Meeting and resisting the corporate body snatchers
Meeting and resisting the corporate body snatchers
This article is based on an empirical study of employees’ experience of downsizing at a US air carrier called Vimanas Airline (a pseudonym) and includes forty two semi-structured interviews with captains and co-pilots who worked at that airline. The product of a fruitful collaboration between an experienced researcher and former Vimanas co-pilot, the paper explores how a new regime of corporeal power and panoptic organizational discourses produced commercial pilots’ subjectivity by first creating loyal company employees who actively participated in their own acculturation. Later, after airline restructuring, pilots modified their thinking and behaviour in an effort to maintain some sense of power, dignity, agency, and identity, resisting managerial efforts at further colonization. It became clear that complex and partly competing reality construction processes were at play. Contrary to previous research finding employees to often be complicit rather than resistant to managerial control efforts, particularly during times of corporate crisis, this study reports airline employees both participated in, yet later resisted managerial control efforts. Prompted by one of our respondents we refer to this colonization process as ‘bodysnatching’ with reference to the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
35-51
Fraher, Amy
5c2ad136-717b-43b1-be85-c7a970f85116
1 March 2016
Fraher, Amy
5c2ad136-717b-43b1-be85-c7a970f85116
Fraher, Amy
(2016)
Meeting and resisting the corporate body snatchers.
Tamara, 14 (1), .
Abstract
This article is based on an empirical study of employees’ experience of downsizing at a US air carrier called Vimanas Airline (a pseudonym) and includes forty two semi-structured interviews with captains and co-pilots who worked at that airline. The product of a fruitful collaboration between an experienced researcher and former Vimanas co-pilot, the paper explores how a new regime of corporeal power and panoptic organizational discourses produced commercial pilots’ subjectivity by first creating loyal company employees who actively participated in their own acculturation. Later, after airline restructuring, pilots modified their thinking and behaviour in an effort to maintain some sense of power, dignity, agency, and identity, resisting managerial efforts at further colonization. It became clear that complex and partly competing reality construction processes were at play. Contrary to previous research finding employees to often be complicit rather than resistant to managerial control efforts, particularly during times of corporate crisis, this study reports airline employees both participated in, yet later resisted managerial control efforts. Prompted by one of our respondents we refer to this colonization process as ‘bodysnatching’ with reference to the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Text
403-1474-1-PB
- Version of Record
Available under License Other.
More information
Published date: 1 March 2016
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 428110
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/428110
ISSN: 1532-5555
PURE UUID: 403be84f-1004-4841-9ce1-3c40bde406af
Catalogue record
Date deposited: 11 Feb 2019 17:30
Last modified: 16 Mar 2024 00:00
Export record
Contributors
Author:
Amy Fraher
Download statistics
Downloads from ePrints over the past year. Other digital versions may also be available to download e.g. from the publisher's website.
View more statistics