Stephen Ackroyd and Paul Thompson (2022). Organisational Misbehaviour, SAGE, xxvii+322 pages

Abstract

It started with an article with the ingenious title ‘All quiet on the workplace front?’. Here, Paul Thompson and Stephen Ackroyd (1995) criticized the dominant types of analyses of work organizations in British working life studies of that time. In these studies, they pointed out that workers had disappeared as agents of workplace life, which was the quiet to which they alluded. According to much of the sociology of work, management had succeeded not only in subjecting workers to total control, but also in turning them into self-controlling dopes of company cultures. Already in Thompson and Ackroyd’s critique, we find concepts such as misbehavior, recalcitrance, and appropriation of time and products – concepts that are further theorized in the first edition of their book Organisational Misbehaviour (OMB, Ackroyd & Thompson 1999). Throughout, the authors emphasized the importance in workplace life of employees’ collective agency through informal self-organization. Undoubtedly, this is the most important book in the field in the beginning of the 2000s and it had a huge influence on working life studies. The success of the book meant that many have been waiting for a long time for a second edition – and now it is here. As before, Ackroyd and Thompson’s foremost targets of criticism are, on the one hand, the individualistic explanations of the managerialist tradition of Organizational Behavior (OB) and, on the other hand, shallow post-structuralist analyses. In the former case, the title of the book, Organisational Misbehaviour (OMB), is of course an ironic twist, alluding to the OB claim that employees always follow management’s wishes – and if they do not, it is due to the influence of individual ‘bad apples’. Ackroyd and Thompson instead puts forward the explanation that new forms of OMB emerge as a consequence of changed managerial regimes. In the latter case, most claims on management controlling workers ‘all the way down’ and electronic panopticons have disappeared by now, but have been replaced by other favorites such as fractured identities. In this book, worker agency is again being emphasized.