Abstract
“Resistance” is a ubiquitous phenomenon in society, from the workplace to the broader community to global economic and political systems, it seems to be everywhere: anytime anyone in power tries to do anything, somebody resists. And by its nature, resistance is contested. Depending on whether you agree with the resistors or those being resisted, resistors are either heroic freedom fighters or recalcitrant luddites—unless you think the original luddites were right. As just one example, as I write this, Donald Trump is finishing his first month as US president, and his initiatives have sparked numerous protests around the world among the many groups that are threatened by aspects of his conservative agenda and the sense that he is shaping up as a Putin-like autocrat. But, how to understand all this from a social science perspective? While resistance has been studied assiduously in management studies for at least a quarter-century now (cf. Jermier et al., 1994), neither the management field nor social sciences more generally has grappled with it effectively, such that our theoretical approaches can model what is happening. The SAGE Handbook of Resistance, edited by David Courpasson and Steven Vallas, attempts to do this, and for the most part, does an admirable job. Their introduction highlights the weaknesses of the field as it now stands, and the stakes involved. Acknowledging the “rich theoretical legacy” of resistance studies that span multiple fields, the editors nonetheless lament the existence of a welter of approaches that lack coherence. This book is thus cast as a “humble effort” to begin the large task of providing that coherence.
The Handbook of Resistance is organized into five sections, Foundations, Sites of Resistance, Technologies of Power and Resistance, Languages of Resistance, and Geographies of Resistance, each consisting of five or six chapters. Foundations covers some broad territory, with most of the five chapters offering a definition of resistance followed by its application to a particular fundamental dimension, such as social transformation (chapter 1, by Juris and Sitrin) and subjectivity (chapter 2, Kurik). Of these first two, I gleaned more value from chapter 1’s ethnographic accounts of recent resistance events such as Occupy in the USA and opposition to austerity in Greece, though I appreciated Kurik’s call for more studies of right-wing subjectivity in resistance as well. Chapter 3 (Moghadam) addresses the role of Islamism and feminism in the Arab Spring movement. I liked this chapter for the complexities displayed in how movements converged (i.e. to resist western colonization of Islamic societies) and diverged (e.g. feminist resistance to traditional Islamic family practices in the same) depending on circumstances. Chapter 4, by David Knights, explores Foucauldian approaches to resistance. As someone whose critical perspective was forged in the heat of the postmodernist/labour process theory (LPT) debates of 20 years ago, this chapter rang my nostalgic bells. Knights revisits old clashes with Paul Thompson and colleagues, updating that debate with more recent literature related to LPT’s turn toward critical realism and his side’s proliferation of micro-resistance studies rooted in Foucault. Knights finds all of them still saturated with dualisms, grand narratives, essentialisms, and binary thinking, and plumps for a late-Foucault approach to resistance that builds from the subject up, with a focus on creating an ethical self. I don’t doubt that this is a worthy project per se, and Knights’ writing is engaging as always, but do we have the time for introspection with Trump on the rampage? Finally, in chapter 5, Fleming and Spicer explore “exit” as resistance strategy in what they call today’s “24/7 capitalism” regime, where employees are expected to be either doing or thinking about their job all the time. This chapter appealed to me because it was more grounded in the workplace than the others in this section. In the end, though, I wondered how far it takes us beyond 1970s Exit/Voice/Loyalty/Neglect approaches.
Section 2, Sites of Resistance, addresses different aspects of oppression from a primarily intersectional perspective. Chapter 6 (de Casanova and Jafar) addresses resistance as an “embodied” phenomena, and like Chapter 7 (Amanda Gengler), adopts an intersectional point of view that addresses resistance complexities in situations where individuals have both dominant (e.g. white) and oppressed (e.g. female) characteristics. Both are interesting on that level, and yet the bigger question, how to create intersecting coalitions of resistance, remains as elusive as ever. Chapters 8 (Jill Crocker), 9 (Blum and Kimelberg), and 11 (Tammi Arford) address resistance dynamics at home, in school, and in prison, respectively. While these are disparate settings, learning about commonalities in resistance strategies among mothers at home, protecting their children from neo-liberal indoctrination at school, and among prisoners at work, was enlightening. The last chapter recalled Mechanic’s classic 1950s studies of power bargaining among guards and prisoners while elaborating on it by discussing resistance when “bargains” are broken. The chapter I found most provocative in this section was 10 (Rantakari and Vaara), which focuses on resistance during organizational strategy making. Resistance in this domain is under-studied in the social sciences, because there is a tendency to focus in resistance studies to focus on the struggles of “the weak,” rather than of personnel in the boardroom. Yet as the author notes, strategy making is where big decisions that often have wide-ranging impact get made, so understanding it in this context is crucial. One high-level advisor who has a President or Prime Minister’s ear on something like whether to build a pipeline or not and can argue him out of it can accomplish in a single stroke what thousands of on-the-ground protestors may not once the decision to build has been made. Overall, I enjoyed this section for how the authors translated theoretical abstractions and applied them to concrete life-situations.
Section 3, Technologies of Power and Resistance, consists of four chapters that emphasize the impact of online technologies on power and resistance dynamics. Chapter 12 (Felipe Massa) looks at the characteristics of online communities. This chapter offers an exhaustive review of the concept of community, but this comes at the expense of a forward-looking assessment of online resistance tactics. Covering similar territory, Chapter 14 (Marianne Maeckelbergh) succeeds in analyzing how some antiglobalization movements have been able to utilize digital technologies to organize practical political activity among members. But it does so without fetishizing the import of “flash” Facebook or Twitter calls to arms, explaining how successful deployment of such technology is the result of a process of values-building within the movements. Chapter 13 (Edward Walker) looks at the phenomenon of “astro-turfing,” whereby powerful, reactionary institutions co-opt the strategies of “grass-roots” activism to engage in resistance to the demands of the weak. I found its analysis of Uber’s campaign against New York mayor De Blasio’s regulatory efforts useful in coming to grips with how elites are using these tactics to advance their agendas. Finally, Chapter 15 (Daniel Hjorth) discusses how recent ideologies and practices associated with entrepreneurialism are being used in complex organizations to exploit and control employees. These firms speak the language of liberating employee creativity and initiative while constraining it within the bounds of established corporate strategy dictated by elites. The chapter struck me as lacking focus in terms of who it is aimed at helping (lower-rung employees using their creativity to resist elite directives? Managers who want to successfully resist this through co-optation?). But there is a lot of food for thought in the emergence of entrepreneurial discourses in terms of possibilities for resistance on all sides.
Section 4 tackles issues of language and identity in resistance studies. Chapter 16, by Ryan Moore, examines cultural resistance as exhibited by changing musical styles. While this chapter provides a detailed history of popular music in the United States and Europe from the middle ages forward, I would have preferred perhaps a more detailed account of how and if today’s musical cultures are coopted by and/or subvert dominant cultural discourses. Chapter 17 (Guillaume Marche) provides this kind of finer-grained analysis, focusing on graffiti as resistance in San Francisco. The author, Marche, defines graffiti as a form of “infra” politics, meaning a form of resistance enacted by subaltern groups that lack ready access to formal political channels. While it is understood that virtually all graffiti is “resistant” to authority, since it is usually unauthorized, Marche is able to examine specific examples of graffiti as resisting urban gentrification and world bank control of global finances. Chapter 18, by Gay Seidman, addresses shaming as a social ritual. The author notes that historically, shaming has been used by dominant elites to coerce and enforce adherence to elite-defined social norms, but thanks to global communications systems, which is emerging as a tactic used by activist groups to resist social domination and reorient social norms in a more progressive direction. I found this particularly timely, as one can see it happening among many groups who are socially shunning anything to do with the Trump organization. Chapter 19 (Adam Reich) is perhaps the highlight of this section. The author uses a participant observation method to reveal how labor unions seeking to organize service workers at a Catholic hospital were able to resist the Sisters-run hospital’s effort to halt unionization by employing alternative arguments based in, not opposed to, Catholic teaching to support unionization. This is an example of the deft use of moral suasion to turn around an environment traditionally hostile to unions. Key to this effort was union ability to sway key Catholic priests and scholars to their side and thus overcome Sister resistance. One wonders whether there are gendered power dynamics at play here as well. Finally, Chapter 20 (Ybema, Thomas, and Hardy) argues that traditional accounts of control and resistance, both mainstream and critical, tend to reify participants as either “change agents” or “resistors.” The authors argue that control-resistance dynamics are in reality fluid and thus participants rarely identify themselves as exclusively one or the other. While in the abstract I found their point well-taken, in my view reifications have their uses, one of which is to draw meaningful lines even if they always have an element of arbitrariness: this is because some classes of people in organizations do have more power and privilege than others, and this can get lost when organizational behavior is viewed as an undifferentiated maelstrom of ebbs and fluxes.
Finally, section 5 is about the relationship between resistance and geographies. Chapter 21, by Giuseppe Caruso, examines the World Social Forum’s (WSF) use of “open space” to organize global resistance to capitalism and the advancement of its vaguely progressive agenda. Given the WSF’s commitment to diversity of views and its embrace of ambivalence, the case made me think about the limitations of such a broad-based form of resistance in terms of achieving concrete outcomes. Chapter 22 (Pablo Fernandez) takes an opposite approach, studying resistance by a worker’s cooperative to “clientelism,” a patronage practice in which the government helps the poor but local party leaders take a cut of the aid in kickbacks. These workers sought work, not unemployment benefits, because those benefits made them vassals of the party machine and stripped them of their dignity as workers. The case study reveals productive ways that workers maintained their stance in the face of strong political pressure to play ball. A similar theme emerges in Chapter 23 (Xueguang Zhou & Yun Ai), which details the struggles of rural Chinese farm workers to resist taxes and fees assessed by the ruling communist party. The case was illuminating for me as I’ve mistakenly held the view that communist control in China is absolute, and that any resistance would be quickly crushed. But the authors show that in the face of resolute peasant intransigence, significant concessions on taxes and assessments, as well as some movement toward local democratic processes, have been achieved. Chapter 24 (Lamia Karim) examines the trials and tribulations of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) attempting to improve life for people in Bangladesh. NGOs, indigenous movements but often with the support of western governments, are critical to helping citizens because the official state is riven with corruption and inefficiency. NGOs have thus used a broad array of tactics, from militant actions such as street protests and strikes, to back-room wheeling and dealing with government and business leaders, to lean forward in making life better. Finally, chapter 25 (Baudry and Eudes) examines the urban gardening movement as a discourse of resistance. The authors concede the seeming “preposterousness” of the idea, but then convincingly explain how urban gardening has implications for big issues such as sustainable food production and global warming. The authors recognize that urban gardening has in some places been coopted by corporations seeking to project a “green” image to cover for unsavory realities, but see transformative potential in these activities.
Overall, I found the The Sage Handbook of Resistance to have something for nearly everyone working in the area of resistance studies. As the chapter descriptions indicate, the scope of the work is vast, covering resistance in rural and urban settings, local and global, organizational and social, and traditional forms of resistance and those enabled by advances in web-based mobile communications. If the book has a bias, it’s that its authors are overwhelmingly of a “critical,” meaning left-wing, orientation, and so the forms of resistance covered are almost uniformly perceived from that point of view, such that instances of right-wing resistance are underanalyzed. Bob Kurik, in chapter 2, does acknowledge this (p. 69), but neither he nor others take up the gauntlet here. For example, in the United States, one of the most impactful instances of resistance in the last few years was the “Tea Party” movement, which helped the GOP win the 2010 congressional elections, thus severely hampering President Obama’s ability to enact a progressive agenda his last 6 years in office. The Tea Party is, to my knowledge, mentioned one time in the book, in passing. Resistance by the right to Obama’s initiatives more generally, culminating in the GOP-controlled Senate’s refusal to vote on his supreme court nominee for over a year, was a hallmark of US politics, but isn’t analyzed at all. Another neglected but in my view significant form of resistance occurring right now are right-wing efforts in Europe to fight the influx of immigrants from middle-eastern and African nations that their governments have pledged to allow. I’m not arguing that right-wing resistance should have dominated the book, nor should US politics—that’s just used here as an example. The Sage Handbook is laudable for its global sweep, with cases of resistance analyzed being drawn from many countries around the world. But there is a clear bent in the book toward trying to understand, and then help enable, marginalized groups resist capitalism and patriarchy, the concerns of critical-left social scientists. This is fine as far as it goes, but opportunities are thus missed to grasp the entire political range of resistance and interrogate its full meaning. That said, no book can do everything, and as the editors are well aware, assembling a book on such a sprawling and still-emerging field such as resistance studies was a formidable task. For the most part, the editors and authors succeed admirably, surely more so than I have succeeded in taking the measure of such an ambitious book in this short review. I recommend this book as a vital reference work for anyone interested in resistance studies, not just in organization/management studies, but from a broader social science perspective.