Tightening the Iron Cage: Concertive Control in Self-Managing Teams

TLDR

The study ethnographically examines how a managerial shift from hierarchical to concertive control led the organization’s members to develop value‑based normative rules that exerted stronger, more comprehensive control over their actions. The authors detail the organization’s structure and member interactions, illustrating how concertive control emerged and unfolded through evolving dynamics among team members. The findings show that concertive control evolved from a shared value consensus into increasingly rationalized normative rules, ultimately tightening the iron cage and constraining members more powerfully than the previous bureaucratic system.

Abstract

In this paper, I provide an ethnographic account of how an organization’s control system evolved in response to a managerial change from hierarchical, bureaucratic control to concertive control in the form of self-managing teams. The study investigates how the organization’s members developed a system of value-based normative rules that controlled their actions more powerfully and completely than the former system. I describe the organization and its members and provide a detailed account of the dynamics that emerged as concertive control became manifest through the members’ interactions. This account depicts how concertive control evolved from the value consensus of the company’s team workers to a system of normative rules that became increasingly rationalized. Contrary to some proponents of such systems, concertive control did not free these workers from Weber’s iron cage of rational control. Instead, the concertive system, as it became manifest in this case, appeared to draw the iron cage tighter and to constrain the organization’s members more powerfully.