709310

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OSS0010.1177/0170840617709310Organization StudiesCourpasson

Article

Organization Studies
2017, Vol. 38(6) 843­–859
The Politics of Everyday © The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0170840617709310
https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840617709310
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David Courpasson
Emlyon Business School, France and Cardiff University, UK

Abstract
Stealing, doing something unauthorized, occupying places, feeling silly and on the edge… how can we
account for these practices that make the everyday? Why would the notion of everyday be interesting for
understanding people’s experiences at work? How can we make sense of the myriad of disconnected actions,
gestures and encounters that make the everyday? This essay takes its inspiration from Henri Lefebvre and
Michel de Certeau’s specific investigations of everyday life to draw a picture of current workplaces; it aims
to capture some particulars of symbolic and material life at work, as well as some representations of lived
experiences that are shared by people at work. We defend a dialectical view of the everyday by showing
the link between forces of alienation and forces of emancipation. We draw from interviews to suggest the
extraordinary influence of the ordinary actions over our lives.

Keywords
de Certeau, everyday life, Lefebvre, politics

There are masses of times, enormous and stupid, in which nothing happens; and short, marvelous
moments in which lots of extraordinary events take place.
(Shaw, 1951, p. 75, quoted in Lefebvre, 2014, p. 144)

Amina, a 34-year-old assistant in a bank, told us in 2003:

What is especially good about the cigarette is that it is an object of subversion. It is forbidden and you are seen
as a bad person when you smoke in this corporation, and it is something that you need to do either in these
restricted cages where the corporation has said ‘this is where you smoke with other smokers’, or otherwise, in
a place that you have freely stolen, and where you spend 5 minutes with someone else in a spirit of play
because you are like a child hidden behind a tree counting up to 10, I mean you play hide and seek with an
invisible enemy who would say ‘go back to work’. This is a funny moment. (Amina, 34, HR assistant, bank)

Stealing, doing something unauthorized, occupying places, feeling silly and on the edge… how
can we account for these practices that make the everyday? Why would the notion of everyday be

Corresponding author:
David Courpasson, Strategy & Organization, Emlyon business school, 23 Avenue Guy de Collongue, Ecully 69130,
France.
Email: courpasson@em-lyon.com
844 Organization Studies 38(6)

interesting for understanding people’s experiences at work? How can we make sense of the myriad
of disconnected actions, gestures and encounters that make the everyday? This essay takes its
inspiration from Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau’s specific investigations of everyday life to
draw a picture of current workplaces that encourages to pay more attention to the casual, random
encounters as well as to the ways of living this randomness that people express in their very every-
day doings at work; it aims not only to capture the particulars of material life at work but also the
representations of lived experiences that are shared by people at work (Parker, 2006).1 It wishes to
continue questioning and unsettling certain assumptions upon which stories of the everyday rest
(Mumby & Stohl, 1991) to highlight the indeterminate matter that everyday life constitutes. We
argue that the careful study of the everyday allows contesting the view that everything is or should
be purposeful, because it leads researchers to pay attention to moments and places when or where
life spontaneously irrupts in the midst of otherwise boring and constraining circumstances. It helps
in looking for human non-purposeful acts that constitute an important part of our lives.
The sociology of everyday life emerged from a critique of approaches contained in contempo-
rary macro theory, whereby the actor is depicted as a passive surface internalizing norms and
values and as an agent developing characteristics and behaviours largely based on her class mem-
bership; according to these views, big narratives and big events are supposed to make the world.
However, they fail to acknowledge the complexity and indeterminacy of everyday activities
(Adler, Adler, & Fontana, 1987) as they silently also contribute to make the world. The study of
everyday life started from the premise that understanding people’s real lives involves analysing
their experiences in their ‘natural’ context, that is to say, where they accomplish things and deal
with the hard matter(s) of actual existence: the everyday social world explains how societies are
constituted (Cicourel, 1964; Garfinkel, 1967), because ‘naturally occurring interaction is the
foundation of all understanding of society’ (Adler et al., 1987, p. 219). This includes understand-
ing the wider structures of relationships that are created by everyday mundane encounters, as well
as the associated meanings and feelings. For instance, Garfinkel (1967) directed scholars to study
the mundane routines of everyday life, arguing that social order is created and maintained by
these very routines; no great events are likely to happen if a myriad of ordinary and mundane
gestures are not generated.
De Certeau and Lefebvre have been particularly insightful in theorizing this relationship
between mundane stories of the everyday and bigger narratives making ‘history’ (Ewick & Silbey,
2003). They shaped a dialectical vision of the everyday by showing the link between forces of
alienation and forces of emancipation. De Certeau considered that possibilities of emancipation
from overarching rhythms, constraints and fatalities rest upon the ‘opaque, stubborn life buried in
everyday gestures’ (De Certeau, 1997, p. 137). In this vein, Fontana (1977) explored the emotional
issues, loneliness and existential identity changes that underlie the everyday experience and mean-
ing of growing old. More recently, Waskul and Van der Riet (2002) have addressed the everyday
bodily emotions and suffering of cancer patients confronted by the constant deterioration of their
health and the simultaneous ‘destruction’ of their body, and how it modifies their relationship with
themselves and others: a true ‘identity’ of being a cancer patient is produced that helps people to
cope with the threat of imminent death by understanding their new ‘self’. This identity is based on
the routines of everyday life as a cancer patient, learning to interact in a new way with family,
friends and healthcare professionals. A whole world is created by these everyday routines that help
cancer patients to cope with and even to free themselves from the fear of imminent death. In other
words, the everyday deterioration of their body becomes a routine that can be fought through the
creation of new opportunities of encounters and emotional sharing. These examples suggest
the extraordinary influence of ordinary actions over our lives. For Lefebvre and Levich (1987), the
very concept of everydayness could reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Courpasson 845

Following this thread, the major idea that this essay will strive to defend is that, on the one hand,
the everyday designates alienating aspects of human life (the repetitive nature of work, the fatigue
and frustration that results from it, the fundamentally oppressive nature of the workplace), but that
on the other hand, it is also associated with the development of unexpected and surprising creative
potentials. The everyday is therefore analysed in this essay as a tension between alienating forces
and creative forces and how these forces are interpreted by individuals to make sense of their lived
experience at work. Indeed, it suggests that ordinary creative practices that are invented by people
at work permit attenuation of the oppressive aspects of the everyday workplace, involving particu-
lar ways of doing politics at the level of everyday encounters and gestures. The paper proposes an
activist sense of everyday life that is, we argue, crucial to understanding the workplace as a space
where individuals are capable of freeing themselves from the constant control of their thoughts and
moves by the authoritarian everyday of management.2 This perspective differs from ideas revolv-
ing around what Contu calls ‘decaf resistance’, that is to say, resistance ‘without the risk of really
changing our ways of life or the subjects who live it’ (Contu, 2008, p. 367). We present people’s
stories that suggest that everyday politics do change power relations, in ways that proceed through
the multiplication of moments where minds shift away, hands are used for something else than typ-
ing on a computer, bodies are going for a while in a different direction and in other places than
those prescribed by management. These are not classical politics or pure misbehaviour: it is the
constant irruption of ‘innocent life’ (Lefebvre, 2014, p. 230) permitted by the expression of simple
passions that bureaucracies did not (yet?) manage to extinguish. It is not the ‘under-life’ of organi-
zations (Ackroyd & Thompson, 1999, p. 165), but rather the very-life of organizations.
We begin by outlining some aspects of Lefebvre and de Certeau’s work before illustrating our
perspective through a number of interviews conducted over the last two decades with employees
and managers in diverse organizational settings. We illustrate the ideas defended in the paper with
four specific meanings of everyday politics as expressed by the people we met: appropriating time
and space, doing useless things, transcending managerial instrumentality and inhabiting the cor-
poration. Our overall objective is to highlight how the careful study of the everyday can help make
sense of the tension between alienating and creative aspects of the workplace, and of the subter-
ranean ways through which people are able to to accommodate and negotiate with the most con-
straining aspects of everyday life at work.

A Theoretical Snapshot of Everyday Life

In his Critique (2014), Lefebvre develops an analysis of the contradictions and potentials inherent
to the transformation of living conditions under modernization; de Certeau (1984) places his
research in direct relation to the quotidian, drawing attention to the inherent inventiveness of the
everyday. In a sense, they cover both aspects of everyday life, alienation and creative potential. If
Lefebvre is particularly interested in the analysis of alienating aspects of modern life, de Certeau
looks deep into the subterranean potentials that this very alienation can trigger.
Both are fascinated by the idea that everyday resists translation into verbal and visual media,
because for many, ‘nothing happens in the everyday’ (Schilling, 2003, p. 24). However, through its
emphasis on anonymity and the mundane, the everyday seems to permit, according to Lefebvre
and de Certeau, the rehabilitation of ordinary practices, showing the essential phenomenological
realm of the lived. Inscribed in the French theories of the quotidien (the everyday) (see Schilling,
2003; Rigby, 1991), the attention given to the liberating potential of daily life is central. A core
questioning that these theories bring about is whether (in the immediate post-1968 revolt in France)
the forces of oppression and ‘recuperation’ would decidedly always win out against the forces of
resistance and transformation. Pointing to the importance of studying the ability of ‘everyday’
846 Organization Studies 38(6)

common men and women to resist is the fundamental political project of French theorists like
Lefebvre and de Certeau, aiming to restore faith in everyone’s capacity to make sense, subvert and
accommodate the constraints of everyday life. Lefebvre and de Certeau strive to rediscover, beyond
all the tiny details of material existence, life itself, without making of everyday life a cult of singu-
larity. They are rather looking for the significant repetition and longevity of certain everyday prac-
tices that gives them a political texture.
Lefebvre emphasizes the tension that is inherent to modern life, between the everyday desig-
nated alienating elements of human life and the resulting suffering that largely shapes people’s
existence, and the [utopian?] idea that ‘collective praxis can transform relations in a lasting fash-
ion’ (Schilling, 2003, p. 31) despite the fact that many people ‘do not know their own lives very
well’ (Lefebvre, 2014, p. 94). The elucidation of mundane acts can therefore, according to him,
help to demystify the ‘social mystery’ (p. 224) of the everyday. What is particularly important for
Lefebvre is to understand the contradictions that are inherent to ordinary practices, such as pur-
chasing goods or reading a magazine. To achieve that, he suggests that asking simple questions
about life as it is lived is the indispensable step to transform life ‘in its smallest, most everyday
details’ (p. 226). The pivotal question that looms in his Critique is: ‘A trivial day in our lives –
what do we make of it?’ (Lefebvre, 2014, p. 196). To escape the monotony and boredom of work-
ing conditions and labour rhythms, Lefebvre encourages the bringing about of ‘the conquest of
the everyday through a series of actions – investments, assaults, transformations’ (p. 73), as a
springboard for collective resistance. The goal is to prevent individuals from becoming ‘homo
quotidianus tout court’ (Schelling, 2003, p. 33), absorbed by the very mundaneness of their spe-
cific everyday.
De Certeau, like Lefebvre, expresses the necessity of penetrating what Lukacs famously called
‘the anarchy of the chiaroscuro of the everyday’ (De Certeau, 1984, p. 199). He attempts to reveal
the inventiveness of everyday life so as to combine in a single vision the alienating aspects of social
life with the emancipatory potential of ordinary human activities. Mundane actions should be
reconsidered in light of their inventiveness, that is to say, ‘the capacity for engendering fresh styles
of life within the interstices of state and class control’ (Schilling, 2003, p. 35). De Certeau wishes
to discover ‘the resistance of the lived to the conceived’ (Schilling, 2003, p. 35) through the patient
observation of everyday practices and the ruses that individuals constantly devise to free them-
selves from the protocols imposed upon them:

If it is true that the grid of ‘discipline’ is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more
urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it. (De Certeau, 1984, p. xiv)

According to de Certeau, this resistance is made possible by the fact that the micro-social activities
(walking, reading, cooking…) are invisible to forces of control; people appropriate the residues of
work and of time through ‘subterranean practices’ and create everyday expressions of freedom as
every gesture (be it of obedience or insubordination) constitutes at the same time an appropriation
of constraints. The everyday is an anarchic composition of secret and interstitial activities of daily
invention, the task of man being precisely to invent as many new ways as possible of going about
the daily grind.
Overall, Lefebvre and de Certeau claim that the careful investigation of the everyday helps us
to move away from exclusive grand narratives about the social and from enhancers of social trans-
formation that would come from above; social and human life is going to be transformed by the
daily indeterminate inventions that individuals draw from their constant confrontation with oppres-
sion and subjugation. The everyday itself is inherently indeterminate, ‘both superficial and pro-
found, strange and familiar, insignificant and fundamental, outside the praxis yet the harbinger of
Courpasson 847

anarchic energies’ (Sheringham, 2000, p. 188). The level of the everyday is associated for Lefebvre
and de Certeau with creative capacities because, despite the constraining forces that make our
lives, the everyday is the interplay of other forces where tactical guile and stratagems can win the
day. For both thinkers, we are not passive users or subjects of institutions and discourses, we con-
stantly amend and subvert them, redrawing the balance of forces through inventive negotiations
with the system making up our environment, thus attenuating the negative aspects of the everyday.
This is permitted by a conceptualization of the ordinary as possibly transformed into something
extraordinary.

The extraordinary ordinary

The café is an ordinary place par excellence that is integral to everyday life (at least in France);
what is extraordinary about it? It is

generally an extra-familial and extra-professional meeting place, where people come together on the basis
of personal affinities (in principle and at least apparently), because they have the same street or the same
neighbourhood in common rather than the same profession or class (although there do exist cafes where
the clients are predominantly of the same class or profession). It is a place where the regulars can find a
certain luxury, if only on the surface; where they can speak freely (about politics, women, etc.), and where
if what is said may be superficial, the freedom to say it is fiercely defended; where they play. (Lefebvre,
2014, p. 63)

For Lefebvre, the character of the everyday has always been repetitive and ‘veiled by obsession
and fear’ (Lefebvre & Levich, 1987, p. 10). But he also strives to find moments and places where
this is not true. Indeed we need not study the everyday as if it were the space of the banal because
what is mundane is not necessarily meaningless: ‘are not the sensual, the extraordinary, the surpris-
ing, even the magical, also part of the real? Why wouldn’t the concept of everydayness reveal the
extraordinary in the ordinary?’ (Lefebvre & Levich, 1987, p. 9). Why would going to a cafe be a
mundane thing to do simply because we do it often, regularly, as a routine, and there we talk about
the weather or even do nothing more than observing people?
The same applies to the workplace. Everyday life at work conceals a secret production of what
Lefebvre called ‘a trace and a remainder’, that shows the unending pursuit by everyone against the
suffocation of conformism. This very pursuit, through the everyday mundaneness of encounters
and ephemeral subversion, or of what is lived by individuals as subversive, is what sometimes
makes the everyday extraordinary:

Everyday it is the same routine, my work is just not interesting, but the manager he says it’s great because
we work in projects. Who could care less? The problem is in the content not in the process, in the way we
work… but hey we are smart enough to have more interesting moments, detached from our work like
stealing a smoking time! This is where life goes back and we feel things could be worse. (Marie, 37,
insurance agent)

Studying everyday lives through ‘extraordinary mundane’ moments like smoking times permits a
turn away from a top-down vision of societies, organizations and work, towards a more grassroots
view whereby the emphasis is put on ideas, feelings, encounters as sites for understanding the
production of social order(s) (Thompson, 2013). Studying the ‘micro’ everyday things and doings
may reveal what the macro structures and decisions taken elsewhere could obscure, in particular
the political texture of everyday life, how politics bring life back in places from which it may have
been merely removed. Indeed, Lefebvre studies everyday life as the site from which any
848 Organization Studies 38(6)

transformation of the social order can begin; in a similar vein, de Certeau (1998) sees the everyday
as a sphere of resistance, a ‘space’ where some freedom can be experienced for people to struggle
unobtrusively against the dictates of conformism.

Lived Experiences at Work

In this section we draw from observations and interviews that we have made over the last two
decades in a number of organizational settings; these are snippets from studies that were not used
because they did not exactly fit, we thought, with what we were writing about then. But they were
striking moments in often long interviews and informal conversations with dozens of workers,
because they conveyed the playfulness and emancipatory ordinary ‘gestures’ that make the work-
place. Overall, the theme of these snippets of interviews is the significance of interstitial moments
in organizational life: coffee breaks, cigarette breaks, lunch breaks, morning and evening greeting
rituals, mundane encounters and useless conversations. Of course, like every ethnographer, we had
some ‘film left on the cutting floor’ from the different stories we had collected over time.3 The core
idea for this essay is in a sense as simple as the one asked by Maspero when he decided to spend a
month riding the B Line of the Paris RER (Maspero, 1990) to merely see ‘what happens?’ to ordi-
nary people in and around those trains; when Perec decided to observe places or the most mundane
objects of our quotidian, leading him to suggest that ‘interrogating your little spoons’ could be a
very significant question (Perec, 1989, p. 12); or when Rolin (1995) decided to go for a journey in
and around ‘zones’ to simply describe encounters and places: indeed what happens when we decide
to interrogate the everyday, as an inherently indeterminate nexus of ambiguities (Blanchot, 1969)
and tensions, while we usually describe it through a ‘nothing happens’ perspective. For instance,
can we observe moments when workers become stronger by exploiting the gaps and blind spots in
the systems of power? How is it possible that, besides open and collective protest, a transformative
quality could exist in the insignificant and often unnoticed gestures and actions that we accomplish
every day in the obscurity of the hidden spaces in which we talk and smoke and drink and suffer?
Indeed, tasks are what they are, often empty and meaningless, achieved in loneliness or in
teams, sometimes painful, sometimes accomplished in contexts of solidarity, sometimes reward-
ing. What remains to be understood in detail is how workers experience their everyday confronta-
tion with gaps in professional and occupational perspectives, with gaps in systems of power and
control, with situations of temporariness and precariousness, with unexpected and unprepared task
circumstances. In short, how they themselves perceive and deal with the tension between alienat-
ing and emancipating aspects of work that both Lefebvre and de Certeau identify. This quest for
understanding the meaningfulness of everyday confrontations with tensions at work can help us
better understand what happens in the current social relationships in the workplace by investigating
the everyday through the limits of what it is possible to do and not do at a given moment. The focal
contention is therefore rather political: pushing the investigation of the complication of everyday
challenging experiences that obliges people to shape practices of subversion and accommodation
that make everyday life at work a succession of micro-political moments, rather than only routi-
nized and standardized moments of boredom and subordination. Put differently, we contend that
we cannot understand the functioning of the contemporary workplace without unravelling the com-
plexity, ambiguity and indeterminacy (Derrida, 1988/1990) of these moments. Seeing the everyday
as politics makes it all the more interesting to look for instances of micro-social dissidence that
would not necessarily be oppositional, but would help individuals to cope with the new cultures of
work based on performance, speed and circulation, digitalization, as well as constant competition
between workers. How can certain ordinary practices permit the deceleration of the circulation and
flow of corporate power that usually crushes individuals? How could organization studies
Courpasson 849

contribute to clarifying the extraordinary dimension of ordinary practices and places? Now we turn
to specific meanings of everyday life at work that illustrate the political and indeterminate stance
that we defend in this essay.

Appropriating time and space: ‘Doing our own thing’

Thompson (2013) provides a first interpretation of everyday departures from conformism and rou-
tine by borrowing the notion of the flâneur (Baudelaire, 1863), that ‘flamboyant and dandyish
figure of the urban landscape who disrupts the conventional codes of conduct with a confident
panache and brash exteriority of style’ (Thompson, 2013, p. 6): this casual wanderer is simply
interested in looking at things and places, in a society of productivity, speed and compulsory
achievement; he has a critical edge and a capacity to quietly subvert the dominant demands of the
conformist social order around him or her simply because he does something that many would
describe as empty or useless; or simply because he does nothing. All workers are obviously not
some sorts of flâneurs à la Baudelaire, either lacking flamboyance or the spirit of liberty and eman-
cipation from controlling gazes that characterizes the Baudelairean casual wanderer; however, they
sometimes take the liberty of not doing exactly what they should do, and they do not feel com-
pelled to justify this liberty. For instance, take the lunch:

What is particularly nice with lunches is mostly when we decide we are not going to eat at the corporate
restaurant, you know, we leave the place, we escape, and we walk for 5 or 10 minutes together to go to
another place, these walking minutes are great because we are nowhere to be controlled, we trust with
whom we speak (right or wrong does not matter), and we breathe, in the street, and we know we have
around an hour for us, time is suspended for a while, we do what we want, and what is more, we do that
using the food coupons given by the company, what a pleasure [he laughs], you know we do our own thing
our own way. (Vincent, 39, publishing company)

There is nothing particularly subversive [or flamboyant] in going to have lunch outside of the fac-
tory or the office, except that Vincent and his colleagues stress the significance of wandering casu-
ally to go for a place to have lunch. This gives them mobility, as they take pleasure in abandoning
themselves for a short while to a parallel world where they do exactly what they want. Indeed
Vincent says that ‘where we go for lunch is not important, what is more important is that we spend
time walking and chatting, making jokes, enjoying a nice girl passing by, a posh car, this is what
matters’. The place where they go is not an extension of the factory, but another space that is cre-
ated by Vincent and his colleagues, so that ‘little things in life’ supplant the ‘great events’ (Bijan,
2013). Dissociating oneself from work, taking a step back, choosing to stroll instead of getting
something done, ‘taking a new route to work, walking and shaking things up a bit’, said Patrice,
one of Vincent’s colleagues. This view could help in moving away from the more usual perspective
of oppression over workers, because it leads us to see the everyday as a space of appropriation of
certain moments, as well as of accommodation and willing adjustment to the dictates of power
structures. Investigating the everyday permits analysis of the accumulation of moments that are
owned by people, from which come the creative possibilities that they can seize to cope with the
tensions and ambiguities that stem from life at work.

Doing something useless

Indeed, there always remains something that escapes domestication of lives at work; this some-
thing generates conflicts that configure everyday life as a contradictory relationship between
850 Organization Studies 38(6)

alienating and liberating activities: people invent activities that enable them to take the road of
‘departure’ and break from their usual compulsory conducts. However, the everyday is often
defined in a reductive way through the unmediated repetition of the identical, ‘the everyday
recorded as the everyday-the event grasped, pulverized and transmitted as rapidly as light and
consciousness’ (Law, 2007, p. 25). This does not always corresponds to workers’ experience
because even doing nothing can be experienced as a significant moment:

The biggest pleasure in my day work is doing nothing, I mean polishing my nails for instance, or looking
at something on Youtube for 10 Minutes …. I mean it is not doing nothing in itself but something like
dreaming or reading, you know, a useless thing with respect to corporate goals

says Catherine, a 43-year-old sales assistant in a bank. Her experience of everydayness seems at
times to fit with a chosen ‘nothingness’ that is meaningful to her. Of course, there is an intrinsic
ambiguity in these interstitial politics, always situated at the edge of the boundary between subver-
sive and accommodating gestures. Like Catherine or Vincent, individuals have to live ambiguously
with contradictions in their working environment: what is and is not authorized after all? The
ambiguity of everyday life comes from the mixing up of the banal (nail polishing) with the signifi-
cant (nail polishing during working hours). Indeed, if the everyday is political, as we contend in
this essay, it is precisely because how actual people experience their life at work cannot be reduced
to totalizing views presenting them as alienated and powerless. It is because they have the power
to decide whether such ordinary activity is meaningful to them, even if it is not to the company
management.
Indeed, following Lefebvre again, in the midst of the stunning conformism and repetition that
he otherwise describes, something irreducible continues to exist: desire, love, play, poetry, justice,
principles that help people to escape from the social programming of corporations. Consequently,
everyday life also shows people continuing to struggle against the conformist programming of
their existence by resorting to conventional banalities and pleasantries, and the manifold activities
that create ‘steam valves’ and ways to accommodate the constraining tone of their lives. In that
effort, each everyday cigarette or coffee on the balcony or in the hidden place, or lunch outside or
minutes of nail polishing takes on much significance (Shortt, 2015), although they are obviously
not subversive acts in themselves. People can sometimes do nothing for the corporation thanks to
the very ambiguities of these everyday life moments: everyday conversations about the weather,
family, friends, workouts, neighbours, impossible projects, bus timetables, the price of things,
irreducible banalities that force their way to the forefront of the significant and give meaningful-
ness to our very presence at work (and in this world).

Re-humanizing the workplace

These ‘irreducible remainders’ (Lefebvre 2014) rest upon the creation of discontinuous moments
that are intensely experienced by people because they are limited in duration but extended in mean-
ing; they are the very reason why people accept taken-for-granted routines and boring tasks. Thus,
the everyday also becomes a series of discrete moments of meaningful subversion where self-
identity and strong relationships in time and space can be constructed, thus going beyond manage-
rial instrumentality and re-humanizing the workplace. Eric, a 37-year-old R&D technician offers
another illustration of this idea:

I do like my job, I mean it is not too bad, it is badly paid, sometimes kind of always the same thing but that
is ok, I sometimes tell to myself if I had worked a bit more at school I’d be an engineer but well, fine, and
Courpasson 851

we have a nice team, we have been working together for quite a few years and we have many moments
outside of work where we just love being together and hanging out, and that is a different place and time,
I mean we see each other outside of the lab and we go to the gym, or to the rugby with a couple of
colleagues and we just forget everything about work, we are not together because we have been in touch
originally at work, this is something different now, we are friends and will remain such, whatever happens,
although I pray every day that the higher-ups and their servants will not come up one of these days with
another project of change and we will have to move somewhere else and split the team in pieces.

The proletarian ‘condition’ that even middle managers experience in today’s workplaces has a dual
aspect – more precisely, it implies a dialectical movement, as Eric’s quotes exemplifies. On the one
hand it tends to overwhelm and crush the (individual) proletarian/manager under the weight of the
toil – ‘Work is my daily life, I spend most of my time here, within these walls, all my discoveries
and achievements are related to this constant presence, every day…’ (Georges, senior manager, 45,
building and trade) – and of the institutions and the ideas which are indeed intended to crush her
(like the threat of change that would ‘split the team in pieces’). But at the same time, and in another
respect, ‘because of his incessant (everyday) contact with the real… through work, the proletarian
is endowed with… a sense of reality which other social groups lose in so far as they become
detached from practical creative activity’ (Lefebvre, 2014, p. 143). In other words, it is because s/
he is subjugated to constraining circumstances in the workplace that the individual worker is capa-
ble of creating her own reasons to ‘like’ being at work through making an alternative sense of
working relationships whereby s/he builds a sense of duration for her colleagues and herself.
Everyday life is therefore paradoxically similar to a fertile soil: ‘A landscape without flowers or
magnificent woods may be depressing for the passer-by; but flowers and trees should not make us
forget the earth beneath’ (Lefebvre, 2014, p. 87). Being depressed at times by the risks of losing the
rituals of pleasure of everyday life at work because of corporate change, Eric, like many other
workers, can nevertheless see the fertility of the relationships that he is capable of creating hic et
nunc, whatever happens tomorrow. Everyday life is indeed colonized by management:

My life has completely changed over the last 10 or 15 years, I mean before I had a life, now I am constantly
at work, connected and stuck to my screen, I have no life anymore, because everyday I am obsessed by the
next click on my computer (Jules, sales manager, 36, hospitality management);

but it definitely contains occasions of happy encounters that are likely to become enduring friend-
ships and solidarities. That being said, Eric’s statements also show the intrinsic contradictions in
belief that structure the everyday work experiences: Eric wants to keep his job while not really
enjoying it. While being somehow constrained to do it, Jules sees the value of his job, not only as
a source of practical survival, but also as a source of everyday enjoyment. And losing this job
would be a terrible break in his life although he maintains that ‘before I had a life’… Being colo-
nized is illustrative of the tension between oppressive and emancipatory experiences. It remains
that all everyday mundane gestures produce a temporary inversion of time and space in the repeti-
tive process of work, which permits avoiding a complete absorption by formal structures, institu-
tions and ideologies, because the everyday world that is constructed through all these tiny departures
becomes partly independent from the everyday world of work. The banal everyday life is con-
stantly disrupted by the contingency of these exceptional events that Lefebvre assimilates with
‘moments of presence’4 although it might seem dull to interpret nail polishing as such. Eric again:

outside of work, we are really together, I mean we have our reasons, our own reasons to be together, and
that has nothing to do with work, we decide what to do and where to go, that means freedom and that is
sort of the opposite of work.
852 Organization Studies 38(6)

A peripheral world is created at times, both connected and disconnected from the centrally ruled
world of work. Connected because it would not exist without work; disconnected because it needs
to be fundamentally remote (a departure) from work to become meaningful for participants.
Another important aspect of these re-humanizing departures is that they are not only aimed at
subverting the everyday for fun or for the sake of it: they are also moments of presence because
people share doubts, fears and personal feelings that they cannot share with someone else and that
will help them to make sense of dramatic managerial decisions. That was the case for Gerard, a
46-year-old desk clerk in a bank at a particularly disrupting moment in his company:

The 1990s were difficult moments in our company as well as in the whole banking sector, there were a lot
of dismissal plans. That created a gloomy atmosphere in most branches because the prospect of being fired
was really credible I mean we could just disappear from one day to another… we needed to share the fear
that we all or almost all were feeling for months, talking about this fear was important to sort of, be
reassured, finding a benevolent ear, and what was exceptional is that we all knew in the branch that we sort
of were in competition, I mean we had these conversations everyday, here and there, more or less
improvised, you know the need to talk, waiting for the list of people fired, and we know that out of 19
people in the branch, six are going to be out in a matter of weeks. Despite that, we shared our fear,
everyday, we shared our meals, our coffees, and we looked at each other with consideration.

Here Gerard shows that the everyday departures are not only subversive, but help to make sense
together of the difficulties of the company. Sharing fears through everyday encounters is a means
to revalorize the subjectivity of individuals that are all threatened and create a space allowing for
autonomy and reciprocal respect, thus transcending managerial instrumentality. They take the time
to listen to each other, to escape the domestication of their thoughts and the brutality of the deci-
sion, that could have led them to obediently play the competitive game (as Gerard said: ‘we also
could have sat and glared at each other without making a move, but that was up to us, we decided
to share our doubts, the place was better then’). People in that branch could decide to use the
‘immense remainder’ of the everyday to improve the quality of their life and relationships, still
waiting for the list of dismissed employees. We do not argue here that the goal of management was
to get the people to compete with each other so as to identify who was the hardest-working
employee who should not be fired. Through their cooperation and reciprocal understanding, despite
the looming layoffs, the employees are likely to achieve a win-win game: even those who shall be
fired will have achieved something significant for themselves and for the company.5 Following de
Certeau here, it seems that the legitimacy of their everyday ways of operating and doing things
(when confronted with a common threat) has been achieved because these doings ‘no longer appear
as merely the obscure background of social activity’ (De Certeau, 1998, p. xi) but as productive
outcomes and initiatives that enable people to move beyond the threat, to build respectful relation-
ships that shape singular and rich moments of their lives. Gerard learnt two weeks after our inter-
view that he was on the list.

Inhabiting, owning the corporation

Another important meaning of everyday politics can be found in practices that can be likened to
‘stealing’: workers describing their moments of departures often highlight that stealing time, or
place, or stuff, is of course on one hand something that is not plainly authorized (even though lunch
times and coffee breaks are usual activities at work that are integral to the constitution of work-
places). However, they also seem to consider that they have a sort of right to own the place a bit
and thus to subvert the usage of certain ‘commonalities’ like time and space. For instance, de
Courpasson 853

Certeau takes practices of ‘ripping-off’ to explain the centrality and creativity of unobtrusive steal-
ing practices in the constitution of everyday life at work:

This phenomenon spreads everywhere, even if management penalizes it or ‘looks the other way’ in order
to know nothing of it. Accused of stealing, or retrieving material for their own profit, of using the machines
for their own ends, workers who ‘rip off’ subtract time from the factory (rather than goods, for only scraps
are used) with a view to work that is free, creative, and precisely without profit. In the very places where
reigns the machine they must serve, they inveigle for the pleasure of inventing gratuitous products intended
solely to signify their own know-how by their work and to respond to the fellowship of workers with a gift.
With the complicity of other workers (who thus put a check on the competition fomented between them by
the factory), one effects some blows within the domain of the established order. Far from being a regression
toward handicraft or individual units of production, ripping-off reintroduces into the industrial space (that
is to say, into the present order) the ‘popular’ tactics of other times or places. (De Certeau, 1980, p. 4)

Normative institutions such as corporations are characterized by the widespread existence of prac-
tices such as ripping off (Anteby, 2008): it goes from taking a pen or a stack of paper home from
work, to workers making barbecues at home from stolen parts at the factory; they are objects of
suspicion, because they are achieved in secret, but they are also creative because they subvert the
effective order of things, by making this very order ‘the field of their art’ (De Certeau, 1980, p. 4).
The infiltration of such institutions by these practices of technical and social inventiveness permits
a moral resistance to exist and develop, attached to an ‘ethic of tenacity’ (De Certeau, 1980, p. 4):
to give meaning to the edges of their experience (in that instance, at the boundary between the
implicitly authorized and the forbidden), people need to stick to these activities, almost to routinize
them. Typically the ripping-off is part of the practices that revalorize the subjectivity of workers
through the creation of spaces allowing for autonomy and creativity. To account for this possibility,
Lefebvre introduces the notion of ‘inhabiting’ as a subversive category, referring to a realm that is
essential to everybody but becomes ‘increasingly deficient for its users as social space is integrated
ever more directly into processes of capital valorization’ (Ronneberger, 2008, p. 135). Feeling like
inhabiting the corporation enables workers to articulate a strategy against usual corroding corpo-
rate practices (Sennett 2011), avoiding the unavoidable acceptance of decisions made elsewhere.
Catherine says: ‘I am not at home of course, but I spend a lot of time here, so it is kind of my place’;
Eric adds that ‘the corporation, they want us to spend long hours working, so they have to accept
that the workplace is also ours, that is fair’. Eventually, some may steal while considering it as
legitimate, and through this subversion they create and appropriate objects. Again, nail polishing
at work could well be seen as the moment when Catherine fully inhabits (if not appropriate) the
workplace: she seems to subvert the use of the workplace, although not really because she also
owns the workplace. The tension comes back: management would say no to nail polishing during
working hours, but it happens anyway because Catherine fully inhabits the workplace. She knows
when and how she can sneak into the cracks of time and space. Does she? At least, the question is
whether all these everyday gestures of life are possible because, after all, they are tolerated by
management. Organizations are not total institutions precisely because they show a certain con-
straining tolerance toward hidden practices. By this we mean that management constantly estab-
lishes the everyday conditions for people to understand that in principle, ripping off, be it stealing
object, materials or time, is obviously not admitted, but that controlling forces may, sometimes,
shift and look in another direction.
Using the notion of inhabiting implies that everyday interstitial politics are more often than not
achieved in relation to a place. In this perspective, Fine considers that the possibility to study
‘small things’ from a sociological perspective supposes recognizing the fundamental importance of
854 Organization Studies 38(6)

the existence of a place (Fine, 2010, p. 360) where people recognize each other; for instance,
Goldfarb was able to offer a theory of the significance of the kitchen table: ‘When friends and rela-
tives met in their kitchens, they presented themselves to each other in such a way that they defined
the situation in terms of an independent frame rather than that of officialdom’ (Goldfarb, 2006, p.
15, quoted in Fine, 2010, p. 361). These places are one of the conditions permitting the everyday
to become political (Courpasson, Dany, & Delbridge, 2017): bookstores, salons, clubs and diverse
gatherings were places where resistance was possible in Eastern European authoritarian regimes
(Emirbayer & Sheller, 1999) because here politics were discussed and subsequently enacted as
people truly and fully inhabited these places. Of course, the tiny departures that we illustrate in this
paper are not of the same political magnitude; however, they build blocks of meaning that people
can use to link up with each other, to make the workplace a space of communication and exchange,
to generate the ‘free spaces’ (Evans & Boyte, 1986) and meaningful ‘dwelling places’ (Shortt,
2015) that are not supposed to infiltrate the controlled space of the factory. This meaningfulness
suggests that everyday life departures are constitutive of an ongoing project more than momentary
scenes to which different actors can jump to find a safety valve (Fleming, 2013; Kelley, 1993) or
to experience a ritual of pleasure (Roy, 1959): ‘Even if we cannot predict the moments of everyday
life, such as jokes, insults, flubs, or queries, when they occur participants incorporate them into an
orderly meaning system’ (Fine, 2010, p. 366), thus creating a commitment to stability that helps
people to feel relatively confident in what they can expect the next day.

The Indeterminacy of Everyday Politics

Behind the apparent subversion that the examples highlight, the complexities of these politics
largely remain. Smoking is not that subversive (it is not about sneaking off to take heroin; see
Hamper, 1992), although it is regulated by a whole complex moral discourse (Brewis & Grey,
2008); stealing time for a longer lunch or nail polishing can also be seen as moments of accom-
modation to the existing order because they act as steam valves that allow workers afterwards to
go back to work and work hard (harder) instead of turning to confrontation; nail polishing can
simply be tolerated by managers who prefer to look away as long as the job is well done. Moreover,
Roy (1959) showed that workers, when facing no enforced conformity from management, were
imposing it on themselves, an approach thus pushing us to not exaggerate the freedom and subver-
sive side of all the breaks and departures of the everyday. The complexity of these politics is the
direct reflection of the complexity and ambiguity of the interpretation that people can make of what
they experience: for instance, the assembly line seen from the shop floor is an exhaustingly lethar-
gic experience, often made of slowing downs, of time stretching out, of a boredom as the line
‘sluggishly and insistently moves’ (Highmore, 2002, p. 173; Hamper, 1992; Linhart, 1981); how-
ever, it is also interpreted ‘from above’ as the very instrument of acceleration and speediness of
work and production, the central tool of modern factories.
To put it briefly, everyday politics are therefore marked by indeterminacy. We started this essay
by emphasizing a posture on everyday life as a tension between oppressive and emancipatory
forces. The instances of subversion of and accommodation to managerial orders show that there is
no right answer to some of the questions raised by the study of the everyday. Adopting an indeter-
minate posture means on one hand that we acknowledge that people may decide how they will
shape the next day at work. But on the other hand, we do not know when the day begins whether
occasions of meaningful ordinary acts will happen, neither whether we shall take advantage of
them. This undecidability might well not be satisfactory, because it is a permanent ‘oscillation
between possibilities’ (Derrida, 1988/1990, p. 274). But what the study of the everyday teaches us
is that there could be a mutual definition and relationship between forces of oppression and forces
Courpasson 855

of creative subversion. The everyday could be the process where opposite forces would merge in a
constant undecidable and unpredictable relationship (Jones, 2004, p. 46), a ‘ceaseless moving
between terms’ (Linstead, 1993, p. 112). The profound irreducibility of these competing forces
leads us to see the workplace as oppressing, dehumanizing and liberating at the same time. The
everyday is defined here by the individual experiences of double-binds such as oppression and
creativity; it is an experience of the undecidable. Following Derrida, we might say that the every-
day is political precisely because people experience the indeterminacy between their state as sub-
jects and their always graspable possibilities of emancipation. For Derrida, ‘the experience of a
double-bind does not involve paralysis or inaction, but is, paradoxically, the condition of possibil-
ity of action’ (Jones, 2004, p. 53), a radical experience of creativity permitted by the very radicality
of contemporary management, simultaneously more and more pressing, oppressing and thoughtful
and smiling.
In other words, we suggest that there is a political quality in the insignificant and often unno-
ticed gestures and actions that we accomplish every day in the obscurity of the hidden spaces in
which we do stuff. Research shows that meaning and community are built in our lives around the
patterns of ordinary occupations (like preparing a meal) that are often ‘seen but unnoticed’
(Garfinkel, 1967, p. 226; Hasselkus, 2006, p. 627). Everyday life provides the ‘points of departure
and return’ (Garfinkel, 1967, p. 225) for all kinds of variations in daily life happenings and permit
getting back to normal life after temporary departures from our usual routines. Everyday ordinary
acts and encounters tighten social links, and at the same time give rein to some of the desires that
are constantly toned down by collective discipline and the necessities of everyday chores. They
give birth to silent micro explosions of freedom that this essay has tried to illustrate; the study of
the apparent banality of these everyday achievements (like escaping for lunch or stealing smoking
time or… nail polishing) is important to continue celebrate the energetic, pleasurable and creative
nature of everyday life at work.

To Close
Shedding light on these instances of everyday politics leads us to ask whether these workers ‘know
what they are doing, that what they do has the possibility of meaning more than they are able to
know’ (Bourdieu, 1972, p. 182), in other words, whether they are aware of the political texture of
their ordinary acts, and whether it matters or not for them, for management, for the future of the
corporation. Bourdieu would characterize these activities as ‘knowing ignorance’ (Bourdieu, 1972,
p. 202), that is to say, ‘a craftiness that does not know itself’ (De Certeau, 1980, p. 18). However,
we would argue that the words of people about these everyday doings suggest a conscious strategy,
aware of itself, and the everyday ingenuity of people to produce tangible experiences of ephemeral
subversion (‘stealing factory time’ as Manuel, a worker in a chemical plant puts it) as oriented
against the managerial order.6 These private and sometimes hidden modes of surreptitiously doing
something that is not supposed to be done (what de Certeau calls ‘the tragic murmur of daily life’,
1980, p. 28) make everyday lives the receptacles of ‘quotidian virtuosities and skills … signatures
of these micro-narratives of everyone’s anonymous daily life’ (De Certeau, 1980, p. 29). This
means that everyday doings are not always freshly constructed in situ as fluid and spontaneous
local projects (Garfinkel, 1967) devoid of any political purpose; rather, our examples suggest that
they produce shared meanings that can develop over time and create local cultures (Fine, 2010) if
not a whole counter-culture (Parker, 2006) that in turn will establish the legitimacy of certain unob-
trusive practices.
This paper has illustrated that when we give our attention to everyday practices, they are no
longer seen as ordinary and mundane; there is some elegance in them, as they offer opportunities for
856 Organization Studies 38(6)

a myriad of small behaviours and experiences freely chosen, that are not planned, not anticipated
and hardly controllable, to produce meaningful unobtrusive struggles against the strictures of man-
agement. Rachel, a 40-year-old engineer in the pharmaceutical industry, does not say otherwise:

The quality of our lives is not brought by the quality of our working environment, or the pleasure we have
to work … so we, I think that breaking with work, criticizing the bosses, talking about other things during
breaks that we offer to ourselves, things of life, beauty, leisure, kids, sport etc., is an act of self-respect, I
mean that helps me to see some quality in my life despite work. I do it for me.

Talking about kids, sport, while sipping a coffee: the legitimacy of our everyday ways of operating
and doing things will be achieved if these doings ‘no longer appear as merely the obscure background
of social activity’ (De Certeau, 1998, p. xi) but as the very outcomes of actions and initiatives that
enable people to penetrate this obscurity, to make sense of it, to render this obscurity more visible as
the site of singular and rich moments of social lives, beyond the instrumentality of management.
This essay also contributes to thinking of life at work as an uncertain alternation between moments
of boredom and moments of social pleasure. It illustrates why work is often lived every day as a series
of knotty entanglements between opposite aspects of everyday experiences, rather than as a uniform
zone of conformism, of tedium and blind obedience to meaningless commandments. This is why it is
important to continue studying the mundane and fragmented gestures of the everydayness. Trivial
occupations, the everyday banality, conceal complex and contradictory realities:

You know what is important to me in this factory? Saying hi and waving at the guy at the security gate,
every day, that gives me the sense that I am stepping in another world, like a ritual… and he waves back
and we will not see each other again till the next morning but that gives me a shot in the arm each morning.
(worker, chemical factory)

Self-conscious practical actions such as waving at the gate guy, or smoking a cigarette, transform
both the world and people, not because of the smoking gesture itself, but because it is interpreted
as a moment ‘stolen’ from the company. Nothing extraordinary at first sight, but this everyday
nevertheless conceals an invisible secret producing long-standing traces and remainders; the pres-
ence of such secrets stresses the unending quest by everyone for a path against the suffocation of
boredom and conformism. This activist sense of everyday life is precious in our understanding of
the ambiguity and complexity of everyday politics: it is never certain that such or such escape from
the subjugation of work is actually subversive and/or also accommodative. It is never certain that
it will even make sense and help people to accept their fate. It is never certain because the study of
the everyday sheds light on the indeterminate matter that everyday life always constitutes. These
actions may also be ways of self-discipline, of achieving win-win arrangements with management,
of having a reason to get back to working hard and feel that it is not that bad after all because ‘We
meet everyday at around 5 pm, in one of our offices, we talk about stuff, when the daylight is dim-
mer and we feel like we are kind of protected by the lack of light’ (Ines, assistant, 34, insurance
company). Everyday life can be ‘the joy that man gives to himself’ (Lefebvre, 2014, p. 219); study-
ing the detailed politics of everyday permits seeing work as something different from the endless
sedimentation of moments where every man ‘must earn his bread with the sweat of his brow’
(Lefebvre, 2014, p. 166): the uncertain and undecidable chance to give a different colour to what
is often seen as a tragic misfortune.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.
Courpasson 857

Notes
1. Parker (2006) concentrates on what he calls the counter-culture of organization, that is to say, some
mundane aspects of what makes organizations ‘profuse symbolic jungles that spread their subversive
post-it notes and emails spams like spores’ (p. 3). He is interested in the satirical power of these everyday
cultural creations, showing that they may not be reduced to safety valves for the machineries of power.
2. Through this notion, we wish to highlight the diverse ways through which everyday managerial gestures
and decisions can be interpreted as practices of power whose central objective is to trigger the willing
obedience of workers (see Courpasson, 2006).
3. The significance of these cuts came to mind when we were working to design the Organization Studies
Workshop in 2012.
4. It is interesting to note that what Lefebvre calls departures permit the intensification of the experience
of being fully present with the people with whom we spend these moments of break. Departing from the
routine permits one to be more present hic et nunc.
5. Let’s not be naive anyway as Gerard was obviously very unhappy to lose his job; this comment is simply
aimed at illustrating the profound political ambiguity of certain everyday activities. Facing a common
threat, branch employees willingly decide to cooperate, thus creating both moments of emancipation
from the threat and moments of construction of a better workplace that could help the branch to be more
competitive in the future.
6. At any rate, these quotes show people thinking like social scientists, explaining what they do and why
they do it rather than merely describing their practices to the researcher. I do not think that is exceptional,
although many ethnographers can be surprised by the theoretical soundness of their informants. In some
cases, this is also due to an acceleration of thinking encouraged by moments of disruption (like dismiss-
als), or by particularly constraining or even oppressing contexts of work. In highly constraining contexts
it is often striking to observe the intensity and creativity of mutual reflections and sharing that are permit-
ted by everyday stolen moments.

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Author biography
David Courpasson is Professor of Sociology at Emlyon Business School, France and Professor at Cardiff
Business School, Cardiff University, UK. He is the Director of Emlyon-OCE Research Centre. He was the
Editor in Chief of Organization Studies 2008–2013. His current research and writing interests are focused
around the multiplicity of resisting processes and how they permit actors to engage with and modify power
relationships. He is also interested in understanding how workplace changes affect identities and social rela-
tionships within organizations and institutions. His work has been published in diverse journals such as
Organization Science, Organization Studies, Organization, Entrepreneurship, Theory and Practice, Journal
of Business Venturing and Journal of Management Studies. He has recently edited The Sage Handbook of
Resistance (with Steven Vallas)