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Presents 31 abstracts, edited by Johanthan Morris and Mike Reed, from the 2003 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, held at Cardiff Business School in September 2003. The conference theme was “The end of management? managerial pasts, presents and futures”. Contributions covered, for example, the changing HR role, managing Kaizen, contradiction in organizational life, organizational archetypes, changing managerial work and gendering first‐time management roles. Case examples come from areas such as Mexico, South Africa, Australia, the USA, Canada and Turkey.

The purpose of this short paper is to introduce the special issue and outline its major themes.

The control‐resistance literatures are described, and the necessity for field‐led empirical accounts is amplified, as a precursor to introducing the contributions to this special issue.

Forms of control co‐mingle and the old imprints the new. Theories of control, resistance, agency and consent can most usefully be expanded by engaging with empirical accounts, resisting duality, and embracing multidimensionality.

This paper offers a review of the state of debate about control and resistance within organisation studies, and calls for field‐informed accounts and fresh perspectives.

This extended editorial to the Special Issue “Are we having fun yet? A consideration of workplace fun and engagement” aims to review the current debates on organised “fun at work” and to suggest a framework for understanding workplace fun and employee engagement. The papers included in the Special Issue are also to be introduced.

The editorial review asks for an approach that offers a critical appraisal and sets the latest move towards fun at work within the context of the material realties of work.

A review of contemporary debates on fun at work reveals a predominantly prescriptive focus on attempts to engage employees through fun activities that oversimplifies the human dynamism involved in the employment relationship. The editorial suggests that we need to consider the motivations, processes and outcomes of managed fun at work initiatives and to consider employees' reactions in terms of “shades of engagement” that detail how people variously engage, enjoy, endure, or escape managed fun.

The suggested framework for understanding workplace fun and employee engagement offers opportunities for empirical testing.

Understanding workplace fun and the work that it does, and does not do, offers opportunities to improve relationships between employees and between employees and the organisation.

The editorial and Special Issue overall offers an important contribution to the ongoing fun at work and employee engagement debate and opens up avenues for further exploration and discussion.

Call centres are high‐pressure work environments characterised by routinisation, scripting, computer‐based monitoring and intensive performance targets. This promises a series of business advantages, but also risks counterproductive outcomes. Drawing on evidence from ethnographic field data, it is suggested that both desired and risked outcomes are mediated by personal modes of coping and organisational sustaining mechanisms. A central concern is to explore the underlying assumptions of call centre design and management, and to establish whether or to what extent information systems have been constructed as learning sites or behavioural control sites. When behavioural control is a primary goal this introduces a climate of resistance, further inflated by the culture of measurement and enforcement that is likely to ensue. In this environment, agent, manager and organisation become defensive and the main outcome is a destructive crisis of trust that creates important and difficult implications for the capacity to learn.

The purpose of this paper is to present a next step in Greta Foff Paules' groundbreaking analysis of control‐resistance in service work by exploring the work practices of restaurant servers in regard to ways they resist and reshape the tipping system that structures their work life. Specifically, the author explores how workers will attempt to manipulate the system to elicit higher tips from customers and when servers forgo an economic tip, so that they can exercise dignity and self‐respect. Central to this analysis is to highlight the space in between Paules' notions of “getting” and “making” a tip. In this space, servers can exercise resistance and still acknowledge the humanness of the customer.

The research methodology is participant observation and interviews.

Restaurant servers see their ability to manipulate the tipping system as routes to exercising agency and resistance in work interactions. Moreover, servers see their ability to earn tips (and even forgo tips) by both capitalizing on the organizational structures and capitalizing on the customers' human nature.

The research focuses on servers broadly, and not on distinctions within groups of servers (i.e. sex differences, age differences or restaurant types).

This paper furthers the understanding of the tipping practice, which is historically viewed in terms of status inequality and control. In contrast, the author highlight how workers in practice, are able to use the tipping system to resist customer and manager demands, assert their creativity, agency, and self‐dignity, and still treat the customer as a social being.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how new public management (NPM) reform from the national level is implemented as practice in a local unit within the police sector in Sweden.

A qualitative case‐study approach is applied using semi‐structured interviews, participant observations and analysis of documents.

The paper illustrates different kinds of resistance at the organizational level. The dominant form of resistance was found to be cultural distancing. The paper demonstrates a tendency among police officers to deal with a changing and more complex work context by embracing a traditional work role.

The paper shows that reforms that add complexity may fail because of potential contradictions and the limited capacity and motivation of employees to deal with the complexity in the manner prescribed by NPM.

The paper shows that the popular trend to adopt multi‐dimensional forms of control (for instance the balanced‐scorecard approach) may fail if there is a lack of consensus about what goals and measurement are important and/or there is a lack of dialogue about how the new goals should be implemented in practice.

Research about NPM‐reforms in the police sector is rare. The original contribution of this paper is to study NPM‐reforms with a focus on the role of complexity in relation to resistance.

Call centres are centralised operations where trained agents communicate with customers via phone and using purpose built information and communication technologies. The normative model of call centre organisation is that tasks are tightly prescribed, routinised, scripted and monitored. What are the implications for managers and management? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article focuses on middle management in call centres: how they work, how they talk about their work and what alternatives they see. It describes an emerging understanding of a manager who is as constrained as a worker under this mass customised bureaucracy. Lack of strategic support and development, a powerfully normative focus on micromanagement and deeply embedded goal conflicts combine to undermine these managers’ scope to truly manage. Like the agents they supervise, call centre managers are engaged in a coping project. In this context, they perform their identity with ambivalence: sometimes role embracing, sometimes resisting.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model to explain frontline employee absence as a form of concerted resistance in a public service welfare environment.

Conflicts over absenteeism can be interpreted as a mix of formal and informal struggles over the effort bargain. Centrelink workers' use of “unplanned leave” between 2005 and 2007 involved the quasi‐collective use of a formal entitlement in a form of misbehaviour that defied management control.

Whereas absenteeism is normally assumed to be a form of unorganised individual time‐theft, in this study it became a tacitly‐agreed form of collective resistance and a way of affirming collectively negotiated rights.

This paper explores how the toll of cost cutting and implementation of tighter welfare eligibility rules elicited collective resistance through leave taking and highlights how absenteeism can be more than an individual response of passive disengagement.

Using theories of resistance, the authors highlight how the case study both conforms to and departs from the received wisdom about absenteeism as an individual oppositional strategy.

This paper deals with flexibilisation of work and employment in large‐scale retailing. Its aim is two‐fold: first, to highlight how an authoritarian workplace regime and normative forms of control interact, in the attempt to achieve workforce alignment to flexibility. Second, to explore how employees make sense of experienced workplace conflicts, and to what extent they are able to develop capacities to act and to influence their working conditions.

The paper draws on a qualitative study undertaken in four large‐scale retailing companies in the Italian city of Milan. It is based on 45 semi‐structured, problem‐centred interviews with employees, shop stewards and union officers.

Analysis reveals how control manifests in “forced availability” based on individualised, informal daily flexibilisation, and sustained by resulting precarisation. Employees are active participants, as the functioning of the work organization depends on their capacity to balance in‐built contradictions. Yet, their capacity to act remains limited. They are trapped by individualised concepts of labour relations: a merit‐oriented understanding of work as a “fair exchange” and a personalised perception of social relations and interactions at the work place.

The research encountered challenges in accessing temporary employees due to their fear of negative repercussions. This makes the sample slightly biased towards permanent, part time and fulltime, employment. Yet, it is also an opportunity, as it makes it possible to map experiences of precarisation across different employee groups.

Using the concepts of “coping practices”, “common sense” and “capacity to act”, the paper proposes to go beyond the dualisms of the resistance‐control debate. It points at the contradictory and interlinked character of employees' coping practices of adaptation, appropriation, conflictive negotiation and resistance.

This article seeks to analyse rituals of humour and joking practices among two groups of meatpacking workers, to better understand the organic dynamics of workplace fun.

This is an ethnographic study of two groups of meatpacking workers within a Swedish food preparation company. Data were collected using multiple methods including observations, field notes, and individual and group interviews.

This study uncovers ample evidence of joking practices among the workers studied. These are presented on a continuum of pure to applied humour in five types: jokes, physical joking practices, clowning, nicknaming and satire.

This article gives a rich description and analysis of organic workplace humour in a contemporary food production setting and offers a typology of joking practices.