Sleeping giants? Fired workbloggers and labour organisation

Abstract

This paper argues that the Waterstone's fired blogger incident performed a labour organising function in terms of garnering pro‐labour media attention and encouraging critical discourse. Looking at the blog's distinctive features and evolution, it evaluates the strengths, limitations and potential for recurrence of similar high‐profile incidents.

“A Brave New (Digital) World”? Effects of in-House Social Media on HRM

“…Thus, he suggests that in many organizations official rules are continuously subverted by employees who install communication devices without official permission by management. This is also stated by several recent studies (e.g., Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010;Schoneboom, 2011). Indeed with Business Soft, the communicative activities on Yammer took place parallel to the official communication channels of the company.…”

Voicing job satisfaction and dissatisfaction through Twitter: employees’ use of cyberspace

“…Richards indicates that his findings point ‘towards a shifting locus of conflict expression: from workspace to cyberspace’ (p. 9) and that ‘cyberspace can represent a new arena for self‐organised conflict expression’ (p. 10). Similarly, Schoneboom (), in an analysis of an incident where a blogger was fired from Waterstones, identifies the blog as a vehicle for communicating dissent. It has been mooted (Richards and Kosmala, : 76) that being cynical about work in their blogs may enable employees to ‘resurrect and galvanize a sense of control and attachment to their own occupational or professional community, while providing distance from corporate culture initiatives’.…”

The impact of the cessation of blogs within the UK police blogosphere

“…Raper () notes that junior academics in the sciences who blog might find that their employer considers their blogging to be a waste of time or even a liability. High‐profile cases of bloggers sacked for blogging at or about their place of employment include Ellen Simonetti, whose blog Queen of the Sky featuring photographs of her in her air‐hostess uniform led to her dismissal from Delta Air Lines; Jessica Cutler, sacked from her secretarial job in a senator's office after she was outed as the sex‐blogger Washingtonienne ; Joe Gordon, who was sacked by UK bookseller Waterstone's after he used the term ‘Bastardstone's’ and joked about his ‘Evil Boss’ in his blog The Woolamaloo Gazette (Barkham, ; Schoneboom, ); and Colby Buzzell, a National Guard in the US military whose blog aimed to offer a different story about the war in Iraq to that carried by the mainstream media. When his superiors discovered his blog My War , it was immediately closed down and Buzzell was confined to barracks, although he later published the blog as the book (or blook) My War: Killing Time in Iraq , which won the 2006 Blooker Prize (Pedersen, ; Wall, ).…”

“…Richards and Kosmala () argue that work‐blogging can benefit the blogger by providing a venue for the expression of work‐related cynicism, which can give an employee a sense of control and attachment to their own community at the same time as allowing them to distance themselves from corporate cultural initiatives. Richards () and Schoneboom () have suggested that work‐blogs might also be a place where employee resistance might be found, locating work‐blogging within debates relating to labour process. The need to let off steam about work‐related issues might be particularly important for those working in the emergency services who, by the very nature of the job, are limited in their ability to discuss their work in the outside world (Burnett et al ., ).…”