Don't ask or tell: Pay secrecy policies in U.S. workplaces

How widespread are workplace rules against discussing wages and salaries in the U.S.? And what are the core correlates of whether or not an employer prohibits or discourages this type of speech? Using a unique dataset that includes a measure of whether workers are prohibited or discouraged from discussing pay, this article investigates the prevalence of pay secrecy policies, and what worker- and workplace-level characteristics are associated with these rules. Key findings reveal that these policies are commonplace, despite being illegal, and that they are concentrated in more "coercive" rather than "enabling" organizations. These more coercive workplaces are disproportionately in the private sector, lack union representation, and have managers that are generally punitive in their approach and unaccommodating of employees. Findings also indicate that the greater discretion pay secrecy provides managers does not result in discriminatory application of these rules to women, racial/ethnic minorities, or immigrants. The article concludes with a call for data collection efforts that would allow researchers to analyze the consequences of this widespread managerial practice.

Cultural-Historical Activity Theory’s Relevance to HRD: A Review and Application

In light of recent calls to embrace multilevel, nonlinear, and open systems perspectives for theorizing and practicing human resource development (HRD), this article reviews key tenets of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and its applications as relevant to HRD. Specifically, the article discusses the four areas where the usage of CHAT could inform HRD scholarship: (a) systems theory and thinking in HRD, (b) HRD and learning, (c) HRD as design science, and (d) the interplay between research and practice in HRD. Recommendations for further developing CHAT applications in HRD research and practice are provided.

The Future of Critical Management Studies: A Paleo-Marxist Critique of Labour Process Theory

For many years, the core of critical management studies was labour process theory (LPT), building on Braverman's (1976) reading of Marx. Recently, LPT has been losing momentum in favour of post-structuralist approaches. This paper takes one step back with the hope of taking critical management studies two steps forward. Whereas post-structuralists have largely discarded the Marxist foundations of LPT, this paper argues that LPT has been hobbled by its insufficiently Marxist foundations. I argue that LPT ignores the fundamental contradiction Marx saw between the progressive `socialization' of the labour process and the persistence of capitalist `valorization' constraints. Understood in Marx's terms, socialization is the movement away from local isolation towards `universal interdependence', and it is a key trend both in the objective structure of industry and in subjective self-construals. I use this framework to develop a modified conception of skill, one that reveals how capitalist development drives a process of long-term skill upgrading. On this platform, I sketch a reinterpretation of two well-known cases of work reorganization — Taylorism and lean production. In both cases, useful insight is garnered by showing how the socialization of the labour process represented by these new management principles and the associated skill upgrading was simultaneously stimulated, retarded and distorted by valorization pressures.

Developing a Relational View of the Organizing Role of Objects: A study of the innovation process in computer games

Innovation processes create distinctive challenges for coordination. Objects are seen as supporting coordination in such settings by enabling the emergent action needed to deal with a dynamic and uncertain process. Thus, previous work has highlighted the role of different types of objects in coordinating the collaborative tasks undertaken by expert groups, either by motivating the creation of new knowledge or through the translation of understanding. Through an empirical study of innovation processes in the computer games sector, our paper adds to this previous work by finding that the relations between objects, and not the objects alone, help to orchestrate multiple collaborative tasks towards a final outcome within temporal and resource constraints. The relational view which emerges from this study shows how such a ‘system of objects’ is able to stabilize coordination of the process while preserving the emergence and autonomy of games developer practices needed to achieve innovation.

DECOUPLING FROM STANDARDS — PROCESS MANAGEMENT AND TECHNICAL INNOVATION IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ORGANISATIONS

The paper explores process management standards in software development organisations. It centres on the question how organisations manage the compliance with process standards as well as the need for ongoing technical innovation at the same time. It refers to former studies where it was concluded that process management standards tend to crowd out technical innovations in organisations. By reconsidering the coupling approach of Orton and Weick (1990) we show based on four case studies that it does not apply to those organisations which allow innovating activities being loosely coupled or decoupled from the reigning standard script. These organisations sustain their chances for incremental and fundamental technical innovations. Dealing with loosely coupled or decoupled innovating activities implies a dialectical standard management. It means that potentially contradictory and conflict-ridden activities like standardised practices and innovating activities are manageable by specific institutional, temporarily limited and formal/informal solutions. Furthermore, we scrutinise in this paper the decoupling discussion of some parts of the standard management literature. Standard decoupling is often seen as an unfortunate, but necessary solution to cope with external pressure for internal standardisation. In contrast to this, we develop an understanding where standard decoupling is not defined as a set of activities without affecting the 'technical core' of an organisation. (Brunsson and Jacobsson, 2000b; Meyer and Rowan, 1967). Rather, decoupling is seen as a temporary and locally limited situation of an innovating subsystem within an organisation where it is allowed to detach from reigning standardised practices and to test and develop innovative ideas under less formalised conditions.

Mundane Objects and the Banality of Evil

In this article, we study one organization that played a pivotal role in the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s: the S-21 extermination center. We analyze, in particular, how processes of sociomateriality in the death camp contributed to create order and normalcy in an extreme and abnormal organization. A more nuanced view of agency ensues from this analysis, one that helps the understanding of how the creation of material spaces critically influences organizing, including the organizing of genocide.

The Role of Knowledge Sharing in Raising the Task Innovativeness of Systems Analysts

This study examines the relationship between creativity and innovation at the individual level and how knowledge sharing mediates the relationship between these two constructs. A survey was conducted that measured individual creativity, innovativeness, and four types of knowledge sharing: explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge (e.g., experience, know-how, and expertise) sharing. It was postulated that the type of knowledge mediates the relationship between creativity and the innovativeness of task performance among systems analysts. The results show that creativity was positively related to task innovativeness. This relationship was mediated negatively by explicit knowledge sharing but positively mediated by tacit knowledge sharing based on know-how among project team members. These results have implications for system development and implementation projects.

Research Methods for Non-Representational Approaches to Organizational Complexity: The Dialogical Mediated Inquiry

This paper explores the methodological implications of non-representational approaches to organizational complexity. Representational theories focus on the syntactic complexity of systems, whereas organizing processes are predominantly characterized by semantic and pragmatic forms of complexity. After underlining the contribution of non-representational approaches to the study of organizations, the paper warns against the risk of confining the critique of representational frameworks to paradoxical dichotomies such as intuition versus reflexive thought, or theorizing versus experimenting. To counter this difficulty, we suggest the use of a triadic theory of interpretation, and more particularly the concepts of semiotic mediation, inquiry and dialogism. Semiotic mediation dynamically links situated experience and generic classes of meanings. Inquiry articulates logical thinking, narrative thinking and experimenting. Dialogism conceptualizes the production of meaning through the situated interactions of actors. A methodological approach based on these concepts, the ‘dialogical mediated inquiry’ (DMI), is proposed and tested with a case study about work safety in the construction industry. This interpretive view requires the researcher to complicate the inquiry process rather than the mirroring models of reality. In DMI, the inquiry process is complicated by establishing pluralist communities of inquiry in which different perspectives challenge each other. The paper ends with a discussion of the specific contribution of this approach compared with other qualitative methods, and its present limitations.

Conceptions of Control and it Artefacts: An Institutional Account of the Amazon Rainforest Monitoring System

Based on Fligstein's (1990) work on ‘conceptions of control’ (broad managerial paradigms), this paper provides an analysis of the ways in which information technology (IT) artefacts shape and are shaped by institutional contexts. Specifically, we report on primary and secondary empirical data that spans a 44-year period pertaining to the uses made of the Amazon rainforest monitoring system (a set of satellite-based geographic information systems). This paper argues that: (1) the process of institutional change is conflictual, emergent and contested; (2) the design and use of IT artefacts tend to reflect the currently dominant conceptions of control; (3) that IT artefacts that emerge within a specific conception of control can be later reconfigured to serve the interests of other conceptions of control; (4) and finally, IT artefacts might unintentionally reinforce alternate conceptions of control and lead to institutional change.

On the Computational Rendition of Reality: Artefacts and Human Agency

The paper seeks to lay open the computational logic by which reality is rendered as information. Computation is claimed to involve a drift away from the palpable and extendible character of things, a trend that both continues and breaks with the prevailing strategies of technological mediation in industrialism and modernity. Computation entails the relentless analytic reduction of the composite character and complexion of the world. Reality is meticulously dissolved and regained after a long analytic retreat and technological reconstruction. The outcome of this analytic strategy is that processes taking place at the human-technology interface are sustained by an elaborate vertical stratification, entailing a variety of other programmes and systems that reach down from the level of the interface to machine language and the mechanics of binary parsing. The deepening involvement of computation in instrumental settings thus reframes the perceptive and action modalities by which human agents confront the world. This way, a coherent set of techniques for building up reality is established accompanied by a new model of human agency that increasingly takes the form of a combinatoria of data and information items, remaking the shape of things out of the digital fragments produced by computation.