The ‘Missing Masses’ of Resistance: An Ethnographic Understanding of a Workplace Dispute
| Author | Darren McCabe,David Knights |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12170 |
| Published date | 01 July 2016 |
| Date | 01 July 2016 |
British Journal of Management, Vol. 27, 534–549 (2016)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12170
The ‘Missing Masses’ of Resistance:
An Ethnographic Understanding
of a Workplace Dispute
David Knights and Darren McCabe
Department of Organization, Work and Technology, University of Lancaster School of Management, UK
Email: david.knights11@outlook.com; d.mccabe@lancaster.ac.uk
The literature on resistance has largely attended to human agents whether in terms of
collective action or individual subjectivity. Through focusing on the ‘missing masses’ or
mundane material artefacts, this paper seeks to show how actor network theory (ANT)
can advance our understanding of resistance.Drawing upon ethnographic research during
a workplace dispute, this study explores how material artefacts as well as human actors
reflect heterogeneous relations that together successfully mobilized opposition to the im-
position of compulsory redundancies in a UK university. In so far as the mingling and
entanglement of humans and non-humans have been largely neglected in accounts of re-
sistance, we believe that an ANT informed account contributes in distinctive ways to this
literature.
Introduction
The missing masses of our society are to be found
among the nonhuman mechanisms, it is not clear
how they get there and why they are missing from
most accounts. (Latour, 1992, p. 248)
There is a long tradition of research on resis-
tance at work including studies of ocial and
unocial disputes as well as those that culmi-
nate in collective action such as a work-to-rule or
a strike (Allen, 2009; Eldridge, 1968; Gouldner,
1954; Hyman, 1972). Other scholars have focused
on dierent forms of resistance including studies
of fiddling (Mars, 1982), sabotage (Bensman and
Gerver, 1963), ‘making out’ (Burawoy, 1979; Roy,
1952), the use of humour, mental distancing, cyni-
cism and dis-identification (Collinson, 1988; 1994;
Costas and Fleming, 2009; Fleming and Spicer,
2003; Karlsson, 2011). There has also been consid-
erable research that has adopted a post-structural
approach to resistance atwork (e.g. Ezzamel, Will-
mott and Worthington,2001; Jermier, Knights and
Nord, 1994; Knights and McCabe, 1998, 2000,
2003; McCabe, 2007; Thomas and Davies, 2005a),
which has highlighted the importance of meaning
and identity.
While acknowledging the contribution of this
literature, we have sought a dierent point of
departure in actor network theory (ANT). In
the British Journal of Management (McDermott,
Fitzgerald and Buchanan, 2013; Nentwich and
Hoyer, 2013) and elsewhere (e.g. Jermier, Knights
and Nord, 1994), the resistance literature has gen-
erally focused on humans and their activities but
this neglects or takes for granted the way in which
resistance is constituted through hybrid networks
where human and non-humans mingle in com-
plex relations (cf. Alcadipani and Hassard, 2010).
Our contribution is therefore twofold: first, to pro-
vide an ethnographic account of an industrial dis-
pute in a UK university and, second, to make the
case for studying the missing objects or, as Latour
(1992) expresses it, the ‘missing masses’ when seek-
ing to understand resistance.
© 2016 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
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The ‘Missing Masses’ of Resistance 535
We are not arguing that non-humans have
never been considered in relation to resistance for
one has only to think of Bensman and Gerver’s
(1963) account of the ‘tap’ in a case of industrial
deviance to know that this is not the case. With
few exceptions (see Harrison and Laberge, 2002;
Pliskin, Romm and Marhey, 1997), however, the
tendency is for a human centred focusto marginal-
ize the complex hybrid relations betweenmaterials
and humans that were critical to the resistance
manifest in our ethnography. As full participants
in the resistance to compulsory redundancies,
we did not adopt full-blown ANT methods by
following each link in the network (Latour, 2005)
because we were unable to access management
actors other than through observing them during
sta−management meetings. Nonetheless, this
problem is mitigated partly by our full and active
involvement in the dispute, which adds to the
paper’s distinctiveness.
Legitimizing the target and approach of our
research, Ashcraft (2008) has argued that there
is ‘a tendency in critical organization scholarship
. . . to frame relations of power and resistance as
phenomena occurring in workplaces “out there”,
rather than also right here,in the academic institu-
tions in which we labourand live’ (p. 380). Because
of our involvement, it was possible to consider
‘the fears and tears of struggle – the emotional
drive that frames workplace politics’, which
are also frequently ‘downplayed’ in accounts
of resistance (Fleming and Spicer, 2008). This
involvement facilitated insights into the impor-
tance of what may be seen as banal objects often
missed by external researchers studying resistance
(Gabriel, 2012; Watson and Watson, 2012).
The paper is organized as follows. First we seek
to locate the distinctiveness of our approach by
contrasting some of the literature on resistance
with the attention we pay to material objects as
well as social relations in presenting our ethnog-
raphy. Second, we discuss our methods before
presenting empirical material to illustrate how
our understanding of resistance can be advanced
through attending to the everyday objects through
which it is mobilized. In the discussion and conclu-
sion, we summarize our arguments together with
indicating the potential of using this approach for
future studies of resistance.
Understanding materials in relations
of resistance
Although ‘materiality’ has recently been consid-
ered ‘in the field of strategy’ (Dameron, Le and
LeBaronl, 2015, p. S1; Thomas and Ambrosini,
2015), it has not been central to the analysis of re-
sistance either historically or currently. In an early
account of resistance, a human centric approach
described resistance to change as ‘a combination
of an individual reaction to frustration with strong
group-induced forces’ (Coch and French, 1948, p.
529). This social psychological and human centric
approach is widespread in the literatureon change
management, for example, and usually resistance
is seen to derive from the individual. This is clearly
evident in Caruth, Middlebrook and Rachel’s
(1985, p. 23) literature review, where it was as-
serted that ‘The reasons for resisting new policies
and job improvements oered bymanagement fall
into two broad groups: human nature and fears
or imagined threats’. The human centric nature of
these studies precludes understanding resistance
as a complex intermingling of social relations and
material objects.
An equally early and enduring body of work
contrasts with this focus on individuals in that it
addresses collective and trade union resistance to
management (Hyman, 1972) exploring industrial
action and disputes among, for example, miners
(Allen, 2009), dockers (Turnbull and Sapsford,
2001) and glass workers (Lane and Roberts, 1971).
These studies were steeped in an understanding of
the material world and, especially, inequalities in
the distribution of material goods. However, this
was largely understood in terms of the context
through which workplace resistance and indus-
trial conflict arises. In a climate of union decline
during the rise of neo-liberalism, recent industrial
relations literatures have focused, for example,
on the development of organizing strategies in
the workplace designed to build or rebuild union
memberships (Lucio and Stuart, 2009) but again
the focus is on human activists. This focus omits
the way material artefacts may be embedded in
mobilizing actor networks to resist management.
To establish a clearer distinction between these
literatures and the approach we are proposing in
© 2016 British Academy of Management.
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