This article provides a systematic attempt to analyze the effects of performance appraisals, here conceptualized as tools for executing disciplinary power, and how the agency of employees is shaped. The article demonstrates how agency is enrolled by a broad set of disciplinary technologies aimed...

Starting from the assumptions of determinacy and identity, conventional approaches reduce social and organizational action to exogenous technological competitive and institutional contingencies and to endogenous necessities of functional unity, ascribing to the discursive aspects of action a...

The article discusses the trade-off between standardization and choice as a central issue that permeates the entire range of questions relating to the instrumental ability of contemporary organizations and institutions. Within this broad context the machine is seen as the main instrument and...

The article examines the forms in which writing is entangled with the project of predictability and accountability, so essential to contemporary systems of production and administration. The analytic predisposition of writing helps in decomposing the synthetic totality of organizational tasks...

The present article discusses the trade-offs between markets, organizations and networks in terms of the cognitive means and the values underlying them. It is claimed that the regulative ability of the market is inextricably bound up with the numerical codification of economic activity supported...