Power and Discretion: Membership Work in the Time of Technology

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to rework contemporary notions of power by acknowledging discretion and membership as the `other' side of an increasingly familiar story of organizational domination through calculation and surveillance. The paper first identifies neglected aspects of power, particularly associated with a discretionary ability to defer affirmations of membership. Such power effects might seem ephemeral and temporary, but when considered alongside translation effects generated by the technologies of managing, particularly accounting numbers, it becomes clearer that discretion can be both redistributed and accumulated in organizations. The ensuing power effects become extended across space and time. It is argued therefore that any full reworking of power needs to consider how `centres of discretion' are created simultaneously alongside `centres of calculation'.

Contributorship and Partial Inclusion

“…It is the reporting of those actions that make them "organizational" and that retrospectively constitute him as having acted as a member when he was participating in those events. His performance, even though it may seem far from ethnomethodology's usual understanding of accounting, in fact displays the features referred to by Garfinkel (1967) and Munro (1999).…”

“…Our starting point rests on Munro's (1999) insight that, in an ethnomethodological perspective, positive sanction of accounts of action is constitutive of membership. As Garfinkel (1967, p. vii) explains, people's actions are "visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practicalpurposes, i.e., 'accountable.'"…”

Extension and the Disposal of the World: Double-Crossing Systems, Culture, Self and Language

“…So too, I have said little about markets -although my work on budgets in the past has clarified how these end up being used as an interface that severs profit goals from the narration of realities, 65 creates different "worlds" for employers from that of staff, and seals off strategy from learning from those on the front line. 66 Most wilfully, I have failed to offer a sociological analysis of management 67 -even though I have traced elsewhere the efficacy of disorganisation and unmanaging, 68 critiqued the separation of policy from operations 69 , explained how discretion is centred in order to underpin authority, 70 and shown how rhetoric about markets is used to disassociate line management from its oversight in one moment and then re-instated the next. 71 What I can say to sum up, is that my key argument that self is always in extension goes beyond simply repeating how open we are to techniques or technologies.…”

Is Actor Network Theory Critique?

“…In ANT terms, then, we live in a world of 'translators' but not in a world that is 'translated'. 'Centres of discretion' can emerge alongside 'centres of calculation' (Munro, 1999). Networks, and their products, can be re-interpreted long after they are supposedly stabilised.…”