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‘Girls’ working together without ‘teams’: how to avoid the colonization of management language

Learmonth, M.

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Authors

M. Learmonth



Abstract

Many of us increasingly experience our personal and working lives through a range of categories and classifications that have come to be strongly associated with the formal management of organizations, the effect of which has been explained as a subtle colonization of our minds and imaginations. This article presents insights from an organizational ethnography based in a UK hospital’s medical records library where participants rarely used management discourses, the only managerial terms they used at all being teams and teamwork, and then mostly by way of parody, while strongly preferring an alternative collective identity, the girls. This article therefore illustrates and analyses how these workers shunned, if not entirely avoided, management language’s colonizing incursions.

Citation

Learmonth, M. (2009). ‘Girls’ working together without ‘teams’: how to avoid the colonization of management language. Human Relations, 62(12), 1887-1906. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726709339097

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Dec 1, 2009
Deposit Date Jan 6, 2011
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Human Relations
Print ISSN 0018-7267
Electronic ISSN 1741-282X
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 62
Issue 12
Pages 1887-1906
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726709339097
Keywords Ethnography, Hospital clerks, Management language, Teams, Women in organizations.
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1535765

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Copyright Statement
The final definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal Human relations, 62 (123), 2009
Copyright © 2009 by The Tavistock Institute by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Human relations page: http://hum.sagepub.com/ on SAGE Journals Online: http://online.sagepub.com/




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