Literature Review Tightening the Iron Cage: Concertive Control in Self-Managing Team

Literature Review from the year 2006 in the subject Communications - Methods and Research Logic, grade: 1, University of Auckland (School of Comunication Studies), course: Media Communications Research Methods, language: English, abstract: Tightening the Iron Cage: Concertive Control in Self-Managing Team by James Barker (1993) deals with a type of organisational control which gained more and more recognition amongst theorists of organisational and management theory in recent years - concertive control. Barker's article attempts to give answers to questions like: What are the consequences when the locus of control within an organisation shifts from the management to the workers themselves? What are the consequences of an increased degree of workforce involvement? And, in which way does bureaucratic and concertive control influence members of an organisation differently? In this context, the author provides the reader with a rather unilateral picture of how concertive control influences members of an organisation. Tightening the Iron Cage: Concertive Control in Self-Managing Team marks the first substantial study in a field where still very little empirical knowledge exists of how self-managing teams construct new and functional forms of control and how these forms compare with how we have conceptualised control in the past (Barker, 2004).