Knowledge that Transforms

Obesity has become a topic of public discourse in Britain with claims that it is now one of the major causes of ill health and premature death. In an effort to tackle this obesity ‘crisis’, the UK government has introduced mandatory calorie labelling on menus. This legislation requires that the number of calories associated with a meal option, together with the recommended calorie consumption per day, be displayed on menus. Such ‘calorie accounting’ seeks to prompt the consumer to make menu choices consistent with public health ambitions and to encourage food establishments to reformulate lower calorie menu offerings. Drawing on the concepts of technologies of government (Miller & Rose, 1990; Rose & Miller, 1992) and biopedagogy (Harewood, 2009; Wright, 2009), this paper suggests that calorie accounting operates as a technology of biopedagogy which seeks to discipline and govern the body in contemporary neoliberal society. The paper also contributes to recent accounting scholarship on counter-conduct (Foucault, 2007) by highlighting how calorie accounting produces a form of counter-conduct that coexists with conformity to governmental goals. The paper draws upon three primary data sources: a documentary analysis of 44 policy documents on obesity and calorie reduction, an analysis of 112 responses to a public consultation exercise on calorie labelling, and 20 interviews with relevant actors.

Arguably the world's most iconic platform organization, Uber relies on a disaggregated labour force and a technology application accessible to users on mobile devices. The company contracts with over three million drivers worldwide and has curated an infrastructure of platform-based control characterized by algorithmic processes. The effects of this new wave of control on the driver-led workforce are unclear. Drawing on interviews with 36 Uber drivers, mainly from Australia and France, this research investigates how the ‘gig economy’ workforce engages with platform-based control. We find that the platform organization's control algorithms operate with strong disciplinary effects. Drawing on Foucault's concept of self-formation, we examine worker responses to the new order of work. We highlight the way workers engage in practices to ‘take care of oneself’, by enduring, subverting or exiting the conditions of algorithmic management. We find that these practices are related to the distance embedded in the field between management and the workforce. In this way, we argue that the gig economy operates differently upon the ‘governable self’ and urge caution in relation to the use of algorithms to control at a distance.

We study the New York City taxi market to examine whether an excise tax hike on cigarettes corresponds to smoker taxi drivers more frequently cheating their customers. Increased cheating could be motivated by both financial pressures and as a reaction to unfair treatment (as surveyed smokers view cigarette tax hikes as quite unfair). We examine this question using detailed ride-level data where we can identify a rare but fraudulent overcharging technique (cheating) and a subsample of taxi drivers who smoke (affected taxpayers, identified via tickets for smoking in a cab). In difference-in-differences regressions we find that following a cigarette tax hike, taxi drivers who smoke are approximately 1.5 times more likely to cheat customers than other drivers. Our findings are strongest in the subsample of smokers with consistently low earnings.

Global practices such as offshoring and expatriation of employees increase cross-cultural interactions within and across firms. In this paper, we use three experiments to investigate the effects of cultural differences on employees' interpretations of employers' contract choices. Applying insights from attribution theory, we predict that cultural differences will reduce the likelihood for employees to attribute employers' choice of a more-trusting contract to trust. This in turn will reduce the ability of such contracts to motivate higher employee effort. However, we also suggest that three interventions will mitigate the negative effect of cultural differences: employees' prior and primed exposure to employers' culture and employees' interactional cultural intelligence. In our labor market setting, employers chose a hiring contract for employees who, in return, indicated their effort levels. In all experiments, dyads interacted in real-time either in the same country or across two countries with high cultural difference. Consistent with our predictions, we find that the effectiveness of a bonus contract in increasing employees' effort is reduced by high cultural difference (in experiment 1). We also find that employees' exposure to employers' culture, either due to prior exposure (in experiment 2) or by priming exposure through culture-specific training (in experiment 3) has a mitigating effect. Finally, we find partial support that employees’ interactional cultural intelligence (CQ) has a mitigating effect. Implications to theory and practice are discussed.

Target setting by superiors and their discretion in compensation decisions are important interrelated pieces in an organization's control system. Thus, we examine how these processes influence each other and superiors' decisions therein. We predict, and experimentally find, superiors with ex post compensation discretion set more difficult targets and put less effort into the target-setting process. This suggests that providing ex post compensation discretion fundamentally changes the ex ante target-setting process. We further analyze how superiors use their discretion and find superiors who set targets knowing they can make ex post compensation adjustments are more likely to make both positive and negative adjustments to subordinate compensation compared to those who set targets without the benefit of ex post discretion, whereas past research findings suggest that superiors are reluctant to make negative adjustments to compensation. Thus, our study illustrates that target setting and compensation discretion influence each other to affect superiors' decisions concerning subordinates, providing insight into the use of these processes in management control systems.