Dependency and Worker Flirting

Abstract

The present paper concentrates on 'worker flirting' as one of the forms of interactional ritual in the culture of an organization. It is thus only an illustration of the interactional dimension of the culture of an organization. The paper deals with interactional ritual in an industrial organization and is based on an empirical study carried out in a radio-electrical plant, "Z," which employs 1,500 workers. The author carried out a period of three-months covert participant observation and recorded 139 free-interviews. These were supplemented by three months of covert participant observation by the author's collaborator, himself a worker at the plant. The study also included 21 one-week periods of covert participant observation in other plants. The research and analytical procedures utilized in this study have been taken mainly from the work by Glaser and Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory (1967; see also Glaser 1978; Turner 1981; and Martin and Turner 1986).