Jan Karlsson

Karlstads Universitet · Business School, Working Life Science

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 t...

In the last decade, research on the nature, impact and prospect of meaningful work has flourished. Despite an upsurge in scholarly and practitioner interest, the research field is characterized by a lack of consensus over how meaningful work should be defined and whether its ingredients are exclusively subjective perceptions or solely triggered by...

Som forskare och lärare vet vi att vi ska "gå till källan" när vi hänvisar till en text. I den här artikeln genomför vi först en sådan jakt. Den utgår från en viss teori i en lärobok inom organisationsteori. Jakten går genom ett antal rakt nedstigande led så långt det är möjligt att komma till den ursprungliga källan för teorin. Vårt första syfte ä...

The purpose of this article is to apply the method of the genre of studying chains of references to an instance of a secondary source of the contested concept of ‘resistance to change’ back to the primary source and thereby exercise criticism of the sources. This includes discussing whether the theory itself is empirically sustainable or sufficient...

Margaret Archer defines Corporate Agency as involving both formulating goals and actively organizing in order to reach them. Primary Agency does not show either of these characteristics. In this article, I further refine this classification according to a typology of agential properties – that is, I create a ‘property space’ – based on the two prop...

The idea behind this book is thrilling: If we presuppose that we since a couple of decades live in an era of flexibility in working life – in which way has the quality of jobs been changed? Now, since a long time, we know that the concept of ‘flexibility’ is of various meanings and often deceptive (Furåker et al. 2007; Skorstad & Ramsdal 2016). It...

Female cabin attendants who have been in the occupation for 25 years or more have been interviewed. They were middle-aged, middle-class women, and they told about the decline of working conditions and the work environment during that time. The point of departure is in the interviews and the literature; from there, the chapter constructs a ‘Dignity–...

The Norwegian sociologist Sverre Lysgaard’s theory of the worker collectivity is virtually unknown outside Scandinavia. This chapter presents the basic principles of the theory and compares it to three Anglo-Saxon theories in the same research area of resistance at work: Stewart et al. on the collective worker and collectivism; Fox on the employee...

In this chapter, we draw the theoretical conclusions of the argumentation in Parts I and II. We present them in the form of what we call the Lysgaardian theory of the worker collectivity. It is the result of combining traits of the original theory as presented in Part I with the critical suggestions we offered in Part II. We thereby contribute a ne...

‘The worker collectivity’ is an expression used by the Norwegian sociologist Sverre Lysgaard in his seminal study of the emergence, maintenance and nature of spontaneously organised communities among subordinates in organisational settings. The collectivity works as a protective mechanism against insatiable, one-sided and inexorable demands made by...

The concept of the economic system is elaborated in this chapter. We use Lysgaard’s concepts of inexorability, insatiability and one-sidedness as important components. As Lysgaard himself indicated, the context of the company needs to be theorised more in a theory about the worker collectivity. In our theorising, the economic system is analysed as...

Sverre Lysgaard’s theory of the worker collectivity is based on a study conducted at a pulp and paper mill during the 1950s. His conclusion at that time was that there existed a collectivity in this particular firm, and that it may very well emerge in organisations in general as long as they are characterised by a focus on economic rationality, emp...

This is the first of a series of chapters critiquing parts of Lysgaard’s theory, of which this chapter discusses the human system. We thereby discern three points that we find problematic: (1) It is unclear how the human system relates to the other systems, as it—in contrast to them—does not emanate from the workplace; (2) there is a mixture of con...

In Lysgaard’s theory of the worker collectivity the technical/economic system is characterised as the primary system. This implies that there is no collectivity without an organisation, but the organisation may exist without having a collectivity. It is the technical/economic system that causes the collectivity to emerge as a reaction to its insati...

This book revolves around the sociologist Sverre Lysgaard’s theory about what he called the worker collectivity. It introduces the theory to international working life researchers as it has until now been accessible only in Norwegian. In this chapter, we place the theory in some of its research contexts in order to locate it in well-known conceptua...

Arbete & välfärd is an advanced basic book in Swedish about WORK & WELFARE. MANAGEMENT, PERSONNEL AND ORGANIZATIONAL MODELS IN SWEDEN. 27 leading researchers contribute in 24 chapters. Edited by Åke Sandberg. More about the book here http://www.akesandberg.se/arbete-valfard/ Read the introductory part of the book, Provläs: https://www.smakprov.se/...

This book presents the first published account in English of Sverre Lysgaard's theory of the ‘worker collectivity’ – a theory of an informal protective organisation among subordinate employees, which so far has been unknown outside Scandinavia. Lysgaard’s theory espouses that workers collectively form a buffer against management to protect themsel...

Purpose First-line nurse managers are frequently torn between conflicting demands from management and employees, and previous research suggests that nurse managers use a variety of responses to cope with these demands. The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of social support on nurse managers’ responses to role-conflict. Design/met...

The Norwegian sociologist Sverre Lysgaard’s theory of the worker collectivity is virtually unknown outside Scandinavia. This article presents the basic principles of the theory and compares it to three British theories in the same research area of resistance at work: Stewart et al. on the collective worker and collectivism; Fox on the employee coll...

The extremely dramatic social transformation – called ‘the great transformation’ by Polanyi (1985) – that the full emergence of capitalism and industrialism meant in Europe led to the birth of modern social theory. The attention of the classics of the studies was taken up by trying to describe, understand, and explain this social change: What is ac...

A collection of articles on working life and research policy in Sweden. There is a separate document in Swedish with chapter abstracts in english

Lysgaard's theory of the worker collectivity is still an influential classic in Scandinavian working-life research. The study was carried out in a pulp and paper mill in the late 1950s and we have returned to the plant to find out what has happened to the worker collectivity. Through observations at the workplace and interviews with workers, engine...

This article revolves around the concepts work, passion, and exploitation. I suggest answers to three questions: What is work? What is passion? What is exploitation? Finally, I discuss some possible relations between them.

In the 1950s, the Norwegian sociologist Sverre Lysgaard investigated social relations at a pulp and paper mill, the result of which was his theory of the ?worker collectivity.? This is an informal defense organization among subordinate employees against a company?s work organization and goals. Our research group returned to the same plant, which un...

Welcome to this Thematic Issue on Perspectives on Nordic Working Life Research! It is perhaps not that surprising that a journal called Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies contains many discussions about “Nordic Models”: What is the Nordic Welfare State Model? What has happened to it lately? Is there still one? Has there ever been one? What abou...

The term ‘restriction of output’ is a basic category in research on resistance and organizational misbehaviour and it has many synonyms, but seems to lack antonyms. The term means, of course, that employees do less work than they are expected to by management. The opposite behaviour is in the management literature regarded as organization citizensh...

Purpose – The introduction of ‘new’ management concepts related to New Public Management is in normative management literature portrayed as a total change from traditional practices to new practices inspired by neoliberal ideas. Empirical studies, however, are inconclusive on whether managers’ ideologies have changed. The aim of this paper is to co...

People need dignity and autonomy at work. If we are denied dignity and autonomy, there will be a strong tendency for us to resist our working conditions and misbehave at work. The bulk of this book is made up of stories or narratives on this theme (Part II). In this chapter, I introduce the theme by discussing dignity in relation to some problems t...

This is the story of a Swedish hotel attendant’s experiences of her work in a Finnish hotel. It is based on a diary she kept about her work.1

In China, any questioning of a manager by workers means that the manager loses face. It is important to ‘have face’ and a manager gets face from their workers. Workers can decide if they want to ‘give face’ or not. This brings drama to something that to us can seem rather trivial events. An example of this is a controversy between the assistant wor...

The company was in constant trouble. Its customers were large motor-vehicle producers with a strong position in the market. They autocratically laid down the conditions of sale and delivery times, as well as the quality and quantity of the products. At the same time, the company did not have a corresponding position with its own subcontractors and...

The web design department of an international IT firm was going to be a fun workplace — that is what management had decided. The customers were going to be really impressed by the unconventional and creative style of the department. This would be noticeable in the architectural layout; for example, the elliptical corridor that divided up the premis...

‘Hot-desking’ is when an office employee does not have a desk of their own: on arriving at work, the employee has to grab any desk available. Employers, management and consultants call it the ‘nonterritorial office’. This renders impossible what most people working in offices want: making a corner of the workplace feel as if it has some personal si...

The rules at Holidayco said that all staff in contact with customers by phone were to be monitored frequently by means of taping calls. By doing this, deficiencies could be corrected and the number of served customers could increase. Every taped call was to be played back to the employee and then discussed with the team leader, which would result i...

In the so-called ‘new’ working life, employees are supposed to be involved in their work and to take responsibility for the results. But at the same time, resources are being reduced within these lean organizations to such an extent that they could rightly be called anorexic. Often, employees have to try to get the resources they need to be able to...

A dress code was issued at the office decreeing that all employees must wear a shirt and tie. Many thought it uncomfortable and everyone thought that this was expensive. There were quiet conferences by the water cooler and behind closed doors.

We are in a wooden toy factory. In one section of the production process, partly assembled toys are being spray-painted and then hung on hooks that move them through an oven to dry them. All the workers are women and the department is known for high absence levels and labour turnover combined with low morale and low profits.

All were agreed, from the executives to the employees on the floor: The enormous drive for a corporate cultural framework, Brand Essence, was a failure. The only question was: Who was to blame?

In a US factory in the 1930s, these informal rules were in force among the workers: You should not turn out too much work. If you do you are a rate buster. You should not turn out too little work. If you do you are a chiseller. You should not tell a supervisor anything that will react to the detriment of an associate. If you do you are a squealer....

There were many rules. The workers were not allowed to loiter on the stairs, in the corridors, in the entrances. They were not allowed to go to other toilets than those intended for them. Their clothes and bags could be searched at any time, to prevent them from stealing. All these rules were constantly being propagated by management, and there wer...

In the factory, sulphate cellulose was boiled. Enormous boilers were filled with wood chips, chemicals and steam. The mixture was boiled for about four hours into pulp, whereupon the boiler was emptied, cleaned and filled again. The greatest work efforts were required when the boil was started and when the boiler was emptied. Between those tasks, i...

In the narratives, we have met people in many occupations, in a good deal of industries, and in different countries. Nobody knows quite how widespread resistance and organizational misbehaviour are in working life, although there are estimates saying that 85 per cent or more of employees ‘routinely behave in a manner that can be described as either...

Both aquatic centres have the same purpose: offering people a chance to cool off and have a refreshing bath, to paying customers in order to make a profit. They are, consequently, in the same market, but they differ very much in their treatment of their employees and, in doing so, in the amount of resistance and organizational misbehaviour they enc...

The latest from the management of the restaurant at this international hotel was the introduction of Service Standards, detailing the way in which the workers were to work and pointing out the skills needed for their jobs. The ways of working in this routinized and regulated way were minutely described in documents and taught at special sessions. T...

In the office of a government agency, a serious health hazard appeared, but the executive management did not think they could afford to do anything about it. One of the middle managers, Maria, was told by a group of professionals that the employees were planning a wild strike in answer to the inaction of management with regard to the safety problem...

Flight attendants must always smile. Not an artificial smile, but a genuine one — it must be visible that it comes from within. At the same time, the airlines have constantly been increasing the number of passengers whom flight attendants have to take care of and smile at. Their answer has been to smile less, and when they do smile, it is not alway...

When Establishment Printers won a contract for a government Department, senior management decided to introduce a new workflow/information management system. There were two reasons for this. The first was that it would help to achieve production targets. The second related to providing detailed invoices automatically generated by the information sys...

The hotel manager wanted to engage ‘shoppers’, but she met with opposition from the desk clerks. Shoppers are secretly employed by management to pose as customers, clients, passengers, policyholders and so on. Their task is to pass on information to management about the quality of service given by the employees. Generally, service employees regard...

If a critic from the lower rungs of an organization seems to articulate what many feel, and also presents solutions to problems, there are four successive steps whereby managers can act in order to intimidate them into submission. Management’s goal is partly to control the critic so that they do not obtain a following and partly to enact this contr...

Japanese factories began establishing themselves in regions with high unemployment in the United States. They were seeking to transplant Japanese work organization principles. The car manufacturer Subaru-Isuzu Automotive (SIA) established a factory close to Lafayette in Indiana. Trade unions were banned — the company and the employees were going to...

The plant was newly built and, when production started, team organization was introduced in order to foster a feeling of commitment to work and to make the employees identify with the company. The team concept, with its emphasis on community and influence, was to permeate the entire workplace. There were to be teams on two levels within the organiz...

The line foreman called a meeting with all the gellers and said: ‘From now on there will be no radio playing or talking when gelling. If you talk, you will be issued a warning. Three warnings and you’re out of here.’ Soon, long letters, written on paper napkins, started to circulate among the workers in order to keep up their conversations. That wa...

In Las Vegas, the glamorous mega-casinos along ‘The Strip’ no longer dominate the industry. Many smaller casinos have been relocated ‘off-strip’, turning to local people and to ordinary tourists who play for smaller stakes. Only a few of the visitors are big gamblers who take a risk — or a chance of winning, if you prefer — with large sums of money...

Stable staff — stable lads and lasses — are employed at small companies owned by horse trainers and their job is to take care of racehorses and prepare them for races. Often, trainers and stable staff work together, making them easy to supervise. At the same time, the lads and lasses develop strong emotional ties with their horses and, if they work...

This nightclub was so big that there were special staff, ‘glass collectors’, who picked up used glasses and carried them to the bar staff, who then washed and stacked them. When management talked about co-operation, they meant unconditional obedience to what managers said. The glass collectors had, however, their own ways of co-operating to make th...

The so-called new economy’s prestigious workplaces in the capital of the electronics industry, Silicon Valley, have to be cleaned too. They are cleaned at night, mainly by illegal immigrants. At Sonix, one of the biggest and most flourishing high-tech companies, management contracted several small non-unionized cleaning firms to do the cleaning. On...

The owner of the exotic dance club was, of course, out to make as much money as possible from the female dancers’ bodies. Part of that involved installing surveillance cameras everywhere to make it possible for him and the bosses to detect the slightest violation of the rules he had laid down. For each crime, a fine was imposed, payable to the owne...

Almost everywhere, maids, domestics and other occupational groups working in private homes come from low positions in class and ethnic hierarchies. This story is about Afro-American women working in the homes of white people in Kentucky. These women are very experienced at their jobs, as they have worked this way for many years. That is also one re...

The organizational development consultant had brought along a diagram of employee reactions to organizational change. It is a bell curve, he said, ‘10 per cent are enthusiastic, 80 per cent are generally followers, and 10 per cent actively resist’. One of the shop floor operators protested: ‘The diagram is fine, but it is more like 90 per cent who...

When Hollywood film directors found they had lost creative control over their films due to interventions on the part of the film studios, they started to protest by refusing to be credited as directors. Instead, they all used the fictitious name Allen Smithee. Until now, a lot of films, TV episodes and music videos have officially been directed by...

When workplaces are closed down, management often releases its grip on production, allowing productivity rise. Before the decision is definite, frustration, stress and anger prevail among the employees. Work motivation drops, as does productivity. Protests and resistance grow. But when it becomes clear that there will be a close-down, the trend rev...

The tests at the end of the line for assembling switches for industrial machines were showing more and more often that these were faulty. They were returned to the workers for re-assembly. Soon, the workers requested that the line be stopped while they tried to find out what was wrong. They then discovered that a tiny component was often faulty, so...

The meatpackers are very busy. They work silently and intensively. Suddenly, one of them starts humming the ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ from the Verdi opera Nabucco. Soon the others join in. The singing is interrupted by one of the workers asking for materials that should be there but are not. The hard work continues in silence until another work...

An ergonomist studied the spatial design of a factory.

The Railway Authority was to be deregularized and marketized. The state grants were to be strongly diminished and the authority had to procure other receipts. At the same time there was still no other customer than the administrative parts of the same authority. But new and buyer-seller-oriented organizational forms, adjusted to a market, were to b...

A leading plant in the world in its industry, part of a national group and having been making great profits for a long period of time, had 90 per cent of the market share when it was acquired by a gigantic US-owned group. Before the takeover, an informally negotiated, flexible work organization had evolved. Management, workers and the union had qui...

Work at this industrialized, conveyor-belt bakery is very dull and humdrum, heavy and hot. There are wall clocks everywhere, but ‘it seems like there’s some bugger standing on the hands of the clock and stopping them going round’, one of the workers often puts it. Some of the jobs are fairly comfortable — they could be learned by anyone in a few se...

All movements were calculated in units of less than seconds. In the afternoons, the line was stopped for ten minutes for a break. But this time, it had been started up after only nine minutes. Massive dismay: ‘It is not time yet! One minute left!’ But everyone started work at once because they did not want to fall behind at their stations. However,...

In this Reno casino, the surveillance system is very rigorous. Big one-way mirrors are part of the décor, more or less hidden cameras are everywhere, and cash registers and receipts are checked. Moreover, the pit bosses and casino hosts walk around to monitor what is going on at the tables and gaming machines. In this setting, a certain professiona...

At this ‘exotic dance club’ the strippers, or ‘exotic dancers’, were not paid by the owner. Instead, they had to pay both him and a disk jockey a fee, and part of their duties also included selling at least ten drinks per night. Their only income was the money they were able to induce their customers to give them. It was thus important for the stri...

When the bars of the nightclub closed, heavy shutters had to be pulled down. They were old and did not function very well, so there were often near-accidents and the staff were constantly complaining about the risks. In spite of that management refused to have them renovated or replaced. The cost would be astronomical, they said. But when two custo...

A nurse says this about the managers at the hospital where she works: ‘We have seagull managers here, they fly in from a great height, make a lot of noise, drop a lot of crap, then they fly off again.’

An American phone company secretly installed equipment to monitor work, but the employees found out. Soon, management noticed that it was not getting the information it had expected — the employees had created ways of manipulating the monitoring system. One manager commented: I cannot begin to tell you about the agitation that was caused, or the cr...

An American bank had speculated in order to generate high profits and had taken risks that were far too big. Senior management had also refrained from investing in new technology. The result was a financial crisis. The ones who got the blame, however, were the employees, especially middle managers: they did not work hard enough and they had a flawe...

The textile plants were parts of a corporation, which issued instructions about the organization of work. Often there were demands for reorganization in order to increase efficiency and profit. The instructions were to be converted by plant managers into actual changes. However, the plant managers were chastened and they saw the corporate directive...

In the literature on the concept of work, there is a contradiction between definitions that take their point of departure from a number of activities per se versus from any activity performed within specific social relations. In the first case, ‘work activities tend to be seen as historical constants and as applicable to every member of a given soc...

The employees who remained after the restructuring of the bank did two types of tasks. One was to answer phone calls from customers, the other to process other matters. Work was organized in teams with team leaders appointed by managers higher up in the hierarchy. The team members had to work the phone lines for two 2-hour periods a day, but they w...

Fifteen years ago, management bought used machines and these have never functioned properly. When workers are hired, they have to sign a document saying that if they break the house rules, they will be dismissed. One of the rules is that they always have to call in the maintenance department if a problem arises with a machine. In spite of that, the...

At an Irish call centre, there is a whole vocabulary among the employees regarding measures taken against dignity-threatening working conditions: slammin’, scammin’, smokin’ and leavin’. Slammin’ takes place while on the phone. Bonuses are an important part of earnings, making it vital to register as many sales as possible. When sales are slow and...

There was to be a team meeting. For two days, the production manager had been walking around the team’s workplace, observing their work and checking the production figures. He had not talked to the workers, only to the management-appointed team leader. It was the team leader’s task to act as an intermediary and make sure that management’s wishes we...

In this Malaysian free-zone, there were three Japanese electronics companies. Most of their work consisted of assembling small components — small enough for the workers to have to use microscopes to perform their tasks. All were women because, as it said in an advertising brochure for the free-zone, ‘Her hands are small and she works fast with extr...