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Return to the Current Issue Index
Editorial Articles Case-Study Opinion Editorial Kirstie Ball: The Labours of Surveillance
Surveillance and work is examined as the central theme of the issue. Two interpretations of the phrase are made – first, surveillance of work, and second surveillance as work. After a focus on the second, a review of recently published work which informs this perspective is undertaken, and then two issues for future research are discussed. These issues concern how the surveilled subject might come to be understood, and how connectivity between different surveillance locales may be examined. It is concluded that examining surveillance as work renders new types of occupational category and organizational activity significant, as well as the labours involved in the social processes of identity work and representation management.
Editorial Articles Case-Study Opinion Articles Paul Thompson : Fantasy Island: a Labour Process critique of the ‘age of surveillance’ While surveillance has long been recognised as part of the armoury of managerial practices in the workplace, there has been increasing claims that electronic or panoptic surveillance is a new and successful model of control. This paper explores and challenges these claims by examining in detail ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ versions of the story through the work of Sewell and Zuboff respectively, before looking briefly at recent debates on call centres. It concludes by arguing that through there has been some shift towards surveillance practices, there is insufficient evidence that a combination of electronic panopticon and peer pressure is effective and distinctive enough to constitute a credible new model of control of the labour process. In addition, social scientists must be careful not to assume that developments in workplace surveillance are transferable to the broader social terrain, or vice versa.
Jeffrey M. Stanton & Kathryn R. Stam: Information Technology, Privacy, and Power within Organizations: a view from Boundary Theory and Social Exchange perspectives Over recent years, information technology has played an increasingly important role in the monitoring and surveillance of worker behavior in organizations. In this article, we take the position that managers, workers, and information technology professionals alike see worker-related information as a valuable organizational resource and that processes of social exchange influence how this information resource is controlled. These suppositions are woven together by joining two theories, information boundary theory, a motivational framework for examining privacy at work, and social exchange theory, which provides a perspective on social networks and social power. After discussing these two frameworks and how they might be interlaced, we analyze a corpus of semi-structured interviews with 119 managers, employees, and IT professionals that explored questions of privacy, motivation, and power in six not-for-profit organizations that were undergoing technology-driven change with potential for increased monitoring and surveillance.
Benjamin J. Goold: Public Area Surveillance and Police Work: the impact of CCTV on police behaviour and autonomy Drawing on a recent study of the impact of closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras on policing practices in a large English police force, this paper considers whether the presence of surveillance cameras affects the working attitudes and behaviour of individual police officers. In particular, this paper asks whether CCTV makes the police more accountable or more cautious in the exercise of their discretion in public spaces. Although noting that in certain circumstances CCTV may inadvertently help to reduce incidences of police misconduct, this paper concludes by arguing that more needs to be done to prevent the police from interfering with the operation of CCTV and gaining unauthorised access to potentially incriminating video evidence.
Editorial Articles Case-Study Opinion Case-Study Peter Holland: Drug Testing in the Australian Mining Industry
Alcohol and illicit substance abuse in the workplace is increasingly becoming a major human resource and employee relations issue. Whilst more sophisticated measures have been developed to test and monitor drug use in the workplace, and despite tacit union support on the grounds of occupational health and safety, the implementation of drug testing procedures remains a contentious issue. This paper examines the issue through a case study in the Australian mining industry where the introduction of the drug-testing resulted in a major industrial disputation.
Editorial Articles Case-Study Opinion Opinion Lucas D. Introna: Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair This piece argues that workplace surveillance is unethical and unfair using the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Such a move is indeed necessary for the possibility of ethics to happen when we monitor and surveil, rather than merely being considered when we talk about, or judge, monitoring and surveillance practices.
Andrew J. Charlesworth: Privacy, Personal Information and Employment It is a widely accepted proposition, reflected in privacy-enhancing legislation and regulations, that individuals will have less privacy in their workplace activities than in their private lives. However, modern technologies and business practices have blurred the boundary between private life and workplace, and a re-evaluation of the traditional legislative and regulatory protections for privacy in employment is required. Michele Beck: Working for Them This piece argues that the meteoric rise of the service economy in the West has led to the spread of surveillance practice, not just over individuals who produce goods, but also those who consume them. Since the West’s primary form of production is no longer carried out by workers in a factory setting, new kinds of ‘workers’ are under the watch of surveillance technologies. Rosalind H. Searle: Organizational Justice in E-recruiting: issues and controversies The recruitment situation has high stakes both for the potential new employer and candidates. This article highlights the technology-led transformation occurring in organization’s recruitment processes and argues that more attention is needed to assess how far these systems actually widen the applicant pool, or whether they mask the replication of previous discriminatory practices. It raises questions about the transparency of the process, and the accountability of recruiters to applicants noting the procedural and distributive justice implications of these changes.
Editorial Articles Case-Study Opinion
