Neither good, nor bad, but dangerous: Surveillance as an ethical paradox

We argue for a discursive ethic of surveillancethat accounts for the paradoxes that thephenomenon presents to today's organisationalmembers. We first we develop a genealogy ofprivacy and illustrate its relation tosurveillance, focusing on the antinomianrelationship between the “public” and “private.” Then we review the common ethicaltensions that arise in today's technologicallyintensive workplace. Lastly, we develop acritical approach to the ethical status ofprivacy and surveillance – a “micro-ethics” – that remains open todiscursively-based negotiation by those whofind themselves at the verypoint of scrutiny.

[1]  M. Poovey.  A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society , 1998 .

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

[3]  R. Miller,et al.  Jeremy Bentham's Panoptic Device , 1987 .

[4]  Norbert Elias,et al.  Le Roi-Machine: Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV , 1984 .

[5]  Nicholas R. Fyfe,et al.  Closed circuit television and the city , 1998 .

[6]  J. Deigh.  The Sources of Moral Agency: Essays in Moral Psychology and Freudian Theory , 1996 .

[7]  F. Schoeman,et al.  Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: Privacy: philosophical dimensions of the literature , 1984 .

[8]  R. Porter.  Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World , 2000 .

[9]  H. Braverman.  Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century , 1996 .

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

[11]  Samuel D. Warren,et al.  Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: The right to privacy [the implicit made explicit] , 1984 .

[12]  S. Woolgar.  Science and technology studies and the renewal of social theory , 1996 .

[13]  Lucas D. Introna,et al.  Privacy in the Information Age: Stakeholders, Interests and Values , 1999, Journal of business ethics : JBE.

[14]  Alan Sheridan.  Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth , 1980 .

[15]  Reginald Whitaker,et al.  The End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance Is Becoming a Reality , 1999 .

[16]  Oren M. Levin-Waldman.  Reconceiving Liberalism: Dilemmas of Contemporary Liberal Public Policy , 1996 .

[17]  William G. Staples,et al.  The Culture of Surveillance: Discipline and Social Control in the United States. , 1998 .

[18]  Jeremy Bentham,et al.  The Panopticon Writings , 1995 .

[19]  James B. Rule,et al.  Private Lives and Public Surveillance , 1974 .

[20]  David Lyon,et al.  The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society , 1994 .

[21]  S. Miller.  The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance , 1999 .

[22]  M. Heidegger.  The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays , 1977 .

[23]  H. Lise.  Jean-Marie Apostolidès, Le Roi Machine, spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV, 1981 - chapitre V Les plaisirs de l'île enchantée , 1970 .

[24]  D. Brin.  The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? , 1998 .

[25]  Graham Sewell,et al.  Be Seeing You: , 1996 .

[26]  Norbert Elias,et al.  The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners , 1978 .

[27]  Heidegger on Technology and Democracy , 1992 .

[28]  David H. Flaherty,et al.  Privacy in colonial New England , 1972 .

[29]  V. Packard,et al.  The Naked Society , 1964 .

[30]  D. Sparti.  Making up People , 2001 .

[31]  H. Becker,et al.  the ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom , 1987 .

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

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

[34]  Jeffery L. Johnson.  Privacy and the judgment of others , 1989 .

[35]  Stephen A. Marglin,et al.  Knowledge and Power , 1984 .

[36]  K. Hoskin,et al.  Accounting as discipline: The overlooked supplement , 1993 .

[37]  Norbert Elias,et al.  The Civilizing Process , 1939 .

[38]  Guy Debord,et al.  La société du spectacle , 1992 .

[39]  Moral and political implications of pragmatism , 1989 .

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

[41]  R. Audi.  The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy , 1995 .