Control, Workplace

There are a variety of types and typologies of control used by employers and their managerial agents to influence workplace processes and outcomes. This variety of concepts indicates that times and practices change, and that social scientists do not always agree on what kind of control is significant or successful. Most of all, however, [Page 128]variation reflects the different objects and objectives of control. Employers and managers may seek, for example, to specify the tasks that should be undertaken and how, which behaviors and outcomes should be rewarded or punished, which values are acceptable in an organization, or even what words should be spoken in a service interaction. Perspectives that proceed from assumptions of underlying social harmony or common interests in the employment relationship are more likely to use the language of communication, monitoring, or perhaps performance management.

However, it is difficult to manage performance without setting targets and using carrots and sticks to influence behaviors. Managerial control ultimately derives from conflicting interests in the employment relationship, or, more concretely, from the gap between the labor power bought by the employer and the actual profitable outcomes from that labor. This indeterminacy of labor results from the distinctive characteristics of labor as a commodity—as Karl Marx put it, variable capital. Such understandings are not that different from others that have been around for a long time in the sociology of work and industrial relations, such as incomplete contracts and wage effort bargains.

Labor process theory (LPT) takes the observation further in referring to a control imperative. Competition drives the accumulation process, but market mechanisms alone cannot regulate work relations. Labor control is thus a means, not an end, and those means are never fixed. LPT has achieved prominence in this area because it has developed an extensive conceptual vocabulary concerning control and a long-running research program. First, the structural imperative for labor control is ever present, but its form and content cannot be treated as givens, and must be achieved in particular contexts and conditions. Types (or combinations) of control are treated as strategies that reflect factors such as dynamics of sector competition, the availability of different managerial agencies, and power resources available to actors. Second, control is necessarily incomplete because it is relational. To use the term of Richard Edwards, the workplace is a contested terrain in which the frontier of control is fluid as various actors try to exert their interests or influence. Third, control exists at both general and detailed levels. The former refers to management's overall capacity to directly allocate and direct labor (sometimes called the “managerial prerogative”), and it is important because the absence of certain detailed controls—for example, over work tasks—is sometimes mistakenly treated as the absence of all controls.