At last...

It's taken nearly seven years, but it's finally finished!

That is, my Ph.D. on organizational misbehaviour.

It's a very long document - 356 pages or 101,522 words to be precise.

In short, I have tried to explain minor acts of misbehaviour by combining two organizational paradigms - labour process analysis and a social identity approach (social identity theory and self-categorization theory).

I used four case studies and my main method of data collection was covert participant observation.

The findings depart from previous insights into workplace misbehaviour in stressing the importance of acknowledging and investigating both the organizational and sub-group social identities of low status workers, in relation to such activities.

As such, a great deal of the misbehaviour noted in the findings can be attributed to the poor treatment of low status workers by management, yet misbehaviour is equally if not more attributable to the empowering or inhibitive qualities of the many psychological groups that worker can associate with or disassociate themselves from.

Ironically, my main method of collecting data involved keeping a secret diary whilst working as a food hygienist, a hotel waiter, a retail stockroom assistant, and a call centre operator, i.e. I could have blogged about it as well, if I'd known about them in 2001 to 2002!

Developing a theoretical basis for the concept of organizational misbehaviour by James Richards (May 2007).

Feel free to browse through it.

1 comment:

Spike said...

Excllent! Gonna go out and get legless in celebration?