Bureaucratizing the Clan: Impact of Technology Affordances on Control

ABSTRACT

We examine how technology affordances impact clan control mechanisms in organizations. Using an interpretive multisite case study of the use of body-worn cameras in police organizations and technology affordance theory, we identify five technology affordances (Practice Visualization, Behavior Sanitization, Panoptic Supervision, Multiplex Evaluation, and Evidence Persistence). Actualization of these affordances constitutes affordance-based control, which reconfigures clan control mechanisms and extends the scope and intensity of bureaucratic control in our case sites, thereby bureaucratizing the clan. Our study makes significant contributions to affordances, organizational control, and technology-mediated control theory and practice. First, we develop a process model of affordance-based control, demonstrating technology’s role in constraining and enabling employees and supervisors to enact clan and bureaucratic control, respectively. Second, we show how affordance-based control extends the control relationship from traditional dyadic supervisor-employee control to triadic supervisor-technology-employee control. Finally, our study shows how affordance-based control facilitates the co-creation of control mechanisms by actualizing employee and supervisor affordances individually and jointly. Thus, affordance-based control can afford participatory supervision, empowering employees to have an input in control mechanisms that were historically imposed on them.

KEYWORDS:

• Affordance-based Control
• Technology Affordances
• Body-Worn Cameras
• Bureaucratic Control
• Clan Control
• Control Mechanisms
• Police Practices
• Technology-Mediated Control

Acknowledgment

The authors thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive guidance and also thank seminar participants at the University of Georgia, Terry College of Business. The first author was partly supported by a National Science Foundation dissertation research grant (Grant No. 1656239). Finally, we thank the police officers at Metropol and Citypol for donating their time to this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2023.2301171

Notes

^1. We use pseudonyms for case sites to uphold confidentiality.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abdul Sesay

Abdul Sesay ([email protected]) is an Assistant Professor in Management Information Systems at the Terry College of Business, University of Georgia. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Information Systems from the University of Colorado Denver. Dr. Sesay’s research interests include human-machine symbiosis and intelligence augmentation, focusing on how intimate technologies, such as wearables, transform organizational phenomena. He has presented his research at various international conferences, including the International Conference on Information Systems, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, and Americas Conference on Information Systems.

Ronald Ramirez

Ronald Ramirez ([email protected]) is Dean of the College of Business Administration at California State University San Marcos. He received his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from the University of California Irvine. Dr. Ramirez’s research interests span the intersections of information systems, organizations, innovation, and strategy. He has published in Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, Information and Management, Production and Operations Management, and others.

Marie-Claude Boudreau

Marie-Claude Boudreau ([email protected]) is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of MIS at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Information Systems from Georgia State University. Dr Boudreau’s research interests revolve around the organizational change induced by information technology (IT), primarily leveraging qualitative approaches. More specifically, she focuses on how IT can transform social systems in the context of the workplace. She also investigates the role played by information systems in supporting environmental sustainability, and has co-developed the concept of Energy Informatics. Dr. Boudreau has published in such journals as Organization Science, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, The Academy of Management Executive, Journal of the AIS, and in multiple conference proceedings.

Gerald C. Kane

Gerald C. Kane is a Professor and the C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry Chair in Business Administration at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. His research interests include the social and ethical implications of artificial intelligence and machine learning; how companies use digital tools to innovate through disruption; the success factors associated with the digital transformation of legacy companies; using social media to manage knowledge; and intersection of information systems and social networks, particularly in healthcare organizations. Dr. Kane has published over 100 papers and reports on these topics in such journals such as Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Organization Science, Management Science, Marketing Science, Journal of the AIS, Harvard Business Review, MIT-Sloan Management Review, among others. He is lead author of The Technology Fallacy: How People are the Real Key to Digital Transformation, and The Transformation Myth: Leading Your Organization Through Uncertain Times, both published by MIT Press.