Fighting the Power Effectively: Worker Resistance and Ideology Critique

Radical realist ideology critique is often criticized for not being able to deliver adequate action guidance (Erman & Möller, 2024). In this paper, we show that it can offer an action-guiding framework by refining how empirical researchers conceptualize and analyze the efficacy of workplace resistance. The paper aims to showcase how ideology critique can provide practical orientation while forming a bridge between the empirical and normative studies of resistance practices. First, we outline the empirical literature and discuss its taxonomies of workplace resistance. This provides the empirical context to raise a philosophical question: what forms of resistance are justified compared to relevant alternatives? Much of the philosophical discussions focus on the conventional forms of worker resistance such as strike action, union activism, and solidarity (Borman, 2017; Gourevitch, 2018; Reiff, 2020; Cicerchia, 2021; Raekstad & Rossi, 2022). Others investigated the ethical foundations of covert resistance in the workplace, e.g., slacking off or evasive employee behavior (Alakavuklar & Alamgir, 2018; Aytac, 2024). However, these contributions analyze the normative desirability of a specific resistance practice. Our argument will instead enable a comparative outlook, helping actors assess the relative advantages of certain resistance practices as opposed to others. As the efficacy of resistance is usually one key dimension of evaluation, we unpack this notion with philosophical tools. Empirical researchers assess that certain practices of resistance are (in)effective in undermining dominant power structures (Contu, 2008; Mumby et al., 2017). However, there can be multiple politically relevant senses of the term. To illustrate, we use an epistemic notion of efficacy that specifically captures how a form of resistance can disrupt the ideological legitimation mechanisms that rationalize asymmetric power relations in the workplace. This does not necessarily make the same act of resistance efficacious in the sense of affecting the distribution of material resources in favor of workers or increasing workers’ ability to coordinate for concerted action. However, the epistemic notion of efficacy is still practically relevant because it can lead to disillusionment, and therefore, increase workers’ ability and willingness to engage in other forms of efficacious resistance. To develop this epistemic notion of efficacy, we draw on a realist conception of ideology critique (Aytac & Rossi, 2023; Prinz & Rossi, 2017). In this view, practices of domination and exploitation are often legitimized through what realists call self-justification of power, i.e., the powerful’s dissemination of narratives, beliefs, and concepts to generate perceived legitimacy for the very same hierarchical arrangement. They argue that this is an epistemically fallacious legitimation mechanism due to the combination of motivated cognition and circular reasoning. Utilizing this theoretical framework, we propose that a method of worker resistance is epistemically efficacious to the extent that it reliably disrupts the mechanisms of self-justified power. Workers’ disruption of self-justifying power can be empirically analyzed through a closer look at whether resistance practices create opportunities for the formation of egalitarian, stable, and collective contestation mechanisms. We argue that such contestation mechanisms help workers gain cognitive independence from managerial elites’ coercive capacity to disseminate their own narratives.