Toward a Postcolonial Reading of Organizational Control

Abstract

The notion of organizational control has been a constant theme in the construction and representations of euromodern1 organizations. The discourse of control has been justified in organizational theory on a variety of counts, such as the need to eliminate stubborn “soldiering” by recalcitrant employees (Taylor, 1911), the inducement of collaborative enterprise (Barnard, 1938), the curtailment of opportunist practices in organizational transactions (Williamson, 1985), the management of bounded rationality (Simon, 1957), the development of adaptive mechanisms (Hannan & Freeman, 1977), the facilitation of diverse organizational conversations (Srivastava & Cooperrider, 1990), the management of organizational knowledge (Davenport & Prusak, 1998), or even the need to create a paradigmatic consensus in organizational research (Pfeffer, 1993). On the other hand, mainstream theories of organizational control have been critiqued as being coercive (Braverman, 1974), insensitive to noncontractual trust-based control systems (Perrow, 1979), or unmindful of the fundamental causal determinants of conflict (Jermier, Knights, & Nord, 1994). Scholars have pointed to the enacted nature of organizational reality (Weick, 1979), the constructed nature of academic practices (Canella & Paetzold, 1994), and the anthropocentric biases that have dominated management research (Shrivastava, 1996), thereby seeking to destabilize the platform of positivism on which much of the mainstream discourse of organizational control stands.

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