace, the capacity for misbehaviour in organisations is dramatically lessened, perhaps even eradicated. At the same time, the extensive mis-selling of pensions, insurance and mortgages and fiddling of currency exchange rates has made the misbehaviour of organisations more visible. This book aims to refute the former claim and incorporate the latter concern into a widened understanding of organisational misbehaviour.
In a good, short introduction by the editors, Barnes and Taksa, outline debates about the ‘what and where’ of organisational misbehaviour. They claim that organisational misbehaviour is now ubiquitous but concede that it has only recently become the focus of systematic research. What research that does exist tends to be either psychology- or sociology-driven, interested in personal motivations or actions within structures, respectively, and concerned with productivity issues. Barnes and Taksa want to broaden the analysis. There is a need, they argue, for multi-disciplinary analyses and a new focus on criminality in and by organisations. They note that while misbehaviour occurs in organisations, research now recognises that it spills into and out of organisations. In other words, the focus, they state, should extend beyond employees to employers, from misbehaviour in organisations to misbehaviour by organisations and even ‘misbehaviour organisations’ (such as WikiLeaks) with a mission to expose misbehaviour by (other) organisations. Drawn from a range of perspectives, for example, marketing, history and entrepreneurship, the contributions to this book examine this broader canvas, and existing and new forms of misbehaviour that ‘expand on existing treatments’ and which ‘disturb assumptions of consensus and conformity in organisations’ (pp. xvi–xvii).
Shifting the focus to practice, Ackroyd’s chapter provides a valuable overview of the workplace and economic developments that have shaped and transformed organisational misbehaviour over the past 20 years. In contrast to claims that these changes have led to the disappearance of misbehaviour, there is ‘another reading’, he believes, we are now in a period of misbehavioural ‘transition … new things are being tried and old types are also changing’ (pp. 18–19). This transition is driven by cynicism and detachment by those in ‘mundane’ jobs and by financial greed among managers. However, Ackroyd sidesteps the issue of whether this worker cynicism and detachment can and does transmute into action that directly challenges management as some misbehaviour did in the past. His examples tend to indicate a new insular misbehaviour, confined, for example, to workers’ use of the Internet for personal use during working time.
Beyond these two scene-setting chapters, there are nine chapters that either revisit old issues with fresh eyes or raise new ones with different eyes. As an example of the former, Thornthwaite and McGraw, return to Mars’ classic study of workplace fiddling. Using Mars’ original (and much under-used) methodology, they explore the new opportunities for fiddling, many of which are influenced by new technologies. This fiddling was once at the expense of employers. Now with new surveillance, and cash and stock monitoring systems in supermarkets, for example, pilfering is less able. Electronic cash payment systems, however, enable employees in hospitality jobs, for example, to overcharge, even defraud customers. The terrain of misbehaviour thus shifts, with customers rather than employers the target and victim.
By contrast, marketing specialists Ang and Koslow show how customers too can behave badly. Customer misbehaviour is of marginal interest to marketing, they explain, because it is inconceivable. Marketing operates on the premise of customer sovereignty or, prosaically, that the customer is always right. If the customer isn’t always right—stealing goods or abusing staff, for example—the conceptual sky falls in on the marketing discipline. The authors nicely scope the literature of an emerging ‘niche’ sub-field within marketing that is trying to deal with customer misbehaviour. This literature explains this misbehaviour variously as the result of abnormal personalities and poor familial socialisation, but also recognises that is context specific, shaped by organisational and practices, as well as social norms. What this literature also reveals is that it is as hard to define and explain customer misbehaviour as it is employee misbehaviour.
Taksa’s chapter is an example of a new issue, though an old practice—the use of nicknames as humour—reinterpreted as misbehaviour, and convincingly so. Nicknames, Taksa says, while often humorous, also give expression to workers’ attitudes, behaviour and values, including their prejudices. Two points are made: first that nicknames used in the workplace reflect and mobilise the vocabularies of society, particularly sexism and second that as a form of ‘identity performance’ (p. 79), they can act as a hammer and shield for workers with management, though she concludes they are probably more shield than hammer. Indeed, what is also clear from Taksa’s review of the field is that the use of nicknames also reinforces managerial control as workers apply derogatory nicknames to belittle other workers who fail to maintain appropriate levels of work efforts. Ironically, as a consequence, worker misbehaviour enforces good behaviour at work as judged by management.
While suggesting the need for reconceptualisation, another contribution that reinterprets existing forms of misbehaviour is that of Dundon and van den Broek. These authors take up the challenge of reconceptualising misbehaviour—or at least its contextual understanding. They argue that in current sociological debate, in which management is ascendant and unions are diminished, misbehaviour has become framed as a personal quest for the authentic self. This framing is the flip side of the mainstream organisational behaviour coin that posits misbehaviour as a personal pathology. Instead, the authors want to see misbehaviour as ‘shaped, conditioned and reconfigured by the political, institutional and economic context in which the labour process [and the employment relationship] operates’ (p. 154). Here, that context is limited to changes to industrial relations but which allows the authors to reconceptualise examples of misbehaviour in existing literature with a new model framed by employer decollectivisation and non-union worker resistance. It’s a short chapter, and it would have been good to see the implications of this reframing for future research discussed, but the authors are right to want to re-assert ‘structural factors’ into the analysis.
Other contributions, such as that of Barnes, identify genuinely new forms of misbehaviour. In this case it is ‘aesthetic resistance’ whereby in call centres, customer service representatives (CSRs) use ‘verbal insolence’ (p. 177) to push back against unreasonable customer demands and managerial impositions. As such, what CSRs say remains on script, but how they say it conveys displeasure. Significantly, this use of this vocal inflection draws on the skills in which CSRs have been trained by their employers and is difficult, Barnes points out, for management to quantify and police. Barnes thus identifies not only a new form but also potentially potent form of individualised misbehaviour and worth further empirical exploration in other interactive service work.
Also new to the debate is the application of entrepreneurial studies by Lundmark and Westelius. This is another chapter that (re)interprets existing literature. As the authors note, the overlap between entrepreneurs and misbehaviourists is that both are regarded as deviant rule-breakers. Indeed, the authors explore entrepreneurship as misbehaviour, with the distinction between the two simply post hoc rationalisation: if rule breaking is successful, it is labelled as entrepreneurial, and if it’s unsuccessful it’s labelled as misbehaviour. For example, Toshiba repeatedly vetoed the development of laptops, but its engineers went underground and developed them anyway only to be later embraced by the company. If the experimentation had failed, Lundmark and Westelius opine, the engineers would have been sacked for wasting company resources and disobeying management. Given the rule-breaker status of entrepreneurs, the authors argue that relationship between entrepreneurship and misbehaviour would be a fertile ground for future research.
While entrepreneurship has positive outcomes, a negative outcome exists in the relationship between misbehaviour and commitment. This finding is not surprising given that misbehaviour is cast a priori as ‘counter-productive workplace behaviours’ (CWBs) by Brooks but who usefully develops a four dimensional typology of such behaviours. This typology is again populated using examples from existing secondary literature. Its utility is limited though by the omission of organisational rule breaking because existing research data is hard to code, Brooks says. However, the expected outcomes are confirmed by what is included: workers with less commitment are more deviant, suggesting that if CWBs can be addressed, organisations might be healthier, Brooks suggests.
Broadening the analytical canvas means that there are inevitably uneven and eclectic inclusions. In the former category is the chapter by Hartt et al., which examines the use of patriotism to dampen workplace unionism in PanAm during the Cold War. Using archival research, it’s a fascinating story but makes only superficial links to organisational misbehaviour. In the latter category is Lafferty’s chapter on the portrayal of organisational misbehaviour on celluloid. It might have easily degenerated into little more than an enjoyable jaunt through ‘my favourite films and TV programmes’. Instead, the examples—Modern Times and Nurse Jackie, for example—are used as springboards to illuminate empirical and conceptual discussion centred on a key question: who defines acts as ‘misbehaviour’, is it the state, management, unions, employees or researchers? Cumulatively, Lafferty uses the examples to reveal that ‘Misbehaviour is multi-faceted, contextually specific, and both perspective- and power-dependent’ (p. 108). Used in conjunction with one of the films or TV programmes discussed, it’s a chapter that could be deployed to lively effect with students.
There is little original research in these chapters, but the reinterpretations are well made. There is a concerted effort to add to understanding. They demonstrate the benefit of having multi-disciplinary contributions. It is perhaps inevitable that most chapters include discussion of the definition of misbehaviour, concluding that it is tricky to define (e.g. Lundmark and Westelius) or needs extending (e.g. Barnes) or needs to be recast (e.g. Brooks). Most end up defining misbehaviour in their own way. Many refer to the contextual nature of misbehaviour and a fair number are happy for misbehaviour to morph into resistance. It would have been good if the editors had used this material to construct a multi-disciplinary account, even construct, of organisational misbehaviour in a final synthetic chapter. The cumulative value of multi-disciplinarity remains a task undone therefore.
The construct would benefit from the addition of criminal/legal studies. Indeed, given the stated aims of the book, it is curious that a contribution from criminal/legal studies is absent. If resistance overlaps with misbehaviour, as Dundon and van den Broek point out, what about the overlap between criminality and misbehaviour? A good example is provided by Lundmark and Westelius. As they explain, Mark Zuckerberg misbehaved while at Harvard with Facemash, but broke his contract with the Winklevoss twins and ended up in court over copyright issues with Facebook and paid out US$65 million to the twins. Was the latter a legal issue or also merely misbehaviour as some lawyers argued at the time of the court case? Relatedly, given the opening comments of the editors about the need to extend analysis of misbehaviour to that of organisations, not just within organisations, there is surprisingly little reference to the recent financial shenanigans of banks on both sides of the Atlantic which brought the global economy close to collapse. At least in the United States, some of those involved in such ‘misbehaviour’ have been convicted of crime. At what point therefore does misbehaviour become criminal behaviour, or does misbehaviour also include criminal behaviour? The boundary might be hazy but needs to be explored, particularly within the context of the employment contract, which is a legal document. To deliver on the editors’ aims, future multi-disciplinary analysis of misbehaviour should therefore include criminal/legal studies. Of course, broadening the analytical net further than it already is runs the risk of diluting the concept as well as giving the impression that misbehaviour is so ubiquitous that it is hard to see how any (good) work gets done in or by organisations. Conversely, it dangerously positions organisational misbehaviour as not just ubiquitous but totalising: a conceptual iron cage of organisational naughtiness and nefariousness.
Beyond a gripe about the unnecessary addition of very structured abstracts at each chapter’s start, this is undoubtedly a novel and welcome collection. Its strength is its breadth; its weakness is the unfinished tasks. Overall, however, the book is a good starting point for researchers and students wanting an update on recent developments to and potential future perspectives on organisational misbehaviour.