On the poverty of apriorism: Technology, surveillance in the workplace and employee responses

Abstract

Many debates about surveillance at work are framed by a set of a priori assumptions about the nature of the employment relationship that inhibits efforts to understand the complexity of employee responses to the spread of new technology at work. In particular, the debate about the prevalence of resistance is hamstrung from the outset by the assumption that all apparently non‐compliant acts, whether intentional or not, are to be counted as acts of resistance. Against this background this paper seeks to redress the balance by reviewing results from an ethnographic study of surveillance‐capable technologies in a number of British workplaces. It argues for greater attention to be paid to the empirical character of the social relations at work in and through which technologies are deployed and in the context of which employee responses are played out. In particular, it suggests that the resistance/compliance couple is too blunt an analytic instrument to capture the richness of those social relations. It argues, moreover, that there is an urgent need to reinstate the social in analyses of workplace relations just as respondents in the study frequently found themselves struggling to reinstate the social dimensions of work in the face of individualizing technologies. At the same time all parties to working social relations bring with them to the workplace understandings and definitions of legitimacy that have their origins at least partly outside the world of work. These definitions of legitimacy exercise a powerful influence on employee responses. Nowhere is this clearer than in the context of privacy where our respondents’ expectations and understandings diverged significantly from those to be found in much academic literature and social commentary—itself frequently framed in terms of a range of a priori assumptions about the priority attached to privacy at work.

Key words:

• surveillance
• new technology
• social relations of work
• privacy
• resistance