The Literary Worlds of Workers: Narratives of Art from the Margins
28 Apr 2019-pp 113-134
TL;DR: The authors argue that workers are reflective beings who narrate their life worlds using literary tropes to outline their resistance and compromise with the extractive economy of organizations, and uncover two literary tropes of jokes and horror to outline how workers yearn for agency to reimagine material worlds in which they are immersed.
Abstract: In this study, we engage with marginal workers who are employed as security guards and janitors in India to understand how they re-enact stories of artefacts of the culture industry. We engage with workers using a narrative methodological frame to understand how literary tropes of workers could provide insights about the politics of disobedience and consent in which they may be implicated. We argue that workers are reflective beings who narrate their life worlds using literary tropes to outline their resistance and compromise with the extractive economy of organizations. We uncover two literary tropes of jokes and horror to outline how workers yearn for agency to reimagine material worlds in which they are immersed. At the same time, we outline how limits of the discursive vocabulary of workers limit their literary challenges to prevailing genres of inequality.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that one way to approach discourse is to analyze the active contribution of texts (especially, but not only, documents) to organizational processes, that is, to what extent texts such as reports, contracts, memos, signs, or work orders can be said to beperforming something.
Abstract: Research on organizational discourse typically reduces it to what members do when producing and using texts in organizational contexts, but fails to recognize that texts, on their own, also seem to make a difference. This essay shows that one way to approach discourse is to analyze the active contribution of texts (especially, but not only, documents) to organizational processes, that is, to what extent texts such as reports, contracts, memos, signs, or work orders can be said to beperforming something. After reviewing what other scholars have been saying on the question of textual agency, I show how it is possible to ascribe to texts the capacity of doing something without falling into some modern form of animism. Having done that, I explore systematically the different types of action that texts can be said to be performing by taking up Searle’s well-known classification of speech acts. This review then leads me to address questions related to the constitution of organizations, that is, to what extent t...
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TL;DR: The authors focus 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.
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