This study examines strategies employed by university administrators and managers to gain compliance from subordinates even as they attempted to increase their workload. These strategies have received comparatively little attention within organizational studies of compliance. The participants in our study included employees at a public university in the Midwest identifying themselves as either “staff/faculty” or “managers/administrators.” Our findings indicate that when administrators and managers are unable to use formal rewards and punishments they attempt to gain compliance from subordinates through two main strategies that we identify as overtures and interactional trebuchet. Both strategies represent a sequence of interaction that we refer to more generally as “boundary work”—a set of activities through which boundaries on time, resources, and workload are defended or diminished, and for which we provide a model. We draw upon organizational, symbolic interactionist, and dramaturgical theories in the analysis of our data.

中文翻译：

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边界工作和合规策略：象牙塔的地下世界


本研究探讨了大学行政人员和经理在试图增加工作量的情况下为获得下属的服从而采用的策略。这些策略在组织合规性研究中相对较少受到关注。我们研究的参与者包括中西部一所公立大学的员工，他们将自己称为“员工/教职人员”或“经理/行政人员”。我们的研究结果表明，当管理者和管理者无法使用正式的奖励和惩罚时，他们会尝试通过两种主要策略（我们将其称为提议和互动投石机）来获得下属的服从。这两种策略都代表了一系列交互，我们更普遍地将其称为“边界工作”——一组活动，通过这些活动，时间、资源和工作量的边界得以捍卫或减少，我们为此提供了一个模型。我们在数据分析中借鉴了组织理论、象征互动理论和戏剧理论。