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This study examines the characteristics ofworker identification with two targets at the same time: the workers'se~-managing team and the larger organization that created the teams. We administered the Organizational Ident9cation Questionnaire in such a way as to tap levels of identgcation with each target and used the results of an ethnographic study of the subjects to enhance our analysis. Our data suggest that workers identijed more strongly with their team than with their company, particularly in terms of loyalty. In addition, long-term workers reported more identification with both their team and company than did short-term v k e r s . The results support the assertion that a concertive (or team-based) system of control is more p o w M l , even if less obtrusive, than its bureaucratic predecessor.

We examine how call-center employees draw on opposed discourses to understand the purpose and consequences of performance measurement as workplace surveillance. Sometimes the workers saw performance measurement as a legitimate and impartial managerial tool serving the interests of everyone in the organization (e.g. by exposing free-riding, etc.). Other times, they saw performance measurement as intrusive and oppressive; imposed on them by managers who, as agents of employers, used it to serve a narrow set of interests (e.g. by intensifying work, etc.). Our analysis depicts how employees used an ironical process of predicate logic to develop flexible meaning-making strategies to cope with the apparent conflicts in meaning that arose from the two opposed discourses. We conclude by developing a three step method for the practical analysis of such ironical situations of competing discourses that facilitates our ability to reconsider and reconfigure meaning in more useful ways.

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