Exploring New Control Techniques Aimed at the Knowledge Work: How to Improve Critical Management Studies’ Understanding of Power

Abstract

We have to give Critical Management Studies (CMS) credit for having made a difference in the research of organisations after introducing Foucault´s concepts and the influences from constructivism. CMS have insisted on how modern organisations shape their members’ identities by means of different ideologies and rituals in order to turn them into loyal and disciplined subjects. Anyway, in this article, I also aim to find out which other new control mechanisms are developed in firms that use tacit and creative knowledge intensively while producing their goods. Examples of these activities are the ICT sector or the animation industry, in which I interviewed up to 40 professionals from different firms to know their typical working practices. By doing this, I could unravel the kind of control mechanisms which these workers are subjected to. Most of them are highskilled professionals. These employees have to be diligent and creative when working out informational inputs so that the goods produced can beat or, at least, meet the standards ruling the market. Therefore, we can suppose that specific control mechanisms will be established in these spaces, whose aim is to stimulate creative and intellectual performance through the extraction and spread of knowledge all over the firm. Based on these mechanisms, I will propose a distinctive model of power (of a biopolitical kind) emerging in these spaces. This model contrasts with the “disciplinary type of power”, which has been studied by CMS excessively. As well as the qualitative interviews, I also analysed other research materials.