Humour, Work and Organization

Robert Westwood, Carl Rhodes, Robert Westwood, Carl Rhodes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415384124
• eBook ISBN: 9781136010941
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Accessible and amusing in style, Humour, Work and Organization explores the critical, subversive and ambivalent character of humour, work and comedy as it relates to organizations and organized work. It examines the various individual, organizational, social and cultural means through which humour is represented, deployed, developed, used and understood.

Considering the relationship between humour and organization in a nuanced and radical way and this book takes the view that humour and comedy are pervasive and highly meaningful aspects of human experience.

The richness and complexity of this relationship is examined across three related domains. They are:

• how humour is constructed, enacted and responded to in organizational settings
• how organizations and work are represented comedically in various types of popular culture media
• how humour is used in organizations where there is a more explicit relationship between the comedic and work.

An exciting and controversial text, Humour, Work and Organization will appeal to students of all levels as well as anyone interested the full complexities of human interactions in the workplace.

Chapter 1

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Humour and the study
of organizations

Robert Westwood and Carl Rhodes

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12 May 2006 marked the twentieth day of the sixth season of the Australian version of the popular reality program Big Brother. An international phenomenon, Big Brother is a franchise that has been used on television in almost seventy countries around the world — from Albania to Argentina, Brazil to Bulgaria, Colombia to Croatia, and almost everywhere else around the globe varieties of the show can be found. Originating in Holland in 1999, the Big Brother concept has both developed and matured as a popular culture phenomenon. The basic format for the program is that a group of approximately twelve men and women are put in a house where they will live for about fifteen weeks. As fans know well, this is no ordinary house. Through a combination of two-way mirrors, hidden cameras and mandatorily worn microphones, the people in the house, or as they are known ‘house-mates’, are under constant surveillance. Broadcast on prime time television, the ‘entertainment’ offered by Big Brother is the opportunity to observe the activities of these people in the context of their most mundane everyday activities. The house is completely isolated from society — no newspapers, no television, no direct contact with the outside world.

As viewers look on through the voyeuristic frame of their television sets, the house-mates also have to undergo various ordeals as set for them by the voice of ‘big brother’ — a voice that regularly comes over a personal address system to give orders, administer punishments and provide information. The voyeurism is also one of competition. The house-mates are contestants, and each week one of them is evicted from the show based on audience voting of who viewers would like to stay and who they would like to go. The person who remains at the end wins a significant cash prize. But this is not the only mode of competition. In the sixth season of the Australian version there is also an activity known as the ‘Friday Night Games’. Each Friday the house-mates participate in a competition against one another. The main prize is that the single winner can select another contestant and together they spend two nights in the ‘rewards room’ where they enjoy creature comforts denied them in the normal house — DVDs to watch, good food to eat, alcoholic beverages and the like.

One of these evenings of Friday Night Games occurred on 12 May 2006. On this night the games were dubbed the ‘Office Olympics’. The competition involved four rounds. The first of these was an office chair race. There were six pairs of contestants. One sat on a wheeled office chair and was pulled around a pre-set course by the other. Completing five laps of the course in between being showered by cold water and having to dress in white collar garb, the contestants laughed their way through such abuse of office furniture in competition with each other. Eight people made it through to the second round. By round two, however, the laughter was growing. This round was dubbed ‘Big Worker's Obstacle Course’. There were two teams of four people each. Each team had to wear giant inflated costumes made up to look like stereotypical office workers — somewhat resembling the iconic office nerd in Scott Adams's Dilbert. The costumes of each team were connected at the hands, and their sheer size made slapstick type body movements unavoidable. There was an uproar of laughter as each team had to walk up a slippery ramp and then down the other side, followed by completion of an obstacle course. The task seemed unachievable as the teams fell about looking impossibly exaggerated in terms of the size of their costumes, the clumsiness of their movements and their inability to fulfill their task. Eventually one team won, and its four members went on to round three — the penultimate round. Each of these four contestants was given a different office artefact — a telephone, a computer printer, a computer keyboard and a calculator. Their task was to provide a one-minute sales spiel on this item. The contestants who had already been eliminated ranked their performance on a scale of zero to five. Following the slapstick shenanigans of the giant office workers, the humorous effect here was more verbal. Michael particularly stood out in his sale of the printer. Barely a word could be understood as he went into super-salesman mode ranting and raving about the printer with bullshit extraordinaire. The other contestants couldn't contain their laughter. Another contestant, Krystal, also caused laughter when she took on the role of a television advertisement sales person extolling the virtues of the calculator. Bringing a sexual element into the proceedings she took off her tie and proceeded to use it to spank both herself and one of the other contestants.

Two people went through to the final round — Michael and Ashley. This was another obstacle course. They were each attached to a rope that was wound around various pieces of office furniture. They had to follow the course of the rope, around chairs, under desks and obstructed by other office paraphernalia and the winner was he who made it to the end first. To mark completion was a large picture of the ‘boss’ — smoking a cigar, overweight, and wearing a black suit, he was looking over his shoulder, with his massive backside featuring as the centrepiece of the image. On completing the course the leader marked their win by having to literally kiss the boss's ass. Michael won and as he reached the end he opened his arms, aimed his lips carefully and landed them enthusiastically on the image of this ass. The other contestants cheered and laughed uproariously. Meanwhile Ashley was still stuck trying to navigate past the water cooler.

Studying humour

Big Brother's Office Olympics is particularly interesting to us. Clearly the producers of the show fabricated these games with a view of providing humorous entertainment — something evidently hilarious to the people who participated in it, as much as to the vast numbers of home viewers tuned in. So why is this funny? We can only imagine that if the same set of activities was included without the office motif, the humour would have been severely muted — there would have been no water cooler to be trapped by, no boss's ass to smooch, no schmaltzy sales stereotype to hyperbolize. Indeed, there was something really funny about the layout and imagery of an office being used for fun. It was distinctly amusing to see the contestants, each dressed in conventional office attire, engaging in stupid and ridiculous competitions. The huge office worker outfits used in round two were particularly amusing as the expected seriousness of office work was pierced by excessive exaggeration. When Michael went into sales pitch over-drive, the other contestants were bent over in contortions of laugher as they wiped the tears from their eyes. The kissing of the boss's ass at the end wrapped it all up with a bow of hilarity and subversion.

A range of things were at play here — the use of work as a context for humour, the commercialization of humour in work, the possibilities of subversion of workplaces, a carnivalization of work for humorous effect, the humour of the misuse of workplace artefacts, the way that humour offers a potential window into the seriousness of work, relations between sex and gender at work, the role of humorous popular culture in parodying work and so on. Now, we'll come back to the Office Olympics shortly, but it is the sorts of issues presaged in the games that are rarely considered in the corpus of research on humour at work. To begin with interest and research on humour in organizations has had a patchy and intermittent history until relatively recently. Over the past twenty years or so, however, there has been burgeoning interest in the issue. Much of this research has been within clearly functionalist traditions wherein organizational humour has been associated with a range of presumed positive managerial and organizational outcomes. For example, research has explored the relationship between humour and the functioning of groups, indicating that through humour, group processes can be enhanced, and group communication, cohesiveness, and solidarity facilitated (Duncan 1982; Duncan and Feisal 1989; Duncan et al. 1990). Additional claims have also been made for humour's role in improving group problem-solving and in enhancing creativity and innovation (Consalvo 1989; Smith and White 1965). There has also been a significant amount of work relating humour and comedy to stress reduction, coping behaviour, and other types of adaptive behaviour (Buchman 1994; Martin and Lefcourt 1983; Yovitch et al. 1990). More recently, humour has been linked with effective organizational culture and culture change (Deal and Kennedy 2000; Dwyer 1991 ; Kahn 1989) and with effective leadership (Avolio et al. 1999; Crawford 1994). But still this all says nothing to the promise of resistant humour pointed to in the Office Olympics.

There is a danger of humour, as an enormously rich and complex facet of human behaviour, being appropriated by a managerialist discourse and subject to regimes of manipulation and control. There is already an emergent humour and management industry (Collinson 2002; Gibson 1994) in which humour is promoted as a viable tool for management (Caudron 1992; Malone 1980). Numerous popularist texts promulgating this functional application have appeared in recent times (e.g. Kushner 1990; Paulson 1989; Ross 1989).

The issue of the relationship between humour and power relations and hierarchical structures has been addressed in the literature and was present from a very early point (Coser 1960; Lundberg 1969; Traylor 1973). More recently this perspective has been narrowly focused on the role of humour in diminishing hierarchy and status (Duncan 1982), its role in smoothing power/ authority relations (Dwyer 1991; Kahn 1989; Ullian 1976; Vinton 1989) or in enhancing social influence processes (O'Quin and Aronoff 1981; Powell 1977). Much of this remains under the umbrella of a functionalist paradigm.

There is a counterpoint to the functional view of humour indicated above. Although less dominant and pervasive, there is some research that suggests that comedy and humour can be deployed as resistance, challenge and subversion (Ackroyd and Thompson 1999; Collinson 1988, 2002; Linstead 1985). In line with such developments, researchers have explicitly investigated how humour can be deployed as a form of opposition or challenge to the status quo both in general (Jenkins 1994; Powell and Paton 1988) and in organizational contexts specifically (Ackroyd and Thompson 1999; Collinson 1988, 2002; Griffiths 1998; Grugulis 2002; Holmes 2000; Linstead 1985; Rodrigues and Collinson 1995; Taylor and Bain 2003). The subversive potential of humour and the attempts to control and police it strongly suggest that functionalist explanations are inadequate to account for the complexities and ambiguities of humour. Functionalist approaches treat the meaning of humour as self-evident (Collinson 2002).

In relation to the subversive and critical potential of humour, in this book we seek to examine in some detail the various organizational, social and cultural means through which such humour is represented, deployed, developed, used and understood. The book explores humour and comedy in organizational settings in a non-functionalist manner. It considers the relationship between humour and organization in a more nuanced and radical way, one which reflects the richness and complexity of the relationship in a broad variety of its manifestations. Further, it takes the view that humour and comedy are pervasive, entrenched and highly meaningful aspects of human experience and that they are as significant in organizational and work contexts as they are in any other domain of human activity.

The book starts with three conceptual chapters which consider, at a theoretical level, the general nature of humour and theories of humour. On this basis, the book then considers the relationship between humour, organizations and work in three different but related domains. First, it contemplates how humour is constructed, enacted and responded to in organizational settings. Second, it focuses on how organizations and work are represented comedically in various types of popular culture media — from television to the mass management textbook. Finally, it examines organizational and work situations where there is a more explicit relationship between the comedic and organization/work.

A funny thing happened on the way from the office (olympics) …

As we noted in the previous section, when humour has been researched in relation to organizations, attention has most often paid to the way that it can enhance workplace functioning and support a broadly managerialist agenda. This managerial bias, however, is only one possible perspective and, when looking at the way that humour has been theorized more generally in the fields of philosophy, history, literary history, theology and history of religion, sociology and anthropology, the limitations of much of organization studies attention to humour becomes apparent. Simon Critchley examines this breadth of theory in the second chapter of the book. Attesting to how humour might be also used as a tool against management, Critchley discusses the critical and radical possibilities of humour. When humour has the potential to laugh at power — pointed to with Big Brother's Michael's hyperbolic kissing of the boss's ass — Critchley argues that it might also be a ‘practically enacted theory’ with emancipatory and elevatory potential. Through its ability to ‘defamiliarize’ the mundane, humour, as Critchely elaborates, can extract our understanding of life from the confines of ‘common sense’ so as to enable a questioning of the taken for granted operations of power.

While Critchley sets the theoretical ground for an examination of humour as a critical practice, Heather Höpfl, in Chapter 3, expands further the potentially disjunctive effects of humour as a phenomenological act that challenges the taken for granted. Drawing specifically on the treatment of humour by Umberto Eco (1986), Höpfl argues that humour's critical potential lies in its practices of v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Humour and the study of organizations
• PART I Theorizing humour, organization and work
• PART II Humour in organizations
• PART III Humour of organizations
• PART IV The organization of humour
• Index