This paper is based on research about humour at work, and more specifically in a Belgian Police station, with a focus on gendered relations. The data were collected for more than 2 years, consisting of shadowing, i.e. a “way of studying the work and life of people who move often and quickly from place to place” (Czarniawska, 2014, p. 92). Shadowing, in this case, involved following police oicers to observe their humour in real-time interactions, with citizens as well as colleagues. This type of observation was later completed by semi-structured interviews, to gather individual insights from police officers about their opinion on humour at work and how they practice it (if they do). The idea behind this research was to investigate how work is experienced looking at humoristic interactions (Goman, 1967), and what humour does to professional relationships, including its gendered character, often neglected by the literature on humour (Johnston et al., 2006). Gender is seen as produced and reproduced in the everyday interactions (West & Zimmerman, 1987), including humoristic ones. Additionally, humour is examined through an intersectional perspective (Lykke, 2010), with gender not being the sole focus but often intertwined with other themes, such as age or race. I am also looking at the ways language is used to put people in dierent categories and reiterate stereotypes about them, or, on the opposite, how people use humour as a tool to challenge those categories. Police is known as a male-dominated workplace (Pruvost, 2007), with a certain ‘cult of masculinity’ (Silvestri, 2017). But women are increasingly present in this occupation, both in the oices and on the streets at the intervention level. How do humoristic discourses at work reveal tensions around gendered dynamics? In what ways do jokes and discussions about humour expose generational divergences of opinions over what is sayable, laughable, and over work in general? How is the ideal worker (Acker, 1990) shaped by humoristic discourses ? Finally, what are the individual strategies and institutional responses, when facing humour that goes too far? By addressing these questions, this research not only hopes to contribute to a deeper understanding of workplace interactions but also highlights the intersection of language, gender and power dynamics, oering insights into how humour can reinforce or disrupt social hierarchies.
Carlier et al. (Wed,) studied this question.