Telling tales: online comic and gripe story‐sharing by service workers about difficult customers

• Author: Ira Fachira,Janet Grace Sayers
• Date: 01 July 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12047
• Published date: 01 July 2015

Telling tales: online comic and gripe

story-sharing by service workers about

difficult customers

Janet Grace Sayers and Ira Fachira

The article extends previous research on the storying practices

of service workers, workplace humour as resistance, and

workers’ autonomous use of social media. Discussion strings

from two hairstylist forum storylines, exemplifying comic and

tragic story-sharing about difficult customers, were analysed

using Gabriel’s notion of story-work. Processes of coping,

entertainment, identity-construction and learning are clearly

evident in the discussion strings and social media is confirmed

as a ‘new’ terrain for the enactment of employee agency.

Findings emphasize that service workers are engaged in contra-

dictory and ambiguous relations of resistance and accommo-

dation as they learn how to deal with difficult customers. The

article’s contribution is to show how service workers share

their fears and anxieties about difficult customers through sto-

rying and humour in generative dialogical poietic processes in

social media. Further research is suggested.

Keywords: service work, resistance, narrativeanalysis, humour,

social media

Introduction

Research concerning organisationalresistance and misbehaviour tend to cluster around

perspectives that either privilege organisationalcontrol processes or those that empha-

sise contestations of organisational control (Mumby,2005). This paper is consistent with

the latter approach,focusing on workers’ use of storytelling and humour. Workers can

use humour subversively (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999/2012), but understanding the

subtleties of its use to contest control requires theoretically nuanced and novel studies

(Taylor and Bain, 2003; Korczynski, 2011; Richards, 2008b, 2012). As Mumby has

emphasised, ‘The devil is in the discursive details’ (Mumby, 2005: 37). When it comes

to appreciating the nuances of contemporary actsof resistance and misbehaviour, what

is necessary are approaches that appreciate the contextual artistry of everyday life.

Dr Janet Grace Sayers (j.g.sayers@massey.ac.nz) is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Management at

Massey University (Auckland) in New Zealand. She has published recently in Gender, Work and

Organisation and Labour and Industry on women’s use of social media and employment issues. She has

written extensively on diversity and service work and has a particularinterest in comedy as a form of

management critique. Dr Ira Fachira (ira@sbm-itb.ac.id) is a Lecturer in the School of Business and

Management, Institute of Technology Bandung (ITB), Indonesia. She teaches Marketing Management

and Service Marketing Strategy courses. She completed her PhD in Management in 2013 at Massey

University in New Zealand. She researches consumer online communities and social media as a form

of consumer storytelling.

New Technology, Work and Employment 30:2

ISSN 0268-1072

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd128 New Technology, Work and Employment

Taylor and Bain’s (2003) research into customer service workers’ (call centre

employees) uses of humour was rooted in labour process analysis. Taylor and Bain

sought to clarify the purpose of call centre workers’ humour and joking practices. They

affirmed the subversive power of humour and emphasised the ongoing dynamic

tension inherent in humourous acts by employees. They note rich practices of service

workers disrupting managerial control by satirising and joking about managers and

customers. Taylor and Bain noted that a function of this humour is the well-recognised

one of relief from boredom and routine (discussed later), but also observed empirically

novel ‘call centre-specific’ forms of humour. Humour in the two call centres they

studied, although enacted differently at each workplace, contributed to the develop-

ment of countercultures, which conflicted with corporate aims and priorities. Through

their study,Taylor and Bainchallenged the view that workplace humour acts as a safety

valve for tension. They instead insisted humour functions within the labour process to

contest control, and that these practices have collective implications.

Taylor and Bain connected humour to collective forms of resistance. However, with

declining unionisation and increasing surveillance control mechanisms, researchers

have argued for resistance to be conceptualised as a phenomenon that spills out of

organisations (e.g. into social media), and which can include individualised acts of

misbehaviour (Barnes and Taksa, 2012). Employee misbehaviour can embrace ubiqui-

tous individual employee ‘misbehaviours’, which are less likely to be direct and collec-

tive (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999/2012), but are still about contesting disagreeable

organisational practices. Ackroyd (2012) noted the growth of service and knowledge

work and newer forms of control associated with customer relations and information.

Under these new conditions, he argues, the ‘impulse to misbehave’ has not diminished,

but is instead healthily vital and innovative. Importantly, he maintains resistance and

misbehaviour, no matter its manifestations, need to be seen in terms of structural

imbalances of power. In line with this view,Korczynski (2011) has connected humour to

the dialectical labour process in his study of the humourous practices of factory

employees.

One new terrain where resistance is potentially being expressed and is ‘spilling out’

(Barnes and Taksa, 2012) into other domains is social media. Castells (2009/2013; 2012)

has studied how social media is being used by protest movements. He stresses how

people in social movements are using horizontal communication networks to seek

support and resist in the face of forces acting against their material interests. Work and

employment researchers have also started to unravel how workers are using social

media in order to better understand its impact on employment issues. Implications

regarding electronic surveillance have been explored previously in this journal (e.g.

Kidwell and Sprague, 2009; Howcroft and Taylor, 2014). Other research has connected

workers’ autonomous use of blogs to resistance (Schoneboom, 2007; 2011a; Richards,

2008a; 2012; Richards and Kosmala, 2013). Clearly, social media is being used to express

employee political agency both individually and collectively, but research is still rela-

tively underdeveloped (McDonald and Thompson, 2015).

This paperis also interested in how and why workers use social media to resist forms

of control—from customers. The role of customers and the ways in which they might

shape the labour process have been relatively understated. However, customers are

becoming more central to dynamics of control as their power over employees has

increased, and as Sturdy et al. (2001) have noted, they need to be considered in labour

process theory (LPT) because they co-produce with workers the ‘experience commod-

ity’ (Pine and Gilmore, 1998).

This paper is divided into four main sections. The first section discusses literature

relevant to the storytelling practices and humour use of customer service workers.

Research on workers’ use of social media for autonomous purposes is also critiqued.

The research question derived is: Does online story-sharing about difficult customers

constitute resistance or accommodation? The second section explains hairstylist occu-

pationalculture and the case forum, together with Gabriel’s (2000) notion of story-work

which is used as an analysis tool. The third section presents analysis and discussion of

two illustrative forum storylines about difficult customers, showing comic and tragic

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Telling tales 129