Resisters at Work: Generating Productive Resistance in the Workplace

Courpasson, David; Dany, Françoise; Clegg, Stewart

doi:10.1287/orsc.1110.0657

Cited by 218 publications

(284 citation statements)

References 56 publications

(48 reference statements)

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“…The body of research into the relationship between resistance and identity owes its impetus to the 'pendulum swing' in the emphasis of scholarship from control to resistance (Mumby, 2005), and away from its collective, overt, radical, organised forms towards more 'everyday', individual, subtle, and creative manifestations (Courpasson et al, 2012;Hollander & Einwohner, 2004;Nentwich & Hoyer, 2013).…”

Section: A Dialectical Approach To Identity Work As Resistance and Comentioning

confidence: 99%

Being an Early-Career CMS Academic in the Context of Insecurity and ‘Excellence’: The Dialectics of Resistance and Compliance

Bristow

Robinson

Ratle

2017

Organization Studies

128

164

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Drawing on a dialectical approach to resistance, we conceptualise the latter as a multifaceted, pervasive and contradictory phenomenon. This enables us to examine the predicament in which early-career Critical Management Studies (CMS) academics find themselves in the current times of academic insecurity and 'excellence', as gleaned through this group's understandings of themselves as resisters and participants in the complex and contradictory forces constituting their field. We draw on 24 semi-structured interviews to map our participants' accounts of themselves as resisters in terms of different approaches to tensions and contradictions between, on the one hand, the interviewees' CMS alignment and, on the other, the ethos of business school neoliberalism. Emerging from this analysis are three contingent and interlinked narratives of resistance and identity -diplomatic, combative and idealistic -each of which encapsulates a particular mode (negotiation, struggle, and laying one's own path) of engaging with the relationship between CMS and the business school ethos. The three narratives show how early-career CMS academics not only use existing tensions, contradictions, overlaps and alliances between these positions to resist and comply with selected forces within each, but also contribute to the (re-)making of such overlaps, alliances, tensions and contradictions. Through this reworking of what it means to be both CMS scholars and business school academics, we argue, early-career CMS academics can be seen as active resisters and re-constituters of their complex field.

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Section: A Dialectical Approach To Identity Work As Resistance and Comentioning

confidence: 99%

Being an Early-Career CMS Academic in the Context of Insecurity and ‘Excellence’: The Dialectics of Resistance and Compliance

Bristow

Robinson

Ratle

2017

Organization Studies

128

164

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…In general, ridiculing practices appear when the author seeks to resist the dominating call to change from the organization by using humor to undermine authority (c.f. Courpasson et al, 2012), and call it to account (c.f. Manz, 2014).…”

Section: Exploring Resisting Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

(Engaging or Avoiding) Change Through Reflexive Practices

Hibbert

Callagher

Siedlok

et al. 2017

Journal of Management Inquiry

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In this paper, we explore the ways in which individuals deploy reflexive practices in order to avoid or engage with a call to change either oneself or the social context. We begin by developing a categorization of the modes of reflexive practice associated with avoidance or engagement. We go on to develop -through a relationally reflexive research process -three contributions that build on this. First, we build an understanding of what a repertoire of reflexive practices may include, and 'what is going on' in such reflexive practices. Second, we explain how reflexive practices can be mobilizing, thereby enabling shifts between avoidance and engagement modes, or fix action within a single mode. Third, we develop an understanding of the ways in which emotions and relationships influence how reflexive practices of either kind are deployed.

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“…Whereas discussion of productive resistance (Courpasson, Dany and Clegg, 2012) has hitherto focused on forms of resistance that change extant power relations, our conceptualization looked at the deviational tactics which parasitically engaged with strategic situations without necessarily changing them. However, the "guileful ruse" (de Certeau, 1984: 37) involved in third sector practitioners" use of social enterprise bears a productive side in the way that it creates transient spaces of difference within the coordinates of the existing order, if outside the direct visibility of power.…”

Section: Tactical Mimicry As Productive Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…By foregrounding complex struggles over meaning, existing research has turned a blind eye toward the possibility that discourse might be resisted in non-antagonistic ways (Courpasson, Dany and Clegg, 2012). In the rest of this paper we explore a particular form of non-antagonistic resistance of "social enterprise" through an in-depth analysis of a third sector organization called Teak.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The tactical mimicry of social enterprise strategies: Acting ‘as if’ in the everyday life of third sector organizations

2015

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Using England as a paradigmatic case of the "enterprising up" of the third sector through social enterprise policies and programs, this article sheds light on resistance as enacted through dramaturgical identification with government strategies. Drawing from a longitudinal qualitative research study, which is interpreted via Michel de Certeau"s theory of the everyday, we present the case study of Teak, a charitable regeneration company, to illustrate how its Chief Executive Liam "acted as" a social entrepreneur in order to gain access to important resources. We establish "tactical mimicry" as a sensitizing concept to suggest that third sector practitioners" identification with the normative premises of "social enterprise" is part of a parasitical prosaics geared toward appropriating public money. While tactical mimicry conforms to strategies only in order to exploit them, its ultimate aim is to increase potentials of collective agency outside the direct influence of power. The contribution we make is threefold: first, we extend the recent debate on productive resistance by highlighting how "playing the game" without changing existing relations of power can nevertheless produce largely favorable outcomes. Second, we suggest that recognition of the productive potential of tactical mimicry requires methodologies which pay attention to the spatial and temporal dynamics of resistance. And third, we argue that explaining "social enterprise" without consideration of the non-discursive, mainly financial resources made available to those who identify with it, necessarily risks overlooking a crucial element of the dramaturgical dynamic of discourse .

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Resisters at Work: Generating Productive Resistance in the Workplace

Cited by 218 publications

References 56 publications

Being an Early-Career CMS Academic in the Context of Insecurity and ‘Excellence’: The Dialectics of Resistance and Compliance

Being an Early-Career CMS Academic in the Context of Insecurity and ‘Excellence’: The Dialectics of Resistance and Compliance

(Engaging or Avoiding) Change Through Reflexive Practices

The tactical mimicry of social enterprise strategies: Acting ‘as if’ in the everyday life of third sector organizations

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