Everyday resistance in home help services in Sweden* : Selective loyalty, consent and irony

The aim of this paper is to gain further understanding of the complexity and dynamic of resistance in organizations. This is done by describing and analyzing how a team of workers in municipal home help services in Sweden interpret and make use of their possibilities to act at work. The point of departure for the theoretical framework is power and resistance in accordance with Michel Foucault (1991) and Jon McKenzie (2001). But to grasp the multi-faceted characteristic of resistance, Stephen Ackroyd and Paul Thompson’s (1999) line of thought on organizational mis behaviour as well as the concept of self-organization is fruitful. James C. Scott’s (1985) work on everyday resistance is particularly important for an understanding of everyday actions and responses as forms of resistance. The employees in this study are being subjected to a process of change initiated by the management. They are dissatisfied with the process as well as with the intentions behind it. In spite of this they do not make collective and planned resistance; rather their actions and responses can be understood as informal resistance. They act with consent but not cooperation, with irony and other symbolic sanctions as well as a lighter form of sabotage. Above all they have a loyal attitude and loyal way of acting apparent in work situations and it has limiting effects on their resistance strategies. They also use their loyalty in a selective manner as a way of making resistance. The home helps identity formation and interpretation of meaning as well as scope of action is in this paper seen as intertwined with doing resistance. In the line of Scott(1985) I argue for the use of ethnography in general and participant observation in particular as a fruitful way of grasping this kind of everyday resistance