Abstract
This article examines managerial control practices in a public bureaucracy at the moment of introducing remote work as part with a new ways of working (NWW) project. The qualitative study builds on 38 interviews with supervisors and subordinates conducted before the advent of COVID-19. By interpreting interviewees’ conversations about current and anticipated future work practices in the changing work setting, we reveal tacit and hidden practices of managerial control that are currently prevalent in many organizations introducing remote working. Three constitutive moments of the organization’s transformation to NWW are analytically distinguished: (i) how implicit becomes explicit, (ii) how collective becomes self, and (iii) how personal becomes impersonal. Our findings emphasize that the transition to NWW must take into account prevailing institutional logics and must reconnect to a fundamental and often neglected question: What does doing work mean within the particular organization? Negotiating this fundamental question might help to overcome supervisors’ uncertainties about managerial control and provide clarity to subordinates about what is expected from them while working remotely. Finally, we discuss how the transition to NWW may serve as both an opportunity and a potential threat to established organizational practices while highlighting the challenge supervisors face when the institutional logics conflict with remote working.
Highlights
Remote working has been rapidly introduced in many organizations all over the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic
There seems to be a consensus that managerial control practices must be adapted for new ways of working (NWW) (Kurland and Cooper, 2002; Taskin and Edwards, 2007), little is known about how this process can be organized in a public bureaucracy
Understanding the potential dynamics underlying the introduction of remote working may help to guide supervisors in adapting their managerial control practices to the new realities
Summary
Remote working has been rapidly introduced in many organizations all over the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic. NWW absorb perspectives previously described as “telecommuting” (Feldman and Gainey, 1997) or “schedule control” (Kelly et al, 2011) and are characterized by greater flexibility in Managerial Control for Remote Working work time and space and by an increased use of information and communication technologies (Demerouti et al, 2014). Existing literature highlights the need to re-align managerial control when employees’ work time—and especially work space—has become more flexible (Kurland and Cooper, 2002; Taskin and Edwards, 2007; Field and Chan, 2018). There seems to be a consensus that managerial control practices must be adapted for NWW (Kurland and Cooper, 2002; Taskin and Edwards, 2007), little is known about how this process can be organized in a public bureaucracy. This paper follows a praxeological research approach (see overview in Reckwitz, 2002) to understand how the material, spatial, and embodied practices are meant to be enacted at new and dispersed sites (Schatzki, 2005), and how this is challenged by pre-existing assumptions about how work is done (Ashforth et al, 2000)
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