M. Learmonth
‘Girls’ working together without ‘teams’: how to avoid the colonization of management language
Learmonth, M.
Authors
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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