Ioana Lupu

Ioana Lupu is a professor of accounting and management control at ESSEC Business School. Her research addresses control, identity, experiences of time and well-being at work, particularly in knowledge-intensive professional firms.

With Joonas Rokka, Lupu studied how organizational controls shape professionals’ experiences of busyness. Their study drew on interviews and weekly diaries from two professional-service firms. It describes optimal busyness as an energizing but fleeting experience between quiet time and excessive busyness, and examines how attempts to sustain it can contribute to overwork. This research provides an important qualification for the strategic entropy article: controls can structure useful focus as well as create pressure. The study concerns workers’ experiences of control, not a count of rules or a test of whether removing controls improves organizational adaptability.