Digital Discipline: Theorizing Concertive Control in Online Communities1

Abstract

Concertive control (CC) theory has primarily been applied to traditional offline, work-based, closed membership teams. New organizational forms such as online communities have opened up additional sites in which CC processes may operate. This article makes several contributions to CC theory and research. First, it increases the applicability of CC theory by extending it from offline to online, work to non-work, and closed to open membership contexts. Second, it increases our understanding of CC processes by elaborating on three mechanisms of CC (group autonomy, group identification, and generative discipline) and how they operate differently in online work/non-work and closed/open contexts. Third, it develops propositions about how these mechanisms interact with three prominent media affordances (visibility, persistence and editability) within those contexts. Extending CC theory to online communities helps to explain individuals’ responses to normative group pressures online, which is highly relevant in our increasingly culturally and politically polarized society.

“Define Yourself. . . #EXSTpride”: Exploring an Organizational Hashtag Through the Structurational Model of Identification

“…In the current study, no public #EXSTpride posts disparaged the organization or signaled back regions or more “negative” identifications. Future work should explore how organizational hashtags might function as a means of concertive control—a peer-based form of influence that has long served as a byproduct of identification and has recently been theorized as operating in online communities (Gibbs et al, 2021). Because the hashtag contained the word “pride,” it would contradict social norms if posters complained, showed disrespect, or scorned the organization.…”

Bringing technological affordances into virtual work

“…A wide variety of affordances have been identified in the literature. Some of these include visibility, persistence, editability, association, personalization, pervasiveness, searchability, evaluability, signaling, self-presentation, accessibility, social presence, privacy, and anonymity (DeVito et al, 2017;Fox & McEwan, 2017;Gibbs et al, 2021;Navick & Mazur, 2021;Rice et al, 2017). These various affordances have been found to both enable and constrain communication, produce both positive and negative outcomes, and have a variety of social, material, or procedural consequences.…”

“…However, this practice leads to constant connectivity behaviors, in which virtual workers are always engaging with incoming information that is not bound by time or space. When constant connectivity becomes the norm, either at the team level or more broadly at the organizational level, expectations of being continually available might become an enforced rule, either through team-level concertive control (Barker, 1993;Gibbs et al, 2021) or at the institutional level. In an environment in which virtual workers are constantly bombarded with information, expected to keep up with it all, and continuously struggle to find socially legitimate ways to protect their jobs, workers develop their own strategic responses to reconcile tensions such as engaging in dissimulation behaviors, disengaging, and selectively sharing knowledge.…”