It started with an article with the ingenious title ‘All quiet on the workplace front?’. Here, Paul Thompson and Stephen Ackroyd (1995) criticized the dominant types of analyses of work organizations in British working life studies of that time. In these studies, they pointed out that workers had disappeared as agents of workplace life, which was the quiet to which they alluded. According to much of the sociology of work, management had succeeded not only in subjecting workers to total control, but also in turning them into self-controlling dopes of company cultures. Already in Thompson and Ackroyd’s critique, we find concepts such as misbehavior, recalcitrance, and appropriation of time and products – concepts that are further theorized in the first edition of their book Organisational Misbehaviour (OMB, Ackroyd & Thompson 1999). Throughout, the authors emphasized the importance in workplace life of employees’ collective agency through informal self-organization. Undoubtedly, this is the most important book in the field in the beginning of the 2000s and it had a huge influence on working life studies. The success of the book meant that many have been waiting for a long time for a second edition – and now it is here.

In the last decade, research on the nature, impact and prospect of meaningful work has flourished. Despite an upsurge in scholarly and practitioner interest, the research field is characterized by a lack of consensus over how meaningful work should be defined and whether its ingredients are exclusively subjective perceptions or solely triggered by objective job characteristics. The disconnection between objective and subjective dimensions of meaningful work results in a hampered understanding of how it emerges in relation to the interplay of workplace, managerial, societal and individual relations. The article addresses this gap and introduces a novel sociological meaningful work framework that features the objective and subjective dimensions of autonomy, dignity and recognition as its key pillars. In this way, a framework is offered that analyses how meaningful work is experienced at the agent level, but shaped by wider dynamics at the structural level.

Som forskare och lärare vet vi att vi ska ”gå till källan” när vi hänvisar till en text. I den här artikeln genomför vi först en sådan jakt. Den utgår från en vissteori i en lärobok inom organisationsteori. Jakten går genom ett antal raktnedstigande led så långt det är möjligt att komma till den ursprungliga källanför teorin. Vårt första syfte är att visa hur författare hänvisar till andras teorieroch hur teorierna därvid kan genomgå omvandlingar. Ett andra syfte är attgenomföra källkritik av primärkällan (Kübler-Ross 1992) och det sätt på vilketden utnyttjas i sekundärkällorna. Slutsatsen är att managementteoretikerförvanskar denna modell med hjälp av det empiriskt falska begreppet”motstånd mot förändring”.

In our capacity of researchers and teachers, we know that we are supposed to “pursue the source” we make references to texts. In this article we carry out such a pursuit of a source. The source we take as our point of departure is a particular theory in a course book in organization theory. The pursuit is implemented through four direct stages as far back as it is possible to detect the original source for the theory. The first purpose of this article is to show how authors refer to theories of other scholars and how the theories thereby can undergo changes. A second purpose is to effect criticism of the primary source (Kübler-Ross 1992) and the way in which it is used in the secondary sources. The conclusion is that management theorists misrepresent this model with the assistance of the empirically false concept ‘resistance to change’.

The purpose of this article is to apply the method of the genre of studying chains of references to an instance of a secondary source of the contested concept of 'resistance to change' back to the primary source and thereby exercise criticism of the sources. This includes discussing whether the theory itself is empirically sustainable or sufficiently scientifically grounded. In the article, we adopt a theoretical lens of Critical Realist Discourse Analysis, mainly because it is sensitive to the importance of the influence of nondiscursive social positions on discourses. The primary source of the chain of theories of resistance to change turns out to be Kibler-Ross's model of stages of dying patients' reactions to their immanent death. We find that the model is systematically misinterpreted to fit the empirically false idea of resistance to change of the ideological discourses of management research.

This book presents the first published account in English of Sverre Lysgaard's theory of the ‘worker collectivity’ – a theory of an informal protective organisation among subordinate employees, which so far has been unknown outside Scandinavia.

Lysgaard’s theory espouses that workers collectively form a buffer against management to protect themselves from the technical/economic power, which controls their working lives. The authors have returned to the same Norwegian factory Lysgaard studied in the 1950s to carry out ethnographic fieldwork in the 1980s and 2010s, and investigate the changing nature of the production, labour processes and management strategies. Through analysis that extends over 50 years of factory life, this research documents shifting power relations between workers and employers during times of changing institutional structures, globalisation, and worker solidarity. A revised version of the theory is also presented as an answer to some of the uncovered deficiencies in the original framework. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of the sociology of work, labour studies, business management and organisation studies.