Joking Aside,Insights to Employee Dignity in “Dilbert” Cartoons: The Value of Comic Art in Understanding the Employer—Employee Relationship

Catholic social teaching makes the moral argument for the importance of dignity at work, and organization studies scholars have documented workers’ plight. Yet, neither perspective sufficiently provides a sense of the feelings that managers and employees have toward one another. Adopting an aesthetics approach, and drawing from comic art and the cartoon strip Dilbert, this research provides an alternative view to understand challenges to employee dignity. Like aesthetics and art, comic art reflects feelings and attitudes and aims to provide insight into contemporary life. The results from surveying Dilbert found that managers often viewed their subordinates as exploitable commodities and threatened them with abuse. They point to a possible structural explanation for why employers view their workers so disparagingly and why employees feel their dignity challenged. This research makes evident the potential value of an aesthetics/comic arts perspective to understand and address issues concerning human behavior in the workplace.