References for Theme: Resistance to/at Work
- Bell, Peter; Cleaver, Harry
- Bukowski, Charles
- Factotum (2009)
(p.5) The work was easy and dull but the clerks were in a constant state of turmoil. They were worried about their jobs. There was a mixture of young men and women and there didn't seem to be a foreman. After several hours an argument began between two of the women. It was something about the magazines. We were packing comic books and something had gone wrong across the table. The two women became violent as the argument went on. "Look," I said, "these books aren't worth reading let alone arguing about." "All right," one of the women said, "we know...
- Factotum (2009)
(p.97) The Florida State Department of Employment was a pleasant place. It wasn't as crowded as the Los Angeles office which was always full. It was my turn for a little good luck, not much, but a little. It was true that I didn't have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to...
- Factotum (2009)
- Cederstrom, Carl; Fleming, Peter
- Chalcraft, John T
- Cleaver, Harry
- "The Contradictions of the Green Revolution" (1972)
- "The Zapatista Effect: The Internet and the Rise of an Alternative Political Fabric" (1998)
- "Work is still the central issue! New words for new worlds" (2002)
- Rupturing the Dialectic: The Struggle against Work, Money, and Financialization (2017)
- Collinson, David L
- Elliott, Christopher Shane; Long, Gary
- Fleming, Peter; Harley, Bill; Sewell, Graham
- Foucault, Michel
- The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I (1978)
(p.95) Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a positionof exteriority in relation to power. Should it be said that one is always "inside" power, there is no "escaping" it,there is no absolute outside where it is concerned, because one is subject to the law in any case? Or that, history being the ruse of reason, power is the ruse of history, always emerging the winner? This would be to misunderstand the strictly relational character of power relationships. Their existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power...
- "Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity" in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (1997)
(p.167) If there is no resistance, there would be no power relations… So resistance comes first, and remains superior to the forces of the process; power relations are obliged to change with the resistance. So I think that resistance is the main word, the keyword, in this dynamic.
- Frayne, David
- Harding, Nancy Helen; Ford, Jackie; Lee, Hugh
- "Towards a Performative Theory of Resistance: Senior Managers and Revolting Subject(ivitie)s" (2017)
- Kellogg, Katherine C; Valentine, Melissa A; Christin, Angèle
- "Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control" (2020)
(p.367) organizational scholarship has not kept pace with the ways that algorithmic technologies have the potential to transform organizational control in profound ways, with significant implications for workers
- "Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control" (2020)
- Lloyd, Anthony
- "Ideology at work: reconsidering ideology, the labour process and workplace resistance" (2017)
(p.268) Foucault has been criticised as a neoliberal apologist (Zamora, 2015) which reflects the movement away from LPT as a potential site of revolutionary politics; Foucault and his followers concentrate on micro-sites, the cultural sphere and the individual subject whilst leaving the material and ideological edifice of capitalism free from critique and able to continue reproducing itself unchallenged. For example, Thompson (2003) concludes his critique on call centre surveillance systems by suggesting that conclusions should take into account-specific organisational context and not how a whole societal or workplace regime should be characterised. Without connecting the macro with the mezzo and micro,...
- "Ideology at work: reconsidering ideology, the labour process and workplace resistance" (2017)
- McCabe, Darren
- Mueller, Gavin
- Mumby, Dennis K; Thomas, Robyn; Martí, Ignasi; Seidl, David
- "Resistance Redux" (2017)
(p.1161) [A]s Foucault succinctly put it, “where there is power, there is resistance” (1980a, p.95). Here, Foucault is not positioning resistance as exterior to power, as a reaction to power, but as an immanent and constitutive element of the exercise of power itself. Thus, while much of the research on resistance tends to situate it in a binary relationship with power (Vallas, 2016), we conceive of power and resistance as co-constitutive and dialectical (Mumby, 2005), though dialectical in Adorno’s (1973) “negative” sense rather than Hegel’s (1977) “positive” sense. Given the topic of this special issue, however, we frame this relationship as...
- "Resistance Redux" (2017)
- Paulsen, Roland
- "Layers of dissent: The meaning of time appropriation" (2011)
- Empty Labor: Idleness and Workplace Resistance (2014)
- Rhodes, Carl
- "All I want to do is get that check and get drunk" (2009)
(p.387) It is in this spirit that this paper offers a reading of Factotum, a novel that is indubitably a testimony to the experience of working in organizations. But not just any work, Bukowski shirks off the cultural reality of work that sees labour as virtuous, replacing it with a particular rendering of reality that “targets the deadening oppressiveness of the workplace [and] the questionable aspects of traditional masculinity” (Charlson, 2005, p. 9). Chinaski, isn’t a Factotum in that he has a job with many tasks – he is a person who has many jobs. He drifts between them, as he...
- "All I want to do is get that check and get drunk" (2009)
(p.388) Factotum’s theme of resistance is one that has been taken up considerably in the academic study of organizations, especially recently. As Fleming and Sewell (2002, p. 858) state: “after something of a hiatus worker resistance now seems to be firmly back on the research agenda”. Fleming and Sewell trace this renewed interest to an article published by Thompson and Ackroyd in 1995 entitled ‘All quiet on the workplace front?” In that article, Thompson and Ackroyd complained that the historical virtue of sociology’s ability to uncover the resistance and misbehaviour in organizations was in danger of being eroded, replaced by a...
- "All I want to do is get that check and get drunk" (2009)
(p.389) In the terms of the debate outlined above, resistance within organizations is cast along a continuum of two opposing possibilities – that of overt forms of “organized non-compliance” (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999, p. 21) on the one side, and “subtle forms of subversion” (Fleming and Sewell, 2002, p. 859) on the other. With the former seen as a remnant of bygone era of capitalism, much focus is placed on the latter as the manifestation of anti-managerialism within organizations in the days of corporate culturalism.
- "All I want to do is get that check and get drunk" (2009)
(p.394) What is most despicable about work for Chinaski is that it robs him of life – robs him of time. Complaining about being sacked yet again, he argues with a boss, who claims that he has been arriving at work late continually, and has not been working hard enough. In his defence Chinaski says: “I’ve given you my time. It’s all I’ve got to give – it’s all any man has. And for a pitiful buck and a quarter an hour” (p. 112). But Chinaski’s resistance is not in the order of withholding his time – located as he is...
- "All I want to do is get that check and get drunk" (2009)
- Seidman, Michael
- Tronti, Mario
- Zerowork Collective
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