Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T18:33:54.915Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Work: What is it good for? (Absolutely nothing)—a critical theorist’s perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 December 2019

Dennis K. Mumby
Dennis K. Mumby*
Affiliation:
Department of Communication, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: mumby@email.uncc.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The title of this focal article (unashamedly paraphrased from Edwin Starr’s classic 1970 antiwar song) is only partly intended to be tongue in cheek; work is a strange thing with a very checkered history. For the most part, it is something we take for granted. Most able-bodied adults work. Working hard is taken as a sign of being an upstanding citizen. Right wing politicians even insist that “government handouts” only be made available in exchange for participation in “workfare” programs. Moreover, work is not just something we do; over the last 100 years or so, it has become a defining, constitutive feature of who we are as human beings. Our very sense of identity and well-being is tied up with our relationship to work. It is no accident, after all, that the first question we ask a stranger is, “What do you do?” (and we are not asking about their hobbies); we see this question as a way of taking the measure of that person.

Keywords

FoucaultCritical Theorypowerresistancework
Type
Focal Article
Information
Industrial and Organizational Psychology , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. 429 - 443
Copyright
© Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The editorial team of IOP created a goal for this term of introducing at least one different disciplinary perspective to IOP readers. To that end, we are pleased to have Dr. Dennis Mumby share a “critical perspective” on work and organizations. Dr. Mumby is one of the world’s leading organizational communication scholars. We are grateful to him for taking the time to write for IOP and for his willingness to be polemic in order to inspire commentaries and generate meaningful discourse.

References

Ackroyd, S., & Thompson, P. (1999). Organizational misbehaviour. London, UK: Sage.Google Scholar
Alvesson, M. (1993). Cultural perspectives on organizations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Alvesson, M. (2002). Understanding organizational culture. London, UK: Sage.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
American Psychological Association. (2019). Industrial and organizational psychology. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/ed/graduate/specialize/industrial.Google Scholar
Ashcraft, K. L., Kuhn, T., & Cooren, F. (2009). Constitutional amendments: “Materializing” organizational communication. Academy of Management Annals, 3, 1–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Becker, G. (1976). The economic approach to human behavior. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bederman, G. (1995). Manliness and civilization: A cultural history of gender and race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beech, N. (2011). Liminality and the practices of identity construction. Human Relations, 64, 285–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Böhm, S., & Land, C. (2012). The new “hidden abode”: Reflections on value and labour in the new economy. Sociological Review, 60, 217–240.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Braverman, H. (1974). Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brief, A. P., & Weiss, H. M. (2002). Organization behavior: Affect in the workplace. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 279–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brophy, E. (2017). Language put to work: The making of the global call centre work force. London, UK: Palgrave MacMillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, A. (1998). Narrative, politics and legitimacy in an IT implementation. Journal of Management Studies, 35, 35–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brummans, B. H. J. M., Cooren, F., Robichaud, D., & Taylor, J. R. (2014). Approaches to the communicative constitution of organizations. In Putnam, L. L. & Mumby, D. K. (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational communication: Advances in theory, research, and methods (3rd. ed., pp. 173–194). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.Google Scholar
Burawoy, M. (1979). Manufacturing consent: Changes in the labor process under monopoly capitalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Burrell, G., & Morgan, G. (1979). Sociological paradigms and organisational analysis. London, UK: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Collinson, D. (1988). “Engineering humor”: Masculinity, joking and conflict in shop-floor relations. Organization Studies, 9, 181–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collinson, D. (1992). Managing the shop floor: Subjectivity, masculinity, and workplace culture. New York, NY: De Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Courpasson, D., & Vallas, S. P. (Eds.). (2016). The SAGE handbook of resistance. London, UK: Sage.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Botton, A. (2009). The pleasures and sorrows of work. New York, NY: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Deetz, S. (1992). Democracy in an age of corporate colonization: Developments in communication and the politics of everyday life. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Deetz, S. (2003). Reclaiming the legacy of the linguistic turn. Organization, 10, 421–429.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deetz, S., & Mumby, D. K. (1985). Metaphors, information, and power. In Ruben, B. (Ed.), Information and behavior (Vol. 1, pp. 369–386). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.Google Scholar
Esch, E. D. (2018). The color line and the assembly line: Managing race in the Ford empire. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fairhurst, G., & Zoller, H. M. (2008). Resistance, dissent and leadership in practice. In Banks, S. P. (Ed.), Dissent and the failure of leadership (pp. 135–148). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.Google Scholar
Fleming, P. (2014a). Resisting work: The corporatization of life and its discontents. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Fleming, P. (2014b). When “life itself” goes to work: Reviewing shifts in organizational life through the lens of biopower. Human Relations, 67, 875–901.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fleming, P. (2017). The human capital hoax: Work, debt and insecurity in the era of Uberization. Organization Studies, 38, 691–705.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fleming, P. (2019). The worst is yet to come: A post-capitalist survival guide. London, UK: Repeater Books.Google Scholar
Fleming, P., & Spicer, A. (2007). Contesting the corporation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fleming, P., & Spicer, A. (2008). Beyond power and resistance: New approaches to organizational politics. Management Communication Quarterly, 21, 301–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, M. (1979). Governmentality. Ideology and Consciousness, 6, 5–21.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (Burchell, G., Trans.). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan.Google Scholar
Frayne, D. (2015). The refusal of work: The theory and practice of resistance to work. London, UK: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Gill, R., & Pratt, A. (2008). In the social factory? Immaterial labour, precariousness and cultural work. Theory, Culture & Society, 25(7–8), 1–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Han, B.-C. (2017). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and new technologies of power. London, UK: Verso.Google Scholar
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Harvey, D. (2018). Marx, capital, and the madnes of economic reason. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hochschild, A. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Holmes, J. (2006). Gendered talk at work: Constructing gender identity through workplace discourse. Malden, MA: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (1988). Dialectic of enlightenment (Cumming, J., Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum.Google Scholar
Illouz, E. (2007). Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Kenny, K., Whittle, A., & Willmott, H. (2011). Understanding identity & organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knights, D., & Willmott, H. (Eds.). (1990). Labor process theory. London, UK: MacMillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kornberger, M. (2010). Brand society: How brands transform management and lifestyle. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuhn, T. (2006). A “demented work ethic” and a “lifestyle firm”: Discourse, identity, and workplace time commitments. Organization Studies, 27, 1339–1358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuhn, T., Ashcraft, K., & Cooren, F. (2017). The work of communication: Relational perspectives on working and organizing in contemporary capitalism. New York, NY: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kunda, G. (1992). Engineering culture: Control and commitment in a high-tech corporation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Lazzarato, M. (2004). From capital-labour to capital-life. Ephemera, 4(3), 187–208.Google Scholar
Lorey, I. (2015). State of insecurity: Government of the precarious (Derieg, A., Trans.). London, UK: Verso.Google Scholar
Marcuse, H. (1964). One dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Marwick, A. (2013). Status update: Celebrity, publicity and attention in the social media age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Marx, K. (1961). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. Moscow, Russia: Foreign Languages Publishing House.Google Scholar
Marx, K. (1967). Capital (Moore, S. & Aveling, E., Trans.). New York, NY: International Publishers.Google Scholar
McNay, L. (2009). Self as enterprise: Dilemmas of control and resistance in Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(6), 55–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McRobbie, A. (2016). Be creative: Making a living in the new culture industries. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Miller, P., & Rose, N. (1990). Governing economic life. Economy and Society, 19(1), 1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mumby, D. K. (1987). The political function of narrative in organizations. Communication Monographs, 54, 113–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mumby, D. K. (1988). Communication and power in organizations: Discourse, ideology, and domination. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Mumby, D. K. (2005). Theorizing resistance in organization studies: A dialectical approach. Management Communication Quarterly, 19, 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mumby, D. K. (2009). The strange case of the farting professor: Humor and the deconstruction of destructive communication. In Lutgen-Sandvik, P. & Sypher, B. D. (Eds.), Destructive organizational communication: Processes, consequences, and constructive ways of organizing (pp. 316–338). New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mumby, D. K. (2016). Organizing beyond organization: Branding, discourse, and communicative capitalism. Organization, 23, 884–907.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mumby, D. K. (2018). Targeting Alex: Brand as agent in communicative capitalism. In Brummans, B. H. J. M. (Ed.), The agency of organizing: Perspectives and case studies (pp. 98–122). New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mumby, D. K., & Kuhn, T. (2019). Organizational communication: A critical introduction. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.Google Scholar
Mumby, D. K., Thomas, R., Martí, I., & Seidl, D. (2017). Resistance redux. Organization Studies, 38, 1157–1183.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neff, G. (2012). Venture labor: Work and the burden of risk in innovative industries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Connor, E. (1999a). Minding the workers: The meaning of “human” and “human relations” in Elton Mayo. Organization, 6, 223–246.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O’Connor, E. (1999b). The politics of management thought: A case study of the Harvard Business School and the human relations school. Academy of Management Review, 24, 117–131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olins, W. (2000). How brands are taking over the corporation. In Schultz, M., Hatch, M. J., & Larsen, M. H. (Eds.), The expressive organization: Linking identity, reputation, and the corporate brand (pp. 51–65). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Oswick, C., Keenoy, T., & Grant, D. (2000). Discourse, organizations and organizing: Concepts, objects and subjects. Human Relations, 53, 1115–1123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paulsen, R. (2014). Empty labor: Idleness and workplace resistance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perrow, C. (1986). Complex organizations (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Random House.Google Scholar
Peters, T. (1997). The brand called you. Fast Company. Retrieved from https://www.fastcompany.com/28905/brand-called-youGoogle Scholar
Pringle, R. (1989). Secretaries talk: Sexuality, power and work. London, UK: Verso.Google Scholar
Putnam, L. L., & Nicotera, A. M. (Eds.). (2009). Building theories of organization: The constitutive role of communication. Oxford, UK: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rhodes, C., & Westwood, R. (Eds.). (2007). Humor, organization, and work. London, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar
Rosen, M. (1985). “Breakfast at Spiro’s”: Dramaturgy and dominance. Journal of Management, 11(2), 31–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosen, M. (1988). You asked for it: Christmas at the bosses’ expense. Journal of Management Studies, 25, 463–480.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ross, A. (2003). No-collar: The humane workplace and its hidden costs. New York, NY: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Schumpeter, J. (2008). Capitalism, socialism, and democracy. New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.Google Scholar
Smith, R., & Eisenberg, E. (1987). Conflict at Disneyland: A root metaphor analysis. Communication Monographs, 54, 367–380.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, F. W. (1911/1934). The principles of scientific management. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers. [Originally published 1911].Google Scholar
Thatcher, M. (1987, September 23). Interview for “Woman’s Hour” (“No such thing as society”). Thatcher Foundation. Retrieved from https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689Google Scholar
Thompson, P., & O’Dougherty, D. P. (2009). Perspectives on labour process theory. In Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T., & Willmott, H. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of critical management studies (pp. 99–121). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tracy, S., Lutgen-Sandvik, P., & Alberts, J. (2006). Nightmares, demons, and slaves: Exploring the painful metaphors of workplace bullying. Management Communication Quarterly, 20, 148–185.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trethewey, A. (2001). Reproducing and resisting the master narrative of decline: Midlife professional women’s experiences of aging. Management Communication Quarterly, 15, 183–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trujillo, N. (1992). Interpreting (the work and talk of) baseball: Perspectives on ballpark culture. Western Journal of Communication, 56, 350–371.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ure, A. (1835). The philosophy of manufactures. London, UK: Charles Knight.Google Scholar
Vaynerchuk, G. (2008). Do what you love (no excuses)! TED talk. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_vaynerchuk_do_what_you_love_no_excusesGoogle Scholar
Weil, D. (2014). The fissured workplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wieland, S. (2010). Ideal selves as resources for the situated practice of identity. Management Communication Quarterly, 24, 503–528.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Willmott, H. (1993). Strength is ignorance; slavery is freedom: Managing culture in modern organizations. Journal of Management Studies, 30, 515–552.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Witten, M. (1993). Narrative and the culture of obedience at the workplace. In Mumby, D. K. (Ed.), Narrative and social control: Critical perspectives (pp. 97–118). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, E. (1989). On the naming of the rose: Interests and multiple meanings as elements of organizational culture. Organization Studies, 10, 187–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. New York, NY: Public Affairs.Google Scholar