ABSTRACT
IN 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.
