On the poverty of apriorism: Technology, surveillance in the workplace and employee responses

Abstract

Those who see ever more sophisticated ICTs as the key to a human future characterised by choice, freedom and plenty have all too often exaggerated the actual capabilities of the systems they promote, while downplaying or ignoring their negative impacts. Often, of course, there are powerful commercial motivations for such claims but journalists, politicians and academics have frequently been guilty of taking them uncritically at face value.At the same time, these developments can be, and are, portrayed in fundamentally negative terms as a threat to individual privacy, autonomy and freedom if not actually spelling the end of embodied social life itself. These perspectives are, perhaps, less frequently driven by commercial motives, although anyone who uses the internet is daily bombarded with advertisements warning of threatened privacy and offering a range of technical solutions. More characteristically, doom-laden prognoses emanate from a range of libertarian, anarchist and left wing political positions. Once again, they are often uncritically endorsed and reproduced by a range of social commentators, journalists and academics, not all of whom necessarily share their underlying political perspectives.At one level, this is scarcely surprising since the matters at stake go to the heart of some of the key assumptions and principles of liberal democracy and its left wing 2 P o s t -P r i n t challengers. The debate is not simply about what are the demonstrable effects of the deployment of ICTs. It is also about the future potential of such systems and about the motives of those who design and deploy them. These must, perforce, be matters of speculation, however well-informed, and debates about them will inevitably be shaped by competing Weltanschauungen, hopes and aspirations as well as by predispositions to optimism or pessimism.At another level, however, we are, perhaps, justified in registering disappointment, if not surprise, that the academic literature itself frequently falls victim to a similarly uncritical rehearsal of one or other position. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of discussions of the impact of ICTs at work. Here, the obligation to adopt a 'critical' position is all too often code for enlistment to a perspective on the nature of the employment relationship which has dominated traditional industrial sociology, at least in Britain, and which owes its main features to an ongoing dialogue with Marxist class analysis. Frequently it seems that the only alternative to a wholehearted embrace of this perspective is an endorsement of managerialist accounts that are uncritical, in both the senses we have used that term.There is no doubt that British industrial sociology has, over an extended period, (2000). These features are particularly prominent in the increasing number of discussions that focus on workplace surveillance.It is against this background that we offer the arguments presented in this paper.Our contentions are essentially threefold. First, we argue that the relative paucity of empirical...

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