Humour, Work and Organization by Robert Westwood & Carl Rhodes

Author:Robert Westwood & Carl Rhodes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Conclusion

One of the particular aims of this book has been to move away from a functional approach to humour in organizations. This chapter has addressed this intention by avoiding an approach which considers humour as a discourse strategy for achieving a particular goal or as a strategy to be actively adopted by employees or managers within their communication repertoire. Instead, I have focused on the distribution of humour in decisions and argued that its recurrent position, at the end of the negotiation of a decision, highlights and challenges the power asymmetries inherent in organizational talk. Humour in this structural position draws attention to the power assigned to the powerful which allows them to influence decision outcomes, and conversely the reduced power available to subordinates to effect change in this process. Many of the examples could have been analysed as humour used to establish group harmony. The very need to address the issue of group harmony, however, may result from the imbalance created by the power exercised in reaching the decision. While this power inequality is imposed by organizational accountability, the impact it has on a philosophically democratic community troubles the negotiation process. If humour is strictly unnecessary at work, its occurrence and prevalence suggests it is worthy of careful examination.

In societies where democracy is an ideal, the workplace remains a site where dominance is organizationally sanctioned but socially unappealing. Humour, as an off-record feature of discourse, allows this dominance to be acknowledged and simultaneously challenged. It may appear to be an amusing distraction and signal a group's sense of team and coherence as has been argued, but there are many other ways of analyzing its effect. While the complexity of humour has always been acknowledged, at the very least a move towards considering its multifunctionality within interaction needs to be given more priority by researchers of organizational humour.

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