Book Reviews 789

and even shop-floor employees play an important role in organizational politics.

Perhaps most intriguingly, the authors alert us to how building power in today’s
corporations involves the tricky task of coordinating very unstable alliances
between a whole range of interested actors. They even suggest that this might
involve the co-optation of protest groups and social movements. This vision of
power is best summed up in the following proposition: ‘The supreme exercise of
political power would be to make organizational activists work for the establish-
ment and maintenance of a true political community, while being unaware that they
are being used that way, and thus not really paying attention to it’ (p.397).
Power and Organization is a summary and extension of our understandings of
politics in organizations. It gives the neophyte reader an entree into the field, it
gives the committed critic plenty to rage about, it gives the interested reader plenty
of bloody anecdotes and it gives the scholar interested in the growing power of cor-
porations plenty of new leads. Perhaps the greatest gift found between the covers of
this book is a full statement of a pluralist theory of power in organization. A theory,
I am sure will not be without its supplicants and detractors.

Robert Westwood and Carl Rhodes (Eds):

Humour, Work and Organization

2006, Routledge: London & New York 307 pages soft cover.

A. H. Pinnington, If one conducted a street poll asking passers-by to share their immediate thoughts
Aberdeen Business
School, Robert Gordon
on the word ‘humour’ it would be intriguing to know how many of them would
University, UK promptly associate it with ‘organizations’ or ‘organized work’. Westwood and
Rhodes edited book on Humour, Work and Organization seeks to do just that:
offering its readers an exploration of ‘the critical, subversive and ambivalent
character of humour and comedy as it relates to organizations and organized work.’
The chapters provide a fascinating account of humour which is relevant to our lives
and draw on familiar media and corporate figures such as Big Brother, The
Simpsons, Seinfeld and McDonalds.
The book is divided into four sections: Part 1 Theorizing humour, organization
and work, Part 2 Humour in organizations, Part 3 Humour of organizations and Part
4 The organization of humour. We should not dissect humour, some say, if we want
to preserve the magic it holds, but for those who are willing to analyse the topic,
then this book offers a variety of thought-provoking forays into: Greek humours,
Middle Ages carnival, sexual humour, Charcot’s treatment of hysteria, fun and
games in the workplace, humour in formal meetings, epic theatre, professional
comedians, dramaturgy, Burke’s pentad, and more - all of it mixed in with a
measure of snigger, giggle and guffaw.
Humour has fascinated a number of writers and the contributors give a com-
prehensive insight into many of the major texts expounding concepts on the role of
humour such as superiority, relief (catharsis), and incongruity theories. The
relationship between the enactment of humour and its relationship to theory is a
major theme of the book. Chapter 2 by the philosopher Simon Critchley explores
ways that humour is a practical enactment of theory and reflects on
790 Organization Studies 28(05)

the ambiguity of training consultancies using humour to improve employee

relations, job satisfaction and organisational commitment. Often such training and
consultancy interventions will have amusing side-effects due to humour’s capacities
to defamiliarise and demythologise, temporarily alienating us from our common
sense habits and mundane realities. The idea of disjunctures of meaning and
spontaneous breaks in practice is a theme that continues in (Chapter 3) Heather
Hopfl’s humorous account of people getting and not getting the joke. Through
moments of humour our phenomenological involvement is excised from the smooth
flow and continuity of events and transported into different realms of being,
knowing and understanding. In Chapter 4, Robert Westwood explores ways that our
modes of intellectual and scientific theorising can function as a joke, or worse still
as grotesque forms of humour. He discusses how past social concepts of hysteria
contributed to a farcical system of gender relations and sustaining distanced modes
of scientific consciousness which, he suggests, continue to characterise many of our
work organizations and much of our academic thinking. His account of the botched
operations and insensitive lecture demonstrations during the emergence of Freudian
theory and publication of, for instance, ‘The joke and its relation to the
unconscious’ (1905) is particularly disturbing and unfunny.
Perhaps since we are at a point in the book where we need some light relief,
Chapter 4 by Martin Parker humorously explores the culture of organization. One
cannot help but be amused and frustrated at the same time as he expounds on
Microman, the management of bollocks and advice on areas of the university where
even he does not dare to don his Fuck Work badge. Having let off some steam, the
readers are better prepared for sitting quietly through Sam Warren and Stephen
Fineman’s Chapter 6 on creating a ‘fun’ work environment in a multinational IT
firm. This very alive and visually crafted chapter on a managerial innovation
sustains its balanced narration of insights with humourous observation, and refuses
anything more than partial closure: employees were offended, amused and flattered
to have their corporate office environment turned into a strange designer
combination akin to the MIT Media Lab and Romper Room.
Chapter 7 by Allanah Johnston, Dennis Mumby and Robert Westwood is an
impressive and well-written feminist discussion of humour and laughter. It reviews
various gendered hegemonies and ways of laughing at people and then discusses
alternative ways of sharing humour and laughing together. The theme of using
humour as a way of socially engaging with others and as a means of subversive
discourse continues in Meredith Marra’s Chapter 8 on workplace meetings. The
chapter is interesting both for its account of the research method of critical dis-
course analysis (CDA), and for its absorbing examination of how humour is used to
maintain hegemony while repairing interpersonal group relations.
Part 3 commences with Carl Rhodes and Alison Pullen’s (Chapter 9) exploration
of the grotesque body and masculinity. If you missed out on The Simpsons as a part
of your upbringing, you could find their analysis of this cult TV programme so
compelling that you no longer want to answer your emails between 6:00pm-6:30pm
Mondays to Thursdays. However, if you are already an enthusiast for cartoons you
might be less convinced by their argument that this genre offers viewers with a new
opportunity for critique rather than just a creative mix of utopia and questions.
Maybe though that is to be too cynical. Chapter 10 by Damian O’Doherty unfolds
Book Reviews 791

rather like one of those Woody Allen movies which suddenly grinds to a halt and
then gets going again with people feeling both slightly uncomfortable and amused
at one and the same time. The thrill and fun of humour often lies in its tightrope act
between the funny and the unfunny. And the expressions of humour may be clever
or straightforward. His ironic treatment of an OB textbook is written rather as if he
is tempted to make a joke which is politically incorrect. The transgressor in stifling
the urge to articulate the joke feels slightly ashamed of its inappropriateness and
angry with its repression. Chapter 11 by Stephen Linstead recounts the last episode
of Seinfeld using it to explore organizational bystanding in what he calls a ‘comedy
of ethics’. His argument is based around the ethical problems raised in a sitcom and
it also draws analogies with witnessing events including deliberate acts of cruelty
such as torture. Comic and severe instances of being a bystander to events are
reviewed to explore some longstanding themes of the duty of care, social
responsibility and problems created by emotional distance. The four main
characters’ comic failure to intervene (when they should) during a robbery is used
to reflect upon our own responsibility when we play safe and fail to act, such as
when we do not come to the aid of others at work in case it brings trouble down on
our own heads. The overall tone of the chapter maintained right through to its
conclusion is somewhat moral and existential. In choosing to act in relation to
others when it actually would be easier not to, we learn something about the self
and our collective identity with others.
Part 4 examines the organization of humour and draws the book to a close,
examining humourous social activities deliberately replete with humour. In Chapter
12, Kavanagh and O’Sullivan explore the production of humour in advertising and
reflect on the fatalistic and disenchanted strategies of corporate sponsors and
advertisers. They combine observations on this postmodern production with its
sophisticated and cynical reception. Their proposition is that consumers expect to
be entertained by pleasurable or intriguing humour but there is no real point of
purchase or moment of persuasion in these acts of consumption. David Boje, Yue
Cai-Hillon, Grace-Ann Rosile and Esther R. Thomas (Chapter 13) recount their use
of grotesque humour to educate and entertain academics interested in or persuaded
to act out various cross-cultural and consumer fantasies about McDonalds. They
relate three distinct ways of audience participation inspired by Bakhtin, Brecht and
Boal. Scripts for informing improvised performances are presented and the authors
challenge their reader to decide whether management education has a role for acting
out grotesque forms of theatre. Possibly, they over-state their point in offering
opportunities of dramatic performance for what may be more elaborate in its
repertoire of dramatic genre but probably is less novel than they claim for
participants of drama in education.
The final chapter by Robert Westwood gives a fascinating insight into the life of
a stand-up comic (that’s if you are not in the business where much of the empirical
material may seem very familiar but nevertheless affirming). While I felt somewhat
of a party pooper imagining Boje et al.’s McDonalds theatre staged at various
academic conferences, this narrative on doing a comedy act with the risk of the
performance going down well or badly was very easy to relate to other personal,
organizational experiences of work. The contention that subversion and
confrontation with the abject is at the heart of comedy, much like the jester is
792 Organization Studies 28(05)

sometimes thought to be central to the purpose of the court, I found less convincing
than his careful application of Burke’s pentad to examine the routine tasks which lie
behind producing comic performances done to get laughs from audiences.
In just over three hundred pages then, ‘Humour, Work and Organization’
encompasses a range of contexts and periods, taking you on a journey through
familiar territories and then leaving you somewhere new or unknown. I unre-
servedly recommend this book to students engaging in qualitative research, and
indeed to the majority of academics who, except for only the small handful of
humourless souls, deeply enjoy sharing their sense of humour with others and the
pursuits of curiosity, whether idle or intellectual.