Cages in tandem: Management control, social identity, and identification in a knowledge-intensive firm

Summary, in English

Developments in organization studies downplay the role of bureaucracy in favour of more flexible arrangements and forms of organizational control, including socio-ideological control. Corporate culture and regulated social identities are assumed to provide means for the integration and orchestration of work. Knowledge-intensive firms, which typically draw heavily upon socio-ideological modes of control, are often singled out as organizational forms that use social identity and the corporatization of the self as a mode for managerial control. In this article we explore and discuss social identity and identification in a large IT/management consultancy firm with a strong presence of socio-ideological or normative control, but also with strong bureaucratic features. Structural forms of control-formal HRM procedures and performance pressures are considered in relation to socio-ideological control. We identify organizational and individual consequences of identification in a context of social, structural, and cultural 'closures' and contradictions, including the tendency to create an 'iron cage of subjectivity'.

• Author: Dan Kärreman; Mats Alvesson
• Department/s: Department of Business Administration
• Publishing year: 2004
• Language: English
• Pages: 149-175
• Publication/Series: Organization
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 1
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1350508404039662
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Topic: Business Administration
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1350-5084