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Portrait of Jens Rennstam. Photo.

Jens Rennstam

Senior lecturer, Director of third cycle studies, Department of Business Administration

Portrait of Jens Rennstam. Photo.

Understanding control in communities of practice-Constructive disobedience in a high-tech firm

Author

  • Jens Rennstam
  • Dan Kärreman

Summary, in English

Communities of practice (CoPs) represent a broad range of work situations characterized by shared knowledge and situated knowledge use. Although CoPs have been studied rather extensively, discussions of control in CoPs are rarer. This is peculiar because CoPs are characterized by a common tension in contemporary work: on the one hand, CoPs are expected to autonomously “think together,” but on the other they are expected to be responsive to various managerial control attempts. We interrogate this tension in an ethnographic study of engineering work, where we found that in response to management control the engineering communities engaged in constructive disobedience – that is, subversion and displacement of rules and orders to construct a dynamic of control where work can be executed autonomously. By associating constructive disobedience with control in CoPs, our study contributes with insight into and theorization of how management control is dealt with and how control operates in work characterized by CoPs. The study also provides deepened insight into the limits of management control and how professionalism may be maintained despite increased management. These insights may support development of a more knowledgeable and nuanced approach to attempts at managing communities of practice.

Department/s

  • Department of Business Administration

Publishing year

2020-06-01

Language

English

Pages

864-890

Publication/Series

Human Relations

Volume

73

Issue

6

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Topic

  • Business Administration

Keywords

  • communities of practice
  • organizational control
  • ethnography
  • constructive disobedience

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0018-7267