Elusive Domination and the Fate of Critique in Neo-participative Management: A French Pragmatist Approach

Abstract

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Workers' Rites: Ritual Mediations and the Tensions of New Management

“…Such controls mobilized subjective desire and identity‐based regulation (e.g., Alvesson and Willmott, 2002; Fleming and Spicer, 2007) to leverage employees’ own normative expectations of who they should be or want to be (Fleming and Sturdy, 2011). The infusion of managerial control with seemingly emancipatory discourses blurred the meanings of worker expression, making it difficult to judge whether participation, expression, and even critique, were not themselves forms of ‘neo‐normative’ control (Daudigeos et al, 2021).…”

“…The resulting mix of emancipatory promise and neo‐normative control make it difficult to diagnose the critical and emancipatory possibilities of new management practices (Daudigeos et al, 2021; De Cock and Nyberg, 2016). Searching for interpretive possibilities, scholarship turns to empirical fields to examine how actors themselves deal with and mediate tensions arising from conflictual situations (Azambuja and Islam, 2019).…”

“…Searching for interpretive possibilities, scholarship turns to empirical fields to examine how actors themselves deal with and mediate tensions arising from conflictual situations (Azambuja and Islam, 2019). Presuming that actors themselves are reflexive agents who search for solutions (Boltanski, 2011), such research focuses on bottom‐up experiences to stimulate theorizing, as well as to understand how critique is foreclosed or captured (e.g., Daudigeos et al, 2021).…”

“…Contemporary organizations are replete with practices and discourses emphasizing employee self‐realization, participation, empowerment and individual expression (Daudigeos et al, 2021; Fleming and Sturdy, 2011; Jenkins and Delbridge, 2017), a heady mix of empowerment narratives that has been termed the ‘new management ideology’ (Chiapello and Fairclough, 2002). In fact, new management ideology points to a much broader range of organizational practices, from what have been termed ‘neo‐normative’ (Fleming and Sturdy, 2011), ‘high‐involvement’ (Ekman, 2014), and ‘enchanting’ (Endrissat et al, 2015; Korczynski and Ott, 2004) practices, among others.…”

Moral responses to uncertainty: The economies of worth towards a reconceptualization of decision making and management

“…The boundaries of the justification regime are a plausible theoretical and methodological topic. However the concept is rarely referred to in the subject literature, and then as a heuristic device (Daudigeos et al, 2019, to describe areas of "elusive domination" in "neo-participative" organizations), or as a stimulus to theoretical reflection (Brandl et al, 2014, on the correspondence between regimes and degrees of institutionalization; Bullinger, 2014, opposing the analytical layering of different regimes of engagement and information to the pervasive categories of discourses and practices in institutional logics theory). In some cases, the term is used as an alternate label for the orders of worth, the core of the model's ontology.…”