Visibility Management: New Managerial Work in Digitalized Organizations

Lise Justesen; Ursula Plesner

doi:10.37725/mgmt.2023.7748

Lise Justesen Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8751-7621
Ursula Plesner Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5248-3276

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37725/mgmt.2023.7748

Keywords: Visibility, Visibility management, Digitalization, Digital technologies, Control, Managerial work, Invisible work

Abstract

Visibility management is becoming an important task in organizations as work is increasingly made visible by digital technologies, but the consequences of increased visibility for management are still underexplored. Based on a qualitative study in heavily digitalized public organizations, the paper investigates managers’ experiences with visibility and control. New concerns arise relating to the risk of employee prying, increase in visualizations of workflow deviations, and the explosion in performance indications. These concerns entail new types of managerial work that we refer to as visibility management, consisting of technological mediation work, relation work, and compensation work. By identifying these types of work, the study challenges the assumption that more visibility, understood as increased ease of access to information, automatically eases control tasks for managers. The paper offers a vocabulary that can help practitioners describe and better understand new types of otherwise often invisible managerial work in digitalized organizations.

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Author Biographies

Lise Justesen, Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

Lise Justesen is Associate Professor at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School. Her research interests include the interplay between management technologies and organization, public sector digitalization and actor-network theory. She has published in journals such as Accounting, Organizations and Society and Organization and she is the co-editor of the volume Making Things Valuable published at Oxford University Press. She is co-PI of the research project Valuing Invisible Work: Efficiency ambitions and digitalization projects in practice.

Ursula Plesner, Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

Ursula Plesner is Associate Professor at the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School. She conducts research on digitalization and organization, mostly in a public sector context. Her work has been published in journals such as Organization, Strategic Organization, and International Journal of Management Reviews. She is the co-author of Digital Organizing – Revisiting themes in organization studies. She is co-PI of the research project Valuing Invisible Work: Efficiency ambitions and digitalization projects in practice.