The ethics of resistance to managerial control

Managerial tools to control the employees and their usage in directing the employees towards commonly accepted goals, is one of the fundamental discussion topics in management and organization literature. Employees? resistance to this managerial control process has been discussed from a variety of viewpoints. Especially, with the contribution of critical perspectives, studies of resistance to managerial control began to develop as an essential part of the relevant literature.This study begins by discussing the place of the resistance in the organization studies. As there are variety of approaches to resistance, ethical position of resistance is questioned. Hence, the research question of the study can be stated as ?what is the ethics of resistance to managerial control in the organizations??. In order to answer this question, the relationship between the main assumptions of critical perspectives in the organization studies and the resistance concept is analyzed. Therefore, dominance of the critical approaches and critical theories in resistance studies is discussed.Following the discussions of main assumptions, conceptualization of resistance in terms of different epistemological and ontological standpoints in organization studies is examined. Afterwards, current expressions of resistance in the contemporary studies is given. In the following chapter, concept of ethics is examined with a critical approach and a theoretical approach regarding the ethical assumptions of resistance is developed. In the discussion of ethics of resistance, utilitarianism and freedom ethics has been given special attention. Within this framework, it is stated that people resist to managerial control in order to reach justice and autonomy and it is claimed that this ethical foundation of resistance makes the resistance a righteous act. The theoretical development of a new ethical assumption regarding resistance constitutes the main contribution and importance of the study.