Respect Stratifying, Formalizing, and Withdrawing as Upstream Occupational Control: How low-level newsroom reporters police their higher-ups

Professional organizations have long struggled to control the quality of professional work and their workers. While extant research has provided abundant information on how peers and senior professionals impose values and codes of conduct on other peers and juniors, we have limited knowledge regarding what or who controls the values and the behaviors of professionals at higher-level positions. With the data collected from a newsroom organization, we depict specific practices that junior newsroom reporters implement to police senior reporters’ work. Specifically, the model of upstream occupational control comprised of respect-granting practices , i.e., observable actions and interactional behaviors through which junior members evaluate and signal the worthiness of their more senior colleagues, and respect-based policing practices —respect stratifying, formalizing, and withdrawing—through which lower-level reporters enact occupational control based on the amount of respect assigned to each higher-level reporter. This model allows us to embrace different hierarchical levels of professionals and the varying functions each hierarchical level plays in controlling professional work, especially junior reporters’ control over seniors’ work via constant respect assessment and subsequent policing practices. Our study advances the literature on occupational control by identifying respect as a distinctive mechanism of upstream occupational control, contrasting with reputation-based lateral control and authority-based downstream control.