ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on changing forms of internal regulation in contemporary work organizations. It overviews the ‘control debate’ in organizational research and analysis, as well as assessing its implications for our understanding of the governance structures and practices through which intraorganizational coordination and order are sustained. This ‘control debate’ has crystallized around three inter-related issues: first, the trajectory followed by changing control logics; second, the overall effect of these putative changes on the dominant institutional locations and forms of regulation discovered in work organizations; third, the cumulative impact of this general process of restructuring on control regimes as a whole. In each of these domains, fundamental questions are being raised about potential transformations in compliance structures, knowledge systems and surveillance technologies within work organizations as existing models of organizational governance and regulation come under attack from various directions.
