Resistance in Organizations

Lecture 11

Key concepts 

Productive resistance can bring change in the management of the organisation 

 
Cynical resistance as a final form of an employee adapting the organisational values; cynicism
giving an individual a 'breathing space' 

Resisters at Work:
 Generating productive resistance in the workplace

Two situations of resistance

- Where resisters are able to influence top management’s decisions and produce eventual
change
o Resisters are organized in temporary enclaves
- Resisters are able to modify temporarily the power configurations of a situation

A focus on resistance in organizations  how organization members can co-produce a future and
how resistance activities can influence top management to achieve significant organizational change

Productive resistance: the forms of protest that develop outside of institutional channels
- It voices claims and interests that are usually not taken into account by management
decisions
- The goal  to foster development of alternative managerial practices that are likely to
benefit the organization as a whole

Resistance  produced by the systems of domination that it challenges

- New sites for identities to develop
Resisting  social phenomenon rather than a psychological one

Managers should accommodate resistance, but it is a difficult task

- They will fail to grasp the relevance of the resister’s claims
- Especially when trust is low

Resistance needs to studied through what resisters do to be listened to by top management and
eventually coproduce change

First step: make an enclave

- Formation of group of people who oppose decisions arising from prevalent power systems
and processes but still act according to the system’s rules
- The formation requires a trigger, or more

Second step: temporary realignment of power

- By sending reports to top management and by making proposals and carefully justified
claims, they presented themselves as potential contributors rather than competitors
 - Force top management to listen to enclave
- Demonstration of cooperation

Third step: accommodation

- Resisters place the top management in a position where they had to take a stand with
respects to combatants
- Accommodation is accomplished when top management realizes and the accepts that their
power prerogatives have been challenge, that new political configuration is working

The process of resisting: Choosing collaborators, reflecting on a given dysfunctional situation,

shaping a cohesive team, articulating a diagnosis, drawing conclusions, and formalizing
recommendations.

Timeline of productive resistance:

1. Insurgence = trigger that induces different emptions to take action of resistance (requires
long term build up for it to happen)
2. Enclave formation = organized operations (managing person ins resistance), mobilization
3. Temporary alignment of power relations = workers wanting to take the agenda in their own
hands, showing an incentive to provide solution and capacity to take on new roles
4. Accommodation = how management acts when facing resistance (many factors can come
into play – feeling indignation, fear of losing face, obstacle is usually relationship type high
control – low trust), creating new roles and strategies

Conclusion:
- Resisters have the ability to influence top managers and facilitate accommodation through
active efforts, which triggers change within a corporate organization
- Resistance is likely to be productive when it is couched as a challenge to established
relations of power
- The resister created new situations that shape a context of converging interests, one that
eventually allows for the construction of settlements
- Resisters --> make accommodation and change possible by building tangible challenges to
extant power relations
- Resistance --> a more ongoing social and material accomplishment, something to achieve,
constituted and sustained by the work of actors who overtly engage in a given struggle
- The work of resister generate a process of accommodation and make resistance productive

 Resistance was not tolerated and embraced because of the goodwill or competence of top
management, but because of the capacity of resisters to realign power relations and to work out
claims and solutions that were substantially convincing and useful for the organization

Decaf Resistance:

Decaf resistance --> form of resistance which neither threatens nor hams anyone, because neither
the resister nor the resisted have that much at stake

At Starbucks
The resistance --> serving decaf coffee when the coffee ordered was not caffeinated, and not
decaffeinated
- it is a silent protest against having to indulge unreasonable clients, combined with a more
general distaste for the Starbucks brand which is seen as fake and pompous

The servings of decaffeinated coffee and anonymous internet scribblings are the closest they come
to a rejection of this ideology, which they know very well is false

Cynicism only serves to tie the employees even stronger to the conditions which they are resisting
and secretly criticizing
- Acknowledging that one can see through the false vision of the organization
- Dis-identification from the ideology at Starbucks

The frustrations of the baristas about not being seen as people, but as coffee robots is an example of
this lack, which the subject will do anything to fill, in order to attain an unrealizable idea of unity

False dis-identification - "The standard notion of ideology (and corporate culture), where it traps
its subjects by offering them a secure point of identification, must be turned on its head, so that
ideology functions just as much by offering a space for false dis-identification, a false distance
towards the actual coordinates of the subject’s existence." Zizek 

Cynicism and decaf resistance --> function as necessary forums where employees can gather
courage and negotiate about how exactly various issues should be addressed

Two different takes on how to conceptualize resistance in organizations.

1. Du Plessis: Cynical, decaf resistance in the informal cracks and crevasses of the
organization. Dis-identification from corporate values.
2. Courpasson et.al: Productive resistance: Openly voiced critique, that is received well by
management and results in changes that are beneficial for the organization.
--> very different takes on resistance

Complementary theories.
- Power- for power to work there should be resistance in an organization  
- Identities and emotions (resistance in order to keep self-identity)