This paper examines how professionals working in bureaucratic organizations, despite having formal authority, struggle to enact authority over the clients they advise, transforming their right to command into deference to commands. Drawing on a comparative ethnographic study of two professional groups overseeing compliance in university laboratories, I identify how choices about their task jurisdiction influence each profession's ability to enact authority over and gain voluntary compliance from the same group of clients. One group constructs its work domain to include not only high-skilled tasks that emphasize members' expertise but also scut work-menial work with contaminated materials-through which they gain regular entry into clients' workspaces, developing knowledge about and relationships with clients. Using these resources to accommodate, discipline, and understand clients, they produce relational authority-the capacity to elicit voluntary compliance with commands. The other group outsources everyday scut work and interacts with lab researchers mostly during annual inspections and training, which leads to complaints by researchers to management and eventual loss of jurisdiction. The findings show the importance of producing relational authority in contemporary professional-client interactions in bureaucratic settings and challenge the relevance of expertise and professional identity in generating relational authority. I show how holding on to, not hiving off, scut work allows professionals to enact authority over clients.

Designed to close the ubiquitous gap between law on the books and law in action, management systems locate the standard setting and implementation of regulation within the regulated organization itself. Despite efforts to more closely couple aspirations and performance, the gap re-emerges because the exigencies of practical action exceed the capacity of system prescriptions to anticipate and contain them. Drawing on data from a six-year ethnographic study of the creation and implementation of an environment, health, and safety management system, this article identifies relational regulation as the approach used by front-line managers to govern the gap: keeping organizational activities within an acceptable range of variation close to regulatory specifications. We identify four practices -narrating the gap, inquiring without constraint, integrating pluralistic accounts, and crafting pragmatic accommodations -and three conditions under which actors may develop a sociological orientation to enact relational regulation. Overall, the article concludes that the mechanism for assuring compliance resides in the apprehension of relational interdependencies rather than the management system per se.r ego_1100 14..42

Dans cet article, nous développons trois exemples de ce que nous appelons des “Citoyens sociologues” (des employés chargés de vérifier le respect des normes de sécurité et de l’environnement, des procureurs et des cadres d’entreprise), qui considèrent leur travail et se considèrent eux-mêmes comme faisant partie d’un réseau complexe d’interactions et de processus, et non comme occupant un poste avec des intérêts et des responsabilités limités. Au lieu de se spécialiser étroitement, et de ne prendre en considération que de façon épisodique les connections plus larges et les répercussions de leurs actions, ces acteurs considèrent leur organisation ou leur état comme le résultat de décisions, d’indécisions, de processus d’essais et d’erreurs, et non comme le résultat d’une action rationnellement organisée . Dans cette entité dynamique, ils conçoivent leur propre rôle comme insignifiant en soi mais essentiel à l’ensemble. Nous situons d’abord cette observation dans la notion de fait social de Durkheim, puis nous faisons l’hypothèse que les sciences sociales du XX e  siècle ont produit une conception réifiée des relations sociales qui masque inutilement ce travail quotidien de construction sociale dans la pratique. À l’inverse, une analyse partant de l’hypothèse d’un “Citoyen sociologue” permet d’explorer plus systématiquement les variations de performance des organisations. Nous suggérons, premièrement, que la perception de la structure de l’action sociale et des interdépendances relationnelles par les acteurs peut varier de manière prévisible. Deuxièmement, nous estimons que cette perception des interdépendances relationnelles peut affecter, à son tour, la performance des différents rôles.

Organizations depend on experts to oversee and execute complex tasks. When faced with pressures to reduce their dependence on experts, managers encounter a control paradox: they require experts to explicate the very knowledge and discretionary approaches that are the basis of their control for the purpose of undercutting this control. Experts rarely consent to such a situation; therefore, attempts to reduce dependence on experts and control their work are more often aspirational than actual. Drawing on an ethnography of an organization that was required by a government agency to transfer the work responsibilities of experts to employees throughout the organization, this paper describes how a network of actors developed a discursive, political process to renegotiate control of expert work practices. Through censure episodes, long-standing and largely successful expert practices were examined one by one and relabeled as problematic in relation to established goals. The constructed breaches opened expert practices to evaluation, questioning, and eventual delegitimation within the organization. This process depended on the introduction of new roles that revised dependencies and generated new resources. This paper contributes to the understanding of control in organizations by theorizing how the emergent, symbolic work of censure episodes are a means of gradually subverting expert control. Further, these struggles are reconceptualized as multiple-role negotiations rather than bilateral manager–expert struggles.

We examine how organizations select some routines to be changed, but not others, during organizational search. Selection is a critical step that links an exogenous trigger for change, change in individual routines, and larger processes of organizational adaptation. Drawing on participant observation of an initiative to improve perioperative efficiency in seven Ontario hospitals, we find that organizational roles shape selection by influencing both politics and frames in organizational search. Roles shape politics by defining the role-specific goals of the people who have authority to change a routine. Organizations will not select a routine for change unless at least some elites-people with role-based authority-frame the existing routine as negatively affecting their role-specific goals. Roles also shape individuals' frames.Because people are only partially exposed to interdependencies between routines in their dayto-day work, they may not be fully aware of the diverse impact that an existing routine can have on their goals. Proponents for change can use strategic framing to focus attention on interdependencies between routines to get elites to better see how an existing routine negatively affects their goals. They can also change elites' goals by using strategic framing to focus attention on new and broader goals that the change in routine would promote.Keywords: work, search, routines, hospitals and health care, conflict and cooperation Organizational routines are a key mechanism by which organizations can change, adapt, and maintain stability over time (Nelson and Winter, 1982;Feldman and Pentland, 2003;Becker et al., 2005;Pentland et al., 2012). Routines are recognizable, repetitive patterns of interdependent action that govern work processes in organizations (Feldman and Pentland, 2003). Research over 20 years has articulated a practice perspective on routines, theorizing how routines change. This literature shows that the lived experience of an organizational routine, including flexibility in how it is used, can be a source of change in the routine and thus the organization (e.g., Feldman, 2000;Feldman and Pentland, 2003;Howard-Grenville, 2005; Pentland and Feldman, 2005;Parmigiani and Howard-Grenville, 2011;Salvato and Rerup, 2011). It has developed the idea that individual routines could be generative systems, in which the dynamics within a routine could trigger change endogenously. In conceptualizing the individual routine as a generative system (Pentland and Feldman, 2005), the source of change comes from experience-feedback, observation, and trial-and-error-in enacting the routine.Change in a routine can also be triggered by an exogenous event. Cacciatori (2012) examined challenges experienced in an effort to alter the bidding routine in an engineering firm in response to an environmental shift-a change in government contracting procedures.Zbaracki and Bergen (2010) examined change in the pricing routine in a manufacturing organization in response to an industry shift-a competitor's move ...