Knights, David and McCabe, Darren John (2016) The ‘missing masses’ of resistance : an ethnographic understanding of a workplace dispute. British Journal of Management, 27 (3). pp. 534-549. ISSN 1045-3172
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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.