Beyond the Boundaries
通过民族志研究一家港口运输行业的小型专业服务公司，发现老板与员工在酒吧的非正式互动成为抵抗仪式，释放紧张并巩固企业秩序，为小企业员工关系研究提供新视角。
This article presents an ethnographic study of control and resistance in a small professional service firm in the port transport industry. We argue that informal interaction between the owner-managers and their employees at a site beyond the organizational boundary, namely the local public house, provided the setting for rituals of resistance in which the participants achieved a modicum of role distance. These rituals, in turn, fulfilled a latent 'tension-release function' (Goffman, 1990:241) that served subtly to reinforce and reproduce order in the firm. On the basis of this argument, our article makes a twofold contribution to small firm research. First, the specific combination of functionalist and interactionist approaches provides fresh 'insights into how the complex and contested dynamics of interpersonal relations in small enterprises are handled' (Ram, 1 999b: I 5). Second, our analysis suggests ethnographic research has considerable methodological potential to deepen the understanding of small firm employee relations.