THE EXPRESSIONS AND REPRESENTATIONS OF WORKPLACE BOREDOM: A STUDY ON SOCIAL MEDIA LITERATURE

Warda Najeeb Jamal, Qurrat Ul Ain Najeeb Jamal, Aasmaan Anam Najeeb, Aliya Ahmad Shaikh

Abstract

The study explores how people express and represent their workplace boredom on one of the major social media websites, Instagram. With regard to this, four popular hashtags, alluding to workplace boredom, were thoroughly searched for their content (e.g., 531 thousand plus posts), and eight themes were identified for the analysis based on the most common expressions and representations of workplace boredom by the people on Instagram. Thus, the study implies the power of social media used by the people to vigorously express and represent one of the ostensible adverse realities of their workplaces, boredom, which they may not be able to voice otherwise. Moreover, as the study has been conducted in the year 2021, it may be significant with regard to the pandemic which led millions of people to bring their work or offices at homes. Thus, such a change in the context of work (e.g., work-from-home) may have affected the people’s expressions and representations of workplace boredom. Similarly, the self expressions and self-representations of boredom at work by the people may attract the contemporary researchers to construct more prevalent definitions of workplace boredom in their future studies