How do post-bureaucratic organizations use friendship as a form of control and how do individuals respond to it? The literature mostly looks at friendship at work as a source of positive organizational and individual outcomes such as cooperation, productivity, creativity, job satisfaction or organizational commitment. Yet, an emerging critical literature on neo-normative control has emphasized how friendship can be mobilized to coopt individuals’ private lives and encourage self-exploitation. Although critical in unraveling the more ambivalent and complex role played by friendship in organizations, this literature however currently tends to restrict its understanding of friendship to ‘fun’. Through our study of a French network of independent consultants, we make two contributions to this nascent literature. First, we show that, beyond the sole element of ‘fun’, organizational control through friendship relies on five other discursive repertoires: ‘equality’, ‘intimacy’, ‘growth’, ‘generosity’ and ‘reciprocity’. Second, we discuss how individuals conform and/or resist this organizational discourse, between conformation and resistance.
