All Outputs (6)

‘Carry on laughing and I’ll punish you as well!’: Humour, power, and relationship negotiation in a prison workshop (2025)
Journal Article

Drawing on a 10-month ethnographic study of a private prison in the UK, this paper examines how humour is used between prisoners and prison staff to negotiate working relationships in prison. We show how both the presence and absence of humour can sh... Read More about ‘Carry on laughing and I’ll punish you as well!’: Humour, power, and relationship negotiation in a prison workshop.

(Doing) Time is money: Confinement, prison work and the reproduction of carceral capitalism (2024)
Journal Article

This article examines how prison work functions as a site where neoliberal and carceral capitalist logics are reproduced across individual, organisational and societal levels. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a private UK prison, we argu... Read More about (Doing) Time is money: Confinement, prison work and the reproduction of carceral capitalism.

When workplace humour turns into conflict: Exploring HR practices in the case of conflict management (2023)
Journal Article

Purpose: Although humour and conflict are popular topics in management, little attention has been paid to the negative effects of humour in terms of how workplace humour could turn into unexpected conflicts. From the perspective of conflict managemen... Read More about When workplace humour turns into conflict: Exploring HR practices in the case of conflict management.

Risky Business? The Value of Employing Offenders and Ex-Offenders: An Interview With James Timpson, Chief Executive of Timpson (2019)
Journal Article

© The Author(s) 2019. This interview with James Timpson, Chief Executive of Timpson retailers, explores his innovative approach to recruitment and empowerment in the workplace. James Timpson is passionate about the employment of ex-offenders, working... Read More about Risky Business? The Value of Employing Offenders and Ex-Offenders: An Interview With James Timpson, Chief Executive of Timpson.

The nurturing of ‘good’ capitalists: Prisoners and private prison labour (2018)
Journal Article

This paper draws on a ten-month ethnographic study of private prison work in a UK prison to drawn attention to the prevalence of neoliberalism; even in an institution as secreted and isolated as a prison, the neoliberal ideology can flourish. Prisone... Read More about The nurturing of ‘good’ capitalists: Prisoners and private prison labour.

Captive in cycles of invisibility? Prisoners’ work for the private sector (2018)
Journal Article

© The Author(s) 2018. This article critiques a case of modern prison-labour by exploring prisoners’ attitudes towards the prison-work they undertake while incarcerated. The study is based at a privatised male prison in the UK, assigned the pseudonym... Read More about Captive in cycles of invisibility? Prisoners’ work for the private sector.