Human Relations

This article investigates the role of ‘truth’ as an object of contention within organizations, with specific reference to the ‘politics of truth’ in the WikiLeaks case. For an empirical illustration of a ‘truth game’, this article draws on varied accounts of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing website. The article shows how different ‘truth games’ are mobilized by different organizational actors engaged in a politics of truth. The article demonstrates the existence of different truth games at work in the WikiLeaks case. It shows WikiLeaks’ profound challenge to hegemonic games of truth in terms of a ‘networked parhessia’, which entails a radical transformation of the process of truth-telling in support of whistle-blowers and in pursuit of an explicitly emancipatory, anarchist political agenda. Networked parhessia provides a new infrastructure to enable a ‘parhessia of the governed’. This article demonstrates how WikiLeaks is of singular importance as a case study of organizational resistance in the way it moves beyond micropolitical acts of resistance, such as whistle-blowing, towards an engagement with wider political struggles.

The impact of work–family conflict on well-being outcomes is well established, as is the role of social support in buffering perceptions of conflict. What is less well understood is how these relationships vary for different groups of respondents. Using a two-wave longitudinal design with a 12-month time lag and samples of employees (total N = 2183) from Australia, New Zealand, China and Hong Kong, the present research investigated whether the mediating relationships between social support, work–family conflict and well-being outcomes were moderated by gender, geographical region and the presence of dependants in the household. Supervisor support and family support were associated with lower work–family conflict, and hence reduced psychological strain and increased job and family satisfaction, for women and for employees in China and Hong Kong, but not for employees in Australia and New Zealand. However, the presence of dependants was not a significant moderator. Our findings illustrate the importance of exploring gender and national differences in work–family conflict research, particularly the investigation of cross-domain effects.

This article aims to move sensemaking theory forward by exploring a post-humanist view of how sense is made in material-discursive practices. Answering recent calls for novel theoretical views on sensemaking, we adopt a relational ontology, assuming subject and object to be ontologically entangled, and viewing agency as a circulating flow through material-discursive practices. Employing this perspective, we study how sensemaking unfolds at the emergency ward of a Nordic university hospital. By working through the concepts of material-discursive practices, flow of agency and subject positions, we produce an account of sensemaking that decenters the human actor as the locus and source of sensemaking, and foregrounds the performativity of practices through which certain ways of acting become enacted as sensible. This allows us to propose an alternative to the traditional view of sensemaking as episodic, cognitive-discursive practices enacted within and between separate human actors. With this view, what makes sense is understood as a material-discursive practice and related subject positions, which owing to their specific positioning in the circulating flow of agency emerge as sensible. Consequently, every actor is not just making sense, but is also already being made sense of; positioning and being positioned in the flow of agency.

This study, based on in-depth interviews with 45 practitioners in the emerging field of environmental sustainability, argues for a more nuanced approach to studying the meaningfulness of work. Drawing from the tension-centered approach, we posit that sustainability practitioners derived meaningfulness in tensional ways from circumstances and factors that were both enabling and constraining, stemming from various organizational, professional and political structures. This occurs through ongoing negotiation that spans everyday work processes, the perceived impact of such work, and participants’ career positioning. In addition to examining meaningfulness as a dynamic and contested negotiation, rather than a purely positive outcome, the political implications of such meaning-making are traced. We close by discussing some implications for future research on meaningfulness of work.

Taking the recent turn to identity in motivation research as its starting point, the study attempts to move the field further beyond instrumentalizing and fractionalizing conceptions in which motivation is simply a question of pulling the right levers. Drawing on a psychoanalytic, particularly Lacanian, perspective and an analysis of 51 narratives shared by employees from a number of occupations, it develops a more fine-grained and complex understanding of how motivation functions in the context of identity work. Specifically, the study explores how motivation is invariably mapped onto internal struggles with unconscious subjectivity and desire. These may align individuals more with organizational ideals of the properly motivated employee, but also create an empowering space in which employees can work through work-related fantasies and find enjoyment on their own terms. The implications of this perspective are discussed.