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Although humour and conflict are popular topics in management, little attention has been paid to the negative effects of humour in terms of how workplace humour could turn into unexpected conflicts. From the perspective of conflict management, human resources (HR) need to better understand this dynamic transition process. The purpose of this research is to explore the transition from humour to conflict and how HR perform when addressing humour-related issues.

A secondary data, multiple case study approach is adopted. Case studies are analysed qualitatively and thematically through a content analysis matrix.

Aggressive humour is closely related to conflict. Humour content and the context in which it takes place are important influential factors contributing to the transition from humour to conflict. It is challenging for HR to deal with humour-related issues: most victims are unwilling to report the issue at an early stage until they cannot bear the joke, forcing HR to perform reactively.

Workplace humour-related issues should not be overlooked. HR should adopt an early, proactive approach to prevent severe conflict from developing and relationships deteriorating.

This study highlights the dynamics and complexity of the transition from humour to conflict, providing new insights for HR in terms of effective conflict management.

In Mémoires of a cabinotier (Memoir of a watchmaker), a 60-year history of the Genevan watch manufacture (1931), the author Paul Maerky recalls his early years apprenticing in Saint-Gervais, Geneva’s horological district, better known as La Fabrique. Located in the heart of Geneva on the right bank of the river Rhone, the Saint-Gervais district established itself as a major Swiss center of horological production spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Maerky’s autobiography is a lively and detailed account of apprenticed life in Saint-Gervais from 1871 to 1876. Drawing from this narrative source, this chapter discusses the Saint-Gervais apprenticeship system as a multisited educational phenomenon, whereby public spaces are conceptualized as an extension of the workshop or the habitual locus of horological knowledge and skill acquisition. This case study of the Saint-Gervais horological craft community in the 1870s analyzes the manner in which youthful apprentices interact with public spaces. Through the physical exploration of the district and its various educational loci, apprentices acquire spatial and relational knowledge. This chapter also discusses the metaphorical meanings assigned to places and their educational function within the context of nineteenth century watchmaking apprenticeship, during which apprentices undertake a metaphorical quest which takes them from childhood into adulthood as full-fledged members of the Genevan watchmaking community. In addition, this case study discusses the function of practical jokes as social mechanisms that regulate youth’s interaction with public spaces. As alternative educational loci, public spaces serve threefold educational functions: (1) to federate an otherwise heterogeneous working-class population around a common identity delineated by known physical and cultural boundaries; (2) to promote apprentice autonomy and foster distrust vis-à-vis outsiders; and (3) to create the setting for youth socialization through play or conflict. This chapter comments on alternative educational loci as relayed by Paul Maerky’s memoir, which include the streets, public fountains, the road to school, and eateries.

April 21, 1970 Master and servant — Negligence — Vicarious liability — Course of employment — Employers instructing plaintiff to obey fellow‐employees' instructions — Practical joke by fellow‐employees — Plaintiff instructed to put hand up spout of grinding machine to clear alleged blockage — Machine accidentally set in motion — Plaintiff's hand injured — Whether employers vicariously liable — Onus of proof.

Purpose: Previous research identified a measurement gap in the individual assessment of social misconduct in the workplace related to gender. This gap implies that women respond to comparable self-reported acts of bullying or sexual discrimination slightly more often than men with the self-labeling as “bullied” or “sexually discriminated and/or harassed.” This study tests this hypothesis for women and men in the scientific workplace and explores patterns of gender-related differences in self-reporting behavior.

Basic design: The hypotheses on the connection between gender and the threshold for self-labeling as having been bullied or sexually discriminated against were tested based on a sample from a large German research organization. The sample includes 5,831 responses on bullying and 6,987 on sexual discrimination (coverage of 24.5 resp. 29.4 percentage of all employees). Due to a large number of cases and the associated high statistical power, this sample for the first time allows a detailed analysis of the “gender-related measurement gap.” The research questions formulated in this study were addressed using two hierarchical regression models to predict the mean values of persons who self-labeled as having been bullied or sexually discriminated against. The status of the respondents as scientific or non-scientific employees was included as a control variable.

Results: According to a self-labeling approach, women reported both bullying and sexual discrimination more frequently. This difference between women and men disappeared for sexual discrimination when, in addition to the gender of a person, self-reported behavioral items were considered in the prediction of self-labeling. For bullying, the difference between the two genders remained even in this extended prediction. No statistically significant relationship was found between the frequency of self-reported items and the effect size of their interaction with gender for either bullying or sexual discrimination. When comparing bullying and sexual discrimination, it should be emphasized that, on average, women report experiencing a larger number of different behavioral items than men.

Interpretation and relevance: The results of the study support the current state of research. However, they also show how volatile the measurement instruments for bullying and sexual discrimination are. For example, the gender-related measurement gap is considerably influenced by single items in the Negative Acts Questionnaire and Sexual Experience Questionnaire. The results suggest that women are generally more likely than men to report having experienced bullying and sexual discrimination. While an unexplained “gender gap” in the understanding of bullying was found for bullying, this was not the case for sexual discrimination.

This paper aims to present exploratory, empirical data from an ethnographic study into workplace humour and fun. It explores the notion that workplace humour and fun are influenced by the creation of boundaries that either enable or constrain activities.

Qualitative data were gathered from four New Zealand companies within different industries. Mixed methods were used and included semi‐structured interviews, participant observation and document collection.

The findings suggest that organisational culture is influential in boundary creation. In three formal companies, boundaries for humour and fun activities were narrower, and this constrained humour activities. In an informal company, wider boundaries resulted in humour activities that were unrestrained which created an unusual and idiosyncratic company identity.

It would be useful to replicate this exploratory research in different workplace sectors and environments.

Boundaries constructed through social processes are assuming greater importance in modern organisations. However, research has not investigated boundaries around workplace humour and fun. Understanding boundaries may assist work groups when creating (and promoting) fun. This original research considers both managerial and employee concerns, and findings extend theory on workplace fun and humour.

The purpose of this paper is to address participants’ humorous provocations as a part of informal interactions between participants and researcher that can be treated just like the research data. By means of autoethnographic analysis, the author explores the expectations of the researcher and participants that humour research entails and discusses how different expectations are revealed in participants’ provocations.

This paper uses an autoethnographic approach to discuss the informal interactions between participants and the researcher gathered during research into staffroom humour. The informal interactions in general and humour specifically were recorded, analysed, coded, interpreted and theorised just like the data on humour between participants. The theoretical framework used in the study combines Goffman’s (1959) version of symbolic interactionism and Solomon et al. (2006) idea of hybrid spaces.

The study shows the need for reconsideration of expectations entangled in humour research and proposes to be prepared for unexpected. Expecting unexpected can help stay open minded in the field and in interactions with participants and apply healthy distance towards own research and own expectations. The study shows that whenever certain behaviour was expected and different behaviour was delivered, there was a chance for certain behaviour being interpreted as provocations. Participants’ provocations can result from their own expectations about the research or what they think is expected from them by the researcher and thus they remain subject to different interpretations.

Further research could investigate and discuss the role of humour in participant-researcher interactions in different research contexts and across different methodologies. Combining and analysing experiences of use of humour from both participants and researchers could allow for creating the guidelines in the use of humour in different research situations. Ethical challenges posed by informal interactions between researcher and participants could be explored further and suggestions as to how to protect the researcher, research and participants in such interactions could be developed.

This paper aims to be a starting point for a discussion about the understudied relationship between expectations humour research is entangled with and participants’ provocations. The study shows innovative approach to informal interactions between participants’ and researcher which are treated as research data and are theorised using original combination of symbolic interactionism and hybrid spaces. The study contributes to the qualitative research methodology by discussing the ethics of both using humour with participants and recording and analysing informal humorous interactions between participants and the researcher.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze cross-national and cross-cultural similarities and differences in perceptions and conceptualizations of workplace bullying among human resource professionals (HRPs). Particular emphasis was given to what kind of behaviors are considered as bullying in different countries and what criteria interviewees use to decide whether a particular behavior is bullying or not.

HRPs in 13 different countries/regions (n=199), spanning all continents and all GLOBE cultural clusters (House et al., 2004), were interviewed and a qualitative content analysis was carried out.

Whereas interviewees across the different countries largely saw personal harassment and physical intimidation as bullying, work-related negative acts and social exclusion were construed very differently in the different countries. Repetition, negative effects on the target, intention to harm, and lack of a business case were decision criteria typically used by interviewees across the globe – other criteria varied by country.

The results help HRPs working in multinational organizations understand different perceptions of negative acts.

The findings point to the importance of cultural factors, such as power distance and performance orientation, and other contextual factors, such as economy and legislation for understanding varying conceptualizations of bullying.

The purpose of this research is to examine ritualistic humor or joking that exists in a small, rural police department in Western New York.

Data were collected through participatory observations and interviews during the summer of 2014. Both authors worked in tandem to capitalize on individual expertise to maximize data collection and analyses.

Results suggest that humor is leveraged by officers to socialize, cope and demarcate authority. Depending on the circumstance, humor can be orchestrated or spontaneous, given the intentions of the officer.

Humor is an important lens through which to view police behavior. The current research underscores the importance of levity as a gauge of organizational and individual health.

The sociology of education has various traditions which examine the connections between education, culture, and inequality. Two of these traditions, symbolic interactionism and critical theory, tend to ignore each other. This paper creates a dialogue between these traditions by applying symbolic interactionist (SI) and radical interactionist (RSI) sensibilities to an important study for resistance theory, Paul Willis’ classic ethnography Learning to Labor (1977). The SI reading of Learning to Labor emphasizes the importance of group interactions and the creation of meaning, while the RSI reading highlights how domination unfolds in social interaction. We argue that SI and RSI have much to offer Learning to Labor, as these readings can avoid some of the critiques commonly leveled on the book regarding the linkage between theory and data, structure and agency, and the book’s conceptualization of culture. Likewise, we argue that the data in Learning to Labor have much to offer SI and RSI, as the material provides grist to further understand the role of symbols in domination while identifying escalating dominance encounters that create a set of patterned interactions that we describe as a “grinding” social order.