Humour, Work and Organization

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "Humour, Work and Organization", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 6, pp. 528-530. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710760517

Most of us would probably accept the view that “work is fun” is an oxymoron or self‐contradictory statement. Yet many companies proclaim they have such cultures in order to attract and retain employees. Fun is a key element of that freedom and creativity that generates innovation, allows people to keep in touch with reality, and let off steam (that famous catharsis or comic relief theorists speak about). Many of us, also, would recognize the saying – on all too many desks – “you have to be mad to work here!”.

Humour at work and humour in organizations, as a subject of study (in the wider social and cultural sense, as in media, and in the narrower professional and academic sense, as in organizational culture, the psychodynamics of power and hierarchy, patriarchy and hierarchy, and decision‐making at meetings), is a growth industry, and this is a good thing. It allows insights as far apart as Bakhtin's carnival and Rabelaisian humour, Foucault's critique of legitimated meaning, the art of the stand‐up comic, the asymmetries of power in the workplace, the role humour plays in creativity and recruitment, how humour can be abused in bullying, and how humour can be used to build consensus, all to come together into a coherent and really useful set of ideas about how work works and why management often does not.

This new collection brings these strands together in a very readable and useful way. It draws on theory and practice, on current media representations of humour in organizations (from The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The Office, Laurel & Hardy, Woody Allen), on a range of ethnographic and critical discourse research into humour and workplace relationships, and gender. Humour can take many forms – satire, mimicry, parody, sarcasm, slapstick, lampoons, ribaldry – and can be critical and subversive, a release and a recognition of consensus, play on stereotypes, deflate power, acknowledge how disorder underlies order, and explore the boundaries of the acceptable. This links the study of humour with the study of ethics: as one essay argues, can and should you be a bystander or spectator at work, do most of us “see but not recognize” forms of moral harassment at work, and do many of us rationalize non‐intervention by saying that other people have a right to be left alone?

There are gender and identity implications, too, as another essay suggests: many organizations are both hierarchical and patriarchal, and humour forms not only critical resistance to the abuse of power but also reflects different feminist and masculinist perspectives. Humour also allows us to explore what is ironic. Publications like The Little Book of Management Bollocks by Beaton (London, Pocket Books, 2001), full as they are of clichés and homilies and nostrums about management, allow us to look at works even as magisterial as Huczynski and Buchanan (2001) in a post‐ironic way – they are deeply serious and deeply funny. To this extent, then, this book under review is likely to interest not only people in management and organizations but also that wider group of readers engaged with critical practices, identity and representation, and discourse in the wider community. Underlying what might seem a superficial debate are deeper issues of ethics, truth, and existence – humour allows us to chat about our own sickness, something Woody Allen brought wittily into his films.

This book adds significantly to its field, with strong editors (Westwood and Rhodes are academics in Australia) and a good team of contributors, even though there are understandably some weaker contributions. What comes through is the message that humour should not be sidelined in understanding organizations and powerplay at work, and this includes libraries. Jokes and incongruities, boundaries of the acceptable, and audience management are not merely the province of the stand‐up comedian: they can and should be better understood in real life and real work.

Unpretentiously highlighting the ambivalence of humour, the book deserves to be bought by any academic library worth its salt. After all, all the talk of competitive advantage and key performance indicators and quality assurance, and all the panoply of structures and meetings, have not changed the plain fact that people interact in often grotesque and oppressive ways, and through humour can transform aggression into consensus. One essay here suggests that humour is most used at meetings when there are challenges and disagreements, something that tells its own story.