‘Girls’ working together without ‘teams’: How to avoid the colonization of management language

Abstract

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. ABSTRACTMany of us increasingly experience our personal and working lives through a range of categories and classifications that have come to be strongly associated with the formal management of organizations, the effect of which has been explained as a subtle colonization of our minds and imaginations. This paper presents insights from an organizational ethnography based in a UK hospital's medical-records library where participants rarely used management discourses, the only managerial terms they used at all being teams and teamwork, and then mostly by way of parody, while strongly preferring an alternative collective identity, the girls. This paper therefore illustrates and analyses how these workers shunned, if not entirely avoided, management language's colonizing incursions.

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