The Complexity of Workplace Humour: Laughter, Jokers and the Dark Side of Humour PDF
Preview The Complexity of Workplace Humour: Laughter, Jokers and the Dark Side of Humour
Barbara Plester The Complexity of Workplace Humour Laughter, Jokers and the Dark Side of Humour The Complexity of Workplace Humour Barbara Plester The Complexity of Workplace Humour L aughter, Jokers and the Dark Side of Humour Barbara Plester Management & International Business University of Auckland Business School Auckland , New Zealand ISBN 978-3-319-24667-3 ISBN 978-3-319-24669-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-24669-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015953439 Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 T his work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. T he use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. T he publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www. springer.com) For Paul – thanks for sharing a lifetime of laughter with me. Foreword: Defying Gravity One of the ways in which we, smarty pants in the Global North, distinguish high culture from low culture, that we decide what matters matter, is on the basis of whether something is ‘serious’. This is a word with several related meanings, but all imply earnestness of purpose or gravity. To be serious suggests a certain depth, an attention to the profound conditions of human nature, a kind of style which guaran- tees truth or a systematic procedure which promises rigour. So when we suggest that something is a ‘serious’ book or fi lm, we mean that it has consequences for how we might live our lives. It might be hard, but careful study will be rewarded by those who have been trained how to study carefully. I suppose the opposite here might be ‘trivial’ or ‘popular’, a piece of work or action which diverts attention for a little while but that we really shouldn’t bother to remember the next morning. Like a song from a musical (‘I’m through with playing by the rules, of someone else’s game’) it drifts away as the work day begins in earnest. A related meaning of the word ‘serious’ is another opposition, but this time it addresses one of the features of trivia – that it might be funny. To say that someone is serious means that they don’t crack a smile, or if it is applied to a condition, it is to say that we shouldn’t laugh, because that would be wicked or immoral. Serious things are not humorous, and the implication is that they shouldn’t be trivialised by being made humorous. No one should be fl ippant about the holocaust, or respond to Mahler with a belly laugh. You don’t fart in church. Etymologically, the serious comes from ideas about weight and heaviness. The body and brain ache under the pressure, and concentration is required in order to do justice to the gravity of the situation. U niversities are often temples to the serious, places of gravitas. They are build- ings in which serious people do serious things, brows are furrowed and heads scratched. You don’t giggle in the library. Business and management schools are even more serious, because they are inhabited by people who care about the bottom line, wear suits and stroke their chins. Not to take business seriously would be to invite disaster. Fools and jesters would squirt jelly into the spreadsheets, causing factories to close and skyscrapers left to stand empty and echo as rookeries for crows. You can’t clown around with the machinery of capitalism. You might break it. vii viii Foreword: Defying Gravity What makes human beings so interesting is that they know all this and then they fart in church and giggle in the library anyway. Someone in my university recently turned all the notices on a notice board upside down, which required a great deal of time spent with drawing pins and produced many oddly authoritarian email exchanges as well as much giggling. No set of social rules, even ones which are widely agreed and codifi ed, ever produces complete obedience. If you don’t believe me, google ‘paedophile jokes’, or consider the sort of gallows or graveyard humour which you fi nd in places and professions where violence and death are present. Order and disorder are made in the same moment; they are made next to each other, as a condition of each other’s existence. The University, and the Business School, will always fi nd it diffi cult to capture rule breaking and bending, whether as topic of enquiry or as a practice within the institution. (I don’t know who did the notice board thing. It wasn’t me.) We proba- bly shouldn’t be too worried about this but instead rather relieved, because it sug- gests that there are always some matters that escape organization. As Barbara Plester’s splendid book shows, formal institutions are wonderful examples of the sinuous way in which structures become inhabited by meanings, places in which the trivial and the serious are always pushing up against each other. There is a serious lesson here, because it illustrates that we should never imagine that the trivial doesn’t matter. Etymologically, the trivial was what the common people talked about at a road junction, somewhere where there were three ways to go. They chat- ted and laughed and farted, sang popular songs and laughed at the King and then went back to working in the fi elds for their lord and master. No wonder that this sort of knowledge didn’t make it into the university. A s Plester shows, whatever theory of humour we deploy, humour at work is very often marking the boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between what ‘we’ talk about between ourselves and what we think ‘they’ think and do and say. It is a way of making organization too, a method for making and questioning the categories of time, space and person which shape the experience of being constructed by an insti- tution. Once you can joke, you know you understand the rules and can show that you understand them. Anthropologically, humour clearly matters in organizations – whether the irreverent email, repeated parody of a strap line or defaced notice. This implies that we should not let ourselves be distracted into believing that only that which claims to matter, which claims to be serious, does really matter. I nstitutions do weigh down on us. They are serious things, they make us breath- less and we can’t always just laugh them off with a timely limerick or clicking your heels three times and imagining you were somewhere else. The many horrors of the world will not be solved by puns and a hopeful smile, and many of those horrors are implicated in the sort of humour that is excused as ‘only joking’. The gravity of the world is clear enough, and it does furrow brows, but that description does not exhaust all that human beings are. This book shows us that we will always be able to laugh at the Wizard of Oz and that the trivial is actually really important. That’s the punch line, so all you need to do now is enjoy the way that this book shows you why studying humour is a serious business. Foreword: Defying Gravity ix M artin Parker is Professor of Organization and Culture at the School of Management at the University of Leicester. He likes to imagine alternative ways in which we might think about and do organizing (A lternative Business: Outlaws Crime and Culture, Routledge, 2012; The Companion to Alternative Organization , Routledge, 2014). His plans for the next year involve tower cranes, spies and detec- tives, as well as a project on the medians, central and verges next to big roads. University of Leicester , Leicester , UK Martin Parker
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