0893318905276558

“Framed
discursively, a MANAGEMENT
10.1177/0893318905276558
AUGUST
Mumby / THEORIZING
2005 COMMUNICATION
RESISTANCE QUARTERLY /
dialectical THEORIZING
RESISTANCE IN
analysis focuses
ORGANIZATION STUDIES
less on identifying A Dialectical Approach
the meaning of
DENNIS K. MUMBY
particular University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill
discourses, and
more on the
interpretive
struggle among
discourses and
practices.”
Management Communication Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 1, August 2005 19-44

DOI: 10.1177/0893318905276558
© 2005 Sage Publications
19
20 MANAGEMENT COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY / AUGUST 2005
This article provides an overview and critique of the extant research on work-
place resistance. It argues that much of this research has developed around an
implicit duality of resistance and control. In other words, critical studies have
highlighted either the growing ubiquity and subtlety of managerial control or
have privileged workers’ abilities to carve out spheres of autonomy within these
control mechanisms. It suggests that, in contrast to this implicit dualism of con-
trol and resistance, a dialectical approach better captures the notion of resis-
tance and control as mutually constitutive, and as a routine social production of
daily organizational life.
Keywords: resistance; control; dialectics; discourse; Marxism; Foucault;

poststructuralism
When the great lord passes, the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts.
—Malaysian proverb, quoted in Scott (1990)
In the past two decades, critical organization studies have been

characterized by increasingly textured and insightful analyses of
workplace control processes. As the field has become more episte-
mologically ecumenical, incorporating Marxist (e.g., Braverman,
1974; Edwards, 1979), neo-Marxist (e.g., Burawoy, 1979; Clegg &
Dunkerley, 1980), poststructuralist (e.g., Burrell, 1988; Knights,
1990; Townley, 1993), feminist (e.g., Kondo, 1990; Townsley &
Geist, 2000; Trethewey, 1999a), and postcolonial (e.g., A. Prasad,
2003b) approaches to organizational power, scholars have devel-
oped a rich array of conceptual and methodological tools by which
to develop “thick descriptions” (Geertz, 1973) of the politics of
everyday organizational life.
However, despite this ecumenicism, the field of critical organi-
zation studies has evolved around an implicit binary opposition
that privileges either organizational control processes or employee
resistance to such mechanisms of control. This dichotomy is by no
means rigid or absolute but reflects a tendency of critical scholars
to engage in a process of deferral (in the Derridian sense), whereby
a dominant pole is adopted as a way to frame and marginalize its
opposite. Such an approach has the dual effect of reifying the pre-
ferred pole and subsuming the deferred pole beneath that which is
privileged. Thus, for example, studies that focus on organizational
control processes tend to interpret worker resistance as relatively
ineffectual in transforming everyday relations of power. Indeed,
such studies frequently adopt a so-called reproduction model of
power and control where forms of resistance are framed as ulti-
Mumby / THEORIZING RESISTANCE 21
mately complicit with extant power relations (e.g., Burawoy, 1979;

Willis, 1977). In contrast, studies that privilege workplace resis-
tance often romanticize employee efforts to resist organizational
control (e.g., Bell & Forbes, 1994; Scott, 1990), situating such
practices in an “authentic, pristine space of resistance” (Kondo,
1990, p. 224) that is untouched by organizational control efforts.
This so-called fault line around which critical organization stud-
ies is organized is reflected in the development of the field during
the past 20 years or so. While early critical studies focused almost
exclusively on organizational processes of control and domination,
more recently the pendulum has swung more toward a focus on—
perhaps even celebration of—possibilities for employee resistance.
In this article, I argue that both of these positions are problematic as
ways of understanding the dynamics of organizational power.
Instead, by adopting a more dialectical approach to control and
resistance we can better understand the ways in which the two are
mutually implicative and coproductive. Thus, as the opening epi-
graph implies, the focus of critical research should be on neither the
bow (an ostensible act of obeisance to power) nor the fart (a covert
act of resistance to power) but rather on the ways in which these
intersect in the moment to moment to produce complex and often
contradictory dynamics of control and resistance. As such, I share
A. Prasad and Prasad’s (1998) claim that
resistance is best understood as a socially constructed category

emerging out of the multiple interpretations of both workplace
actors and academic researchers. Therefore, it is important to avoid
essentializing routine resistance and treating it as an established set
of actions or behaviors. (p. 251)
Such an approach avoids the tendency of scholars to romanticize

and/or hypostatize resistance, seeing it in every nook and cranny of
organizational life.
The goal in this article, then, is to develop a dialectical perspec-
tive that emphasizes the discursive conditions under which the
dynamics of control and resistance unfold. Such an approach does
not argue that the control–resistance dynamic is a purely discursive
phenomenon. Rather, I suggest that all forms of organizational
behavior—discursive or material—can be understood through the
frame of discourse, focusing on the ways that organizational be-

havior is subject to competing efforts to shape and fix its meaning.
In this context, the dialectical study of control and resistance
addresses how organizational stakeholders and interest groups
engage with, resist, accommodate, reproduce, and transform the
interpretive possibilities and meaning systems that constitute daily
organizational life.
The remainder of this article, then, unfolds as follows. First, I
briefly address the elements of a dialectical approach to power and
control. Second, I provide a reading of the extant literature on
workplace resistance, adopting the dialectical approach as an inter-
pretive frame. Third, I suggest further directions for research on the
dialectics of workplace control and resistance.
A DIALECTICAL APPROACH
A dialectical approach to the study of human behavior is, of

course, by no means new and is a constituent feature of criti-
cal thinkers from Hegel (1977), through Marx (1967), to first-
generation Frankfurt school researchers such as Horkheimer and
Adorno (1988), through Western Marxists such as Lukács (1971)
and Gramsci (1971), to poststructuralists such as Bakhtin (1984).
Although diverse in their approaches, each addresses the ways in
which human social order is premised on tensions and contradic-
tions that underlie apparent cohesion and that point to potential
social change and transformation. For some of these thinkers, the
resolution of these dualities and contradictions involves grand syn-
thesis and absolute, transcendent knowledge (Hegel and Lukács
and, in some readings, Marx), while for others it is the constant
exploration and maintenance of tension and contradiction that
opens the space for critical reflection and praxis. Thus, Adorno’s
(1973) “negative dialectics” involves precisely this refusal to
engage in transcendence or grand synthesis and chooses the more
difficult path of keeping tensions and contradictions in constant
play. Such synthesizing tendencies Adorno described as “identity
thinking,” in which all phenomena are reduced to a single, mono-
lithic (and nondialectical) mode of explanation. Thus, if we define

dialectics as the dynamic interplay and articulation together of
opposites (e.g., control and resistance), then an analysis that in-
vokes a negative dialectic would not attempt to arrive at some kind
of synthetic resolution (e.g., resistance can be explained in terms
of, and seen as reproducing, control) but would rather explore the
possibilities that exist in keeping the opposites in tension and play.
In critical organization studies, Benson (1977) provided a useful
way of framing dialectics, situating it specifically in relation to
praxis and ethics:
The commitment to praxis is both a description—that is, that people

under some circumstances can become active agents reconstructing
their own social relations and ultimately themselves on the basis of
rational analysis—and an ethical commitment—that is, that social
science should contribute to the process of reconstruction, to the lib-
eration of human potential through the production of new social
formations.
Dialectical analysis contributes to this process in part by dereify-
ing established social patterns and structures—points out their arbi-
trary character, undermines their sense of inevitability, uncovers the
contradictions and limits of the present order, and reveals the mech-
anisms of transformation. (pp. 5-6)
Benson’s (1977) dialectical approach and Adorno’s (1973) neg-

ative dialectics have considerable resonance for my effort to con-
ceptualize the control–resistance dynamic. In brief, I suggest that
resistance (and theorizing about resistance) be understood as an
effort to engage in some form of praxis—individual or collective,
routine or organized—in the context of “established social patterns
and structures” (including mechanisms of control), such that these
patterns and structures are, at some level, dereified and their “iden-
tity logic” interrogated. In this context, critical studies of work-
place resistance need to address the mechanisms by which the dia-
lectic of control and resistance produces—either at the level of the
day-to-day or in the longer term—critical reflection and transfor-
mation, and reproduction of the status quo. In other words, a dialec-
tical analysis explores the ongoing tensions and contradictions that
constitute the process by which organizational actors attempt to
shape workplace practices.
Framed discursively, a dialectical analysis focuses less on iden-

tifying the meaning of particular discourses, and more on the inter-
pretive struggles among discourses and practices. Analyses
explore how social actors attempt to “fix” meanings in ways that
resist and/or reproduce extant relations of power. In this con-
text, workplace resistance is “best understood as a local social pro-
duction involving the discursive participation (willing or other-
wise) of different organization members” (P. Prasad & Prasad,
2000, p. 389). Again, such an approach eschews the idea of resis-
tance as a set of behaviors that can be specified a priori and looks
instead at “how it is constituted in local workplace situations”
(p. 389).
In the body of the article, then, I apply this dialectical approach
to extant research on workplace resistance. My goals here are two-
fold: first, to examine the degree to which critical research has
reproduced the control–resistance dichotomy; and second, to sug-
gest ways in which a dialectical approach to workplace resistance
might be further developed.
ANALYZING THE
RESISTANCE-CONTROL DIALECTIC
IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES
Perhaps appropriately for an article with a dialectical focus, the

study of workplace resistance rests on a curious duality. One one
hand, a number of authors bemoan the critical focus on organi-
zational control mechanisms at the expense of attention to work-
place resistance. Such has been this apparent fascination with pro-
cesses of power and domination that Taylor, Flanagin, Cheney, and
Seibold (2001) were led to comment that “so far, the topic of resis-
tance has been little explored by organizational communication
scholars” (p. 124). In management studies, Thompson and Ackroyd
(1995) expressed concern that the “recalcitrant worker” is fast
becoming an endangered species in critical organization studies,
whereas Gabriel (1999, p. 191) criticized the “premature requiem”
for employee workplace resistance.
On the other hand, a closer examination belies this pessimism as

the study of workplace resistance seems to be alive and flourishing.
In fact, the past 10 years or so has seen the emergence of a signifi-
cant body of research incorporating a number of perspectives
devoted to this topic (e.g., Ackroyd & Thompson, 1999; Hodson,
1995; Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994; A. Prasad & Prasad, 1998;
Trethewey, 1997). Indeed, P. Prasad and Prasad’s (1998) overview
of research on routine worker resistance identifies studies from
several perspectives, including Marxist, neo-Marixist, critical-
cultural, feminist, interpretive, and poststructuralist–postcolonial.
In much of this work, the focus is typically on the everyday strug-
gles of workers to carve out spheres of autonomy through vari-
ous informal (often guerrilla-like) practices. Indeed, this body of
research rarely focuses on direct, confrontational forms of worker
resistance and/or collective, organized resistance efforts, such as
union organizing. In this sense, everyday worker resistance is gen-
erally conceived as functioning interstitially within the formal
economy of the workplace.
Regardless of theoretical perspective, however, scholars take the
following premise as the starting point for studies of workplace
resistance:
Control can never be absolute and in the space provided by the inde-
terminacy of labour, employees will constantly find ways of evad-
ing and subverting managerial organization and direction at work.
This tendency is a major source of the dynamism within the work-
place. (Ackroyd & Thompson, 1999, p. 47)
Framed in this manner, studying the dialectic of control and

resistance is precisely about understanding how this indeterminacy
is subject to various and competing efforts to shape it. In Edwards’s
(1979) sense, this indeterminacy is at the center of the workplace as
a “contested terrain.” In the rest of this section, then, I examine how
critical scholars have explored and resolved this indeterminacy,
with particular attention to studies of resistance. In part, I wish to
focus on the ways in which the control–resistance relationship has
been treated as a dualistic rather than a dialectic relationship, illus-
trating how critical research has tended to resolve this tension by
privileging one pole or the other.
ORGANIZATIONS AS
SITES OF CONTROL (AND RESISTANCE):
NEO-MARXIST AND FOUCAULDIAN APPROACHES
Despite the relatively wide epistemological divide between

them, neo-Marxist and more recent Foucauldian studies have fallen
prey to the dualistic approach to the study of control and resistance
identified above. Heavily influenced by Braverman’s (1974) clas-
sic Marxist analysis of the structural conditions of 20th-century
monopoly capitalism, and Burawoy’s (1979) critical ethnography
of the subjective experience of work at the point of production, crit-
ical researchers have examined extensively how employee iden-
tities are constructed in ways that reproduce the managerially
defined organizational culture and ideology (e.g., Rosen, 1985,
1988; Steinem, 1999; Willmott, 1993; Witten, 1993). Similarly,
Foucauldian-inspired critical research has taken seriously his
(1979) claim that factories are similar to prisons in which disciplin-
ary mechanisms operate in the modern organization to produce
docile employees (e.g., Holmer Nadesan, 1997; Townley, 1993)
Even though employee resistance figures at some level in both
forms of analysis, it is usually read as subsumed within, and repro-
ductive of, these control mechanisms. In Burawoy’s (1979) study,
for example, workers’ principal mode of collective resistance—the
game of “making out”—is analyzed as an ideological mechanism
that functions to reproduce capitalist relations of production by
obscuring the inherent structural antagonisms between labor and
capital. It is interesting to note that although the discourse of the
game is a collectively shared employee resource, the actual process
of making out involves the individual employee’s relationship to
the machine. In this sense, resistance is ultimately framed in indi-
vidual terms, and any sense of collective worker consciousness and
struggle is subsumed beneath interpersonal forms of conflict.
Similar mechanisms can be seen operating in other critical anal-
yses of the workplace throughout the 1980s and 1990s (e.g., Casey,
1995; Kunda, 1992; Willmott, 1993). Rosen’s (1988) neo-Marxist
ethnography of an advertising agency, for example, examined
forms of resistance to the regimes of control in the workplace; how-
ever, these are interpreted as ultimately reaffirming the prevailing
workplace hegemony. Similarly, Witten (1993) argued that organi-
zational storytelling helps create a “culture of obedience” whereby

any subversive elements in employee stories remain only at the
symbolic level and do not translate into material change in the orga-
nization. Indeed, she argued that such “symbolic subversion” may
actually provide an outlet for employee frustration and sense of
powerless, hence deflecting attention away from the oppressive
material conditions of organizational life.
Foucauldian studies similarly ascribe large amounts of agency
to managerial forms of control and relatively little to the employees
who struggle with them everyday. However, what distinguishes
this work from neo-Marxist–inspired analyses (apart from the con-
ceptual differences) is the focus on larger managerial discourses of
surveillance and normalization. For example, from a feminist per-
spective, Ferguson (1984) deployed Foucault to deconstruct
bureaucracy as a pervasive disciplinary mechanism that positions
managers and workers alike as feminized and docile. In the same
vein, Holmer-Nadesan’s (1997) analysis of personality testing
examines it as a discursive technology of control that constructs the
ideal organization member as the docile subject and/or object of
“corporate culturalism” (Willmott, 1993, p. 540).
How, then, might one assess this body of research from a dia-
lectical perspective? First, if one examines some of the prevailing
“terministic screens” for talking about the exercise of organiza-
tional power, almost all position management as the active and suc-
cessful agent in the power dynamic, while largely eliding the
worker as an agentic figure of resistance (Thompson & Ackroyd,
1995). Thus, critical organization studies address “tightening the
iron cage” (Barker, 1993), “corporate colonization” (Deetz, 1992),
“normative control” (Kunda, 1992), “manufacturing consent”
(Burawoy, 1979), the construction of “paper dolls” (Holmer
Nadesan, 1997), and “designer selves” (Casey, 1995), to name a
few. Willmott (1993) even invoked an Orwellian leitmotif in his cri-
tique of the ubiquity of the corporate culture movement. In each
instance, although there may be some effort to articulate the possi-
bilities for worker resistance, it remains largely unrealized (per-
haps latent at best) in the face of the onward, irresistible march of
managerialism and its attendant rationalization processes.
Second, and related, much of this research fails to adequately
theorize the possibilities for human agency at the level of everyday
organizing. Giddens’ (1979) characterization of agency as the abil-

ity to “act otherwise” is frequently absent from these studies. With
Foucault-inspired research, this elision is, in part, accounted for by
the frequent lack of attention to the empirics of everyday organiz-
ing and a privileging of managerial texts (on total quality manage-
ment [TQM], teams, corporate culture, etc.) as the primary object
of analysis. As Ackroyd and Thompson (1999) pointed out, one of
the consequences of this textual focus is “the removal of workers
from the academic gaze and the distinction between the intent and
outcome of managerial strategies and practices” (p. 161). In
Adorno’s (1973) terms, we see here a form of identity logic in oper-
ation: An espoused managerial discourse is taken as imposed intact
on daily organization life. Thus, “some of the strongest claims for
the ‘governance of the soul’ are simply read off from the stated
goals of senior management and corporate discourses” (Ackroyd &
Thompson, 1999, p. 161). In much of this research, then, there is
relatively little focus on the everyday dynamics of organizational
life and the ways that organization members actively engage in an
interpretive struggle with these discourses. The concerns focus
rather on explicating the conceptions of worker subjectivity con-
structed in these managerial texts.
In neo-Marxist research, this lack of attention to human agency
stems, in part, from the limitations of the conceptual tools avail-
able. The popularity among scholars of Althusser’s (1971) “ISA”
(ideological state apparatuses) essay has led to a relatively impov-
erished conception of the relationship between ideology and sub-
jectivity, whereby subjectivity is conceived as interpellated, or
hailed, in ways that simply reproduce capitalist relations of produc-
tion. Possibilities for alternate, more agentic conceptions of sub-
jectivity are theorized out of Althusser’s model, leaving us with a
so-called empty subject who is largely a bearer of the dominant ide-
ology. In this sense, the relationship between ideology and dis-
course is conceived in an unproblematic, undialectical manner,
with limited exploration of the tensions and contradictions that
underlie the process of interpretive struggle among workplace
actors. The idea of the control–resistance dialectic as a so-called
local social production is subsumed beneath a larger, structural
view of social actors as the bearers of their class, race, and gender
positions.
In general, then, neo-Marxist and Foucauldian analyses of the

control–resistance dialectic are subject to the critique that they read
this relationship in a rather functionalist manner, occluding agency
in favor of a structural analysis of the disciplinary mechanisms of
the workplace (be this a discourse similar to making out or a disci-
plinary technology such as personality testing). Where employee
agency and possibilities for resistance are highlighted, such resis-
tance is generally framed in ways that are consistent with Willis’s
(1977) notion of “partial penetration”; that is, while possessing
some insight into the processes by which hegemonic systems of
meaning are constructed, employees are ultimately unable to fully
penetrate the so-called deep structure power relations that are
rooted in capitalist relations of production, and which system-
atically exploit workers through the privatized accumulation of
surplus value and capital. Thus, similar to Willis’s “lads,” workers
end up reproducing the very system that they intend to subvert
through their various resistance practices.
ORGANIZATIONS AS SITES OF
(CONTROL AND) RESISTANCE
Much of the research on employee resistance focuses on the rou-

tine practices of workers as they engage with the everyday control
mechanisms and disciplinary practices of organizational life. In
these studies, resistance is often framed more as an interstitial,
covert practice that frequently operates “below the radar” of formal
organizational life (Bell & Forbes, 1994; Murphy, 1998; A. Prasad
& Prasad, 1998; P. Prasad & Prasad, 2000; Scott, 1990). Although
some forms of resistance exhibit open hostility to managerial con-
trol efforts, much of it relies on the interpretive ambiguity that sur-
rounds the meaning of organizing practices.
Underlying virtually all of this research is the notion that work-
ers are active, creative participants whose level of “discursive con-
sciousness” (Giddens, 1979) enables them to appropriate organiza-
tional control mechanisms for their own ends. Hence, they are able
to subvert the so-called official organizational ideology, producing
unintended consequences that undermine managerial efforts to cre-
ate a totalizing system of control. This shift toward a more robust
notion of worker agency is, in part, a response to the perceived fail-

ure of neo-Marxist studies of the workplace to adequately theorize
worker subjectivity in the context of organizational power rela-
tions. Rather than simply imputing subjectivity by virtue of class
location, positioning workers as “passive carriers of political and
ideological structures” (Ezzamel, Willmott, & Worthington, 2001,
p. 1057), critical researchers have argued for analyses that place
worker autonomy and agency front and center.
However, this growing body of research is eclectic theoretically,
comprising a number of divergent conceptions of resistance that
vary greatly on a number of different dimensions, including con-
ceptions of agency, what counts as resistance, the relationship be-
tween resistance and control, the impact of resistance, and so on.
Below, I attempt to make sense of these varying conceptions.
Resistance as typologies of behavior. There is a small body of

research—emerging largely out of sociology—that attempts to
enumerate and identify specific forms of behavior that can be iden-
tified as resistant to organizational control mechanisms. In such
research, resistance is generally framed as having specific proper-
ties that distinguish it from other forms of nonresistant organiza-
tional behavior. For example, in his study of temporary employees,
Tucker (1993) identified a number of different forms of resistance,
including gossip, confrontation, resignation, toleration, theft, sab-
otage, noncooperation, collective action, formal complaints, use of
the law, and violence. Tucker defined resistance as “social control
directed upward” (p. 26), suggesting an active, agentic conception
of employee behavior. However, the study is little more than an
effort to enumerate different types of employee resistance and con-
tains no theory of resistance per se. Furthermore, the implicit con-
ception of resistance with which Tucker operated is a behavioral
one, with the emphasis on how such behaviors enable temporary
workers to engage in conflict management.
Hodson’s (1991, 1995, 1999) research is similarly devoted to
identifying resistance as a specific workplace activity and differen-
tiating among different forms of this phenomenon in the work-
place. The rationale for this focus is twofold: first, worker resis-
tance is an underdeveloped concept that has been neglected by
sociologists; and second, that workers are not passive bearers of the
production process but instead are active participants in the dynam-
ics of workplace power relations. Hodson’s goal, then, is to develop
a conceptual model of worker resistance that pays due regard to the
creativity of workers and, at the same time, addresses resistance as
an everyday, endemic feature of organizing. However, this concep-
tual model is more accurately described as a system of classifica-
tion that differentiates among four broad forms of worker resis-
tance: “deflecting abuse, regulating the amount and intensity of
work, defending autonomy and expanding worker control under
worker participation schemes” (Hodson, 1995, p. 102). Again,
while this work is useful in identifying everyday efforts by workers
to defend and expand their “sphere of discretion” (May, 1999) in
the workplace, there is no real effort to develop a conceptual model
that situates resistance within a larger, dialectical framework that
explores the intersection of discourse, power, subjectivity, meaning
systems, and so on.
In general, this typological approach to resistance has several
limitations when examined in terms of the dialectical approach
developed here. First, it reifies resistance as a discrete, identifiable,
and largely behavioral phenomenon that has a particular intent
aimed at achieving specific organizational consequences. Although
resistance can be an intentional, fully conscious form of behavior
that has important organizational consequences, this approach
overlooks the discursive and dynamic character of the control–
resistance relationship. In other words, the interpretive ambiguity
inherent in the control–resistance relationship means that certain
behaviors can have multiple meanings, and the meaning and conse-
quences of specific forms of resistance may not be fully transpar-
ent to either the workers engaged in them or the managers trying
to attenuate their effects. Second, and related, this behavioral
approach overlooks the ways that forms of resistance may have the
unintended consequence of reproducing dominant forms of power
(e.g., as in Burawoy’s [1979] analysis of making out). Finally,
while this research identifies resistance arising in response to work-
place control efforts, it rather overlooks the extent to which resis-
tance and control are coproduced. As such, the specific, locally
produced character of the dialectic—and its attendant ambiguities,
contradictions, and so on—are elided in favor of a relatively

straightforward explication of behavioral efforts to exert work-
place autonomy.
Exploring resistance as a discursive practice. With the advent of

the “discursive turn” and in particular poststructuralist approaches
to organization studies, resistance has been analyzed increasingly
as a discursive practice. Within this general framework, scholars
have been interested in resistance as a routine yet complex, embed-
ded social process, the meaning of which is contingent on the con-
textual features of organizing (e.g., Clair, 1994; Collinson, 1992,
1994; Fleming & Spicer, 2002; Holmer Nadesan, 1996; Jermier
et al., 1994; Knights & McCabe, 2000; Murphy, 1998; A. Prasad,
2003a; A. Prasad & Prasad, 1998; Trethewey, 1997).
This effort by poststructuralist scholars to thematize worker
resistance is, in part, a response to the perceived neglect of em-
ployee subjects as agents and thus constitutes an attempt to coun-
teract the impression that power within the Foucauldian framework
is a force from which there is no possibility for escape. The current
focus on resistance, therefore, represents a means not only of
exploring the positivity of power (in Foucault’s sense) but also of
conceptualizing agency as positive and productive, and more than
simply a result of the reactivity of “subject effects.”
Consistent with a poststructuralist perspective, most current
resistance research explores workers’ deployment of discursive
strategies in attempting to create “resistant spaces” (Gabriel, 1999)
within the larger discourses of managerialism. For example, schol-
ars have examined various discursive tactics, including irony
(Fleming & Sewell, 2002; Trethewey, 1997, 1999b), cynicism
(Fleming & Spicer, 2003), disidentification (Holmer Nadesan,
1996), humor and joking (Collinson, 2002; Fleming & Spicer,
2002), “bitching” and gossip (Sotirin, 2000; Sotirin & Gottfried,
1999), mimicry (Bhabha, 1994; A. Prasad & Prasad, 2003a), par-
ody (Graham, 1993), modes of dress (Gottfried, 1994), “hidden
transcripts” (Murphy, 1998; Scott, 1990), “office graffiti” (Bell &
Forbes, 1994), and discursive distancing (Collinson, 1994).
Although this body of research covers a large array of discursive
tactics, almost all of these studies examine not only routine dis-
course but also forms of resistance that are covert and noncon-
frontational, operating in the interstices of organizational life. In

this sense, these studies invariably examine the processes through
which social actors strategically engage the systems of meaning
that constitute the daily fabric of organizing. Thus, a key focus of
this body of work is explication of the ambiguity and indetermi-
nacy of meaning that characterizes organizational discourse pro-
cesses. Although certain “grand narratives” of management may
frame interpretive possibilities, the struggle over meaning is always
open-ended, always characterized by an excess of signification that
makes available possibilities for constructing alternative, resistant,
counterhegemonic accounts of organizing.
One of the most significant aspects of this body of research is
that in recent years it has taken a significantly gendered turn. Many
of the studies cited above directly address the ways in which resis-
tance practices are strongly tied to the performance of gender (West
& Zimmerman, 1987) in the context of patriarchal organizational
structures. Much of this work focuses on the control–resistance
dialectic as a key feature of the ways that organization members
(men and women) discursively manage their gendered identities in
the face of management efforts at control and surveillance.
An early example of this research is Collinson’s (1988, 1992)
critical ethnography of working-class masculinity in a truck manu-
facturing factory. Collinson showed how humor among the male,
working-class shop-floor employees functions as a discursive prac-
tice that simultaneously resists managerial culture, produces con-
formity to the strongly masculine culture of the shop floor, and
maintains control over workers’ production output. In dialectical
terms, Collinson illustrated how these simultaneous functions
are contradictory, enabling a strongly resistant culture rooted in
working-class masculine conceptions of work, family, and sexual-
ity, and a form of individualism and autonomy (rooted in what
Collinson [1992] called “critical narcissism”) that militates against
the possibility for genuinely collective resistance to managerial
control efforts. Ultimately, Collinson saw the form of masculine
agency and resistance that characterizes the shop-floor workers as
inimical to genuine possibilities for workplace democracy.
Other, more explicitly feminist studies have focused on female
employees’ efforts to discursively establish spheres of autonomy
in organizational settings. Bell and Forbes (1994), for example,
examined secretarial office graffiti as a discursive practice that uses

feminine tropes to carve out an informal, interstitial space of resis-
tance to the demands of bureaucracy and rationalized organiza-
tional life. Here, the preservation of a feminine (sexualized, em-
bodied) identity that is autonomous from the impersonal character
of bureaucratic life is central. Trethewey’s (1997) feminist post-
structuralist ethnography of female clients in a human service orga-
nization similarly focuses on the clients’ efforts to maintain a
degree of autonomy in the face of a bureaucratically administered
system that, in Ferguson’s (1984) sense, attempts to construct them
as feminized and dependent. Trethewey showed how the women
used irony to exploit the contradictions of the system and subvert
the formal bureaucratic procedures that dictated their subject posi-
tions as clients.
Finally, Kondo’s (1990) feminist ethnography of a Japanese
confectionary factory is perhaps the most sophisticated in its effort
to examine the relationships among discourse, identity, and organi-
zational relations of control and resistance. Although her analysis
owes much to poststructuralist conceptions of power and dis-
course, she refused any temptation to frame the dynamics of power
as a purely discursive process. Instead, she situated her analysis
within the larger political economy and history of Japanese society
generally and the small business in particular, showing how the
subject positions of the various actors (owners, male artisans,
female semiskilled workers, etc.) are closely tied to the complex
conceptions of family, self, work, and the public–private relation-
ship that operate in Japanese society. For our purposes, the most
interesting feature of Kondo’s analysis is that she framed resistance
as a shifting, contextual, and contradiction-laden feature of every-
day organizing; indeed, neither a behavioral or ideological analysis
would be able to explain the dynamics of resistance operating here.
For example, she illustrated how the female workers’ resistance
strategies are made possible, in part, by their relatively precarious
position in the workplace and their subject position as Japanese
women whose primary role is in the home. Thus, while the male
artisans occupy a position of privilege in the workplace by virtue of
their gender and skill, the women workers discursively construct
the artisans as dependent on the formers’ caregiving skills. Of
course, and consistent with a dialectical analysis, there is an inher-
ent tension here between the women’s abilities to carve out a space
of autonomy and their ongoing deployment of a traditional, mar-
ginalized gendered identity that makes such autonomy possible in
this particular context. Such a tension is not resolvable but is central
to the ongoing management of meaning in this workplace.
In short, studies that examine organizational relations of power
from a gendered perspective add considerable texture to our under-
standing of the resistance–control dialectic. Much of this research
does not provide a straightforward reading of feminine resistance
against patriarchal power but instead explores the complex dynam-
ics involved in gendered identity management. In this context,
working-class masculinity, for example, is resistant and hege-
monic; and pink-collar femininity constructs ambivalent subject
positions that resist and reproduce insititutionalized relations of
power and control (Sotirin & Gottfried, 1999).
Given the discourse focus of this body of research, an important
issue concerns the generative mechanisms for resistance. While
Marxist, class-based analyses situate the impetus for resistance
within the inherent structural antagonisms of capitalist relations of
production, discourse-based, poststructuralist approaches possess
no such foundational mechanism. Instead, resistance is framed as a
form of identity work; that is, social actors engage with organiza-
tional discourses as a means of securing a stable sense of identity,
even though under contemporary capitalist conditions, identities
are inherently subject to contradictions and insecurities (Kerfoot &
Knights, 1996; Knights, 1990; Knights & McCabe, 2000; Knights
& Vurdubakis, 1994; Willmott, 1990, 1994). In this context and
absent the grounding of class consciousness, self-formation be-
comes the primary impetus for resistance. As Collinson (2003)
argued, the shift from an ascribed self in feudal societies to an
achieved self in capitalism sets up different discursive conditions of
possibility, simultaneously rendering identities more insecure and
creating possibilities for different subject responses and positions.
Thus, a worker may pursue a conformist subjectivity in which she
or he continually pursues a secure identity in the face of constant
pressures to achieve. Alternatively, workers may attempt to articu-
late resistant identities that challenge the dominant managerial
discourses and, hence, expand the conditions of discursive possi-
bility for organizational subjectivities.
It is within this theoretical framework that much of the post-

structuralist studies on resistance can be read, particularly the
research that examines the discursive tropes of irony, cynicism,
parody, and so on. Here, the goal of researchers is to examine the
ways that organization members create resistant spaces by virtue of
their engagement with and appropriation of extant managerial dis-
courses. As I indicated above, such discursive resistance is rooted
in the possibilities for alternative interpretations, while at the same
time articulating these alternatives in ways that do not directly con-
front the dominant discursive regime. In A. Prasad and Prasad’s
(1998) terms, such strategies involve “subtle subversions,” “ambig-
uous accommodations,” and various forms of disengagement that
are difficult to identify as direct forms of worker recalcitrance.
For example, Ezzamel and colleagues (2001) identified “being
unreasonably reasonable” as a discursive tactic deployed by work-
ers as a way to resist managerial attempts to “re-engineer” produc-
tion. This strategy allowed workers to prevent management from
encroaching on their perceived sense of autonomy and collective
identity in the production process. Thus, Ezzamell and colleagues
(2001) read worker resistance as “a means of protecting an estab-
lished space for reproducing the sense of self-identity that had been
developed during the era of unplanned responsible autonomy”
(p. 1068). Similarly, P. Prasad and Prasad (2000) identified “careful
carelessness” as an indirect form of resistance to technological
innovation that would negatively affect worker autonomy. In each
case, resistance is medium and product of the indeterminacy of
meaning that characterizes everyday organizing practices.
How, then, does this body of research “stack up” in terms of its
contribution to a dialectical approach to the control–resistance
dynamic? In general, poststructuralist analyses have analyzed work-
place resistance as a discursive practice that needs to be examined
not as a specific, identifiable phenomenon or set of behaviors, but
as a complex, often contradictory, and socially situated attempt to
construct oppositional meanings and identities. Given the shifting
and precarious character of organizational meaning systems, resis-
tance practices are contingent on the ability of knowledgeable
actors to strategically engage with and adapt to available dis-
courses. Such forms of engagement may involve the articulation
together of several discourses that may be coherent, contradictory,

oppositional, and so on. Although these articulations may create
moments of discursive stability, such moments are relatively tem-
porary as other discourses, identities, and interpretive possibilities
emerge.
Perhaps most important, however, the best of this research has
resisted efforts to dichotomize the control–resistance relationship,
situating it neither as inevitably reproducing capitalist relations of
production, nor as the romantic expression of an authentic, unitary
identity. As Kondo (1990) suggested, resistance is neither mono-
lithic nor internally coherent and frequently has unintended con-
sequences; what seems resistant can turn out to be collusive, and
apparent accommodation can produce possibilities for change. The
same act can be resistant in one context and reproduce extant power
relations in another. The devil is in the discursive details.
CONCLUSION:
THE FUTURE OF RESEARCH
ON WORKPLACE RESISTANCE
In this article, I have tried to provide an assessment of the current

scholarship on employee workplace resistance, arguing that much
of this research is organized around a dualistic, dichotomous con-
ception of the relationship between control and resistance. Given
this dichotomy, I have argued that the richest and most powerful
conceptions are those that transcend the dichotomy that sees resis-
tance as either (a) the practice of a wholly coherent, fully self-aware
subject operating from a pristine, authentic space of resistance or
(b) the activities of social actors that are subsumed within, and ulti-
mately ineffectual against, a larger system of power relations.
Although these are limit cases, these tendencies are implicit in
much research on resistance. Moreover, one can argue that both
positions adopt an incipient functionalism: The first celebrates a
fully functional participant who is positioned as epistemologically
privileged simply by virtue of his or her marginal location in the
field of power relations; the second frames the practices of resistant

subjects as functionally reproducing extant power relations.
Transcending this dichotomy enables the study of resistance as
a set of situated discursive and nondiscursive practices that are
simultaneously enabling and constraining, coherent and contradic-
tory, complex and simple, efficacious and ineffectual. In this con-
text, social actors are neither romanticized nor viewed as unwitting
dupes but rather are seen as engaging in a locally produced, discur-
sive process of self-formation that is always ongoing, always ten-
sion filled. This self-formation process involves drawing on larger
discourses that are articulated together in ways that may be coher-
ent and contradictory. The important point here is not to resolve this
dialectic through some grand synthesis but rather (and consistent
with Adorno’s [1973] negative dialectic) to explore how the ten-
sions and contradictions that inhere in the dialectic can create pos-
sibilities for organizational change and transformation.
Furthermore, the dialectical approach to resistance and control
outlined here lends itself to the process of “dereification” (Benson,
1977) identified above. Research that focuses predominantly on
either resistance or control runs the risk of reifying one or the other.
Certainly, Marxist studies have sometimes fallen prey to reifying
capitalist forms of workplace control rather than explaining the
mechanisms by which they are produced, resisted, accommodated,
and so on. Similarly, resistance studies have imputed social actors
with levels of agency and insight that sometimes stretch credulity.
A dialectical approach, in contrast, insists on the contingency of
organizational life, exploring how even the most sedimented prac-
tices are precarious and—to a certain degree—arbitrary. With its
focus on the indeterminacy of organizational meanings and prac-
tices, dialectics refuses a monologic reading that reifies practice as
either resistant or dominant.
The development of textured and nuanced approaches to the
study of resistance also seems to have become increasingly urgent
as forms of workplace control and surveillance—particularly in an
era of post-Fordist workplace regimes—have increased in strength
and ubiquity. Indeed, the impetus for the increased emphasis on
routine, everyday forms of resistance seems to have arisen, in part,
out of the recognition of decreased possibilities for collective,
organized, and confrontational forms of worker resistance. It is no

accident, then, that researchers have recently focused more on the
interstitial spaces of organizational life as the place where resis-
tance may be flourishing. It is via a dialectical model, I would sug-
gest, that the limitations and possibilities of these forms of resis-
tance are best explored.
Finally, the turn to a discourse-based approach to the study of
resistance risks neglecting how the disciplinary practices of organi-
zational life have very real material consequences for organization
members (Cloud, 2001). It seems a very hollow victory to celebrate
the ability of social actors to engage in irony, parody, mimicry, and
so on, while neglecting the extent to which the lives of organization
members are becoming more oppressive, more heavily surveilled,
and generally more insecure. In this context, it is important that
critical scholars continue to explore the dialectical relationship
between discourse and the material world, examining how the
structural, political, and economic antagonisms of the workplace
are medium and outcome of discursive struggles over meaning
(Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Reed, 2000). Indeed, one might argue
that the very movement toward the study of covert, routine forms of
discursive resistance is indicative of the capitulation of critical
scholars to the success of managerialism and capitalism. I am
certainly not rejecting a discourse approach to organizing here.
Rather, I am arguing that a dialectical approach helps us to avoid a
form of “text positivism” whereby in arguing that organizations are
nothing but text, we forget that discourse gets played out in, and
constitutes, a world that affects social actors at the level of the
everyday.
In sum, the study of resistance as a routine feature of organiza-
tional life has—after some years of scholarly neglect—once again
become a vibrant area of critical scholarship. In important ways
this research has mitigated the tendency of critical studies to
explore control processes to the neglect of worker agency. Hope-
fully this is not a simple pendulum swing that results in the privileg-
ing of resistance over control. Instead, it perhaps signals a con-
certed effort to explore resistance as a constitutive element in the
complex dynamics of routine organizing.
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Dennis K. Mumby (Ph.D., Southern Illinois University) is professor and

chair of the Department of Communication Studies at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research examines the relationships
among discourse, power, gender and organization. He is the coauthor (with
K. Ashcraft) of Reworking Gender (2004) and coeditor (with S. May) of
Engaging Organizational Communication Theory and Research (2005).

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“Framed

Management Communication Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 1, August 2005 19-44

Keywords: resistance; control; dialectics; discourse; Marxism; Foucault;

In the past two decades, critical organization studies have been

mately complicit with extant power relations (e.g., Burawoy, 1979;

resistance is best understood as a socially constructed category

Such an approach avoids the tendency of scholars to romanticize

frame of discourse, focusing on the ways that organizational be-

A dialectical approach to the study of human behavior is, of

lithic (and nondialectical) mode of explanation. Thus, if we define

The commitment to praxis is both a description—that is, that people

Benson’s (1977) dialectical approach and Adorno’s (1973) neg-

Framed discursively, a dialectical analysis focuses less on iden-

Perhaps appropriately for an article with a dialectical focus, the

On the other hand, a closer examination belies this pessimism as

Framed in this manner, studying the dialectic of control and

Despite the relatively wide epistemological divide between

zational storytelling helps create a “culture of obedience” whereby

organizing. Giddens’ (1979) characterization of agency as the abil-

In general, then, neo-Marxist and Foucauldian analyses of the

Much of the research on employee resistance focuses on the rou-

notion of worker agency is, in part, a response to the perceived fail-

Resistance as typologies of behavior. There is a small body of

contradictions, and so on—are elided in favor of a relatively

Exploring resistance as a discursive practice. With the advent of

frontational, operating in the interstices of organizational life. In

examined secretarial office graffiti as a discursive practice that uses

It is within this theoretical framework that much of the post-

together of several discourses that may be coherent, contradictory,

In this article, I have tried to provide an assessment of the current

field of power relations; the second frames the practices of resistant

organized, and confrontational forms of worker resistance. It is no

Ackroyd, S., & Thompson, P. (1999). Organizational misbehaviour. London:

Deetz, S. (1992). Democracy in an age of corporate colonization: Developments

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (1988). Dialectic of enlightenment (J. Cumming,

Rosen, M. (1985). Breakfast at Spiro’s: Dramaturgy and dominance. Journal of

Dennis K. Mumby (Ph.D., Southern Illinois University) is professor and

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