In keeping with this journal’s recent attempt to revive worker narratives as a means of understanding social questions, this research note reflects on the significance of workblogging as a window on the labour process. The article reflects on the impact of emerging social networking tools such as Facebook, as well as factors such as increased surveillance and blog searchability, on how and where workplace stories are told. It assesses some of the problems of conducting research in a rapidly changing blogosphere and argues that researchers must sustain trusting relationships with bloggers, as well as staying abreast of emerging social networking practices, in order not to lose sight of these important recalcitrant voices.

This paper argues that the Waterstone's fired blogger incident performed a labour organising function in terms of garnering pro‐labour media attention and encouraging critical discourse. Looking at the blog's distinctive features and evolution, it evaluates the strengths, limitations and potential for recurrence of similar high‐profile incidents.

This ethnographic study of busy allotment-holders explores the juxtaposition of time spent on the allotment with paid employment and caregiving. Highlighting the recent surge in allotment demand among professionals such as nurses and educators, the article examines the seeming contradiction of adding a very time-consuming responsibility onto an already packed schedule. It shows how the allotment's normative structure creates a sense of obligation, helping busy professionals make the time to explore what most pleases. The research is informed by the idea that paid work continually extends its reach and that leisure is caught up in the dynamics of intensification. It suggests instrumental use of the allotment in ways that are functional for wage labour, yet it also argues that contemporary leisure has been overcharacterised as an extension of internalized control and urges closer attention to the allotment as fertile soil for the post-work imaginary.

A B S T R A C T ■ Anonymous workbloggers — employees who write online diaries about their work — are often simultaneously productive workers and savage critics of the organizational cultures in which they toil. This research focuses on a small group of white-collar workers from the Greater Manchester and Lancashire area, who risk their jobs by writing publicly about their office experiences under assumed identities. Countering the notion that resistance to corporate culture leads to `confusion and emptiness' (Willmott, 1993: 538), this study contributes to the recent revival of interest in worker misbehavior and recalcitrance. By focusing on workers as authors, it addresses a shortcoming in the existing critical literature, which treats informal employee resistance as an intellectually and artistically unsophisticated phenomenon. Drawing parallels with the lives and work of authors such as Franz Kafka and T.S. Eliot, it evaluates whether embedded writers, in spite of their ambivalence about the alternative, can constitute an effective counter-hegemonic force.

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