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  • BJM Missing Masses

    Rights statement: This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Knights, D. and McCabe, D. (2016), The ‘Missing Masses’ of Resistance: An Ethnographic Understanding of a Workplace Dispute. British Journal of Management. doi: 10.1111/1467-8551.12170 which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8551.12170/abstract This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for self-archiving.

    Accepted author manuscript, 310 KB, PDF document

    Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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The ‘missing masses’ of resistance: an ethnographic understanding of a workplace dispute

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>31/07/2016
<mark>Journal</mark>British Journal of Management
Issue number3
Volume27
Number of pages16
Pages (from-to)534-549
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date18/05/16
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

The literature on resistance has largely attended to human agents whether in terms of collective action or individual subjectivity. Through focusing on the ‘missing masses’ or mundane material artefacts, this paper seeks to show how actor network theory (ANT) can advance our understanding of resistance. Drawing upon ethnographic research during a workplace dispute, this study explores how material artefacts as well as human actors reflect heterogeneous relations that together successfully mobilized opposition to the imposition of compulsory redundancies in a UK university. In so far as the mingling and entanglement of humans and non-humans have been largely neglected in accounts of resistance, we believe that an ANT informed account contributes in distinctive ways to this literature.