Autonomy and Control? How Heterogeneous Sociomaterial Assemblages Explain Paradoxical Rationalities in the Digital Workplace

The implementation of new technologies, including business analytics, is commonly seen as a managerial technique to enabling employee control and standardization, i.e. to establish a prevalent way of thinking and reasoning within organizations (Kallinikos, 2011). Despite this purposeful “rationality engineering” (Cabantous & Gond, 2011), researchers acknowledge unforeseen and paradoxical effects of digitalization, involving, for example, both autonomy and control (e.g. Leonardi, Treem, & Jackson, 2010; Mazmanian, Orlikowski, & Yates, 2013; Sarker, Xiao, Sarker, & Ahuja, 2012; Stohl, Stohl, & Leonardi, 2016). For this reason, this paper aims to shed some light on the paradoxical rationalities that exist in the digital workplace. Following the assumption of digital materiality that characterized the materiality turn (e.g. Pink, Ardèvol, & Lanzeni, 2016) and the idea of technologies as “rationality carriers” (Cabantous & Gond, 2011) we conceptualize how humans and artifacts together enact paradoxical rationalities. We exemplify this with reference to the autonomy-control paradox and illustrate our arguments using empirical examples from existing literature on the use of mobile devices. More concretely, we examine three scenarios in which autonomy and control occur: (1) where they co-exist independently of each other, (2) where they hybridize on the level of individuals, and (3) where either autonomy or control prevails. As a result, we propose that heterogeneous, i.e. diverse and shifting, sociomaterial assemblages matter for the enactment of rationality. In addition, we suggest that the individual hybridization of paradoxes is rooted in materiality’s capacity to act which is, in turn, overruled by collective norms. Our propositions can inform future research and practice for managers who seek to enact particular types of rationalities within their organizations.