The DOI matches its Crossref record.
'Engineering Humour': Masculinity, Joking and Conflict in Shop-floor Relations
Abstract
The focus of this paper is on the organizational significance of shop-floor humour and in particular its relationship to gender identity and working-class resistance. A brief review of the literature on organizational humour is followed by a more detailed examination of the illuminating analysis by Willis of school/shop-floor counter-culture. Although his research provides a strong basis for the case study presented below, it is criticized for a tendency to romanticize working-class culture, humour and informal opposition. In contrast, by means of an empirical analysis of joking forms in the components division of a lorry producing factory, the paper then explores not only the collective elements, but also the internal divisions and contradictions that characterize shop-floor relations. By critically questioning the workers' manifest search to secure a highly masculine sense of identity, the paper is able to highlight a 'darker side' of shop-floor culture, which underpins and ultimately undermines the creative humour and collectivity found in the factory.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 29
- Balzer, Richard, 1976, Clockwork
- 10.1177/001872675701000207 · DOI
- Burawoy, Michael, 1979, Manufacturing consent
- 10.2307/2088120 · DOI
- Cockburn, Cynthia, 1983, Brothers: Male dominance and technological change
- Collinson, David L., 1981, 'Managing the shop-floor'. Unpublished Msc, Department of Management Sciences
- 10.1177/001872675901200205 · DOI · Paper page
- Fletcher, Clive, 1974, Beneath the surface
- Freud, Sigmund, 1976, Jokes and their relation to the unconscious
- Goffman, Erving, 1961, Encounters
- Goffman, Erving, 1968, Asylums
- Green, A.E., Paper presented at the Conference of the British Sociological Association, University of Sussex
- Hearn, Jeff 1985 'Men's sexuality at work' in The sexuality of men. A. Metcalf and M. Humphries (eds.), 110-123. London : Pluto Press.
- 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1985.tb02447.x · DOI
- 10.1108/eb055518 · DOI
- Nichols, Theo, 1976, Workers divided
- Palm, Goran, 1977, The flight from work
- Pfeffer, Richard M., 1979, Working for capitalism
- Pat, Malcolm, 1979, The world on our backs
- 10.1007/978-1-349-16609-1 · DOI
- Radcliffe-Brown, A.R., 1965, Structure and function in primitive society
- Riemer, Jeffrey W., 1979, Hard hats
- Roy, Donald F., 1958, Human Organisation, 18, 158
- Sykes, Andrew J. M., 1966, American Anthropologist, 68, 1139
- Westwood, Sally, 1984, All day, every day: factory, family, women's lives
- 1977, Learning to labour
- Willis, Paul 1979 'Shop-floor culture, masculinity and the wage form' in Working class culture. J. Clarke, C. Critcher, and R. Johnson (eds.), 185-198. London: Hutchinson.
- Wilson, Colin, 1979, Jokes: form, content, use and function
- Zijderveld, Anton C., 1968, Social Research, 35, 286
Cited by
Working at a Cynical Distance: Implications for Power, Subjectivity and Resistance
Fleming, P., & Spicer, A. (2003) · Organization · doi:10.1177/1350508403010001376 · Cited by 835
1 Constitutional Amendments: “Materializing” Organizational Communication
Ashcraft, K. L., Kuhn, T. R., & Cooren, F. (2009) · Academy of Management Annals · doi:10.5465/19416520903047186 · Cited by 731
Advanced Teaching Methods for the Technology Classroom
Petrina, S. (2007) · doi:10.4018/978-1-59904-337-1 · Cited by 94
Group Pleasures: Collaborative Commitments, Shared Narrative, and the Sociology of Fun
Fine, G. A., & Corte, U. (2017) · Sociological Theory · doi:10.1177/0735275117692836 · Cited by 94
Rimvall, M. K., Jeppesen, P., Skovgaard, A. M., Verhulst, F., Olsen, E. M., & Rask, C. U. (2021) · Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry · doi:10.1111/jcpp.13286 · Cited by 22
Metadata
- Authors
- Collinson, D. L.
- Venue
- Organization Studies
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1988-04
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 181-199
- ISSN
- 0170-8406 (ISSN-L)
- 1741-3044
- OpenAlex
- W2168127144
- Cited by
- 597
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 1.27
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
