The Contexts of Control: Information, Power, and Truck-Driving Work

Abstract

This article examines the implications of electronic monitoring systems for organizational information flows and worker control, in the context of the U.S. trucking industry. Truckers, a spatially dispersed group of workers with a traditionally independent culture and a high degree of autonomy, are increasingly subjected to performance monitoring via fleet management systems that record and transmit fine-grained data about their location and behaviors. These systems redistribute operational information within firms by accruing real-time aggregated data in a remote company dispatcher. This redistribution results in a seemingly incongruous set of effects. First, abstracted and aggregated data streams allow dispatchers to quantitatively evaluate truckers’ job performance across new metrics, and to challenge truckers’ accounts of local and biophysical conditions. Second, even as these data are abstracted, information about truckers’ activities is simultaneously resocialized via its strategic deployment into truckers’ social relationships with their coworkers and families. These disparate dynamics operate together to facilitate firms’ control over truckers’ daily work practices in a manner that was not previously possible. The trucking case reveals multifaceted pathways to the entrenchment of organizational control via electronic monitoring.

Keywords:

• electronic monitoring
• information
• organizations
• social control
• sociotechnical systems
• surveillance
• trucking
• work

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author gratefully acknowledges the special issue editors and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The author also thanks Paul DiMaggio, Kim Lane Scheppele, Janet Vertesi, Dory Kornfeld, Naomi Adiv, Dennis Feehan, and members of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Social Organization and New York University School of Law Privacy Research Group for their feedback.

FUNDING

This research was financially supported by the National Science Foundation (SES number 1228436), Intel Labs, the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, and the Data & Society Research Institute.

Notes

1. My categorization of truckers into “cowboys” and “family men” is congruent with the Stratford et al. (2000) study of HIV risk factors among long-haul truckers, in which he and his colleagues characterize their subjects as risk-taking “highway cowboys,” more moderate “old hands,” and “Christian truckers/old married men,” who exhibit the least risky behaviors and have the most stable family relationships. Consider also Hamilton's (2008, 199) characterization of popular trucking culture in the 1970s viewing “working-class manhood as a constant negotiation between the poles of promiscuity and fidelity.”

2. Roughly speaking, there are two types of employment arrangements in trucking. A driver may be a traditional employee for a firm or private fleet (in which he drives a truck that the company owns), or may be an independent owner-operator driving his own truck. Owner-operators can compete for individual hauls, often via brokers or electronic “load boards,” or may be leased to a carrier for a period of time. My analysis here, being focused on information flows and worker power within trucking firms, is primarily focused on truck drivers who work as employees of such firms; these drivers are much more commonly supervised through fleet management systems than are independent drivers.

3. Compare Hamilton's (2008) characterization of the “dense web of weigh stations, ports of entry, reams of paperwork, layers of taxation, and contradictory regulations” with which truckers must contend. Notably, the degree of “social” regulation, governing truckers’ working conditions in the name of safety, has increased markedly since the economic deregulation of the late 1970s and early 1980s (Belzer 2000).

4. Current hours-of-service rules are listed in the Code of Federal Regulations, 49 C.F.R. § 395.3.

5. References in trucker popular culture suggest the ubiquity of these violations and the extent to which they are taken seriously by truckers. Consider the 1963 trucker anthem “Six Days on the Road,” written by Carl Montgomery and Earl Green and popularized by Dave Dudley (“I.C.C. is checking on down the line / I'm a little over weight, my logbook's way behind / But nothing bothers me tonight / I can dodge all the scales all right / Six days on the road and I'm gonna make it home tonight”) or the 1975 hit “Convoy” by C.W. McCall (“We tore up all of our swindle sheets / and left 'em settin’ on the scales”).

6. It should be noted that firms face contradictory economic incentives regarding electronic hours-of-service recording: While firms don't want their fatigued employees to have accidents, they do want them to transport goods quickly. For large firms especially, the potential loss of employee productivity can be economically offset by safety benefits, reduced litigation risk, and savings on insurance premiums and internal auditing costs—as well as enhancements to efficiency supported by performance monitoring. In some cases, firms may instruct drivers about how to exploit the technical limitations of the monitor to evade the timekeeping regulations without being caught (for instance, by mislogging time doing nondriving work, like vehicle inspection, as sleep time).

7. 49 C.F.R. § 395.8(i).

8. By embroiling families in these managerial control regimes, monitoring-related incentive programs bear some resemblance to the involvement of wives and girlfriends as supports for state-based surveillance systems detailed in Goffman (2014).