Politics of managing: the dialectic of control

Abstract

Accounting influences the evolution of management identity by determining which aspects of performance are made visible. However, management do not technocratically apply accounting measurements. An organizational study is used to analyze how management use partisan performance measurements to control the labor process. Management's strategies are influenced by how technology, worker skill, and product competition affect worker capacity to resist. Management's dilution of capital's interest by accommodating labor's needs, or mobilization of the efficiency ethos, reflect the politics of dialectical control.