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128 MANAGING KNOWLEDGE WORK AND INNOVATION

This challenge was one of the important, if sometimes, unspoken, ingredients in
the development of HRM as a management discipline. Early writers on HRM
contrasted the traditional emphasis on control with HRM’s pursuit of ‘com-
mitment’. Control involved tightly prescribed job designs, a focus on stable,
measurable performance and direction through rules. In contrast, an emphasis
on employee commitment required flexible, team-based job designs, the pursuit
of improvement and change, and direction through shared values and culture
(Walton, 1985).
Commitment can take a variety of different forms. Continuance commitment,
for example, simply denotes an intention to carry on in an existing job. This
may have little or no implications for the individual’s motivation and behav-
iour. Where commitment is affective, however, and embraces a positive attitude
towards the organization, it may be an important factor in eliciting the voluntary
behaviours highlighted earlier. Knowledge sharing, in particular, is more likely
to occur where employees view their organization positively (Thompson and
Heron, 2006).
The emphasis which the early HRM literature placed on commitment tended
to locate it at the opposite end of the spectrum to management control. While
it is certainly true that commitment can be an alternative to control for employ-
ers seeking strategies to achieve high performance, more recent work has tended
to see these strategies not as mutually exclusive but as complementary. Thus,
the development of the kind of supportive organization culture highlighted in
Chapter 2 is sometimes seen not simply as a way of gaining employee commit-
ment but as another form of control which seeks to shape the identity of the
employee (Kunda, 1992). Some critical writers argue that this form of cultural,
indirect control is one of the most insidious aspects of HRM because it shapes the
employee’s identity and enlists their autonomy in the pursuit of corporate goals
(Willmott, 1993).
Even if we see this as too Machiavellian a view of HRM, it is clear that
control and commitment tend to co-exist in the management of knowledge
work, because organizations are unwilling to rely wholly on the voluntary com-
mitment of their employees to ensure good performance. This co-existence is
always precarious, however, because of the contradictory logics of commitment
and control. A good example of this is what has been termed ‘the vicious circle
of control’. As Crozier describes it, this cycle operates as follows: attempts to
impose new controls on employees reduce their commitment, with the result
that performance deteriorates. Faced by deteriorating performance, managers
impose even greater controls, leading to a downward spiral of further loss of
commitment, declines in performance and so on (Crozier, 1964).

Outsourcing and offshoring
The difficulties of pursuing control and commitment simultaneously have led
many organizations to see-saw back and forth between different kinds of policy
for their knowledge workers. Within the last decade or so, though, we have

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