Boundary Work and Strategies of Compliance: The Underlife of the Ivory Tower

Abstract

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.