Absorptive Resisting Work: How the yellow vests deployed resistance to and through violence

Abstract

Organisational research has increasingly recognised violence as an instrument for achieving compliance and maintaining the existing order. However, resisters tend to be portrayed as powerless in the face of this violence or engaging in hopeless acts of resistance. In comparison, by examining the context of violent protests, this paper discusses how activists can endure and use violence as part of their resistance. I build on a fifteen-month ethnography of the yellow vest movement to illuminate the absorptive resisting work involved in deploying resistance to and through violence. This absorptive resisting work included reducing the repressive effects of violent protests and embracing those effects to generate symbolic and discursive resources against police violence, as well as including violent protest tactics in ways that regenerated those resources. Ultimately, my findings reveal that this absorptive work allowed resisters to withstand violent protests in the short term and reframe them in the long term. This paper thus contributes to studies on resistance to violence by showing how people can effectively and collectively catalyse violence to challenge it.

Wage Theft, Secrecy, and Derealization of ‘Ideal Workers’ in the Bangladesh Garment Industry

“…Violence has been investigated extensively in academic research (see Arnold & Costas, 2024;Costas & Grey, 2019;Galtung, 1969;Lobbedez, 2024;Zizek, 2008). For instance, Galtung (1969) provides a broader understanding of interpersonal and structural violence, which can be physical, psychological, intended, unintended, subjective, objective, manifest or latent.…”

“…Recently, a growing number of studies have investigated violence in organizations and societies (see Arnold & Costas, 2024;Lobbedez, 2024;Soundararajan, Sharma, & Bapuji, 2023;Varman, Al-Amoudi, & Skålén, 2023;Zanoni & Miszczyński, 2023). According to Grey (2019, p. 1579), violence is 'woven into an everyday organizational logic, that of maximizing productivity' which can be found in various shapes and forms, including physical to symbolic, subtle to brutal, individual to collective, or legitimate to illegitimate.…”