Navigating Norms and Normalization: Coping with Contrary Techniques of Power in Organizations (WITHDRAWN)

Contemporary knowledge organizations have two co-present yet contrary technologies of power, norms and normalization, operating in and around them. As such, knowledge workers experience tensions that are derived from these two forms of power’s co-presence. In this paper we identify how these tensions manifest: in organization member’s roles, relations and requirements, and explicate how knowledge workers resist at least one technique of power. Some of these tactics to subdue these tensions are targeted at norms comprised of hiding, quantifying and performing, and others are targeted at normalized requirements such as collectivizing, transitioning and leaving. In doing this, our paper makes three primary contributions to CMS literature. Empirically, by addressing the co-presence of norms and normalization in knowledge organizations, which is thus far sparse in the literature; theoretically, by offering a framework to conceptualize their co-presence as contraries, which aligns to Foucault’s conceptualizatio...