Scrolling through tensions: Work-related memes and the discursive construction of tensions in digital work

Organizational life is increasingly characterized by tensions and paradoxes, intensified by digitalization and changing conditions of work. This study examines how Internet memes reflect, reproduce, and perform these tensions within contemporary digital work discourse. Drawing on a qualitative multimodal analysis of work-related memes shared on Instagram, we explore how irony, intertextuality, and participatory meaning-making articulate contradictions of working life. Situating memes within broader shifts in digital labor—such as algorithmic mediation, precarity, and expectations of constant availability—we apply an integrative framework for analyzing organizational oppositions. Our findings identify recurring tensions, including agency–inertia, expression–inexpression, rationality–irrationality, and hypocrisy–integrity, which converge around an overarching tension of control and resistance. We show how memes function as multimodal, participatory sites of paradoxical category work through which tensions of digital work are simultaneously contested and normalized.