Introduction – Misbehavior in the Air

Abstract

Misbehavior is ubiquitous. Its occurrence stretches back in time and shows little sign of abating. According to Richards (2008, pp. 653–654), organizational misbehavior “has been a prominent feature of organizational studies throughout the twentieth century and continues to command similar attention in the first decade of the twenty-first century.” Early interest has been traced back to F. W. Taylor's criticisms of workers’ restriction of output (Taylor, 2003) in the first two decades of the twentieth century, a phenomenon also considered by Donald Roy (1952, 1959) after World War Two, and subsequently extended by Jason Ditton (1977) and Gerald Mars (1982) to include workplace crimes such as “fiddles and theft.” In more recent times, such fiddles have been extended to the study of “cyberslacking” (Block, 2001), “cyberloafing” (Lim, 2002), and general workplace internet misuse (Lara, Tacoronte, Ding, & Ting, 2006). Yet, despite such interest in “organizational misbehavior,” the scholarship in this field is relatively recent and generally traced back to the work of Vardi and Wiener (1996) and Ackroyd and Thompson (1999).

Citation

Barnes, A. and Taksa, L. (2012), "Introduction – Misbehavior in the Air", Barnes, A. and Taksa, L. (Ed.) Rethinking Misbehavior and Resistance in Organizations (Advances in Industrial & Labor Relations, Vol. 19), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. ix-xxiii. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0742-6186(2012)0000019003