Humor in the workplace - from the physical settings to the digital spaces

What is it about?

Focusing on the use of humor in workplace talk as a discursive strategy, this chapter delineates how such a communicative act can benefit or threaten the tasks and colleagues of a work team. Grounded in existing literature of organizational humor in physical contexts, the research draws on a corpus of face-to-face and online conversations from eight Hong Kong workplaces whereby the inter-textual and multimodal performance of humor in the digital age can be elucidated through the qualitative discourse analysis method. This study in particular conceptualizes the roles of keyboard, mouse, software interfaces, and the relevant cyber-behavior when colleagues not only joke face to face but also behave playfully on the Internet. The interplay between the offline and online further contributes to emergence of heteroglossic identity and amplification of IT power in the workplace, which leads to additional space for the reconstruction of workplace discourse and its intermingling with other discourses outside the workplace. The chapter ends by suggesting some of the adaptive and maladaptive use of humor at work that may have been overlooked by scholars and practitioners, especially those from in Asian settings.

Featured Image

Photo by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash

Photo by DESIGNECOLOGIST on Unsplash