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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the link between operations of organization control and workers’ response to them in case of telework, a technology-embedded new way of working. Design/methodology/approach The authors adopted an interpretive approach to explore control and home-based teleworkers’ response in the Indian information technology industry. Interviews and non-participant observations were analysed using constructivist grounded theory. Findings The discourse of “telework as a privilege” served as a basis for normative control, helping managers exercise increased technocratic control. Combined with the discourse of “self-responsibility to client”, it led teleworkers to self-subjugate to long/unsocial work hours. However, the simultaneous exercise of technocratic and normative controls resulted in an inconsistency, creating space for teleworker’s resistance to technocratic control. Nonetheless, resistance to technocratic control ironically reinforced normative control. Originality/value The authors contribute to the recent discussion on compatibility and coherence of multiple control modes, and their relationship to resistance. The authors show how workers’ selves can be compatible with one control mode while being incompatible with other modes. The authors argue that when workers’ experience incoherence between control modes, they can appropriate the logic underlying compatible control mode(s) to resist incompatible control mode(s). Further, the authors demonstrate how resistance to incompatible control mode(s) can ironically reinforce compatible control mode(s), and thus explicate the micro-processes of control-resistance dialectic. Advancing the emergent understanding of resistance, the authors show that resistance is an exercise of strategic counter-power that seeks to exploit incoherence between control modes and inconsistencies between actions and rhetoric.

We discuss algorithmic control and nudges prevalent in the gig economy in relation to extant management control literature. We draw on an analysis of archival data and interviews with drivers and executives of app‐based cab companies in India. Comparing algorithmic control with direct control, we explain the increase in the scale and scope of automation that enables detailed driver profiling and segmentation, which is crucial for microtargeting control mechanisms and controlling driver earnings. Explaining nudges vis‐a‐vis indirect control, we highlight the role of mental processes and clarify the labelling of control mechanisms as nudges. Furthermore, we show how nudges are interwoven into algorithmic control as they capitalise on and feed into it. We also substantiate the discussions on information asymmetry by explicating the calculative apparatus that underlies the asymmetry.

This study delineates the microprocesses of solidarity development and the subsequent collective actions of gig workers in India amidst multiple structural constraints. Using netnography, semi-structured interviews and direct observation, we show how digitally naive app-based cab drivers amalgamate physical and digital spaces, construct a phygital space free of managerial gaze and leverage it to bond and bridge, create webs of care and share and resist multiple oppressive forces, individually and collectively. Thus, we broaden the conceptualisation of worker agency beyond labourmanagement antagonism and extend the extant literature on solidarity development and resistance in gig work by identifying a spatial enabler, phygital free space and the expansive role of relationship-based commitment. Relationship-based commitment not only functions as a membership mobiliser but also helps mobilise collective resistance when interwoven with an external threat-based identity created through injustice framing.

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