Affective governance theory: rethinking organisational control in digitally mediated organisations

Digital work is increasingly organised through communication platforms, workflow systems, electronic monitoring and algorithmic systems. Existing research already shows that digital technologies create affordances, structure choice, intensify visibility and support algorithmic and datafication-based control. The unresolved issue is therefore not whether digital systems influence behaviour, but how recurrent digital cues become organisationally linked to norms and anticipated consequences strongly enough to acquire stable affective and evaluative force. This paper formulates Affective Governance Theory (AGT) as a new mid-range theory of organisational control. Using an abductive conceptual model-building approach, the analysis integrates organisational control, digital affordances and sociomateriality, algorithmic and datafication control, digital nudging and persuasive technology, surveillance, affect theory and work-design scholarship. Theory development proceeds through anomaly specification, comparison of alternative explanations, iterative construct formation, discriminant and boundary testing, and recursive model derivation. AGT proposes that digital work infrastructures become affective configurations when four conditions co-occur: recurrent dependence, evaluative legibility, organisational norm linkage and anticipated relational or professional consequences. Three mutually reinforcing mechanisms, affective inscription, anticipatory self-regulation and the moral economy of digital presence, explain how these configurations orient behaviour and become recursively reproduced. Seven propositions specify emergence, operation, discriminant effects, sustainable-work consequences and structural amplification. AGT does not claim that digital design, monitoring or algorithms shaping behaviour are new. Its contribution is to theorise the organisational conversion of recurrent digital affordances into relatively stable affective governance structures and to generate predictions that can be tested against surveillance, algorithmic control, nudging and normative control. Practically, AGT offers a diagnostic for identifying when digital work design turns visibility, response latency and online presence into informal governance demands. It thereby connects responsible digital transformation with employee autonomy, recovery, dignity, well-being and equity.