Concertive Control Research Articles

Women’s Empowerment in Rara Asmoro Community: An Organizational Culture in Shadow Puppetry Performances

The research discussed that the woman dalang was still not considered equal to male ones in shadow puppetry performances despite being developed in the Mataram Kingdom era. Various reasons caused this phenomenon, such as the audience's preferences for men's dalangs. To respond to this condition, an all-women's karawitan community, Rara Asmoro, emerged in Surakarta to give support to many women who love wayang arts. This community sought to embrace these women's potential to then jointly promote and strengthen their skills in the field of Javanese art and culture. The research attempted to analyze the organizational culture formed in the Rara Asmoro community as an effort to empower women in the Javanese wayang art. The research applied a qualitative descriptive method to obtain a complete picture of the problem by interviewing the leader of Rara Asmoro and its four members. It finds a significance of the leader in empowering its members, fostering their confidence and talents, and expanding their opportunities for networking within the Wayang world. The dynamics of the organizational culture in the community allow everyone to switch roles: as a dalang, as a karawitan player, and as a singer, which opens opportunities for all members to have added value and skills. Conflicts are always resolved in a democratic and respectful manner, in which the leader keeps all of her members close as a family. However, internally, concertive control has not been fully implemented in the organization as it is still centralized on the leader.

Managing the Paradoxical Role of Control in Innovation Teams: A Leadership Perspective

Self-managed teams facilitate the necessary organizational flexibility and rapid product innovation for organizations to meet the increasing rate of change in their market conditions. However, recent evidence shows that achieving this goal is not so straight forward. Self-managed teams need to carefully balance autonomy and control to maximize their innovation output. This study adopts a multi-level perspective and investigates how concertive control mechanisms affect team innovation through the experience of paradoxical tensions (team level) and the moderating role of the managers’ paradox mindset (unit level). We collected survey data from 149 self-managed teams and their managers, all part of a multinational FinTech firm operating in various sites around the world. We then performed a mediated moderation analysis to verify our hypotheses.

Digital Discipline: Theorizing Concertive Control in Online Communities1

Abstract Concertive control (CC) theory has primarily been applied to traditional offline, work-based, closed membership teams. New organizational forms such as online communities have opened up additional sites in which CC processes may operate. This article makes several contributions to CC theory and research. First, it increases the applicability of CC theory by extending it from offline to online, work to non-work, and closed to open membership contexts. Second, it increases our understanding of CC processes by elaborating on three mechanisms of CC (group autonomy, group identification, and generative discipline) and how they operate differently in online work/non-work and closed/open contexts. Third, it develops propositions about how these mechanisms interact with three prominent media affordances (visibility, persistence and editability) within those contexts. Extending CC theory to online communities helps to explain individuals’ responses to normative group pressures online, which is highly relevant in our increasingly culturally and politically polarized society.

Communication and Political Conflict Resolution of the Prosperous Justice Party in Handling the Case of Fahri Hamzah

This study aims to determine the conflict resolution carried out by the Prosperous Justice Party in handling Fahri Hamzah’s case. This study uses organizational control theory. This study uses a qualitative methodology with literature review studies. Based on orgatizational control theory, PKS uses the method of domination:suppressive violence. PKS decision to dismiss Fahri Hamzah is a method of domination or suppression. Organizational Control Theory is a theory that regulates the ways of communication that are able to control employess. Organizational control is carried out in four ways: First, simple control or the uses of power that is on going and open. Second, technical control or use of technology tools. Third, bureaucracy, which is the use of organizational procedures and formal rules, as described by Weber. Employees are provided with a guidebook that include policies to follow, memos, repost reviews, meeting reviews and performance reviews which are used to convey other expectations. Fourth, concertive control. There are several methods used in conflict resolution: First, conflict stimulation methods, conflict reduction and conflict resolution. Second, the conflict reduction method is used to reduse the hostility caused by conflict. Third, conflict resolution methods, which are carried out through domination or supression, compromise, and integrarive problem solving. This study uses a qualitative methodology with a literature review study. Based on orgnizational control theory, PKS uses the method of domination or suppresive ciolence. The PKS decision to dismiss Fahri Hamzah is a method of domination or suppression.

Agricultural workers’ participation in certification as a mechanism for improving working conditions: The Equitable Food Initiative

ABSTRACT The Equitable Food Initiative (EFI) is a third-party certification program seeking to improve agricultural working conditions as well as food safety practices, environmental stewardship, and farm viability. The initiative uses innovative cross-functional labor-management teams to promote compliance with EFI standards and advocate for worker interests. Based on focus groups, interviews, and observations at five EFI-certified operations in the U.S. and Mexico, we describe how farms implemented the participatory system and the degree of involvement and influence the teams achieved. We elucidate how organizational dynamics generally associated with concertive control instead contributed to logics of collective advocacy. Theoretical implications address debates about (a) worker participation and empowerment, (b) corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate accountability, and third-party auditing, and (c) positive deviance and critical praxis. Practical insights can guide EFI operations and other worker-driven accountability systems.

Tożsamość we współczesnej instytucji: zarządzanie poprzez przestrzenie upodmiotowienia

The aim of the article is to reconstruct the emerging patterns of controlling people in contemporary institution which is connected with creating the spaces of empowerment. The management of people is ensured through concertive control the essence of which is related to mutual „watching” of each other by the teams members. At firstsight the concertive control is much less oppressive than in the past direct top to the bottom control. However, in practice it is more effective control as institution aims and values are realized by people which feel to be empowered thanks to lack of direct presence of top managers. In concertive control workers do not seem to be aware that they are only of an instrument of top managers’ power.

Concertive resistance: how overlapping team identifications enable collective organizational resistance

ABSTRACTThis study describes how overlapping sources of identification allow organizational members to resist managerial influence collectively in the absence of overt talk or leadership communication – labeled here concertive resistance. Concertive resistance is exercised by organizational members according to a set of core group-level values which challenge, invert, or disrupt top-down control. Concertive resistance extends Barker’s [1993. “Tightening the Iron Cage: Concertive Control in Self-managing Teams.” Administrative Science Quarterly 38 (3): 408–437] concept of concertive control by explaining how team-level resistance is also attributable to team-level control. Through an ethnography of an American university football team, this study reveals how multiple and overlapping sources of identification produced a team’s spontaneously and collective resistance, without the aid of overt resistance leadership. The essay contributes to the resistance literature by using Unobtrusive Control Theory to explain how group-level resistance is accomplished through control.

“What is innovation anyway?”- Creation of Concertive and Formal Control for Innovation Processes

Enabling innovation processes, constitutes one of the primary functions of organizational control in modern organizations. While studies show that control may indeed enable innovation, little is kn...

"The Work Must Go On": The Role of Employee and Managerial Communication in the Use of Work-Life Policies.

The Netherlands is characterized by extensive national work–life regulations relative to the United States. Yet, Dutch employees do not always take advantage of existing work–life policies. Individual and focus group interviews with employees and managers in three (public and private) Dutch organizations identified how employee and managerial communication contributed to acquired rules concerning work–life policies and the interpretation of allocative and authoritative resources for policy enactment. Analyses revealed differences in employees’ and managers’ resistance to policy, the binds and dilemmas experienced, and the coordination of agreements and actions to complete workloads. There are also differences between public and private contexts in the enactment of national and organizational policies, revealing how national (e.g., gender) and organizational (e.g., concertive control) mechanisms play out in employee and managerial communication that determine the use of work–life policies.

Conceptualising the surveillance of teachers

Schools are risky places: the risk of a poor Ofsted report, the risk of sliding down league tables, the risk of teachers abusing children, the risk of teachers being falsely accused of abuse. As a result of risk anxiety and the ever-increasing sophistication of technology, the surveillance of teachers has proliferated, becoming a future-oriented pursuit to manage this risk. Drawing on the surveillance studies literature, this article attempts to theorise the surveillance of teachers. Firstly the article argues that there are three types of teacher surveillance: the vertical perpetuated by Ofsted and senior school leaders such as teaching observations and learning walks, but also students recording their teachers on mobile phones; horizontal surveillance enacted by peers in terms of concertive control, but also parental surveillance via online and offline networks; and, finally, intrapersonal surveillance embracing reflective practice, data reporting and self-policing proximity from children. The article then concludes by arguing that while surveillance in schools embraces the themes of modern surveillance in general, by doggedly retaining the proximal and the interpersonal, it should be considered a hybrid form between traditional and modern forms of surveillance.

Investigating the Role of Control and Support Mechanisms in Members’ Sense of Virtual Community

Research on online communities has emphasized the individual benefits of social support for members, but less is known about how such communities are regulated through organizing processes of support and control. Drawing on a survey of 214 members of a particular online message board community, we develop and test a model of social support, strength of ties, normative influence, and concertive control and their influence on members’ sense of virtual community (SOVC). We find that all four factors predict SOVC, but that normative influence and concertive control have the strongest effects. Furthermore, social support and concertive control mediate the effects of number of strong ties and normative influence (respectively) on SOVC. Finally, we find no association between SOVC and time-lagged posting frequency. Our findings have important implications for understanding the factors that lead to attachment in online communities, and they suggest that sense of belonging works through tandem communicative processes of support and control.

Gendering the Eye of the Norm: Exploring Gendered Concertive Control Processes in Two Self‐Managing Teams

This article is the result of an ethnographic research project exploring the workplace interactions of two self‐managed teams of recruitment consultants. I use data from participant observation and recorded interviews to show the gendered nature of what Barker terms concertive control: the social processes by which team members regulate each others' conduct in line with negotiated team values. My analysis examines how team members negotiate core team values, translate these into specific actions and regulate these actions through concertive control interactions. I then set out three ways in which gender acts as a resource for these concertive control processes. These are: team members' assumptions about men's and women's relative skills and capacities, the ‘tough’ masculinity of the haulage industry in which one of the teams operates and the regulation of performances of heterosexuality during customer interactions. Building on research by others, I show gender to be not only embedded in the values and managerial style associated with teamwork but also integrated into the collaborative process of team‐working itself. I emphasize that social categories like gender become resources in the regulation of conduct at work and can reify hierarchies even in so‐called participative practices like self‐managed teamwork.

Recasting public relations roles: agents of compliance, control or conscience

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to reconceptualize public relations roles, particularly the organizational conscience role, by examining practitioner involvement in organizational value setting.Design/methodology/approachAustralian communication practitioners were interviewed to ascertain practitioner involvement in organizational value setting. The interview results were subjected to a multiple perspective analysis, which was used to develop a new framework for public relations roles.FindingsThe research found that most respondents were involved in organizational value setting, albeit at the implementation stage. The results also showed the potential for practitioners to extend their involvement to a more leadership‐oriented critical inquiry role. Based on this analysis, this paper proposes three agency roles: agency of corporate compliance, agency of concertive control, and an agency of critical conscience.Research limitations/implicationsThe small sample of Australian respondents and the novel approach used to analyse public relations roles require further research. The results offer new ways for practitioners to enact the conscience role through dialectical inquiry.Practical implicationsThe paper includes implications for embedding dialectical inquiry in public relations roles, and for integrating leadership into the technician‐manager role typology.Originality/valueThe paper examines practitioner involvement in organizational value setting through a multiple perspective lens and introduces a new public relations roles framework.

Safe Space Oddity: Revisiting Critical Pedagogy

Inspired by an incident in a social work graduate classroom in which she was a teaching assistant, the author reflects on her commitment to constructivist teaching methods, critical theory, and critical pedagogy. Exploring the educational utility of notions such as public space and safe space, the author employs this personal experience to examine the roles played by ideology and concertive control in (re)creating societal power imbalances—with surprising results. Finally, rather than attempting to avoid inherent classroom tensions through rhetoric (“safe space”) or repeatedly finding herself shocked and ill‐prepared for the inevitable facilitation of emotional topics teaching requires, the author posits that the role of the educator may be to maintain these tensions while embracing a “pedagogy of discomfort” (M. Boler, 1999).

Ambivalence and Resistance: A Study of Management in a Concertive Control System

This research contributes to our understanding of control and resistance by demonstrating that managers may be constrained by the very concertive systems of control that they enact and that managers may subtly and indirectly support employee resistance to control. A study of an aerospace company finds concertive control acts as a barrier to management directed organizational change. In this case, managers subverted their own change efforts by communicating ambivalence about changes they introduced; this gave employees support in resisting the proposed changes. Despite clear material necessity and discursive ideologies supporting change, managers were bound by their identification with and devotion to the traditional value premises of the company.

A Lexicon of Conflict under Concertive Control Conditions

While much of the literature on teamworking has become focused on employer-driven design of work teams, this article casts a critical eye on employee-driven workgroups through the examination of a selfselected and autonomous employee group. The evidence from this case study suggests that groupworking can result in a quest for homogenization, and in strong informal controls on members’ behaviours, where these controls operate through covert confiict expressions, mediated by the work environment. The evidence to emerge indicates that some of the suggested positive impacts on employees of groupworking may be simply surface constructs, while covert, suppressed confiicts persist. The unique contribution of this study is the modelling of a lexicon of confiict under concertive control conditions and the integration of social identity theory into a groupwork framework.

Sensemaking of change in the managed care era: a case of hospital‐based nurses

This study explores how nurses working in a large, metropolitan hospital make sense of the managed care change. Findings from 24 nurse interviews suggest that nurse sensemaking has generated interpretations of managed care change that are grounded in the caregiving role. Study results show that nurses view managed care with ambiguity. Nurses understand managed care change as instrumental in encouraging collaboration and affecting patient care quality. Implications are drawn regarding the importance of identity construction to the sensemaking process and illustrate the paradox of change in the managed care era. Although nurses view collaboration and professional empowerment as positive outcomes of managed care, further analysis reveals that these values function ideologically, promoting managed care concerns over worker interests. Concertive control – a team‐based process which shifts organizational control from management to employees – is explored as a way that workers act in accordance with management decisions and uphold traditional power structures.

Informating the Clan: Controlling Physicians' Costs and Outcomes

Past literature recognizes the power of information technology (IT) to establish greater transparency and in turn the potential for greater control. Theoretical perspectives such as informating and agency theory describe situations whereby legitimized management authority can control goal divergence by implementing information systems to better monitor agents' behavior and outcomes. But what happens when the principal does not possess legitimacy to impose an agent's use of information and/or behavioral conformance? This study investigates this situation. Through an action research project, a physicians' profiling system (PPS) was used to monitor and benchmark physicians' clinical practices and outcomes resulting in changed practice behaviors in closer congruence with management's goals. The PPS project represents a successful attempt of a hospital's management (principal) to the of physicians (agents) to reduce clinical procedural costs and adopt practices benchmarked to produce better outcomes. This research moves beyond directly controlling informated workers through legitimized managerial authority to a better understanding of how to informate autonomous professionals. Emerging insights suggest that a clan can be informated if the principal can improve the perceived legitimacy of the information (the message), legitimize the technical messenger (customized user interface), legitimize the human messenger (boundary spanners and influential clan members), and facilitate an environment where clan-based discussion, using the information provided by the principal, is incorporated into the process of concertive control.

Book Review Section

Book reviewed in this article:Jan Maarten Schraagen, Susan F. Chipman, and Valerie Shalin (Editors). Cognitive Task Analysis.Kevin Kruse and Jason Keil. Technology‐Based Training: The Art and Science of Design, Development and Delivery.Frederic M. Hudson. The Handbook of Coaching: A Comprehensive Resource Guide for Managers, Executives, Consultants, and Human Resource Professionals.Judith Hale. Performance‐Based Certification: How to Design a Valid, Defensible, Cost‐Effective Program.Robert E. Cole. Managing Quality Fads: How American Business Learned How to Play the Qualify Game.Jonathan I. Klein. Corporate Failure by Design: Why Organizations Are Built to Fail. The Process of Business/Environmental Collaborations: Partnering for Sustainability Evan M. Dudik. Strategic Renaissance: New Thinking and Innovative Tools to Create Great Corporate Strategies.Rita Gorawara‐Bhat. The Social and Spatial Ecology of Work: The Case of a Survey Research Organization.James R. Barker. The Discipline of Teamwork: Participation and Concertive Control.Mike Johnson. Winning the People Wars: Talent and the Battle for Human Capital.Elsie Y. Cross. Managing Diversity: The Courage to Lead.M.P. Quirk and P.M. Fandt. The 2nd Language of Leadership.Kay Hammer. Workplace Warrior: Insights and Advice for Winning on the Corporate Battlefield.Frank‐Jürgen Richter (Editor). The Dragon Millennium: Chinese Business in the Coming World Economy.Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual.Al Gini. My Job, My Self: Work and the Creation of the Modern Individual.Michael J.A. Howe. Genius Explained.Aaron Ben‐Ze'ev. The Subtlety of Emotions.Glenn D. Walters. Beyond Behavior: Construction of an Overarching Psychological Theory of Lifestyles.Charles Woodruffe. Development and Assessment Centres: Identifying and Assessing Competence.Robert Rosenthal, Ralph L. Rosnow, and Donald Rubin. Contrasts and Effect Sizes in Behavioral Research: A Correlational Approach.

Book Reviews

Towers, Brian, (ed.) Employment Relations in Britain: 25 years of the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration servicesRigby, Mike, Smith, Roger and Lawlor, Teresa, (eds.) European Trade Unions: Change and ResponseTurner, Lowell, Fighting for Partnership: Labor and Politics in Unified GermanyElliot, Robert, Lucifora, Claudio and Meurs, Dominique, (eds.) Public Sector Pay Determination in the European UnionLind, Jens and Hornemann Möller, Iver, (eds.) Inclusion and Exclusion: Unemployment and Non‐standard Employment in EuropeClark, Ed and Soulsby, Anna, Organizational Change in Post‐communist Europe: Management and Transformation in the Czech RepublicDark, Taylor, The Unions and the Democrats: An Enduring AllianceFreeman, Richard and Rogers, Joel, What Workers WantWhetten, David and Godfrey, Paul, (eds.) Identity in Organizations: Building Theory through ConversationsTsutsui, William, Manufacturing Ideology: Scientific Management in Twentieth‐Century JapanBarker, James, The Discipline of Teamwork: Participation and Concertive Control