Culture and incongruity in The Office (UK)

Jongste, Henri de

doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2016.09.007

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 23 publications

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“…Watson (2015, p. 409) notes that ‘as a field of study, humour has been subject to considerable scrutiny’, leading to a number of overlapping and complementary theories as to its function. These include incongruity (de Jongste, 2017), superiority (Mulkay, 1988), relief (Rodrigues & Collinson, 1995), ridicule (Billig, 2005) and dramaturgy (Ybema & Horvers, 2017). It is widely recognized that forms of humour are present in most conversations (Fox, 2004) and help people understand what is salient (Watson, 2015).…”

Section: Humourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Putting humour to work: To make sense of and constitute organizations

Huber

2022

Int J Management Reviews

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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.

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