Abstract
‘How on earth can it be so difficult to manage a pay cheque?’ said the manager of an administrative office when I interviewed him. ‘In this New Pay system there are so many and often conflicting considerations to be aware of.’ While this web of considerations makes managing a pay cheque a complicated affair, however, it also establishes the very conditions that make management possible. As this chapter will show,ˡ complexity offers managers not just ‘a difficult tight-rope to walk on’, as the administrator described it, but also an opportunity to approach pay as a management issue in the first place; moreover, it functions as a mean to construct management as such. This can be seen very clearly in regard to a new pay technology that has been implemented in the Danish public sector over the last ten years. Here pay is discussed in different ways, which makes the decisions more complicated than ever before, and also more complicated than the designers of the new scale ever imagined.
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© 2012 Betina Wolfgang Rennison
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Rennison, B.W. (2012). Cash, codes and complexity. In: Thygesen, N. (eds) The Illusion of Management Control. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230365391_2
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