Knowledge-Sharing, Control, Compliance and Symbolic Violence

Recent developments in control hold that professionals are best managed through normative and concertive as opposed to bureaucratic and coercive mechanisms. This post-structuralist approach appeals to the notion of congruent values and norms and acknowledges the role of individuals’ subjectivity in...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Organization studies 2014-07, Vol.35 (7), p.989-1012
Main Authors: Kamoche, Ken, Kannan, Selvi, Siebers, Lisa Qixun
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bureaucracy
Compliance
Corporate culture
Knowledge
Knowledge sharing
Management controls
R&D
Research & development
Research and development
Resistance
Social relations
Studies
Violence
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Recent developments in control hold that professionals are best managed through normative and concertive as opposed to bureaucratic and coercive mechanisms. This post-structuralist approach appeals to the notion of congruent values and norms and acknowledges the role of individuals’ subjectivity in sustaining professional autonomy. Yet, there remains a risk of over-simplifying the manifestations of such control initiatives. By means of an in-depth case study, this article considers the challenge of implementing a knowledge-sharing portal for a community of R&D scientists through management control initiatives that relied on a blend of presumed ‘peer pressure’ and the rhetoric of ‘facilitation’. Arguing that traditional approaches such as normative/concertive control and soft bureaucracy only partially explain this phenomenon, we draw from Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic violence’ to interpret a managerial initiative to appropriate knowledge and affirm the structure of social relations through the complicity of R&D scientists. We also examine how the scientists channelled resistance by reconstituting compliance in line with their sense of identity as creators of knowledge.
ISSN:0170-8406
1741-3044
DOI:10.1177/0170840614525325