Working under intensive surveillance: When does ‘measuring everything that moves’ become intolerable?

We examine how call-center employees draw on opposed discourses to understand the purpose and consequences of performance measurement as workplace surveillance. Sometimes the workers saw performance measurement as a legitimate and impartial managerial tool serving the interests of everyone in the organization (e.g. by exposing free-riding, etc.). Other times, they saw performance measurement as intrusive and oppressive; imposed on them by managers who, as agents of employers, used it to serve a narrow set of interests (e.g. by intensifying work, etc.). Our analysis depicts how employees used an ironical process of predicate logic to develop flexible meaning-making strategies to cope with the apparent conflicts in meaning that arose from the two opposed discourses. We conclude by developing a three step method for the practical analysis of such ironical situations of competing discourses that facilitates our ability to reconsider and reconfigure meaning in more useful ways.

[1]  G. Wright,et al.  Satisfaction and dimensions of control among call centre customer service representatives , 2005 .

[2]  J. Kenneth Benson,et al.  Organizations: A Dialectical View. , 1977 .

[3]  J. Barker.  Tightening the Iron Cage: Concertive Control in Self-Managing Teams , 1993 .

[4]  J. Barker,et al.  The concept and the practices of discipline in contemporary organizational life , 1994 .

[5]  William Bogard,et al.  The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies , 1996 .

[6]  M. Nussbaum.  Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions , 2001 .

[7]  S. Hall,et al.  THE SPECTACLE OF THE ' OTHER ' , 2003 .

[8]  E. Deci,et al.  On happiness and human potentials: a review of research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. , 2001, Annual review of psychology.

[9]  Raymie E. McKerrow.  Critical rhetoric: Theory and praxis , 1989 .

[10]  Alan Bryman,et al.  Research Methods and Organization Studies , 1989 .

[11]  Shoshana Zuboff.  In the Age of the Smart Machine , 1988 .

[12]  M. Poster.  The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context , 1990 .

[13]  Martha C. Nussbaum.  Upheavals of Thought: Frontmatter , 2001 .

[14]  Mark A. Huselid.  The Impact of Human Resource Management Practices on Turnover, Productivity, and Corporate Financial Performance , 1995 .

[15]  James R. Barker,et al.  Neither good, nor bad, but dangerous: Surveillance as an ethical paradox , 2001, Ethics and Information Technology.

[16]  Erik Olin Wright,et al.  Working-Class Power , Capitalist-Class Interests , and Class Compromise 1 , 2000 .

[17]  Peter Fleming,et al.  'Kindergarten Cop': Paternalism and Resistance in a High-Commitment Workplace , 2005 .

[18]  D. Nebeker,et al.  The Effects of Computer Monitoring, Standards, and Rewards on Work Performance, Job Satisfaction, and Stress1 , 1993 .

[19]  I. Hacking.  The Social Construction of What , 1999 .

[20]  Chris Smith,et al.  Nursing on the line: Experiences from England and Quebec (Canada) , 2005 .

[21]  J. Webster,et al.  Where is the line between benign and invasive? An examination of psychological barriers to the acceptance of awareness monitoring systems , 2002 .

[22]  Jerald Greenberg,et al.  An Identity-Based Model of Organizational Monitoring: Integrating Information Privacy and Organizational Justice , 2006 .

[23]  G. Marx.  Murky conceptual waters: The public and the private , 2001, Ethics and Information Technology.

[24]  Stephen A. Marglin,et al.  What Do Bosses Do? , 1974 .

[25]  T. Welbourne.  Editor-in-chief's note: The HRM paradox , 2007 .

[26]  유창조.  Naturalistic Inquiry , 2022, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Design.

[27]  E. Hoyle,et al.  Two Faces of Organizational Irony: Endemic and Pragmatic , 2008 .

[28]  J. Kruger,et al.  Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. , 1999, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[29]  R. Brown.  Dialectical Irony. Literary Form and Sociological Theory , 1983 .

[30]  P. Thompson,et al.  We Recruit Attitude: The Selection and Shaping of Routine Call Centre Labour , 2002 .

[31]  H. White.  Tropics of discourse : essays in cultural criticism , 1979 .

[32]  Juliet Webster,et al.  Women, Social Skill and Interactive Service Work in Telephone Call Centres , 2002 .

[33]  H. Marcuse.  One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society , 1964 .

[34]  John Weckert,et al.  Privacy, the Workplace and the Internet , 1999, WebNet.

[35]  G. Sewell,et al.  Coercion Versus Care: Using Irony to Make Sense of Organizational Surveillance , 2006 .

[36]  A. Waterman.  Two conceptions of happiness: Contrasts of personal expressiveness (eudaimonia) and hedonic enjoyment. , 1993 .

[37]  G. Sewell.  The discipline of teams: The control of team-based industrial work through electronic and peer surveillance. , 1998 .

[38]  Bradley J. Alge,et al.  Effects of computer surveillance on perceptions of privacy and procedural justice. , 2001, The Journal of applied psychology.

[39]  K. Ball.  Workplace surveillance: an overview , 2010 .

[40]  Barbara Garson,et al.  The Electronic Sweatshop: How Computers Are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past , 1988 .

[41]  Greg Carlson,et al.  A unified analysis of the English bare plural , 1977 .

[42]  Kenneth G. Brown,et al.  HR professionals' beliefs about effective human resource practices: Correspondence between research and practice. , 2002 .

[43]  Miriam Glucksmann,et al.  Call configurations: varieties of call centre and divisions of labour , 2004 .

[44]  David S. Landes,et al.  What Do Bosses Really Do? , 1986, The Journal of Economic History.

[45]  W. M. Johnston,et al.  Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism , 1983 .

[46]  Sue Fernie,et al.  (Not) Hanging on the Telephone: Payment Systems in the New Sweatshops , 1998 .

[47]  M. Foucault.  Truth and Juridical Forms , 1996 .

[48]  Jeffrey M. Stanton,et al.  The impact of electronic monitoring on quality and quantity of performance , 2002, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[49]  S. Fiske,et al.  The Handbook of Social Psychology , 1935 .

[50]  M. Nussbaum,et al.  Upheavals of Thought: The Romantic Ascent: Emily Brontë , 2001 .

[51]  William M. Foster,et al.  Praxis Makes Perfect: Recovering the Ethical Promise of Critical Management Studies , 2010 .

[52]  Michael Reynolds,et al.  Critical Management Education and Action-Based Learning: Synergies and Contradictions , 2004 .

[53]  Deborah L. Wells,et al.  Can Electronic Performance Monitoring Be Fair? Exploring Relationships Among Monitoring Characteristics, Perceived Fairness, and Job Performance , 2003 .

[54]  E. Guba,et al.  Naturalistic inquiry: Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1985, 416 pp., $25.00 (Cloth) , 1985 .

[55]  Kristin G. Esterberg,et al.  Qualitative Methods in Social Research , 2001 .

[56]  Keith Townsend,et al.  Electronic Surveillance and Cohesive Teams: Room for Resistance in an Australian Call Centre? , 2005 .

[57]  Paul Thompson,et al.  Teams without Teamwork? Explaining the Call Centre Paradox , 2004 .

[58]  D. Kaufer.  Irony, Interpretive Form, and the Theory of Meaning , 1983 .

[59]  Simeon Yates,et al.  Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader , 2001 .

[60]  Martin Jay,et al.  Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought , 1993 .

[61]  D. Lyon.  Facing the future: Seeking ethics for everyday surveillance , 2001, Ethics and Information Technology.

[62]  A. Gouldner,et al.  Metaphysical Pathos and the Theory of Bureaucracy , 1955, American Political Science Review.

[63]  Kevin R. Murphy,et al.  Understanding Performance Appraisal: Social, Organizational, and Goal-Based Perspectives , 1995 .

[64]  John R. Aiello,et al.  Computer‐Based Work Monitoring: Electronic Surveillance and Its Effects , 1993 .

[65]  W. Creed,et al.  Institutional Contradictions, Praxis, and Institutional Change: A Dialectical Perspective , 2002 .