Dr Guy Huber

Have you stopped to consider why humor in workplaces is an important topic of research, and not just a laughing matter? Some answers can be found in the International Journal of Management Reviews 2022
open access article “Putting humour to work: To make sense of and constitute organizations,” by Guy Huber,
a senior lecturer at Oxford Brookes University Business School, in the UK.

This article shows how autoethnographic vignettes can be used as a reflexive tool to problematize the power relations in which organizational ethnographers participate when doing and representing their fieldwork. Foucault’s analysis of the ethical self-formation process provides the impetus to explore the embodied experiences of my autoethnographic study of a cooperative retail outlet in New York. In questioning how power and knowledge reflexively generated my actions and interpretations, I frame this autoethnography as a means of critically reflecting on my own practice as a researcher. By writing about our own embodied interactions with others through discourses that constitute our experiences, we begin to understand how power is exercised in practice. I conclude by discussing the practical benefits for researchers of writing autoethnographic vignettes and, in particular, for doctoral students seeking to become qualitative researchers in the field.

Based on ethnographic research of a large food retail cooperative in New York (the Co-op), this paper raises the research question of whether organizations can cultivate an ethic of responsibility to others and, if so, how this can be secured in everyday working practices? It draws principally on the work of Foucault and especially his later writings on the care of the self and ethics but seeks to link these deliberations to Levinas in identifying responsibility to the Other as prior to identity. Indeed, one message that we seek to convey is that attachments to identities are frequently a stumbling block for developing ethically responsible relations and organizations and this may necessitate some normative control. While recognizing that normative control can easily become oppressive and there were occasional signs of this where staff were watching one another and demanding compliance, our research provides a platform for exploring conversations about alternative forms of organization. We explore how relations of power can produce ethically progressive relations, through generative norms that give space to, and nurture, care and responsibility for others to constitute morally engaging organizational life.

How do people use humour to make sense of and constitute organizations? To understand this, I consider humour as a dynamic discursive practice, through which people (re)produce, complicate and potentially transform relations of power in the workplace. To extend the reach of humour research to this end, I have reviewed and synthesized the literature on humour to identify five contextual resources for agentic sensemaking in the use of humour through which discourses are destabilized and critiqued. I then consider six discursive practices, exercised through humour, that generate power and help constitute organizations. To complete my conceptual framework, I identify and discuss five potential avenues for future research on humour and power at work. I aim to inspire researchers to associate, use and analyse the processes in my framework to generate critically orientated evidence of how people use humour to substantiate organizational/workplace realities. I conclude that humour offers rich potential to better understand how people subjectively constitute organizations in practice.

In this essay, we explore the underlying processes of identity work in teaching from a critical management education (CME) perspective. Identity is a concern for both teachers and students and especially where the assumptions and routines on which it is grounded are challenged as in a CME learning environment. Through auto-ethnographic accounts of our teaching experience, we focus on the problems that result from being attached to an identity and how this might be explored through reflexive participative learning. Identity work describes the pursuit of these attachments without challenging the pursuit itself. A distinctive part of our contribution is to consider how in taking identity for granted as a laudatory accomplishment, CME scholars often fail to recognise how our attachment to it can be an obstacle for management learning. To conclude, we speculate on the implications of our pedagogy for inculcating more critical forms of identity work, through which we might free ourselves to think and engage with the world differently.

A reflexive approach to identity work is vital to understanding management learning and especially when subscribing to critical management theory. While there are some limitations in the study of self and identity developed by George Herbert Mead, in this paper we argue that the depth of his insights has been unduly neglected. Yet, these ideas are critical to understanding how identity work plays out specifically in pedagogic practice. We produce a sociology of knowledge that addresses this neglect before examining Mead’s ideas on how reflexivity and indeterminacy are central to learning to think differently, which is the benchmark for teaching from a critical management perspective. We also explore some of the limitations of Mead’s work, which broadly relate to his tendency to remain dominantly cognitive even though recognizing bodily gestures as important elements of the self-formation process.  Drawing on Foucault, we suggest that identity work in the context of learning also involves power/knowledge relations that we have to reflect upon if we are to learn to think and feel differently.  Overall, the concern is to challenge not only our students but also ourselves in seeking to engage in identity work in ways that facilitate ways of thinking and feeling differently.