Summary: This study of workbloggers in Manchester asserts that contrary to common perceptions that white collar workers are disinterested in social change, workers who blog about their jobs have subversive political potential even while participating in the corporate capitalist system.

Abstract:

Anonymous workbloggers – employees who write online
diaries about their work – are often simultaneously productive workers and savage critics of the organizational cultures in which they toil. This research focuses on a small group of white-collar workers from the Greater Manchester and Lancashire area, who risk their jobs by writing publicly about their office experiences under assumed identities. Countering the notion that resistance to corporate culture leads to ‘confusion and emptiness’ (Willmott, 1993: 538), this study contributes to the recent revival of interest in worker misbehavior and recalcitrance. By focusing on workers as authors, it addresses a shortcoming in the existing critical literature, which treats informal employee resistance as an intellectually and artistically unsophisticated phenomenon. Drawing parallels with the lives and work of authors such as Franz Kafka and T.S. Eliot, it evaluates whether embedded writers, in spite of their ambivalence about the alternative, can constitute an effective counter-hegemonic force.

]]> Article: Diary of a working boy: Creative resistance among anonymous workbloggers Ethnography, Vol. 8, no. 4

Summary: This study of workbloggers in Manchester asserts that contrary to common perceptions that white collar workers are disinterested in social change, workers who blog about their jobs have subversive political potential even while participating in the corporate capitalist system.

Abstract:

Anonymous workbloggers – employees who write online
diaries about their work – are often simultaneously productive workers and savage critics of the organizational cultures in which they toil. This research focuses on a small group of white-collar workers from the Greater Manchester and Lancashire area, who risk their jobs by writing publicly about their office experiences under assumed identities. Countering the notion that resistance to corporate culture leads to ‘confusion and emptiness’ (Willmott, 1993: 538), this study contributes to the recent revival of interest in worker misbehavior and recalcitrance. By focusing on workers as authors, it addresses a shortcoming in the existing critical literature, which treats informal employee resistance as an intellectually and artistically unsophisticated phenomenon. Drawing parallels with the lives and work of authors such as Franz Kafka and T.S. Eliot, it evaluates whether embedded writers, in spite of their ambivalence about the alternative, can constitute an effective counter-hegemonic force.

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