Book: Negotiating Control

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Negotiating Control: Organizations and Mobile Communication asks readers to re-think their assumptions about how other people can and do use their mobiles. You can learn more in this brief book trailer or you can read all the chapter abstracts here.

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