Elucidating the bonds of workplace humor: A relational process model

Cooper, Cecily D.

doi:10.1177/0018726708094861

Cited by 245 publications

(358 citation statements)

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“…Such a milieu would be more attractive to athletes, and release energy needed to keep focused and work properly. This finding is in line with research from other working life settings (Cooper, 2008) that shows humour's relief function by offering a respite from business pressure and routines. In Goffman's terminology, performances are given in a 'front region' and a 'back region', guided by different principles.…”

Section: Analysis Of Resultssupporting

confidence: 91%

“…Here, humour can be used as a coping strategy when facing uncertainty or risk (Grugulis, 2002), it can help to relieve the tension of embarrassment in social situations (Goffman, 1967), and can function as a relief from routine-driven boredom (Cooper, 2008). Plester and Orams (2008), examining the role of 'the joker' in companies, noted that 'jokers' offered a respite from pressure and stress by creating fun and laughter.…”

Section: Leadership and Humourmentioning

confidence: 99%

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‘Humour helps’: Elite sports coaching as a balancing act

Ronglan

Aggerholm

2014

Sports Coaching Review

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This file was dowloaded from the institutional repository Brage NIH -brage.bibsys.no/nih Ronglan, L. T., Aggerholm, K. (2014 To date, humour's role in sport settings has hardly received scholarly attention. However, reflecting on future research within the sociology of sports coaching (Jones, Ronglan, Potrac & Cushion, 2011), it was suggested that 'the multi-functional use of humour, its intent, manifestation, and effect within the often emotionally-charged world of coaching, would appear to hold very interesting possibilities'. This formed the point of departure for the work presented in this paper. The study focuses on how coaches interpret the appearance of humour in the context they operate, and how they apply it as an integrated part of their coaching performances. In-depth interviews with six experienced elite Scandinavian sport coaches formed the empirical basis for the analysis. Based on Erving Goffman's sociology of social interaction, the data were analysed and discussed in relation to three main categories:humour's significance in the elite sport context, humour and group dynamics, and the performance of the coach. The analysis demonstrates that 'humorous coaching' can be seen as a balancing act between the inherent tensions of 'seriousness and fun', 'distance and closeness', and 'authenticity and performance'.

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Section: Analysis Of Resultssupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Leadership and Humourmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Humour helps’: Elite sports coaching as a balancing act

Ronglan

Aggerholm

2014

Sports Coaching Review

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“…Humour can be understood as important in maintaining informal relations by downplaying status differences and indicating a sense of personal closeness (Cooper, 2008;Radcliffe-Brown, 1940). …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Informality and Employment Relationships in Small Firms: Humour, Ambiguity and Straight‐talking

Mallett

Wapshott

2012

British J of Management

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Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. This paper presents in-depth qualitative research on three small professional service firms whose owner-managers sought to introduce greater degrees of formality in their firms' working practices and employment relationships. We focus on humour as an ambiguous medium of informality, yet viewed by owner-managers as a tool at their disposal. However, while early studies of humour in small and medium-sized enterprises support such a functionalist view, our findings indicate its significant limitations. We argue that humour obscures but does not resolve disjunctive interests and it remains stubbornly ambiguous and resistant to attempts to functionalize it. Our findings contribute to studies of humour in small and medium-sized enterprises by challenging its utility as a means of managerial control or employee resistance. They also contribute to studies of employment relationships by exploring humour's potentially disruptive influence within the formalityinformality span, especially as small and medium-sized enterprises seek greater degrees of formalization with implications for how those relationships are conducted and (re)negotiated on an ongoing basis.

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“…Yet, definitions are important for consistent empirical identification. We therefore define humor as "utterances…intended by the speaker(s) to be amusing and perceived to be amusing by at least some participants" (Holmes, 2000: 163; see also Cooper, 2008;Hay, 2000;Holmes & Marra, 2002). This definition operationalizes humor by facilitating the identification of "instances of humour…on the basis of paralinguistic, prosodic and discoursal clues" (Holmes, 2000: 163) and is consistent with a practice-based approach to the discursive construction of organizations (for a review, see Balogun, Jacobs, Jarzabkowski, Mantere & Vaara, 2014).…”

Section: Constructing and Responding To Paradox Through Humormentioning

confidence: 99%

We Have To Do This and That? You Must be Joking: Constructing and Responding to Paradox Through Humor

Jarzabkowski

Lê

2016

Organization Studies

172

233

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This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. We have to do this and that? You must be joking: Constructing and responding to paradox through humor This paper adopts a practice approach to paradox, examining the role of micro-practices in shaping constructions of and responses to paradox. Our approach is inductively motivated. During an ethnographic study of an organization implementing paradoxical goals we noticed a strong incidence of humor, joking and laughter. Examining this practice closely, we realized that humor was used to surface, bring attention to, and make communicable experience of paradox in the moment by drawing out some specific contradiction in their work. Humor thus allowed actors to socially construct paradox, as well as -in interaction with others -construct potential responses to the multiple small incidences of paradox in their everyday work. In doing so, humor cast the interactional dynamics that were integral in constructing two response paths: (i) 'entrenching a response', whereby an existing response was affirmed, thereby continuing on a particular response path, and (ii) 'shifting a response', whereby actors moved from one response to paradox to another, thereby altering how the team collectively responded to paradoxical issues. Drawing on these findings, we reconceptualize paradox as a characteristic of everyday life, which is constructed and responded to in the moment. This paper was inspired by an observation we made a few months into our ethnographic study of a telecommunications firm beset with paradox: People make a lot of jokes about paradoxical conditions. We increasingly found ourselves sharing things participants had been laughing about, as we 'checked in' with each other after fieldwork. For example, one particular day managers were working with the paradoxical tensions occasioned by trying to implement a joined-up technology across divisions that had to maintain strict structural separation to comply with regulation. Tensions were running high as they discussed a 'piece robot' technology that might get around the problem without co-locating their engineers. Suddenly, laughing, one of them suggested that what they really needed was a 'peace robot' to help settle the tensions between them in trying to do their jobs in this paradoxical structural context. The others in the meeting quickly joined the joke, laughing and making peace signs in the air, insisting the peace robot should be included in the resulting action plans. Laughing, the team leader agreed and the meeting progressed with a better will to work with the paradoxical conditions to implement the joined-up technology. Sure enough, there was a humorous picture of a robot with a peace symbol on its chest and doves on its shoulders in the action plans, which occasioned further laughter at the next meeting. Permanent repository linkRevisiting our notes, we often found ourselves chuckling at such humorous incidents.These managers were dealing with pa...

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Elucidating the bonds of workplace humor: A relational process model

Cited by 245 publications

References 58 publications

‘Humour helps’: Elite sports coaching as a balancing act

‘Humour helps’: Elite sports coaching as a balancing act

Informality and Employment Relationships in Small Firms: Humour, Ambiguity and Straight‐talking

We Have To Do This and That? You Must be Joking: Constructing and Responding to Paradox Through Humor

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