Identity Incentives as an Engaging Form of Control: Revisiting Leniencies in an Aeronautic Plant

Organization Science, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 202-220, March-April 2008

19 Pages Posted: 19 Aug 2009 Last revised: 15 Dec 2013

See all articles by Michel Anteby

Michel Anteby

Boston University - Department of Organizational Behavior

Date Written: August 19, 2009

Abstract

Research has long shown that organizations shape members’ identities. However, the possibility that these identities might also be desired and that members might benefit from this process has only recently been explored. In a qualitative study of a French aeronautic plant, I demonstrate how an implicitly negotiated leniency between management and workers around the use of company materials and tools, on company time, to produce artifacts for personal use, enhances workers’ identities. This leniency applies to a select subset of workers and enhances their desired occupational identity. This practice produces an engaging form of control that relies on management’s selective allocation of identity incentives. These findings document a previously overlooked type of control: one reliant on desired identities that engage rather than constrain. Desired identities, specifically previously enacted ones, constitute potent incentives for inducing efforts or actions.

Keywords: informal behaviors, leniency, control, identity, aeronautics, ethics, theft, morality, sociology of work, sociology of professions

JEL Classification: M00

Suggested Citation

Anteby, Michel, Identity Incentives as an Engaging Form of Control: Revisiting Leniencies in an Aeronautic Plant (August 19, 2009). Organization Science, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 202-220, March-April 2008, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1457871

Michel Anteby (Contact Author)

Boston University - Department of Organizational Behavior ( email )

Boston, MA 02215
United States

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