Culture, Control, and the Labor Process (original) (raw)

1993, Annals of the International Communication Association

N his essay, Mats Alvesson addresses an element of organizations that has always been considered to be of primary importance to critical scholars, namely, organizational control. As he discusses in the first portion of the essay, traditional approaches to organizations have typically used a conception of organizational control that has been limited to an objectivist, behavioral view and centers on external and structural control mechanisms. Alvesson points out that this perspective tends to focus on the control of work behavior while neglecting the "ideational sphere" of influence in which workplace control is embedded in the culture, values, and cognitive framework of the organizational members. These cultural-ideological forms of control, he notes, are particularly important in complex, uncertain, and highly decentralized organizations, which are becoming increasingly prevalent today. Cultural-ideological control, Alvesson argues, cannot be explained adequately by either macro-level general culture theories or what he calls "the micro-level use of a single key concept" such as culture, ideology, or clan (p. 10). What he proposes instead is a "middle-range" cultural theory of organizational control that conceptualizes the control dynamic as consisting of four interrelated dimensions: collective control, performance-related control, ideological control, and perceptual control. After a brief description of each of these dimensions, Alvesson provides an elaborate case study and discussion designed to illustrate the concepts and their relationships. He concludes with a discussion of the implications of cultural-ideological modes of control and the social and organizational conditions under which they are likely to occur. Alvesson notes that he has three primary objectives in writing his essay: (a) to present a theory of new forms of cultural-ideological management