‘ This Is the End ’? An Ethnographic Study of Management Control and a New Management Initiative
通过民族志研究，揭示管理控制并非终点而是过程，其实现充满不确定性和偶然性，对理解管理实践中的控制动态有启发。
Over recent decades, critical scholars have quite rightly warned of the control implications of new management initiatives. There is a danger, however, of treating control in a ‘distal’ way or as an ‘end’. Through drawing on proximal theorising, we make explicit what is often implicit in such accounts, which is that control is best understood as unfinished, in process, for it is inherently contingent and unpredictable. Viewed in this way, control becomes elusive as it always has to be achieved. The article draws on ethnographic research conducted in a back office of a manufacturing organisation to illustrate this understanding of management control. It highlights tensions between staff and management and between multiple layers of management that can thwart control.