Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Prisons, playgrounds and parliaments
- Part 1 Theoretical framework
- Part 2 Forms of resentful struggle
- 4 Dis-identification and resentment: the case of cynicism
- 5 Desexualizing work and the struggle for desire
- 6 Displacement and struggle: space, life and labour
- Part 3 Overt, organized and collective struggle
- Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index
4 - Dis-identification and resentment: the case of cynicism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Prisons, playgrounds and parliaments
- Part 1 Theoretical framework
- Part 2 Forms of resentful struggle
- 4 Dis-identification and resentment: the case of cynicism
- 5 Desexualizing work and the struggle for desire
- 6 Displacement and struggle: space, life and labour
- Part 3 Overt, organized and collective struggle
- Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
It can be an unpleasant job, especially when you are working for a bank – it happens every day on the phone … [In an angry tone] ‘You have done this, you have done that, this is your fault.’ It's like, ‘I haven't done anything, you motherfucker, go fuck yourself.’ But you can't say that – you have to always be pleasant and say ‘Oh, is that right? I can appreciate that, that should not have happened.’ And they're swearing at me and then you would rather not be there … Management have the rhetoric of ‘this is what we are doing, we are different’. But when you get there and start working you find that it is just the same, and this is where those corporate strategies fall down because they aren't going to convince someone like me that this shitty job is ‘fun’.
(Employee interviewed in a ‘high-commitment’ call centre, Fleming, 2003)Resentment forms a major dimension of organizational life and is a particularly interesting way in which subordinates experience relations of domination and power. This is especially so in contexts where, to paraphrase de Certeau (1984), people find themselves in power relations that they cannot leave or change. Today it is fashionable, however, to denounce resentment as a perverted, or at least unhelpful, engagement with power (Brown, 1995).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Contesting the CorporationStruggle, Power and Resistance in Organizations, pp. 69 - 88Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007