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Making People Work: Control and Incentives in Swedish Organizations

Department of Sociology, Stockholm University, Sweden

There are two main strategies to elicit effort from employees: control and incentives. The issue addressed in this paper is how systems of control and incentives are related, and how they are embedded in the organizational structure. The analyses are based on data from a national survey of Swedish public and private sector organizations. According to the findings, the degree of bureaucratization is not only positively related to the extent to which employees are controlled, but also to the level of incentives. The results also indicate that employers using selective incentives rely on monitoring and output control in order to establish who will get ahead and why. Furthermore, some results show that the control level is relatively low in organizations which use general rather than selective incentives. Hence, the idea that incentives and control are functional equivalents appears to be invalid for selective incentives.

Acta Sociologica, Vol. 42, No. 2, 103-122 (1999)
DOI: 10.1177/000169939904200201


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