Description
This study explores the phenomenon of office lore (Hatch & Jones, 1997; Brednich, 2014), focusing on textual and visual artefacts like postcards, cartoons, and memes displayed by employees. These seemingly trivial items offer a bottom-up perspective on organisational culture and management, revealing how employees relate to their work environment and express attitudes toward office life. While research on office lore peaked between the 1970s and 1990s, with more research focusing on U.S. workplaces, our study fills a gap by examining contemporary German speaking workplaces and analysing the messages of these artefacts in more depth. We analysed over 200 items collected through snowball sampling from public and commercial organisations in Germany and Austria. Through an iterative process of inductive coding, we identified recurring themes that reflect key concerns of employees in modern workplaces. These are:1. Workplace-related issues (organisational and managerial practices)
2. Coping mechanisms for managing the demands and challenges of the modern workplace
3. Strong expressions of either rejection or supportive endorsement of workplace demands in a broader sense
Both positive and negative coping strategies - such as humour and self-care on one hand and sarcasm or substance abuse on the other - highlight varying levels of employee engagement and disengagement (Stranzl, 2024). Some themes, especially those related to resistance and subversion, can also be interpreted as modern forms of organisational misbehaviour (Ackroyd & Thompson, 2022). Overall, this study sheds light on how employees in German-speaking workplaces navigate and critique their environments, offering insights into contemporary organisational culture and behaviour.
| Period | 4 Jun 2025 → 6 Jun 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Association of Business Communication Regional Conference 2025: Building bridges between Business Communication and Management |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Bergen, NorwayShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Austrian Classification of Fields of Science and Technology (ÖFOS)
- 508004 Intercultural communication
- 602007 Applied linguistics