Don’t Bother Me as Long as The Client Has No issues: Control and Resistance in Telework

Employees’ presence and associated visibility in a central workplace facilitate direct surveillance and exercise of normative controls through their participation in various organizational activities and discourses. Scholars argue that lack of such visibility and presence in telework necessitates new control modes. n turn, the associated resistance and its manifestation are also likely to be different. Yet, telework literature has underexplored control and resistance. Using the theoretical lens of dialectic of control and resistance and adopting an interpretive methodology, we explore control and resistance in telework using data from a wide variety of sources such as face-to-face in-depth interviews, blogs, online news articles, reader comments and archival data. The study documents the use of sophisticated technological means for enhancing task visibility and employee visibility. We find that the social norm of reciprocity and the professional norms of client-centricity and ownership act as powerful control means that obviate the need for direct supervision. Further, the study shows how teleworkers subvert organizational control mechanisms, creatively appropriating them to resist the power that operates through the control mechanisms.