Suchergebnisse

Employee involvement is an evolving process replete with uncertainties even given the best of preconditions–worker ownership. This case study of the largest Indian worker cooperative focuses on the processes of employee involvement over a decade. The authors argue that employee involvement is contingent upon the feeling that the information that the employees consider critical is shared with them. While for the management, information sharing is an instrument in eliciting involvement, for the employees it is a matter of trust. The authors propose that as the management expectation of information sharing goes through an instrumental loop, the worker expectation of information sharing goes through an institutional, trust-based loop. This mismatch in expectations around information critically influences employee involvement.

Smart city (SC) experts in India often center-stage citizens as an alternative to a technology-led transformation. A substantial body of literature on smart cities sustains this resultant binary between techno-centrism and citizen-centrism. Mobilizing ANT sensibilities, we generate an ethnographic narrative on how the smart city discourse has translated into everyday processes of city administration and urban governance in India. Our account unmutes more-and-other-than-human actants—event-stage, glossy publications, ceremonial awards, conference producers, and decision-makers—in the translation of SC discourse, with following effects: the uncertainties in the translation process are foregrounded which potentially destabilize center-staged actor identities; and the work of heterogeneous actants in articulating the citizen as the center of their efforts is revealed, thereby de-naturalizing the binarized reality. Furthermore, when unmuted, more-and-other-than-humans spell out their ongoing collaborations and negotiations and generate a nuanced reading of the clashes and accommodations made in the process of translating SC discourse in everyday settings of city administrations. These effects lead us to emphasize the translation of SC discourse as an uncertain socio-material process proceeding through episodic clashes and tentative accommodations. They also invite a conceptual expansion of translation as constitutive of the ontological politics of organizing, which insists on attending to ongoing collaborations and negotiations among more-and-other-than-humans that compose organizational realities. Thus, we address critical organization and management studies' concerns regarding ANT's alignment with its objectives by locating politics in the performance of, and interference into, the multiple realities that are being enacted through practices that assemble experts, decision-makers and non-humans.

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the link between operations of organization control and workers' response to them in case of telework, a technology-embedded new way of working.


Design/methodology/approach
The authors adopted an interpretive approach to explore control and home-based teleworkers' response in the Indian information technology industry. Interviews and non-participant observations were analysed using constructivist grounded theory.


Findings
The discourse of "telework as a privilege" served as a basis for normative control, helping managers exercise increased technocratic control. Combined with the discourse of "self-responsibility to client", it led teleworkers to self-subjugate to long/unsocial work hours. However, the simultaneous exercise of technocratic and normative controls resulted in an inconsistency, creating space for teleworker's resistance to technocratic control. Nonetheless, resistance to technocratic control ironically reinforced normative control.


Originality/value
The authors contribute to the recent discussion on compatibility and coherence of multiple control modes, and their relationship to resistance. The authors show how workers' selves can be compatible with one control mode while being incompatible with other modes. The authors argue that when workers' experience incoherence between control modes, they can appropriate the logic underlying compatible control mode(s) to resist incompatible control mode(s). Further, the authors demonstrate how resistance to incompatible control mode(s) can ironically reinforce compatible control mode(s), and thus explicate the micro-processes of control-resistance dialectic. Advancing the emergent understanding of resistance, the authors show that resistance is an exercise of strategic counter-power that seeks to exploit incoherence between control modes and inconsistencies between actions and rhetoric.