The fast-food worker finds refuge in a bathroom stall to respond to her boyfriend's fifth message in an hour. The human resources manager sees a colleague sending a stream of text messages during a meeting and quickly grabs her mobile to make sure she's also multitasking. These scenarios are common, but unique to the 21st century. Until the early 2000s, workplaces provided most of the computers and portable devices that employees used to perform their jobs and communicate with others. Today, people bring their own mobile devices to work and create new norms for how communication occurs in the workplace. Managers and organizations respond by setting and enforcing new policies that are intended to help them navigate the ever-changing mobile-communication environment.
In Negotiating Control: Organizations and Mobile Communication, Keri K. Stephens responds to the struggles of employees, organizations, and even friends and family, as they try to understand new norms for connectedness in the workplace. Drawing on over two decades of her own research and fieldwork, , representing people in over 35 different types of jobs, Stephens claims that though people assume mobile communication is a uniform practice, there are underlying -- and often hidden -- issues of control and power at play, which shape how people are permitted and expected to use mobiles to communicate while working. The accounts Stephens offers reveal the many ways that these portable tools are actually used across work environments today, integrating information, communication, and data, and connecting people in expected and often conflicting ways.
Industry Reviews
"Stephens' Negotiating Control is bold in its wide sweep across time and place, from the earliest clunky car phones to today's sleek multifunctional communication and computing devices, and across organizations and occupations representing a very broad spectrum of working environments. Stephens pulls the pieces of an intricate puzzle together, knitting together theory and data to show how practices, policies, people and artifacts are implicated in a
complex process of negotiating control in and around mobile communication and computing -- and how such negotiation has wide-ranging implications at the personal, organizational and even societal levels." --
Janet Fulk, Professor of Communication, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
"Negotiating Control is a wonderful contribution to a much written-about but under-theorized phenomenon that is reshaping work, organizations, and society. Based on a wealth of qualitative and quantitative research, this book is both academically rigorous and accessible to a broad audience. This will be a seminal book for students of mobile communication specifically and information and communication technologies more generally." -- Marshall Scott
Poole, David L. Swanson Professor of Communication, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
"This is a highly readable book on an important subject. Building on more than two decades of research, Stephens presents many practically and academically relevant insights into how our increasing use of (and dependence on) mobile communication devices leads to new dynamics of control in the relationship between organizations and employees. Combining fascinating and recognizable user stories with a thorough academic grounding, this is recommended reading for
anyone interested in how the mobile revolution affects the way we communicate - both in and outside of the workplace." -- Bart van den Hooff, Professor of Organizational Communication & Information
Systems, VU University, Amsterdam
