Managing and resisting workplace reorganization: Labor-management relations in a pre-digital media corporation

Abstract

This article examines how newsworkers resisted workplace reorganization in the pre-digital news industry. It analyzes how and why the Thomson Corporation reorganized the workplace and unions resisted workplace change from 1994 to 1995 as a case study of corporate control and worker resistance. Developing the concept of alternative communication resistance practices, it conducts a thematic analysis of untapped archival documents: union, company, legal, and news content. This concept articulates historically-contingent institutional conditions that facilitate corporate strategies to reorganize the workplace and union resistance practices. This article contributes an original relational framework to understand what is distinct about workplace reorganization at a particular setting. It considers workplace actors’ heterogeneous resistance practices within a specific workplace context and how communication practices express and constitute resistance. The article outlines five propositions of this framework that could be tested and potentially refined beyond a single case study in future (digital) journalism research.