Dissent at work and the resistance debate: departures, directions, and dead ends*

Abstract The primary purpose of this article is to review what has become ‘the resistance debate’ among critical scholars of work and organization, and to extract from that theory and practice some assessment of contemporary dissenting behaviours in the workplace. While criticizing tendencies to see resistance as nowhere or everywhere, the article evaluates the impact that changes in managerial regimes have on traditional oppositional practices, and discusses the new spaces for innovative labour agency.


Introduction
Resistance is a focal point of debate among radical scholars across a range of issues involving labour and social movements. The primary purpose of this paper is to review what has become known as 'the resistance debate' among labour process, organization, and management studies, and to extract from that theory and practice some assessment of dissenting behaviours in the workplace. Given the predominance of pessimistic readings of the prospects for labour agency, there is a temptation to look for and laud the peaks, and analyze the troughs of struggles. Although this is understandable, it is arguably more important for social scientists and activists to be able to recognize, understand, and appreciate the diversity of what we might call oppositional practices. On that basis, we can make a more realistic assessment of the possibilities for mobilization and linkages between different types and spheres of action.
My previous work with Stephen Ackroyd 1 emphasized the excavation of a category of practices that we called 'organizational misbehaviour'-struggles around the appropriation of effort, product, time, and identity-that were distinctive, though overlapping, phenomena in their own right. Despite some objections from orthodox Marxists, 2 the goal was to add to, rather than subtract from, collective, more formal action. 'Rather than trying to replace existing accounts, we have been trying to fill a gap, adding a dimension and vocabulary to get people to think differently about workplace behaviour. ' 3 There is a parallel between this topic and recent debates concerning the diversity of worker organization. It is an inescapable fact that unions and other traditional sources of labour voice have been eroded in most countries, but there has been a tendency for much intellectual energy to be expended on debates concerning union renewal. That effort has been far from wasted, but it does sometimes neglect the emergence of new phenomena and opportunities arising from the fragmentation of worker voice. Important developments are taking place with the growth of workers' centres and nonunion worker groups, community unions, and community campaigning in developed and developing economies. These new or hybrid forms are both a reflection of, and stimulus to, a wider variety of labour struggles.
Papers presented at the October 2014 McMaster Conference on Dissent and Resistance in the Workplace in the Context of Neoliberalism were similarly broad in scope. This is reflected in the two papers from that conference in this issue of Studies in Political Economy. Baines, and Lewchuk and Dassinger add significantly to our understandings of labour agency, self-organization, and the boundaries between the formal and informal. They focus on two sectors-nonprofit care work and workers seeking jobs through employment agencies-that encapsulate the challenges of understanding resistance and dissent in diverse and difficult circumstances. I will return to those specific contributions later. But while I was listening to some conference papers, a familiar feeling hit me and a question occurred to me-why are these particular behaviours being spoken of as resistance? We need an analytical and practical vocabulary that matches the above diversity and requires some boundary drawing. In this article, I argue that among the many limitations of the debate is that too many things have been lumped and linked together under the resistance category. Although the range of debates is interesting, I have focused on oppositional practices within the workplace in an attempt to capture a parallel sense of diversity and direction. To do so, I need to retrace the basic features and dynamics of the debate, from the denial to the celebration of resistance, and then back again. I argue that a further weakness of that debate has been a version of collapse of context. Possibly the most famous concept in Labour Process Theory (LPT) is Richard Edwards' 4 Contested Terrain, the book encapsulating the control and resistance model. Yet contestation in such models requires the identification of specific empirical objects-the 'terrain' of managerial and accumulation regimes. Without this, resistance becomes an underspecified, overgeneralized collection of practices. The latter stages of the article, therefore, set out the medium-term changes in workplace regimes that frame the possibilities for various kinds of oppositional practices. It is argued that while these changes have closed down the space for some traditional kinds of misbehaviour and resistance, they have opened up others.

The end of resistance?
It may seem perverse to begin a discussion of the resistance debate at the 'end.' But the 'end' refers to arguments concerning the end of the phenomena rather than the end of the debate. By the mid-1990s, the view that labour recalcitrance at work was diminished or dead was pervasive. Such arguments were directed primarily towards LPT. Post-Braverman 'second wave' LPT was associated with a 'control and resistance' model. It is important to understand that what was discussed as resistance was primarily the kind of informal practices and organization to be found in the contested terrain of work relations-effort bargaining, absenteeism, and sabotage and the like, rather than strikes and disputes.
Of course by the start of the 1990s, collective disputes were themselves in significant decline, reflected in broader discussion around 'the forward march of labour halted.' Advocates of the 'end of resistance' thesis made reference to the decline of broader labour power and struggles, but their claims focused on the labour process. The argument was that work was no longer a contested terrain and that workers' countercontrols at work were 'effectively eliminated.' Subjectivity was no longer a significant source of resistance. The theoretical source material for such claims was Foucauldian. A raft of influential papers from mainly UK commentators claimed that various combinations of the disciplinary power of 'soft' cultural controls and panoptic or electronic surveillance were rendering employees willing, docile, and individuated or self-disciplining subjects.
Moreover, within the Foucauldian universe, resistance was seen as futile given that it is inseparable from power, and 'discipline can grow stronger knowing where its next efforts must be directed.' 5 Similar influences can be seen in German debates on the 'subjectification of labour.' 6 The ideal person under new managerial regimes is an 'entreployee' who is always available and willing to self-control, self-commercialize, and self-rationalize.
Although I developed the misbehaviour thesis 7 with Stephen Ackroyd for wider purposes, it was used to counter these arguments by challenging both the (often flimsy) empirical claims about the disappearance of contestation and the underpinning agency-removing concepts. It should be emphasized that the use of the term 'misbehaviour' was in part ironic, intended to subvert the conformist assumptions of mainstream accounts of organizational behaviour. However, the foundational concepts were drawn from a combination of industrial sociology and LPT, traditions that foreground labour agency and informal self-organization. With that in mind, even though some forms of collective action were declining, this did not mean all others disappeared. The thesis developed a framework for mapping and updating issues of time, work, and product appropriation by workplace actors, and added in a new territory of contested identity practices that foreshadowed the potential for dissent from corporate cultures.
Taken together with internal doubts raised among Foucauldian and poststructuralist scholars, the misbehaviour thesis appeared to shift some of the terms of debate. 8 It is worth noting, however, that similar end-of-resistance arguments emerged in parallel in other countries, drawing on different theoretical sources. B elanger and Thuderoz 9 outline and critique French neo-Marxist arguments on a mixture of factors-lean production, financialization, delegated responsibilities (dubbed 'responsibilization')-claimed to produce new disciplinary tools, a form of 'voluntary servitude,' and an 'invisible chain' that ties the employee to capitalism and production norms. Of course, capital is always developing new disciplinary tools and control practices; the issue is how widespread and effective they are. The overestimation of both tends to derive from managerial rhetoric being taken at face value and the underestimation of the operational obstacles to implementation and also the vulnerabilities that enable workers to exploit opportunities to assert interests and identity.
It is possible to add more evidence and examples about the persistence of such practices, but the notable point for this chapter is that the 'resistance debate,' in its main form at least, went through a major shift in the opposite direction.

Resistance is everywhere and everything
The practices that might constitute resistance in this new turn are remarkably broad. Take, for example, the Critical Management Studies 10 (CMS) Conference Stream called 'Food for thought? Opening up entirely new vistas on food, subjectivity and resistance': Food practices do not just normalize power. They also subvert it. Employees may overeat or spend time on food-related events to subvert the production/discipline ideology, and they may even refuse to eat altogether to resist organizational attempts to make employees more productive, reward them, or invite them to socialize and develop informal relations.
More broadly, what happened during this phase of the debate was a reworking of the Foucauldian framework away from panopticons and surveillance in favour of an emphasis on communicative conflicts and a micropolitics of resistance. This is summarized effectively in the oft-cited Thomas and Davies definition of resistance as: A constant process of adaptation, subversion and reinscription of dominant discourses which takes place as individuals confront, and reflect on, their own identity performance, recognizing contradictions and tensions and, in so doing, pervert and subtly shift meanings and understandings. 11 As Mumby observes in a sympathetic commentary about this body of research-the rejection of interest-based, employment-relations-oriented generative mechanismsresistance is conceptualized as a form of identity work through which actors form 'subject positions' that engage with organizational discourses. 'Self-formation becomes the primary impetus for resistance.' 12 Research on what Mumby calls 'discursive tropes' 13 is not without value. It enabled examination of the rise of irony, ambivalence, bitching, gossip, and cynicism as covert or hidden forms of resistance. These are considered, in part, to be responses to identity-based controls that can 'nourish communal vocabularies of critique.' 14 In principle, some of these themes fit nicely into our concern with dissent. However, it is often not clear what the discursive positioning is dissenting from. Take the paper on 'secretarial bitching' from Sotirin and Gottfried. Observation of the conversational interactions of four key informants reveals five 'bitching instances,' marked by informal, personal complaints about small infractions that express anger and moral indignation.' 15 Despite heroic attempts to invoke their emancipatory possibilities, such instances struggle to escape the impression that they are describing everyday horizontal interactions with colleagues and sometimes bosses. I think this is what the authors mean in referring to 'micro-accommodative impulses' or resistance that 'unreflectively legitimate organizationally-preferred identities that reproduce their subservience.' 16 Discursively-based micropractices have been used increasingly to reframe traditional 'resistance to change' frameworks as resistance for change, or, as Thomas, Sargent, and Hardy put it, 'how particular communicative practices can lead to generative dialogue in which resistance plays a facilitative role.' 17 These conclusions are drawn from observation of a three-hour managerial workshop in a telecom company as part of a culture change program. This dialogue enabled the negotiation of meaning among senior and middle management participants in which a mutual willingness to be influenced led to the 'emergence of a common sensibility around a commercial focus.' 18 Courpasson, Dany and Clegg put forward a similar argument on the merits of 'productive resistance.' The authors are also keen to avoid anything that smacks of an 'adversarial perspective' and oppositional structures of action, and they draw on 'cases' that demonstrate how middle managers can influence their superiors through skilful, creative 'resisting work' during which they 'temporarily displace normal power relations.' 19 It is clear from both papers that this version of 'resistance' is basically (re)describing normal intramanagerial manoeuvrings. In fact, such practices of 'challenge, diagnosis, and recommendations' could be carried out only by managerial agents. Courpasson et al. state, without apparent irony, that 'An interesting feature of resisting work that deserves further attention in future research is its similarity to managerial work.' 20 The paradoxical outcome of restoring a focus on resistance as everywhere, everybody, and everything is that it is emptied of any substantive content. This has led to a further twist in the resistance tale as the more radical elements of the Critical Management Studies camp have mounted a strong critique of their poststructuralist colleagues.

Back to zero?
Mumby articulates the limits of discourse-based approaches to the study of resistance effectively: Risks neglecting how the disciplinary practices of organisational life have very real material consequences for organization members. It seems a very hollow victory to celebrate the ability of social actors to engage in parody, mimicry, and so on, while neglecting the extent to which the lives of organization members are becoming more oppressive, surveilled…and insecure. 21 Nor does the problem need to be confined to the discursive. Cynicism, irony, and other everyday interactions can seem mired in the micro, 22 with relatively trivial and self-centred agential practices that receive prominence at the expense of broader collective threats and struggles inside and outside the workplace. Such resistance, according to Contu, 23 is 'decaf' because its lack of strength 'threatens and hurts nobody.' So far, so plausible. But some of the same critics have taken the argument further by attempting to identify resistance that is immune to incorporation: 'What is now being labelled resistance is advocated in the latest management rhetoric and practice…the real question is what kinds of resistance could not be incorporated.' 24 Even if it were the real question, the incorporation thesis requires difficult answers. In principle, short of social revolution, any struggle or act of resistance can be incorporated. 25 The criteria applied in the incorporation thesis would rule out almost all larger, collective labour struggles of the past 100 years. Never one to duck a challenge, Contu elaborates on this theme. Contu says that real acts of resistance 'present themselves as outrageous breaks with all that seems reasonable and acceptable in our liberal postmodern world,' 26 and defines an act of resistance as 'a real act that suspends the constellation of power relations,' 27 or 'an act that changes the sociosymbolic network in which we and our way of life make sense.' 28 One searches the paper in vain for an actual example, so it is of little surprise that, ultimately, resistance is defined as 'an impossible act.' 29 Shorn of the rhetorical excesses, part of the problem for the incorporation thesis is that its categories exist largely in a vacuum. As indicated earlier, we can evaluate the content and effectiveness of oppositional practices only with reference to the empirical object-the managerial policy, the available power resources present in the context, and to the subjective motives and rationales of the oppositional actor/s. It is easy to be dismissive of some of the discursive interactions described above, but Contu is equally skeptical of the kinds of 'transgressive actions' and misbehaviours highlighted by Ackroyd and Thompson. Yet informal, small-scale collective actions can result in real gains in rewards, effort, autonomy, time, or dignity, as well as providing bridgeheads to broader mobilizations.
To the extent that the incorporation thesis has a context, it is manifestly misleading. References to the latest managerial rhetoric and the postmodern liberal workplace indicate that the authors have been reading too many academic texts. It is bizarre that Contu's examples of 'liberal workplaces-call centres, car factories, and insurance companies-are not normally experienced as such by employees.' 30 No doubt it will keep workers awake at night knowing that their struggles for unions or against zero hours contracts can be incorporated into the bourgeois humanist fantasy of the autonomous subject. The thesis is also Western-centric. Workers in Indian call centres or those in Apple suppliers in the Chinese factories of 'late capitalism' would be surprised to hear that their transgressive acts have no costs to them or their employers.

Some reflections on the debate that ate itself
The resistance debate has taken us back to where we started. 'Resistance is everywhere' is ultimately the reverse side of a 'resistance is nowhere' coin. As indicated above, a key problem is that resistance is treated as a generic category without an empirical object or context beyond the endless interpenetration of power and resistance. There is a revealing admission at the end of the paper, previously discussed, by Thomas et al.: 'Nor were we able to examine the backdrop or organizational restructuring and job losses[, as] well as a downturn in the industry, which form part of the wider organizational and socioeconomic power resistance relations within which the workshop was located.' 31 Reference to not being able to is somewhat disingenuous, as poststructuralist researchers generally see no need to contextualize their observations. Radicals such as Fleming and Spicer 32 rightly criticize some limits of this kind of research, but have their own version in which struggle of any kind is a multidimensional dynamic that animates the interface between power and resistance between any actors. We get little idea why one form of struggle arises in particular times or places. As Mumby observes, 'in doing so 'struggle' seems without motive or direction and I am not sure where the 'difference' arises that creates the struggle.' 33 Both 'wings' also share a common rejection of the inferences drawn from the particular context on which (post) Marxist and labour process scholars base their analyses.
Fleming and Spicer reject the 'capital-labour dichotomy,' while Thomas and Davies reject the 'negative paradigm' of LPT that 'conceptualizes resistance as the outcome of structural relations of antagonism between capital and labour.' 34 Setting aside any specific conceptual or empirical claims, I suggest that the problem with 'multimodal theories of resistance' is that they obscure the specific dynamics that shape oppositional practices. It is entirely legitimate to study resistance strategies pursued by social movements in civil society, but the actors, contexts, and mechanisms are very different. Add together a preference for generic categories and a profound pessimism about, or lack of interest in, effort bargain struggles, and the result is that any focus on labour and the employment relationship is removed or marginalized.
To offer a corrective, we can produce a better conceptualization of the boundaries within which the repertoire of oppositional practices at work can be redefined, but the key requirement is to put context back in the picture. The next section attempts to do that, focusing largely on the misbehaviour categories outlined earlier, but adding a more detailed discussion of dissent.

The reconfiguration of workplace regimes
The context in which both resistance and misbehaviour take place is changing continually, but recent decades have seen a more decisive shift that has modified or diminished many of the traditional forms of misbehaviour that preoccupied managers in the postwar period. Some of these changes are the result of long-term trends, such as the shift away from traditional manufacturing or industrial sectors where worker selforganization has been strong (for example, motors, engineering, and mining). These have coincided with strategic choices made by corporate and state actors that have weakened employment protection and reduced union density.
Elsewhere, I have set out a number of key changes in overlapping accumulation, corporate, and employment regimes. 35 Under financialized accumulation, the source of profits is increasingly through the active management of corporate assets-for example, through downsizing and divestment. Both the corporation and labour are disposable, with the burden of risk being transferred to labour and other stakeholders. In terms of corporate regimes, larger and often conglomerate firms disaggregate structures-for example, into profit centres-while retaining significant power and strategic capacity at the centre, and using sophisticated IT systems to coordinate complex activities and financial controls, surveillance, and management of performance at plant level. Externalization in the labour market and fragmentation in employment systems increase precarious or insecure work and employment in many sectors. The combination of perpetual restructuring and transfers of risk inside and outside work, plus weakened labour market protection, help to account for multidimensional and rising subjective fears of insecurity. 36 In such circumstances, controls rest largely on market discipline and performance management despite the appearance or formal existence of 'employee engagement' in the form of commitment-seeking practices. 37 Its characteristic form is a cascading down of target-setting for cost savings and performance metrics, such as key performance indicators (KPIs), aided in many cases by electronic monitoring and tighter work flow. 38 In professional work settings, particularly in the public sector, enhanced audit and accountability practices perform parallel functions. As a consequence, compliance is more likely than commitment, with constrained rather than discretionary effort. 39 Versions of high performance and commitment-seeking remain in the mix of some managerial regimes. Though often framed in the language of values, managerial attention focuses on conduct and behavioural descriptors manifested in performance. 40 In other words, change is focused on performance behaviours rather than culture and identity. These include task-based scripts that standardize emotional and aesthetic labour requirements in interactive services; bureaucratized behavioural metrics in performance review; and the extension of regulation of employee conduct into areas that were previously private or partly protected. This includes codes of conduct concerning harassment, dress and appearance, health, and use of social media. 41 Precariousness, as Lewchuk et al. demonstrate in this issue, also tends to exacerbate insider-outsider tensions, with temporary or agency workers seen as competitors for work rather than potential allies for change.

New spaces for innovative misbehaviour
There can be little doubt that the consequences of performance cultures with enhanced surveillance and monitoring are greater work intensity and less opportunity for previous forms of effort bargain 'fiddles' and 'time wasting' in many, though not all, workplaces. As (Paul) Edwards and B elanger observe: The ability to claim ''special effort'' has in many jobs fallen. The electronic monitoring of work in low and medium skilled manufacturing jobs and in call centres is now taken for granted. Allied to this, production processes are much more predictable than they were, so that space for [effort] bargaining has been reduced. Many of the fiddles described in the classic studies turned on variation in the product or the process, which gave workers space to bargain about how much they were paid for non-standard work, or what would happen if they could not work because the machinery was broken. 42 In some sectors, work intensification is associated with the spread of leaner working and performance metrics. This, in turn, is reducing some of the scope for absenteeism-one of the traditional forms of employee misbehaviour. However, the crackdown on sickness and absence is in itself creating a 'big area of contestation,' according to a UK Civil Service union rep quoted in Carter et al., 43 and is taking up a considerable amount of lay union representative time and attention. 44 Tighter work flow and management of performance is not universal, especially in some office settings. As Paulsen 45 has charted in his recent but already oft-cited study, there are still workplaces in which various forms of 'empty labour'-skiving, work avoidance, and 'private activities at work'-are feasible. This is an important corrective to the assumption of universal intensification, but many of the cases outlined are the result of untypical workplaces where there is not enough work to fill the day, or where profits are still being made through minimal effort, but high value outputs. However, what F.W. Taylor called soldiering or restriction of output still persists as resistance to meaningless work. Paulsen also includes examples where new forms of Information and Communications Technology (ICT)-from workplace computers to social media on smartphones-can be used by employees for 'cyberloafing' or pursuing private activities during work time, such as using social media during work time, leading employers to complain of theft, misconduct, or an abuse of resources. That employees are using ICT devices for their own personal use during work time is confirmed in my own recent survey-based research, 46 which found that almost all employees engaged in online activities during work time, though most for short periods of time.
Some of the most interesting developments in reconfigured terrains are being contested in new ways and in new and mostly service settings. Edwards and B elanger 47 summarize a number of recent service sector studies that show that the growth of lowskill service work enhances the opportunity for forms of misbehaviour, such as pilferage and sabotage as employees search for dignity and means of defence against work pressures. Such evidence is consistent with findings from call centres, where despite fears of an 'electronic panopticon,' there is considerable evidence of employees exploiting spaces in surveillance systems to modify work or evade work norms. 48 One facet of such trends is that workers subject to emotional labour use the multifaceted nature of the practices necessary to demonstrate emotions to deflect or depart from employer demands, including using emotions as a 'gift' to clients and customers. 49 As demonstrated by Donna Baines in this issue, 50 this is particularly the case for employees in the voluntary or third sector who can draw on values-based traditions and ways of working to bolster their own autonomy and client advocacy. It is worth noting, however, that resistance and misbehaviour are inevitably caught up within the complex dynamics of the 'service triangle.' In other words, as employees seek to appropriate time or effort resources constrained by employer choices, clients and customers might pay the costs in terms of poor service. This speaks to a wider issue beyond the scope of this article, but is worth noting: the rise of dysfunctional behaviours, such as presenteeism (staying at work for longer than is formally required) and bullying that arise in the gap between increased work pressures and tighter controls and the restricted opportunities for defence of interests and identity.

Disengagement and dissent
Compliance is clearly a common and understandable response to market and organizational discipline. But it is not the only potential outcome. There is compelling evidence that disengagement from corporate values and practices is a systemic feature of new managerial regimes. The choice of this term is deliberate given that employee engagement is the fashionable term used in human resources (HR) and corporate circles to describe various policies to secure commitment and then measure their effectivenessexcept that they aren't effective, as their own sources indicate: A range of UK sources, including the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, UK Task Force, and academic papers, chart a persistently low and sometimes falling level of engagement in the recent period, ranging from 19% to 38% depending on the methodology. 51 The Harvard Business Review reports survey results that 'a mere 13% of employees worldwide are engaged with their work, with twice as many disengaged or hostile.' 52 Two large-scale studies 53 -by the Gallop Organization in 2003 and Towers Perrin in 2005-report high levels of disengagement. In the latter, ratios of 'engaged' (loyal, productive, and with satisfying work) to 'actively disengaged' is 21/16 United States, 12/23 United Kingdom, 15/15 Germany, 9/23 France, and 2/41 Japan. An international poll of 9,000 workers in 52 countries produced a global average of 33% of workers who think their bosses are completely incompetent. British workers were the most critical, with 41% rating their bosses in this way and 70% feeling that they could do better. 54 The two main forms of disengagement are cynicism and dissent. Both are forms of misbehaviour framed by the distancing from organizational commitment. Although cynicism is compatible with high performance (under insecure conditions), it might also be linked to employee appropriation of time and effort. Naus et al. outline a model of organizational cynicism that links negative attitudes to 'tendencies to disparaging and critical behaviour towards the organisation.' 55 While this model is useful, it may be more accurate to differentiate cynicism from dissent, with the latter being a more conscious and oppositional voice that can underpin active resistance.

Dissent and online communities
Although traditional industrial subcultures that have underpinned workplace recalcitrance have been in long-term decline, there is some evidence that new forms of social media can facilitate not just cyberloafing, but cyber dissent. Recent survey research 59 in the United Kingdom and Australia indicates that 15% of the employees had engaged in posting critical comments about their employer or manager at least sometimes, and that 47% had witnessed such actions. This might be predominantly individualistic, of course, but there is some evidence that web-mediated online communities are emerging that can give voice to dissent and foster occupational or other solidarities. 60 This can take a number of forms, and initially the focus has been on work blogs. Richards and Kosmala examine some such blogs, ranging from those of a bus driver to a hospital consultant. They argue against the kind of CMS incorporation thesis discussed earlier,

Avatar-An Illustrative Case of Disengagement
Evidence from ethnographic research 56 on a large IT firm in Ireland shows how top management and HR at Avatar expressed the strategic importance of having a normatively aligned workforce that was 'committed' to the organization and happily 'engaged' in their work.
Employees picked up on the contradiction between values espoused in the 'Employment Deal' and actual employment practices: It's very hard to swallow, extremely hard, they're telling you one day how important you are to them and the next day they're making more redundant [. . .]It's just hypocrisy after hypocrisy; they don't eat their own dog food basically. 57 Employees also engaged in more overt forms of work-related misbehaviour. Employee performance was measured against service-level agreements and knowledge of how such workflow systems operated meant they could manipulate the reports in their favour.
The statistics are taken from the trouble ticketing system. But you can put in any criteria you like, it's the same technology. You'd pick out the best ones and they're the ones you use. We would clear high priority faults within a couple of hours whereas all the normal ones would take weeks and weeks and they wouldn't show up on any end of year results anyway. It's all a game, seriously. 58 which views cynicism as ultimately reproducing power relations. They argue that cynicism or postcynicism can act as a group empowerment process: 'What emerges is a rich picture of how cynicism can lead to employees developing a deeply held sense of detachment from corporate culture initiatives and a closer connection within their own occupational or professional community.' 61 To stimulate and sustain dissent, however, online forums and blogs have to go beyond individual commentary to potentially act as a focal point for collective discussion and action with respect to work, organizations, and careers. Richards and Kosmala 62 argue that such potential is present as critical commentary migrates to more collective forums such as Twitter and Facebook. There is also evidence that some blog spots meet such requirements. An example is provided by blog forums among film industry workers involved in VFX/special effects. 63 Individual rumblings of discontent about worsening conditions are linked to union perspectives and actions. Such developments do not take place in isolation from corporate power. Their potential challenge to employers can be measured by the extent to which organizations frame disparaging blogs as a threat to their interests and take disciplinary action in terms of 'bringing the organisation into disrepute' and develop social media codes of practice that attempt to 'chill' employee voice. 64 In pioneering work on e-activism, Moore and Taylor 65 show internet-based communications played a vital and positive role in the 2009 À 2011 dispute between British Airways (BA) and the union, BASSA, representing cabin crews, particularly in circumstances of a geographically dispersed workforce. There were two sister forums, BASSA and Crew. The latter was developed partly in response to surveillance and legal constraints, and although open to all, it was pro-union. It allowed individual and collective expressions of dissent that enabled participants to express anger, raise fears, ask questions, seek clarification, evoke empathy, and share experiences. As one Cabin Crew Employee observed: That's where the BASSA forum became good, that's marvellous, 20 years ago that would never have happened, it would have been impossible…because instantaneously they could read what's happening, what's going on, what stories have happened, how we were treated, how unfair things were. And in fact that's changed trade unionism I would have thought, massively, in order to get things out straightaway. And especially in our job, if you're on a factory floor then it wouldn't matter because you would be there every day, but because we're all over the world, they would type in BASSA and then read what's going on. 66 The innovative and surveillance-aware nature of worker engagement with the forum is clear from Moore and Taylor's extracts from real-time postings. Participants were careful to use playful pseudonyms and avatars that often blurred gender, ethnic, and sexual identities and allowed for the fullest expression of feelings and ideas 67 : Chief Wiggum FU*K YOU, BA!! Just when we thought things were actually getting better, you go and dig yourselves a hole big enough to hide all our lost luggage in.
DNS1 I have just read the email and am pretty much speechless, except for one word. F U C K. (sorry to bypass the swear filter admin but I really needed that).
Lisarupe If this is right then this puts away to all good feeling, it's time to walk the cheeky feckers!!! As the authors note, whatever the distinctiveness of the communicative space provided by the forum, the virtual and the real were not separate spheres. The picket lines and other physical actions were also vital and vibrant. Nor should we lose sight of the broader point on dissent-that new forms of collectivism rooted in the labour process and informal organization are far from dead in 'new' workplaces with aggressive employers. 68 The link between dissent and mobilization need not be virtual. Elsewhere in this issue, Baines argues that among not-for-profit workers, dissent is nourished by moral projects linked to social justice values. These discursive interactions can and sometimes do lead to broader and collective action. Although the circumstances of this sector are highly distinctive, the account from Baines has similarities with Taylor and Moore's 69 use of the term 'micro mobilizations' to describe how everyday selforganization in the labour process can still play a foundational role.

Concluding comments
This article has two main purposes: first, to counter the pessimism and excessive burden of expectation that has arisen from the increasingly misnamed resistance debate. For many commentators influenced by poststructuralist perspectives in the 'decollectivizing workplace' and 'glass cage,' 70 only whistleblowing and individual acts of cynicism and exit are seen to offer occasional alternatives. In such formulations, the shrunken prospects for labour agency are underpinned by persistent and profound misunderstanding of the changed context and conditions. Beyond the confines of academic texts, employees remain knowledgeable about management intentions and outcomes, and retain the resources to resist, misbehave, or disengage. It is less about labour scholars 'celebrating' labour agency or concentrating on the 'heydays,' 71 than making practical and conceptual connections between different types and levels of struggle without losing sight of the distinctiveness and legitimacy of each. This links to the second purpose of the article-to contribute to remaking the conceptual boundaries within and between 'repertoires of opposition' at work. 72 Why any, or many, of the kinds of microbehaviours discussed earlier are labelled resistance is never entirely clear, and this question is not clarified by the view that resisting need not be conscious or active. 73 As B elanger and Thuderoz argue, 74 it is important to go beyond forms of action and their contexts to meanings and actor rationales.
Given the welcome emphasis on purposeful labour agency, the conscious/active criteria is not a problem in analyzing the behaviours of employees in the valuable contributions from Baines and Lewchuk and Dassinger. However, I do have some issues with the tendency to wrap up very varied oppositional practices under the heading of 'resistance strategies.' 75 Lewchuk and Dassinger are correct that precarious employment and the role of labour intermediaries require us to rethink some traditional categories. It is also pertinent to argue that such employment might weaken bonds of attachment and open up potential for certain kinds of dissent and misbehaviour (around work effort). However, it is difficult to see why working harder or paying for your own training is a resistance strategy. What might be confused, I suspect, is asserting greater autonomy as labour market actors (in accessing employment) and autonomy in the effort bargain at work. This returns to my earlier point that we need to be clear about the empirical object at which resistance is being directed. Something of the same problem arises in the Baines study. She successfully reveals the complex and overlapping forms of resistance, misbehaviour, and dissent among not-for-profit employees. However, despite the intent to treat these as 'a package of overlapping but separable activities,' misbehaviour largely disappears, and too many things that workers do and think are placed under the resistance label. A particularly contentious claim is the designation of unpaid labour and bringing resources into work as 'compromise resistance' or 'gift solidarity.' These are innovative terms, but could confuse rather than clarify. Compromise is inherent in unequal and/or uneven power resources, but no matter how well-intentioned 76 or linked to future dissent, these actions subsidize shifts of risk and resources from the state and employers to employees and clients, making it less likely that they be acted against. Baines invokes an interesting parallel with research on call centres and gift solidarity. The comparison is telling for a different reason. When customer service representatives find ways of talking to older or vulnerable customers, they are misbehaving by evading emotional labour scripts and managerial targets on time and performance. 77 With these observations in mind, we share the view that workplace resistance should be considered an intentional, active, upwardly-directed response to managerial controls and appropriation of material and symbolic resources. 78 It then becomes part of a continuum of oppositional practices in which misbehaviour denotes a broader category of things you are not supposed to do, think, or be. Dissent-the emergent focus of this article-becomes more significant because of both increased managerial attempts to dictate what we think and the massive gap between those efforts and the destructive engagement-sapping corporate practices dominating the work and employment spheres.
A third imperative arises from a review of these debates-that of elaborating ideas for, and as a means of, connection between different levels of oppositional practices. This has been raised, but not resolved nor even adequately discussed, in this article. There are conceptual means available, notably Kelly's mobilization theory, 79 which outline the key dimensions-interests, organization, mobilization, opportunity, and forms of action-that might 'traverse the space between experience at the point of production and formal means of dispute and action.' 80 Whatever the theory-building challenges that remain to link some of the traditional territories of LPT and radical industrial relations, the more difficult obstacles are practical. In the Fordist era, traditional forms of everyday resistance and misbehaviour, such as output restriction and sabotage, underpinned a parallel form of informal worker self-organization-first of the work group, then of the shop steward (or equivalent) structure. In turn, such self-organization was frequently the backbone of collective action through strikes and the like. 81 That 'transmission belt' has been damaged or broken through the changes in workplace regimes described earlier. It is becoming more difficult for oppositional practices in the workplace to translate into broader labour mobilization under conditions of market discipline, labour market fragmentation, and the decline of traditional forms of voice and organization.
Unions of course still try to escalate or build from everyday grievances-for example, around bullying and punitive performance practices-but change in power resources and pressures put on employees makes it more difficult, at least for the time being. 82 As Baines demonstrates, however, establishing such connections can and does happen. The social justice orientations of nonprofit employees facilitate oppositional narratives that can sustain both unionization and social movement initiatives. Admittedly, these circumstances are distinctive if not highly unusual. Fragmented employment systems and greater diversity of interests, identities, and forms of organization pose significant problems for labour scholars and activists, but there is little option other than to embrace that challenge and ensure that our forms of understanding match that diversity.

About the author
Paul Thompson is based at the Management School at the University of Stirling in Scotland, United Kingdom.

Disclosure statement
The author reports no conflicts of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of this article.