Ideologies at Work in Organizations: An Emerging Critical Perspective and Reflexive Research Agenda Severin Hornung, Thomas Höge, and Christine Unterrainer Abstract This article reviews conceptual and empirical building blocks of an emerging research agenda on ideology in work organizations. Ideologies are discussed with reference to interests, institutions, and identities, reflecting societal, organizational, and individual perspectives. Societal issues are addressed in the critique of the political-economic ideology of neoliberalism, system justification theory, and historical ideological transitions. On the organizational level, ideologies are examined in the context of management control systems and employee responses to power, drawing on downsizing research as an example. Individual-level psycho- logical mechanisms and consequences of ideological control are addressed in theo- rizing on social character, subjectification, governmentality, and the entreployee concept. Denaturalization, reflexivity, and anti-performativity are suggested as research principles. Operationalizing anti-performativity, a suggested counter- model of humanistic ideals, positions individuation, solidarity, and emancipation against neoliberal ideologies of individualism, competition, and instrumentality. Discussed research needs include theoretical elaboration, empirical investigations, and practice-oriented applications. Keywords Ideology · Critique · System justification · Neoliberalism · Management control 1 Introduction Ideology has been described as one of the most elusive concepts in social science (Eagleton 1991; Jost et al. 2009; Seeck et al. 2020). This, however, applies mostly to value-neutral conceptions. According to these, ideology refers to integrated sets or configurations of mental models, ideas, attitudes, values, and beliefs, interconnected S. Hornung (*) · T. Höge · C. Unterrainer Institute of Psychology, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria e-mail: severin.hornung@uibk.ac.at; thomas.hoege@uibk.ac.at; christine.unterrainer@uibk.ac.at © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. H. Bilgin et al. (eds.), Eurasian Business Perspectives, Eurasian Studies in Business and Economics 16/2, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65085-8_11 165