Short description:

Accessible and amusing in style, Humour, Work and Organization explores the critical, subversive and ambivalent character of humour, work and comedy as it relates to organizations and organized work.

Long description:

Accessible and amusing in style, Humour, Work and Organization explores the critical, subversive and ambivalent character of humour, work and comedy as it relates to organizations and organized work. It examines the various individual, organizational, social and cultural means through which humour is represented, deployed, developed, used and understood.

Considering the relationship between humour and organization in a nuanced and radical way and this book takes the view that humour and comedy are pervasive and highly meaningful aspects of human experience.

The richness and complexity of this relationship is examined across three related domains. They are:

• how humour is constructed, enacted and responded to in organizational settings


• how organizations and work are represented comedically in various types of popular culture media


• how humour is used in organizations where there is a more explicit relationship between the comedic and work.

An exciting and controversial text, Humour, Work and Organization will appeal to students of all levels as well as anyone interested the full complexities of human interactions in the workplace.

'From Heidegger to HucBuc, Bakhtin to Ronald McDonald, ready yourself for a hysterical ride when you open Westwood and Rhodes? fascinating and refreshingly original collection. Anyone interested in the radical possibilities of a comic organizational frame should buy this book. I?m just off to purchase my ?work sucks? T-shirt.' - Peter Case, Professor of Organization Studies, Bristol Business School, The University of the West of England

'Humour in the workplace has always fascinated researchers. Now Westwood and Rhodes have assembled a collection of chapters that finally does justice to our current understanding of organizational humour. If you think humour in the workplace is a serious business then this is the book for you.' - Graham Sewell, Professor and Chair in Organizational Behaviour, Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London

Table of Contents:

 Part A: Theorizing Humour, Organization and Work  1. Introduction: Humour and the Study of Organizations 2. Humour as Practically Enacted Theory, or, Why Critics Should Tell More Jokes  3. Humour and Parody: The Power of Inversion  Part B: Humour in Organizations  4. What Does Fun ?Make? Of Us?  5. The Little Book of Management Bollocks: Kitsch Artefacts  6. Organizing Humour: A Feminist Perspective  7. Humour in Workplace Meetings: Challenging Hierarchies  Part C: Humour about Organization  8. Humour as Critique in Popular Television: Work and Organizations in The Simpsons  9. Another Average Day in The Office: Humour and the Brentist Striation of Modern Work Spaces  10. How Sick Are These People? Organizational Bystanding, Seinfeld?s New York Four and the Duty of Care  Part D: The Organization of Humour  11. The Comedy Club: The Staging of Humour  12. Grotesque Humour Regeneration of McDonaldization and McDonaldland  13. Budweiser?s Lizards and The Organizational Production of Humour  Part E. Coda  14. Theory as Joke