A longitudinal study of the influence of shop floor work teams on expressions of ‘us’ and ‘them’
研究了一家钢铁厂引入车间工作团队前后员工话语的变化，发现团队工作语言被工人用来私下批评管理层，同时传统劳资对立被更细致的区分取代，员工态度变得更个人主义。
A discourse analysis of employee rhetoric before and after the introduction of shop floor work teams in a steel mill reveals important changes in expressions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ attitudes. The normative rhetoric of teamworking used by managers, insisting that all employees are working towards the same goal, raised an expectation of change in the traditional ‘them’ and ‘us’ divide between managers and workers. When workers detected little subsequent change they used the new language of teamworking to critique management in private although working in teams they reported pressure to behave differently. New working roles in teams did undermine traditional ‘them’ and ‘us’ loyalties, which fragmented to encompass finer distinctions (e.g. middle and upper management, workers and slackers) and employee attitudes became more individualistic.