Installation humor: a resistive social practice identified in the engineering workplace

Abstract

Purpose

Social practices of work humor among engineering workers are a lesser studied phenomenon. We examine the social practices of an engineering work team through acts of a peculiar form of humorous expression we identify as installation humor. In these cases of installation humor, an anonymous member of the team created a temporary, inappropriate, yet neutral installation of a physical object to amuse the other members of the team. We provide three mini-cases of installation humor; these installations appeared as the team subtly resisted a managerial initiative. We contribute knowledge to the practices of engineers at work and to the practices of resistive humorous expression.

Design/methodology/approach

Qualitative, full-participant ethnographic research with multiple data collection methods and utilizing abductive analysis. During the data collection, one of the researchers was a full member of the engineering team.

Findings

We identified anonymous, artefact-based enactments of resistive humorous expression, which we named installation humor. We identify and describe installation humor, which occurred at the intersectionality of work and self-expression and served as momentary artefacts symbolic of engineering worker resistance in a high-tech environment.

Research limitations/implications

Managerial awareness of the unfolding forms of worker-led, fleeting signals of resistance, such as acts of installation humor, would provide another dimension of perception for identifying salient signals surrounding the phenomenon of resistance to managerial-led change initiatives. Further research is needed on engineering humor in the R&D workplace to better understand the complexity and dynamics of phenomena such as worker resistance through humorous acts. We suggest future studies on forms of humor in the engineering workplace, including incidences of installation humor as they exist in other professional work environments and organizations, to understand common and shared practices across professional boundaries.

Practical implications

We advance and extend the understanding of humor as a social practice in the context of professional engineers in their R&D workplace and we identify humorous acts serving as a response to negative emotions (Huber, 2022) toward the organization related to a newly instated form of managerial control. This paper contributes to the studies of social practices of humor and emotions (Fine and De Soucey, 2005) in the engineering workplace (Buch and Andersen, 2013; Buch, 2016; Mazzurco et al., 2021) as unsupervised activity at work (Gabriel, 1995), with the social practice of humor adopting a non-verbal form that we identified as installation humor. We named this specific form of humor that we observed as installation humor and defined its specificity and differences from more traditional methods of humor (t. ex. Fine and De Soucey, 2005; Martin and Ford, 2018), shop floor humor (t. ex. Roy 1959), workplace humor (t. ex. Rosenberg et al., 2021) and engineering student humor (Holmila et al., 2007; Bender, 2011; Berge, 2017).The results of this study also suggest that ethnography for studying humor as a social practice is useful in identifying micro-level occurrences of unfolding engineering humor, including humor as a form of resistance.

Social implications

The study of humor in high-tech engineering settings enhances the literature of engineering work (t. ex. Mazzurco et al., 2021) and emerging humorous phenomena (Jarzabkowski and Lê, 2017). This case study highlights and extends the understanding of the non-technical competencies of engineers and the role of peer-to-peer humor in the engineering workplace as a form of resistance during managerial initiatives within an organization.

Originality/value

The study extends and contributes new knowledge to research on emotions and humor by engineers at work, including the identification of a peculiar form of humor used by the engineers. This study also contributes to nascent research on the social practices of engineers at work. The research material was gathered as a full-member ethnography, increasing methodological knowledge of researching a site from within.

Citation

Leppälä, K. and Lehtimäki, H. (2024), "Installation humor: a resistive social practice identified in the engineering workplace", International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior, Vol. 27 No. 3, pp. 206-220. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOTB-01-2023-0006

Introduction

Important insights into organizational life can be found through the examination of unfolding micro-level practices (Felin et al., 2015; Nicolini and Monteiro, 2016) of workers (e.g. Roy, 1959; Romero and Cruthirds, 2006; Vaughn, 2008; Gherardi, 2012; Buch, 2016), including socially informed phenomena such as work–life humor (Lyttle, 2007; Jarzabkowski and Lê, 2017). Humor is a part of the cultural fabric of social orders (Fine and De Soucey, 2005; Wilkins and Eisenbraun, 2009) and serves as a vibrant and interpersonal act of social practice during the daily work and work lives within organizational environments (e.g. Romero and Cruthirds, 2006; Nijholt, 2016; Tripathy, 2018; Rosenberg et al., 2021; Huber, 2022), yet humor is often dismissed by researchers in favor of a static explanation or story of the workplace (Lyttle, 2007). Humor is complex and can take many forms (Fine and De Soucey, 2005; Martin and Ford, 2018; Huber, 2022) and while humor within an organization may be enacted in multiple methods such as joking, manipulation and ridicule, the organizational outcomes from humor are aimed at group affinity through relaxation and stress reduction (Romero and Cruthirds, 2006; Huber, 2022). Humor may also trigger changes in the brain and in the body’s biochemistry and ultimately produce positive health benefits (Wilkins and Eisenbraun, 2009; Martin and Ford, 2018).

Previous studies have primarily focused attention on organizational humor primarily as a nuanced managerial tool (Lyttle, 2007; Huber, 2022), yet humor as a conflicting, socially constructed negative emotive response in the workplace is understudied (Huber, 2022), especially when enacted as a symbolic activity (Ashcraft, 2019). This research examines R&D engineers’ acts of resistive humor within the workplace, asking: how do engineering teams enact humor as a form of resistance to managerial initiatives?

We investigated the unfolding social practices (Nicolini and Monteiro, 2016) of engineers and viewed humor as a phenomenon (Vaughn, 2008; Orlikowski, 2010) as they were enacted through humorous resistive acts within an engineering workplace setting in Finland. Informed by practice theory (e.g. Schatzki et al., 2001; Schatzki, 2002; Orlikowski, 2010; Räsänen, 2015), we examined both the resistive activities expressed as humor and the social practices of the participants in the R&D workplace (Schatzki, 2005; Marzi et al., 2021) with a qualitative approach (Eriksson and Kovalainen, 2016) and full member ethnography (Alvesson, 2009; Järventie-Thesleff et al., 2016).

This research contributes to two research areas. First, this paper extends research on workplace humor (e.g. Lyttle, 2007; Garner et al., 2015; Jarzabkowski and Lê, 2017; Tripathy, 2018; Huber, 2022) by providing mini-cases (Tsoukas, 2011; Yin, 2018) of a resistive humor form we identified and named installation humor. Recognizing resistive expressions of humor would be important for managers to recognize, especially during change management initiatives that directly affect the workers’ daily work lives. Second, the research contributes to nascent research on the social practices of R&D engineers at work (e.g. Kunda, 2006; Blomquist et al., 2010; Buch and Andersen, 2013; Buch, 2016; Mazzurco et al., 2021); we describe and explain a form of resistance through social practices (Barnes, 2005; Feldman and Worline, 2016; Clegg et al., 2018) of creating dyadic humor through inanimate objects.

The paper is structured as follows: In the following section, we outline the theoretical foundations for the paper, dividing the section into social practice theory and humor. In the third section, we contextualize the research site, a research and development (R&D) office of a large firm and describe the methodology of this ethnographic case study. In the findings section, we provide a first-person description of the site and then provide examples of the installation humor cases as mini-cases. This section is followed by a discussion of the research and the findings. The theoretical contributions, the limitations of the study and future research venues are presented in the conclusion section.

Theoretical foundations

Social practices

Schatzki (2002, p. 87) defines social practice as “a temporally evolving, open–ended set of doings and saying linked by practical understandings, rules, teleo-affective structures, and general understandings.” The research output of practice research is not a list of participant sayings and doings but is an examination of the micro, meso or macro levels of the organization’s realities, assumptions, tensions or routines (Felin et al., 2015; Loscher et al., 2019) and as such, the examination of work and work life stories serves to build emergent theory through the generation of new concepts or relationships (Gehman et al., 2013). Studying social practices within organizations includes an examination of both participants and their activities (Marzi et al., 2021). Social practices are described as embodied interactions and inter-spaces between the subjects, including their mental, emotional and physical states (Küpers, 2013), which can be further studied as micro-responses. Stories of social practices in working life increase our understandings of organizational realities, innate assumptions and constituted tensions (Orlikowski, 2010; Tsoukas, 2011; Räsänen, 2015; Clegg et al., 2018). Engineering work and work life can be examined as a nexus of unfolding social practices and analyzed for social outcomes, recurrent themes or hidden phenomena (Schatzki, 2005; Blomquist et al., 2010; Buch and Andersen, 2013) of the group within a shared context.

Shared practices are lived experiences that involve learned or acquired knowledge and are regarded as a shared accomplishment (Barnes, 2005). Shared practices can involve common, unsupervised activities in organizations such as the workplace; these activities, such as humorous expressions, are not necessarily work-related or rational in their enactment but serve as a form of escapism from organizational reality (Gabriel, 1995). One example of shared practices is related to engineering student humor. Engineering students in Finland practice a form of humor called teekkarihuumori (Finnish: teekkari = engineering student, huumori = humor) (Holmila et al., 2007). This phenomenon of teekkarihuumori is described as the enactment of humor by engineering student society members through their extracurricular escapades; this humor is characterized within the scope of a silly form of wit, banter and prankish episodes (Holmila et al., 2007). MIT engineering students in the USA also have an extravagant and showy form of student humor that has become legendary, as engineering students produce “hacks” – grand, intricately designed and executed public displays of humor such as the building of a detailed cathedral into a building’s lobby space or the placement of a functioning firetruck on top of the revered MIT Dome (Bender, 2011). Although separated by an ocean, the activities of two separate groups of engineering students are defined and “branded” as shared social practices of humor.

Interestingly, Mazzurco et al.’s (2021) mapping review of empirical studies from 2000 to 2018 examined and synthesized research which focused on engineers as practitioners and found that this body of literature was primarily centered on limited aspects categorized as: how engineers learned on-the-job, how engineers developed professional competencies and attributes and how socio-technical and performative aspects such as diversity and identity as a professional were achieved. This mapping review did not identify studies which examined engineering humor or acts of humor by engineers at work as either an activity, competency or linked with softer themes such as identity and belonging. Such studies do exist, but may be missing from the analysis for many reasons, for example, not being written in English (Holmila et al., 2007, written in Finnish), humor is viewed as a product of engineering (Nijholt, 2016) or the definition of engineer is equivalent to a shop floor worker (Roy, 1959; Collinson, 1988), This lack of studies related to R&D engineers and their uses of humor during work further adds to the complexity of understanding the non-technical competencies of engineers (Buch, 2016; Mazzurco et al., 2021).

Humor as a social practice

Humor is a delicate and interactive social practice composed of interaction and communication facilitated by humans through social action (Fine and De Soucey, 2005; Nijholt, 2016; Tripathy, 2018). Humor has been primarily studied through three theoretical lenses, namely theories of (1) relief (as an emotional energy release response), (2) superiority (self-enhancement, increased self-esteem) and (3) incongruity (laughter caused by an unexpected event or answer) (Martin and Ford, 2018, p. 34). Humor has been regarded as a conceptual framework for reactionary understandings of structured organizational relationships (Lyttle, 2007; Huber, 2022; Shoda and Yamanaka, 2022); for example, mental and emotional tensions during work and work life may be navigated through the social practice of interactive humor (Nijholt, 2016) for a beneficial outcome (Lyttle, 2007).

Humor is both an intellectual act as well as a form of social play that takes many forms, from salient to demure, and is aimed at producing an emotional response and collective agency (Wilkins and Eisenbraun, 2009; Martin and Ford, 2018). The act of humor is an interactive one (Fine and De Soucey, 2005) and is acknowledged by the humor recipient as either a positive, negative or neutral occurrence or as the conclusion of the social interaction (Romero and Cruthirds, 2006; Garner et al., 2015; Tripathy, 2018). Martin (2010) describes humor as a phenomenon that is attributed to the planning or sayings of people that are produced with the intention of being funny and to evoke laughter. Forms of humorous expression range from salient to demure (Fine and De Soucey, 2005; Martin and Ford, 2018). These forms of humor are expressed through playfulness and may present, for example, as displayed cartoons (Lyttle, 2007), pranks (Holmila et al., 2007; Bender, 2011), teasing (Fine and De Soucey, 2005), jokes (Lyttle, 2007), inside jokes (Fine and De Soucey, 2005), sarcasm (Tripathy, 2018) or other types of humor aimed at producing responsive laughter (Fine and De Soucey, 2005; Lyttle, 2007; Tripathy, 2018) with no offensive intent (Graefer et al., 2018). Humor has also been investigated as a non-technical competency in other forms of power-related social interactions, such as teacher–learner interactions (Nordstrom and Korpelainen, 2011; Berge, 2017; Shoda and Yamanaka, 2022).

Humor is regarded as a positive, micro-level response, competence and attribute for work and work life (Fine and De Soucey, 2005; Nijholt, 2016; Jarzabkowski and Lê, 2017), yet although there has been much attention devoted to the managerial use of humor in the workplace (Lyttle, 2007; Jarzabkowski and Lê, 2017; Huber, 2022; Rosenberg et al., 2021), there is scarce research focus placed on the worker-level social practices of humor. Managerial humor, though, has been shown to contribute positively when applied to the work environment (Romero and Cruthirds, 2006; Jarzabkowski and Lê, 2017) and teamwork has been shown to advance positively when humor is incorporated (Tripathy, 2018). Jarzabkowski and Lê (2017) examined the interactional dynamics between middle and senior managers and their use of verbal humor as a response to organizational paradoxes during a company restructuring effort and found that humor was a tool to communicate paradoxical goals in the organization. Romero and Cruthirds (2006) created an organizational humor model based on managerial outcome goals in which the manager-as-initiator selects humor as a managerial tool and implements humor as a tool for use with an audience of peers or subordinates. Contrastingly, the use of humor has been found to provide negative responses related to dissatisfaction toward a temporary workplace (Garner et al., 2015), during times of stress (Tripathy, 2018) and during ambiguous situations (Lyttle, 2007; Jarzabkowski and Lê, 2017).

Methods

Methodology

We employed a single-case study method composed of multiple micro-cases (Yin, 2018). This research took place within an R&D department in Finland during normal workdays. We approached the dialogue between our empirical observations and theory in a reflexive manner to both inform and expose the phenomenological context and the structure of the observed social practices in the field with a site ontology (Schatzki, 2005), asking “what is occurring” (Miettinen et al., 2009; Lund, 2014; Loscher et al., 2019) as events unfolded.

This qualitative research utilized full-member ethnography (Davies, 2002; Järventie-Thesleff et al., 2016). Ethnography is a longitudinal method to examine and record events as they develop and materialize (van Maanen, 2011). This fieldwork was performed as a part of a larger body of research to understand practices and the roots of reactionary practices within the same setting (Leppälä, 2022), with the first author being an employee at the examined R&D department.

Data collection

Data were collected in multiple forms, including detailed field diary entries, photographs and other collected field materials. The photographs serve to produce an entirety and freeze the reality of the moment for later inspection (Warren, 2002; Quattrone et al., 2021).

Analysis

The events reported here were not in the scope of the initial research but serendipitously unfolded during the fieldwork and were examined as an abstraction from the main research topic (Lund, 2014). The engineering installation humor practices in this study were observed as they occurred at the group level and are analyzed at the micro level. The data was analyzed using abductive analysis (Mantere and Ketokivi, 2013). Abductive analysis is a normative ideal and a form of reflexive reasoning that views understanding as a cyclical and continuous dialogue between the interpreters’ preunderstandings and the collected research materials (Mantere and Ketokivi, 2013). The unit of analysis was the social practices of the site. During the non-prescriptive analysis, the authors combined both site social and dimensional activities, artefacts, contexts and interconnections (Blomquist et al., 2010; Raelin, 2020) during three semi-overlapping phases of analysis to: (1) extract data, (2) analyze the extracted data and (3) choose the stories and write the ethnography (van Maanen, 2011) using thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973). As we had various levels of closeness to the data and the research site, we iteratively reviewed these for potential bias (Anteby, 2013).

Findings

We report the context of the fieldwork and three mini-cases of installation humor and situate the events within the larger organization during a managerial initiative to increase worker health and safety instigated by the EHS team. Viewed through a practice theory lens (Schatzki et al., 2001; Feldman and Worline, 2016), the stories of work and work life events were observed during full participant fieldwork as the events unfolded, thus allowing for the exploration of the daily social dynamics regarded as practices in a work ”life-world” at a workplace. As this work is a full-member ethnography, the voice of the researcher as an inside author is also present in the work as a first-person narrative or case inclusion, thus reporting from within the cases and not only as observed external events. We first provide a contextualization of the site in a first-person author format, followed by three nuanced mini-cases as accounts, which explain how the installation humor was enacted in the R&D spaces by the engineers for engineers.

We drew on acquired field data to identify the phenomenon observed in the office spaces as a form of humor we named “installation humor.” We identified similarities and resemblances between installation humor and installation art, which are site-oriented 3D works of art that are meant to transform perceptions of the space they occupy. We define installation humor as the act of temporary installation of a physical object or objects in a set space with the goal of eliciting a humorous response of appreciation from one’s peers. Additionally, we found that installation humor was informal, spontaneous and self-produced in addition to the normal workday and work tasks; these reported acts of installation humor were unannounced to peer-coworkers by the installer(s).

Site context, as viewed by the first author

The R&D office work environment was not remarkable and consisted of the expected desks and chairs, computer equipment, materials to fabricate prototypes, memo boards and rest areas. Workdays consisted of work, meetings and break times for lunch and coffee. Engineering work is rather quiet, static desk or laboratory work and is performed by highly educated specialists. Prototype testing was performed at the desk site or in a separate laboratory. The factory was close by and had a good safety record. Within the organizational leadership, a non-engineer CEO was named and he gave power and work focus to a newly enlarged Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) organizational team. This specialty group was given a task by the CEO to make the workplace a safe and healthy workplace for all employees. Their reach was not just the office spaces and the factory but all locations of the operational site, including parking garages, loading docks, meeting room areas, break areas, restrooms and hallways.

Floors populated with R&D engineers saw changes to their work environment based on environment, health and safety instigated changes. Online EHS trainings of every sort flooded both the mailboxes and schedules of both me and my team; training subjects included subjects like “how to sit at your desk properly,” “avoiding blood borne pathogens” and “working in confined spaces.” We wondered aloud why we would need these types of training, as we essentially had white-collar office jobs. Lists of all the infractions were handed by the EHS team to managers, who were required to have monthly EHS sessions and discuss the tickets. EHS became a subject in all team meetings, positioned right before “all other business.” EHS became a strong force within the organization, almost overnight. Statistics were gathered. Black and yellow striped caution tape was applied liberally, including the door frames to the lavatories and on to small supports to cubicle dividers, apparently to draw attention to the places one could trip or come into accidental physical contact with – although no one could remember this type of contact ever having taken place. Laboratories for engineering work were locked and entry was restricted (Plate 1). We all agreed that employee safety was important, but we were adults in an office setting. One team member jokingly renamed the EHS team’s acronym base words from Environmental Health and Safety to Everyone Has to Suffer, and everyone at the coffee table laughed appreciatively. As the EHS team continued to exert authority, engineers repeatedly stated during peer-to-peer discussions that EHS was “useless” and we agreed on our first mild act of resistance: to not open emails sent by the EHS team.

The EHS team had positioned themselves in the parking garage during morning and afternoon high-traffic times with hand-held radar speed detectors like police use in traffic control. EHS presented informal speeding tickets to people driving too quickly through the tight slopes of the parking garage levels. Employees who had speeding tickets from these checks feared that their parking spot would be taken away. One worker presented a ticket she had received to me; this normally calm person was visibly angry and stated that she may use the ticket as toilet paper because that is what it was worth. Ticketing was interpreted by the engineers as a humiliation tactic imposed by EHS to punish noncompliant employees.

Regular checks of the engineering work environment were made by EHS workers. Glues and extension cords were discouraged, as they were deemed dangerous to the workers; glues were classified as hazardous chemicals, and all glue was to be centrally housed in a locked cabinet. Several engineers brought their glues to me for safekeeping. I was not an engineer; thus, I was not expected to have any engineering tools like different glues in my possession. I kept the glue in my desk drawer, unlocked and was never questioned if I had any glue, even though EHS checks on my coworkers included a question related to having glue in one’s possession. On cubicle inspections, I was given a warning for having an extension cord on my desk, as I could electrocute myself by accidentally putting a pencil into the socket. A seven-kilogram (over three pounds) round rock I kept on the desk as a decoration was overlooked (Plate 2). I was given a ticket for having a cardboard box on the floor in the corner under my desk. When I asked why I had received a ticket, I was told that the box was a dangerous object and that it could be tripped over. On further inquiry as to how someone can trip over a box that is under a desk, I was given another ticket for being uncooperative. It felt absurd.

Mini-case 1: sign vandalization

The first noted act of installation humor as a form of resistance was the vandalization of a newly installed placard in a stairwell advising people to hold the handrail when they go up or down the stairs. The engineering team saw the altered placard for the first time as they went to lunch. The picture of a stick-figure person walking down the stairs was artfully turned into a picture of a person going down the stairs in a canoe, reproduced by the first author as Figure 1 in her field notes. The original alteration to the signage addressed the “hands on the railing” mandate, as the revised figure’s hands are holding an oar and the figure is maneuvering a boat down the stairs. The figure had a halo of comic surprise lines drawn above it. This altered sign was quickly removed. The representation of the figure in a boat going down the spiral staircase used humor to counter the safety-focused suggestions of the original sign. When going down the stairs, each engineer looked at the sign and laughed out loud, with a few pointing at the sign. The discussion about the sign lasted for a few minutes and was not brought up again.

Mini-case 2: a motorcycle in the coffee break area

The second act of resistance through installation humor was the parking of a motorcycle in an office space coffee break area many stories above the underground parking lot (Plate 3). This seating arrangement was on the upper floor of the multi-story building, far from the service elevator used to transport the motorcycle from the parking lot in the basement of the building. The motorcycle was owned by an engineer. The contrast of a red Italian motorcycle parked in an office seating area, casually leaning to one side, offered a different form of seating in the coffee area, where it has been installed as a humorous act. This sporty motorcycle in the office seating area, when combined with the fragile paper lamps, presented the viewers with a strong contrast between decorative and functional and the speed and power of a sport motorcycle represented a form of resistance to the styled office space and to appropriate work behavior. The color of the red of the motorcycle matched the red of the sofa and chairs nearly perfectly; the motorcycle’s lamp was off, but three paper lamps to the right provided a muted light. Two forms of seating and lighting were presented in the same space; however, one – the motorcycle – was inappropriate for the office seating area.

The first author was made aware of the motorcycle by another coworker, who invited her to go up and see what was in the break room on the next floor. No mention of the motorcycle was made at that time; it was just an instruction to go to the coffee area. Office workers near the break area ignored the slow flow of people coming to see the installation; it was looked at in silence for less than a minute before returning to one’s own cubicle.

Mini-case 3: a noose made from a window shade cord

The last act of installation humor is pictured in Plate 4. From a skylight, a thin, blue plastic cord hung. During normal circumstances, this cord hung down and was used to open and close a window shade to the skylight. As an act of installation humor, this cord has been tied into a noose and hung high over the floor, nearly at ceiling height but low enough to be understood as a noose. This unfunctional noose served as a symbol of suicide, an extreme and final way to leave a situation through death. Only a handful of people came to view the cord, and those who did joked about its use as a method to get out of the working day; the tied cord was not received as a form of offensive humor (Graefer et al., 2018). In the USA, this could be seen as a symbolic racist act and potentially be seen as a threat to viewers. This cord was tied like a noose for a very short time, and then returned to its normal purpose. One morning, the cord had been unknotted and the cord was neatly placed higher and out of reach by an anonymous party.

Discussion

Humor is a force that exists in all organizational settings (Gabriel, 1995) and is generally perceived as providing multiple benefits to the workplace (Lyttle, 2007), yet studies of both the social practices of R&D engineers at work and the corresponding engineering humor therein are relatively sparse (Mazzurco et al., 2021); these would be critical in the understanding of group social practices engineering practitioners (Buch and Andersen, 2013; Buch, 2016) and their forms of humor as a form of social regulation (Fine and De Soucey, 2005). During ethnographical fieldwork, we discovered the emergence of unexpected social practices that occurred in the realm of accepted social practices and expected norms of R&D engineering work (Gherardi, 2012; Buch, 2016; Nicolini and Monteiro, 2016).

The negative feelings R&D workers had toward the well-meaning managerial initiatives were deemed pandering and eventually stirred the engineers’ past distinctive teekkarihuumori practices, and they instigated acts of installation humor to challenge the new organizational order and control. This study illuminated the social practices of resistive humor among engineers as viewed through a practice theory lens (Schatzki et al., 2001; Schatzki, 2003; Nicolini and Monteiro, 2016). Humor is a universal cognitive-perceptual process and a vibrant part of social life (Martin and Ford, 2018). When viewed through a practice theory lens (Schatzki et al., 2001; Schatzki, 2003), we are able to identify and analyze the unfolding and puzzling humor practices (Fine and De Soucey, 2005; Watts, 2007) at the micro level as group social practices at work by worker-level employees. We identified and defined a specific and peculiar form of humor that was enacted during a time of organizational worker resistance as installation humor. Installation humor was used as a joint social practice as a subtle and unusual form of resistance and empowerment against a managerial initiative and its enactment at the site. The reaction to the managerial initiative by the engineering team was through the creation, maintenance and removal of temporary works of incongruent humor.

The arc of activities related to the installation of humor was a social practice; it was a phenomenon that emerged, was temporarily realized and then, quietly disappeared. The mini-cases and their analysis show how engineers enacted resistance to a managerial initiative through acts of installation humor; the acts of installation humor toyed with absurd responses to the safety initiatives. We captured and described three acts of installation humor: sign vandalization, a motorcycle in the coffee area and a noose made from a window shade cord. Although varied in their presentation, the acts were similar in the use of temporary, unexpected, physical installations as short-lived artefacts enacted to promote a positive humorous response by other coworkers. These acts of installation humor were temporary, non-credited and situationally instigated; implementation of installation humor was not in the scope of the assigned work; it was anonymously constructed, meant for the humorous appreciation of coworkers and later subsequently removed. Installation humor was created by coworkers and for coworkers.

The mini-cases from the field (Yin, 2018) were ethnographically captured; these ethnographic stories produced descriptions of the acts of a new form of humor we named “installation humor.” Installation humor was found to be a form of ephemeral humor at work. Installation humor acts were mild and mediated responses, rooted as a form of resistance by the workers to respond to newly imposed managerial initiatives and controls. We found that installation humor was different from other explored and documented forms of humor. Installation humor is similar to both Finnish engineering student teekkarihuumori (Holmila et al., 2007) and MIT engineering student “hacks” (Bender, 2011), in that an inanimate object is used for humorous relief; however, acts of installation humor are created by R&D professionals (and not by students), are much smaller in scale, were not expected, were presented only for a short time and were available only within the privacy of the official workspaces – no public viewings or anticipation occurred. While “teekkarihuumori” and MIT “hacks” even have their own Wiki pages, installation humor’s intent was modest and internally focused.

Installation humor provided non-conforming disruptions to the workplace, which usually operated under the neutral work norms afforded to engineers in established high-tech environments (Vojak et al., 2006; Lyttle, 2007). The presented mini-cases are descriptions of micro-level social practices (Schatzki et al., 2001; Felin et al., 2015) of engineering humor under the umbrella of collective engineering work social practices (Buch and Andersen, 2013; Buch, 2016; Mazzurco et al., 2021). Although not directly named by the engineers as a response to a managerial-backed initiative, the installation humor episodes appeared and disappeared with the arrival and retreat of EHS authoritative control practices. The R&D engineering team members used humor as a social practice to empower themselves during the managerial-backed initiative by creating an incongruous situation enacted through the acts of installation humor. When the power assigned to EHS was removed, the episodes of installation humor ended.

The practices of engineering student humor (ref. teekkarihuumori and MIT engineering student practices) had transposed into the professional engineering workplace setting. While Berge (2017) explored humor in technology students, specifically students of physics, this research demonstrated how humor as a group discipline occurred during the working lives of graduates of Finnish technological universities. These social practices of humor (Fine and De Soucey, 2005; Watts, 2007) were retained in the workplace of current engineering practitioners and embodied as a transference of previous humor-based practices among engineering students. The creation, instigation and maintenance of installation humor may have an antecedent rooted in engineering student humor, teekkarihuumori (Holmila et al., 2007).

Conclusions

In this paper, we focus on engineering R&D workers’ social practices of humor during non-work tasks and describe the patterns of performative resistive activities related to the resistance of a managerial initiative. Thus, our findings additionally provide managerial implications, as the recorded events occurred because of a managerial initiative yet proceeded without any managerial reaction or reactivity. As many aspects of work and work life may go unnoticed or are dismissed, it is inherent to have a sensitive understanding of the worker and work–life relationships, as they are an unfolding of practices not inclusive of work tasks. Managerial awareness of the unfolding forms of worker-led, fleeting signals of resistance, such as acts of installation humor, would provide another dimension of perception for identifying salient signals surrounding the phenomenon of resistance to managerial-led change initiatives.

We advance and extend the understanding of humor as a social practice in the context of professional engineers in their R&D workplace, and we identify humorous acts serving as a response to negative emotions (Huber, 2022) toward the organization related to a newly instated form of managerial control. The study of humor in high-tech engineering settings enhances the literature of engineering work (e.g. Mazzurco et al., 2021) and emerging humorous phenomena (Jarzabkowski and Lê, 2017). This case study highlights and extends the understanding of the non-technical competencies of engineers and the role of peer-to-peer humor in the engineering workplace as a form of resistance during managerial initiatives within an organization.

This paper contributes to the studies of social practices of humor and emotions (Fine and De Soucey, 2005) in the engineering workplace (Buch and Andersen, 2013; Buch, 2016; Mazzurco et al., 2021) as unsupervised activity at work (Gabriel, 1995), with the social practice of humor adopting a non-verbal form, which we identified and named installation humor. We defined the specificity and differences of installation humor versus more traditional methods of humor (e.g. Fine and De Soucey, 2005; Martin and Ford, 2018), shop floor humor (e.g. Roy, 1959), workplace humor (e.g. Rosenberg et al., 2021) and engineering student humor (Holmila et al., 2007; Bender, 2011; Berge, 2017).

The results of this study also suggest that ethnography, during the study of humor as a social practice, is useful for the identification of micro-level occurrences of unfolding engineering humor, including the identification of humor as a form of resistance. Further research is needed on engineering humor in the R&D workplace to better understand the complexity and dynamics of phenomena such as worker resistance through humorous acts. We suggest future studies on forms of humor in the engineering workplace, including incidences of installation humor as they exist in other professional work environments and organizations, to understand common and shared practices across professional boundaries.

Figures

Plate 1

Laboratory sign with restriction information

Plate 2

Seven kilogram (over three pounds) round, granite rock and pen for scale

Figure 1

Recreated representation of the sign vandalization in the stairwell

Plate 3

A motorcycle brought into the office spaces via the elevator

Plate 4

A small noose made from a window shade cord