Organizational Culture as Material for Resistance: How White-Collar Workers Frame Protest as Part of Their Jobs

• In Event: Economic Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 6: Markets, Culture, and Moral economy

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with employees and labor activists in the technology and media sectors, this paper describes the changing relationships between elite white-collar workers and their firms. It offers a novel account of how work culture – often critiqued as a mechanism for internalized employee discipline – instills commitment and loyalty in workers but also acts as material for internal contestation. Workers often expressed strong belief in their work and in their industries but doubted the intent and ethics of their managers and firms – citing industrial norms to justify their labor activism and to argue against managerial decisions. Such norms differed from displays of more traditional and more limited economic loyalty, which tended to follow workers’ material interests and the hierarchical relationships embedded into their contracts. This paper further notes the role of strategic discretion in worker activism, describing how workers adjust their performance of occupational responsibilities to compensate for perceived weaknesses or missteps by management. The use of such discretion offers an additional path beyond exit and voice for workers to pursue their interests in the workplace. Yet workers’ capacities to contest firm decisions through industrial norms and to draw on occupational responsibilities vary. Those closest to a firm’s core business typically engaged in more activism and more consciously inverted industrial cultures in opposition to managerial decisions. These findings suggest that even if industrial cultures succeed in coercing worker commitment, they are co-constructed and contested by many workers themselves in ongoing struggles over firm control, firm impacts, and firm resources.

Author

• Mason Barnard, Princeton University; Harvard Law School