How are people's identities disciplined by their talk about humour? Based on an ethnographic study of a New York food cooperative , we show how members' talk about appropriate and inappropriate uses of humour disciplined their identity work. The principal contribution we make is twofold. First, we show that in their talk about humour people engaged in three types of identity work: homogenizing, differentiating and personalizing. These were associated with five practices of talk which constructed Coop members as strong organizational identifiers, respectful towards others, flexible rule followers, not 'too' serious or self-righteous, and as autonomous individuals. Second, we analyse how this identity work (re)produced norms regulating the use of humour to fabricate conformist selves. Control, we argue, is not simply a matter of managers or other elites seeking to tighten the iron cage through corporate colonization to manufacture consent; rather, all organizational members are complicit in defining discourses, subject positions and appropriate conduct through discursive processes that are distributed and self-regulatory.

How do people use humour to make sense of and constitute organizations? To understand this, I consider humour as a dynamic discursive practice, through which people (re)produce, complicate and potentially transform relations of power in the workplace. To extend the reach of humour research to this end, I have reviewed and synthesized the literature on humour to identify five contextual resources for agentic sensemaking in the use of humour through which discourses are destabilized and critiqued. I then consider six discursive practices, exercised through humour, that generate power and help constitute organizations. To complete my conceptual framework, I identify and discuss five potential avenues for future research on humour and power at work. I aim to inspire researchers to associate, use and analyse the processes in my framework to generate critically orientated evidence of how people use humour to substantiate organizational/workplace realities. I conclude that humour offers rich potential to better understand how people subjectively constitute organizations in practice.

This article shows how autoethnographic vignettes can be used as a reflexive tool to problematize the power relations in which organizational ethnographers participate when doing and representing their fieldwork. Foucault’s analysis of the ethical self-formation process provides the impetus to explore the embodied experiences of my autoethnographic study of a cooperative retail outlet in New York. In questioning how power and knowledge reflexively generated my actions and interpretations, I frame this autoethnography as a means of critically reflecting on my own practice as a researcher. By writing about our own embodied interactions with others through discourses that constitute our experiences, we begin to understand how power is exercised in practice. I conclude by discussing the practical benefits for researchers of writing autoethnographic vignettes and, in particular, for doctoral students seeking to become qualitative researchers in the field.

He received his doctorate from the University of Bath having completed a discursive ethnographic study on humour and laughter. His primary research interests centre on issues of discourse, power, ethics, identity, embodiment, sensemaking, autoethnography and reflexivity.

In this essay, we explore the underlying processes of identity work in teaching from a critical management education (CME) perspective. Identity is a concern for both teachers and students and especially where the assumptions and routines on which it is grounded are challenged as in a CME learning environment. Through auto-ethnographic accounts of our teaching experience, we focus on the problems that result from being attached to an identity and how this might be explored through reflexive participative learning. Identity work describes the pursuit of these attachments without challenging the pursuit itself. A distinctive part of o2ur contribution is to consider how in taking identity for granted as a laudatory accomplishment, CME scholars often fail to recognise how our attachment to it can be an obstacle for management learning. To conclude, we speculate on the implications of our pedagogy for inculcating more critical forms of identity work, through which we might free ourselves to think and engage with the world differently.