‘I didn't feel like I was alone anymore’: evaluating self‐organised employee coping practices conducted via Facebook

Abstract

This document is the author's final accepted version of the journal article. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. 'I didn't feel like I was alone anymore': Evaluating selforganised employee coping practices conducted via Facebook AbstractThe long-term fracturing of the labour movement has led to increased attention to employee coping practices under new management practices and labour processes.However, the literature caters little for the recent rise of employees taking to social networking sites (SNSs), such as Facebook, to find ways to cope with the pressures of contemporary employment. To explore the self-organised coping qualities of SNSs, interviews were conducted with front-line workers, employed by a large anti-trade union USA retailer, who contribute to a self-organised Facebook page set up as a place for fellow employees to deal with collective employment-related problems.The main findings suggest employee self-organised Facebook pages represent an important development and extension to the coping practices available to individual and groups of employees. The main implication of the findings is that Facebook groups appear to strengthen and widen the options for employee resilience in an age of continuing trade union retreat.2

Paradoxical implications of personal social media use for work

“…Characterisations of the contradictory or paradoxical implications of constant connectivity include opposites such as positive/negative, liberating/dominating and autonomy enhancing/autonomy limiting (Mazmanian et al ., ; in the case of smartphones). Similarly, the blurring of public and private boundaries presents employers with new social media(ted) tensions, for instance, between allowing employees to voice opinions and protecting organisational reputations (Cohen and Richards, ; McDonald and Thompson, ).…”

The Online Unmanaged Organization: Control and Resistance in a Space with Blurred Boundaries

“…Critical studies on blogs and closed Internet groups (Cohen and Richards 2015;Ellis and Richards 2009;Richards 2008;Richards and Kosmala 2013;Sayers and Fachira 2015;Schoneboom 2007Schoneboom , 2008Schoneboom , 2011 have shown that workers find the Internet to be a media for collective identification detached from organizational culture. Therefore, we can also imagine that workers are not exchanging emotionologies, but rather following emotionologies of the Internet while defying emotionologies of work.…”

“…Sayers and Fachira (2015) analyzed how hairstylists vent about customers in a professional online forum, using humor or tragedy to find solidarity from colleagues in coping with emotional labor. Cohen and Richards (2015) found that closed Facebook groups may provide workers a forum for mutual emotional support.…”

Confusion and collectivism in the ICT sector: Is FLOSS the answer?

“…Cohen and Richards (2015) Reputation, control over technology and learning opportunities were explanations for involvement in communal resources. Hyman (1999) The history of open source software development has been characterised by resisting curtailments on the 'freedom' of coding through the imposition and exploitation of copyrights by corporations (Rigi, 2013;Stallman, 2002).…”

“…Lücking and Pernicka, 2009) and second, to contribute to the growing body of work on virtual spaces as organising forums (e.g. Cohen and Richards, 2015;Upchurch and Grassman, 2015). Unlike other work in the field (e.g.…”