Welcome to the House of Fun: Work Space and Social Identity

Chris Baldry and Jerry Hallier
Additional contact information
Chris Baldry: University of Stirling
Jerry Hallier: University of Stirling

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2010, vol. 31, issue 1, 150-172

Abstract: Following the diffusion of HRM as the dominant legitimating managerial ideology, some employers have started to see the built working environment as a component in managing organizational culture and employee commitment. A good example is where the work space is designed to support a range of officially encouraged ‘fun’ activities at work. Drawing on recent research literature and from media reports of contemporary developments, this article explores the consequences of such developments for employees’ social identity formation and maintenance, with a particular focus on the office and customer service centre. The analysis suggests that management’s attempts to determine what is deemed fun may not only be resented by workers because it intrudes on their existing private identities but also because it seeks to reshape their values and expression.

Keywords: commitment; labour process; working conditions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X09351215 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:31:y:2010:i:1:p:150-172

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X09351215

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().