Surveillance

A Key Idea for Business and Society

Graham Sewell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351180542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Being watched and watching others is a universal feature of all human societies. How does the phenomenon of surveillance affect, interact with, and change the world of business? This concise book unveils a key idea in the history and future of management.

For centuries managers have claimed the right to monitor employees, but in the digital era, this management activity has become enhanced beyond recognition. Drawing on extensive research into organizational surveillance, the author distils and analyses existing thinking on the concept with his own empirical work.

Drawing together perspectives from philosophy, cutting-edge social theory, and empirical research on workplace surveillance, Surveillance is the definitive introduction to an intriguing topic that will interest readers across the social sciences and beyond.

1 Surveillance at work
An unnatural history

Surveillance at large

Surveillance has been a perennial concern for historians, philosophers, social scientists, and, more recently, business and management scholars. One way or another, being watched and its direct corollary—watching others—seems to be a universal feature of all human societies. It would be wrong, however, to dismiss surveillance as a timeless and unchanging natural phenomenon; although it may have always been done, it has always been done for purposes that have reflected the prevailing political, economic, and social priorities of the time. Sometimes, this surveillance has passed almost unnoticed, while on other occasions it has provoked great fear and loathing. So, what is it exactly about being watched and watching others that makes us passively accept surveillance in some situations and vehemently oppose it in others? One of the social settings where both acceptance of and opposition to surveillance are most evident is in the workplace. For centuries, nominal superiors have claimed the right to subject their subordinates to classification and measurement in the name of performance management, but when this evaluating gaze intrudes into other parts of our lives that we hold to be private, it is often resisted. It’s all very well if our managers want to know how many widgets we produce in an hour or even how many times a day we go to the bathroom at work, but it’s another thing altogether if they become too interested in what we do when we get home. Importantly, what we consider to be a legitimate feature of managerial curiosity and what we consider to be an unacceptable breach of privacy have drastically changed even in the last 100 years. Infamously, Henry Ford thought it entirely appropriate in 1914 to set up the Sociological Department whose job it was to visit workers’ homes to determine if they were sufficiently thrifty, sober, and cleanly to warrant benefitting from the much-heralded Five Dollar Day (Meyer, 1980). Things are very different now in a world of electronic performance monitoring, social media, and apparently unlimited self-disclosure from what they were when surveillance at work appeared to be solely the formal responsibility of authority figures like foremen, overseers, floorwalkers, gang masters, and charge-hands. If the difference between legitimate and illegitimate surveillance is about crossing some ambiguous, contestable, and movable line separating acceptable from unacceptable intrusions into our lives, how and where is that line drawn? We can’t answer that question without understanding the origins of surveillance as a perennially vexatious feature of modern life: although being watched and watching others may have always been with us, understanding the When, How, Who, and Why of surveillance at work has always depended on developing an appreciation of the status of work organizations alongside the social, economic, political, and cultural institutions in which they operate (Marx, 2016). Reflecting on the French etymology of the English word surveillance is useful here. Indeed, it captures much of what this book is about. The bringing together of sur (as in above or over) with veillance (the noun of action from the infinitive veiller or to watch) denotes a hierarchical relationship between the watcher and the watched. This is also conveyed by the English noun oversight—a slightly modified calque of the French word—which alludes to the widely recognizable role of the overseer in many organizational settings. And, for every over, there has to be an under. Superiors and subordinates. Upper, middle, and lower managers. Bosses and underlings. Masters and minions. There are many others.

The word surveillance itself appears to have entered the English language at the very beginning of the eighteenth century when the tensions between France and Great Britain were high due to a generalized fear inspired by the French Revolution. In all likelihood, this English usage had sinister overtones from the outset as, forever wary of the French, the British were unsubtly alluding to these perfidious neighbours and their “surveillance committees.” By order of the governing Convention Nationale, these committees were responsible for keeping the Revolution safe from counterrevolutionaries and other internal threats. Initially charged with keeping tabs on foreigners in their respective districts, surveillance committees quickly came to be the primary means by which all kinds of deviants, dissenters, and even unfortunate but innocent misfits were identified and denounced. Organizations that were supposed to be promoting public safety thus ended up being implicated in some of the worst excesses of The Terror (Scurr, 2007).

So here we have two main themes of this book encapsulated in the French and English origins of the word surveillance. First, it denotes a form of watching others that is inescapably linked with notions of hierarchy and, with it, power differentials. Second, it connotes a way of identifying those who deviate from standards of proper behaviour, however those standards are derived. At this early stage, however, I need to introduce an important caveat. As the etymology of word vividly demonstrates, in the past surveillance has privileged the sense of sight and, to a lesser extent, other embodied senses like hearing (e.g., eavesdropping—Locke, 2010), yet much of what passes for surveillance these days involves the collection, storage, and dissemination of information in a digital form. Although we do not tend to distinguish between what might be called embodied or sensory surveillance and disembodied or technological surveillance in the vernacular, at some stage in this book I will have to break with this convention when it becomes important to my conceptual argument.

Interestingly, although watching and being watched is such a familiar experience, for a long time after the earliest use of the word surveillance in English it was not really part of our common parlance, being largely restricted to its technical usage in the arcane worlds of covert law enforcement, espionage, and epidemiology. It is only relatively recently then that surveillance has emerged as the focus for wider critical attention. This book will thus examine its history prior to, during, and after the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the modern nation-state, even during the times when it wasn’t even called surveillance. In particular, I will tackle the historical antecedents of today’s surveillance at work through a consideration of the changing character of the employment relationship and the broader institutions that help to maintain social stability, both inside the workplace and beyond. This is what I mean by an unnatural history—taking something that some may well think is a universal and taken-for-granted part of our human nature or even an inevitable feature of all human societies and showing that it is in fact an epiphenomenon of much more politicized and contingent struggles. Through all this perhaps my most important contention will be that surveillance is not an end in itself but is a means to an end. This raises the key question that we must always bear in mind when considering the phenomenon: what social arrangements is surveillance meant to uphold and, as a corollary of this, what desirable social behaviours is it supposed to encourage and what undesirable social behaviours is it supposed to subdue?

The rise of surveillance studies

You know a field of study has truly arrived when it gets its own journal and for surveillance studies, this happened in 2002 with the launch of Surveillance & Society. As the founding editor and one of the prime movers behind this venture, in his opening editorial David Lyon defined surveillance studies as

a cross-disciplinary initiative to understand the rapidly increasing ways in which personal details are collected, stored, transmitted, checked, and used as means of influencing and managing people and populations. Surveillance may involve physical watching, but today it is more likely to be automated. Thus it makes personal data visible to organizations, even if persons are in transit, and it also allows for comparing and classifying data. Because this has implications for inequality and for justice, surveillance studies also has a policy and a political dimension.

(Lyon, 2002: 1)

It is fitting that Lyon should be left to do the honours and launch the journal for few people could have contributed as much to the establishment of the field.

The next milestone in the maturation of field is that it gets its own handbook. The proliferation of academic handbooks is an interesting cultural trend in its own right and publishers prize these high-priced volumes, not least because university libraries tend to buy them as a reflex action (an important consideration in an era of dwindling book sales). Some handbooks are therefore of questionable value, but the Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies published in 2012 still stands as an important and comprehensive collection of essays that has mapped out the contours of its maturing cross-disciplinary terrain. Its editors attribute the growth of surveillance as an empirical phenomenon, not to the emergence of novel enabling technologies, but to

a confluence of factors [that] make surveillance often appear as the most appealing way to advance any number of institutional agendas. Some of these factors include changing governmental rationalities, the rise of managerialism, new risks (or perceived dangers), political expediency and public opinion.

(Lyon et al., 2012: 2)

This statement lays bare the power of surveillance to seduce us into thinking it is the solution to so many of today’s social and political problems. Terrorism? Check! Urban crime? Check! Post Brexit cross-border trade? Check? The spread of a new and deadly disease? Che…hold on, what happened there? Even a cursory glance would confirm that surveillance has been a spectacular failure at solving any of these problems. So why are we still simultaneously so enamoured of surveillance in some circumstances but also frightened to death by it on other circumstances? Step forward Vance Packard. He is an unlikely hero for this book for few people could have better personified Richard Hofstadter’s (1964) “paranoid style” of American politics. Packard was a jobbing journalist of a conservative mien who railed against a succession of social, cultural, and technological developments that he thought were undermining his romantic notion of the American Dream. In this way, he was a kind of prototypical paleoconservative well before the term was coined, but when it came to surveillance, he was really onto something. In his 1964 book The Naked Society he alerted us to the massive proliferation of “electronic eyes, ears, and memories” that were just beginning to grip the nation’s consciousness. Appropriately for the time, Packard sometimes sounds like a script writer for films like The Conversation (with a touch of Get Smart! thrown in for good measure) as he warns against the dangers of miniature listening devices and hidden transmitters. But he also has moments of sober reflection, noting that,

a quite different kind of electronic surveillance—and control—has become possible through the development of the giant memory machines. Each month more and more information about individual citizens is being stored away in some gigantic memory machine. Thus far, the information about individuals is usually fed into the super-computers to serve a socially useful or economically or politically attractive purpose. But will it always be? This might especially be asked concerning those memory machines that are building up cumulative files on individual lives.

(Packard, 1964: 48)

Of course, the “super-computers” and “memory machines” of which Packard speaks would seem unbelievably puny to anyone staring at even the most basic smartphone these days, but in this short passage he captures some enduring sentiments. The first of these is that although surveillance and control may not be the same thing, they should be understood together. Then we have the idea of the importance of memory (in its technological and embodied senses). Although we might get distracted by flashy gizmos like virtual reality and robotics, it is actually the prosaic and unseen technology of cheap and apparently limitless digital memory that has really transformed surveillance; as many people are finding to their cost, nothing really goes away in the digital world. Genuine yet embarrassing mistakes, peccadillos, and unguarded comments are remembered in exactly the same way as serious lawbreaking. Finally, Packard lets slip his paternalistic and technocratic instincts when he suggests that surveillance can be a tool to be used for the common good, so long as we are constantly vigilant and prevent it falling into the hands of malign forces that would use it to serve their own nefarious interests. This last observation is particularly important because it draws our attention to the “two faces” of surveillance (Lyon et al., 2012). Think of it like this: it’s all very well when surveillance is directed at what some people might think are obviously bad guys (like terrorists, criminals, illegal immigrants, or strangers who might infect you with nasty diseases), but shouldn’t upstanding citizens (us and other people like us, of course) be left alone to get on with their lives without interference? So, the question often boils down to deciding when surveillance is an appropriate response to a pressing problem—as invariably determined by the more powerful at the expense of the less powerful—and when it is beyond the pale. Usually, this decision is made with very little consideration of whether it is actually effective or not. If this also sounds a little paranoid, we would do well to remember that in the past surveillance has rarely been democratized. That we can be ambivalent when it comes to our understanding of the purpose and consequences of surveillance will be a recurrent theme in this book, but how did we get to this state of affairs?

According to Giddens (1985), much like it has tried to maintain a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, the modern state has also tried to maintain a monopoly on the legitimate use of surveillance (see Dandeker, 1990). Although it may be hard for people to raise their own private armies these days, it has become much easier for commercial organizations and even individual citizens to conduct their own surveillance. In this way, surveillance studies has emerged to critique with equal vigour the activities of states, corporations, and individuals alike. While my main interest is the close scrutiny of employees undertaken by employers, I obviously owe a great intellectual debt to the work of pioneering critics of surveillance in its broadest sense (see, for example, Rule, 1974; Marx, 1988; Dandeker, 1990; Poster 1990; Rule and Brantley, 1992; Gandy, 1993; Lyon, 1994). These have joined a second wave of scholars (see, for example, Ball, 2010; Monahan, 2010; Smith, 2015) who, building on the efforts of the pioneers, have done so much to consolidate the status of surveillance studies as a vibrant and thriving field of study.

Surveillance at work: what to expect of this book

At this stage I need to make a short detour in order to explain what this book is decidedly not. It is not a comprehensive, let alone exhaustive, review of everything that has ever been written about surveillance, either at large or at work. So, a pre-emptive apology is probably due to any and all of those notable scholars of surveillance who feel their endeavours have not received their due regard.

Nor is t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of table
• Preface
• 1 Surveillance at work: an unnatural history
• 2 We’ve always been working away at surveillance: 20 … 200 … 2,000 years of surveillance at work
• 3 The prison and the factory: surveillance and the custodial origins of modern workplace discipline
• 4 Someone to watch over me: surveillance at work and the labour process
• 5 The surveillant assemblage at work: thinking about surveillance with Deleuze and Guattari
• 6 The gaze at work: from Aristotle to Miller and beyond
• 7 Heterotopias of surveillance at work
• 8 Modern surveillance is rubbish: or why surveillance at work isn’t as good at its job as we think it is and what we can do about it
• References
• Index