The Implications of Digital Employee Monitoring and People Analytics for Power Relations in the Workplace

In this blog piece, Ivan Manokha shows the insights from his article titled “The Implications of Digital Employee Monitoring and People Analytics for Power Relations in the Workplace,” which was recently published in the journal Surveillance & Society

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I am a relative latecomer to the field of Surveillance Studies — I joined it about 5 years ago. Having had done some work on Michel Foucault, I was intrigued by the arguments of many established Surveillance Studies scholars that with the rise of digital technology and different related development s— social media, Big Data, data monetization, targeted advertising, AI, etc. — Foucault’s notion of ‘panopticism’ was no longer relevant or useful. I felt that such a conclusion was overlooking the central dimension of ‘panopticism’ — how those who are watched and who aware of this, may be led to exercise power over themselves: to engage in self-restraint, self-censorship, self-discipline, etc. in order to behave in ways that are expected of them or to conform to what they perceive as a ‘normal’ or desirable form of agency. I thought that if we extended the notion of the ‘gaze’ to include all the different means and ways in which data is now collected about individuals, the notion of ‘panopticon’ might still be a very potent conceptual tool to guide the research into how this affects this dimension of power — power exercised over oneself.

The attempt to illustrate this gave rise to several publications, including two articles in Surveillance & Society: first, a more general analysis of panopticism and self-discipline — “Surveillance, Panopticism, and Self-Discipline in the Digital Age,” published in 2018, and the paper that came out in the latest issue entitled “The Implications of Digital Employee: Monitoring and People Analytics for Power Relations in the Workplace.”

As regards this latest paper, it seeks to show that the workplace has always been one of the ‘panoptic’ institutions of modernity alongside schools, hospitals, clinics, asylums, barracks, and prisons. And the history of the workplace in capitalism until the rise of digital technologies may be seen as a series of attempts on the part of employers to perfect the ‘panoptic’ dispositif to ensure that the commodity that they purchase — labour power — is used as efficiently as possible (Taylorism, Fordism, the rise of Human Resource Management, etc.). At the heart of the pre-digital workplace surveillance paradigm lay visual ‘gaze’ and abstract time, the combination that characterized employee surveillance particularly since the entry of the clock into the workplace in the early eighteenth century. Now, the key point to note here is that despite different attempts, this ‘panoptic’ dispositif was never perfect: surveillance was exercised only when the supervisor, the foreman or the manager was actually ‘looking’, that is, when he or she was physically present and observed employees.

The supervisor is now always ‘looking’, even when not actually present.

With rise of digital technology and new means of employee surveillance — different software that monitors and records everything employees do on their computers, tracks every worker movement, times lunch and toilet breaks, registers and analyses the interactions of employees, not to mention some extreme technologies, such as microchipping employees or using brain scanning technologies — there has been a revolutionary change in the paradigm of workplace surveillance. As everything is recorded and stored (and analysed in various ways with employees ranked and compared to each other), the supervisor is now always ‘looking’, even when not actually present. As a result, it may be argued that the ‘panoptic’ dispositif in the workplace is in the process of becoming ‘perfect’, i.e. conforming to the ideal as imagined by Jeremy Bentham when absolutely every action of the watched is observable. And this has very important implications for power relations in the workplace, and in particular with respect to self-discipline exercise by the employees, as the paper seeks to illustrate using different examples.