Search results

The purpose of this short paper is to introduce the special issue and outline its major themes.

The control‐resistance literatures are described, and the necessity for field‐led empirical accounts is amplified, as a precursor to introducing the contributions to this special issue.

Forms of control co‐mingle and the old imprints the new. Theories of control, resistance, agency and consent can most usefully be expanded by engaging with empirical accounts, resisting duality, and embracing multidimensionality.

This paper offers a review of the state of debate about control and resistance within organisation studies, and calls for field‐informed accounts and fresh perspectives.

This extended editorial to the Special Issue “Are we having fun yet? A consideration of workplace fun and engagement” aims to review the current debates on organised “fun at work” and to suggest a framework for understanding workplace fun and employee engagement. The papers included in the Special Issue are also to be introduced.

The editorial review asks for an approach that offers a critical appraisal and sets the latest move towards fun at work within the context of the material realties of work.

A review of contemporary debates on fun at work reveals a predominantly prescriptive focus on attempts to engage employees through fun activities that oversimplifies the human dynamism involved in the employment relationship. The editorial suggests that we need to consider the motivations, processes and outcomes of managed fun at work initiatives and to consider employees' reactions in terms of “shades of engagement” that detail how people variously engage, enjoy, endure, or escape managed fun.

The suggested framework for understanding workplace fun and employee engagement offers opportunities for empirical testing.

Understanding workplace fun and the work that it does, and does not do, offers opportunities to improve relationships between employees and between employees and the organisation.

The editorial and Special Issue overall offers an important contribution to the ongoing fun at work and employee engagement debate and opens up avenues for further exploration and discussion.

This paper deals with flexibilisation of work and employment in large‐scale retailing. Its aim is two‐fold: first, to highlight how an authoritarian workplace regime and normative forms of control interact, in the attempt to achieve workforce alignment to flexibility. Second, to explore how employees make sense of experienced workplace conflicts, and to what extent they are able to develop capacities to act and to influence their working conditions.

The paper draws on a qualitative study undertaken in four large‐scale retailing companies in the Italian city of Milan. It is based on 45 semi‐structured, problem‐centred interviews with employees, shop stewards and union officers.

Analysis reveals how control manifests in “forced availability” based on individualised, informal daily flexibilisation, and sustained by resulting precarisation. Employees are active participants, as the functioning of the work organization depends on their capacity to balance in‐built contradictions. Yet, their capacity to act remains limited. They are trapped by individualised concepts of labour relations: a merit‐oriented understanding of work as a “fair exchange” and a personalised perception of social relations and interactions at the work place.

The research encountered challenges in accessing temporary employees due to their fear of negative repercussions. This makes the sample slightly biased towards permanent, part time and fulltime, employment. Yet, it is also an opportunity, as it makes it possible to map experiences of precarisation across different employee groups.

Using the concepts of “coping practices”, “common sense” and “capacity to act”, the paper proposes to go beyond the dualisms of the resistance‐control debate. It points at the contradictory and interlinked character of employees' coping practices of adaptation, appropriation, conflictive negotiation and resistance.

The purpose of this research is to examine the role of various management functions within the complex multi‐layered and multi‐faceted history and structure that is the National Health Service (NHS) hospital service and explore the legitimacy of the role of human resource management (HRM).

Semi‐structured interviews with senior medical professionals and HR managers of one particular Hospital Trust are presented within a conceptual framework based upon an interpretivist notion of “vocabularies of motive”.

Qualitative research at an executive level demonstrates vocabularies of motives in action, where it appears that the role and status of HRM is potentially more dominant and influential than has previously been suggested.

Data are limited to a small group of senior managers and medical professionals and, therefore, does not represent generalisable knowledge. It does, however, offer insights from actors employed in senior roles in one particular hospital trust employing a conceptual framework that may have relevance for other studies concerned with the role of HRM and the dynamics of organisational change.

The paper offers insights into the complexities of change in a complex bureaucracy such as the NHS hospital service. It suggests that government policy and management practice can benefit from an understanding of the various vocabularies of motive at play and how these may effect the successful interpretation of policy into practice.

The paper offers original data and a useful conceptual framework which offers the potential for a more nuanced understanding of the implementation and interpretation of government policy in the NHS hospital service

The purpose of this paper is to present a next step in Greta Foff Paules' groundbreaking analysis of control‐resistance in service work by exploring the work practices of restaurant servers in regard to ways they resist and reshape the tipping system that structures their work life. Specifically, the author explores how workers will attempt to manipulate the system to elicit higher tips from customers and when servers forgo an economic tip, so that they can exercise dignity and self‐respect. Central to this analysis is to highlight the space in between Paules' notions of “getting” and “making” a tip. In this space, servers can exercise resistance and still acknowledge the humanness of the customer.

The research methodology is participant observation and interviews.

Restaurant servers see their ability to manipulate the tipping system as routes to exercising agency and resistance in work interactions. Moreover, servers see their ability to earn tips (and even forgo tips) by both capitalizing on the organizational structures and capitalizing on the customers' human nature.

The research focuses on servers broadly, and not on distinctions within groups of servers (i.e. sex differences, age differences or restaurant types).

This paper furthers the understanding of the tipping practice, which is historically viewed in terms of status inequality and control. In contrast, the author highlight how workers in practice, are able to use the tipping system to resist customer and manager demands, assert their creativity, agency, and self‐dignity, and still treat the customer as a social being.

Recent government proposals seek to extend the role of nurses into management at a time of (yet another) cultural transformation for the British National Health Service (NHS). This is especially the case for line managers involved in service‐delivery, ward managers and clinical nurse managers for instance, roles typically undertaken by senior nurses. This paper aims to give some insight into the role of nurses as managers in the NHS hospital service. Data presented were collected as part of a longitudinal qualitative study, 1994 to date, in a North West trust hospital. The role of ward and unit management has significantly changed since the early images of the nurse as manager and it is hardly surprising that, given the fundamental shift in the framework of values and attitudes, senior nurses have greeted the management role with mixed feelings.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how new public management (NPM) reform from the national level is implemented as practice in a local unit within the police sector in Sweden.

A qualitative case‐study approach is applied using semi‐structured interviews, participant observations and analysis of documents.

The paper illustrates different kinds of resistance at the organizational level. The dominant form of resistance was found to be cultural distancing. The paper demonstrates a tendency among police officers to deal with a changing and more complex work context by embracing a traditional work role.

The paper shows that reforms that add complexity may fail because of potential contradictions and the limited capacity and motivation of employees to deal with the complexity in the manner prescribed by NPM.

The paper shows that the popular trend to adopt multi‐dimensional forms of control (for instance the balanced‐scorecard approach) may fail if there is a lack of consensus about what goals and measurement are important and/or there is a lack of dialogue about how the new goals should be implemented in practice.

Research about NPM‐reforms in the police sector is rare. The original contribution of this paper is to study NPM‐reforms with a focus on the role of complexity in relation to resistance.

Over the last two decades, in response to political and financial pressures, the NHS has been subjected to considerable changes in its organisation. There is increasing emphases on containing the costs of hospital provision and making the treatment available from hospitals more responsive to consumers’ needs. “New” public sector management (NPM) philosophy clearly reflects an ideological shift toward newly valued entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviours, where patients and health service‐users are re‐defined as “customers” and “consumers”. Through a consideration of the recent changes, this paper will argue that the increasing emphasis on efficiency, cost‐cutting and most especially consumer satisfaction has transformed how nurses manage their emotions at work, adding new dimensions to their caring role. Nurses now find themselves having to present the detached, calm, but caring, face of the health professional whilst also having to present a smiling face to patients who now behave as demanding customers.

Much current academic writing focuses on the changing nature of work in the services sector, particularly with regard to the implementation of new technological processes. Bringing attention back to a traditional industry, coal mining, the paper aims to consider the impact of technology upon the labour process and identity of coal miners.

The paper is based on qualitative research undertaken by an ex‐coal miner and draws upon interviews with workers in five of the UK's remaining deep coal mines.

The paper demonstrates how the introduction of new technology in the mining industry has intensified workplace monitoring and surveillance. Despite this, we identify how complete management control over the labour process has not been possible. As the paper will show, miners draw upon their identity as autonomous workers in order to mediate the impact of technology on their working practices. The underlying belief of miners is that the capabilities of new technological working practices do not extend to replacing them at the coal face and that their unique identity as coal miners, combined with the unusual nature of the job, provides them with a force for mediating management control.

The paper offers a unique insight into the impact of technology upon the identity and labour process of a group of workers from a traditional heavy industry.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model to explain frontline employee absence as a form of concerted resistance in a public service welfare environment.

Conflicts over absenteeism can be interpreted as a mix of formal and informal struggles over the effort bargain. Centrelink workers' use of “unplanned leave” between 2005 and 2007 involved the quasi‐collective use of a formal entitlement in a form of misbehaviour that defied management control.

Whereas absenteeism is normally assumed to be a form of unorganised individual time‐theft, in this study it became a tacitly‐agreed form of collective resistance and a way of affirming collectively negotiated rights.

This paper explores how the toll of cost cutting and implementation of tighter welfare eligibility rules elicited collective resistance through leave taking and highlights how absenteeism can be more than an individual response of passive disengagement.

Using theories of resistance, the authors highlight how the case study both conforms to and departs from the received wisdom about absenteeism as an individual oppositional strategy.