Surveillance: A Key Idea for Business and Society 2020049608, 2020049609, 9780815385639, 9780815385646, 9781351180566

Citation preview

Surveillance

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 novel conceptual and 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. Graham Sewell is Professor of Management at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Key Ideas in Business and Management Edited by Stewart Clegg

Understanding how business affects and is affected by the wider world is a challenge made more difficult by the disaggregation between various disciplines, from operations research to corporate governance. This series features concise books that break out from disciplinary silos to facilitate understanding by analysing key ideas that shape and inf luence business, organizations and management. Each book focuses on a key idea, locating it in relation to other fields, facilitating deeper understanding of its applications and meanings, and providing critical discussion of the contribution of relevant authors and thinkers. The books provide students and scholars with thought-provoking insights that aid the study and research of business and management. Global Oligopoly A Key Idea for Business and Society Chris Carr Bureaucracy A Key Idea for Business and Society Tom Vine Professions A Key Idea for Business and Society Mike Saks Surveillance A Key Idea for Business and Society Graham Sewell

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Key-Ideas-in-Business-and-Management/book-series/KEYBUS

Surveillance A Key Idea for Business and Society

Graham Sewell

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Graham Sewell The right of Graham Sewell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sewell, Graham, author. Title: Surveillance : a key idea for business and society / Graham Sewell. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Key ideas in business & management | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020049608 (print) | LCCN 2020049609 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815385639 (hardback) | ISBN 9780815385646 (paperback) | ISBN 9781351180566 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Electronic monitoring in the workplace. | Electronic surveillance. | Personnel management. | Organizational behavior. | Privacy, Right of. Classification: LCC HF5549.5.E37 S49 2021 (print) | LCC HF5549.5.E37 (ebook) | DDC 331.25/98—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049608 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049609 ISBN: 978-0-8153-8563-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-8153-8564-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-18056-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

In memory of Barry, Nick, and Joe

Contents

List of figures List of table Preface

viii ix x

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

12

The prison and the factory: surveillance and the custodial origins of modern workplace discipline

40

Someone to watch over me: surveillance at work and the labour process

57

The surveillant assemblage at work: thinking about surveillance with Deleuze and Guattari

81

6

The gaze at work: from Aristotle to Miller and beyond

98

7

Heterotopias of surveillance at work

118

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

142

References Index

156 171

3 4 5

1

Figures

2.1 Some Categories of Behavior Subject to Monitoring, Measurement, or Testing (OTA, 1987) 16 2.2 The All Channel Network (Williamson, 1975) 36 2.3 The Wheel Network (Williamson, 1975) 37 3.1 Plan of Bentham’s design for the Panopticon with notes in his own hand (used with the permission of University College, London Special Collections) 52 5.1 The Topology of the Sovereign Diagram (Munro, 2000) 88 5.2 The Topology of the Panoptic Diagram (Munro, 2000) 88 5.3 My Revision of Munro’s (2000) Topology of the Sovereign Diagram 90 5.4 My Revision of Munro’s (2000) Topology of the Panoptic Diagram 91 5.5 The Topology of the Network Diagram (Munro, 2000) 95 7.1 “The Seven Deadly Sins,” Hieronymus Bosch (used with the permission of the Prado Museum, Madrid) 131 7.2 Communitarian Heterotopias under Sovereign Power Founded on Territorialized Relationships of Horizontal Surveillance 132 7.3a The Quasi-Panoptic Surveillance of Bureaucratic Hierarchy 134 7.3b Plan of a Stratum in the Bureaucratic Hierarchy Showing Communitarian Heterotopias 135 7.4 Diagram of the Archipelagic Power of Distal Work 137 7.5 An Unbounded Agoristic Dystopia of Net-work 138 8.1 “Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face,” Barbara Kruger (used with the permission of the artist) 149 8.2 “Surveillance Is Your Busywork,” Barbara Kruger (used with the permission of the artist) 150 8.3 “Surveillance Is Their Busywork,” Barbara Kruger (used with the permission of the artist) 150

Table

6.1

Simple and Complex Surveillance as Configurations of the Ontological and Epistemological Functions of the Gaze at Work

110

Preface

I first became interested in surveillance by what, at least at the time, seemed to be complete accident, although on ref lection it is probably better to say it was a case of serendipity. In 1989 I had accidentally just switched disciplines— quite literally as it turns out after I was involved in a near-fatal car crash in 1988—and I eventually found myself working on an arcane UK Economic & Social Research Council research project dealing with management information systems supporting human factors in just-in-time manufacturing and total quality management. Yes, it sounds rather dreary and prosaic to say the least (although, to be fair, such things were considered to be cutting-edge ideas in business and society at the time). Still, I was grateful to my colleagues Nick Oliver and Barry Wilkinson who conducted an interview at my hospital bedside and saw enough through the orthopaedic and medical paraphernalia to entrust me with a two-year research post once I had learned to walk again. The serendipitous nature of my interest in surveillance became even more apparent when, as part of this project, I found myself in a television factory in the South West of England. This factory had a complicated history. It was originally an established part of a large British-owned conglomerate that had been brought to its knees by foreign (at the time, mainly Japanese) competition. In “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” desperation, they entered into a joint venture with a Japanese electronics giant to produce televisions for the local and European markets. By the time I got there the British partner had cut its losses, completely withdrawing from the venture so that the factory came to be seen as yet another example of the “Japanization” of British industry, to borrow a phrase coined by Nick and Barry. It was while wandering around this factory and talking to the workforce that I became struck by the way in which the recently installed and apparently mundane quality assurance system could be understood as a form of surveillance resembling the Panopticon (at least as it was described by Michel Foucault). This was not in itself a novel observation; many people have made a similar connection before and since. For me personally, however, it was a revelation; one that probably ref lected my lack of knowledge of industrial sociology at the time. Now that I have had a more thorough schooling in this venerable tradition, and after a professional career largely dealing with workplace surveillance, it is time

Preface xi

for me to take stock of our understanding of this enduring feature of modern organizational life. Research topics come and go as intellectual fashions change, but surveillance has always piqued our interest. Surveillance is, as they say, always news. This is not to say that it is always the same kind of surveillance, enacted for the same purposes, and carrying with it the same consequences. For instance, surges of popular and scholarly interest in surveillance do seem to coincide with the emergence of new technologies and then slowly dissipate as those technologies become ubiquitous and, ultimately, taken-for-granted. While changing technologies no doubt play an important role in extending the scope and scale of surveillance, for me what have always been of interest are the purposes to which it is put and the consequences it has for the people who are being watched (and, for that matter, the people who are doing the watching). Of course, these purposes and consequences vary across time and space for, as we shall see, what inspired the forms of surveillance developed in Dutch correctional facilities in the late sixteenth century was, in many ways, different to what inspired a Japanese firm’s response to the problems of making television sets in the late-twentieth-century Britain. Indeed, even in its own globalized manufacturing system it turns out that the Japanese firm’s response in terms of quality assurance was unique to the circumstances of the British industrial relations climate of the time. But, in a broader sense, there are also some similarities across time and space for the gaolers’ same desire to control every aspect of the prisoners’ conduct 400 years ago persists among managers who today still believe it is their duty—and even their right—to control the actions and even the thoughts of their subordinates. So, this book is a retrospective attempt to make sense of those differences and similarities while prospectively anticipating the surge of interest in surveillance that will no doubt accompany the next technological upheaval. At the moment we are animated by the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” but who knows what’s around the corner? Here we must not conf late what novel surveillance technologies can do with what we believe surveillance, as a more abstract notion, should do: while the former is necessarily unpredictable, the latter is more enduring and ref lects strongly held beliefs about core features of modern life such as privacy, shame, autonomy, freedom, power, domination, risk, safety, compliance, conformity, dissent, and disobedience. Thus, while technological matters should never be far from our thoughts, it is much more enlightening to address the changing ideological and ethical considerations that inform the everyday practices of surveillance. Before we embark on this enterprise, some thank yous are required. First, I must thank Terry Clague of Routledge for his saintly patience and the anonymous reviewers who saw some promise, no matter how meagre, lurking in my original proposal. Here’s to hoping I have gone some way towards repaying that trust. I’d also like to thank Stewart Clegg, a constant source of inspiration for me over the last 30 years who, among his many projects, established the series in which this volume appears. I would also like to thank all my

xii

Preface

collaborators, past and present, who have worked with me on so many of the ideas that have been assembled in this book. Here a special mention must go to Barry Wilkinson (sadly no longer with us), Jim Barker, Joeri Mol, Laurent Taskin, Andre Spicer, Peter Fleming, Nick Weydenthal, and Daniel Nyberg. Their original thinking and constant good humour have done much to sustain my interest in surveillance, even at the times when I thought I had run out of things to say. Finally, I reserve my biggest thank you for all my friends and family who helped me through those dark times following that accident over 30 years ago; a period of my life when a university career seemed such a pipedream. Although this is my first “proper” book in that subsequent career, its origins can be traced to that life-changing event in 1988. Otherwise this book might have been about urban planning! Graham Sewell, Melbourne, 2021.

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 ref lected 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, f loorwalkers, gang masters, and charge-hands. If the difference between legitimate and illegitimate

2

Surveillance at work: an unnatural history

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). Ref lecting 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

Surveillance at work: an unnatural history 3

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 inf luencing 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.

4

Surveillance at work: an unnatural history

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 ref lex 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 ref lection, 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

Surveillance at work: an unnatural history 5

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 f lashy 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

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Surveillance at work: an unnatural history

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 this book primarily a discussion of the variable efforts to hold back the tide of surveillance as it increasingly intrudes into our working lives. On this, I live in a country—Australia—whose constitutional states have relatively effective legal prohibitions against its worst excesses. Yet most of what I’m talking about in terms of surveillance at work is barely given a second thought. It is as if that horse has well and truly bolted and we take for granted the relentless scrutiny, measurement, and comparison of ourselves and our colleagues based on forms of surveillance that are hard to distinguish from the tools and techniques we rely on every day to perform our work. This book, however, decidedly is a personal—some might say idiosyncratic—take on the way surveillance is bound up with our everyday experience of work. This is based on over 30 years as a student of business and society worrying about the problems and, yes, the opportunities surveillance poses for us as employees, managers, superiors, subordinates, peers, and all the other relational nouns we can muster. This list should tell us that surveillance of one kind or another mediates in nearly all the relationships we build with others inside the workplace (or outside, for that matter), and, in this respect, this book should be of interest to anyone who has ever lifted a finger in the name of work and had their performance, their conduct, or even their sanity questioned on the basis of intense scrutiny directed at them by others. Finally, this book is not particularly interested in gee-whiz stories about the white heat of new technology. For example, I do not dwell on the emerging nexus between handheld devices and wearable technologies that has given rise to the “quantified self ” (Lupton, 2016)—a form of self-surveillance adopted by people who hope that the mere possession of intimate data about themselves can assist in a personal quest for improvement. But wasn’t it ever thus? Indeed, as I shall argue, much of what passes for surveillance at work has been around for a very long time in various guises, and, technologically speaking, it is usually rather prosaic, mundane even. To be sure, novel ways of

Surveillance at work: an unnatural history 7

conducting surveillance are constantly emerging, often without the conscious intent of the people who devise the new technologies upon which it relies. In light of this we have to be aware of the discontinuities we experience when it comes to surveillance as well as the continuities. Here I am with Heidegger (1977) in that he was interested in what lies behind the degradations of modern life as they play out through the effects machine technologies have on us as self-conscious, representing subjects. For Heidegger, however, modern technology was just one part of the story, all of a piece with science, art, religion, and culture in being implicated in dividing the world into subjects and objects. And in any realm where an abstract division into subjects and objects is to be found, there will also be self-conscious subjects turning other f lesh-and-blood human beings into distinct and dehumanized objects based on some evaluation of their worth (see Rose, 1999; Barnard-Wills, 2012). In an abstract sense then, this book deals with how surveillance was and still is about dividing humanity into subjects and objects, and, in a practical sense, it deals with how and why we do this at work and the consequences this has for all those involved.

Surveillance at work: what to expect in this book This book begins in earnest with Chapter 2, which is an attempt to breathe new life into the old saw that surveillance in one form or another is a perennial feature of human life. After a brief discussion of the forms of surveillance at work that may or may not have been in operation in the ancient world, it moves on to consider the simple device known as the Silent Monitor that Robert Owen used in his New Lanark spinning mill around the turn of the nineteenth century. I argue that, despite being over 200 years old, the Silent Monitor was used to expose Owen’s workers in a way that would be very familiar to us even now—whether or not they had lived up to their managers’ expectations of them in terms of temperament and work habits. I then go on to argue that the main difference between surveillance then and now is that we have a quite different conception of what it means to be an autonomous human agent at work. In other words, the standards by which we have been judged in terms of our status as a reliable and valued worker (and, of course as an unreliable and worthless worker) have changed over time. Even if surveillance at work has, formally at least, remained relatively stable over time, what it has been set on exposing has changed. I argue that we are currently living through a period where surveillance is implicated in valorising our activities as part of a “retreat from society” that is the result of the privileging of market-based economic transactions at the expense of other forms of social solidarity. Chapter 2 then continues by showing that surveillance at work is part of this retreat that requires people to do the work of surveillance. Inspired by the work of Jay (1988), I call this scopic labour. Here I introduce the efforts of previous commentators such as Vance Packard, Gary Marx, Frank Webster, Kevin Robins, and Shoshana Zuboff who have shown

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Surveillance at work: an unnatural history

what this scopic labour entails. This is followed by a brief excursion into how surveillance at work impinges on employees’ autonomy, which forms the basis for my development of two important and related concepts: the negative and positive heuristics of surveillance. The former is an attempt to expose employees who don’t live up to expectations set by their managers, and the latter is an attempt to expose employees who exceed those expectations. The chapter then ends by identifying three main configurations of work where surveillance mediates in the relations between workers: Proximal work—relationships between workers are based on close physical proximity to each other. b. Distal work—workers may work for the same organization but do so separated across time and space. This has a distancing effect on their work relationships. c. Net-work—work relationships are primarily founded on widely distributed economic transactions between people who, legally at least, are not even considered to be working for an organization at all, let alone the same one.

a.

Chapter 3 concerns itself with the way the antecedents of surveillance at work as we know it today developed in penal institutions of the late sixteenth century. I start this discussion by focusing on an important organizational innovation in the form of the Amsterdam Rasphuis—a place where prison inmates had to perform hard labour to produce sawdust used in dying cloth. This institution emerged at the same time as things like industrial work, migration from the countryside, and the disruption of traditional forms of agricultural labour founded on serfdom were causing concerns about urban poverty, indigence, and vagrancy. Much of what the Rasphuis was trying to achieve was later pursued with great zeal by Jeremy Bentham, the British utilitarian philosopher and his now (in surveillance studies circles, at least) ubiquitous Panopticon. Bentham’s attempt to perfect the idea of this model prison and sell it to governments throughout Europe consumed most of his adult life, but he got his original inspiration by observing a work setting—a Russian shipyard run by his brother. Although Bentham claimed that the Panopticon could be applied to prisons, workhouses, and factories alike, even he realized that the strict physical isolation of individuals was not entirely suitable in a work setting, and, after many years of refinement, in something of a volte face he proposed loosening many of the Panopticon’s features to allow for social interaction between workers in its factory incarnation. Nevertheless, under these revised circumstances, Bentham was still concerned with exposing and, of course, reforming what he called “idle hands” through surveillance, and this reveals a perennial anxiety—if left to their own devices, how can we trust workers to work as hard as they possibly can? This anxiety serves as a segue into the next chapter. The main focus of Chapter 4 is what has become known as Labour Process Theory. This is concerned with how organizations try to resolve the

Surveillance at work: an unnatural history 9

“indeterminacy of labour”: a technical term for the difference between the amount and quality of labour a person can potentially perform and what they actually end up doing. In other words, it is an analytical expression of the fear of “idle hands” that so exercised Jeremy Bentham (along with many others before and since) and deals with the way managerial control is deployed to minimize the gap between potential and actual labour. Although the entire edifice of Labour Process Theory has been erected on the foundations of a brief passage in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, it has antecedents in the “labour theory of value” of John Locke, as well as the proto-communism of the likes of Saint-Simon and Fourier. Despite these august origins, Labour Process Theory languished for much of the twentieth century until it was revivified in the 1970s through the work of Harry Braverman. Much of the chapter is then taken up with an autocritique of my own contribution to Labour Process Theory which has mainly dealt with the role surveillance plays in managerial control. In particular, I show how the negative and positive heuristics of surveillance can combine in practice in the context of proximal work to identify employees who are not achieving managerially specified work targets and those who are exceeding them. Importantly, beyond this managerial or “vertical” scrutiny, we can also observe the operation of peer or “horizontal” scrutiny. Remembering the two faces of surveillance mentioned earlier (Lyon et al., 2012), I then consider how the interaction of this vertical and horizontal scrutiny can, in some situations, appear to be coercive and deployed with the sole intention of intensifying work but, in other situations, it can be seen to protect the interests of the majority of workers from the activities a disruptive minority. I then conclude the chapter by revisiting the value of the Panopticon, as described by Michel Foucault, in understanding the purpose, operation, and consequences of surveillance at work. Here I argue that it is better to think of the Panopticon not as blueprint for surveillance in the workplace but as a powerful metaphor that conveys the desire of managers to resolve the indeterminacy of labour through the totalizing rationalization of work. Despite my attempt to rehabilitate our understanding of the Panopticon in the previous chapter, in Chapter 5 I engage with important criticisms of the desirability of its stubborn and persistent presence in surveillance studies. Here I home in on the considerable body of literature that has promoted the concept of the assemblage as an alternative. This literature has turned to Foucault’s friend and interlocutor Gilles Deleuze for its inspiration. I start by unpacking Deleuze’s description of Foucault as a “new cartographer,” in the process showing how we can think of power as an “intensive” quality of social relations. This allows us to conceive of the relative positions of social power in the same way that we might refer to a topological map like Harry Beck’s famous depiction of the London Unground. This is only useful because it shows nothing else but the relative positions of stations, excluding as distracting noise any topographical information like the physical distance between them. In this vein, Deleuze described Foucault’s Panopticon as topological

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“diagram.” Importantly, Deleuze took it that diagrammatic thinking about power logically preceded the instantiation of the assemblage. I use this contention to argue that we should avoid reifying the concept of the assemblage as merely a literal description of more complex and integrated surveillance. From this I then go on to examine how we can think of different eras of power and surveillance as being associated with distinct diagrams of power. This is not, however, a diachronic succession of progressively novel and more effective surveillance. Rather, it is better to think of the synchronic operation of different modes of power as captured in diagrams and operationalized through surveillance. In short, different modes of power coexist; they do not necessarily emerge and replace the existing mode of power, only to suffer the same fate further on down the line. This allows me to situate Deleuze’s discussion of the transition from Disciplinary Society to Societies of Control within a broader argument about the relationship between surveillance as a practice and the operation of the gaze as a persistent intersubjective feature of human relations. Working up to an argument about the operation of the gaze finally allows me to reframe my ideas—especially those about vertical and horizontal scrutiny and their role in the operation of negative and positive heuristic and Labour Process Theory developed in Chapter 4—in a way that plays on the continuities, rather than the discontinuities, between the Foucauldian and Deleuzian takes on surveillance. This starts in earnest in Chapter 6 through a return to a point I made at the beginning of this introductory chapter—that the very word sur-veillance implies a social positioning based on relative heights. This is in keeping with the characterization of Foucauldian genealogy as a conf luence of discourse and materiality that is sometimes described as “saying and seeing” and with Deleuze’s concept of power as an intensive quality that can be considered topologically. Of course, thinking of surveillance as being both material and discursive is a central theme of this book, and the concept of the gaze allows me to develop this point further. This involves a discussion of Martin Jay’s historiography of twentiethcentury writings on the gaze, taking in Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Lacan before alighting on the work of Lacan’s son-in-law and acolyte, Jacques Alain Miller. Miller’s contribution is particularly important because he developed ideas about the gaze and the Panopticon at the same time as Foucault that can be seen as the culmination of a line of thinking that unites Merleau-Ponty and Sartre with Lacan. From this excursion into Francophone social theory, I  propose two versions of the gaze: an ontological version that marks us out as social objects and an epistemological version that attributes relative values to us as members of that social class of objects. These two versions of the gaze operate vertically and horizontally—that is, between classes such as when a superior casts his or her gaze on a subordinate and within classes such as when someone casts their gaze on a nominal peer. Importantly, these gazes can be embodied and immediately sensory or they can be disembodied and abstracted through technology. My final move then is to posit surveillance at work as various configurations of the ontological and epistemological gazes

Surveillance at work: an unnatural history 11

that are cast vertically and horizontally, either through embodied experience or through technological rationalization. Chapter 7 starts with brief but necessary diversion through very important contributions of surveillance studies made by two of the biggest names in the field: Shoshana Zuboff and David Lyon. Zuboff ’s concept of Surveillance Capitalism is subjected to a critical assessment and is contrasted with Lyon’s disquisition on Surveillance Culture. Zuboff ’s substantive claim is that the tech giants of Silicon Valley—most notably Google—have reduced wider social relations to abstract and decontextualized numbers through their surveillance activities. While this is, if true, an alarming development, I argue that employers have been doing this kind of thing with impunity for years. But how do we respond to such developments, both in business and in society? My contention is that we can look to Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia for inspiration. As the name suggests, this is neither a utopia nor a dystopia but a “social space” that exists alongside, and as an alternative to, the dominant power structures of the time. While a heterotopia is obviously not a utopian social space where all forms of power and domination have been banished and the ontological and epistemological versions of the gaze have disappeared, it does have the potential to be a place where we can explore new forms of social solidarity that are founded on alternative ways of understanding each other as members of social classes. In other words, we do not have to yield to those who want to use surveillance to dominate us through its ability to define what sort of person we are and determine our relative worth. The book then concludes with a final chapter that, Janus-like, looks backwards to the history of surveillance at work while also speculating about its future. Here I re-examine what elsewhere I have previously called the Paradoxes of Surveillance. This allows me to make some observations about why we continue to put so much faith in surveillance to solve myriad social problems when it has been such an abject failure in the past. This misplaced faith in surveillance can be partially explained by the simple fact that we invariably place unrealistic expectations on the capabilities of technology to achieve social ends but even “successes”—and here, of course, I am being ironic because one person’s satisfaction over a surveillance job done may well mean coercion and misery for many others—can also be undermined by the existence of heterotopias that show us other ways of acting with and for each other. I attribute this compulsion towards surveillance to the enduring power of a scopic regime that compels us to turn us as subjects into objects through classification and valuation. Through these acts of classification and evaluation we are all implicated in the practices of scopic labour. But understanding surveillance as scopic labour is also potentially liberating. So, instead of surveillance at work being, as Barbara Kruger memorably noted, “their busywork” (meaning the hollow and ultimately pointless gaze of superiors on subordinates) or even “your busywork” (meaning the hollow and ultimately pointless gaze of peer on peer), we can reimagine the concepts of privacy and shame that inform our scopic labour so that it can truly be transformed into the work of caring for us as subjects rather than coercing us as objects.

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We’ve always been working away at surveillance 20 … 200 … 2,000 years of surveillance at work

Mel Brooks’s character the 2,000-Year-Old Man is one of twentieth-century comedy’s greatest creations. Having lived so long, he’s met every historical figure you could imagine and has a world-weary opinion about every major historical event. The genius of this schtick is that the source material is inexhaustible; in the same act Brooks can kvetch about absolutely anyone or anything to potentially endless comedic effect! A case in point: at one stage he tells us of his business making Stars of David. Six workers, each holding a point, would run at each other and the impact when they collided in the middle of the room would fuse the metal to make the star. Brooks goes on to bemoan the fact he turned down Saint Peter’s offer of the monopoly on making crosses. He complains that not only did the cross go on to be an insanely popular product but, because it only involved two parts, he could have fired four of his employees! And, in that, 2,000 years of business wisdom is summarized in one skit. Yet the 2,000-Year-Old Man’s amusing ruminations reveal a potential pitfall for all would-be historians: it is very difficult to imagine the past as anything other than a sepia-toned image of our present. For example, the acclaimed Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor notes that in today’s secular age it is now almost impossible to imagine how much religion infiltrated every aspect of our thinking for most of the last two millennia: it is only in the last 500 years that, with varying degrees of success, we have really been able to conceive of the operation of things like the state and even commercial organizations as being separate from the unfolding of divine providence (Taylor, 2007). Whether it’s making Stars of David or crosses, for a very long time religion was the only show in town when it came to understanding the world around us, including the world of work. So, with these cautionary tales in mind, we have to be careful about making claims to the effect that surveillance at work has always been with us, at least in the way we understand it now. Still, as Ezzamel (2004) notes, a careful reading of original documents from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom dating back over 2,000 years reveals that its great feats of collective human endeavour required more than the brutal coercion of slavery to make them a reality. Indeed, for him the historical record clearly shows the presence of features associated with workplace surveillance that would be familiar to us

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today such as the physical corralling of labour under the observation of an overseer, the monitoring and control of workers’ attendance, the assignment of individual and collective work targets, reports on whether or not those targets were achieved, and, taking into consideration all these things, the distribution of reward. For example, through the compilation of rosters and name lists, the setting of work targets, regular reporting on performance, the application of sanctions against recalcitrant individuals and the determination and distribution of differential wages, accounting and administrative practices established a regime of control that traced workers’ presence and absence at precise temporal points and spatial locations and monitored their achievements. The evidence points to a very strong role for both accounting and administrative practices, lending greater credence to the view that the “visible” hand of administration played a crucial role in the civilization of ancient Egypt. (Ezzamel, 2004: 498) The key point of difference between then and now (apart from the slavery of course) is, as Ezzamel notes, that these targets and rewards did not seem to be closely related to time considerations in the Middle Kingdom. Such an absence of time-related goals would make Edwin Locke choke on his breakfast toast, and this would have to wait until much later, as historians like Thompson (1967) and accounting scholars such as Hoskins and Macve (1986) have noted. I will leave a detailed exploration for how this relationship between time, space, and the evaluation of performance came about until later in this book, but, for now, in the rest of this chapter I shall map out the general intellectual terrain that informs our understanding of surveillance at work.

The silent monitor as a cypher for modern surveillance at work It has become something of a cliché to begin a historical discussion of surveillance at work by invoking Robert Owen’s “Silent Monitor.” From the work of Ezzamel and others, we can see identifying any starting point for surveillance at work risks a descent into some kind of surveillance First Cause argument, and, in the next chapter, we will explore its antecedents in sixteenth-century penal establishments; however, for the time being, the Silent Monitor is as good a place as any to start. This was deployed at Owen’s New Lanark cotton spinning mill, and examples can still be seen in museums around the world to this day. Owen is usually remembered as a Utopian Socialist, but, in terms of his lifetime, he was well into middle age before converting to this way of thinking, and by the time he was running his New Lanark mill in 1800 he was still as interested in personal enrichment as the next hungry Georgian entrepreneur. On taking over at New Lanark, Owen

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“… imposed strict controls on costs and quality, clamped down on bad timekeeping, and dismissed workers who had reputations for drunkenness, persistent absenteeism, or dishonesty” (Donkin, 2010: 93–94). It has, moreover, also become a cliché to hail Owen as the “father” of personnel or human resource management, not least because he did appear to have something more than a purely instrumental interest in the welfare of his employees (including the child labourers who he still relied on, despite some misgivings). Before his conversion to socialism in 1817, however, this concern was decidedly paternalistic, and, like many industrial philanthropists before and since, he maintained a keen interest in improving the morals of his workforce. It was with this in mind that Owen developed the Silent Monitor: a heavy foursided wooden block that would be suspended at every workstation. Each side of the block was painted a different colour that represented an assessment of an individual worker’s conduct the previous day. White stood for “super excellence,” yellow for “moderate goodness,” blue for “a neutral state of morals,” and black for “excessive naughtiness” (Donkin, 2010). Moreover, these classifications were recorded in a “book of character” that allowed for an assessment of a worker’s moral disposition over time. Importantly, the public shaming that stemmed from having the black face of the block suspended like a Damoclean sword above your head or regularly appearing in the book of character with the proverbial “black mark” against your name no doubt also had strong reformatory effects on wayward weavers. It’s hard not to smile at the unexpected combination of archaic and surprisingly current language at New Lanark—few managers would describe an employee as being excessively naughty these days, but they wouldn’t hesitate to think of themselves as being super-excellent—but it demonstrates a crucial point about the purpose of workplace surveillance. The most marked difference between this signposting and the much later time-and-motion practices of scientific management is that the Silent Monitor was never intended to measure performance or output. It appeared instead to be a record of temperament or behavior, an early psychological bellweather. If you kept your nose clean, the least you could expect was a blue. (Donkin, 2010: 94) We will encounter scientific management and its evangelist, Frederick Winslow Taylor, later; for now, it should be noted that they did indeed record performance and output at New Lanark in innovative ways. What this quote shows, however, is that surveillance has been, at least since the days of Owen (and, no doubt, well before), as much about normative considerations like a worker’s attitudes and character as it has been about rational considerations such as productivity. It has, moreover, also been about publicly displaying these assessments of character to others. These normative and public dimensions of management control have, of course, become a major focus of

We’ve always been working away at surveillance 15

attention for a wide range of organizational scholars (see Hochschild, 1983; Kunda, 1992; Barker, 1993; Willmott, 1993; Fleming and Sturdy, 2011), but we should still never lose sight of the fact that surveillance is as frequently used to identify employees who “have the wrong attitude” or “don’t fit in” as it is to identify those who “aren’t working hard enough.” Following on from the pioneering work of Hochschild (1983), one of the workplace scenarios where this has been most intensely studied is where employees interact regularly with customers. For example, Modern parallels with the Silent Monitor can also be drawn with the way some call-center operatives are monitored in telephone conversations with customers. The more sophisticated forms of call-center monitoring involve “listening in” by supervisors who will make behavioral observations, checking for tone, friendliness, and helpfulness as much as they are measuring the time of the call and efficiency. (Donkin, 2010: 94) Although call-centres have possibly passed their heyday in terms of economic importance as so-called frontline customer service work increasingly migrates to online systems that no longer involve interaction with a human being, they nevertheless have been the site of many activities that Robert Owen and the management specialists who have come after him would find utterly familiar. Indeed, nearly 200 years later, an inf luential report published by the U.S. Office of Technological Assessment (OTA, 1987) traced this lineage from Owen, through the American factory system, eventually to include white-collar jobs such as office work, telemarketers, and customer service operatives. The report provides one of the earliest comprehensive descriptions of the way in which a panoply of emerging technologies impact workers’ measurable performance, their general behaviour, and their personal temperament (see Figure 2.1). The one thing that ostensibly stays constant among all this technological and institutional change across the ages, however, is the human being. After all, we are told that human nature is the solid and unchanging building block with which we have built our societies for millennia (Pinker, 2002). Yet the human subject—whether it be a figment of the divine imagination, an Enlightenment-era rational and autonomous agent, or a posthuman cyborg—is itself a product of the institutions in which it finds itself enmeshed. And the same goes, of course, for the subject at work (Willmott, 2010). So, when we consider the impact of surveillance on workers’ performance, behaviour, and personal characteristics we should not think of it as acting on a universal human nature; rather, we should think of it as one of the many sets of ideologies, technologies, and practices that contribute towards “making up” humans at work (see Hacking, 1985). Indeed, work itself is an institution that has changed beyond recognition in the last 200 years—would a ten-year-old staring at a Silent Monitor in Owen’s New Lanark mill have

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Figure 2.1 Some Categories of Behavior Subject to Monitoring, Measurement, or Testing. Source: OTA (1987).

thoughts about their current and future prospects that in any way resembled those of a ten-year-old staring out the window on a rainy Monday morning at school today? How then can we begin to understand the ways in which surveillance is bound up in this complex interplay of institutions, technologies, organizations, and subjects? One way to do this can be found in the hugely inf luential work of Friedland and Alford (1991). They observe that those of us who live in the developed world also live “across” many constantly changing institutions that sometimes align and sometimes place contradictory expectations, constraints, and possibilities on us. These include the capitalist market, the bureaucratic state, democracy, the nuclear family, and (for some of us, at

We’ve always been working away at surveillance 17

least), Christian religion. For the sake of argument, if we accept that the privileging of the capitalist market has accelerated since the 1970s then we can also accept that it has been instrumental in what Friedland and Alford call the “retreat from society” with all its layered complexity and, via the reductionist ideology of neoliberalism, towards social relationships that are little more than a f lattened network of instrumentally motivated economic exchanges between atomized self-interested utility maximizing rational actors. Thus, they continue: a market, we believe, is not simply an allocative mechanism but also an institutionally specific cultural system for generating and measuring value. Many of the most important dimensions of economic life—material security, prestige, meaningful work, sociability, craftsmanship—do not have explicit prices. The utilitarian and contractarian philosophical foundations of neoclassical economics operate with a means-ends, subject-object dualism which assumes that individuals are instrumentally rational, that they evaluate their participation in social relationships based upon the costs and benefits they impose upon them. … work provides identities as much as it provides bread for the table; participation in markets is as much an expression of who one is as what one wants. Economists typically assume that work is a disutility to be traded off against leisure or income. Work contains all kinds of positive utilities—whether as expression of an identity (I work or I am a metal worker), relative performance (I am a good metal worker), social value (It is good to be a metal worker), gender (It is good for a man to be a metal worker), or social status (It is better to be a metal worker than a salesperson). These utilities are socially and historically structured. The extent to which there are problems monitoring, measuring, and controlling performance—the major determinants of the displacement of the market by bureaucratic hierarchies in transaction cost economic explanations— will be contingent upon the utilities that individuals obtain from work. (Friedland and Alford, 191: 234) In short, Friedland and Alford are effectively saying that the old adage of “what gets measured, gets done” only holds because what gets measured gets valued and, therefore, rewarded under the preferred social arrangements of the capitalist market. Here surveillance is not only an increasingly common way of attributing utility to familiar features of work like physical effort and material productivity but also to other things deemed to be desirable like mental effort, loyalty, commitment, cooperativeness, initiative, entrepreneurial spirit, and the list goes on and on. This is not, moreover, restricted to employees of commercial organizations; this kind of valorising surveillance has extended beyond the walls of the corporation to be implicated in various evaluative processes that mediate in the kinds of market or quasi-market transactions that concern Friedland and Alford. These might

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include, inter alia, valuing us as customers (e.g., through credit ratings or, more recently, web-based activities like eBay purchaser and seller ratings), citizens (e.g., the notorious Chinese Social Credit System), professionals (e.g., teachers through RateMyProfessors.com, physicians through RateMDs.com, or lawyers through avvo.com), and, allegedly, even ministers of religion. Of this last one we might well say Heaven Forbid, although I hope the numerous RateMyPastor-like websites that appear to be available online are part of an elaborate joke! Later on, we will have to consider carefully how this extension of surveillance at work beyond the internal relationship between supervisor and supervisee to include others outside the organization in the processes of evaluation and valorisation is reshaping the world or work (see Chapter 7). At this stage, however, it is sufficient to note that it highlights Ball’s (2002) crucial observation that surveillance at work requires people to do the work of surveillance (see also Smith, 2015). For the purposes of my argument, it is helpful to think of this work of surveillance as, what I shall call from hereon, scopic labour. This is an extension of the writing of Martin Jay who coined the term “scopic regimes” for a non-natural visual order operating on a pre-ref lective level to determine the dominant protocols of seeing and being on view in a specific [visual] culture at a specific time. The term “regime” implies something vaguely coercive, involving a disciplined gaze or organized visual field that permeates a culture. ( Jay, 2008: 1) In this way, scopic labour is bound up in a particular scopic regime that makes up subjects and objects in the workplace. It’s not just that more and more people are becoming involved in this kind of activity (even when it is unpaid work, as in the case of customer ratings); whole new sectors like ride-sharing, on-line retail, and certain private security services have emerged in recent years whose very existence at scale could not have been possible without activities that can be included under the title of scopic labour. This means it is all the more pressing to consider the interaction of the rational and normative in the valorisation of work activity through surveillance because, to put it bluntly, we’re all at it! We are all involved in scopic labour somehow. Ball (2009) proposes a way of considering the rational and normative in the valorisation of work that brings together our developing understanding of the subject at work and our knowledge of the specific institutional conditions under which scopic labour takes place. In doing so, her approach avoids the many traps associated with existing treatments of the duality of agency and structure. She achieves this by focusing on what she calls exposure. Playing on the double meaning of the word, we are exposed to surveillance which renders us visible or exposed to others. In doing this, however, surveillance only exposes us in incomplete and constantly changing ways that depend on

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what is valued at any moment under what she calls the “political economy of interiority” (Ball, 2002). This is where a person’s internal world is made public in a manner that purports to be a true representation of their authentic self, at least in terms of the prevailing standards of time. Thus, the excessively naughty ten-year-old working under Owen’s paternalistic New Lanark regime is a very different kind of person from an Uber driver whose rating falls below 4.6 under the extreme market conditions of the twenty-first century (even though neither of them are measuring up to expectations in the rational or normative standards of the time). In both situations, however, this exposure is a double-edged sword for, to be exposed, observed, and judged under surveillance is frequently a disconcerting and uncomfortable experience, which may give rise to all manner of anxieties but simultaneously be of benefit to the subject. (Ball, 2009: 652) Consider the child who is not excessively naughty but who has a permanent claim on “super excellence” or the Uber driver who consistently has a close-to-five-star rating. They will both come to be valued in ways that have obvious material consequences for such a high-performing worker, but they will also come to be seen—by others and by themselves—as a particular kind of moral person too who quiet literally embodies certain ideals of conduct associated with particular institutions. Still, as institutionalists like Meyer and Rowan (1977), DiMaggio and Powell (1983), and many others since have shown, even though institutions are about how we ought to behave, in practice we revert to all kinds of informal and nonconforming practices that circumvent these expectations. We might expect surveillance to reveal these practices, but, as Ball (2009) points out, there is a performative aspect to exposure, which means that workers may be “playing up” to expectations in terms of what is measured while subverting them in other ways that evade the same degree of scrutiny and valorisation. An example might be someone insisting on reading every line of a pre-prepared script in a call-centre when it is clearly not relevant to the caller’s inquiry (Nyberg and Sewell, 2012). Indeed, extreme conformity and excessive compliance can themselves be seen as forms of resistance that allow workers a degree of mastery over their own subjectivity (Fleming and Sewell, 2002). Drawing these threads together it suggests the following. When we are trying to understand surveillance at work—whether it be in the past or now—we should move beyond a narrow focus on technology and the attempts to extend the scope and scale of the rational measurement of performance to include a broadened consideration of the way it contributes to making up our subjectivity through exposing us to judgement in terms of the normative expectations conveyed through the institutions that operate in and around organizations. This should include, moreover, an appreciation of the way in which workers strive to fashion their own subjectivities while

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recognizing the incomplete nature of this exposure as they embrace some of its aspects while resisting being defined as objects by the rational and normative elements of surveillance at work. From Georgian child workers to today’s rideshare drivers, surveillance and subjectivity have been and still are bound up with who others want us to be and how we respond to these implorations though various degrees of conformity and compliance or rebellion and resistance. With these thoughts in mind, in the rest of this chapter I will provide a brisk review of how other scholars have reported the development of surveillance at work.

Welcome to the world of scopic labour We brief ly encountered Vance Packard in Chapter 1 as one of the first commentators to draw attention to the connection between the widespread use of computing technology and the possibility of pervasive surveillance at work, which he saw as evidence that trust had disappeared from the American workplace. He noted: Surveillance of teammates on the job in private industry has shot up at such a rate in recent years that the phenomenon might seem to have pathological overtones. At thousands of plants no one is to be trusted in any sense in which we’ve traditionally known the word. No one’s motives and integrity are to be taken for granted. (Packard, 1964: 74) But for Packard it was not just a question of scale; this expansive surveillance was qualitatively different from traditional forms of supervision. Many employers assume that the new electronic eyes and ears are just substitutes for the old human eyes and ears used by business supervisors for many, many decades to check on performance. And they feel that management has a clear right to know what all employees are doing at any particular moment while at their work stations or in their offices. Even if the new electronic eyes and ears are visible and known to the employees they offer less freedom than the old human system, because in the old system the employee at least knew when he could relax for a moment when weary. Now he must assume someone out there is always watching even if his work is only spot checked. (Packard, 1964: 76) His concern that the operation of this surveillance would be constant and its effects inescapable is now very familiar to us, but at the time it was a remarkably prescient observation that anticipated aspects of Foucault’s (1979) celebrated discussion of the Panopticon (see, in particular, Chapters 3 and 4). In addition to looking forward, however, Packard implicitly harked back to

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the days of Robert Owen and the desire not only to maximize productivity but also to observe and correct a worker’s character. We see this in the following observation: The Hancock Telecontrol Corporation has developed a panel on which a red light blinks if any man-operated punch press in the building is not in operation. Another device that has seen some use is a time-measuring computer that can be operated by a hidden operator. It has had some acceptance. An observer (often in a box) can secretly watch a man or woman performing a job that involves a good deal of talking, and indicate by punching keys how the conversation is going time-wise. Who dominates, who interrupts and so on purportedly indicates personality traits and temperamental reactions. (Packard, 1964: 78—my emphasis) In his book Packard thus captures many of the perennial concerns of subsequent studies of surveillance at work—especially its omnipresence, its frequently covert nature, its apparent inescapability, and its dual focus on employee productivity and employee morality. Although one might argue that, with hindsight, Packard’s anxieties actually turned out to be well-founded concerns, the Cold War paranoia of the time nevertheless created a climate where surveillance could infiltrate civilian life without too much opposition. Indeed, as Packard reports, much of the technology of surveillance deployed in American companies in 1964—listening devices, cameras, and the like—had their origins in the covert activities of state security services. Consequently, in the second half of the twentieth century, there was a rapid expansion of systematic surveillance to cover the broader civilian population. This was undertaken by various Federal agencies, but the activities of local law enforcement officers in particular piqued interest in the changing nature of surveillance as work (e.g., Manning, 1977). From this diverse group of criminologist and sociologists emerged one of the most prominent voices in contemporary surveillance studies. Gary Marx established his reputation with a detailed ethnographic study of undercover police officers and their role in the “New Surveillance” (Marx, 1988). Importantly. Marx noted that many of these new techniques and practices had, on a superficial level at least, broad public support and this was also the case where similar forms of surveillance were used in the workplace. In an earlier op-ed piece for the New York Times, Marx had described how this New Surveillance had permeated American businesses. This not only included more generalized techniques that tried to expose illegal behaviours like drug taking and even “undesirable” legal activities like smoking or overeating but also included a highly focused monitoring of individual performance (Marx, 1987). Like Packard before him, Marx also made some highly prescient observations, in this instance about the ability to keep tabs on workers in previously impenetrable locations such as the locker-room;

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also, anticipating the rise of call-centres and homebased “telecommuting,” he predicted that the ability to monitor work remotely via information and communication technology would mean that the separation between home and work would become increasingly blurred. In addition, he also popularized the term, the “electronic sweatshop” in manufacturing and highlighted the negative impact of intensive performance monitoring on stress, absenteeism, and turnover. The use of the term monitoring is important here for, as Ball (2010) notes, it has technocratic and disinterested connotations while surveillance itself is a loaded term with decidedly sinister overtones for most people. Ref lecting on this, Marx (1987) observed that managers tended to prefer the former term, seeing such practices as generally having benign and beneficial effects, including cost reduction, enhanced security, and improved productivity or service delivery, while also ensuring rewards were fairly distributed. Indeed, emphasizing the neutral status of monitoring and championing its benefits is a crucial feature of the legitimation of surveillance at work (Ball, 2010). Jim Barker and I have previously characterized this as a “discourse of care” that is seductive and hard to counter without sounding militant and unreasonable for who could possibly argue against protecting the majority of employees against a minority of colleagues who are “letting the side down” (Sewell and Barker, 2006; see also Barnard-Wills, 2012)? For Marx, justifying surveillance in the interests of corporate efficiency has always been something of a Trojan horse for it is conceivable that you could mount an argument for any form of overt or even covert scrutiny if the threat to the majority was presented as being sufficiently dire. What would follow? Monitoring employees’ eating habits (a major concern, of course, in countries where employers carry the costs of employees’ healthcare), tracing their spending patterns to see who was in debt and likely to defraud the company, or even those who engaged in morally dubious practice in their private lives (Marx, 1987). We now know that Marx’s list turned out to be far from exhaustive and organizations have tried all these things and more, but he did a remarkable job of setting the terms of reference for subsequent studies of surveillance at work. While Marx was charting the New Surveillance in the United States, in the United Kingdom, too, voices were emerging to warn us against the perils of surveillance at work. Prominent among these voices were Frank Webster and Kevin Robins. Drawing liberally on the work of de Gaudemar (1979)—an early commentator on what has become known as “knowledge work”—they claim that the same information and communication technologies that caused such concern for Vance Packard and Gary Marx should be seen part of a much wider transformation of society but, especially, the transformation of work organizations. Their own description of their approach as “Luddite” is meant to be provocative of course because the popular use of the term implies an irrational opposition to technological progress. In contrast, they rehabilitate Luddism as a radical movement that tried to navigate a path between the Scylla and Charybdis of lazy fatalistic or gullible futuristic

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thinking about technology: a historical determinism where technological change is merely an inevitable extension of the natural state of things or a naïve progressivism where technology has been sent to emancipate us from the tyrannies of the past (Noble, 1983). They observe, thus, If we can see technology, not as a socially neutral force, but as an expression of social and political relations—of relations of power—then we can perhaps begin to understand why the Luddites opposed progress. And, on this basis, we can better scrutinize the meaning of technological progress in the present context of the information revolution. (Webster and Robins, 1986: 307) In short, the Luddites were not mindless opponents of universally beneficial progress but were shrewd readers of the way technology was “a vehicle for power” (Webster and Robins, 1986), a tool that was invariably mobilized in the struggle to assert the values and priorities of emerging capitalist institutions (de Gaudemar, 1979). In the same way that, later on, Taylor’s Scientific Management and Henry Ford’s implementation of the assembly line were as much about using ideology as they were about using systems or machinery to bring about social change, the so-called Information Revolution of the 1980s involved a reimagining of how all aspects of industrial societies should operate. For Webster and Robins, the increase in civil and workplace surveillance were all of a piece with the ideology of “rolling back the state” through “small” government and “personal” responsibility, although the irony of increasing state or managerial control in the name of market liberalism should be obvious to even the most obtuse neoliberal. In conclusion, they turn to two vivid metaphors to speculate about the future of industrial societies. The first of these is H.G. Wells’s dream of the creation of a “World Brain” that would integrate and make available to anyone all the knowledge that was scattered throughout the world. Long after the Luddites brutally exposed such naïve optimism, it still animates much of the thinking about things like the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Take, for example, Google’s Ray Kurzweil and his controversial comments on the coming “singularity.” Is this anything other than a repackaging of Wells’s World Brain? As Webster and Robins note, The World Brain anticipates what we see as an emerging regime of information production, circulation, consumption, and control—an economy of politics and knowledge. Wells, of course, saw this “new encylcopaedism” as a benevolent phenomenon. We have shown that it is by no means so. (Webster and Robins, 1986: 343) Their discussion of the second metaphor, however, dispenses with any pretensions to optimism right from the outset and is particularly important for

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this book. Casting a dim light on the information revolution, they were possibly the first in the Anglophone world, courtesy of de Gaudemar (1982), to point out in a systematic way that the intrusion of computer-based surveillance into more and more aspects of lives resembled an information or electronic Panopticon—the architectonic surveillance machine imagined by Jeremy Bentham and popularized by Michel Foucault (see Chapter 4). For Webster and Robins, this development was all part of the extension of the management principles of Taylorism and Fordism beyond the factory in the realization of what historian E.P. Thompson had previously warned would become “… a managed society, whose managing director is money and whose production manager is the police” (quoted in Webster and Robins, 1986: 343). This discussion of surveillance at work comes as the conclusion to Webster and Robin’s book. As a result, it is something of a teaser for many studies to follow that took up the idea of an electronic Panopticon with alacrity. Most prominent among these was Shoshana Zuboff ’s In the Age of the Smart Machine. The subtitle, however, proved to be much more instructive for our purposes for it was an exploration of The Future of Work and Power. According to Burton-Jones (2014), few people with an interest in information technology and organizations would not have an at least perfunctory knowledge of what she meant by “informating” or the “information Panopticon.” The former occurs when activities, objects, and events are translated into information. In relation to work (and echoing the ideas of Polanyi, 1966), Burton-Jones (2014) gives the example of when the knowledge and skill acquired by a worker over many years of doing a job is encoded as a mere representation. Here, as Polanyi had previously noted, anything that resists being reduced to information in this way is effectively devalued as the informated way of doing things prevails. Zuboff distinguishes this from previous attempts to deskill or automate work, however, through a qualitative change that goes beyond the zero-sum equation of less autonomy for a worker equals more control for managers. Rather, informating work creates a feedback process that simultaneously breaks even the most complex work into a set of instructions while generating information about the underlying productive and administrative processes through which an organization accomplishes its work (Kallinikos, 2010). Instead of a once-and-for-all improvement in productivity achieved through automation, this means continuous improvement becomes possible. Importantly, more and more of that knowledge and skill mentioned by Burton-Jones becomes amenable to codification leaving less and less tacit knowledge in the hands of the employee (cf. Polanyi, 1966). As a result, work processes become more abstract and increasingly subject to appropriation by the organization. Here the future of work and the nature of power are on full display. Even the work of elite professions like lawyers and physicians that involves the acquisition of advanced knowledge and intricate skill can eventually be reduced to a set of instructions; the actions of brain and hand become little more than an electronic text (Kallinikos, 2010). And, of course, as a text it is a representation that is also subject to interpretation;

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something we all thought we understood intuitively to be fixed like the purpose of work and its meaning suddenly becomes f luid and contestable. As a result, Zuboff (1988) pointed to a shift from a traditional division of labour to what she called a “division of learning” (see also Chapter 7). For her this would be the most disruptive aspect of informating work because it would challenge existing hierarchies of organizational of power and authority and threaten our traditional understanding of work as a spatial, temporal, and embodied phenomenon. Thus, The informated workplace, which may no longer be a “place” at all, is an arena through which information circulates, information to which intellective effort is applied. The quality, rather than the quantity, of effort will be the source from which added value is derived.… A new division of learning requires another vocabulary—one of colleagues and co-learners, of exploration, experimentation, and innovation. Jobs are comprehensive, tasks are abstractions that depend upon insights and synthesis, and power is a roving force that comes to rest as dictated by function and need. (Zuboff, 1988: 395) But what of surveillance in this process of informating work? Although, as we shall see in Chapter 7, surveillance would become central to Zuboff ’s later thinking, in 1988 it was ancillary to her main interests in the contest over the meaning of work. Nevertheless, her popularization of the term, the information Panopticon, served as inspiration to many studies that focused directly on this feature of the long-term technological, organizational, and social trends Zuboff was examining. In particular, a good deal of attention has been paid to the way in which surveillance at work has been implicated in two related elements: the intensification of managerial control, and the appropriation of work knowledge and its concentration in the hands of managers. The concept I shall draw on to develop the link between these two elements is the putative autonomy of an individual worker and the manner in which it is affected by surveillance.

Surveillance as a constraint on workers’ autonomy Without embarking on an excessively long detour into moral philosophy, we can summarize the Western notion of autonomy as the capacity to conduct oneself according to purposes and motives that one devises through the exercise of one’s own faculties of reason and in the absence of coercive external forces (Sewell, 2015). In this way, an increase in managerial control is indeed something of a zero-sum game: more control for them is less autonomy for us. This focus on the personal exercise of reason can be traced back to Plato and, especially, Aristotle via the Christian apologetics of Saint Augustine. He was trying to counter heretical elements in the Church who argued that

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there was no obligation to conduct a self-consciously moral life on earth because all unfolding events were already part of God’s divine providence. Along with Augustine’s formulation that we do have a degree of personal autonomy in earthly matters, however, comes the moral obligation to exercise that autonomy responsibly. Kant returned to this in his extended ref lections on the nature of “Moral autonomy”—that is, the ability to regulate one’s own behaviour on the basis of objective reason—as a fundamental organizing principle at the heart of morally defensible social interactions (Hill, 1989). Thus, autonomy is not some untrammelled freedom to do whatever you want regardless of how it affects others. For Kant, a mature moral subject arrives independently at authentic purposes and motives that move them to act with reference to some kind of universally recognizable standard. This is, of course, the famous “a priori categorical imperative,” and Max Weber later moderated Kant’s advice that we ought to “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law” by adding that the universal law in question may not be immutable but will ref lect the prevailing circumstances at a particular historical moment (Sewell and Barker, 2005). This becomes important from the perspective of surveillance at work because it underpins Weber’s notion of legitimate authority in modern work organizations. According to Weber, if you were a superior in a bureaucratic hierarchy you could justify issuing instructions to subordinates and check to see whether those instructions had been followed on the ground that you are following mutually binding rational principles that were deliberately arrived at through the application of impartial reason rather than, say, through imposition of tradition or the personal will of a charismatic figure (Weber, 1958; Bendix, 1977). But what if those who receive the instruction from a superior do not share the same understanding of moral conduct as the person issuing it? In other words, what if they can’t arrive at what is, by Weber’s lights, a universal law (albeit a temporally and spatial contingent one)? Then surveillance stops being a disinterested and technocratic exercise and becomes a matter of coercion and domination—that is, getting people to do things they may not otherwise do, if they were left to their own devices. This is because surveillance becomes associated with the pathologization of deviance in that it is a means of identifying those who are using their autonomy against the interests of the organization (interests that are usually indistinguishable from those determined by the supervisor). Here surveillance is implicated in a negative heuristic of control—that is, its primary purpose is to identify employees who are failing to live up to their obligations (as set by their employer, of course). Elton Mayo—the prime mover in the Human Relations School—enthusiastically subscribed to this view through his belief that employee disobedience and recalcitrance was not an authentic expression of autonomy based on reason but was the manifestation of delusions (he used the term “reveries”) that would disappear if only the poor unfortunates could be persuaded to see the error of their ways (Mayo, 1933). In such a situation, managers are not only perfectly entitled to use

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surveillance to coerce subordinates to comply with the organization’s edicts and expectations for the good of everyone; they are also morally obliged to do so for the sake of the wretched employee’s personal well-being. This view still runs through much of the human resource management literature that emphasizes the pursuit of unitary interests, with the corollary that any kind of dissent or disobedience is, by definition, an irrational act. In short, you’d have to be mad not to toe the organizational line. There have been many tendentious interpretations of Weber that adopt this negative heuristic when it comes to deviance, surveillance, and social control—most notably in the voluminous writings of Talcott Parson. He argued that social control in general was not a conscious act of domination but that individual practices of control like surveillance emerged as rational solutions to particular problems that, if left to fester, would eventually undermine the collective desire for social stability. Thus, Without deliberate planning on anyone’s part, there have developed in our type of social system, and correspondingly in others, mechanisms which, within limits, are capable of forestalling and reversing the deep-lying tendencies for deviance to get into the vicious circle phase which puts it beyond the control of ordinary approval-disapproval and reward-punishment sanctions. (Parsons, 1951: 319–320) A corrective to Parsons’ functionalist interpretation of surveillance at work is to consider the inf luence that the work of Friedrich Nietzsche exerted on Weber. Following Nietzsche, Weber took all social relationships in a bureaucratic organization to be relations of power and domination, regardless of whether all parties agreed on the ends towards which that organization’s activities were directed (Sewell and Barker, 2005). Schecter (2000) goes as far to say that Weber’s could not have conceived of the notion of legal/rational authority without recognizing, courtesy of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, that any talk of disinterested neutral administration associated with bureaucracy—for example, using surveillance to keep an eye on whether subordinates were fulfilling their superiors’ instructions—could at least become a discourse that legitimated domination. Nietzsche’s inf luence on Weber is also evident in the latter’s cultural pessimism: for Weber, yielding to the march of ever-increasing rationalization in the name of efficiency and impartiality inevitably involved a subordination of one’s will to some degree (even if he didn’t go as far as Nietzsche in describing this as evidence of the triumph of a “slave mentality”). Finally, Weber followed Nietzsche in recognizing that pursuing a vocation or submitting to some notion of duty also involved a voluntary subordination of the will on the part of a bureaucratic officeholder as they wielded the instruments of rational administration. These three points of similarity between Weber and Nietzsche are important because, among other things, they lead us to appreciate that surveillance is

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not only an external force that works as a technical instrument of coercion but is also implicated in an internalized normative force through revealing to ourselves and to others the kind of person we are. If surveillance purports to expose our moral and behavioural failings (see Ball, 2005, 2010) then the information it produces can shape our subjectivity by impinging on our internal normative dialogue (Hacking, 1983, 1985, 2011; Taylor, 1991). In a stark Manichean sense, if the surveillance tells us we are a bad (or, for that matter, a good) person then we might just come to believe it! This strong, if widely underestimated, inf luence exerted by Nietzsche on Weber is an appropriate point to introduce the work of Michel Foucault. At this stage there are two main reasons for this move. The first of these is that Foucault—also ref lecting the inf luence of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals—wrote at length on what has become known in the context of business and society as normative or socio-ideological control (see Willmott, 1993; Alvesson and Kärreman, 2000), that is, a notion of self-restraint of the kind where an organization’s members ref lect on their conscience in order to police their own conduct without the need for direct external intervention from others. Although we must acknowledge that such a conception of self-restraint figures prominently in traditional philosophical discussions of autonomy, one of Foucault’s main contributions has been to get us to focus on the historical origins of discourses of morally justifiable conduct towards which a subject’s intentional ethical actions may be directed in this way (Mahon, 1992). Foucault called this deontological process the “mode of subjection” where each of us establishes our own relation to the moral code inherent in a discourse by recognizing our obligation to act according to its edicts so that our conduct is seen by others to be praiseworthy. Importantly, our conception of the rational self-knowing agent cannot stand outside of this mode of subjection. Take, as a practical example, the everyday notion of employee disobedience in an organization. Here the purpose and consequences of the operation of surveillance can be understood through a discourse of protecting the interests of the many from the activities of a selfish, disruptive, and even dangerous few—a situation where disobedience comes to be seen by all (perhaps even the delinquents themselves) as irrational. Surveillance thereby remains a prophylactic necessity only until disobedience is eradicated and the organization is entirely populated by rational self-policing subjects (Sewell and Barker, 2006). In contrast, the operation of surveillance can simultaneously be understood through a discourse of protecting the interests of the few against the many—a situation where disobedience comes to be seen as a rational response that ref lects the conscious pursuit of opposing interests and where surveillance itself will always be aimed at coercing the majority to do the bidding of a minority (Sewell and Barker, 2006). In the former situation surveillance is a conduit of capillary power that is diffused throughout the social body in the form of quotidian practices that act on everyone, whereas, in the later situation, surveillance is a focused instrument of control associated with a more orthodox notion of power as a clash between opposing forces

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(Clegg, 1989). An important philosophical corollary of Foucault’s concentration here on the history of practices that are aimed at dealing with deviance is that it means we need not beg the question of what a knowing human subject is. Rather, it leads us to recognize that, in order for the modernization of the world to take hold, we had first to understand ourselves as autonomous rational actors in the classical liberal mould before we could start to act like one (Hacking, 2007; Willmott, 2010). By this I mean that how to behave as a rational human agent in, say, a modern organizational setting doesn’t come naturally but has to be learnt through processes of acculturation and socialization that themselves have their origins in ideological and institutionalized practices (see Willis, 1977). In this way what seems to be our intuitive and everyday understanding of autonomy is a very recent development in terms of human history. In light of this, surveillance is not a conscious negation of an immutable and timeless notion of autonomy; it is implicated in defining what autonomy itself consists in at any particular moment. For example, the individual sense of autonomy experienced by a worker in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, a child weaver in Owen’s New Lanark Mill, or a customer service representative in a call-centre today would be quite different even though they may all be subject to ostensibly similar forms of surveillance. That is because in each setting the surveillance is trying to reveal a different kind of truth about them in terms of how far they can stray from the expectations imposed on them by their superiors. This mention of surveillance and its relation to the exercise of autonomy through deviating from rules, standards, and expectations imposed on us at work is a useful segue into the second reason for ref lecting on the work of Michel Foucault here, for it allows us to develop a positive heuristic. This point becomes clearer if we ref lect on Foucault’s essay, The Subject and Power, where he observes that it is the very existence of a widespread belief that human subjects have some kind of freedom to exercise autonomy—that is, there are conditions of possibility where they could do otherwise in almost any setting—that enables us to conceive of surveillance and its relation to power and knowledge in a meaningful social sense. In short, according to Foucault, power relations can only obtain between subjects because those subjects themselves possess some understanding of their volitional and rational capacities to indulge in conduct that challenges the prevailing mode of subjection. That is why the abject domination of total physical coercion (say, under extreme conditions of imprisonment or forced labour) does not involve the exercise of power in Foucault’s terms. If power is getting people to do what they might not otherwise do, then the complete absence of other courses of action removes half the equation as people quite literally have no alternative but to submit to the will of the other. Power then is only being exercised when we have the opportunity (however slim) to resist the will of others but nevertheless choose, for whatever reason, not to. Extending this idea of a positive heuristic to a modern work setting, however, we can think of how we might use surveillance to reveal wilful

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conduct that can still be deemed to be praiseworthy even though it actually deviates from the rules, standards, and expectations placed on the worker— for example, when a particularly innovative employee finds a way of doing things that improves upon the standards of performance set by their superior (Sewell, 1998). From this point of view, surveillance might initially be enacted through overt practices of performance measurement and training that direct such deviant conduct towards the goal of improved organizational performance. Such a positive view of the operation of surveillance— that it is not just repressive and conservative but can also be productive and dynamic—is consonant with Foucault’s wider notion of “governmentality” in modern societies in that familiar things like performance measurement not only produce knowledge about individual employees but also support a broader discourse of what it means to be a “good” employee as an autonomous rational actor who should be striving for the benefit of organization. In this way, we can posit an inverse relationship between overt and coercive forms of surveillance that attempt to minimize negative deviance while maximizing positive deviance and the emergence of normative forms of control that come to operate on an employee’s conscience; while the former may decline, the latter may gather momentum. In other words, surveillance need only remain for as long as it takes employees to become self-policing and apparently voluntarily begin to behave in a way that aligns with the norms of the organization. Here the continued presence of surveillance can be seen as indicator of the persistent failure of normative forms of control. Walking into any workplace where intensive surveillance is in operation, it is a sure sign that the employer doesn’t trust their employees to “do the right thing,” whether it is behaving in a way that meets minimum standards imposed by managers or making their know-how available to colleagues when they find a way of exceeding those standards.

Surveillance at work: three basic forms To summarize the argument so far in this chapter, although something resembling what we intuitively think of as surveillance at work can be traced across history, we need to consider it in its ideological, social, economic, and cultural contexts. Importantly, what it means to be an autonomous human agent who works and the impact the operation of surveillance has on that autonomy are not independent of these contexts. Although technology is also clearly part of this changing terrain, it is not the sole driver of the change, at least not in a deterministic sense. As Webster and Robins (1986) noted, the technology of surveillance at work is not on some neutral and undeviating trajectory but ref lects the power relations that operate in and around workplaces (see also Webster, 1995). As a result, surveillance at work necessarily involves the work of surveillance; the scopic labour of superiors watching subordinates, subordinates watching superiors, or peers watching each other rarely takes place for reasons of idle curiosity or prurient interest. It is not

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thus simply a matter of how surveillance is enacted but who is doing it and why they are doing it. Drawing on Ball’s theoretical concept of exposure and Zuboff ’s rather atheoretical (but nonetheless elegantly descriptive) concept of informating, I have boiled this down to two main processes that I call the negative and positive heuristics. In the former, surveillance is used by superiors to expose those subordinates who are not living up to expectations while the latter is used to expose those who are exceeding expectations. Importantly, this exposure has an impact on the person thus exposed, not only in terms of how they see themselves but also how they are seen by others, including their peers as well as their superiors (see Sewell, 1998). From such simple processes, of course, great complexity can ensue, and I shall develop these ideas as this book unfolds. At this stage, however, I shall conclude this chapter by discussing three main configurations of work that ref lect these processes in distinctly recognizable ways, along with the way they operate in relation to some familiar work activities. Proximal work Despite my earlier caveat about the pitfalls of projecting our current way of understanding the world onto the past, we have nevertheless always gathered together to undertake collective work efforts, although the circumstances under which we have done it have changed significantly over time. Social, economic, and technological developments may come and go, but, whether we turn to Xenophon, Bernard de Mandeville, Adam Smith, or even Lenin, they all recognized that through a division of labour we can achieve things together that we would never be able to do in isolation. While this does not always require us to be in the physical presence of coworkers, since the rise of the factory system we have become habituated to the idea that work usually takes place under one roof, however large. Indeed, scholars of the early modern period (e.g., Styles, 1983) have noted the impetus to oust weavers from their own premises and bring them together in one place was not primarily for the purposes of efficiency but to help early cloth entrepreneurs keep an eye on them. And even if the decline of bricks-and-mortar retail premises is as terminal as some predict, products are nevertheless shipped from massive warehouses of bewildering operational complexity where humans interact with stock-keeping and movement-recording systems that resemble surveillance. So, despite predictions to the contrary, it is likely that there will be, for a long time to come, work activities where we must be in close proximity with fellow workers. This proximal work involves a complex combination of formal and informal surveillance (Ball et al., 2016). Earlier, Rushing (1966) had provided a set of criteria with which to assess the attainment of workplace control through surveillance based on performance monitoring. He showed that in more complex working environments, rules must be established to counter the limitations of traditional forms of proximal surveillance like direct supervision as this carries significant costs. This led him to suggest

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that the greater the costs of face-to-face surveillance, the greater the tendency to extend the use of rules in the form of standardized production quotas to ensure that desired levels of control are attained. As Zuboff (1988) and many other have noted, however, this directly proportional relationship seems less rigid given the rise of the informated workplace where the marginal cost of surveillance shrinks to close to zero. This enables familiar forms of supervision and performance measurement to be augmented by peer scrutiny, itself aided by the public display of performance data and informal comparisons based on ostensibly objective and subjective assessments of the contributions of others (Wickham and Collins, 2004). While proximal work has taken place across all sectors for centuries, for the purposes of illustration I shall focus on call-centres as they have been subjected to a good deal of attention in recent years. Although Vance Packard, the Office of Technological Assessment, and, in particular, Gary Marx predicted its expansion to include service work, it was not until the 1990s that call-centres emerged as an important source of employment and as the locus classicus of surveillance within a proximal work setting. Even if we have never visited a call-centre, most of us can imagine the serried ranks of cubicles with operatives wearing tightly clamped headsets, fielding calls from anxious consumers. In this respect, and unlike a manufacturing assembly line, there is little interdependence between these individual workers in terms of the tasks they perform, and they could conceivably do their work anywhere there is telephone reception. Nevertheless, call-centres have become an established part of the employment landscape to the extent that they are now subject to the same economic forces as other sectors, reduced to chasing lower labour costs in developing countries (Poster, 2018). There are two main types of call-centre: inbound and outbound. The former involves the customer initiating the call—perhaps to order a product, seek information, or register a complaint—while in the latter it is the operator who makes the call—perhaps to sell a product or collect information. Urry (2013) describes three important characteristics of work that are, however, present in both inbound and outbound call-centres. First, it is communicative work that poses challenges for standardization and measurement because it involves both “send” and “receive” features that introduce ambiguity. Second, a major part of this communication process involves affective labour: it’s not just what you say but how you say it, and the ability to at least sound empathetic may be a major part of the job description. Third, and as a corollary of the previous two characteristics, it involves interpretive and representational or analytic and symbolic work. Taken together, the call centre exemplifies a material assemblage in which the production of … intangible goods takes place, examples being data, intellectual property and emotional affect. (Urry, 2013: 27)

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Here what is being exposed through the surveillance of call-centre work is not the strength of dexterity of the human body in the material sense of “How many widgets did you produce today?” but how effective the body is at producing these intangible goods (Smith, 2016). On this, Poster (2018) makes the interesting point that the human body is acting as a conduit for data where an operative is an intermediary for information as it moves from one part of the service economy to another. Thought of in this way, the objective may be to transcribe the caller’s talk with as little distortion as possible, or, it may be to transform this talk in some way in order to serve as an input into another part of the service economy. Detailed empirical studies of call-centre work abound, probably because it is not only an interesting combination of the desire of managers to know all there is to know about their subordinates via an “electronic Panopticon” (Bain and Taylor, 2000) but also because this involves surveillance of communicative, affective, and symbolic/analytical work. Echoing Gary Marx’s term, early on Fernie and Metcalf (1998) described call-centres as “electronic sweatshops” where every activity would be recorded, measured, and compared in minute detail. Most of these—log-on and log-off times, length of calls, number of calls, keystrokes, and so on—were anticipated by the Office of Technology Assessment, but the extension of surveillance to include behaviour, temperament, and morals (Ball and Margulis, 2011) harks back to my previous discussion of Owen’s Silent Monitor. Here the negative and positive heuristics operate in tandem as undesirable behaviour is identified and minimized while desirable behaviour is shared and celebrated. Nevertheless, numerous studies (e.g., van den Broek, 2002; Woodcock, 2017) have consistently shown that, despite even the most pessimistic fears about the inescapabilty of surveillance in call studies, it is always incomplete and only partially effective. As a result, there will always be spaces (however small) where surveillance can be avoided, and, if it can’t be avoided, there will always be opportunities to resist it. And what goes for call-centres—for many, the apotheosis of surveillance at work—also goes for other proximal work settings, be they factories, retail outlets, or offices. Distal work In the same way that we have always gathered together to cooperate in some work settings, there have always been some work roles that are performed in isolation. From mendicant priests, itinerant tinkers and peddlers, and shepherds to long-distance truckers, linemen, and district nurses. Traditionally, these diverse kinds of worker were usually left to their own devices, perhaps with the obligation to check in with superiors periodically. This would not, of course, stop superiors from wishing to keep tabs on their mobile subordinates, and occupations like truck driving became early candidates for the introduction of track and trace technology, as Vance Packard noted back in 1964. Such a device was proposed for the railways by Max von Weber as

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far back as the 1840s, and Charles Babbage turned his hand to developing a refined version for the Great Western Railway in the 1860s. The Jones Recorder—a device for measuring the speed of a moving truck—was developed as early as 1911, but it wasn’t until 1952 that the use of what had by then become known as a tachograph was mandated in Germany (and throughout the European Union in 1985). The rationale for this was ostensibly for health and safety concerns, as it was meant to ensure that drivers would take regular breaks and not exceed the maximum allowed driving time; however, it also meant that those same drivers could be held much more closely to pick-up and delivery times while being made to stick to predetermined routes. More recently, the advent of cheap GPS technology has allowed for the real-time tracking of truck drivers and many other occupations to boot. It was not until the end of 2017, however, that the U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration required all its licensed haulage operators to use Electronic Onboard Recorders. Unlike proximal work, even truck drivers subject to this level of scrutiny are not, in the normal course of their duties, interacting with colleagues on a continuous basis. In this sense, although they can be subject to traditional managerial supervision through tracking, they are less likely to draw on individual performance data and informal comparisons of their peers to make ostensibly objective and subjective assessments of the contribution of others (see Wickham and Collins, 2004). This suggest a potential limit on the positive heuristic of surveillance in that, while it is possible to clamp down on undesirable behaviour, it is harder to share and celebrate desirable behaviour in the absence the social dimension of proximal work. Although the challenge of keeping tabs on a workforce on the road is a familiar one, it takes on a new perspective when occupations that have in the past involved proximal work are no longer anchored to the traditional office. The disruptions of 2020 will be felt long after SARS-CoV-2 is just another endemic virus, but the shift to homeworking was only accelerated, not precipitated, by the pandemic of that year. Indeed, our old friends Vance Packard and the Office of Technology Assessment also predicted a trend towards homeworking, and there have always been claims—some more outlandish than others (for a considered assessment see DeSanctis and Monge, 2006)—that the proximal work of the traditional office is an endangered species. Brocklehurst (2001) provides a fascinating and prescient study of the way the information and communication technologies that have enabled office work also have surveillance capabilities built into them as an integral part of their functionality. Importantly, as some organizational boundaries have become more and more fuzzy, the distinction between workspaces and non-workspaces has been eroded, and the traditional rhythms of the working day have been interrupted (Sewell and Taskin, 2015). As Tietze and Musson (2010: 148) note, various forms of work have for some time “… become an ‘unbounded activity’ to be conducted ‘anytime and anywhere’, including the ‘other sphere’ of the home environment.” This has also given rise to hybrid workspaces (Halford, 2005) where employees’ activities are spread

We’ve always been working away at surveillance 35

across traditional facilities, their homes, and other temporary settings, including public places like airports or cafés. The organizational implications of this are obvious in that traditional managerial activities such as coordination, performance monitoring, and the maintenance of discipline that, in part, depend on proximity and visibility must be modified under these distributed circumstances (Felstead et al., 2003; Kaufman-Scarborough, 2006; Taskin and Edwards, 2007; Sewell, 2012). While we shouldn’t exaggerate this rise of what I call distal work as a substitute for more traditional and concentrated forms of organization—we need only look to electronics assembly in China, the textiles industry in Bangladesh, or call-centres in India to realize that proximal work shows little sign of disappearing—the events of 2020 did prompt a f lurry of speculation in the press about the end of the office. For example, an article in the Washington Post on 1 May 2020 entitled “Managers turn to surveillance software, always-on webcams to ensure employees are (really) working from home” and authored by staff artificial intelligence reporter Drew Harwell noted that, in a throwback to the proximal origins of supervision, productivity tools, remote screen capture, synchronized calendars, and even shared music playlist were being widely augmented by an “always on” rule for webcams so that managers could see whether employees really were at work when the said they were. Add to this the mandated online social activities, and, together, they suggest a yearning for social connection that is largely absent in distal work. This echoes a point I made elsewhere with my colleague Laurent Taskin when we studied telecommuters who had “earned” the right to work part of the week at home through exemplary performance but, when there, simultaneously felt the weight of intensive surveillance and the social dislocation of being away from the office (Sewell and Taskin, 2015). In this way, the intensification of surveillance in the case of distal work is a recognition of the perennial fear of managers that employees they cannot see, often literally, aren’t working as hard as they could be—a case of out-of-sight but very definitely not out-of-mind. Yet, at the same time, those very same workers who are so mistrusted are also yearning for the sociability and connection of the traditional workplace (Sewell and Taskin, 2015). In light of this, managers must seek a way of maintaining a sense of cohesion and common purpose so that employees can share and celebrate the achievements of their isolated colleagues. Net-work While proximal and distal work have plenty of historical antecedents, our final form of work is one that few have predicted, although Toff ler (1970) did make Delphic statements about the decline of industrial society where the home would increasingly become the focus of consumption and production. For a finer-grained analysis of such developments, however, we have to turn to ideologically motivated economists who yearn for a free market utopia where hierarchical firms are an anachronism, and all economic activity is

36 We’ve always been working away at surveillance

conducted between ruthlessly efficient individual contractors who are unshackled from the constraints of being a direct employee of an overweening corporation. Coase (1937) famously posed the question “Why have firms at all?” And his answer was that, under most realistic circumstances, the network of contractors he envisaged would be impossible to maintain because of the number and complexity of costly transactions involved in modern economies. Williamson (1975) described this as the All Channel Network: a veritable web of relations where everyone potentially transacts with everyone else (see Figure 2.2). He contrasted this with a hub and spoke or “Wheel” configuration where, in the language of institutional economics, a centralized principal transacts with a number of agents who are themselves isolated from each other (see  Figure 2.3). This wheel arrangement is suboptimal in that it requires some kind of hierarchy in the shape of the centralized principal at its hub, but it is at least possible using traditional surveillance techniques to maintain the integrity of wheel through the spokes that hold the peripheral agents tied to the centre. Indeed, it at least formally resembles the distributed arrangements of managers keeping tabs on those engaged in socially isolated distal work. Williamson, like all good institutional economists, was particularly worried about freeriding in any transacting arrangement: self-interested utilitymaximizing agents would guilefully take advantage of the limitations of the principal’s ability to keep tabs on them and thus accrue benefits to themselves at the cost of the principal. Just imagine, then, if the principal’s surveillance costs could be reduced to close to zero? Then, in theory, there would be no limit to the number of contractual arrangements a single principal could make. This would, in turn, make the all actor network a reality and enable

Figure 2.2 The All Channel Network (Williamson, 1975).

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Figure 2.3 The Wheel Network (Williamson, 1975).

almost completely frictionless markets to arise spontaneously and, in the process, make old-fashioned firms obsolete. It’s clear to see how such a prospect would appeal to economists of a certain stripe, but, for much of the time since Coase’s seminal contribution, it has remained just that—a prospect. Now, however, we appear to be able to get close to something like the all actor network. Nearly everyone these days carries in their pocket the kind of computing power we could only have dreamed of a few years ago and we take for granted that we are all connected to each other through the worldwide web. Indeed, we are so used to this that even writing “worldwide web” seems like the kind of phrase you might use to explain the world to your grandmother. (Except, of course, that most grandmothers are acutely tech-savvy these days.) With all these rapid developments, it has become something of a cliché to predict the demise of large hierarchical and bureaucratic organizations full of managers who do nothing else except issue orders and check up on the progress of others. This strikes a chord with the kind libertarian (someone we will encounter again in Chapter 7) who thinks, like Friedrich Hayek did, that deep down even a capitalist firm is an undesirable form of socialist planning. But this utopian world of networked contractors is only possible because it is enabled by the forms of surveillance inherent in the mobile devices we carry. In short, surveillance makes the “platform capitalism” of Uber and its many bedfellows of the so-called sharing of platform economy possible (Murakami Wood and Monahan, 2019). I call the employment relations of the platform economy net-work, although this is stretching the term employment as firms like Uber typically contend that they employ no one. This is more than a tearing down of the gains organized labour has struggled for in favour of a return to good-old-fashioned precarity through the “gig economy”—zero hours contracts are nothing new, as

38 We’ve always been working away at surveillance

dockworkers could tell you anytime over the last 200 years, and, although my own father never missed a day’s work, he was always aware he could be laid off at a moment’s notice. Rather, as Murakami-Wood and Monahan (2019) argue, surveillance is implicated in the transformation of social practices and institutions, reducing social relations to little more than surveillant exchanges of a pure market that deals with nothing else except minimal contractual obligations (see also Fleming, 2017; Gandini, 2019). Take the rating systems of an Uber, Lyft, or Airtasker. It’s not enough to do a good job; you have to be likable too (Anderson, 2016). Or, to put it another way, it’s not just a matter of being effective; you also have to be affective. After all, although driving a person from A to B in comfort and safety does require a basic level of competence, at the margin there isn’t much to differentiate you from your competitors as an independent contractor other than your demeanour or your ready wit and repartee (plus an endless supply of bottled mineral water and sanitizing wipes). And, in full circle, we’re back to Robert Owen’s Silent Monitor and normative judgements about character, except the surveillance isn’t conducted by managers on behalf of employers. Rather, in net-work the scopic labour of surveillance is outsourced; it is conducted by a principal (i.e., the passenger) who has contracted an agent (i.e., the driver) using the platform as a brokerage or market-making clearing house. In this sense, Uber doesn’t care about surveillance in terms of the negative or positive sense I developed earlier (except, perhaps, for reasons of maintaining its reputation). Once a driver has dropped below a threshold rating—notoriously they are simply shut out of the system—then their place can be taken by any number of desperate and willing replacements. And, regardless of the quality of the ride experience, Uber still gets paid, just like a stockbroker gets paid whether the market goes up or down. It is the velocity of the trading that matters. So long as people are taking rides then Uber can impose its transaction cost on the contract between the driver and the passenger; a cost, moreover, that is effectively a rent as it bears very little relation to the actual cost of processing the transaction. In monopolistic terms, Uber’s competitive position is protected by its passenger surveillance as a highly rated driver cannot simply defect to a potential competitor without sacrificing their hard-earned record and starting all over again. In this way, they don’t have to operate as a traditional employer who may be concerned with developing a long-term relationship with employees; they don’t need to identify those in need of retraining (the negative heuristic) or those who are marked out as a valuable asset who have found a better way of doing things and who can serve as exemplars to others (the positive heuristic). That is not to say that platform companies like Uber wouldn’t like to retain their best service providers; nevertheless, at the end of the day, their business simply is surveillance—nothing more, nothing less—collecting information about transactions between principals and agents generated by each party (for drivers rate passengers too) and using this in combination with GPS location surveillance to bring the parties together (Pasquale, 2017). In this sense, Uber’s attempts to avoid employment law in

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various jurisdictions on the ground that they are merely an information company rather than an employer have some face value as they ruthlessly pursue the relentless logic of neoliberal economics. The extent to which this raw surveillance, shorn of its positive and negative heuristic, will infiltrate other occupations and sectors remains to be seen. I will return to this prospect in Chapter 7, but for the time being I will leave you with an observation that neatly captures what we are facing with the rise of net-work: the emergent forms of platform capitalism portend new governmentalities, as they gradually draw existing institutions into alignment or harmonization with the logics of platform surveillance while engendering subjectivities (e.g., the gig-economy worker) that support these logics. (Murakami Wood and Monahan, 2019: 1) If Ronald Coase was alive today to see these developments, I’m sure he would be cheering the rise of things like platform capitalism, the gig economy, and net-work to the rafters.

3

The prison and the factory Surveillance and the custodial origins of modern workplace discipline

We can hardly fault Jeremy Bentham for his ambition. In 1787 he was utterly convinced that he had happened upon a universal architectonic machine— the Panopticon—to solve the organizational problems of human containment, regardless of the nature of the institution in question. Witness the scope of his claims for his invention. To say all in one word, it will be found applicable, I think, without exception, to all establishments whatsoever, in which, within a space not too large to be covered or commanded by buildings, a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection. No matter how different, or even opposite the purpose: whether it be that of punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education: in a word, whether it be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room of death, or prisons for confinement before trial, or penitentiaryhouses, or houses of correction, or work-houses, or manufactories, or mad-houses, or hospitals, or schools. (Bentham, 1995 [1787]: 33–34—emphasis in original) Although there can be few people these days who have not heard of the Panopticon, especially after Foucault’s (1979) justifiably celebrated invocation of Bentham’s designs, it is still surprising that it wasn’t better known before Foucault’s intervention elevated it to its central position in discussions of surveillance. Surprising because it was such an important part of Bentham’s long life, preoccupying him in one way or another for nearly 50 years (Himmelfarb, 1968). Indeed, as we shall see later in this chapter, he spent much of this time trying to convince others of its practical benefits (mainly in pursuit of his own fortune, as it turns out). A casual reader of the surveillance literature couldn’t be blamed for thinking, however, that placing people under inspection in this way began with Bentham, but his case for the Panopticon represents his uniquely utilitarian take on a line of thinking that had already been around in Europe for at least two centuries. In this chapter, I will explore

The prison and the factory 41

these European origins of modern workplace discipline via a discussion of the prison reform movements that sprung from the humanist philosophy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The main focus of this discussion will be developments in the newly unified state of the Spanish Netherlands, created as part of the Union of Utrecht in 1579. This initial assertion of a degree of independence from the Spanish Hapsburg empire allowed the Dutch under William I to pursue economic and social policies that differed markedly from those previously imposed by Phillip II’s royal decrees. At first blush, this detour into early Modern European history may seem far removed from any current understanding of surveillance at work, but I will go on to show how many of the things we take for granted about the practices of surveillance in organizations today were already evident long ago. Before I continue, however, I need to issue a crucial caveat. I am not contending that the modern world of work was invented in the late-sixteenth-century Amsterdam and diffused throughout the globe from there (although others I shall refer to on the way do indeed make this contention). No doubt similar developments were occurring elsewhere, and here we are faced with a common problem of historiography: although our most important and earliest sources focus on the Netherlands, we can’t take this to show that the Dutch were the only ones, let alone the first, to think of work in this way.

Penitent but profitable: the rise of the rasphuis One of the most comprehensive accounts of penological reform that links prisons with the development of the modern workplace is provided by Thorsten Sellin’s book of 1944, Pioneering in Penology. Sellin locates the origins of modern penology in the dawning realization that the danger to social stability posed by vagrants, paupers, and petty criminals could not be divorced from an incipient economic system based on commerce and waged labour, rather than the subsistence agriculture and indentured servitude it was in the process of replacing. The emergence of a class of people who were no longer tied to the land through obligation to a liege lord cut both ways: it made the economy less bound by custom and lore and, therefore, more dynamic as it became easier to move around in search of work, but those who were unable to benefit from this dynamism and mobility were often left without any means of support (Duby, 1980). It is not that these developments created vagrancy, begging, and indigence per se—after all, Protestants and Catholics alike recognized Jesus’s edict, “The poor you will always have with you”—but it certainly made the problem larger and, importantly, more visible (especially when people displaced from the land f locked to the towns and cities). According to Sellin (1944), one of the most important inf luences on Dutch reformers who encountered these visible problems of indigence was Juan Luis Vives, whose 1525 treatise on poverty, De Subventione Pauperum, advocated both poor relief and training for the unskilled. There was, however, already within Vives’ work an incipient understanding of the “deserving”

42 The prison and the factory

and “undeserving” poor, and the latter were to be treated with the firm hand of discipline rather than with compassion. Inspiration for this went all the way back to Plato who in The Laws had proposed a comprehensive penal system that included a “house of correction.” This house was reserved for those who had strayed due to lapses in conscience (rather than “viciousness of temperament and disposition”) and who stood a chance of being reformed through useful toil. This view is also evident in the opinions of a contemporary of Vives: the prominent Dutch magistrate, Jan Spiegel. Sellin reports that in 1589 Spiegel had proposed all convicts (except for those condemned to death) should be detained in a tuchthuis and be trained to work in useful trades while being paid a small fraction of the going rate. As Spiegel noted, this would require specially designed premises—effectively early factories— along with an accurate production control system to keep track of materials used, work done, and wages owed. Anyone who refused this reformatory work would be forced into hard labour like working a treadmill or rasping sawdust with a hand saw. Even these physically demanding and menial tasks were, however, useful for the treadmill-powered the prison workshops, and, most importantly, the sawdust formed an important raw material for cloth production (more of this later). One aspect of Spiegel’s proposal that anticipated Bentham two centuries later was that the identities of the inmates should not be revealed to each other or to the outside world. Effectively they would all be anonymous so as not to risk being exposed as an ex-convict in later life. Here Spiegel reasoned the one thing that would be most valuable to reformed prisoners would be their newfound reputation as an upstanding member of the community and the threat of losing this would be the biggest deterrent to recidivism. After extensive lobbying of prominent burghers by Spiegel and his supporters, the Amsterdam tuchthuis finally opened in a converted convent in 1596, and, according to contemporary records, the vast majority of inmates were classified as “professional beggars” who had falsely claimed incapacity (Sellin, 1944). Resembling an open campus rather than the more familiar fortified prisons of the medieval era, there were no barred cells to speak of. Rather, there were combined bedroom/workshops that the inmates were obliged to keep clean and tidy according to exacting standards. Only the warden was on the city payroll, and all operating costs were funded through the activities of the prison industries. Initially the most important of these was weaving, and this was effectively contracted out to an entrepreneurial civilian, Jan Parent, who set up his family workshop in the grounds of the tuchthuis on the promise of low-priced labour. The weaving workshop, however, was quickly superseded in commercial importance by what became known as the rasphuis. Although using hard labour to create sawdust sounds like the kind of menial task ideally suited to mindless punishment, it was actually producing one of the most important commodities of the age. The bark of tropical hardwoods was a major source of dye in cloth production and this had to be

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made into a fine powder to release its pigments. By the late sixteenth century, this process has been highly mechanized using water- or wind-powered grindstones, and extracting the powder by hand was no longer strictly necessary. Indeed, rasping raw logs by handheld saws was extremely strenuous work, and, for this very reason, it was chosen as a suitable activity for a house of correction. Complaints by existing dye producers that (even with their mechanized processes) they could not compete with the Amsterdam rasphuis went unheeded. In order to protect the commercial value of the rasphuis, in 1599 the city council went as far as decreeing that it had a total monopoly on the production of bark dyes, and in 1602 this was extended to cover all the territories covered by the Union of Utrecht, effectively shutting down all private producers. Sellin captures the brutal yet systematic nature of the work in the rasphuis as follows: The rasping was done in the cellrooms of the first f loor, and in fair weather in the courtyard. The prisoners assigned to this heavy labor were the stoutest ones, who worked in pairs, using a tool which might be described as a multiple crosscut saw, made by placing a number of heavy saw blades close together, the teeth of one blade laid next to the spaces between the teeth of its neighbors. Strong handles at each end made it possible to pull this saw back and forth across the log placed on a sawbuck or in some kind of vise. At first a twelve bladed saw was used, but as time passed the blades were reduced in number to eight, six, or five. The blades weighed, according to John Howard [the eighteenth-century British prison reformer], from seventy to eighty pounds and must have been much heavier when it was twelve-bladed. The work, therefore, must have been backbreaking and was so described by many visitors. Even in Howard’s time [some 200 years after the rasphuis opened] it was said to cause ruptures frequently. (Sellin, 1944: 57) Strict production quotas of up to 30 kilos of sawdust a day were imposed, and even when a mechanized grinding system was built in the prison grounds in 1656, manual rasping was still retained. As Sellin observes, the origins of the tuchthuis in the reformatory ideal of teaching inmates useful trades soon fell by the wayside (not least because this was a source of cost rather than profit), and the entire institution became synonymous with the rasphuis, with up to 80 prisoners involved in the daily production process. In short, instead of having their dissolute lives transformed through the acquisition of useful skills, the reformatory power of this house of correction was now seen to reside in the arduous labour and strict discipline of the sawpit. This discipline was enshrined in explicit principles set out as a preamble to a detailed rulebook discovered in 1924 in a Leiden archive by the Dutch

44 The prison and the factory

historian Anne Hallema. These were intended to inculcate “Christian and social virtues” by, A. Teaching the difference between good and evil through 1. speech a)

i.e., in general though religious and worldly instruction by the house father [warden] and work supervisors: b) in individual cases through contacts with regents [the board of governors], employees, etc. 2. example, as a result of friendly relations established between prisoners and staff. B. Attracting the prisoners toward the good and preventing their doing evil, through 1. careful supervision which would prevent the violation of rules and would operate through a) surveillance in general, and b) at least one member of staff being present when prisoners worked together. 2. Assured punishment for violation of disciplinary rules. (Quoted in Sellin, 1944—my emphasis). The reference to surveillance in these principles—Sellin’s translation of the Dutch word, toezicht—is instructive because it shows that, as early as the sixteenth century, the founders of the tuchthuis could not enforce its formal operating procedures like production quotas and payment systems without close supervision. Although Sellin traced the “rediscovery” of the rasphuis to 1898 and the work of German historian Robert von Hippel, after 1944 interest in this organizational laboratory waned until it was once again rediscovered in 1977 by the Italian Marxist historians, Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini. Indeed, it features prominently in their history of the modern European prison from 1550 to 1850 where they acknowledge that moral reformatory principles played a large part in legitimating the founding of the Amsterdam house of correction. Still, true to their own principles, as Marxists they consider its real purpose was to be the driving force behind the creation of an urban proletariat—especially the conversion of ex-peasants into workers who had nothing to sell other than their brute labour power. For them the promise of providing the emerging proletariat with valuable skills was always false because this would make inmates the kinds of artisans who were, at the time, still able the resist the march of capitalism. The genius of the tuchthuis then was as a way of surreptitiously introducing the rasphuis into early modern penology

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under the guise of moral reform and the illusive prospect of eventual material betterment of the inmates upon release. One of them put it this way: given the problem of managing a section of workers that needed to be disciplined and coerced into its place in the world of manufacture, clearly the most suitable method of production would tend to be that which could render workers most docile and which would demand the least knowledge and skill of them lest they be furnished with the means of resistance. (Melossi, 1981: 21) In this way, the real historical importance of rasphuis was neither primarily economic nor primarily moral. Rather, it was educative, for the rasphuis was not a place of production per se (indeed, it could not survive commercially without the protectionism of its government-imposed monopoly) but “… a place for teaching the discipline of production” (Melossi, 1981: 21—emphasis in original) where the prominence given to order, cleanliness, uniforms, hygiene (except of course when it came to working conditions), the rules against swearing, using slang or obscene language, reading, writing or singing ballads unless allowed by the governors (in a place and time characterised by the struggle for the freedom of thought!), the prohibitions on gambling and the use of nicknames, etc.—all of this constituted an attempt both to impose the newly discovered way of life and to smash a radically counterposed underground popular culture which combined forms of the old peasant way of life with new methods of resistance called forth by capitalism’s relentless attacks on the proletariat. If one cannot understand the close connection between the worker in manufacture and later in the factory with social relations as a whole; if one cannot understand the thoroughness with which, even in the early stages of its development, capital tried in every possible way to pull together a proletariat for itself and to secure the most favourable conditions for the exploitation of labour, one will not succeed in seeing how a series of factors and social events, far from being insignificant, reveal meaning and direction which link them up with manufacture during this period. (Melossi, 1981: 22) This captures Melossi’s (2014) position, based on a reading of Rusche and Kirchheimer (1939), that the prison was ground zero for a unique form of labour discipline that served as a necessary precondition for the formation of capitalist social relations of production based on class. The prison became, if you like, a “proof of concept” exercise, demonstrating the universal effectiveness of capitalist work management in subordinating workers to the interests of a capitalist class that is so ideologically persuasive that it not only

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pervades the economic base but also gets taken up across the superstructure (Melossi, 2014). This triumph of managerialism effectively turns all workers into prisoners, regardless of where they labour; perhaps not in recreating the abject conditions of an actual prisoner in other workplaces, but certainly in showing that the long-term prospects of the proletarian labourer are the same as those of the disciplined prisoner. In other words, prison discipline reduces the prisoner to an abstract “subject in need” whose only means of survival is, like all his fellow proletarians, to submit himself to the whims of those who serve the interests of capitalists (Pavarini, 1981). Here the kind of surveillance of prisoners performed by the prison warder is indistinguishable from the manager’s supervision of factory workers—they are all of a piece where the prison is the “factory of men” who go on to populate the workplace as “men of the factory” (Pavarini, 1981). All of this is not to say the prison necessarily antedated the factory because, in terms of its physical layout and organization, something like the Amsterdam rasphuis was clearly modelled on preexisting productive facilities; indeed, as Sellin (1944) points out, sawing logs by hand to create pigments was already a technological anachronism by the late sixteenth century. Nevertheless, according to Pavarini, the emergence of this form of highly organized work was instrumental in creating the necessary antecedent conditions for the creation of an urban proletariat habituated to the disciplinary requirements of the modern factory through education in expropriated labour; education in waged labour as the only means of satisfying one’s own needs; education in acceptance of not being a proprietor. (Pavarini, 1981: 163) We do not have to accept the full deterministic sweep of their Marxian social reproduction argument to see the power of Mellossi and Pavarini’s point about how learning to labour under the disciplinary requirements of the prison demonstrated the potential effectiveness of managerial supervision to a wider audience. We would do well to remember, however, that nearly two centuries passed from the creation of the Amsterdam rasphuis to the time when the factory system really took off in Europe in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century. In this way, the rasphuis was probably more important as an innovation in organization through its focus on discipline forged by surveillance and prisoner management than it ever was as a machine to manufacture an urban working class. After all, most people who would end up forming the urban proletariat would not have gone to prison, and its educational impact would thus have only been felt at the margins of society (Ignatieff, 1978). Although Melossi (2014) dismissed Foucault’s (1979) arguments about the wider importance of the emergence of discipline as a distinguishing feature of modern life as being insufficiently rooted in the material processes of emerging class politics, this feels like putting the Marxist ideological cart before the historical horse. Indeed, it is a very long bow to draw

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to claim that capitalist social relations needed to be “invented” through penal policy and thence manufactured through prison labour. It is fair to say, however, that both Melossi and Pavarini remain sympathetic towards Foucault’s historiographical account of the emergence of a more generalized discourse of the disciplined body that is instantiated in a diverse range of modern institutions. In this way, we can see the rasphuis as an “extreme” case (Flyvbjerg, 2006) of surveillance-based work discipline that predates Bentham’s Panopticon. It is an extreme case because it conveys the basic principles of managerial surveillance that underpin the kind of organizational discipline required for industrial work to be effective; principles that were taken up in more moderated forms in a number of other organizational settings (Sewell, 2001). There is, however, a large time gap of some 200 years between the creation of the rasphuis and the Panopticon as conceived by Bentham, and I shall seek to fill this gap in the next section. This will involve a switch from the Netherlands to England where the development of penology took on unique characteristics in terms of the treatment of indigence and social deviancy; characteristics that played directly into Bentham’s own understanding of the problems of social order in an emerging capitalist economy.

From the poor laws to pauper management Poverty in England was, until the nineteenth century, largely a local problem to be dealt with by the host community. Making formal provision for control of the poor can be traced back to 1349 and the immediate aftermath of the Black Death when the massive population loss attributed to the plague profoundly disrupted the social and economic order of so many countries (Cartwright, 1991). Although the main problem at that time was the scarcity of labour, it was exacerbated by unprecedented population mobility as the strong local bonds that many agricultural workers had with agricultural estates were severed. This gave the workforce a newfound power to bid up wages, and jurisdictions across Europe sought novel ways to control wage inf lation (Cohn, 2007). In England this centred on the Ordinance of Labourers of 1349 which tried to restrict wage rates in exchange for price controls on staple goods, without much success on either count, according to Cohn. Importantly, this disruption focused minds on a problem that, under these changed circumstances, took on a new significance: the wandering indolent who were able to work but, for whatever reason, refused to do so. The vagabond was for many reasons deemed to be a particularly dangerous threat to social harmony and stability. He could but would not work. When he wandered the country alone he was a seductive example to those bent to the discipline of labour; traveling with companions he threatened the peace. Whipping, branding, mutilation and even hanging were used to supress this menace, but all in fits and starts. (McConville, 1995: 281)

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But containing a ragtag itinerant group in one place has its own problems; notably that the most recalcitrant had to be fed, watered, and clothed by the community. If they can’t or won’t be moved on then they remain your problem. Here the Christian impulse towards charity would only stretch so far, and by the early sixteenth century the parishes of the newly founded Church of England were clamouring for some kind of central guidance on how to deal with this intractable problem. This came in the form of the introduction of parish registers in 1552 that formally classified and enumerated those who were officially deemed as “poor”—itself a form of surveillance. In 1562 this classification was refined to include: those who, for reasons of illness or infirmity, could not work; those who were willing to work but for whom there were no suitable jobs; and, finally, the “idle” who, for whatever reason, refused to work at all. Throughout the history of the English Poor Laws, what was to be done with this final category of idlers exercised minds the most (McConville, 1995). Indeed, the basic division between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor is still evident in much social policy today to the extent that, as recently as 2014, the treasurer of my own country Australia felt at ease talking in the national parliament about “lifters” and “leaners.” It was all very well that parishes were now expected to provide for the poor, but where was the money to come from if not from voluntary charity? A solution was essayed in the Poor Law of 1572—the levying of a local parish relief tax based on a property rate that remained in effect until 1834—but the key legislation in this area was the Poor Law of 1601 which created what became known as “outdoor” and “indoor” relief. Outdoor relief comprised money, goods, and food given to people in their own homes, but “indoor” relief would revolve around the containment of the indigent in purpose-built institutions like traditional almshouses and other refuges such as hospitals, orphanages, and asylums. A previous Act of Parliament in 1575 had, however, required all able-bodied citizens to work, and every county was to establish a house of correction for those who refused to do this work. These houses of correction were modeled after London’s Bridewell [founded in 1553] … which was a type of reformatory prison for vagabonds, petty offenders, and orphans. Penal labor, trade-training and a generous recourse to the whip were the principal elements of the regime.… Thereafter, the relief of the poor and the policing of petty criminals remained closely associated tasks of the magistracy and a triumvirate of institutions—jail, workhouse, and house of correction. (McConville, 1995: 282) There was a notional hierarchy of these institutions. At one extreme, jails were reserved for those awaiting trial or sentencing (usually to death or banishment for, even in the sixteenth century, long-term imprisonment of the

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convicted was unheard of ). At the other extreme were the workhouses where mostly women and children were expected to do some kind of productive labour to earn their keep. In between stood the houses of correction (like the tuchthuis of the previous section) which were supposed to reform those idlers for whom the moral benefit of labour was an alien concept. Yet, as McConville (1995) notes, administration of these ostensibly separate forms was not particularly standardized and, in practice, there was a great deal of overlap between jails, workhouses, and houses of correction so that often all three institutions could be found housed under one roof with little obvious distinction between inmates. Debates about the effectiveness of the Poor Laws in dealing with the problem of poverty (regardless of whether they were aimed at the deserving or undeserving poor) and continued concerns about the funding of indoor and outdoor relief raged for centuries. Indeed, highly localized systems of dealing with the poverty-stricken lasted in one form or another in England right up until 1945. It should come as no surprise then that many important figures in the Enlightenment turned their minds to the problem of how to inculcate industrious habits in a resistant citizenry. Prominent among these in England was Jeremy Bentham, although we must see his contribution as a characteristically idiosyncratic intervention in a long-running debate about the fate of the poor. This puts Bentham’s thoughts on “pauper management” (as he called it) into perspective for, as we shall see later, his famous proposal for the Panopticon with which we started this chapter was but one part of a comprehensive plan to bring the whole of English society under rational control. In 1797 Jeremy Bentham produced a tract with the title Outline of a Work Entitled Pauper Management (Improved) which he intended to publish in The Annals of Agriculture. In response to the growing concerns about the costs and the dubious benefits of the Poor Laws, he proposed the effective privatization of poor relief in England through the creation of a commercial enterprise, The National Charity Company. This was to have the sole responsibility for the building and running of up to 250 “Industry Houses” throughout the country for the purpose of turning paupers into productive members of society. Bentham proposed that the monopoly be given extraordinarily far-reaching coercive powers, including the right to apprehend anyone (adults and children alike) it deemed to have “neither visible or assignable property, nor honest and sufficient means of livelihood” and effectively detain them until the Charity Company had determined they would no longer be a burden on society. Discipline in these industry houses would be maintained through, 14. Universal transparency. 15. Simultaneous inspectability at all proper times. 16. On the part of the inspectors, the faculty of being visible or invisible at pleasure. 17. On the part of the building, the faculty of affording separation, as between class and class, to the extent of the demand. (Bentham, 1995 [1843]: 369—emphasis in original)

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The prison and the factory

These objectives would be achieved using, a plan of architecture, governed by a new and simple principle—the central inspection principle. General form, circular; or, for cheapness, circularly poligonal—say in twelve sides or cants, each constituting a division of the building: each division divided in height into five stories, viz. two long or whole f loors, alternating with two short or narrow f loors, and a gallery above, divided into six stages, rising one above another.—Ward, the name of an occasional division, adjusted in its dimensions to the population of the class to which it is allotted. The governed, (the paupers of all ages and classes) occupying the several divisions at the circumference; the governors, (the officers,) the central part, termed the Lodge, or Inspection Lodge.… Any part capable of being withdrawn from inspection at any time, for comfort, decency, &c., by circumferential screens, parallel to the outer front of the division, and up to the height to which it reaches, closing the inner front. (Bentham, 1995 [1843]: 369—emphasis in original) As we shall see in the next section, this is nothing less than a thinly veiled description of his Panopticon, repurposed in the pursuit of a business opportunity (but not mentioned by name) for Bentham had, of course, every intention of being the main stockholder and beneficiary of the National Charity Company. Importantly, given its intended status a “total institution” (Goffman, 1961) where its inmates would be cut off from the wider society for an extended time, Bentham produced minutely detailed principles of management. Many of these addressed moral injunctions like maintaining sobriety and chastity, but there were other features that would not look out of place today in any human resource management textbook, such as how to select people for particular jobs, how to make inmates industrious, and how to reward differential performance on the basis of rational measurement. It is this close link between Bentham’s inspection principle and still current ideas about moral and behavioural management that makes a fuller discussion of his ideas about the Panopticon relevant when considering our understanding of surveillance at work.

Bentham’s Panopticon As I noted at the beginning of this chapter, few people reading this book would not have already heard of the Panopticon. It even features prominently at the beginning of the venerable Australian novelist Thomas Keneally’s tale of the founding of the Sydney Cove convict colony, The Commonwealth of Thieves. And, of course, everyone knows that Jeremy Bentham was the one who originally devised it. Except that he didn’t! As Keneally notes, Jeremy was merely formalizing a means of supervision he had originally observed in his brother Samuel’s Russian workshop (Himmelfarb, 1968; Steadman, 2012).

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Surprisingly, this fact—widely known among Bentham scholars—provokes scarcely a comment in surveillance studies. Yet understanding the relationship between Jeremy and his brother sheds a good deal of light on how the Panopticon has subsequently become so closely associated with management control in recent years. Apparently, Samuel was as urbane and socially adept as Jeremy was prickly and awkward. An engineer with a gift for ingratiating himself with minor European aristocrats, Samuel found himself in charge of Prince Potemkin’s shipyards in the southern Russian city of Krichev in the 1780s (Steadman, 2012). It was after visiting Samuel in 1786 that Jeremy wrote: My Brother has hit upon a very singular new and I think important though simple idea in Architecture which is the subject of a course of letters I have just finished for my Father which it is not improbable may find their way to the press.… The architectural idea in the plan of what we call an Inspection-house is that of a circular building so contrived that any number of persons may therein be kept in such a situation as either to be, or what comes to nearly the same thing to seem to themselves to be, constantly under the eye of a person or persons occupying a station in the centre which we call the Inspector’s Lodge. You will be surprised when you come to see the efficacy which this simple and seemingly obvious contrivance promises to be to the business of schools, manufactories, Prisons, and even Hospitals. (Bentham, 1971—errata corrected) One of Samuel’s first moves in Krichev was to recruit several British naval craftsmen to oversee the artisans. We might reasonably thus assume that Samuel’s development of a rational system of supervision was part of this process of disciplining the local workforce, but it turns out they were relatively diligent and well-behaved. Rather, it was the disorderly conduct of the British supervisors that troubled Samuel enough for him to turn his mind to developing the arrangements described in Jeremy’s letter (Werrett, 1999). Thus, the origin of the Panopticon—so commonly associated in the workplace surveillance literature with the subjugation of shopf loor workers—lies with the challenges posed by disruptive middle managers rather than unruly labourers. One of the effects of this observation is to reinforce a point later made by Michel Foucault—the popularizer-in-chief of the Panopticon as an explanatory concept—that managers are as caught up in the effects of disciplinary power as are their underlings. Nevertheless, any discussion of workplace surveillance must include a detailed analysis of the way in which the Panopticon was conceived as an expression of the desire to subsume subordinates’ actions under a disciplinary managerial gaze. As it is such a ubiquitous feature of the surveillance studies literature, only the briefest description is required here. Think of a central inspection tower with individual cells arrayed around it in an annular formation (see Figure 3.1).

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Figure 3.1 Plan of Bentham’s design for the Panopticon with notes in his own hand (used with the permission of University College, London Special Collections).

This arrangement would allow anyone in the tower—conceivably just one person—to look directly into any of the peripheral cells, although not at the same time. This risked the prisoners becoming aware of the moments when they were not under inspection. The genius of the Panopticon, however, lay in Bentham’s disarmingly simple solution to this potential shortcoming. Inspectors in the tower would be obscured behind blinds so prisoners in their cells would never know the actual moments when they would and would not be under direct observation. In this way prisoners would act as if they were under constant surveillance even though they were not. This assumes, of course, that the mere presence of surveillance would have the required disciplinary effect of ensuring compliance in the short term, but Bentham was convinced that the sustained combination of social isolation and the impression of unbroken inspection would eventually have a lasting reformatory effect on the moral disposition of even the most hardened of criminals. Finally, and importantly, the Panopticon was to be open to the public (via a viewing gallery in the central tower), although the identities of the prisoners were to be kept secret from each other as well as from the public. This was

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not only intended to satisfy idle curiosity (visitors would be obliged to pay an entrance fee, of course) but to extend the inspection principle to include the (presumably admiring) gaze of the public. Although this initial conception of the Panopticon as a prison is its purest and most extreme expression, over many years Bentham sought to revise the design and adapt it to different institutional needs (Himmelfarb, 1968). For Jeremy Bentham it would serve several purposes. First and foremost, and before it became applied to the management of the poor masses, it was to be an efficient and, importantly, humane solution to the challenges of containing Britain’s rapidly growing prison population. Although we might reasonably think of Middle Ages as the height of penal brutality, in some ways the period from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the Great Reform Act of 1832 was far worse. This was the period of the “Bloody Code” where more and more property offences were incrementally added to the list of capital crimes. Overwhelmingly, this was to protect the interests of an emerging capitalist class against a growing urban proletariat, often referring to acts such as loom breaking that were associated with specific occupations (Hay, 1975; Linebaugh, 1991). The popular idea that people were regularly hanged for stealing a loaf bread, however, is no doubt an exaggeration (Seal, 2008), and it was common for many capital sentences to be commuted, especially when the option of transportation to the colonies became available a way of exporting criminality. Still, even before the concerted efforts of reformers like John Howard (1726–1790) and Bentham himself led to the tempering of the Bloody Code’s worst excesses, the sheer increase in the number of convicted persons forced an important change in the role of the prison system. Rather than being a short-term accommodation for people awaiting trial and, if convicted, execution (or, later, transportation), prisons slowly took on their modern form as places of extended, if not yet orderly and reformatory, confinement (McGowan, 1995). In short, prisons went from being a holding pen to being a human “warehousing” problem in today’s parlance. This is a quite different problem to the one Bentham faced later when he turned his mind to the underserving poor and what he called “idle hands” through his National Charity Company; hence, his proposals for the prison version of Panopticon did not, initially at least, contain much detail about the management of behaviour (as opposed to things like ensuring the physical and social isolation of the prisoners). This is because his prison was to be a machine for reform through contemplative isolation, whereas his industry houses were to be machines for reform through the instilling of good moral and work habits through supervised labour which, even Bentham acknowledged, was a thoroughly social process unsuited to solitary penitence. It also seems there was a good deal of the pragmatic entrepreneur in Bentham because he clearly thought he was going to make his fortune by building prisons; however, when such an ambition failed to materialize, he turned his attention to other opportunities with quite different disciplinary requirements. Thus, while devoting most of his later life, on and off, to refining the Panopticon and lobbying various

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European governments to take up his prison design, the closest his inspection principle got to sustained operation in practice was the School of Arts in St Petersburg, Russia (Steadman, 2012). Again, this was a collaboration with brother Samuel and was effectively a version of the proposed English Industry House for the training of shipwrights. Although the basic layout of the Panopticon was retained, this time five stories of large workshops, rather than separate isolation cells, were arrayed around the central inspection tower. The illusion of continuous surveillance from the supervisor—such a key feature of the prison Panopticon—was nevertheless retained by ingenious means: according to first-hand reports by Samuel’s widow made in 1849 and 1853, the Inspector of the School could sit in a chair suspended in a tube within the central tower and, with the aid of pulleys, move silently between the five stories so that he was able to arrive unannounced and apparently miraculously in any of the workshops (Steadman, 2012). Whether this feature was thought up by either of the Bentham brothers is, however, uncertain for Samuel was banished from Russia in 1807 after the Tsar declared war on Great Britain and the School of Arts did not start operation until 1810. Regardless, one concrete instance of the Panopticon—even in this diluted form—hardly seems much of a return for a lifetime’s toil. Although the fact that Bentham kept at it for so long led some of his contemporaries to comment that it was just an obsession of an idiosyncratic crank, his attempt to balance personal enrichment with a genuine desire to address some of the most pressing social problems of the age was a powerful, if obdurate, application of his philosophical and moral principles (Himmelfarb, 1968). Yet his willingness to modify the original design of the Panopticon, while retaining its basic inspection principle, to suit different circumstances suggest a degree of f lexibility on Bentham’s part that is lost on many of today’s critics of surveillance who invoke what has become his signature idea. So, to conclude this chapter, I wish to explore what we can learn from the different manifestations of Bentham’s inspection principle.

The prison and the factory: a meaningful comparison? Although Bentham’s proposals for prisons were rejected by numerous governments, some formal features of his inspection principle were incorporated into numerous newly built reformatory institutions in England and elsewhere, including the United States where Alexis de Tocqueville undertook a study of the “Philadelphia System” which implemented Bentham’s proposals about prisoner isolation and silence with particular zeal (Pavarini, 1981). In the United Kingdom, however, the inf luence of the inspection principle was felt most strongly during an intensive period of workhouse construction that followed the passing of 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act—generally known as the New Poor Law—which was the most thoroughgoing legal reform of the parish relief system since 1601. The full force of the Act was, unsurprisingly, directed at that most Victorian of categories—the stubbornly persistent

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undeserving poor mentioned earlier whose moral turpitude and fecklessness were still seen as the main causes of their destitution—with parishes in England and Wales combined to form districts known as Poor Law Unions overseen by elected boards. The by-now-familiar tendency to blame poverty on the personal moral failings of indigents extended as far as ostensibly sympathetic voices like the social reformer Henry Mayhew (see Mayhew, 1851), but at a time of such opprobrium even this law was seen as being unnecessarily punitive (its treatment of illegitimate children and their mothers being particularly harsh—Higginbotham, 2013). Sir George Gilbert Scott—one of Victorian Britain’s most celebrated architects and the designer of many important buildings including the Albert Memorial and the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras station—started out as a designer of workhouses during this period. Between 1834 and 1845 he designed over 40 workhouses with his partner William Boynton. He developed a signature plan that can trace its origins, through Bentham, right back to sixteenth-century Rasphuis where promoting the moral reformatory benefits of labour were at least as important as the architecture. Some of these workhouses still exist, although their origins are lost to most passers-by who have grown up in a world where the more punitive aspects of social welfare are better-hidden. For example, as a child I would regularly pass Scott’s monumental structures at Witham, Writtle, and Billericay in Essex oblivious to their original purpose, although the horrific prospect of “ending up in the workhouse” still resided in the living memory of my own grandparents. As if to cock a snook at these distant memories of enforced labour, the Witham site is now a retirement village! To prevent this chapter ending on an interesting but potentially peripheral historical observation, I shall finish by making some observations that resonate with our current understanding of surveillance at work. First and foremost, the late sixteenth century was a watershed moment in prison design—for minor offenders and for the indolent, work was seen as a means of moral training and reformation. Social dislocation, an increase in poverty (or, at least, an increase in the visibility of poverty), an increase in the longterm prison population, and the sharpening of the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor resulted in a blurring of the purposes of jails, workhouses, and houses of correction, and the understanding emerged that they should be organized along similar principles. In all three types of institution, rational organization and surveillance were aimed as much at improving the moral reform of the inmates as they were aimed at making sure those same inmates were disciplined and docile. In this context, Bentham’s initial proposal for the Panopticon can be seen as a particular way of implementing his more general inspection principle, inspired by the organization of work at brother Samuel’s naval workshops, to address the specific carceral needs of a prison. Nevertheless, the prison Panopticon was above all else a design for a penitentiary—as in a place of penitence or self-reform—and Bentham was convinced that the combination of

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discipline induced through surveillance would combine with quiet contemplative isolation to ensure the moral improvement of offenders. Even when later versions of the Panopticon prison design emerged that dispensed with isolation cells in favour of shared cells, it was primarily to reduce construction costs rather than any recognition of the inhumanity of solitary confinement (Himmelfarb, 1968). Still, Bentham noted that cellmates would need to be selected using a rational assessment of their temperaments, noting that a happier prisoner would probably also make for more a more compliant prisoner (an antecedent of today’s psychometric testing, no doubt). When prisons failed to make him his fortune, Bentham turned his entrepreneurial zeal to houses of correction, and this led him to focus more on the organizational and managerial aspects of running work-based institutions. Interestingly, this sees Bentham going full circle, from the workshop origins of the inspection principle, through its more austere prison form, and back to the workshops of houses of correction and, later, workhouses. Even in these later manifestations of the inspection principle, coercion was still evident for, while attendance at the workhouse was ostensibly voluntary, paupers had few alternatives and work at both houses of correction and workhouses became compulsory. Nevertheless, there was a greater emphasis on things like rational organization, training, selection, and performance measurement. Clearly these can be considered as precursors of many of the key features of twentieth-century management science and, especially, human resource management. Indeed, Bentham’s focus on the need to reform the temperamentally indolent anticipates what later became known as the “recalcitrant worker problem” (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999). Even the nominally free labourers of the workhouse had to be subject to surveillance and control to ensure not only their moral improvement but also that they made a full contribution in terms of work effort. This connection between Bentham’s fear of “idle hands” and concerns about workers not pulling their weight highlights a central feature of what has become known as Labour Process Theory and the way that surveillance has been deployed to try and ensure workers labour at their full capacity is the topic of the next chapter.

4

Someone to watch over me Surveillance at work and the labour process

It wasn’t only Jeremy Bentham who was worried about “idle hands.” Just over 100 years later, Frederick W. Taylor—the driving force behind the rise of Scientific Management—shared Bentham’s concerns, but he went even further. The natural laziness of men is serious, but by far the greatest evil from which both workmen and employers are suffering is the systematic soldiering which is almost universal under all the ordinary schemes of management and which results from a careful study on the part of the workmen of what will promote their best interests. (Taylor, 1911: 6) A little further on he returned to this theme. The greater part of systematic soldiering is done by men with the deliberate object of keeping their employers ignorant of just how fast they can work. So universal is soldiering for this purpose, that hardly a competent workman can be found in a large establishment, whether he works by the day or on piece work, contract work or under any of the ordinary systems of compensating labor, who does not devote a considerable part of his time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace. (Taylor, 1911: 17) This isn’t being congenitally lazy though for it involves a good deal on cunning on the part of the worker to “soldier.” Thus, by soldiering, Taylor meant that a majority of workers were actively using their ingenuity to deceive their employers into believing they were working at their absolute capacity when they were actually goofing off and, even worse, were accruing the benefits of this leisure on the job. Just think how productive businesses would be if that ingenuity was actually turned to the benefit of the employer rather than the employee? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate triumph of Scientific Management

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as an ideological and practical movement? As we will see later, the fear of soldiering so vividly expressed by Taylor was also a neat summary of the very crux of what became known as Labour Process Theory (from hereon, LPT)—how managers attempt to maximize the efforts of workers so they are working as close to their potential as possible. This chapter is concerned with how surveillance has been enrolled to try and minimize (or even, in some people’s fantasies, eliminate) this gap between what we are capable of and what we actually do at work. The term “Labour Process” has been familiar in industrial sociology and its related disciplines for a long time, but mention it to most social scientists today and you could well draw a blank. LPT is part of an intellectual and political tradition that has developed, on and off, since Karl Marx introduced us to the term “labour process” in Capital, his magnum opus of 1867. At a time where Marxist critique is in one of its popularity upswings in the wake of Thomas Piketty’s best-selling Capital in the Twenty First Century, in this chapter I shall explore the basic tenets of LPT under economic, organizational, and technological conditions that bear little resemblance to those found in the Georgian/ Regency Britain of Bentham or even the Victorian Britain of Marx. Despite this caveat, there is still—from a Marxist perspective, at least—a clear connection between Bentham’s understanding of enforced labour and a Marxist analysis of paid work that remains current. Although the circumstances of enforced labour appear to be quite different from those enjoyed by people who ostensibly submit themselves to workplace surveillance voluntarily as one of the conditions of the employment relationship, for Marx this latter form of labour was only nominally free. His view was that, to all intents and purposes, most of us have no more choice than the most brutalized prisoner over whether to work or not (see Chapter 3). Hence the power of Bentham’s contention that his inspection principle was just as relevant to factories as it was to prisons. Although many would challenge that today’s workplaces are anything like prisons in an obvious sense, in this chapter I will show that, under the guise of LPT, it still isn’t so much of a stretch to think about managers’ desires to get their subordinates to do things they may not otherwise do if left to their own devices in a way that resembles Bentham’s desire to reform recidivists in a prison over 200 years ago.

A Fair Day’s work for a Fair Day’s pay? The origins of a labour theory of value Central to LPT is the understanding that modern work organizations are constituted through the operation of an employment relationship between a legal entity that acts as an “employer” and individual “employees.” This employment relationship is normally governed by an explicit written contract that places certain expectations on employers and employees in terms of their conduct towards each other. In particular, the contract governs the employer’s expectation of an employee’s performance in their work role and,

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in return, the employee receives assurances about their terms, conditions, and wages. This is so taken-for-granted by specialist scholars and lay people alike that we rarely ref lect on the fact that it is a relatively recent innovation in human history that requires some understanding of the concept of equivalence between effort (as measured by an input such as time spent labouring or an output such as productivity) and reward (cf. Ezzamel, 2004). This is important because it allows wages to be set at a level that ref lects the prevailing labour market expectations about effort and reward. Although the exact details of how this conceptual relationship between reward and effort came about are historically contentious, there is a consensus that the Reformation played an important role in promulgating this notion throughout Protestant Europe. Max Weber (1930) famously observed that the Reformation was crucial in establishing an inner-worldly asceticism that provided the impetus for capitalism, but what is equally important to Protestantism is the belief that one’s salvation comes through a personal relationship with God rather than simply through submitting oneself to the authority of the Church. An important corollary of this is that living a virtuous life becomes one’s own responsibility. Even Protestant denominations such as Calvinists who held strict beliefs about predestination thought that, because there was no way of telling who was actually destined for eternal life and who was not, everyone should strive to live a life of virtue and hard work. Thus, financial success that was the result of one’s own efforts came be to be seen as an outward symbol of virtuousness as well as a product of Weber’s inner-worldly asceticism. This belief in the moral probity of worldly riches became a central element of the value theory of labour contained in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government (1690). Although primarily concerned with demonstrating that the ownership of private property (in particular, cultivated land) was compatible with Protestant godliness, Locke noted that not only had God commanded man to labour since the Fall but “… the labour of his body and the work of his hands are properly his” (§26). From this observation he went on to argue that it was through labour that man transformed nature and thus imparted value on all things that did not occur naturally. He gave the simple example of picking up acorns that had fallen from an oak tree standing on common land—they were part of nature’s bounty available to all, but the act of labouring to pick them up imparted value on them and transformed them into a commodity. Because this labour was the possession of the labourer, acorns valorised in this way also legitimately became the property of the labourer. According to Locke, it was “… labour that puts the difference of value on all things” (§40), adding that when labour provided sustenance beyond subsistence levels then, “by the common consent of men,” this surplus value could be recognized and stored in the form of money. Importantly, not only did Locke’s value theory legitimate the accumulation of private wealth but, at a time when for many centuries wages had been based on custom and tradition, it introduced in the public consciousness a consideration of the link between reward and effort at work (Thompson, 1963).

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An important practical implication of this growing appreciation of the links between effort, reward, and the creation of value through labour can be seen in the development of penitential institutions we encountered in Chapter 3 where something like Bentham’s inspection principle as a source of moral improvement combines with the measurement of individual and, at an aggregate level, organizational productivity. In this way, those penitential institutions can be seen as proto-modern work organizations (Ignatieff, 1978) where familiar notions such as hierarchy, control, subordination, and “factory time” (see Thompson, 1967) began to take shape, all of which became central to Marx’s conception of the labour process (Sewell, 2001). With the necessary conditions of the capitalist labour process—a value theory of labour based on nominally free employment governed by contract, combined with a uniform conception of factory time and a supervisory hierarchy—in place by the nineteenth century, the time was ripe for a critique of managerial control and employee subordination associated with industrial work. Of course, the huge economic, political, and social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution made such a critique all the more pressing.

Marx’s critique of the capitalist labour process Marx was not the first commentator to offer a systematic critique of the early stages of modern capitalism. For example, a rich vein of proto-communistic thinking can be identified in post-revolutionary France where commentators such as the Comte de Saint-Simon pointed out that the great mass of workers were free in name only when their only alternative was destitution. Charles Fourier took these sentiments on board and incorporated them into his proposals for a form of cooperative and decentralized production system where the full fruits of the participants’ labour were distributed on the basis of need rather than ability. It was Fourier’s insight—that workers received but a fraction of the value that their efforts created under capitalist production—which was taken up with such penetrating force by Karl Marx. Reading Marx and Locke in parallel on labour as the source of value reveals that they had much in common, although their purposes were diametrically opposed. Unlike Locke and his intellectual heirs such as Smith and Ricardo who wanted to legitimate private property, Marx intended that his critique would demonstrate once and for all that capitalism was fundamentally exploitative and, in the process, would hasten the demise of a system based on the accumulation of private wealth. His explicit discussion of the labour process takes up a mere ten of the one-thousand-plus pages of the first volume of Capital, but the principles set out therein are central to his subsequent disquisition on the “laws” of capitalist accumulation. Marx begins his discussion of the labour process by drawing the important distinction between labour power (i.e., an individual’s potential to labour) and labour power in use (i.e., the actual labour the individual ends up performing). In purchasing an individual’s labour power, the capitalist sets it to work

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to produce a use value (i.e., a specified article that satisfies another’s want). This difference is the source of what has become known by labour process theorists as the “indeterminacy of labour”—whoever purchases labour power from another is unlikely ever to receive its full productive benefit; the challenge is to make an individual’s labour effort approach their labour power. Effective organization of this consumption of labour power to produce use values is thus set out early on as the central problem of any labour process, regardless of the social conditions under which it takes place. There then follows a detailed discussion of the way in which nature is transformed by labour to produce value that is, in its central argument, almost indistinguishable from Locke’s, save for one important respect. Although Marx’s starting point is, like Locke, “nature” in its most basic form, he also recognizes that few material inputs into the industrial system have not been previously transformed by human labour, including things that we now call capital equipment and infrastructure. One of Marx’s quaint aphorisms, however, signals his main departure from Locke when he notes that, just as the taste of porridge doesn’t tell you who grew the oats, so a product tells you little of the social conditions of capitalism under which it was made. First, the labourer works under the direction of the capitalist, and, as a result, the actions of the labourer are subordinated to those of the capitalist. Second, the product of this labour remains the property of the capitalist and not the labourer. Moreover, the labourer, as the seller of labour power, receives its exchange value (as set by the labour market), while the capitalist, as buyer of labour power, receives its use value (as set by the product market). If it takes half a working day for the labourer to produce enough to pay for the exchange value of his labour for a whole day, then anything that accrues to the labourer’s work for the rest of the day belongs to the capitalist. This constitutes a highly abbreviated description of Marx’s theory of the production of surplus value; a theory which has been debated by labour economists ever since it was first put forward. Today the simplicity of Marx’s nineteenth-century examples of industrial labour—mainly cotton spinning—seem so far removed from current economic, political, and technological complexities that it seems difficult to accept the theory today. Indeed, LPT languished in the intellectual and political backwaters for much of the twentieth century until Harry Braverman’s landmark 1974 book, Labor and Monopoly Capital. Braverman was an autodidact metal worker with an intimate knowledge of industrial work, and he saw first-hand how Marx’s prediction that managers would seek to strengthen their control over workers by monopolizing the knowledge and skills needed to operate the factory played out in practice. Yet even well into the twentieth century, many industrial workers retained a good deal of discretion over how work was done and what a job actually entailed often remained a mystery to their superiors. Thus, while workers were formally subordinated to capital, this degree of discretion meant that managers never really knew if their employees were, to use Taylor’s term, soldiering. For Braverman (1974), Scientific Management’s aim of breaking down each job into a minute set

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of instructions that were to be followed to the letter was the crucial step in the real subordination of labour for workers lost the last element of selfdetermination in the workplace as everything they did would eventually be specified by managers. This has been called the separation of conception and execution of work, but, perhaps even worse for the worker, Marx predicted that the complexity of most jobs would steadily reduce as human skills become increasingly embedded in the machinery of production, leading to the so-called deskilling of work (Wood, 1987). In combination, both tendencies create work where discretion is driven out as jobs become simpler and managers redouble their efforts to control the activities of workers. Moreover, although both these tendencies were conceived with reference to industrial work, we have also become familiar with the threat of the deskilling of service work as artificial intelligence is used to replace even the most skilled knowledge-based work.

Surveillance as managerial control The implications that the separation of conception and execution of work in combination with deskilling have for an orthodox understanding of surveillance at work are obvious: both are principally deployed in an attempt to resolve the problem of the indeterminacy of labour as an indispensable part of the imposition of managerial control. Prior to the real subordination of labour, the role of overseers or supervisors was thus quite literally to watch employees to make sure they were behaving appropriately, even though the supervisor themselves might not have known what exactly their subordinates were supposed to be doing work-wise from moment to moment (Edwards, 1979). Once the real subordination of labour has been achieved, however, surveillance—now often incorporated into the technology of production— could focus on minute aspects of performance to determine whether specified work tasks had been correctly performed at the right tempo (Edwards, 1979). Here using surveillance to control the activities of workers is more than just an end in itself; it is a means of closing the gap between the workers’ potential to work and the actual work they do. In short, it is not using surveillance to subordinate workers just for the sake of subordination (for there are surely other more brutal and immediate ways of doing that) but using surveillance to subordinate the interests of workers to the interests of capital by intensifying work. Interestingly, as we saw in the previous chapter, Jeremy Bentham had already anticipated this subtle change in the role of surveillance at work when he realized that his inspection principle had to be expanded from its narrow focus on individual obedience in a basic prison setting to a broader focus on the wide range of activities involved in job performance in the social setting of a workplace. Satisfying this desire to ensure that workers work at, or close to, their capacity for as long as possible is, in effect, common to most efforts to use surveillance as a means of improving individual and organizational performance,

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regardless of whether this is seen to serve the interests of a few capitalists or the interests of all but an incorrigible minority of wilfully disruptive recalcitrants (Sewell and Barker, 2006). This is a prime example of the negative heuristic of surveillance I identified in Chapter 2 in that it is aimed, at least from an LPT perspective, at protecting the managers’ monopoly over the conception of work. This is the case, as we shall see in a moment, even at the expense of potential yet unforeseen improvements in productivity. Think of it like this. If, as a manager, I spend hours analysing your job in order to tell you exactly what you ought to be doing at any particular moment and you fail to follow my instructions then you are being disobedient, even if you have found a way to improve upon my instructions. Here surveillance is aimed at identifying these instances of disobedience so that those who step out of line can be disciplined. This preserves the status quo by shoring up my managerial status as the expert on how the organization is to be run, but it is based on the assumption that I really do know best. It is possible, however, to conceive of using surveillance in pursuit of a general improvement in productivity along the lines of the positive heuristic of surveillance I also identified in Chapter 2. In this scenario, as a manager I may still analyse your job and tell you what I think you ought to be doing, but, if you find a way of improving on my instructions, I am much more interested in discovering what you’ve done and making that knowledge available to others like you who are doing a similar job. I am certainly more interested in this aspect of work than disciplining you for being disobedient. Here I still want surveillance to identify the instances where you deviate from my instructions, but, if they are improvements, then they are a cause for celebration rather than opprobrium. The attractiveness of this positive heuristic began to emerge when there was an explicit ideological move away from Scientific Management and towards what became known in the 1990s as “empowerment” where a proliferation of prescriptive approaches to management advocated that organizations should begin to see the ingenuity and discretion of its workforce as a resource to be exploited rather than as a source of disruption and disobedience (Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992b). It was this dual nature of surveillance at work—its ability to identify both negative and positive deviations from managerially determined standards of performance and norms of behaviour—that first piqued my interest in the topic. In the next section, I shall go on to demonstrate how my thinking on this has developed over the past two decades.

Dealing with the indeterminacy of labour through surveillance at work Imagine an ideal world where there was no structural conf lict at work based on different interests. Apart from the odd irrational or temperamental disagreement here and there, everyone who joins an organization is (or, at least, ought to be) animated by a common purpose: the success of the organization

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and their success in the organization ought to be perfectly aligned. This concept of “unitary” interests—we’re all in this together—seems platitudinous, but it has deep ideological roots. Although these sentiments can be traced back to ancient philosophy, in modern managerial thought my starting point is here in Australia with the musings of Elton Mayo; better known as the founding force behind the extraordinarily inf luential Human Relations School, first at Northwestern University and later Harvard. Mayo was born in Adelaide, but began his academic career as a lecturer in philosophy and ethics at the University of Queensland where in 1919 he published his first substantial work, Democracy and Freedom. This was a treatise on political theory that contained a trenchant critique of Australia’s unique industrial relations institutions. In 1904 the newly federated Australian Commonwealth had created a system of compulsory arbitration as a legally binding system for resolving industrial disputes. This infuriated Mayo, who wrote, So far as arbitration encourages the mutual discussion of difficulties between masters and men, the effect is excellent.… But the notion of an Arbitration Court goes far beyond this.… Its primary assumption is that the interests of masters and men cannot be made identical, that the intervention of an intermediary is necessary in the general interest. This assumption serves in practice to stereotype the breach and to multiply the causes of dispute; arbitration courts have the effect of recognising and legalising social disintegration. (Mayo, 1919: 47–48) For Mayo, spontaneous rational debate between employers and employees was to be encouraged (to be fair, I am assuming that his use of the terms “masters” and “men” simply ref lects the conventions of the time), but the intrusion of third parties like unions, let alone the state, into such relations was to be abhorred because this only served to undermine a meeting of minds over what ought to be quite obviously unitary interests. In fact, Mayo went as far as to say an employee who does not recognize that their interests are coincident with those of their employer was suffering from a delusion bordering on mental illness. Compare this with Frederick Taylor’s characterization of soldiering. Here it was perfectly rational for an employee to pursue their own interests at the expense of their employers. These contrasting positions on the status of divergent and convergent interests between employees and employers reveal one of the fundamental fault lines of management theory and practice since the early twentieth century, and they have been played out in debates about surveillance at work—especially whether surveillance is a technocratic and impartial form of monitoring or whether it is a form of subordination to the interests of capitalist organizations. In particular, this deeply buried fault line heaves into view around the question: what is the problem that workplace surveillance is trying to solve? In other words, what is its purpose and what are its consequences (Sewell and Barker, 2006)?

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These questions weren’t at the forefront of my mind when in 1990 I walked into the Japanese-owned television factory I mentioned in the preface to this book, but they soon became apparent when the full extent of its employee surveillance system was revealed. This factory became known as Kay Electronics (Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992a, 1992b), and Barry Wilkinson and I were there at the height of interest in Total Quality Management (TQM) and Just-in-Time ( JIT) production (Oliver and Wilkinson, 1988). TQM encouraged manufacturers to focus their attention on eliminating product quality problems introduced during the production process while JIT encouraged manufacturers to synchronize supply chains to minimize the amount of inventory they held at each stage of the production process. Although these principles have become ubiquitous across the manufacturing and service sectors, at the time they were novel in the United Kingdom and money was readily available to research their impact on the British industrial and service economies. Introduced under the guise of a production quality control system, Kay’s surveillance system used the unique features of the product—insertion by hand of discrete electronic components onto a printed circuit board—to identify the individuals who had introduced quality errors into the production processes. These errors were doubly undesirable in that they not only had to be rectified but, in doing this, it also interrupted the smooth f low of JIT production by causing partially completed boards to pile up while starving the final television assembly stages of one of their key components. Being one of the few stages of production yet to be fully automated, the potential for human error to disrupt the entire factory upstream and downstream led Kay Electronic to pay close attention to individuals whose performance was deemed to be unsatisfactory. This was achieved through a “traffic light” system above every workstation (at the time I was unaware of Owen’s Silent Monitor we encountered in Chapter 2). A green card hanging above your head meant that you had made no insertion errors during the previous shift while a red card meant you had made five or more errors (a very small proportion of the many thousands of insertions you may have made in that time). In between, an amber card was reserved for those who had made between one and four mis-insertions. These errors were identified using electronic testing equipment that could identify the wrongly inserted component and, thus, the person who had done this. Conceivably these errors could have been f lagged in real time and the traffic lights could have been fully automated and synchronized with the production system, but the management at Kay chose to stick with manual cards that were to be updated on a daily basis where they formed the main topic of conversation at the daily team meetings held before each shift started. At this stage we need to ref lect on how this relatively simple and easily implemented form of production quality management can be considered as surveillance at work as we have come to think of it in this book. At the time it struck me as a form of “electronic Panopticon”—a term which, as I noted

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earlier, has been regularly used before and since (de Gaudemar, 1982; Webster and Robins, 1986; Zuboff, 1988; Lyon, 1993; Long et al., 2010)—and prima facie it certainly does appear to rely on Bentham’s inspection principle, at least in terms of the negative heuristic of preventing undesirable divergences from managerially imposed production quality standards. By way of an example, consider the effect of the red cards. If the whole team (usually between 18 and 22 personnel, depending the particular production “cell” involved) was on green from the previous day, save for one person who was on red, this would reveal the single individual whose performance had failed to meet expectations. These expectations were indeed set by managers who, on the basis of the kind of careful analysis Frederick Taylor would no doubt have been proud of, determined the sequence and rate at which the workers needed to insert their components which, in turn, set the speed of conveyer belt carrying the printed circuit board from one work station to another. Of course, there could be a perfectly valid reason for a red card on a one-off basis, but if the same person was regularly on red it would suggest a more serious and persistent failure on the part of that individual. At Kay this was dealt with by withdrawing the repeat offender from the line for “retraining,” but eventually that person could be dismissed if their performance failed to reach the required standard upon their return to the production line. Importantly, the managers at Kay Electronics thought that the mere threat of regularly being on a red card and, consequently, being exposed as a poor worker to be withdrawn from the line and “retrained” was sufficient to motivate its employees to strive for perfection in terms of production quality. In this way, it can be seen as an attempt to reform the failings of the individual worker in much the same way that Bentham thought his Panopticon would reform offenders or instil good work habits in the indolent. There is, however, an aspect of the surveillance at Kay Electronics that was not anticipated by Bentham, and it relates to the positive heuristic I previously mentioned. This revolves around the role of the amber card in addressing the indeterminacy of labour problem envisaged by LPT. If you were a manager trying to minimize the gap between labour power and actual labour, you certainly wouldn’t want everyone to be on green all the time as it would suggest that the performance standards you have set are not really testing the capacity of your workers. Conversely, you wouldn’t want everyone to be on red all the time, as it would suggest that you have set unrealistically high performance expectations and you have a poor understanding of what your workforce is really capable of. Ideally you would want workers to be on amber most of the time, as it suggests the whole shift is being tested in terms of its capacity and endurance while staying within acceptable qualitycontrol limits. Imagine then a scenario where the entire shift is on amber, save for one person who is on green. This suggests that that person has found a way of exceeding the expectations you have set as a manager. What is it this person has done to surpass the standards you have set in the best Scientific Management style? Are they simply more dexterous than their peers or have

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they discovered a way of doing the job that you just didn’t see yourself? If you were Elton Mayo, you would hope that the person on green would spontaneously share that knowledge with you and with their peers because it was in everyone’s interests to do so, but if you were Frederick Taylor you would be convinced that the innovative employee would simply keep this knowledge to themselves and reap the benefits by not working as hard as they could. Either way, revealing this positive deviation from your managerial standards of performance is a form of surveillance that goes beyond the disciplinary and reformatory instincts of Bentham’s inspection principle to reveal opportunities for work intensification that can, in turn, be used to raise the work expectations imposed on everyone in the team. When I first saw this traffic light system in operation at Kay Electronics I initially assumed the system had been directly imported from the company’s Japanese plants, but it turned out that it had been devised by its production engineers as a unique response to the special circumstances of the British plant. In particular, they thought that, unlike their Japanese counterparts, British workers weren’t liable to share their intimate knowledge of the production process spontaneously and needed the surveillance system to coax them into being more forthcoming (Sewell, 1996). Their rationale for thinking in this way was that Japanese culture was more collectivist than British culture and, as a consequence, Japanese workers didn’t need external reminders of the need to share the fruits of their ingenuity with their fellow workers. The British, in contrast, simply couldn’t be trusted to do the same (Sewell, 1996). Whether this is true or not in the strictest sense is almost immaterial, but the perception on the part of the plant’s senior management (which included both British and Japanese managers) that Japanese workers could be trusted to do the right thing while their British counterparts could not be was very strong. It also drew attention to the social nature of work that Bentham was beginning to grapple with when he was adapting his inspection principle to workhouses and workshops after the failure of the prison Panopticon to take off as a commercial venture, and it was the very thing that prompted me to consider how managerial surveillance—as a vertical form of scrutiny (in the figurative sense of over-sight)—interacted with peer surveillance as a horizontal form of scrutiny (Sewell, 1998). This last point is important because ideas of empowerment and especially teamwork were very much in vogue at that time, and they seemed antithetical to the intensification of surveillance at work.

Vertical and horizontal surveillance at work My interest in the perhaps unexpected combination of teamwork—as a central feature of the empowerment literature so popular in the 1990s—was piqued by the warnings of people like Poster (1990), Lyon (1994), and Bogard (1996) that surveillance was displacing bureaucracy as the principal mode of rationalization and control in the workplace. Their pessimism stood in

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stark contrast to the messages of empowerment, devolved responsibility, and the widespread reversal of repressive workplace control structures that were popular at the same time. This had been anticipated by Barley (1990), who observed that teams were becoming the basic unit of work organization. For advocates, this represented a reversal of the rationalization of Taylor’s Scientific Management and held out the promise of mutual gain. Although teams were supposed to provide a means of working “smarter, not harder,” working within the tradition of LPT I set out to explore whether the coexistence of surveillance and teamwork created a climate where the surreptitious intensification of work was simultaneously accompanied by a sense that it is actually more fulfilling (Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992a, 1992b). A popular management guru at the time posed the question, “How do you achieve control without controlling?” (Senge, 2006). Perhaps he should have asked a variant of this question, “How do you achieve control without appearing to control?” Barker (1993) had shown that much of the control of teamwork was unobtrusive. He coined the term “concertive” control to suggest that team members (usually unwittingly) conspired in their own subjugation, and I examined the role that surveillance played in this process. This was an attempt to weigh the preoccupations of the mainstream social psychological literature of the time that dominated the business and management journals (with its focus on surveillance as implicitly neutral monitoring) against critical sociology which associated the operation of surveillance with the exercise of power (cf. Ball and Margulis, 2011). Here I drew on Poster’s (1990) argument that the experience of working life was becoming subject to a “mode of information” where domination was now legitimated through language and symbols derived from new forms of classification that were “electronically wrapped.” By scrutinizing more and more of our everyday activities, surveillance was increasingly placing us in categories in terms of criminality, consumption, health, or work that were comprehensible to scholars and workforce or management alike. Memorably, Poster called this the Superpanopticon as it was no longer constrained by the physical architecture of the individual prison, school, hospital, or workplace. Although this implies integration and orchestration (perhaps by some shadowy elite), at the time surveillance was still much more piecemeal than Poster contended, being limited to discrete social settings like individual workplaces. Nevertheless, it was still only an incremental extension of existing practices rather than a whole new way of doing things. In this way, the unobtrusive aspects of traditional bureaucratic organization like rules, standards of conduct, and other forms of administrative integration (Herman, 1982) were augmented (rather than replaced) by “ideational” control based on the creation of shared meaning. This, in turn, reduced the need for strict hierarchy and explicit rule-governed procedure (Rosen and Baroudi, 1992), thus paving the way for the adoption of a form of organization where the teams themselves, rather than managers, exercised a limited degree of responsibility for the conception and execution of work. I called this the “double-bind of discretion”

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in that, in loosening managerial control over the day-to-day running of the workplace, you as the manager ran the risk of team members using this newfound freedom for their own purpose—a collective instantiation, if you will, of the indeterminacy of labour associated with LPT (Sewell, 1998). Of course, the answer to this lay in ensuring that teams used their newfound discretion for the good of the organization, and this is where surveillance came in. Here the challenge of working through the negative and positive heuristics takes on a more complex form in that team members can not only collude to work slower but can also collude to work faster and accrue the benefits of that to themselves, perhaps by making their quotas early and idling for the rest of the day. Managers thus first have to prevent the team acting in concert to avoid meeting basic, externally imposed production targets (e.g., a daily production quota) even if the team is left to its own devices to work out how to do this. If the team does then find a better way of doing things and can actually exceed those targets, then managers must ensure that it shares with the rest of the organization what is effectively the generation of new knowledge about the production process. In short, this is a recognition in LPT terms that managers do not have a monopoly on the conception of work but, to guarantee the organization can capitalize on the resource derived from the ingenuity of the team’s members, those same managers must devise some way of controlling the team, especially if ideational and normative means fail to deliver the desired effect (as they frequently do—see Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995). My crucial observation based on the study of Kay Electronics (Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992a, 1992b) was that reconciling the double-bind of discretion under teamwork could be achieved via the strange chimera of an interaction between vertical or external managerial scrutiny and horizontal scrutiny within the team. Although, to my continuing disappointment, my coining of the term Chimerical control to describe this has never really caught on, the analysis still stands up. Returning to LPT, to be effective traditional managerial control must satisfy three conditions: (1) it must involve the direction of work tasks in that managers should be able to break down the conception of work into a series of discrete tasks that can then be executed by subordinates; (2) managers must then be able to evaluate whether or not those tasks have been executed satisfactorily; and (3) on the basis of that evaluation, managers must be able to invoke a mode of discipline based on punishment or reward (Sewell, 1998). Under the form of teamwork used at Kay, however, its managers loosened the first condition by ceding some limited responsibility for the conception and execution of work to the team but still retained a way of evaluating the team’s activities and disciplining its individual members. This was achieved by the rather prosaic but remarkably effective quality control system I mentioned earlier. Although the traffic lights were only the most obvious outward manifestation of the vertical surveillance, its real genius lay in its ability to identify those who were exceeding performance standards and those who were failing to meet them.

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This form of vertical scrutiny could operate independently from, but was directly related to, the horizontal scrutiny we also found operating in the teams at Kay (Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992a, 1992b). Imagine a team member who has devised a simple innovation that makes their job easier or quicker. Perhaps it might be a reordering of the sequence of component insertion or, if they were particularly dexterous, two-handed insertion of those components. This would, of course, be picked up by the traffic light system through a green card for they had found a way of reliably inserting components quicker than required given the speed of the line that day. If managers intervened at this stage to direct these innovations to become the new way of working it would seriously undermine any claim the team had that it was autonomous. Thus, to preserve the team’s nominal autonomy but still ensure it used its discretion to pursue continuous improvement, the team itself had to identify the source of improvement and make sure others took it up. Again, this was achieved with reference to the public display of quality information supplied by the traffic lights which drew wider attention to an individual member’s performance. Consequently, every team member could evaluate their own and their peers’ performance based on the vertical surveillance which legitimated this peer group scrutiny and led to the establishment of the team’s own internal methods of sanction and reward (cf. Barker, 1993). Indeed, there were no external individual or even team-level rewards such as bonuses for finding ways to improve the speed and quality of work. Rather, daily team meetings where daily production targets were set became the forum for members to express approval or disapproval of individual behavioural or performance standards, thus creating a setting where the team rewarded or sanctioned its own members through either public celebration or humiliation. Here exposing an individual’s poor performance to the scrutiny of the team may motivate them to improve on their own efforts, but it is the exposure of higher performers that held the key to continuous improvement at Kay under Chimerical control. As social psychologists (e.g., Hopkins, 1964) have long contended, the concerted action of groups is not just an issue of conforming to norms (i.e., accepting the collective beliefs and expectations of the team) but complying with those norms as well (i.e., actually behaving in accordance with team beliefs and expectations). At Kay, the necessary degree of compliance was achieved through a highly localized form of normalization akin to Foucault’s concept of Governmentality. Historically, this involved a shift away from dealing with troublesome citizens on a case-by-case basis and towards preventing deviancy through a generalized process of “policing” and “normalization.” Thus, a constant supervision of individuals by someone who exercised power over them—a schoolteacher, foreman, physician, psychiatrist, prison warder—and who, so long as he exercised power, had the possibility of both supervising and constituting knowledge concerning those he supervised. A knowledge that now was no longer about determining

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whether something had occurred; rather, it was about whether an individual was behaving as he should, in accordance with the rule or not, and whether he was progressing or not. This new knowledge was no longer organized around the questions: “Was this done? Who did it?” It was no longer organized in terms of presence and absence, of existence and non-existence; it was organized around the norm, in terms of what was normal or not, correct or not, in terms of what one must do or not do. (Foucault, 2000a: 59) Here governmentality operates, first through the creation of categories of desirable conduct and then, through surveillance, the policing of the population to identify those who lie outside these categories. Misfits, recalcitrants, mad people, and such like would then receive the attention of the normalizing instruments of modern society, such as therapy, discipline, or medical treatment. Extending these principles to the workplace, in addition to the common types of classification that formed the basis for the intersubjective relations of Kay’s team members (gender, ethnicity, age, etc.), vertical surveillance added one more in the form of performance levels. Team members were able to compare themselves with their colleagues on an ostensibly rational basis, simply by glancing at the stark, simplified, and public displays of personal performance data. The power of this normalization to act on the subjectivity of team members was starkly expressed by the following statement. OK, so no one likes to have a red card hanging above their head but it’s when you see other people with red cards when yours is green that it really gets to you. (Kay employee, quoted in Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992a: 110) What caused such offense was not that an individual’s performance might drop below expectation on a few occasions but that others were seen to fail the team continually. The combined display of individual quality performance and other indicators, like absenteeism, enabled the team to identify those members who “where letting the side down” in minute detail, as well as those who were “showing up” the rest. This vivid and simultaneous juxtaposition of the negative and positive heuristic created a climate in which a horizontal disciplinary force, based on peer scrutiny, operated throughout the team, as members sought to identify and prevail upon those who were jeopardizing its overall performance while simultaneously trying to emulate those who could show the way to even better performance. This disciplinary force was clearly evident in the daily team meeting, but it was also evident in the less public forms of peer-group pressure that team members exerted. These closely resembled the pressures Barker (1993) had earlier identified in teamwork as the features of concertive control, including gentle persuasion, more forceful exhortation, or even verbal bullying and other types of

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intimidation. When minimum production quotas are continuously being re-established around the highest performer in the group, then peer pressure takes on a particular urgency. With few externally derived rules to moderate this intersubjective behaviour, the forces of normalization can take on any form a team considers necessary to ensure an acceptable level of compliance. Although normative and ideational controls may well establish the need to strive for improvement, the combination of vertical and horizontal surveillance is likely to create the circumstances where a team’s own intersubjective dynamics increase the likelihood that the benefits of its own innovations ultimately accrue to the organization.

Thinking about the “two faces” of surveillance at work Why surveillance rarely works as well as we think An early criticism of the ideas Barry Wilkinson and I were developing about surveillance at work and its relationship to the control of the labour process was that we exaggerated the effectiveness of managerial control and conveyed an image of the workplace where employee resistance was not just futile but was effectively extirpated (e.g., Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995; Knights and McCabe, 1998, 2000). To a certain extent the criticism was a fair one for we didn’t dwell much on the way the surveillance at Kay failed to deliver on its promises or was circumvented, whether this was intentional or not. Still, remembering Foucault’s (1982b) edict that where there is power there is resistance, we were always cognizant that Kay’s system had limits and shortcomings. Indeed, one thing we know about surveillance in all its forms is that it rarely lives up to its billing (see Chapter 8). It is the fate of surveillance, no matter how sophisticated it might be, to be an eternal disappointment in terms of its oft-repeated promise to deliver total conformity and compliance when it comes to rules and social norms. In this sense, my interest was why the managers at Kay had invested so much time and effort in developing their response to the rather prosaic challenge of quality control and teamwork in a relatively insignificant British television factory. This was especially so given that, even in the early 1990s, it should have been easy enough to automate the assembly process. I always thought the reason given by Kay’s managers—that the British workforce simply weren’t as committed to furthering the interests of the company as their Japanese counterparts—was a rather trite response (even if they really did believe it themselves). This prompted me to think about the way that increased surveillance is legitimated in the name of social harmony and collective interests, not only at work but across societies more generally. I thought this was all the more pressing given that we have come to place so much faith in the ability of surveillance to solve so many social problems. A particularly pertinent example comes to mind. As I was writing this chapter I was living through an extreme response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Melbourne involving public health measures that would not have

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been out of place during a Medieval plague. We were confined to our homes for weeks on end and were only allowed to go out once a day for four reasons: for one hour’s exercise per day, to purchase food, to give care to others, or to seek medical treatment. Even if we did have a legitimate reason to leave our homes, we were not allowed to travel more than 5 km and a strict 8 p.m. curfew was enforced. All the time though we were informed that tracking and tracing people infected with the virus was being aided by a smartphone app called COVID-Safe, and politicians from the Prime Minister down intoned the dire consequence that would await us if every citizen did not download it immediately. Responses quickly cohered around two themes: arguments that it was a monstrous and crude attempt by the state to subjugate its citizens stood in stark contrast to arguments that it was the only way to protect the community from being ravaged by a terrible new disease. There was, to be blunt, little nuanced middle ground. It soon turned out, however, that this app had not revealed one instance of potential exposure to an infected person despite being in operation for many months. Indeed, all the tracking and tracing that was done involved good old-fashioned techniques like actually visiting infected people’s homes and asking them to remember where they had been and who they had met. So, to paraphrase Dr Johnson rather loosely, to me surveillance has always seemed to be like a dog walking on its hind legs; it’s not so much that it does well what it claims to do, but that it does it at all! What is much more interesting is to understand why we place so much faith in surveillance despite its obvious shortcomings. The experience of the COVID-Safe app is a particularly vivid reminder on the “two faces” of surveillance I touched on in Chapters 1 and 2. The debate about whether to download the app was highly polarized at the time, with many arguing that it should be rejected as a coercive intrusion into our lives that serves the interests of the few against the many and others arguing in its favour that it should be embraced to protect the interests of the many against a malign and disruptive few. To expand on these two faces as they pertain to surveillance and the labour process it is helpful to reconsider the work of Alvin Gouldner. When thinking in these terms, one of Alvin Gouldner’s most interesting and sustained projects was, as he described it, to undertake a “Marxist critique of Marxism.” By this he meant that we must see Marxism as an historical and social product with its own internal contradictions (Gouldner, 1973), and his discussion of bureaucracy as the “metaphysical pathos of modernity” (Gouldner, 1955) was an early example of this kind of critique. It is important to remember, when it came to imagining how we might organize human activity on a large scale, for much of the twentieth century bureaucracy was the only show in town. For example, even the Soviet Union embraced bureaucracy as a neutral and technocratic way of organizing, but, with the emergence of its self-serving elites, it also appeared to be a perfect example of Michels’ (1915) “Iron Law of Oligarchy.” This apparent contradiction in a nominally Communist society—that a political class instated to serve the

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masses ends up serving itself—no longer seems so shocking, however, when we reconsider Weber’s warning that all relations in bureaucratic organizations are, at their heart, relations of power . This observation led Gouldner (1955) to historicize bureaucracy by identifying two ways of understanding its purpose and consequences. These were aligned with what he called the Liberal and Radical ideological and intellectual traditions in the United States, respectively. The former considered bureaucracy to be a legitimate means of exercising power by a few to serve the interests of the many while the latter considered bureaucracy to be an exploitative means of exercising power by the few to serve the interests of the even fewer (i.e., capitalists). Gouldner’s identification of these Liberal and Radical traditions served as the inspiration for my work with James Barker (Sewell and Barker, 2006) and our reconsideration of the organization of work under surveillance. In particular, we took the common invocation of the Panopticon in these circumstances to be what White (1973) called an “inaugural gesture” that provides researchers with a memorable way of reconsidering Gouldner’s metaphysical pathos of modernity (cf. Rose and Miller, 1992). Foucault (2000b) clarified his primarily figurative understanding of the Panopticon by showing how we use it to convey the almost compulsive desire to know all there is to know about people and then rely on this knowledge to regulate their behaviour (see also Hacking, 1983; Marks, 2000). The operational logic of the Panopticon suggests that the need to direct an employee’s activities exclusively and continuously towards achieving an organization’s goals is satisfied through the direct and immediate disciplinary effect of surveillance rather than through a reliance on abstract and formal rules enforced through bureaucratic means (Rosen and Baroudi, 1992). This particular depiction of the few watching the many sits well with longstanding preoccupations about the almost limitless ability of information technology to provide constant surveillance of citizens or employees (Poster, 1990; Lyon, 1994; Bogard, 1996; Alge et al., 2004); technology that was, of course, unavailable in Weber’s day. In this way, the Panopticon is a vivid metaphor of power and domination in an organizational setting that is more in tune with the experience of people who are increasingly conscious of the intrusion of surveillance into many aspects of their working lives. That is, the Panopticon captures both the ideal of universal and continuous surveillance in a compelling manner and creates the expectation that such “total” surveillance is a possibility (Fludernik, 2019). This spurs us on to pursue the ideal though various technological means (Heidegger, 1977), even if the practical results are often disappointing. Not that this quest always gives rise to a regressively constraining social dynamic for surveillance can conceivably protect us by preventing lapses into irrationality and chaos by contributing to the maintenance of order, but the pursuit of this degree of social control nevertheless necessarily involves the exercise of power, regardless of the political character of the regime that presses it into service (Foucault, 2000c). This is why it is so important to address the normative question: when considering surveillance at work, in whose name are

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power, domination, and control exercised? We may know how surveillance works (or, at least, is supposed to work), but we also need to establish why it is enacted in the first place. This is why James Barker and I addressed the question of how Radical and Liberal discourses continue to exert an epistemological inf luence on researchers who pursue characteristic research programs in surveillance at work. In this sense, we claimed that surveillance had replaced bureaucracy as the new Metaphysical Pathos of Modernity. The radical discourse of coercive surveillance at work We contended that, within a particular community of scholars, discussion of surveillance at work displayed a certain “family resemblance” (Wittgenstein, 1958) to Gouldner’s radical discourse of organizational control because it presents surveillance, using the terminology of LPT, as a means of ensuring that the effort expended by employees gets as close as possible to their notional maximum capacity to work. In this way, the employee is problematized as an individual who is duty-bound to act in a certain way. Thus, managers are moved to coerce employees into doing something they would otherwise not do—that is, to work as hard as they can all the time, even though such hard work is not obviously in their own interests. The few watching the many is justified because it enables a small number of managers to exercise control over a larger and potentially unruly mass of employees through the monitoring of individual behaviour (Rushing, 1966). The prospect of constant surveillance is attractive to managers because it minimizes the opportunities for employees to avoid working as hard as they really can (the negative heuristic) while picking up innovations the employees may make themselves (the positive heuristic), even in circumstances that transcend the organizational arrangements traditionally associated with the separation of conception and execution. Consequently, a discourse of coercion focuses on two main roles: (1) the activities of managers who wish to guarantee the constant visibility of employees in order to maximize their effort, and (2) the activities of employees who wish to avoid this scrutiny in order to minimize their subordination to managers. Thus, managers become agents of oppression, and, in this respect, the discourse of coercion concentrates on how surveillance allows the more powerful to dominate the less powerful. From this position on the purpose of organizational surveillance, empirical studies within this research program tends to focus on identifying its localized disciplinary effects. In particular, researchers direct their attention towards how specific systems of surveillance track employees’ positions in time and space and how managers use the data generated by these systems to expose those employees who are working “hard” (and who are, therefore, setting an example to others) and those who are not “pulling their weight” (and who should, therefore, be subjected to retraining or dismissal—Sewell, 1998). On the basis of such comparative performance monitoring, individuals may come to be seen (by themselves and by others) as “lazy” or “industrious,”

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“compliant” or “recalcitrant,” “normal” or “deviant,” and so forth. Importantly, managers’ efforts aimed at perfecting control through surveillance and employees’ efforts at avoiding that control are seen as equally rational organizational behaviours (Fleming and Sewell, 2002). These efforts become an escalating “battle of wits” in which mangers devise ever more sophisticated surveillance and employees use their ingenuity to circumvent it. Setting out this coherent position on the coercive purpose of organizational surveillance and its consequences drawing attention to the family resemblances helped us to place research (e.g., Garson, 1988; Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992a, 1992b; McKinlay and Taylor, 1996; Sewell, 1998; Marx, 1999; Bain and Taylor, 2000; Ball and Wilson, 2000; Thompson, 2005; Ball et al., 2016) in the radical tradition. Generally speaking, by being critical of the way in which surveillance primarily serves the interests of an organizational minority (be it a “managerial elite” or, ultimately, the “capitalist class” itself ), the discourse of coercion has informed research that is aligned with the critical thrust of LPT: documenting the extension of surveillance into new areas of organizational life, closing down the spaces in which workers could previously escape the gaze of managers, and exerting its disciplinary effect in circumstances where physical oversight or bureaucratic control are deemed to be impossible or undesirable. This move signals the prospect of work intensification and the erosion of employees’ autonomy as they submit to the will of managers. An important implication of this radical critique is that, if left uncorrected, the expansion and perfection of surveillance will ultimately lead to the complete subjugation of all employees who come to recognize the futility of dissent and end up supine and self-disciplining; a characteristically dystopian vision that this perspective on surveillance shares with other critical representations of complete organizational domination (e.g., Goffman, 1961). Nevertheless, this line of research also suggests avenues of resistance that are perhaps better suited to countering surveillance than blatant sabotage, industrial action, or other directly confrontational practices of traditional radicalism (Fleming and Sewell, 2002). For example, a subtle understanding of the practical limitations of surveillance can reveal the “blind spots” in a network of control; areas where employees can escape the gaze of mangers, thus providing them with space to manoeuver (Knights and McCabe, 1998). The liberal discourse of coercive surveillance at work In contrast to this radical research program, we went on to identify a liberal research program where the employee is problematized as an individual who has the potential to indulge in self-interested behaviour should they be so inclined and should they be left to their own devices (Sewell and Barker, 2006). Thus, surveillance at work (usually in the guise of individual performance monitoring) is deemed to be legitimate so long as: (1) it prevents antisocial individuals from taking advantage of the organization and their

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colleagues; (2) its operation is invested in the hands of impartial managers (Williamson, 1975); and (3) all members of the organization recognize both the reasonableness of surveillance as a course of action and trust in the impartially of those responsible for its operation. In this way surveillance is seen to be benign and protecting the interests of the majority of organizational members against the actions of a potentially disruptive or self-interested minority of employees (Rushing, 1966). This leads me to make three important observations. First, under this logic, anyone who objects to being placed under surveillance runs the risk of being labelled “irrational” or a “troublemaker” (Fleming and Sewell, 2002; cf. Mayo, 1919). Second, this research program ref lects the preoccupations of the social psychology literature on “monitoring”—that is, a focus on the technocratic and essentially disinterested nature of surveillance. Here critical attention homes in on issues such as the effective and equitable operation of surveillance in the name of “procedural fairness” and involves considerations such as ensuring data accuracy at the point of collection, maintaining data integrity and security over time, and respecting the prevailing standards of privacy (e.g.,  Stone and Stone, 1990; Eddy et al., 1999; Ambrose and Adler, 2000; Alge, 2001; Frayer, 2002; Moorman and Wells, 2003; Stanton and Weiss, 2003; McNall and Stanton, 2011; Alge and Hansen, 2014) rather than mounting a challenge to the basic legitimacy of the surveillance per se. Third, the rhetorically compelling nature of these first two points meant that liberally minded researchers often rely on them to legitimate claims that surveillance is (or, at least could be) essentially benign. Thus, surveillance may be deemed to be acceptable in some circumstance (say, when matters such as health and safety are at stake— Findlay and McKinlay, 2003) or where it can be used to turn the scrutiny back on managers through some form of “sousveillance” or “undersight” (Mann et al., 2003). For example, Mason et al. (2002) showed that work groups were able to make surveillance a “disclosure” mechanism that confirmed they had performed to expected standards; something that gave them an advantage in negotiating new production levels and rewards. Similarly, McKinlay and Taylor (1996), Ezzamel et al. (2001), and Button et al. (2003) reported that, in some circumstances, employees were able to use data related to their own performance to highlight the hypocrisy of managers who had high expectations of others but exempted themselves from the same obligations. In some respects, this strategy is hardly surprising: if you become aware of the disciplinary effects of the “calculability” of your own position (Clegg, 1989; Covaleski et al., 1998) then you are also likely to be aware that others—including those who are nominally your superiors—are themselves subject to similar forms of discipline. Thus, while being at odds with implacable opposition and repudiation, this strategy does allow for negotiations to take place around specific practices of surveillance that can then make recourse to legal injunctions (Mishra and Crampton, 1998; Frayer, 2002; Findlay and McKinlay, 2003) or cultural expectations such as privacy and mutual obligation (Stone and Stone, 1990).

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Surveillance at work and the future of labour process theory In this chapter I have charted my own personal journey from a rather literal interpretation of surveillance at work as an immanent Panopticon to a more figurative reading where the metaphorical Panopticon conveys the desire, if not the ability, to subsume all work activity under a totalizing rationalism. I believe this latter position is a more convincing way of accounting for the kinds of technological developments we have encountered in the twenty-first century that also allows LPT to retain its critical edge—remember, this theory was originally developed in the nineteenth century. Thinking of surveillance like this also reveals a contradiction at the heart of workplace domination—because these desires for total control, unwavering discipline, and complete obedience will always remain a fantasy rather than a practical reality, the more comprehensive and far-reaching surveillance becomes, the more spectacular are its failures. More broadly, and beyond the abject failure of individual initiatives like the COVID-Safe app I mentioned earlier, the limitations of workplace surveillance provide an important lesson for us as we are living in an era where numerous states are abandoning hard-fought and long-held civil liberties in the name of security. This is, of course, often pursued via the piecemeal and incremental march of surveillance. And when that surveillance fails (as it invariably does), the response is to impose even more restrictions on liberty. It is as if the failure of surveillance irresistibly compels us to do more of it, rather than making us question why it never lived up to its promises in the first place (Sewell and Barker, 2006—see Chapter 8)! We should also remember here the way that despots have always justified cruelty and repression the world over—so long as they are done in the name of protecting the masses against a disruptive minority then they are just fine. I wish to close this chapter by thinking about where LPT sits as a viable way of understanding the changing world of work. If we consider one of its central tenets—the indeterminacy of labour—this has usually been associated with traditional industrial work that involved both mental and manual labour. Harking back to Scientific Management, by denying the worker any room to exercise discretion, Frederick Taylor tried to create the circumstances where managers monopolized legitimate knowledge about the best way to organize work. Indeed, Taylor was only half-joking when he wished for workers who were “trained gorillas” (Sewell, 2005). In short, managers put in all the mental effort and workers were left to do physical toil. Under these conditions, the indeterminacy of labour was simply a question of physical effort—at any moment we are left to ponder whether employees really are working are hard as they can. Under conditions where managers do not try to enforce a monopoly over the conception of work—that is, where employees are expected to use their discretion to make improvements to work processes and products—the indeterminacy of labour now includes an explicitly cognitive element. In other words, the problem is expanded to include a

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consideration of whether employees are working their bodies and their minds as hard as they can? In this way, the labour process can be characterized as a problem of the “indeterminacy of knowledge” where surveillance is implicated in a process of expropriating cognitive faculties like imagination, ingenuity, problem-solving skills, and other forms of embodied knowledge (Sewell, 2005). This is likely to become all the more prominent as so-called knowledge work increases in importance. This brings me to another important point. I am often asked whether surveillance at work is ultimately coercive or protective? The answer is, of course, it can be one or the other or even both, depending on who you ask and under what circumstances you ask them. As any of the team members at Kay would have happily told you, the quality control system wasn’t primarily directed at them; it was directed at the team members who weren’t pulling their weight. And they would continue to say this right up to the point where the red card appeared above their head; the very moment that it became an unnecessary and unpleasant intrusion that undermined their status within the team. Meanwhile, managers would have sung the praises of the quality control system as an impartial tool to promote productivity, right up to the moment when team members turned around and said the data show that we’ve kept our side of the bargain but what have you done for us lately? More generally, an employee who directs their skills and expertise towards the continuous improvement of the production process is likely to be hailed by managers as a model corporate citizen (although some of that employee’s colleagues might think of them as a “rate-buster” or “company suck”). If, however, the employee used those very same skills to indulge in creating personal utility or even engage in sabotage then managers would condemn them as a disruptive and undesirable inf luence on others (although some of the employee’s colleagues might consider that employee to be a hero). The important point to note here is that what constitutes legitimate surveillance (and, consequently, what constitutes illegitimate surveillance) is bound up with an understanding of the wider interests of different parties in the organization. This is not, however, a simple Manichean moral dilemma although, prima facie, we might reasonably expect that talking about surveillance as being coercive ought to preclude talking about it as being protective. Indeed, the status of pursuing control through surveillance is always likely to be theoretically and empirically ambiguous, just as bureaucracy was before it. An interesting outcome of this ambiguity is that it actually creates the space for supporters of rival ways of seeing surveillance at work to coexist. These views are more likely to stand in an antinomian relationship to one another (Sperber and Wilson, 1986; Barley and Kunda, 1992; Trethewey, 1999), operating in parallel without obvious contradiction for most of the time—that is, although we may find surveillance intrusive and restrictive, we can still acknowledge (however grudgingly) that there may be occasions when it is able to protect us from the antisocial behaviour of others (and vice versa, of course). The net result is that we rarely have to confront the potential tension

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between coercion and protection and a crisis that forces us to decide one way or another may never eventuate. There may be times, however, when this tension will be felt most acutely; times when the contradictory character of these logically opposed views of coercion or protection may become more obvious (Trethewey, 1999). Faced with this antagonism, we are usually expected to decide whether surveillance is primarily coercive and should be resisted or primarily protective and should be supported (see Chapter 8). This is the great irony of workplace surveillance; one which we must bear in mind whether we are dyed-in-the-wool labour process theorists or management consultants designing a state-of-the-art workplace surveillance system. Before moving on to our next substantive topic, I wish to make one final observation. Although I have characterized this chapter as an attempt to chart a personal journey towards a more nuanced reading of Foucault’s Panopticon as it relates to surveillance at work, I have to acknowledge that there have been other voices that have counselled that we should leave Foucault behind as critic of a previous age, and, in order to make sense of the way of surveillance has seeped into so many aspects of our lives, we should embrace the work of one of his closest friends and intellectual allies—Gilles Deleuze (see Haggerty and Ericson, 2000; Lyon, 2010a; Burke, 2020). Although this was never an invitation—like Baudrillard’s (1998)—to “forget Foucault,” in the next chapter I explore the continuities and discontinuities that exist between Foucault’s and Deleuze’s takes on surveillance. This will help us to develop our understanding of surveillance in a way that takes into account the complex and interconnected ways in which it penetrates nearly everything we do while maintaining a healthy critical stance that recognizes power and domination go hand-in-glove with the minute scrutiny of our working lives.

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The surveillant assemblage at work Thinking about surveillance with Deleuze and Guattari

The work of Deleuze and Guattari is notoriously dense (some might say wilfully obscurantist) and, as such, is readily open to multiple readings. After all, anyone who exclaims that “God is a Lobster” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) is inviting a particular kind of attention! As the old joke goes, ask two people about Deleuze and Guattari and you get three opinions—at least! Yet we must persevere because their work has become the focus of a considerable amount of attention as we have sought ways of understanding the operation of increasingly complex and interconnected technologies of surveillance. This is hardly surprising. As we saw in the previous chapter, if we are looking to the Panopticon as a literal representation of today’s surveillance systems we are bound to be disappointed. According to Deleuze (1988), however, we should not be surprised at this as it is less a user’s manual for implementing surveillance and more of a map showing how a particular set of social relations play out. This leads Deleuze (1988) to describe Foucault as a cartographer, making topological maps showing the intensities of social relations rather than topographic maps showing their extent. As an introduction to this chapter, we need to consider brief ly how this distinction between intensive and extensive qualities as it is developed in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 1994) plays out through mapmaking. This will help us to think through later what Deleuze (1988) was driving at in his commentary on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Take a topographical map—the kind we would all be familiar with through high school geography—where the first two contour lines link points on the terrain that are at sea level and then 100 m above sea level. On the same map you could draw another line linking points that are exactly at 50 m above sea level to show the contour with greater precision. In terms of elevation, it’s not hard to grasp the vertical distance from a point at sea level to one at 50 m is exactly the same as the vertical distance from a point at 50 m to one at 100 m. In this way, height above sea level is what Deleuze considers to be an extensive property—a scalar measure that is intrinsically divisible and one we primarily experience quantitatively. A topological map, however, is only concerned with relative locations. Take the universally familiar map of the London Underground—Harry Beck’s “Tube” map dating back to 1931. From this we have no idea that the platform of London Bridge station is 23 m

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below sea level whereas the platform at Amersham station is 147 m above sea level. Yet we know from the map that the former is in Zone 1 and the latter is in Zone 9. We also know that we will encounter a very different kind of world if we get off the tube in Zone 1 than if we get off in Zone 9: Amersham is the terminal of a branch of the Metropolitan line, and, culturally speaking, semirural Buckinghamshire is a very long way indeed from central London. Of course, you could think of the zones as conveying a core–periphery relationship based on scalar quantities like physical distance or fare price structure, but, as I’m sure the residents of Amersham would agree, living there is not nine times less exciting than living in central London. Still, zoning like this has become a selling point for real estate agents the world over, and house owners will even lobby local authorities for their streets to be included in certain desirable zones. In this way the zones convey intensive differences between the places themselves and, by implication, the people and the institutions to be found in them (DeLanda, 2016). Importantly, we primarily experience these intensive differences qualitatively, opposing the culturally vibrant city to the sleepy suburb or the life of the urban hipster to that of the suburban soccer mom. Indeed, the only thing that is remotely topographical about the Tube map is the River Thames, but even this gives rise to the butt of many a comedian’s joke about intensive qualities like the cultural deprivations of life “south of the River.” The intention of this brief diversion into physical and cultural geography is so that for the rest of this chapter we can think of the Panopticon of Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1979) as the aforementioned topological map (Munro, 2000). It conveys qualitative differences between the experiences of the surveyor and the surveilled as well as something important about the nature of the relationship between those who inhabit the central tower and those in the peripheral cells. Even though Jeremy Bentham would no doubt disagree, the Panopticon is not, therefore, a “how to” guide for perfect surveillance, at least in Foucault’s terms. To use Deleuze’s description, it is a “diagram” of power relations. Of course, Deleuze is directly appropriating the word from Foucault, but he extends it in a way that helps us understand Foucault’s thinking about surveillance as a crucial transitional stage from his focus on archaeology to his focus on genealogy (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982). More on what Deleuze calls Foucault’s “new cartography” later, but, before I can develop this argument further, we need to consider how the work of Deleuze has usually been presented in the surveillance literature.

The rise of the surveillant assemblage The growth of interest in the work of Gilles Deleuze as it pertains to surveillance can be traced to an inf luential article by Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson published in 2000. They point out that many authors have admirably charted changes in the type and amount of surveillance we have been subjected to in the second half of the twentieth century (e.g., Gandy, 1993;

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Lyon, 1994; Bogard, 1996; Staples, 1997), but Haggerty and Ericson’s stated objective is to challenge the familiar theoretical preoccupations of this body of work—especially those supplied by George Orwell and Michel Foucault. In one sense such a re-evaluation was long overdue for, as early as the 1960s, it was obvious that the patchy, incoherent, and unreliable surveillance technologies of the modern state were coming together in a far-reaching, integrated, and more effective form (Packard, 1964). According to Haggerty and Ericson (2000), Orwell’s fears were misplaced because he thought the state would only care about what the professional classes were doing; the proletariat would be left to its own devices in some unedifying Hobbesian Bellum Omniun Contra Omnes. For Haggerty and Ericson, however, Foucault (1979) was really onto something by taking the modern state’s desire to control the entire population seriously in his wide-ranging theory of power. They even describe Foucault’s use of the Panopticon as “… a diagram for a new model of power which extended beyond the prison to take hold in other disciplinary institutions” (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000: 607). Here their use of the word “diagram” is much more colloquial than Deleuze’s own usage, and this is something we will have to take up in a moment. They do, however, note rather ruefully that Foucault didn’t engage with the twentieth-century technology of surveillance, as if it was some obstinate refusal on his part (cf. Murakami-Wood, 2007). This absence of any reference to contemporary surveillance technologies is their rationale for turning to Deleuze and Guattari (1987) for a take on the matter that intuitively fits our experience of pervasive and ubiquitous surveillance. Of all the potentially nebulous concepts they could have drawn on from the complicated (and sometimes, it must be said, delightfully baff ling) One Thousand Plateaus, they turn to the assemblage which consists of “…a multiplicity of heterogenous objects, whose unity comes solely from the fact that these items ‘work’ together as a functional entity” (Patton, 1994: 158; quoted in Haggerty and Ericson, 2000). This seems to suggest a search for a representational device much like our everyday understanding of a diagram that more accurately conveys the complexities of today’s surveillance technologies, and, from this, it would be easy to think of an assemblage as a topographical representation of surveillance practices; something you could potentially create as a likeness in the same way like you might create an icon—say, of a long dead saint—to stand in for something absent in a religious ceremony. When venerating the icon, you consider yourself to be in the physical presence of the object it depicts (much like, when drinking the wine of the Eucharist you are, through transubstantiation, considered to be drinking the actual blood of Christ). This is the kind of image Charles Sanders Peirce had in mind when he spoke of our conventional understanding of a diagram as an icon (Peirce, 1992; de Weydenthal, 2018). Here the problem becomes one of verisimilitude: is an assemblage a more detailed and accurate depiction of contemporary surveillance than the Panopticon? In other words, is an assemblage a more faithful icon of surveillance; more faithful than the alternatives, including (but not limited to) the

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Panopticon? I think this does a disservice to Foucault and Deleuze, especially if we carefully read the latter’s commentary on Discipline and Punish (Deleuze, 1988). Here Deleuze is not seeking to repudiate Foucault’s discussion of the Panopticon and replace it with something more fitting for today’s experience. In other words, he is not seeking a better icon of surveillance. On the contrary, Deleuze’s reading can best be seen as an attempt to demonstrate that the Panopticon—and, by extension, panopticism—is still an indispensable way of thinking about the nature of power and its effects in modern society, so long as we take into account the full implications of Foucault’s embrace of genealogy as a means of exploring “… the relationship between truth, theory, and values and the social institutions and practices in which they emerge” (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982: xxv).

Deleuze and surveillance If we had to draw on one concept from Deleuze which helps us to understand surveillance then, it is not the so much the assemblage as the diagram that is most apposite. This is because the surveillant assemblage as described by the likes of Haggerty and Ericson (2000), Hier (2002), and Burke (2020) is an epiphenomenon of the exercise of power rather than its prerequisite. In this way concrete assemblages are not the same as what Deleuze (1988) calls abstract diagrams of relations of power. The logical relationship between these objects is indicated as follows: “The abstract machine is like the diagram of an assemblage” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 0 100 D). Generally speaking, Deleuze’s conception of power is taken directly from Foucault: it is not a finite property to be divided up in a zero-sum economy of power (more for me is less for you) but a description of a productive relationship between parties that relies on strategies operating through “… dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings” (Foucault, 1979: 36; quoted in Deleuze, 1988). This clarification is important for, if surveillance was simply a prerequisite for the exercise of power, then all the powerless would need to do is take control of the technology—the means of surveillance, if you will—in the same way that a Marxist would advocate taking control of the means of production. Conversely, all the powerful would need to do to tighten their grip would be to widen and deepen the means of surveillance. This could be done by seeing where it is already operating most effectively, drawing up a blueprint, and using this as a plan to recreate a similarly effective surveillance system in another setting. Intuitively this suggests a way of making a surveillance assemblage a bigger, better, and more integrated superstructure of societal control by stealth. But this misunderstands the relationship between power and surveillance as conceived by Deleuze (and, of course, Foucault). Surveillance is not a scalar proxy measure for power; it is not an extensive quality. Nor is power concentrated in one place (like the Panopticon’s central tower or a CCTV control room); drawing on the dual meaning of the word “local,” power is, according to Deleuze

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(1988: 26), “… local because it is never global, but it is not local or localized because it is diffuse.” In other words, power acts on individual bodies in time and space, but it is not one aggregated extensive property that can be quantified by adding up its magnitude at all the individual points of action. Nor is it unidirectional for one of the most important yet most commonly misrepresented of Foucault’s contentions is that both the watcher and the watched are bound up in a mutually constitutive arrangement (Caluya, 2010). Thus, by alerting us to the topology of the Panopticon, Foucault was mapping out the intensive qualities of surveillance as it obtains in an array of particular power relationships. Hence Deleuze’s description of Foucault’s genealogy as a new form of cartography. Simply saying that today’s technology of surveillance doesn’t look anything like an eighteenth-century prison-machine misses the point of what this cartography is trying to achieve. According to Deleuze (1988), Foucault is presenting us with the Panopticon as a diagram of power, but this version of a diagram is very different from Haggerty and Ericson’s (2000) vernacular usage of the word. Here it is a way of considering what Deleuze saw as Foucault’s most important contribution from his archaeological period—that we should simultaneously consider discursive and non-discursive “practical formations”—through a genealogical prism. This has become known as the duality of discourse and the environment or “seeing” and “saying” (Hetherington, 2011)—for example, the way that we conceive of deviancy as category of behaviour (a primarily juridical discourse premised on containment and reform rather than revenge) and the way those who are called deviants are presented to the world (as prisoners in the physical environment we know as the prison). One is not reduced to another for talking about deviancy in a certain way doesn’t necessarily lead to a particular way of dealing with it through imprisonment in any determinist sense. Describing individuals as a threat to society doesn’t necessarily mean we will seek to contain and reform them through the prison system, even though Bentham saw this as the logically obvious choice. Indeed, there are a potentially infinite number of discourses available that can be materialized in a potentially infinite number of ways. For Deleuze, the crucial contribution of Discipline and Punish was to show that a new way of talking about citizens as productive or unproductive members of society became associated with new ways of organizing them in time and space. Thus, panopticism—of which the Panopticon was merely a diagram—is a means of combining the social and material in the desire to impose “… a particular conduct on a particular human multiplicity” (Deleuze, 1988: 34). Thus, as a diagram, the Panopticon gives us a way of sharing this desire by capturing its expression in the form of something he called an abstract machine that is “… the cause of concrete assemblages that execute its relations; and these relations between forces take place, ‘not above’ but within the very tissue of the assemblages they produce” (Deleuze, 1988: 37). Such abstract machines must first become socialized through the diagram before they can become realized materially through the components of an assemblage. Here realization “… is equally an integration, a

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collection of progressive integrations that are initially local and then become or tend to become global, aligning, homogenizing and summarizing relations between forces” (Deleuze, 1988: 37). This is in line with Foucault’s (2009) observation that, although disciplinary power emerged simultaneously and apparently independently within specific institutions like prisons or factories at the end of the eighteenth century, it eventually cohered at a more aggregated level through biopower and governmentality. Importantly, Foucault (2009) saw no discontinuity between his analysis of contained and localized relations in prisons and his analysis of populations at the level of state. In this sense, the Panopticon can be taken as an abstract machine with a characteristic topology serving as diagram of the same desire that is enacted through discipline at the level of the body and enacted through regulation at the level of the population (Foucault, 2009). Of course, an actual prison is much simpler than a complex modern society (although a prison is a society of sorts), and it is understandable that we might reach for something like an assemblage that ostensibly ref lects the latter’s complexity. Concrete assemblages, however, are not the same as abstract machines: the apparent simplicity or complexity of an assemblage is unrelated to the simplicity or complexity of the diagram that may have preceded it. In other words, the same simple diagram can, in Deleuze’s terms, inspire the simplest instantiations of localized discipline or the most complex instantiations of globalized regulation. Helpfully for us, Deleuze’s concept of the diagram serves as a methodological addendum to Foucault’s genealogy (Caluya, 2010). Thus, while the Panopticon can be taken as a diagram for the emergent modern state of the eighteenth century, previous societies were associated with different diagrams. Here we could imagine something like Hobbes’ Leviathan (with the sovereign acting as the head of a giant sea monster whose body was made up of the great multitude of subjects), Lovejoy’s (1936) “Great Chain of Being” (a descending hierarchy of naturally occurring social stations from God downward, with the King as God’s chosen representative on earth), or the varnas of the Hindu caste system as diagrams of competing sets of social relations that preceded the modern centralized state. Nevertheless, genealogy is not simply a matter of charting the complete and sudden replacement of one diagram by another as if it were a Kuhnian paradigm change where one scientific theory is rejected and replaced by another. It is, rather, more like the apparent continuity and gradualism we now associate with the Annales School of history. While a new diagram does, from time to time, emerge to challenge the status quo of saying and seeing, existing diagrams are constantly being modified, and it is only retrospectively that we can say that one has effectively displaced another. For Deleuze, this is what Foucault had achieved in Discipline and Punish through his discussion of the way we talk about deviancy and present it to the world, contrasting it ideographically through the famously grotesque public torture and execution of Damiens (whose regicide attempt on Louis XV and his subsequent execution in 1757 made him the last person to be drawn and quartered in France) and the ostensibly more humane

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confinement of Bentham’s the Panopticon. This is not, moreover, a linear story of progress for older diagrams do not completely disappear but remain in circulation, challenging and sometimes undermining newly accepted ways of doing things. As Foucault (1979: 216) noted, the transition from sovereign power to disciplinary power happened, not because the disciplinary modality of power has replaced all others; but because it has infiltrated the others, sometimes undermining them, sometimes linking them together, extending them and above all making it possible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant elements. For example, and despite the apparent rationality and humanity of penitence and reform, even today it is still hard for many of us not to think of imprisonment as a form of revenge and score-settling against those who dare to challenge the norms of society.

So what should we make of the surveillant assemblage at work? The purpose of the foregoing discussion of Deleuze, cartography, diagrams, and abstract machines is not to dismiss the valuable contributions made by the likes of Haggarty and Ericson (2000) or Burke (2020) and all those in between who have drawn our attention to the surveillant assemblage. Thinking of it as a complex and f luid array of multiple systems and actors with no obvious centralized director is certainly a powerful way of confronting some of our deepest concerns about ubiquitous surveillance. But is it helpful when thinking about surveillance at work? To be sure, workplace surveillance could easily be taken to be part of this wider assemblage, and, at the level of the organization, surveillance itself may be a multiplicity of more or less integrated activities. For the purposes of this book, however, the assemblage should be still considered as being secondary to the diagram when drawing on Deleuze to make sense of surveillance at work. The presence of increasingly complex and rapidly changing surveillant assemblages in the workplace does, however, give rise to a legitimate question of genealogy: are they the result of the emergence of new diagrams that ref lect qualitatively different ways of talking about work and revealing it through surveillance (the saying and seeing duality I mentioned earlier)? Clearly this is as much an empirical question as it is a conceptual one, and, in attempting to answer it, we need to consider the methodological implications of Deleuze’s disquisition on genealogy. In particular, we can look at the development of diagrams that map the way in which the discourse of productive work (i.e., what it means to be “good” or “bad” worker) and the environment (i.e., how work is organized, measured, evaluated, and displayed) has changed over time. When it comes to workplace surveillance, this is not a chronological history of the power of the gaze

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but a genealogy of power through the gaze (Caluya, 2010). We will examine this distinction in the next chapter; for now, let’s stick with diagrams. Munro (2000) provides us with one of the most prescient but, to my mind, relatively undervalued glimpses at the potential for diagrams to help us understand surveillance more generally and the surveillance of work activity in particular. He starts off by working through the by-now-well-worn arguments about the capability of information systems to act as surveillance systems before launching into his take on diagrams. Importantly, the Panopticon would be just one among many ephemeral techniques of power—a footnote in the history books perhaps—if it were not for its ability to provide a degree of coherence that transforms those disparate techniques into the coherent formation of forces that Foucault called disciplinary power. Here Munro relies on Foucault’s limited use of the term (rather than Deleuze’s extended version) to present diagrams that contrast pre-modern sovereign power and panoptic disciplinary power (see Figures 5.1 and 5.2, respectively,

Figure 5.1 The Topology of the Sovereign Diagram (Munro, 2000).

Figure 5.2 The Topology of the Panoptic Diagram (Munro, 2000).

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while noting the latter’s morphological similarity to Oliver Williamson’s Wheel Network depicted in Chapter 2). Accordingly, these reveal “… a particular relation between forces where space and time are distributed and ordered according to these forces” (Munro, 2000: 683). Figure 5.1 is thus meant to convey the relationship between forces where the sovereign directly exercises dominion over its subjects across the entire realm, while Figure 5.2 is meant to convey the relationship between the forces of the surveyor (in the central tower) and the surveilled (in the peripheral cells). This leads me to an important technical point: you don’t need to be Leonhard Euler to see that, topologically speaking, Figures 5.1 and 5.2 are identical. In other words, from these diagrams at least, we can see there is no difference between sovereign power and panoptic power. Of course, this is very definitely not Munro’s argument (not to mention Foucault’s), but it provides us with a cautionary tale about the challenge of drawing up and using diagrams as Deleuze conceives of them. Indeed, there is a good reason for us to revert to Bentham’s original drawings of the Panopticon (see Figure 3.1) as the basis for our diagram of panoptic power, but to appreciate this point we first need to think through Munro’s diagram of sovereign power. Constitutionally, an absolute monarch like Louis XV had direct and unconstrained power over the bodies of his subjects, and, as an example of this, Deleuze (1988) points to Foucault’s discussion of the mechanism of lettres de cachet—documents signed by the king enforcing his arbitrary judgements in the case of named persons who could not then appeal their contents. Despite their apparent top-down nature, often they were solicited by the King’s subjects themselves to constrain an unruly family member or stymie a local rival merchant—a case of the citizen availing themselves of the services of the King rather than the other way around. Still, the only notional limit on the operation of this brute sovereign power was the physical boundary of the state. Thinking back to our earlier discussion of the Tube map, as far as the Louis was concerned all his subjects lived in one undifferentiated zone; if you were a French subject you were most emphatically subject to his every whim, regardless of whether you were a courtier at Versailles or digging potatoes in Picardy. The best that any aristocrat or peasant could hope for was that the King would act as an enlightened autocrat (although his soubriquet, Louis the Beloved, was apparently highly ironic). This exercise of sovereign power did not, notionally at least, impinge on relationships between subjects, and this is indeed ref lected in Munro’s diagram. But if we were redrawing it in line with Deleuze’s (1988) commentary, we would definitely place a boundary around it for the King’s writ only ran as far as the limits of his own realm (i.e.,  the border of the sovereign state—see Figure 5.3, while noting the morphological similarity between this and Oliver Williamson’s All-Channel-Network depicted in Chapter 2). Stripping away all the verbiage, for me this gets to the kernel of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of territoriality for the diagram of power at once conveys two sets of intensities: the dispositif of power relations under a

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Figure 5.3 My Revision of Munro’s (2000) Topology of the Sovereign Diagram.

particular array of forces and also the play of the formative relations of subjectivity across space and time (Elmer, 2003). Thinking of territoriality in this way also helps us to make sense of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s (1987) observation that a reconfiguration of power relations and subjectivity involves a deterritorialization and a reterritorialization. This is important because we can consider Discipline and Punish as a tale of deterritorialization of sovereign power and its reterritorialization as disciplinary power. With this in mind we need to redraw Munro’s second diagram to ref lect the dispositif of power relations and the formative relations of subjectivity across space and time (see Figure 5.4). There is a boundary around the Panopticon, ref lecting the limited extent of the territory in question. Unlike the king, who has dominion over everyone in his realm regardless of their location, the gaoler and the gaoled only exist in relation to each other perforce the institution of the prison; should the prisoner be released or the warder be dismissed then they are no longer bound by mutual dependency. There are, however, boundaries around the individual prisoners, who remain sequestered in individual cells. Indeed, Bentham went to great pains to ensure this isolation would take effect in practice: for example, by minimizing the possibilities of communication between inmates or ensuring they were hooded when outside their cells. Hence the plan of the Panopticon as a diagram of disciplinary power. Unlike sovereign power,

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Figure 5.4 My Revision of Munro’s (2000) Topology of the Panoptic Diagram.

which was supposed to extend across the entire realm, disciplinary power was materialized in the specific architecture and operating machinery of individual institutions like the prison or the factory. In terms of a reterritorialization, mapping the observer in the central tower and the isolated prisoners arrayed around it suggests a topology of social relations that play out very differently in terms of power and subjectivity across space and time from those that preceded them. Although these individual institutions could conceivably operate quite independently, in aggregate, they ref lect the integrated modern state where we simultaneously experience a range of institutions that mark us out as useful and obedient (or disruptive and disobedient) members of society according to different discourses (see Chapter 4 and the discussion of the negative and positive heuristics of surveillance). Thinking of this aggregation of singular sites of power and subjectivity provides some insight into Foucault’s (2003) contention that governmentality did not supersede panopticism but incorporated it for we can consider the complexities of the assemblage as a diagram of diagrams or a territory of territories; a dynamic arrangement where some institutions and technologies support each other and some potentially cancel each other out. With this observation in mind, from a methodological perspective, the presence of a surveillance assemblage as described by Haggerty and Ericson (2000) and others does not preclude a genealogical analysis of specific sites like workplaces where the conf luence of discourse

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and surveillance (the aforementioned seeing and saying) is associated with the characteristic relations of power and subjectivity conveyed by the diagram of panoptic power. Of course, to be true to Foucault’s genealogical intentions, we need to be alert to changes in discourses and surveillance—essentially an empirical matter—but the mere presence of an assemblage does not necessarily imply the practices of surveillance have substantially altered in settings such as the workplace.

From the disciplinary society to societies of control? At this stage we have to confront a rather inconvenient question: is the above attempt to reconcile Foucault with Deleuze’s earlier work on surveillance also compatible with his later work on the topic (Deleuze, 1992)? In his essay, Postscript on the Societies of Control, which was originally published in 1990 but first appeared in English two years later, Deleuze appears to repudiate his earlier contention that we could read his work on the assemblage as a continuation of Foucault’s discussion on discipline and governmentality. Although it is quite possible that Deleuze corrected his own thinking on this, only four years passed between the French versions of his commentary of Foucault as the new cartographer and his prediction of the rise of societies of control, so it is worth ref lecting on whether this is an adequate reading of the development of his thinking. Deleuze begins his discussion of societies of control by pointing to Foucault’s empirical focus on environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory; to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. (Deleuze, 1992: 3) Importantly, for Deleuze our experience of these environments of enclosure was episodic and discontinuous: we would go from school to the barracks or the barracks to the factory. This is quite distinct from our experience of the open environment of societies of control which is undifferentiated and continuous: for example, where “lifelong learning” supersedes the normal progression from school to university or work and the continuous evaluation of performance replaces the annual review. While sovereign power made use of crude technologies of simple machines (think the pulleys, levers, and irons of bodily torture), disciplinary power deployed more complex machines using various forms of energy to amplify the physical capabilities of the human body (think the assembly line or newspaper printing presses). Deleuze’s prescience, however, comes to the fore when he notes that controlling power only becomes available through the advent of computers, and this becomes known to us not through the instantiations of disciplinary power in the school or the

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factory but through the faceless and undifferentiated corporation. The effects of this are not to concentrate our activities in particular territories; they are essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner—state or private power—but coded figures—deformable and transformable—of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. (Deleuze, 1992: 6) Rather than being concerned with the judgement of posterity (have we been a solid contributor to our lifelong employer or an enduring credit to our community?) we are subject to the instantaneous judgement of the market; one day we’re on top, but the next day we’re just an also-ran. Deleuze vividly presages the coming zeitgeist in the following statement, invoking his friend and co-author: The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether an animal in a reserve or a human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Félix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighbourhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position—licit or illicit—and effects a universal modulation. (Deleuze, 1992:7) Before we can continue we need to clarify what Deleuze means here by dividual and modulation. The former refers to the reduction of a subject to a code or cypher standing for the base matter to be controlled, while the latter distinguishes itself from the constraining rigidities of disciplinary power by shaping conduct in an infinitely malleable way (see also Haggarty and Ericson [2000] on digital avatars or, as they call them, “data-doubles”). In order to illustrate them, Deleuze brings the two together by discussing the modern concept of the professional salaried employee. Instead of following a vocation with all that entails in terms of identity, meaning, and stability of income, we are reduced to a constantly f luctuating number (i.e., the dividual) that stands for our contribution to the corporation from moment to moment, which modulates our conduct through a similarly volatile level of reward for that contribution. But this is not a wholesale and irreversible change. Indeed, Deleuze was alerting us to these incipient forces so we could make sense of the piecemeal and incomplete crises we experience across institutions of enclosure—prison, hospital, factory, school, family—for some

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aspects of our lives are being reterritorialized while others remain relatively stable. Take, for example, the case of employees whose work is split between traditional workplaces and the hypermobility of teleworking. Here an overt tension exists between the two that is difficult for some people to reconcile; at times they are subject to the disciplinary effects of an enclosed institution but at other times they are the dividuals of modulating control (Sewell and Taskin, 2015). In light of this, what is most interesting to me is the varying rate and extent of deterritorialization and reterritorialization we experience: some things change while others remain the same. From a methodological perspective then, in order to consider surveillance at work, we can draw on the concept of the diagram to disaggregate the surveillant assemblage into components that variously involve relationships of sovereign power, disciplinary power, and governmentality, as well as those associated with Deleuzian societies of control. At once this overcomes the gee-wiz technological fetishism of some treatments of surveillance as an assemblage while staying true to Foucault’s more generalized genealogy of “the political control over life and living beings” and to Deleuze’s more specific focus on control by explicitly economic and informational means (Nail, 2016). With this in mind, I now go on to examine how Deleuze’s later commentary on control has been further incorporated into surveillance studies.

From societies of control to liquid surveillance Given how Deleuze’s description of societies of control chimes so resoundingly with our growing concerns about intensified and pervasive surveillance since 1992—whether it’s the emergence of the tech giants like Google and Facebook, the worst excesses of the surveillance state, or the rise of the “platform” and the “gig economy”—it is little wonder that his short commentary on the topic has resonated strongly with many surveillance scholars (see Lyon, 2010b). Its brevity, however, has meant that it has been left to other scholars to fill in the theoretical and practical details. Perhaps the most important example of this is Lyon’s concept of “Liquid Surveillance.” This is his attempt to build on Deleuze through the later work of Zygmunt Bauman (see Lyon, 2010a; Bauman and Lyon, 2013) by drawing on the apparently seamless and continuously f lexible experience of surveillance in the early twentieth-first century. Unlike the rigidities of the disciplinary society’s bricks-and-mortar institutions, today’s social bonds are much looser (and sometimes even completely severed) while our life chances are limited, not by long-term and mutually dependent relationships forged with employers or financial institutions, but by opaquely derived and constantly changing data like credit scores or, most recently, something like China’s infamous “social credit” system (Liang et al., 2018). While the high modernity of the twentieth century created fixed dyads like the watcher and the watched or the manager and the managed, Liquid Surveillance dissolves these ties, so we don’t know who’s watching us at any particular moment. This leads us to be constantly

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troubled by the anxiety of being caught in the wrong category—unable to get credit, receive services from state or private providers, or even gain entry to a building—without ever knowing who we can appeal to or even what we would say to them (Lyon, 2010a—see also Hayles, 2009). Bauman (2004) called this the “spectre of exclusion” which sees its surveillance at work apotheosis in the ride share driver who is shut out of the platform for falling below a threshold passenger satisfaction score (Chan, 2019). Crucially, Lyon (2010a) proposes that we think of this conf luence of seamless, faceless surveillance and loosened social bonds as a network, which ties in neatly with Munro’s (2000) third diagram (see Figure 5.5). Unlike my revised versions of Munro’s diagrams of sovereign and panoptic power, and consistent with Lyon’s (2010a) concept of Liquid Surveillance, this diagram is potentially unbounded by things like the physical walls of a cell, the legal boundary of an organization, or even the border of a state: conceivably everyone could be eventually incorporated in a vast protean network of surveillance while never occupying a fixed location, either on the inside or the outside or as watcher or watched. Indeed, there is much overlap between Lyon’s Liquid Surveillance and Munro’s conception of the simultaneously disruptive effects of networked surveillance’s effects at the local level of individual organizations and at the national level of state institutions. For example, they both alert us to the implications of these developments. Take, Lyon’s observation, The old enclosures, like the panopticon, in which surveillance disciplines were instilled, are gone, and in their place only something resembling Gilles Deleuze’s audio-visual protocols check and trace us in a mobile world. (Lyon, 2010a: 332)

Figure 5.5 The Topology of the Network Diagram (Munro, 2000).

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and compare its remarkable similarity to Munro’s earlier (but more expansive) statement, Whereas disciplinary institutions tended to function by confinement, the new institutions operate in open spaces, introducing continuity between different sites.… For example, the workplace and the home are being transformed through teleworking, and the school and the home through distance learning and programmes and ‘open’ universities. These new institutions do not rely on enclosure or visual (Panoptic) surveillance for their operation. Instead power operates through free-f loating control, through the regulation of flows, rather than the imposition of exercises. (Munro, 2000: 688—emphasis in original) In each instance, enclosure and stasis are contrasted with openness and f low, but, importantly, we should not lose sight of the caveat made elsewhere by both authors that earlier forms of power do not disappear. For example, Munro (2000: 691) adds in relation to his Network Diagram (see Figure 5.5), “It should also be noted that other relationships might exist within this diagram, such as Panoptic or sovereign relations.” Likewise, Lyon (2010a: 332) notes that the familiar disciplinary effects of confinement and stability associated with panoptic surveillance “… are supplemented—not supplanted—by the controls that admit or deny access, indicate eligibility or exclusion.” Do these notions of openness and f low, however, challenge our traditional understandings of place and space? Have familiar territories like home and work been thoroughly reterritorialized so that the f lows of Liquid Surveillance belong to a universal and homogenous “non-place” where we are constantly mobile bodies circulating around a single undifferentiated space, much like the feeling of being trapped in the blandness of a giant metaphorical airport lounge (see Augé, 1995)? If a place is defined as being relational, historical, and concerned with identity then a non-place is its antipode, devoid of any social relations, history, and relevance to our identity (Augé, 1995). Yet even in the face of the territorial destabilization of Liquid Surveillance we still cling—on some occasions, romantically; on other occasions, nostalgically; on still others, militantly—to the power of the home, the workplace, the community, or the nation-state to shape our relations with others, provide us with a sense of continuity with our past, and create a sense of social solidarity and belonging. Liquid Surveillance may be superimposed on these places and processes—a kind of supraterritorial assemblage if you will—but it never completely erases them. To be sure, it may challenge or compromise some historically stable dispositifs of power relations and their associated formative relations of subjectivity across space and time. Moreover, some of the institutions of enclosure that Munro and Lyon speak of may well be radically altered or even disappear but others will endure. For example, in my own profession the traditional universities with their physical infrastructure have so far been remarkably resistant to the predations of online teaching

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from non-traditional providers, and notions of collegiality are still invoked to counter the rise of ostensibly rational third-party metrics purporting to show research quality or “impact.” Perhaps these will ultimately be losing battles, but the social revolutions of the past—French, Industrial, Russian—did not happen overnight. With this in mind I contend that, rather than echoing the bloviations of some commentators that everything is different, we can still embrace the theoretical and methodological insights of diagrams, assemblages, liquidity, and f lows in a more gradualist and nuanced manner. Here we can learn a valuable lesson from the labour process theorists we discussed in Chapter 4 for, if we do place dispositifs of power relations and their associated formative relations of subjectivity across space and time at the heart of our analysis, then the way that we say and see the changing nature of the employment relationship—that is, the way in which our discourses on work and the way that workers are presented to the world through surveillance change over time—then we can, in effect, conduct a genealogy of power through the gaze (Caluya, 2010). This genealogy involves an appreciation of the way the development of diagrams socializes the possibility of different configurations of the gaze and thus leads us to experience space and time at work in settings that are undergoing deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Indeed, by refocusing our attention on the operation of the gaze under competing diagrams of power (which, incidentally, is also a story of the progressive refocusing of the gaze) we gain a new kind of understanding of the changing intensities of power and subjectivity at work. In Chapter 7 I will expand on this to show how we can consider alternative patterns of resistance to power and the reclamation of subjectivity under surveillance at work but in the next chapter I shall will develop my argument about the gaze further.

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The gaze at work From Aristotle to Miller and beyond

Over the moon. Under pressure. Beside myself with anticipation. Down in the dumps. Over, under, sideways, down. Where would we be in our everyday language without figures of speech that rely on spatial predicates? But it’s not just everyday language; technical jargon from almost any discipline abounds with such spatial metaphors, and the surveillance literature is no different. Indeed, as I pointed at the very beginning of this book, our own discipline is partly founded on a spatial metaphor! And the other part? Well, that’s a visual metaphor, and, taken together, we have the view de haut en bas. The idea that power is a matter of relative vertical positioning seems so natural that we rarely give it a second thought. As Schwartz (1981: 171) puts it, “… the most momentous experiences and deepest emotions associated with growing up are crystallized in a scheme of vertical classification.” As an expression of the apparent natural order then, with the King in his castle, all’s right with the world. But, as Pelz (2016) points out, even in societies founded on the slow accretion of custom and lore, fealty and submission to those on high could never be taken for granted but had to be won through persuasive ideology and coercion in equal measure; whether it was the king dealing with fractious nobles, the bishop dealing with troublesome priests, or cloth merchants dealing with recalcitrant weavers. As we noted in the previous chapter, images like Hobbes’ Leviathan or the Great Chain of Being are very handy when trying to persuade people they shouldn’t seek to rise above their putative natural station in life. And, of course, what could be more natural when trying to maintain a position of relative power than keeping an eye on troublemakers below you? While the notion of vertical separation between classes of similar objects has been explicit in formal models of nature and society for centuries—think Linnaean taxonomy, Marxian “base” and “superstructure,” or Weberian bureaucratic hierarchy—with the linguistic and cognitive turns in the social sciences we have become more attuned to how shared modes of talking and thinking about power and authority are utterly dependent on bodily experiences of our positioning in physical space (see Schubert et al., 2011). As one inf luential advocate of this approach notes,

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diverse languages refer to social authority as power or force. These linguistic practices are more than simply lexical metaphors; they are collective cognitive representations of what AR [Authority Ranking] consists of: Authority is being above, greater, and more powerful. Languages mark status in diverse ways, including titles and speech registers, but these metaphors of social physics are the most widespread and often the most basic. (Fiske, 2004: 193) Here the term Authority Ranking refers to one of the four dimensions of Fiske’s (1992) Relational Models Theory and describes asymmetric relationships where people are ordered along an ascending social scale. Although those higher up the scale hold increasingly greater authority, prestige, and privilege, the relationship with those below is reciprocal, up to a point, for subordinates are also entitled to expect benevolence and protection. Perhaps this last point is wishful thinking on Fiske’s part because history has shown us that autocrats rarely keep their side of the bargain. Regardless, Fiske (2007) goes on to state without hesitation that this inclination towards vertical stratification is biologically innate and thus culturally universal. I am temperamentally ill-disposed towards such essentialist assertions, and we can only marvel at the boldness of claims such as the following. Unlike other animals, humans also use cues that go beyond the body, namely elements of the created environment (architecture, furniture, clothes), to judge power. Cues from the human body which are interpreted as indicating power, such as size and elevation, are also interpreted when they appear disconnected from the body in the form of large cars and high towers. In addition, power and status are metaphorically described as spatial relations to such an extent that power and space are intuitively identical. It seems that we are so used to talk of power and status as size and elevation that these have almost come to define the concept of power itself. (Schubert et al., 2011: 154) We do not, however, have to concur with the essentialist assumptions about human nature contained in this statement to understand the intuitive appeal of thinking that the higher the tower, the better the view. In seeing farther, can we not see more? No doubt this kind of simple logic accounts, at least in part, for why the physical (and social) isolation of the Panopticon, where sequestered inmates are peered at by unseen faces hidden in an elevated tower, makes for such a compelling figurative expression of the desire to subsume all human activity under a totalizing rationality (see Chapter  4). The monumental architecture of the high tower chimes with the ambitions of despots the world over. But underneath this figuration lies the experience of a combination of embodied spatial experiences— height and sight if you will—that point to the privileging of vision as the

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dominant metaphor for knowing ourselves and others that stretches all the way back to Plato ( Jay, 1991). With this in mind, in this chapter I will propose a way of thinking about height and sight that allows us to reconsider the operation of surveillance at work as successive reconfigurations of the gaze. This is consistent with the position developed in the previous chapter—that the development of surveillance ought to be considered as genealogy of power through the gaze (Caluya, 2010)—while also remaining true to our earlier historical appreciation of the way we have understood changes in the nature of work. Methodologically speaking, this means we are pursuing an approach to the conf luence of discourse and materiality—or saying and seeing—in a way that resonates with Foucault’s conception of genealogy, as refined by Deleuze. Instead of taking the voir of pouvoir and savoir or the vision of supervision for granted, we are thus developing a theory of height and sight—that is, the gaze—as it plays out in the particular social and spatial conditions of the workplace. This will take in the main contributions of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Lacan, as set out by Jay (1991, 1993), before turning to the work of Jacques-Alain Miller and his commentary on the Panopticon. Before I continue, however, I need to reiterate an important caveat I originally made in Chapter 1. For some time, very little of what we call surveillance has involved visual means in any literal sense. Indeed, early critics of modern organizational surveillance like Packard (1964) were more worried about eavesdropping, hidden microphones, and audio recorders than they ever were about vision or cameras and, CCTV and facial recognition apart, most information that is gathered about us these days has limited visual content. In light of this observation, the following discussion of the gaze will be primarily figurative although, as we shall see, stubbornly enduring elements of embodied vision will still be involved.

Three perspectives on the gaze Martin Jay mischievously begins his magnum opus, Downcast Eyes, with a paragraph containing 21 different visual metaphors within the space of fifteen-and-a-half lines. Although it may be labouring the point, this conceit demonstrates how Western philosophy “… at its most putatively disinterested and neutral can be shown to be deeply dependent on occluded visual metaphors” ( Jay, 1993: 2; see also Turbayne, 1962; Hacking, 1975). The fact that this quote itself contains two visual metaphors—shown and occluded—only serves to reinforce his point. According to Jay, seeing has been a consistent feature of epistemology since Aristotle. Knowing about the exterior world is one thing, but, with the rise of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century, we became equally indebted to the metaphor of sight as a way of gaining knowledge of our interior lives ( Jay, 1993) for how could we possibly be selfaware without possessing insight? With these thoughts in mind, Jay’s main thesis may seem somewhat counterintuitive but it runs as follows. If we take the honour roll of twentieth-century French thinkers—the likes of Sartre,

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Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, and Lyotard, for example—we will see that although their writings are replete with unavoidably visual metaphors, they are united by a profound suspicion of the privileged role of vision in the project of the Enlightenment (itself, of course, a powerfully visual metaphor). Traditionally we have taken clear sight to be a universal, unfaltering, and neutral tool of positivistic science that leads to discoveries of the truth about the world and its inhabitants through observation—remember the importance of sight in Plato’s allegory of the cave or Locke’s interest in whether blind people who suddenly regained their sight would be able to distinguish visually between objects they had previously known by touch alone. In contrast, these French thinkers agreed that sight is no less normative and fallible than anything else in human endeavour and we should critique any and all historically specific manifestations of visuality ( Jay, 1991). Forget about “seeing is believing” as a way at getting at the truth; what we believe will always shape what we see (Hanson, 1958). This book is not, directly at least, a treatise on the history of Enlightenment and its discontents, and, in the rest of this chapter, I will not dwell on the finer details of Jay’s thesis but focus on his treatment of three main figures that contributed enormously to a developing theory of the gaze. The first of these is Jean-Paul Sartre who, according to Jay (1993), was alert to the potentially malign effects of le regard—alternatively the look or the gaze—throughout his career. Importantly, for Sartre, the asymmetrical nature of the gaze was a defining feature of intersubjective relations. Starting from the relatively uncontroversial point that when another person turns to us it ought to alert them to the possibility that we are also a subject not unlike themselves, he contends that the one who casts the initial look is likely to remain the subject and the person who is looked at is likely to become locked in as the object of their gaze (Sartre, 1956). Importantly, this first look is not arbitrary; enduring social institutions already ref lect this differential and give certain persons—men over women, the rich over the poor, managers over workers, and so forth—the privilege of initiating this objectifying look. For Jay (1991), Sartre is maintaining here that this objectifying gaze is unavoidably asymmetrical because, when we are looked at, we are also blinded to the features of the person doing the looking and are unable think of them as another person much like ourselves. They become the mysterious and unknowable Other with a capital “O,” while we are but one of many subordinated others rendered as objects by their gaze (an implicit invocation of the height-and-sight metaphor). In this way, simply by being the first to initiate the gaze gives the watcher a certain transformative power over the watched, elevating themselves while simultaneously reducing the watched to a mere set of observable characteristics. The watched, moreover, also come to understand themselves by reference to these criteria. Sartre (1956: 319) puts it thus, “… I now exist as myself for unref lective consciousness.… I see myself because somebody sees me.” Continuing, he contends this creates a sense of shame through “… the recognition of the fact that I am indeed that object

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which the Other is looking at and judging” (Sartre, 1956: 320). Later he goes even further in saying that this is a manifestation of the watcher’s desire to mould the subjectivity of the watched along certain preferred lines that are ref lected in the choice of judgement criteria. In making this point he resorts to some revealing imagery. I am possessed by the other Other … the Other’s look fashions me in my nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it. The Other holds a secret—the secret of what I am. (Sartre, 1956: 445—emphasis in original) This power of the gaze to objectify the watched by reducing them to a mere set of desirable or undesirable features, as identified by Sartre, obviously resonates with Foucault’s later work on discipline and also my comments on the negative and positive heuristics; however, before we can begin to incorporate this into an argument about surveillance at work, I need to explore further how Jay develops this process of objectification through the gaze. This leads him to the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although Sartre was sceptical about the usefulness of psychoanalysis throughout his life ( Jay, 1993), Merleau-Ponty’s career was largely taken up by trying to reconcile phenomenology’s interest in conscious perception with the operation of the Freudian unconscious (Phillips, 2019). He was also more hopeful than Sartre when it came to the possibility of achieving more symmetrical social relationships. As Jay (1993: 306) puts it, for Merleau-Ponty, “Intersubjective relations are not thus constituted by a duel of objectifying gazes; indeed, they cannot be reduced to their visual component alone.” This led Merleau-Ponty to reject Sartre’s dyad of the watcher and the watched, preferring to talk in more impersonal terms of the visible and invisible. Subjects are not completely reduced to objects via what is made visible to the world through Sartre’s judgemental gaze; there are aspects of subjectivity that will remain invisible to the Other’s gaze, not least because we can choose to hide them. Importantly, we can also choose to reveal to others what remains invisible to the watcher in his high tower, and this can form the basis for a nascent social solidarity that resists the objectifying gaze (Merleau-Ponty, 1968). This sets a much more optimistic tone than Sartre’s: not only can we resist the power of the gaze by making features of ourselves invisible to it but, by revealing those hidden features to sympathetic others, we can make common cause with them. For example, consider how effective the gay rights movement has become, building strength while underground and invisible before visibly breaking into the mainstream to challenge the tendency of the straight male gaze to enforce binary gender and sexual classifications. In terms of our height-and-sight metaphor, it is as if those below can look to others on the same level and join with them in ultimately resisting the watcher in the high tower. If Merleau-Ponty represents a staging post in formalizing the analysis of the gaze within psychoanalysis, then it reaches its apotheosis in the work of

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Jacques Lacan. It is possible to get the impression when reading Lacan that, just as you think you understand him fully, the man himself pulls the rug from under you. It’s as if Lacan would feel he wasn’t trying hard enough if we ever got to grasp everything he was saying. Nevertheless, we have good reason to persevere with this endeavour, not least because it gives us some essential tools with which to think about surveillance at work that resonates with our saying and seeing framework set out in the previous chapter. Early on in his career Lacan had a traumatic encounter that reinforced the centrality of sight in his thinking when, on becoming blind with cataracts, his doctoral supervisor committed suicide in 1934. Unsurprisingly, this tragic event had a powerfully formative effect on the young Lacan and coincides with his development of a major extension of Freud’s psychoanalysis—his now-familiar concept of the “Mirror Stage” ( Jay, 1993). Although a lengthy disquisition on the Mirror Stage is well beyond the scope of this book, it is worth dwelling on one of its key features. Widely understood as the moment when the developing infant recognizes themselves in a mirror for the first time (something other primates seem unable to do), it is crucial to the formation of the ego in that, from that moment on, there is always the potential for the subject to become its own object (Lacan, 1977). Although sympathetic critics have argued ever since about what this means for healthy mental development (relating it to things like paranoia, narcissism, and dissociation, among many other disorders), in the simplest terms it is central to the concept of alienation because it suggests it is also possible for us to see ourselves as something that we are not. For Lacan this self-othering posed an enormous hurdle to be overcome for, if we cannot see ourselves as we really are, how could we ever see others as they really are. Crucially for our purposes, this combines elements of Sartre’s vertical judgemental and objectifying gaze with Merleau-Ponty’s more optimistic notion of a caring horizontal and subjectifying look towards others. It links back, moreover, to our previous discussion of saying and seeing for the language of classification associated with the objectifying gaze of good-better-best or bad-worse-worst reinforces the pathological effects of mental blocking or “scotomization,” thereby leading to “foreclosure” (Lacan, 1978). Lacan’s usage of these psychoanalytic technical terms requires some closer attention here. Being objectified by a vertical gaze in a certain way can lead to a misalignment between our ego and our unconscious. For example, our ego may drive us to be a good corporate citizen, but our evaluations may tell us (and the whole world) otherwise. A common scotomizing response to this is for us to protect our ego by questioning the validity of the measure while, unconsciously, we are resigned to the apparently ineluctable truth that the numbers reveal that we really are inadequate. This, in turn, precipitates mental discomfort (and, eventually, psychosis) as we are foreclosed as subjects from the symbolic order of good-better-best or bad-worse-worst because our ego experience of evaluation is so different to that revealed by the ostensibly rational numbers. It’s not just that we are told that we are inadequate but that we must make sense of this inadequacy using

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only the language of performance we have at our disposal. (We want to be good, but if we really are that bad how can we ever even begin to get better?) Of course, I have denuded this example of its usual psychoanalytic Father/ Mother and penis/castration terminology, and, in the process, I will probably attract the ire of Lacanians the world over. Nevertheless, it provides a useful adumbration of Lacan’s most important concepts as they pertain to our discussion of surveillance at work. To recap with reference to our chapter theme of height and sight, from Sartre we get that the judging gaze of the superior on the subordinate is not some epiphenomenon of a naturally occurring hierarchy but that it actually contributes to the creation and reinforcement of social strata or authority rankings (to use Fiske’s term) through objectifying the subject. From Merleau-Ponty we get the comforting thought that this objectification can be countered by reaching out across the social stratum to make common cause with others similarly objectified so that we can ultimately challenge the judging gaze of our superiors and thus reclaim our subjectivity. Finally, from Lacan, these two tendencies come together in showing that the objectifying gaze, which can cause so much distress for our mental health, is founded on a language of vertically indexical differentiation or “standing.” This standing vis-à-vis our membership of classes, social bodies, or groups (e.g., high/low, inside/outside, etc.) thus forms part of the wider symbolic order that takes in historically contingent customs, institutions, laws, mores, norms, practices, rituals, rules, traditions, and so on. In reaching out in acts of solidarity à la Merleau-Ponty we thus have to confront the challenge that we are questioning an entrenched part of the symbolic order. In short, in terms of seeing and saying we must be prepared to challenge how we are rendered objects via the gaze and how we are judged through the prevailing normative language of height-as-value used to described us as objects.

Jacques-Alain Miller and Jeremy Bentham’s panoptic machine All this talk of objectification through the gaze may seem far removed from anything to do with our everyday experience of surveillance at work, so we need to bring things back to earth from the stratospheric heights of French social theory. Turning to the work of Jacques-Alain Miller—yet another French psychoanalyst—to do this may therefore seem a rather unpromising move on my part. But bear with me as it should become obvious that Miller’s (1987) take on the Panopticon bridges the gulf between Lacan and Foucault in a way that is directly relevant to the understanding of surveillance I am developing in this book, especially as Miller’s commentary on the Panopticon was almost exactly contemporaneous with Foucault’s (both were originally published in French in 1975). In landing on Miller as Lacan’s main interlocutor we are celebrating a chain of personal connections that borders on apostolic succession. Not only

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was Miller Lacan’s son-in-law but he was also his analysand. He then became Félix Guattari’s analyst while still finding time to serve as his father-in-law’s amanuensis, collating Lacan’s papers and editing them, including the unpublished notes from the master’s weekly Wednesday Paris seminars which ran from 1952 to 1980. Long after Lacan’s death, Miller continued as his fatherin-law’s intellectual executor, labouring towards the eventual publication of all the seminar material although, for our purposes, the most important volume is number six in the series, better known as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Given his intellectual and personal relationship with Lacan, it should come as no surprise that Miller would be interested in the Panopticon as an arrestingly concrete image of the gaze in operation, but his psychoanalytic heritage means that he develops a subtly different (but not incompatible) take on surveillance from that of Foucault. Miller’s take, however, is founded on Lacan’s (1978) distinction between l’oeil or the eye and le regard or the gaze; a distinction which is itself heavily indebted to Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) concepts of the visible and invisible mentioned earlier. For Lacan (and ultimately after Husserl, courtesy of Merleau-Ponty) this distinction is based on a phenomenological appreciation of their functions: while the eye serves a mainly localized epistemological function in that it gives us subjective knowledge of our immediately perceptible surroundings, the gaze serves a globalized ontological function in that it defines the objects that comprise the entire world, including those beyond our direct sensory apprehension. The eye is thus warm and intimate and produces embodied sensation that are all of a piece with the subject’s “… expectations, his movement, his grip, his muscular and visceral emotion—in short, his constitutive presence, directed at what is called his total intentionality” (Lacan, 1978: 71). The operation of the gaze, however, has a cooler, more abstracted, and therefore almost imperceptible effect that “…circumscribes us, and which in the first instance, makes us beings who are looked at, but without showing us” (Lacan, 1978: 75). Lacan coins the term speculum mundi (as in a mirror ref lecting the entire world) to describe the potentially universal ambition of the gaze as an objectifying force. For him, even if its reach is incomplete, the gaze still “… appears to us as being all-seeing. This is the phantasy to be found in the Platonic perspective of an absolute being to whom is transferred the quality of being all-seeing” (Lacan, 1978: 75). In effect, the king in the castle, the watcher in the tower, or the manager in the office are each taken to be this Platonic all-seeing being. With these observations in mind, Miller comes at the Panopticon as a synonym for the speculum mundi. For him it serves as a figurative device that provides a way of contrasting the different features of the eye and the gaze as set out by Lacan, where the former involves using our embodied senses (although primarily vision) to gain subjective knowledge of the world. This is not, however, a vernacular use of the term subjective as in knowledge based on our personal feelings, tastes, or opinions. Rather, it is about knowing others without turning them into objects. Indeed, objectification all too easily

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f lows from personal feelings, tastes, or opinions. In other words, the eye is a state of knowing through a look that avoids the objectifying tendencies of the gaze. Unfortunately, this is hard to do, and all too frequently we resort to objectification through the “Othering” of tendencies such as orientalism (Saïd, 1978) or patriarchy (Grosz, 1994). This should make us alert to the risk that even embodied vision is, more often than not, a form of objectifying gaze, although it is “subjective” in the sense that it is not reliant on objectification through ostensibly rational instruments of systematic scrutiny, measurement, and classification. Presently I will argue that, by considering this simultaneous operation of the embodied and the disembodied gaze, we can extend our understanding of surveillance at work beyond a simple focus on the technological systems involved in the dyadic relationship between superiors and subordinates. This is, of course, not to discount the importance of Foucault’s work to my argument as it will unfold; while Lacan invites us to focus on what I will call the ontological effects of the gaze, Foucault reminds us simultaneously to behold its epistemological effects which are primarily achieved through the rationalizing properties of surveillance that measure and differentiate human conduct. Put simply, the Lacanian gaze (embodied and disembodied) is primarily—although not exclusively—a nominal exercise concerned with form while the Foucauldian (embodied and disembodied) gaze is a measuring and ranking exercise more concerned with substance. It is not a particularly controversial claim to say that we ought to be concerned with both form and substance or naming and measuring when teasing out the complex relationship between surveillance and the social dynamics within work organizations so we can look to Lacan to reveal to us how the gaze creates classes of objects, while Foucault reveals to us how the gaze also sorts objects within classes. Taken together, they show us how workplace surveillance is a specific instantiation of the wider compulsion to control through objectification and rationalization associated with the modern state, manifested in techniques of classification and disciplinary power that attempt to integrate individuals into a greater social body. These ontological and epistemological ramifications of the gaze for the world of work become clearer if, taking our lead from labour process theory (see Chapter 3), we consider the corporation as a particular kind of social body. Here the creation of a class of employees who are deemed to be subordinates and who, at any one moment, are subjected to numerous forms of scrutiny and measurement by a class of employees deemed to be superiors render those subordinates—in their own opinion and in the opinion of others—as good or bad, compliant or recalcitrant, effective or ineffective, and so on (or any combination of such qualities—Sewell, 1998). Historically, within organizations this involved a move towards preventing deviancy through a generalized process of policing and normalization where a supervisor (be they a schoolteacher, foreman, physician, psychiatrist, or prison warder) determined whether the conduct of a subordinate (be they a pupil, employee, patient, lunatic, or prisoner) was acceptable by reference to some norm of behaviour. In the workplace this kind

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of “vertical” surveillance (Sewell, 1998) is, however, but one response to the challenge of getting potentially unruly employees from diverse backgrounds and with varying abilities to become useful and productive members of the organization by compelling them to work at or close to their physical and cognitive limits (Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992a). In addition, we can consider the peer-to-peer scrutiny that subordinates perform on each other to ensure behavioural norms are observed to be a form of “horizontal” surveillance that may or may not lead to behaviour that is deemed to be organizationally appropriate conduct (Sewell, 1998). Returning to our height-and-sight theme, and, to summarize going forward, we can augment our understanding of the ontological and epistemological effects of the vertical gaze between classes of objects (i.e., between the watcher and the watched) with an appreciation of ontological and epistemological effects of a side-to-side gaze within a class (i.e., between peers). From this we can first posit that the ontological effect of the gaze, enacted through vertical surveillance, enables superiors to determine whether subordinates are worthy members of the wider corporate body, such as a firm or any other form of organization—for example, are subordinates good corporate citizens to be retained or bad corporate citizens to be fired? In contrast, the epistemological effect of the gaze allows superiors to rank subordinates using some measure of contribution—for example, using a normal distribution of performance to determine reward. Thought of in these ways, the ontological function of the gaze, enacted through vertical surveillance, is a matter of form through its role in determining whether subordinates are “one of us” (an organizational membership criterion—cf. Douglas, 1970) while the epistemological function of the gaze is a matter of substance through its role in determining “how good” subordinates are (a question of relative vertical positioning across the wider organization—cf. Douglas, 1970). We can also posit that the ontological effect of the gaze, enacted through horizontal surveillance, enables peers who are nominally at the same level in the organization to determine whether they are worthy members of a more circumscribed corporate body, such as a work team—for example, are peers good team players who deserve the esteem of their colleagues? The epistemological effect of the gaze, meanwhile, allows peers to rank each other’s performance using some measure of contribution. Again, the ontological function of the gaze, enacted through vertical surveillance, is a matter of form through its role in determining whether peers are “one of us” (this time a group membership criterion—cf. Douglas, 1970) while the epistemological function of the gaze is a matter of substance through its role in determining “how good” peers are (this time a question of relative vertical positioning within the group—cf. Douglas, 1970). Building on this extended notion of height and sight that takes in superiors, subordinates, and peers, we can now go on to consider the effects of the embodied objectifying gaze in combination with the operation of forms of the gaze more commonly associated with a disembodied and objectifying

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process. I call these simple surveillance and complex surveillance, respectively. Simple surveillance literally involves “keeping an eye” on others using our embodied senses—primarily sight but also our ears and perhaps even our “feelings.” Because it is embodied, its effectiveness depends on physical proximity and an unobscured view; if the line of sight is interrupted then so are the effects of the gaze, and, as we all know, “out of sight” is sometimes “out of mind” (Sewell and Taskin, 2015). In contrast, complex surveillance is the result of disembodied technologies of surveillance; more a case of “keeping an eye” on people in a figurative sense, and, on a day-to-day basis, these can appear remote, unobtrusive, and, at their most extreme, occult. Moreover, the material technology of complex surveillance can, perhaps counterintuitively, be very basic—as in the architectonic minimalism of Panopticon, for example—or it can involve a vast, integrated “surveillant assemblage” (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000) comprising a combination of visual (e.g., CCTV) and auditory (e.g., listening devices) devices, along with less obvious elements like formal evaluation processes using ostensibly rational instruments of measurement (especially those that are computerized or embedded in the technology of production). I shall return to this important reconceptualization of the surveillant assemblage in the next chapter, but, at this stage, I wish to draw the basic distinction between simple and complex surveillance as follows: unlike the former, the latter is not constrained by proximity and constancy. Indeed, as Foucault (1979) memorably showed us, the disciplinary power of the Panopticon stems from its ability to liberate the remotely housed and hidden watcher from the obligation to observe the watched all the time. In other words, a superior does not have to keep a literal eye on a subordinate for that subordinate to understand their position in a social hierarchy, effecting a subtle but important modification of our height-and-sight metaphor. It is thus not the constancy of the gaze but its mere appearance of being constant that keeps the conduct of the subordinate in check. Of course, we may strive to increase the reach of complex surveillance or make it constant, but this does not fundamentally affect our distinction; no matter how hard we try, there will always be blind spots in the gaze of complex surveillance or times when it is not in operation, which means it is quite different from the intimacy of simple surveillance. With this in mind, I shall now set out how we can develop a generalized theory of surveillance at work by reconciling the effects of the gaze as conceived by Lacan and Foucault, respectively.

Configurations of the gaze Summarizing the foregoing discussion, we have identified two functions of an objectifying gaze: an ontological or nominal function focused on membership and an epistemological or ranking function focused on an evaluation of relative performance. These functions can be thought as different aspects of scopic labour (see Chapter 2) that are enacted, variously, through an embodied and proximal or simple form of surveillance and a disembodied and

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remote or complex form of surveillance. Finally, both simple and complex surveillance operate vertically and horizontally—that is, from superior to subordinate and from peer to peer, respectively. The possible configurations of these elements of the gaze are summarized in Table 6.1, and I will now go on to explore how they combine to build up a more conceptually comprehensive and integrated picture of workplace surveillance. The ontological function of simple surveillance We can easily imagine a situation in diverse work settings where superiors literally keep an eye on subordinates using their own senses. As we noted earlier, supervisor is a calque of surveillance, and work arrangements like raised viewing platforms or the layout of workstations that aid lines of sights and minimize the dark spaces where employee can literally hide from view have been recurrent features of workplace design. Even the Hawthorne studies started out as an investigation of productivity effects of different factory layout and lighting arrangements (Gillespie, 1991). If we consider the vertical form of simple surveillance, in relying on the data provided by their embodied senses, superiors are directly observing their subordinates to determine whether they are complying with organizational rules or conforming to organizational norms of conduct. This not only includes a consideration of practical aspects like general aptitude and suitability for the work in hand but more attitudinal factors like obedience, initiative, and a willingness to share ideas. Supervisors use this sensory data, in combination with what is commonly called “gut feeling” (and even things like gossip and rumour), to develop their own ideas about where subordinates stand with respect to the organization’s norms of conduct. Here they are effectively making a personal judgement about whether subordinates “fit in” or are the right sort of person to work in the organization. We can think of this as developing a nominal scale using a basic dichotomous variable of “yes/no,” “in/out,” or “asset/liability” in terms of suitability for membership of the organization. Clearly, as I implied earlier, there are strong echoes here of Mary Douglas’s (1970) discussion of how an individual’s position inside or outside a social group—in this case an organization—is determined (Pierides and Sewell, 2019). Although we would probably describe this colloquially as being based on subjective judgement (because it does not depend on ostensibly reliable and valid measures of conduct to arrive at an assessment of suitability for membership), I prefer to call this “private” judgement to avoid conf lation with my previous discussion of the subjective aspect of Lacan’s eye. By private then I mean that not only is judgement based on a personal perspective or view but also that the basis of this view rarely has to be shared or publicly justified. As such, judgements based on simple vertical surveillance are particularly prone to favouritism, nepotism, and other familiar sources of bias. Moving on to simple horizontal surveillance, we can also easily imagine a workplace where peers literally keep an eye on each other by relying on

Horizontal

Simple Vertical surveillance (proximal/embodied)

Epistemological Function (Substance/“How Good?”)

Peers literally “keep an eye” on each other (although Peers literally “keep an eye” on each other (although this can include other sensory data—for example, this can include other sensory data—for example, listening), directly observing each other’s general listening), directly observing each other’s conduct with reference to group norms. performance with reference to group expectations. Based on sensory data, peers rely on their Peers rely on their professional judgement, professional judgement, “gut feelings,” and “gut feelings,” and other informal sources of other informal sources of information to information to rank each other based on their develop a personal perspective that is used to own understanding of group performance determine whether others are a worthy part of a expectations. smaller corporate body (e.g., a “team”). A “private” form of judgement around the matter A “private” form of judgement around the matter of inclusion/exclusion using a nominal scale of relative performance using an ordinal scale (membership of the group). (vertical positioning within the group).

Supervisors literally “keep an eye” on Supervisors literally “keep an eye” on subordinates (although this can include other subordinates (although this can include other sensory data—for example, listening), directly sensory data—for example, listening), directly observing their general conduct with reference observing their performance with reference to organizational norms. organizational expectations. Based on sensory data, supervisors rely on their Supervisors rely on their professional judgement, professional judgement, “gut feelings,” and other “gut feelings,” and other informal sources of informal sources of information to develop information to rank subordinates based on their a personal perspective or view that is used to own understanding of these organizational determine whether subordinates are a worthy part performance expectations. of the wider corporate body (e.g., a “business”). A “private” form of judgement around the matter A “private” form of judgement around the matter of inclusion/exclusion using a nominal scale of relative performance using an ordinal scale (membership of the organization). (vertical positioning within the organization).

Ontological Function (Form/“One of Us?”)

The Gaze (Le Regard)

Table 6.1 Simple and Complex Surveillance as Configurations of the Ontological and Epistemological Functions of the Gaze at Work.

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Complex surveillance (remote/ technological)

Peers figuratively “keep an eye” on each other, relying on information about each other supplied by disembodied technological means to observe each other’s conformity with organizational norms indirectly. Based on information supplied by complex surveillance, peers use formal organizational criteria to determine whether others are a worthy part of a smaller corporate body (e.g., a “team”). A “public” form of judgement around the matter of inclusion/exclusion using a nominal scale (membership of the group).

Horizontal

A “public” form of judgement around the matter of relative performance using an interval scale (vertical positioning within the group).

Peers figuratively “keep an eye” on each other, relying on information supplied by disembodied technological means to observe each other’s performance indirectly with reference to organizational expectations. Peers rely on ostensibly rational measurements of individual performance to rank each other according to organizational expectations.

Supervisors figuratively “keep an eye” on Supervisors figuratively “keep an eye” on subordinates, relying on formal information subordinates, relying on information supplied supplied by disembodied technological means by disembodied technological means to observe to observe their conformity with organizational their performance indirectly with reference to norms indirectly. organizational expectations. Based on information provided by complex Supervisors rely on ostensibly rational surveillance, supervisors use formal measurements of individual performance organizational criteria to determine whether supplied by complex surveillance to rank subordinates are a worthy part of the wider subordinates according to organizationa l corporate body (e.g., a “business”). expectations. A “public” form of judgement around the matter A “public” form of judgement around the matter of inclusion/exclusion using a nominal scale of relative performance using an interval scale (membership of the organization). (vertical positioning within the organization).

Vertical

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their embodied senses. Here the concept of a peer group is relatively elastic: it could be a grouping based on being at the same nominal level in an organization (e.g., a military rank); it could be based on shared expertise (e.g., medical specialists); or it could be based on functional specialization (e.g., membership of a department or a specialist work team). Importantly, in all these instances, being a peer depends on some notional sense of solidarity that stems from merely being a member of the group. Like supervisors, peers also use sensory data in combination with “professional judgement,” along with other informal sources of information, but in this case they do so to develop a personal perspective or view which they then use to determine whether others are “good team players” and, therefore, worthy of being members of the group using a nominal scale comprising a dichotomous set of variables of inclusion and exclusion. Again, I style this as a “private” form of judgement in that this need not be subject to public scrutiny within the group, except perhaps in the elusive sense of being (or not being) a “good fit.” Importantly, the boundaries of this smaller corporate body do not coincide with those of the wider organization and its objectives, and, in this way, the norms of conduct which are used to determine membership may or may not coincide with those of the host organization. As a result, not only could it lead to the group valuing conduct that goes against the interests of its host, it may also be prone to expelling members who superiors could conceivably consider as assets to the wider organization. Nevertheless, and like the ontological effects of simple vertical surveillance, due to its private nature, simple horizontal surveillance is also particularly prone to all the familiar sources of bias I previously mentioned.

The epistemological function of simple surveillance Maintaining our focus on simple vertical surveillance which literally involves keeping an eye on others, here we see that supervisors still directly observe subordinates to evaluate their performance. This involves developing a personal perspective or view about what constitutes good, average, or bad performance, based on their professional expertise and their understanding of the organization’s expectations of the level at which its employees ought to be working. Being responsible for evaluations in this way places a lot pressure on superiors to be able to demonstrate to their subordinates that this exercise of judgement is not arbitrary. In other words, even though it is personal, judgement must be seen by subordinates to be legitimate through its ability to respect wider expectations of equity and fairness, especially if the evaluation is linked to levels of reward. This places supervisors in a difficult position because it is still a “private” form of judgement in that it is not ultimately based on a publicly verifiable form of rational measurement. In this respect, being seen to be a fair and accurate judge of performance is likely to make superiors win the esteem of their subordinates and their own superiors alike.

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Turning to the epistemological function of the gaze enacted through vertical simple surveillance, we can think of the supervisor as engaging in a ranking of employees from lowest to highest; an invocation of the heightand-sight metaphor that has run throughout this chapter. It is, therefore, less a matter of whether or not the subordinate deserves to be in the organization (so long as they achieve a certain threshold level of performance) and more about their relative contribution to the organization and, thus, their position within it. Again, this resonates with the work of Mary Douglas (1970); this time her discussion of how an individual’s position within a social group—in this case an organization—is determined (Pierides and Sewell, 2019) Because the judgement exercised here is private, any understanding of relative contribution must be based on an ordinal scale. This means that it is difficult to make relative rewards proportional to relative performance because it is logically impossible to claim, for example, that the best performer is twice as good as the worst performer and, therefore, deserves twice as much pay. That, of course, would require an interval scale which, as we shall see below, points to one of the key operational differences between simple and complex surveillance.

The ontological function of complex surveillance We have already noted that the distinction between simple and complex surveillance is less about the complexity of the technology of surveillance per se and more about the fact that technology is involved at all. In this way complex surveillance fulfils its ontological function whether it is enacted through a relatively crude architectonic device like the Panopticon or a vast infrastructure of observation, measurement, and comparison involving the latest in computer hardware and software. Regardless, the basic principles remain the same. Consider the vertical form of complex surveillance. Here superiors figuratively keep an eye on subordinates by indirectly observing their conduct. Think, for example, of how a manager may look at the computer login or phone records of a home worker to determine whether they are keeping appropriate hours. This is a kind of moral judgement that is less concerned with how effectively a subordinate is working when they are eventually online and more concerned with whether they are online at all (and, therefore, deemed to be “working”). The supervisor is thus making a normative judgement about whether the subordinate is the “right sort of person” for the job given the organization’s expectations as they are expressed through formal criteria, ref lecting the ontological function of the gaze enacted through complex surveillance. While this still relies on a nominal scale using a basic dichotomous variable such as “in/out,” it is a “public” form of judgement in the sense that it relies on ostensibly rational data that can be compared to explicit organizational expectations. This conceivably gives subordinates the opportunity to appeal against the judgement of superiors on various grounds, including that the data were wrong, the superior had wrongly interpreted the

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numbers, the superior had not followed due process, and so on. Of course, this does not rule out the possibility that supervisors will act arbitrarily or indulge their worst prejudices, but it does provide subordinates with some recourse if they feel they have been hard done by. In this way, complex vertical surveillance provides a limited degree of protection against managerial fiat (Sewell and Barker, 2006). If we consider the ontological function of horizontal complex surveillance, peers now use the same information that superiors use to judge subordinates and apply the same organizationally determined criteria in order to keep a figurative eye on each other. This distinguishes it from its corresponding simple form because peers themselves are effectively no longer responsible for drawing up their own criteria for membership of the group. Instead, organizationally determined information and evaluative criteria replace locally devised judgements. This can be seen as a means by which superiors tighten their grip on subordinates by constraining the subordinates’ autonomy to determine who is in fact a peer and who is not. Here peers are bound to use a nominal scale, but it is no longer one of their own choosing, which creates the potential for the norms of the group to be more closely aligned with those of the host organization. Nevertheless, being a public form of judgement, peers are bound to demonstrate that their determinations about each other are not arbitrary or obviously based on prejudice or favouritism.

The epistemological function of complex surveillance We are now left to consider the final configuration of the gaze at work. Here supervisors are interested in determining the contribution of subordinates to the organization by focusing on the measurement of their performance. This involves a reliance on data delivered by complex vertical surveillance to make evaluations about relative performance using organizational criteria. These data are usually ostensibly rational measures of individual performance that allow superiors to rank subordinates in terms of their contribution to the organization. The effect of this ranking process, therefore, is to establish a subordinate’s vertical positioning within the organization. This effectively constitutes a public form of judgement about relative performance because the data must be seen to be fair and equitable in order to ensure their legitimacy. Additionally, the data are frequently presented as an interval scale, which plays into common attitudes towards the relationship between performance and reward. It thus becomes possible to entertain arguments along the following lines: “Well, my performance is 10% better than colleague x so I deserve 10% more pay than them.” Although this appeals to those who believe that the definition of equity is that you should get out of life what you put in, it also creates the circumstances whereby colleagues are pitted against each other to prove their value to the organization. This contest of relative performance takes on a different hue when we consider the epistemological function of horizontal complex organization. This

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is because peers no longer rely on their own assessment of what constitutes good-better-best or bad-worse-worst but turn to the same data that supervisors use in their performance evaluation processes. These data are, moreover, now likely to be used by peers to rank each other with respect to organizationally determined standards of performance rather than their own locally derived standards, leading to an revised understanding of relative vertical positioning within the peer group. For example, this intra-organizational Hunger Games-style scenario infamously proved to be close to the undoing of Microsoft after CEO Steve Ballmer introduced a system where employees were forced to rank themselves and each other as good, average, below average, and poor based on performance data (Eichenwald, 2012). Again, this is a public form of judgement in the sense that the data and performance criteria involved in horizontal complex surveillance are effectively the same as those involved in vertical complex surveillance—that is, ostensibly rational data based on an interval scale that can be challenged in terms of reliability and validity. One likely outcome of this is there will be a closer alignment between what supervisors and subordinates come to recognize and value in terms of the operation of what we have come to understand in the course of this book as the positive and negative heuristics of surveillance.

What kind of person are you and how good are you at your job? In the next chapter I shall explore how a consideration of surveillance at work as different configurations of these components of the gaze can be combined with our previous discussion of diagrams of power to produce a more adequate account of recent economic and social developments that have been described by some prominent authors as the rise of a surveillance state or culture. Before I continue, however, I need to introduce two important caveats. The first of these addresses the analytical implications of this chapter’s discussion—especially how we should interpret Table 6.1. A cursory glance at this table might suggest to the reader that there are four potentially discrete states of surveillance, each with vertical or horizontal features. Earlier I alluded to the work of Mary Douglas—in particular her famous “grid and group” analysis—which does indeed allow us to identify four paradigmatic societal states: fatalistic, individualistic, hierarchical, and egalitarian (Douglas, 1970). A common criticism of this kind of approach is that it is merely an exercise in static nominalism which, given her deep roots in the work of Durkheimian functionalism, should come as no surprise. In contrast, I am not suggesting that we can read off four mutually exclusive and static states of surveillance. Rather, it is my contention that, by reconciling the work of Foucault with French fellow travellers like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Lacan, we can think of surveillance at work as the exercise of scopic labour that is accomplished through a gaze that objectifies subjects through the simultaneous interaction of eight different processes. At least eight! There

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may be more that are not captured in my approach, but these are for others to deduce. Importantly, these different features of the gaze can sometimes reinforce each other or detract from each other. Some may be more prominent than others, given the work context. The importance of some may increase as others decline, as the capabilities of technology change and novel organizational structures are tried and retained or rejected. A second related caveat (given that technologies and organizational structures appear to be changing so fast) concerns attempts to develop other analyses that transcend our historically based understandings of surveillance like, for instance, the Panopticon. This tendency has launched a host of neologisms such as the Superpanopticon (Poster, 1990), omniveillance (Blackman, 2009), sousveillance (Mann et al., 2003), or coveillance (Mann et al., 2003—see also Rainie and Wellman, 2012), and so on. Interestingly, these all play with overtly spatial metaphors like geographical reach, physical colocation versus remoteness, or the direction of scrutiny. While these are all entertaining ways of describing ephemeral social and technological architectures, I contend that, by thinking of scopic labour in terms of the configurations of the gaze, we can develop a parsimonious understanding of what it means to be under surveillance at work without resorting to increasingly tortuous neologisms. After all, the gaze may come at you from all directions, but, in objectifying you, it is always and ultimately surveillance, regardless of whether it is simple or complex (cf. Monahan et al., 2010); someone is putting themselves above you to judge you in order to pose and also to answer the basic questions— what kind of person are you and how good are you at what you do in that role? In order to consider the implications of these two caveats an example from my own profession is instructive. Academics still proudly (desperately even) talk about collegiality; a notion of mutual dependence and collective accountability which is supposed to unite the nominal classificatory stratifications of assistant, associate, or full professor as one social body. Isn’t this kind of peer scrutiny a case of coveillance par excellence? Aren’t peers by definition on the same level? Shouldn’t the relationships between peers be even more than that? Shouldn’t they be a perfect example of the non-judgemental consideration of other subjects that Merleau-Ponty and Lacan had in mind when agonising about the potential for a more humane form of solidarity? I would respond to these questions by saying that we are all too easily drawn into the discourse of relative vertical heights where non-judgemental solidarity quickly turns into the piercing objectifying and judging scrutiny of our putative peers so that we determine they are in fact at a lower level than us (an example of the Foucauldian epistemological gaze) or, worse, that they don’t deserve to be considered as one of us at all (an example of the Lacanian ontological gaze)! Of course, academics have always done this—jockeying for position in the eyes of colleagues who are deploying their elusive “professional” judgement—and this simple horizontal surveillance will always be present. With the advent of novel performance measures like the h-index and other impact factors, however, it has become much easier—obligatory,

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even—to compare ourselves with our nominal peers using publicly available data, setting up a finely stratified pecking order that transcends the traditionally f lat hierarchy of academia. Here academics are inadvertently appropriating ostensibly rational data to reinforce the kinds of judgements the swollen ranks of university managers are making about who deserves to work at this or that august institution and how much they deserve to be paid. In another now universally familiar example, looking up a long-lost friend on Facebook to see how they are faring in moments of joy or crisis might also be considered as being caring and non-judgemental. Doing it to gloat about them being less successful and more miserable than ourselves is, however, most decidedly placing ourselves above others through an objectifying and judging gaze which is, at least in my terms, by definition surveillance! So, with this thought in mind let us now turn to how we can think about how we should respond to recent developments in the reach and concentration of scopic labour via the gaze.

7

Heterotopias of surveillance at work

The resistible rise of surveillance capitalism? In the second half of this chapter I will look at surveillance at work in terms of its role in creating the circumstances in which what I shall style “heterotopias” can appear—that is, configurations of the gaze in space and time that challenge established power relations as we experience them in different parts of our lives. In this respect, the main substance of this chapter is an extension of work I first developed with Joeri Mol and Laurent Taskin (Mol et al., 2019). I shall start, however, by ref lecting on important recent contributions to the surveillance literature by two major figures in the field as they situate this mainly conceptual enterprise in its current technological, social, and cultural contexts. David Lyon’s the Culture of Surveillance (Lyon, 2018) and Shoshana Zuboff ’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) share much in terms of their ambition and the scope of their claims: each provides a dystopian vision of society entirely transformed by the baleful inf luence of surveillance. Of course, dystopian visions of technological transformation are nothing new, and we have to exercise caution when being asked to consider a future where everything is different from what went before. Nevertheless, each one deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms, and, in the case of Zuboff ’s book, we also need to consider it in light of the enormous inf luence it has exerted on the popular consciousness since its publication. There was a time in 2019 when you couldn’t open a newspaper without seeing Shoshana’s face or turn on the radio without hearing her voice. Well, figuratively speaking at least, for one of her main points is that no one actually buys an old-fashioned newspaper or listens to an old-fashioned radio anymore. Rather, our consumption of news and information is now delivered by the very tech giants that are surreptitiously “scraping” and monetizing our personal data as we obliviously browse the web, chat with our friends, or swipe right! Of course, no one really reads the terms and conditions before checking the “accept” box that authorizes this activity. How could you when they run, quite literally, to many tens of pages in some instances? To be fair to Zuboff, her book—a monumental effort many years in the making—pays due regard to the grand theorists of modernity such as Marx,

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Weber, and Durkheim, as well as the rise of the sovereign individual associated with the economic liberalism of Smith, Hayek, Coase, and Buchanan. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the U.S. tech sector, with Silicon Valley at its epicentre, is a hot bed of libertarianism; the kind of place where Ayn Rand is seen as a towering intellect. Nevertheless, Zuboff makes the bold claim that an entirely new economic order based on the extraction of personal information has supplanted other modes of accumulation and this development poses a threat to our very sense of what it means to be human. At the heart of this threat lurks a stark contradiction equal to anything Marx identified in that the very thing animating the new robber barons of Silicon Valley—a deeply held ideological belief in the sanctity of the autonomous and rational individual agent—is being undermined by the commercial practices of data extraction and behavioural prediction they have unleashed. Like so many people who claim to believe in unfettered freedom of speech and action, it is a freedom that is only extended by and to a like-minded elite. The foundations of surveillance capitalism lie in the way the neoliberal ideological project has consciously degraded the human individual of classical liberalism to leave nothing more than a hollowed-out Homo Economicus. Reducing all social relations to economic transactions (cf. Friedland and Alford, 1991) creates a climate where tech giants—Zuboff ’s locus classicus is, of course, Google—can with impunity “… disregard the boundaries of private human experience and the moral integrity of the autonomous individual” (Zuboff, 2019: 19). This unilateral declaration that all human experience is simply free raw material to be extracted without regulation—akin to a twenty-first-century declaration of terra nullius—leads to an asymmetry of information favouring those who can get their hands on it that, in turn, sustains the rapidly emerging “Division of Learning” in society (see Zuboff, 1988). In short, social stratification is based on our ability to extract and exploit knowledge about others, be it through superior technical abilities, the brute force of massive technological infrastructure, or an artful combination of the two. Like imperial conquerors setting foot in a new land, their possession of these overwhelmingly superior resources is taken as the surest sign that destiny had bestowed on buccaneering entrepreneurs the right to rule over the technological savages and appropriate everything in sight— something that comes right out of the pages of Ayn Rand in fact. It is not sufficient, however, to be content with the mere possession of this information; its value must be amplified by using it to modify the behaviour of citizens in ways that shape the commercial interests of its appropriators (Trottier, 2012). In the space of two decades the worldwide web has thus gone from the last frontier of personal freedom to being the biggest current and future threat to that freedom as surveillance capitalism constrains “… the individual’s ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future” (Zuboff, 2019: 20). Zuboff calls this quest for total predictive certainty the rise of “instrumentarian power” where not just individuals but the whole of society becomes nothing less than an integrated network of inescapable

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compliance and conformity. This is not like Orwell’s Big Brother with surveillance concentrated in the hands of a totalitarian state but more like the wholesale corporate psychological manipulation of Huxley’s Brave New World; something she calls the Big Other. Surveillance capitalism thus bypasses our time-honoured institutions of democracy, regulation, taxation, and redistribution by concentrating the responsibility for the organizing and policing of society in the hands of a tiny number of megacorporations. It’s not just that the tech giants do all they can to avoid paying tax; Zuboff claims they also decide what it is appropriate for us to think, believe, and do. Moreover, through more or less subtle techniques of seduction and manipulation they can bring this to pass. This is where the poverty of Silicon Valley’s libertarian creed is most brutally revealed. Just think of some social media platforms’ stubborn refusal to remove obviously false but commercially lucrative political advertising—an act usually justified in the name of free speech—when they are also quick to take down other posts that might offend certain inf luential users. Although such corporate double standards shouldn’t really surprise us, Zuboff warns that veiling them in the libertarian rhetoric of anything goes makes it more likely that private corporations will be able first to decide what goes and then make it happen as well. There is little doubt then that Zuboff ’s Big Other is as frighteningly dystopian as Orwell’s Big Brother, and, in this sense, her book is polemical; a call-to-arms so that we can moderate the excesses of surveillance capitalism before it’s too late. David Lyon also starts The Culture of Surveillance by invoking Orwell, but, instead of rooting his critique primarily in political economy like Zuboff, he offers a more anthropological approach that also includes an examination of customs and habits that make up our understanding of the lived experience of surveillance. One of Lyon’s main claims, however, clearly complements Zuboff ’s observations—the apparently mundane nature of the pervasive and quotidian uses of information technology seems far removed from the activities of governments, security agencies, and data-hungry corporations. Through almost imperceptible increments, however, those very governments, security agencies, and data-hungry corporations have become heavily dependent on the information supplied by the casual use of smartphones, personal computers, and all the other taken for granted electronic trappings of our twenty-first-century lives. This leads to a situation where our experience of surveillance has effectively been “deterritorialized” in that it has shifted away from familiar places and proximal social relationships to become “liquid” through a fundamental modification of traditional social ties (see Chapter 5). Instead of seeking the approval of our immediate neighbours (with all the institutionalized norms and behavioural constraints that involves), we have become more interested in seeking the “likes” of people we have never met and with whom we may have little in common in any meaningful sense. Reputation thus becomes commodified through a diffused market of relative approval using a very narrow set of criteria enacted by strangers. In an important sense this is exactly what markets are supposed to

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do—as Adam Smith once noted, the further you get away from hearth and home, the harder it is to make judgements about the intentions of others. In this sense, one of the main functions of a market is exactly to signal the reliability and integrity of a supplier to a customer and vice versa, even if they are complete strangers to each other. Here, to paraphrase Douglas (1986), the market is doing the thinking for us as we only have to imagine how exhausting it would be if we had to gather information about the character and reputation of a stranger every time we wanted to do business with them. To put it another way, although your friends, colleagues, and neighbours probably know whether or not you’re an asshole, on the web nobody really knows (or even cares) if you’re an asshole, so long as your eBay seller or Uber driver ratings are high enough or you get enough shares and likes. Indeed, in some circles on social media, behaving like an asshole is a prerequisite for getting attention and building a particular type of reputation that can then be monetised. To be sure, the scope of Lyon’s and Zuboff ’s books is grander than mine, but their ref lections on the current state of surveillance obviously have implications for the world of work. So, at their prompting, in the rest of this chapter I shall explore the following themes. First, subordinating our privacy to the interests of corporations is something we are used to at work. Indeed, rather than checking a box in ignorance, by signing a contract we are submitting ourselves to the surveillance of our employers in an open manner that rarely gets commented on. In this sense, what Zuboff sees as the Big Other is merely the familiar principle of predictive behaviouralism developed in the workplace but extended to wider society: as we have seen throughout this book, kings, bürgermeisters, prison warders, and managers have always dreamed of perfectly compliant subjects, citizens, prisoners, or workers whose will can be bent to the interests of the state, city, society, or corporation. So why wouldn’t the tech giants of today now dream of being free to act with minimal legal scrutiny and regulation to procure perfectly compliant employees and consumers who do the corporation’s bidding? Yet we know that even in prisons, let alone commercial corporations, such complete control is and always has been a fantasy; there will forever be opportunities to challenge the limits of compliance and conformity. Here Zuboff commits a double error in that she simultaneously overestimates the ability of surveillance capitalism to render us docile (see Chapter 4) while simultaneously paying undue reverence to a cartoon version of the Enlightenment concept of autonomy and self-determination (see Chapter 2). This leads Zuboff to conf late a long-running fantasy of the realization of complete control with a quasi-religious myth dripping in post-Augustinian Christian theology. My response to this is to maintain a healthy scepticism when it comes to certain exaggerated claims about the power of apparently separate but effectively imbricated webs or assemblages of surveillance (see Chapter 5) to render us docile while also recognizing that our understanding of what it means to be an autonomous agent is protean and contingent on the prevailing social,

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economic, and technological conditions (see Chapter 2). In short, Zuboff ’s surveillance capitalism is not quite the same as working under surveillance in a capitalist organization, although it ref lects many of the enduring preoccupations of surveillance at work. Here Lyon’s remarks on the experience of deterritorialization are pertinent because in the rest of this chapter I want to focus on how surveillance mediates in social relationships at work that take place in different physical and social settings across different times. In short, time and space or territory and territorialization matter. This will no doubt take in some of the important observations made by Zuboff—not least her point about the relentless extraction of personal information impinging on our sense of autonomy—but I will argue that the way tech giants have reduced wider social relationships to abstract and decontextualized numbers has some antecedents in the way measurement at work reduces us to our latest performance review for there is little doubt that the way we waive the right to privacy by checking the “agree” box on an app or website has been going on in the workplace as long as we have been signing employment contracts (see Chapters 2, 3, and 4). Here I take inspiration from Michel Foucault’s concept of the Heterotopia as I expand the scope of my discussion of surveillance at work to take in different epochs and different social spaces. In doing this I shall also be able pull together some threads that have been running throughout this book.

Thinking of the workplace as a surveillance heterotopia In this section I will show how Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia is useful when thinking about the experience of surveillance at work. As we shall see, this simply does not just extend to the kind of panoptic surveillance we readily associate with Foucault but takes on various emergent and historically contingent forms. Although he alludes to them early on in The Order of Things, Foucault’s only detailed discussion of heterotopias extends to a mere nine pages of a transcribed lecture from 1967 that wasn’t published until much later (Foucault, 1986). There is a pleasing symmetry here with our knowledge of Marx’s brief disquisition on the labour process for, as we saw earlier, that also generated a level of interest that stretches way beyond the scope of the original discussion (see Chapter 4). The concept of the heterotopia originally came to Foucault on reading Jorge Luis Borges’ (1999) weird and wonderful creation, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. This strange taxonomy—the one that famously talks, among other things, of mermaids, stray dogs, “those that from afar look like f lies,” and “those that tremble as if they were mad”—is reproduced in the preface of The Order of Things, leading Foucault to ponder that such strange objects can only exist in a world where normal relationships between everyday things are disrupted. Thus, a heterotopia is a potential space for social transformation that sits between two imaginary worlds: a utopia where such relationships are perfectly ordered and a dystopia where they are in total

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disarray. This allows Foucault to consider a heterotopia as a place apart from normal society where established cultural conventions that govern our everyday perceptions, language, and social practices can be disrupted, if not totally negated. Moreover, depending on our circumstances we can move into and out of a heterotopia with more or less ease. From this he goes on to identify six defining principles of heterotopia. First Principle. All societies have produced such places, although Foucault notes a historical tendency to replace heterotopias of “crisis” with heterotopias of “deviation.” In the former we temporarily stand outside normal social classifications, such as when women are menstruating or adolescents are undergoing a rite of passage to adulthood (cf. Douglas, 1970). In the latter, however, we exist outside of normal social classifications on a more open-ended basis, such as when we are incarcerated in prisons or mental hospitals. Echoing Max Weber, heterotopias of crisis are enchanted places where difference is based on magical traditions and folk wisdom. In contrast, heterotopias of deviation are more likely to be disenchanted places where difference is based on “science” and rational instruments of evaluation. Second Principle. The same physical space can act as a quite distinct heterotopia over time. Foucault mentions our changing understanding of the function of the cemetery, but you could equally consider how the prison changed from a holding pen to a place of penitence, reform, and productive labour (see Chapter 4). Third Principle. A heterotopia can be considered as a single place yet may be made up of physical spaces that stand in logical and even necessary contradiction. For example, we go to the zoo to experience the thrill of seeing “wild” animals, but we would never contemplate going there unless we were sure those animals were effectively separated from us (and each other) in their own enclosures. Fourth Principle. In the same way that being in a heterotopia dislocates us spatially, taking us away from the everyday spaces of society, so it also disturbs us in a temporal sense. Think, for example, of the way that visiting a holiday resort takes us away from the quotidian rhythms of working life. Fifth Principle. For it to be effective, a heterotopia must simultaneously appear closed off and separate from our regular domestic existence and somehow seem accessible. Regardless of whether entry is mandatory (as in a prison) or is voluntary (as in a holiday resort), we must also satisfy certain conditions to enter and leave. If we can never leave, then it ceases to be a heterotopia but becomes our new everyday reality. This is not, of course, a rare occurrence for we are used to prisoners becoming “institutionalized” and unable to return to a life outside. Sixth Principle. A heterotopia must always stand in contrast to ordinary spaces so that it reveals some truth about our experience of everyday life.

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Imagine going into what we expect to be perfectly ordered and hierarchically separated space run on strictly enforced rules—just like a prison in fact—only to realize once inside that, much like rubbing along with our fellow citizens, collusion and compromise are as important as command and control. In contrast, in order for us to suspend our disbelief and enjoy the emancipatory magic of a theatrical performance to transport us to another place, we have to behave in the most controlled of ways by sitting obediently still in our seat in total silence for hours on end. By ref lecting on these general principles we can now develop some more specific observations about the heterotopic character of working under surveillance. First, the workplace has always had the potential to be a heterotopia of deviation in Foucault’s sense as we are subject to ostensibly scientific and rational instruments of surveillance that determine whether we are “good” or “bad” workers, regardless of whether we are “good” or “bad” citizens outside of work. For example, it is entirely possible that we might perform miserably at our job while being exemplary parents, partners, or neighbours or vice versa. In this chapter, however, I am more interested in heterotopias within work organizations. What I mean by this is that alternative configurations of the ontological and epistemological gazes—different arrangements of scopic labour, if you will—can exist in contradistinction to those enacted through official or formal mechanisms of the organization. For example, in prison a disruptive prisoner may be considered as a hero by other inmates. Similarly, although formal surveillance may mark out certain employees as being disruptive or recalcitrant at work, at least as far as their superiors are concerned, those same employees may be considered in the eyes of their peers to be brave and independently minded people who are willing to stand up to oppressive bosses. Second, the changing physical organization of industrial and commercial workplaces over time means we experience the impact of this workplace surveillance in very different ways, even though in most other ways the organization as a whole is a relatively stable entity (for an excellent discussion of the subjective experience of surveillance see Ball, 2002). Consider the way the introduction of open plan seating transformed office work in the 1960s, only to be superseded by today’s “hot desking.” Opposition to the impersonal nature of these changing working spaces is often expressed through attempts to “claim” them through various struggles around meaning (Brown and Humphreys, 2006). Third, although we may think in an abstract sense of the workplace as an integrated whole, it is of course made up of many different physical spaces— the meeting room, the locker room, the shop f loor, the classroom, and so on—where we are more or less subject to surveillance. The decisions we make about what to do and how to behave towards others thus depend on where we are at the time we make them. For example, we might say things in the

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gendered space of the locker room that we would never say on the open shop f loor. Similarly, we might perform very differently at the office than when we are working from home in some kind of f lexible arrangement (Sewell and Taskin, 2015). A corollary of this is the desire to broaden the scope of surveillance to take in spaces that were previously impervious to its reach. Fourth, in the same way that early factories were heterotopias where the requirements of coordination and discipline disrupted the established rhythms of agrarian life (Thompson, 1967), so recent developments in the organization of work like homeworking, zero hours contracts, and the “platform” economy have disrupted the rhythms of the nine-to-five working day or the Monday-to-Friday working week. Such changes required the development of surveillance technologies that were f lexible enough to extend beyond the spatial and temporal limits of traditional factory or office work. Fifth, we are used to work being a distinct place that is separate from other parts of our lives. Thus, in order to enter we sign a contract that not only creates mutual expectations between employees and employers but also allows employers to intrude into our lives in ways that we usually would not tolerate elsewhere, such as intensive monitoring of our activities all the time we are at work. Such monitoring has usually ended when we cease being employees, although there are circumstances where it can continue when we leave the organization (e.g., if we sign a confidentiality clause or agree not to poach our former employer’s customers). Here the growing ubiquity of surveillance identified by Zuboff and by Lyon has the potential to challenge this separation of work life from non-work life. Take, for example, the growing and ostensibly benign interest employers are taking in their employees’ “wellness” (Cederström and Spicer, 2015). Here in the name of health and well-being employers are increasingly asking their employees to don wearable technologies that measure things like blood pressure, heart rate, and footsteps, all in the name of care (see Chapter 4). Meanwhile, in the platform economy independent contractors—who, as we shall see in Chapter 8, are employees in all but name—are subject to constant surveillance through global positioning, not only while they are completing the tasks that intermittently come their way but also while they go about their lives between jobs. Thus, today’s ubiquitous surveillance has the potential to obscure the traditional boundary between work and non-work. The blurring of the line between work and non-work surveillance can also lead to a blurring of the distinction between our status as employees and as citizens—if we are bad workers how could we not also be bad citizens, and vice versa? A frivolous example of this is increasing appearance on on-line dating sites of psychometric profiles like the Myers-Briggs type indicator. Although such tools have traditionally been restricted to recruitment and selection, they are now being used to signal to potential partners that we have a stable and desirable personality. More worryingly, something like the Chinese Social Credit System shows little respect for the boundary between work and nonwork (see Cinnamon, 2017) and how long is it before government agencies

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elsewhere start drawing on work-related performance measures to determine the kind of citizen we are? Finally, as a corollary to these last observations and in line with Foucault’s sixth principle, I would make the normative point that we should retain an understanding that work can indeed be kept separate from other parts of our life. Here a qualified invocation of Zuboff ’s concept of autonomy is helpful. Without ever suggesting that labour is an expression of our essential human nature, by maintaining some control over where the boundary between the public and the private lies within the workplace or where it lies between work and non-work, we can end up exercising something close to autonomy (understood as a historically contingent concept rather than some eternal and immutable human quality). In short, fighting to preserve the workplace as a heterotopia is an important political project in itself because it is an attempt to protect us from having the whole of our lives colonized by the rationalizing forces that start, but do not end, with surveillance at work. If the distinctive and separate spaces of our lives where different forms of surveillance play out do eventually merge into one unified morass—a surveillance singularity if you will (cf. Kurzweil, 2005)—then we do truly face a dystopia of the most frightening kind. Rather than dwell on the obviously pessimistic implications of my last point—after all, people have been predicating one kind of technological singularity or other for years (Vinge, 1993)—I shall now turn my discussion to a much more optimistic take on workplace surveillance as a form of heterotopia. This will take seriously Foucault’s relatively underdeveloped thoughts about the heterotopia as a recurrent feature of human society by essaying a historical take, via the concept of the diagram, on how we experience surveillance as a constellation or assemblage of discursive practices and technologies that operate in space and time (see Chapter 5). This will involve adopting an extended historical perspective so we can broaden our understanding of surveillance at work that moves beyond narrow technological considerations to embrace the various historical applications of the original concept of surveillance as a mechanism that supports a set of preferred social arrangements. Importantly, such an analysis assists in attending to the structural differences that societies exhibit across time as well as the role that institutionalized forms of measurement plays in the normalization of human conduct. This also involves the application of the concept of performing scopic work the through gaze I set out in Chapter 6 in order to develop a chronology of heterotopias as recognizable social spaces that align with proximal, distal, and net-work forms of work we encountered in Chapter 2. Before I can do this, however, I need to spend a little time working through some ideas about social space.

Surveillance as social space Social space as a concept has a venerable history in dating back, at least in the way I want to talk about it, to Émile Durkheim. He saw it, quite literally, as

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the land over which a social group ranged and, thus, inhabited (Durkheim, 1971). This is distinct from an individual’s singular perspective on the space around them as perceived through their senses; ontologically speaking, a social space is an abstract object comprising all those individual perceptions that is coextensive with society itself. From this perspective, to map out a social space is, in methodological terms at least, effectively to define what constitutes a coherent social group (Buttimer, 1969) for the “… organization of society is naturally passed on to the space it occupies” (Durkheim, 1971: 444). For example, in Mauss’s (1968 [1904]) study of the “double morphology of Eskimos’ societies” he showed that nomadic arctic tribes engaged in different social relations and religious activities depending on whether it was winter, when they were sedentary, or summer, when they were mobile. In effect, Mauss was saying that there were effectively two distinct forms of tribal society, spatially and temporarily defined. Durkheim’s position contrasts with Marx who took class consciousness to be independent of location. Thus, for Marx space was only really a consideration insofar as it helped or hindered the development of that class consciousness—for example, when the working class are clustered together in slums (Claval, 1977). In effect, under capitalism a social space could only ever be a particular manifestation of the domination of labour by capital. Yet it is possible to develop an understanding of space that is not merely the physical trace of the social relations of production (Claval, 1977; Duncan and Ley, 1982). This is the line taken by Henri Lefebvre (1991) and others who have attempted to reconcile a radical political economy with a more critical notion of social space. For Lefebvre social structures are both mental conceptions and material things. This dual constitution avoids the crude physical determinism of previous Marxist conceptions of geography that unwittingly undermined the dialectical character of space as it is experienced by members of distinct social formations (Claval, 1977), such as individuals who are employees of work organizations. Lefebvre’s transformation of radical geography was highly inf luential first in France (e.g., Isnard, 1978) and then in the Anglophone world (e.g., Soja, 1980; Sayer and Walker, 1992) and is exemplified in Harvey’s (1982: 374) line that, “I view location as a fundamental material attribute of human activity but recognize that location is socially produced.” Importantly, this does not refer to simplistic extensive notions of distance or area; rather, it is the metaphorical usage of intensive qualities that convey the qualitative nature and extent of human social relationships, such as the familiar core– periphery model in all its manifestations (Claval, 1980). In this way, by using such figurative language we are mapping out what Buttimer (1969) called an “action space” encompassing the cultural, social, and economic horizons of a society’s members (cf. Bourdieu, 1977—especially his notion of habitus). This avoids economic or environmental determinism by recognizing that a society’s members live across many finer-grained elements of social architecture, including families, kinship and friendship groups, religious affiliations,

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co-worker relationships, and various community organizations (Maquet, 1971; Claval, 1977). This recognition led Malmberg (1980) to anticipate what Friedland and Alford (1991) would later theorize as the complex interaction of the diverse normative constraints on social behaviour, seeing social space as the patchwork produced by the contiguous and overlapping territories that each ref lect a particular combination of objective social forces and subjective conceptions of geographical solidarity (Gottmann, 1973; Brown et al., 2009). Here the importance of scale becomes evident because such territories do not extend over the same Cartesian space: for example, we experience family at a much more intense and intimate scale than community. This points in the direction of a more historical approach to the social spaces of organization that is consonant with Lefebvre’s concept of territoriality and Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. In other words, I am interested in the way in which we “make” social spaces collectively through an interaction of historically contingent social practices and technologies but experience them at the individual scale. This not only requires an understanding of how at any one moment we personally relate to the various social spaces we inhabit during the day but also how our total experience is shaped by the interaction of these social spaces. Such questions of personal experience of collective space as well as their internal structures lead me to a more detailed consideration of the work of Henri Lefebvre as it pertains to social space in and around the workplace; especially as this appears in his 1991 book, The Production of Space (see also Dale and Burrell, 2008; Maréchal et al., 2011; Wapshott and Mallett, 2012; Zhang and Spicer, 2014; Klauser, 2017; Kingma et al., 2018). Lefebvre (1991) contends that space and, by extension, time are not things in themselves but are subjective forms of human sensible intuition. This is not to say that they are not empirically real, but neither are they sui generis; rather, they are the means by which we represent the material world in order to understand, through consciousness, our position within it. According to Lefebvre, this focus on representation has been superseded by objective mathematical notions of time and space, a tendency that has found its apotheosis in the rationalized mathematical models of the behavioural sciences today. In contrast, Lefebvre wants to us to think of space and time as “mental things” that can also take on myriad forms so that, depending on certain contingencies, our experiences proliferate to include ideological spaces, disciplinary spaces, dreamscapes, and psychoanalytical topographies. For Lefebvre, we must understand how these multiple spaces are at least subject to the inf luence of the capitalist mode of production itself, either because they are representations of its material effects or can offer alternatives to them. He emphatically wants to move beyond the brute physical form and the technocratic theories of space as developed within professional bureaucracies and directs attention to the persistence of social space through meaning structures and habituated practices. It is important to note that while repetition provides some form of structural persistence to social spaces, they are not to be understood as rigid and unchanging: because social space is born out of the inherent tension between

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the individual and the collective imagination there are always paradoxes and pressures at play that render them plastic in nature. For example, the intended uses of certain theoretically planned physical spaces (e.g., the city, the suburb, or the home) are legitimated by ideologically derived social spaces but can be undermined when people imagine alternative uses (cf. Bachelard, 1994) and respond accordingly, either individually or, as Lefebvre hoped, collectively (Klauser, 2017). This not only suggests a way of conceiving of a heterotopia of surveillance as a social space marked out by practices and technologies (e.g., those implicated in scopic labour) but also suggests a way of resisting spatial and temporal effects of surveillance by challenging its legitimating ideology.

An unnatural history of scopic labour: heterotopias of the gaze Now I have established that surveillance is centrally implicated in establishing heterotopias as specific social spaces we inhabit at work, it is now time to extend our unnatural history to account for how we have experienced this interaction of technology and social organization over time. Here I am taking inspiration from the Annales School and its idea of the historical longue durée (see Braudel, 2009—although the detailed methods of the School are well beyond the scope of this book). Thus, rather than trying to attribute the development of workplace surveillance to a single motivating cause throughout history—for example, its deployment in the service of class domination (as in the case of Marx) or as part of a trend towards ever greater rationalization (as in the case of Weber)—I will concentrate on changes in what Braudel (2009) called “secular trends” where ideology and social organization cohere around certain practices and technologies. These trends do not align with the all-too-neat periodization of kings and queens, decades, or even centuries. Nor do they align with longer but equally familiar historical periods such as the Middle Ages or the Modern Era. Rather than looking at these essentially arbitrary periods, we should focus our attention on identifying breaks, shifts, and ruptures within social institutions that align with paradigmatic shifts or breaks in thought (Foucault, 2005). In this vein, I will go on to identify four periods where surveillance and its intimate relationship with the operation of various modes of power align with my topological diagrams as I developed them in Chapter 5. Although these diagrams are more general in their scope, I will relate them to parallel developments in the organization of work and show how, in each period, heterotopias of the gaze can coexist that challenge the dominant power relations of the time. Here the concept of a heterotopia works on several levels. First, it aligns neatly with my interest in spatial and temporal matters for these are collective social and political entities that extend over time and space; entities that can be thought of in terms of the way the scopic labour of the gaze inscribes social relationships via discursive (i.e., ideological) and non-discursive (i.e., environmental) elements (Caluya, 2010). Second, it prompts us to think about configurations of the gaze in

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their current state (as signalled by the likes of Zuboff and Lyon) by comparing them to previous configurations. Finally, it chimes with concerns about the rise of the fully integrated and dystopian “Surveillance State” where the separation between public and private realms is dissolving. Communitarian heterotopias of sovereign power For my first pairing of a diagram of power and heterotopia I turn to a line of thinking that Foucault was developing immediately prior to the publication of Discipline and Punish. This was aired in a series of lectures to the College de France in 1977 and 1978, but the lectures themselves were only published much later (see Foucault, 2009). This is the key period where he begins his shift from a narrower descriptive account of the “disciplinary society” to the more generalized analytical concept of governmentality (Davidson, 2009). Here Foucault distinguishes between the original French usage of the word police as a noun and its subsequent gradual transformation into a verb, as in to police. Of course, the former is etymologically derived from the Greek Polis— especially Plato’s idealized description of the political, judicial, legal, religious, and social institutions and practices that made up the Athenian city-state. In terms of usage the more familiar verb form is close to the noun form etymologically and semantically, but they still have distinct connotations according to Foucault. Thus, policing has come to be associated with the activities of a centralized, rationalizing, and technocratic nation-state while a proliferation of self-administrating city-states in all their diversity represent a much more localized and differentiated form of social regulation. This is not to say that such localized social systems were not as hierarchical as the modern centralized state. Rather, for many centuries local customs and folk wisdom exercised as much inf luence on daily activities as more formal ways of understanding the world promulgated by the likes of the Church, princes, or guilds. Echoing Ferdinand Tönnies’ concept of Gemeinschaft, Foucault (2009) noted that, under this localized governmental and ideological character of the citystate, the principle mechanism by which social solidarity and social cohesion were established and maintained was through direct and personal peer scrutiny; effectively a community-based or collective gaze where everyone watched everyone (cf. Mathieson, 1997—see also my discussion of peer scrutiny at Kay Electronics in Chapter 4). After Mann et al. (2005), this ostensibly resembles coveillance insofar as it is conducted by nominal peers. We should, however, use this term with caution for if peers cast an ontological or epistemological gaze on each other—that is, if they pass judgement on each other in terms of their status or value—then they are still engaging in a form of relative positioning that in effect constitutes sur-veillance. To illustrate this point, I turn to an unlikely source: Hieronymus Bosch’s 1470 painting The Seven Deadly Sins (see Figure 7.1). The image in question is actually a painted wooden tabletop that is now displayed in the Prado Museum in Madrid, but it once hung on the wall of the bedchamber of the pious King Phillip III of Spain in his Escorial Palace.

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Figure 7.1 “The Seven Deadly Sins,” Hieronymus Bosch (used with the permission of the Prado Museum, Madrid).

In the centre of the picture, announced by the declamation Cave, Cave, Deus Videt or “Beware, Beware, God Sees,” is the eye of God peering into the lives of burghers whose debauched exploits were depicted in tableaux arrayed around it in a circle, each depicting in graphic detail one of the seven sins. Although, at first glance this arrangement appears, morphologically speaking at least, to be strikingly similar to Bentham’s plan of the Panopticon (see Figure  3.1), any sinner would quickly come to realize that what was more important on a day-to-day basis was not so much God’s delayed judgement but the more proximal and immediate judgement of their fellow burghers. This did not just involve the operation of the ontological gaze to determine whether or not they were members of community but also the epistemological gaze that determined whether they were morally upstanding or morally deficient burghers. Replace God’s eye with the eye of the sovereign— supposedly God’s anointed representative on earth (see Figures 5.1 and 5.3) and you get a better sense of what The Seven Deadly Sins is trying, ultimately unsuccessfully, to convey. Although sovereign power was supposed to ensure social cohesion by uniting the community under the authority of the monarch, its effects were only rarely experienced. Indeed, most of Phillip III’s subjects (or, for most of human history, the subjects of any other sovereign for that matter) wouldn’t even know what their king looked like, let alone experience his judgement or even the judgement of his proxies. Social cohesion was not then an epiphenomenon of the exercise of sovereign power but the

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Figure 7.2 Communitarian Heterotopias under Sovereign Power Founded on Territorialized Relationships of Horizontal Surveillance.

result of something much more palpable and localized. This is what I mean by a heterotopia of surveillance—a social formation maintained by scopic labour enacted through a configuration of the ontological and epistemological gazes that stands in contradistinction to the prevailing diagram of power. In this case, it demonstrates the power of surveillance enacted through peer scrutiny, backed by the ideology of the Church, to maintain discipline through communitarian means (Manning, 1997). This notion is inherently territorial in that the apparently universal principles enshrined in canon and secular law were interpreted through the prism of local custom and practice, making each community a unique heterotopia of surveillance that undermined the exclusive authority of the sovereign power of popes and kings whose writs were supposed to run unchallenged and unmodified throughout the land. Figure 7.2 shows how we can plot this diagrammatically as a network of territorial relationships based on horizontal or peer surveillance. This is not to say, however, that such communitarian heterotopias were invariably or even commonly benign; the history of medieval and early modern Europe is littered with examples where isolated communities were consumed by accusations of witchcraft (see, for example, Macfarlane, 1999) or millenarian eschatological dysfunction (see, for example, the tyranny enacted by the monstrous John of Leiden in anticipation of the Second Coming during the 1534–1535 Siege of Münster—Cohn, 1992). Proximal work and heterotopias under quasi-panoptic disciplinary power The foregoing commentary leads me to the contention that the communitarian configuration of the ontological and epistemological gazes associated with Foucault’s notion of the police stood in contradistinction to the operation

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of sovereign power—if you will excuse the pun, by circumventing the gaze of the king, the police was, for good or ill, self-policing. This is not to say, however, that sovereign power was entirely absent in this pre-industrial example, but, harking back to Bosch’s painting, its effects were likely to be more delayed than the instantaneous judgement of status and merit that we associate with the combined ontological and epistemological gazes as they subsequently developed at the local level. Importantly, this tension between the limits of intermittent and deferred sovereign power and the immediate and inescapable experience of a communitarian heterotopia actually set the stage for the emergence of biopower, governmentality, and the modern state. As Elias (1969) noted, apart from the priestly confessional, the notion of the individual private realm was not well-developed prior to the seventeenth century, with people having to live many aspects of their life in full public view. Ideas about what we ought to have done in public and what we ought to have done behind closed doors, however, were gradually transformed by increasingly complex and rival networks of social connections that translated personal feelings of shame and repugnance into something akin to a Freudian super-ego that ultimately became formalized in competing manuals of courtly etiquette, the founding articles of guilds, and so on. Vincent (2015) notes that this coincided with the emergence of the modern concept of individual privacy as boundary that can be erected as a defence around putatively autonomous subjects to protect them from unwanted attention such as the intrusive gaze of state agencies. Of course, this provoked a debate that continues to this day about what constitutes a legitimate intrusion. Equally importantly, it marked out the individual subject as the focus of the vertical gaze from superior to subordinate. Taken together, the rise of the notion of the sovereign individuals and those individuals’ concomitant desire to protect that sovereignty created a countervailing impulse in others to “know” what was going on behind this wall of privacy. In this way the sequestering power of the gaze can be deployed to satiate a politics of suspicion which posits that a self-serving minority may invoke privacy to conceal the fact that they are not living up to the collective expectations of communities, governments, commercial organizations, and so on. This can be seen as the origin of the adage that, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear” that we have heard so often repeated ever since and which legitimates the surveillance of all as a precautionary measure based on eternal vigilance. This emergence of constant and pervasive suspicion was particularly evident in the incipient stages of the modern governmental state that occupied Foucault in Discipline and Punish and represents the kind of rupture in ideology that Braudel (2009) alerts us to. It also played out in the dynamics of pre-industrial modes of production such as the putting-out system where wool merchants would place responsibility for spinning, dying, and weaving cloth in the hands of communities of local craftsmen who were usually bound together through familial or broader kinship ties. As we saw in Chapter 2, this made the merchants potentially vulnerable to theft as they had no direct surveillance of the manufacturing process

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and were at the mercy of the outworkers who, it was hoped, would transact honestly. Without doubt this provided a good deal of impetus for the creation of the early factory system that went beyond the desire for efficiency and need for a specialized division of labour for it was the bringing all these workers under one roof that made it possible for the merchants to keep an eye on them (Styles, 1983). In the absence of a well-developed system of supervision or vertical surveillance, however, these were still in effect enclosed communitarian heterotopias where social cohesion and solidarity were reinforced through peer scrutiny. This is an important historical point of transition where the communitarian heterotopia associated with the localized community or police endures in the microcosm of the proto-capitalist organization. Although the development of these proto-modern organizations created a boundary that defined its members as being on the inside, they were often left to their own devices in terms of the day-to-day running of the place. This was proximal work in the sense I set out in Chapter 2, but it had yet to become a site of orthodox managerial control as I set out in in Chapter 3. There was, however, an internal sense of order and common purpose maintained through a communitarian heterotopia that allowed its members to understand they were a corporate body engaged with external entities in the form of potential competitors. I contend that vertical surveillance, in the form of the direct managerial scrutiny and evaluation of labour, has attempted to undermine this form of peer solidarity, but it does not approximate to the purely panoptic ideal of power discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. This is because the physical and social isolation along the lines of Bentham’s Panopticon isn’t a practical consideration. In this sense, the organization of work along bureaucratic principles of hierarchy is better characterized as a manifestation of a quasi-panoptic form of power where there is surveillance of subordinates by superiors but there is also horizontal surveillance between peers (see Figure 7.3a).

Vertical Surveillance (between strata)

Horizontal Surveillance (within strata)

Figure 7.3a The Quasi-Panoptic Surveillance of Bureaucratic Hierarchy.

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Figure 7.3b Plan of a Stratum in the Bureaucratic Hierarchy Showing Communitarian Heterotopias.

To illustrate this, consider for a moment the example provided by Trist and Bamforth’s (1951) classic study which memorably charted the introduction of mechanized coal cutting and modern managerial methods in the postwar UK mining industry. Although, somewhat counterintuitively, this imposition of productive technology and organizational hierarchy initially had the effect of actually reducing the productivity of the miners, it nevertheless disrupted the traditional kinships ties that formed the basis of workforce’s self-management and solidarity. Effectively this was a deterritorialization of those kinship relations and a reterritorialization of relationships based on the formal relations of a modern bureaucracy. But, as we saw in Chapter 3, nearly 150 years earlier even Bentham had come to realize that completely closing off paid employees (as distinct from prisoners) from each other was enormously difficult and, given the social nature of work, even undesirable. Thus, Figure 7.3b conveys the idea that, even within the strata of the most rational of bureaucratic hierarchies, localized communitarian heterotopias of peer surveillance can emerge. In the case mapped out by Trist and Bamforth this happened through peer relations founded on a technical division of labour once those based on kinship had been disrupted, but we can think of other sources of solidarity such as membership of a work team or even something as basic as physical co-location. Speaking more generally, these heterotopias would be founded on the proximity of individuals who have some shared understanding of the basis of their solidarity (and, consequently, the basis of the judgements they make about each other in terms of status and value) as stemming from mutual dependency, rather than some Hunger Games competitiveness. Of course, the experience of Kay Electronics in Chapter 4 (and many other teamwork scenarios before and since) suggests that managers may be aware of this and try to enrol a communitarian dynamic in the service of the organization—that is, managers will seek to yoke horizontal surveillance to vertical surveillance as carefully articulated components of wider negative and positive heuristics

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in order to minimize disruption and maximize productivity respectively. Despite this risk, I maintain that instead of seeking to banish surveillance completely, maintaining an independent communitarian heterotopia through horizontal surveillance creates the potential for subordinates in a traditional organizational hierarchy to resist the vertical surveillance of their superiors (see Buchanan, 1989). This does not necessarily mean, however, that such a heterotopia is a pristine space devoid of all judgements about status and value; after all, it still involves a configuration of the gaze that ranges across a social space where its ontological and epistemological functions are still in operation. Indeed, although such activity has previously been framed in terms of sousveillance (i.e., subordinates watching superiors) or coveillance (i.e., peers watching each other), this is why I contend that surveillance is still the appropriate term. The key point here is that, although they are still judgements about status and value, they rely on criteria that are not set by the organization in pursuit of its own purposes. In this way, such a heterotopia lives up to its billing as a challenge to the established social relationships of work as they are mediated through the common practices of organizational surveillance. The emergence of other ways of organizing work that diverge from the orthodox notion of bureaucratic hierarchy (of which teamwork is but only one) means, however, that we must consider how these alternatives involve different configurations of the gaze. Distal work and the search for heterotopias under archipelagic power When writing a book like this it is always risky to mention an event that we are currently living through as phrases like “this time it’s different” eventually give way to “business as usual.” Although the narrative of a combined health and economic crisis precipitated by the pandemic of 2020/21 has justifiably dominated during this time, many commentators haven’t hesitated to expound on the “end of work as we know it.” At a time when technologically enabled homeworking has become a necessity rather than a preference for many—at least for those lucky enough for this to be an option—the popular press has been full of serious commentary on the trials and tribulations of homeworking. But even before such an unprecedented disruption in work practices, there was a humorous report in The Guardian newspaper of 24 September 2019 called “Shirking from Home: Why Bosses still Insist on Pointless Presenteeism” which captured a core element of Labour Process Theory we explored in Chapter 4: once they are away from the prying eye of managers, will employees still work as hard as they possibly can or will they take the opportunity to goof off knowing that such behaviour is less likely to be detected? Of course, as we saw in Chapter 2, we have known for a long time that a central feature of technologically mediated homeworking has been its in-built surveillance capability (Brocklehurst, 2001). In this respect, what I have been referring to as vertical surveillance has for some time now been a practical possibility in certain types of distal work, but this raises the matter

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of what happens to horizontal surveillance in these situations when nominal peers are isolated from one another. In order to explore this conundrum, I shall return to a point I made earlier in this book when I noted that workers used to working proximally with their colleagues sometimes responded negatively to the apparent privilege of working from home and yearned for the social connection of the traditional office workspace (Sewell and Taskin, 2015). If we image a diagram of the power relations of this distal work, morphologically speaking it is much more like the modified version of the Panopticon I put forward previously (see Figure 5.4). As in that configuration, vertical surveillance radiates from the central organization in the form of an ontological and epistemological gaze that penetrates dispersed work locations—in this case, the employees’ own homes. Unlike proximal work, however, there is no obvious and immediate basis for those employees to exercise horizontal surveillance over their peers. This makes it much harder for a communitarian heterotopia of surveillance to survive the spatial reorganization of work. The collective aspects of proximal work are thus deterritorialized first in order to be reterritorialized later in isolated islands of work on a domestic scale (Sewell and Taskin, 2015). In this way distal work operates across something much more like a dispersed archipelago of cells than anything like a single unified prison (cf. Foucault, 1979). Hence my use of the term archipelagic to convey the morphology captured in the diagram of power presented in Figure 7.4. But even under these conditions of extreme separation, a communitarian heterotopia can still exist, although it requires some imaginative thinking and novel ways of maintaining connections between peers. We can see this in the way that employees who find themselves working from home reach out to colleagues in informal ways that try to re-establish the kinds of

Figure 7.4 Diagram of the Archipelagic Power of Distal Work.

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connections they experienced when working together in an office (Sewell and Taskin, 2015). We must, however, seek out other opportunities for developing relations of solidarity with colleagues with some urgency if the effects of the ontological and epistemological features of the vertical gaze are to go unmitigated across our lonely archipelago of distal work. Net-work and a potentially dystopian future of unmitigated agoristic power This section is where Zuboff ’s nightmare of Surveillance Capitalism and Ronald Coase’s dream of a world inhabited by independent contractors spectacularly collide. Although the emergence of modern bureaucratic organizations was slow, incremental, and piecemeal, as Zuboff (2019) notes, we are now facing a moment of rapid disruption that may well end up challenging our very idea of what organizations are and how we experience them, either as employees or even as customers. Considering the “surveillant exchanges” (Murakami-Wood and Monahan, 2019) that make net-work possible in a “gig” or platform economy as we discussed them in Chapter 2, I present these in Figure 7.5 as a diagram showing an unbounded web of horizontal scopic labour enacted between customers and contractors. Notionally, the relative positions within it are infinitely f luid and interchangeable because every contractor is also a potential customer and every customer is a potential contractor. Moreover, the size of the web is notionally unconstrained as customers and contractors can enter and leave the network as a result of any number of changing circumstances, including those that do not relate to the normal conditions of work (notoriously, stable and long-term contractual arrangements that are conspicuously absent in the platform or gig

Figure 7.5 An Unbounded Agoristic Dystopia of Net-work.

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economies). Nevertheless, at first glance this web of relations does appear to be, morphologically speaking at least, similar to our previous diagrams of communitarian heterotopias of peer scrutiny. So why isn’t this web of scopic labour presented in Figure 7.5 the same as the communitarian heterotopias we saw earlier? The most obvious point to make is that the platform technologies that enable customers and contractors to interact by connecting them in time and space only work for as long it takes for the contractor to fulfil their service obligations. Take, for example, a ride share platform. In a now very familiar series of events, we type in our destination, and we are matched with drivers in the vicinity. One of these drivers then elects to take the fare in an instantaneous tender process based on a number of factors such as our destination (considering things like the distance and the safety of the neighbourhood we are travelling to), the pricing at that moment (as determined by a supply-and-demand algorithm), and our passenger rating (as indicated by our prior history with that platform). In the process, they automatically exclude other drivers from taking the job and they pick us up. After dropping us off, the driver then rates us while we rate them as we each go our separate ways. If we do meet again in another time and another place, however, then these roles could conceivably be reversed in an equally temporary arrangement. The combined effect of the temporary nature of the relationship in the platform economy and the interchangeability of roles (no matter how unlikely that is) means there is little basis for the kind of peer solidarity that we might usually derive from a common employment status or even a physical colocation. Indeed, we cannot know what our peers are doing for we don’t even know who they are. Here contractors and customers are completely atomized and work is effectively deterritorialized without being reterritorialized in any meaningful sense (cf. Lyon, 2018), leaving the nodes in the web adrift in a featureless two-dimensional plane of temporary economic relations stripped of everything but their instrumental and transactional features. But this is not all it is for, despite the appearance that vertical surveillance is absent, it is in fact in constant operation. This is because the platforms establish and enforce the criteria that customers use to cast their ontological and epistemological gaze on contractors and vice versa, using these data from this scopic labour to build enduring profiles that reduce the participants to a raw number that is, in turn, fed into algorithms that distribute work through matching customers with contractors, and on and on it goes. In this way, individual instances of the ontological and epistemological elements of peer scrutiny imperceptibly get converted into a vertical gaze through aggregation. It is as if, through an act of transubstantiation, the vertical gaze returns full circle to resemble Bosch’s Eye of God as it is dissociated from the material and takes on an almost numinous and spectral form. And what goes for the platform economy a fortiori can also be seen in incipient form in all those disembodied versions of the aggregated vertical gaze that I mentioned in Chapter 2; forms of scopic labour that increasingly intrude into our working lives through things such

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as professional rating sites or, something close to home for me personally, academic citation rates and other measures of research impact.

Heterotopias of surveillance at work: an optimistic coda A reader might take away from the last few passages the rather gloomy message that we are on an inexorable descent into fractured social relations at work and are thus consigned to an occulted vertical gaze that reduces us, ontologically speaking, to nothing more than contractors and customers and, epistemologically speaking, to nothing more than our raw performance ratings extracted from the scopic labour of peer surveillance. I’m happy to report that I think this is unduly pessimistic for several reasons. First and foremost, although there is an implied transition from sovereign power to quasi-panoptic disciplinary power, from quasi-panoptic disciplinary power to archipelagic power, and archipelagic power to agoristic power, this is purely an artefact of the sequence in which I have presented them. As I mentioned previously, rather than thinking of one as emerging to replace the previous one in a diachronic sense, it is better to think of these forms of power operating synchronically. Indeed, I am definitely not suggesting that proximal work conducted in traditional organizations is being completely replaced by distal work conducted at home, let alone that both are being replaced by net-work enabled through platforms, apps, algorithms, and handheld devices. In the first of two of the three scenarios I have set out as alternatives to pre-modern sovereign power—that is, quasi-panoptic power and archipelagic power—I have argued that communitarian heterotopias of surveillance can emerge to challenge the associated configurations of the gaze. To be sure, a heterotopia of this type is still surveillance, but it is surveillance that takes place on terms that reinforce the bases of solidarity between workers rather than undermine them. This is because the criteria upon which the ontological and epistemological components of the horizontal gaze operate—the standards by which status and values are determined through scopic labour if you like—are not set by superiors simply in virtue of their position in a hierarchy of organizational authority. Rather, they are set by members of the community itself (although these criteria may not be entirely edifying themselves of course). A prime example of this would be the way in which professional bodies still cherish collegiality and self-policing, even in the face of increased regulation and the evaluation of performance by external parties. This gives us a glimpse at how the excesses of the platform economy and its associated agoristic power can be resisted. First, by simply exposing the aggregation of data through horizontal or peer surveillance as an occult form of vertical surveillance, it should galvanize us to challenge the contention of the likes of Uber that they are nothing more than software providers; the mere fact that contractors (and customers for that matter) are doing this work of surveillance gives the lie to the claim that drivers are not working for Uber, even if, strictly speaking, those drivers have no contract of formal employment with

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the platform. Indeed, Uber and other platforms could not exist without this scopic labour, and, as such, it is absolutely crucial to their continued viability. For example, appropriating and monetizing the data extracted by peer surveillance is one of the ways that platforms like Uber or eBay shore up their almost monopoly status by creating an enormous barrier to entry for would-be competitors. This is because the ratings generated by the sellers and buyers of goods and services remain the property of the platform. If the buyers or the sellers want to shift their activity to a rival start-up platform they would have to begin building up their reputations from scratch. So, if governments and regulators are serious about the monopoly status of tech giants, as an important antitrust move they could reduce the barriers to entry for new competitors by insisting that the data generated by peer surveillance belong to the customers and suppliers themselves and could follow them if they choose to switch to another platform. In other words, people retain the fruits of their scopic labour. More generally, from this recognition that surveillance work is central to the platform business model, those doing the surveillance—that is, peers rather than superiors—can develop a consciousness that reclaims both solidarity and territoriality. For example, at the time of writing, the Facebook group Uber Drivers Australia had over 1,000 members and was being used to campaign for legal recognition as employees, challenge the tyranny of Uber ratings, and develop local face-to-face support communities (although it should be noted that, at the same time, the official Uber Facebook group in Melbourne alone had 3,750 members). There is a delicious irony to the fact that one platform so reviled by Shoshana Zuboff as part of the Surveillance Capitalism nexus is being used to undermine the power of another, but then, again, who said that surveillance wasn’t a complex and protean problem?

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

According to the New Musical Express of 13 May 2013, the title to Blur’s breakthrough 1991 album Modern Life Is Rubbish was taken from graffiti spotted by the band leader Damon Albarn on London’s Baywater Road. In Melbourne these days writing on walls has been transformed into high art, so it was always unlikely that I would find a similarly pithy graffito in my hometown to inspire the title of the last chapter of this book. This is a shame because I hope to convince you that modern surveillance really is rubbish and can be resisted or, even better, commandeered and pressed into the service of the less powerful rather than the more powerful. As I shall argue, a promising way to do this is to challenge the prevailing scopic regime by reclaiming the concept of privacy. This, in turn, will enable us to challenge the way surveillance, as scopic labour, is currently used to mark people out as objects in the workplace and open up the debate, through an exploration of the concept of shame, to alternative ways of seeing others and, ultimately, ourselves as subjects. Before this, however, I need to revisit something I previously called the paradoxes of surveillance in order to understand the way in which we deal with the iniquities of the existing scopic regime.

Confronting the enduring paradoxes of surveillance at work We have already seen at various stages in this book how James Barker and I developed our own take on the “two faces” problem (Lyon et al., 2012) through our discussion about the tension between the two main competing discourses of care and coercion that inform how we make sense of surveillance at work (Sewell and Barker, 2006). As I noted in Chapter 4, in their briefest senses, the former discourse posits that surveillance has the prophylactic purpose of safeguarding the interest of the majority against the disruptive actions of a small and antisocial minority (the proverbial “bad apples” if you will), and the latter discourse posits that the purpose of surveillance is to coerce the majority to serve the interests of a powerful minority. This is a prime example of the idea of surveillance as a combination of the material and the discursive or “seeing and saying” as I have called it throughout this

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book in that the way we construe its purpose will affect how we implement and use it and, thus, inf luence its consequences. Although these two competing discourses are logically contradictory, people can without too much mental discomfort simultaneously hold that both offer an element of truth. There will be, however, moments when the contradiction becomes more obvious and we have to rely on tried-and-tested techniques to reduce the resultant cognitive dissonance. For example, we might come to see someone who is unfairly marked out by surveillance as a troublemaker simply because they are a union activist, as someone who is actually getting what they deserve. Similarly, we might draw on performance measures to justify that those who are fired for “poor” performance really had it coming to them because they were letting the side down, even though the corporation has arbitrarily decided to “rank and yank” the bottom 25% of performers. Finally, we simply might decide that the interests of the few really do outweigh the many, perhaps because they deserve their exalted status and, therefore, a bigger slice of the pie. After all, what senior executive wouldn’t agree with the belief that they got to where they were today based on their superior qualities rather than, say, sheer luck or grubby nepotism? There are, however, moments when even the most convoluted rationalization strategies cannot reconcile these competing discourses of surveillance. It is at these moments that the paradoxes of surveillance become most obvious and force us towards deciding which of the discourses we must cleave to and which one must be jettisoned (Sewell and Barker, 2006; Sewell et al., 2012). Paradox 1: I’m comfortable with surveillance, just don’t direct it at me Thinking back to Chapter 2 and the discussion of Robert Owen’s Silent Monitor or Chapter 4 and the traffic lights at Kay Electronics, it’s not hard to imagine the shaming effects of the public display of individual performance information. Just think what it would be like to be identified as being excessively naughty when everyone else is displaying qualities of super excellence or having a red card hanging above your head while everyone else is on green. Such scenarios are common when it comes to surveillance at work, and the kind of intersubjective dynamic it sets up is actually a prerequisite for the operation of the negative and positive heuristics that have been discussed at various stages in this book. Yet who really goes to work each day wanting to be being humiliated in this way? Indeed, poor performance must feel a bit like halitosis; it’s something that other people have (with apologies to Terry Eagleton). In the same way that the mass surveillance of the public realm using CCTV, telephone intercepts, or the collection of online metadata can be explained away as simply being there to catch the “bad guys,” surveillance at work is commonly seen as a necessity for other people. Other people, moreover, who just aren’t up to the job. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear, as the tired old adage goes. But we are on shaky ground here for it would seem that we are generally very poor judges of our

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own performance (Kruger and Dunning, 2000) and what happens when the spotlight is turned on us as we are exposed as poor performers? Invariably, it’s somebody else’s fault or the fault of unforeseeable circumstances. In short, surveillance is a boon when it stops the bad guys, but, after years of apparently diligent service, if the bad guy turns out to be you, isn’t it time for you to wonder if surveillance was such a good idea in the first place? Of course, at work you might be sitting comfortably in the middle of a normal distribution of work performance, but, if performance standards are incrementally and progressively increased (as the positive heuristic dictates) and people who find themselves more than one standard deviation below the norm keep getting picked off, then everyone will eventually find themselves being classified as unsatisfactory or surplus to requirements as younger, hungrier, more vigorous, or more compliant people are recruited. So, remember the next time you think surveillance at work is only for the bad guys; remember it’s only a matter of time before it comes for you. Paradox 2: Hold on, doesn’t surveillance work both ways? One of the more implausible claims that Frederick Winslow Taylor made in his Principles of Scientific Management was that managers deserved their exalted status in organizations, not only because they were better qualified than their subordinates but also because they worked harder. Although this may have come as news to workers literally breaking their backs humping pig iron at Bethlehem Steel, at a stretch you could say that the scopic labour a manager did to ensure a gang of workers functioned at its maximum capacity might have ended up contributing more value to the organization than the individual contributions of the labourers themselves. Still, taking Taylor at his word, it shows how hard it is to make meaningful comparisons about relative contributions to the organization if the only thing we have to go on is outward signs like hours worked or physical effort expended. What is clear from Foucault’s work on surveillance, however, is that both superiors and subordinates are bound up in a mutually constitutive relationship of scopic labour. In other words, although the manager has expectations about what the labourer is doing and holds them to it, the labourer also has expectations of what the manager should be doing and so the labourer ought to be able to hold the manager to those expectations as well. After all, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. This view is also evident in the economics literature of transactions costs and principal/agent relations (see Chapter 2) and has previously been described as sous-veillance or undersight (see Chapter 4). In the human resource management literature, a version of this is known as the 360º performance review, but in all cases the following problem arises: how does a subordinate evaluate the contribution of superior when the subordinate has little or no access to the kind of detailed performance information that is used to hold the subordinates themselves to account? So, even if surveillance at work does—or, at least, should—work both ways, there are always likely to

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be severe limits placed on the ability of subordinates to undertake the scopic labour of scrutinizing their superiors. In this situation, the asymmetry of power will soon become evident, and the effectiveness of sous-veillance will be called into question. Surveillance may work both ways, but rarely (if ever) with equal force. Paradox 3: Surveillance is a failure, so let’s do more of it! As we have seen throughout this book, a scopic regime that involves classification and evaluation supports a vision of a perfectly stable social order that is entrenched in the popular consciousness, whether it is conveyed through a painting like Bosch’s Seven Deadly Sins, a design for a prison like Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon (see Foucault, 1980), or an infinitely malleable web of contracting parties as envisaged by Friedrich Hayek or Ronald Coase. But, as I asked all the way back in in Chapter 1, have we come to place too much trust in surveillance to solve persistent social problems like terrorism, urban crime, smuggling, migration, and even epidemics, let alone apparent disobedience at work? Here we are at a perennial disadvantage as most of us—including some of the people who use them on a daily basis—rarely understand how the systems we rely on to measure performance, track movement, or monitor patterns of pathogenic infection actually work. Let me give you an example that strikes very close to home. Following the devastating Victorian bushfires of 2009 when 173 people died in a single evening, there was a f lurry of activity to monitor and predict the movement of fire fronts. Although apps were created for handheld devices that could be used by firefighters on the ground to assist them in their activities, the technical experts who developed these apps knew that, even with the best data and modelling, the predictions they made about the movement of fire were just that, predictions. Yet the firefighters on the ground came to see these predications as a real-time indication of the movement of the actual fire front (de Weydenthal, 2018). The same problem also exists with surveillance at work as we come to take the information we obtain from things like performance monitoring to stand for the actual person under scrutiny. They are reduced to nothing more than an avatar or “data-double” as Haggarty and Ericson (2000) called it, and we rarely question the validity or reliability of this information. And if that wasn’t enough, as we sit down to watch David Simon’s The Wire or Éric Rochant’s Le Bureau des Légendes we might think that surveillance in all its incarnations actually is perfectible and inescapable. In the fifth series of Le Bureau, for example, there is a recurrent scene where the main protagonist Malotru jogs around a Moscow park and it cuts to a CCTV control room where FSB operatives use facial recognition to identify every single person in shot in real time (for an in depth study of the operation of CCTV in an urban setting see McGrail, 2002). Leaving aside the widely reported limitations of facial recognition (e.g., Bailey et al., 2020), there are many aspects of this scene that show the limitations of surveillance. First, even if we were able

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to identify everybody in shot (even more of a problem if we are all legally required to wear facemasks), there are always many more people out of shot. In other words, the gaze has to be directed somewhere and on someone, and those people who are wise to this limitation can evade surveillance. Second, even if surveillance could have universal coverage, someone has got to watch the feed and alert law enforcement about an offence, either actual or anticipated. This would require almost as many watchers as there are watched, not to mention almost as many police officers as there are citizens. Third, the previous point alerts us to the fact that, even if this identify-and-alert sequence could be fully automated, there still needs to be a response. A prime example of this limitation is the ankle bracelets used to track people on bail or convicted offenders on home detention. These are always failing, and even when they are working it can take up to 24 hours for overstretched police forces to respond to a transgression of court orders (Karsten and West, 2017). Fourth, and finally, what about people who just don’t care whether they are under surveillance and will go to any lengths to commit illegal or antisocial acts with no consideration of the consequences? All of these limitations of mass public surveillance are evident in the workplace. First, there are always dark spots at work—literally and figuratively— where surveillance doesn’t reach. Employees and managers know this and respond accordingly. Second, as economists have always known, there are costs associated with scopic labour. Take, for example, Oliver Williamson’s all-channel-network (see Figure 2.2). He used this to argue that such a complex network of surveillance was prohibitively costly—in effect the participants are so busy watching each other that they have no time to do their “proper” job (Williamson, 1975). Third, even if we can reduce these costs using technology, there are still the costs of following up and enforcing compliance with work or contractual standards. Fourth, what about those workers who just don’t care about surveillance, perhaps because they know their skills are scarce and cannot easily be substituted or because they realize the intricacies of the employment laws in which their employers operate make it difficult to fire them? Yet in the face of these limitations, when surveillance fails to do its job at work, invariably the response is that we need to do more of it, or do it better, or both! You can be sure that anyone is in thrall to ideology when, in the face of a failed project, its advocates want to do more of the same thing. It’s like complaining that the Soviet Union collapsed because it wasn’t communist enough or that, after years of neoliberal economic policy, so-called free markets are failing because they aren’t free enough.

Surveillance is our busywork Given that surveillance rarely lives up to its billing, you do have to wonder why we continue to place so much faith in its ability to detect, let alone eliminate, deviant behaviour and encourage positive behaviour. Ref lecting on this conundrum allows me to draw some threads together that form a way

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forward when thinking about surveillance at work that also extends to our understanding of surveillance in society more generally. One thing that underpins all the diagrams of power and surveillance that have peppered this book is that every one of them is based on the premise that the more we think we know about someone, the more malleable they are likely to be as we try to bend to them to our will. It is as if all the ontological and epistemological elements of the gaze in their various configurations need to do is to classify and valorise us as objects and our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviour will follow; as if simply turning someone into an object through scopic labour means they will then act predictably. For me this is why we are compelled to undertake more and more surveillance. If other people don’t do what we want them to, it’s because we don’t know enough about them yet. For example, it is this compulsion that is so vividly captured in the image of the Panopticon and largely accounts for its enduring popularity as a figurative device to convey the purpose and consequences of surveillance. It is even a compulsion that is evident in the most unlikely places, like team sports (Manley and Williams, 2019). My consideration of the implications of this premise about the relationship between our knowledge of the subject and, through turning them into an object in this way, controlling their thoughts, beliefs, and behaviour involves a return to something I brief ly touched upon in Chapter 2. Jay (1988) developed his concept of a scopic regime—a visual order permeating a culture that informs a disciplining gaze of seeing and being on view—in relation to the way we classify and value art objects. He noted, however, that the concept had been extended to encompass other fields, including spatial organization ( Jay, 2008), and this fits well with my contention that we should consider surveillance at work in terms of maps, diagrams, territories, and social spaces. Thus, the various configurations of the ontological and epistemological components of the gaze at work ref lect a wider scopic regime of Modernity that, in this particular context, through scopic labour sees employees as assets to be classified and evaluated in terms of their relative contribution to the organization. This is analogous in some respects to what the French Regulation School calls a regime of accumulation—thought of as a “… set of regularities that ensure the general and relatively coherent progress of capital accumulation, that is, which allow the resolution or postponement of the distortions and disequilibria to which the process continually gives rise” (Boyer and Saillard 2002: 334)—except that the scopic regime extends over an even longer historical period that encompasses several specific formations of the social relations of capitalism. In this way, the early capitalism of the Rasphuis (Chapter 3), the mature capitalism of mass production and Taylorism (Chapter 4), the late capitalism of f lexibility and distal work (Chapters 2 and 7), and even net-work and surveillance capitalism (Chapter 7) are all underpinned by the same scopic regime of classification and evaluation. Moreover, across these formations, scopic labour—whether it is superiors surveilling subordinates or peers surveilling

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each other—is not merely an adjunct to general principles of economic organization: it is absolutely central to our understanding of what an organization is and how it ought to operate. In short, without some degree of scopic labour there is neither organization nor productive work in their most basic senses. We can look to another area of art criticism to explore this crucial point further. Mulvey’s (1975) critical exploration of the dominance of the male gaze in cinema—a medium that has fascinated previous theorists such as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Lacan whom we encountered earlier—was taken up with alacrity by second-wave feminist artists such as Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman, and Barbara Kruger. Subverting the male gaze was central to the practice of these artists and particularly to that of Kruger, whose now-much-imitated combination of images and terse textual statements of subversion turned her art into an active form of critique. This juxtaposition of images and statements is blunt and arresting, as was always Kruger’s intention. As she rather exasperatedly noted, I’m not interested in any of this complicit subversion trip—an implicit critique—that people talk about. The critique in my work is fairly explicit, you don’t have to read three essays by [art historian] Doug Crimp to understand what my work is saying. (Kruger quoted in Kamimura, 1987: 41) Take, for example, one of her earlier works in this vein from 1981, “Your gaze hits the side of my face” (see Figure 8.1). Here she presents her critique of a woman as the objectified other which is emphasized by the image of the marble bust that literally petrifies her, thus solidifying her alienation as an object. At this moment, the subject is already an object; it has already stopped, the moment of seeing suspended … the woman here is at her most vulnerable and most powerless; the power of a male gaze is exercised directly. “Your gaze hits the side of my face” successfully attacks the patriarchal culture’s way of seeing woman as a sex object; it is an assault on both fetishism (in the Freudian sense) and voyeurism. (Kamimura, 1987: 41) This preoccupation with the power of the gaze was further explored through one of Kruger’s famous poster campaigns where images appeared unannounced on public advertising spaces. Take “Surveillance is your busywork” which appeared on the New York subway in 1985 (see Figure 8.2) and “Surveillance is their busywork” which appeared on billboards in New York suburbs in 1988 (see Figure 8.3). As Rose (1995) notes, the variation of the possessive pronouns used here leads us to question who is doing the looking and who is being looked at?

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Figure 8.1 “Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face,” Barbara Kruger (used with the permission of the artist).

If surveillance is your busy work, who is speaking? And who to? Is it addressed to men? Or does it comment on women’s complicity in the dominant gaze? What then am I to make of the same image with the text changed to surveillance is their busywork. (Rose, 1995: 344—emphasis in original)

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Figure 8.2 “Surveillance Is Your Busywork,” Barbara Kruger (used with the permission of the artist).

Figure 8.3 “Surveillance Is Their Busywork,” Barbara Kruger (used with the permission of the artist).

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Considering these questions is meant to disorient us and prompt us to reconsider our own subject position in relation to the stereotypical objectification of the male gaze (Rose, 1995). One thing is clear though. Your busywork. Their busywork. My busywork. It’s all our busywork. We are all at it! We are all engaged in scopic labour for better or for worse. All it takes is for us to cast a judgemental eye over others to determine which class they fall into (in Kruger’s work, female) and how good they are compared with other members of that class (in Kruger’s work, how they measure up when compared to some patriarchal notion of idealized female beauty). And, under the prevailing scopic regime of Modernity, what goes for women in terms of patriarchy also goes for workers in terms of capitalism—not only whether they can legitimately be considered to be a colleague but how good they are as a colleague. Of course, Kruger’s use of the word busywork is meant to suggest that scopic labour as I have described it has little value for the person doing it, at least in an immediate sense. Indeed, if we ref lect on it, it may not even be immediately apparent to us why we are doing it. For example, we may not think it is harmful to cast a casual glance at a stranger and draw conclusions about their value to society or to look at a colleague and think whether they deserve to be part of our organization. Surely it is just an innocent, albeit judgemental, glance that has no harmful and enduring implications. But if we consider it in aggregate, each localized instance of surveillance is shoring up a scopic regime that classifies and values objects in ways that perpetuate oppressive power relations. Something that, at that time and in that place, seems trivial to us is in fact an act of scopic labour that is shoring up existing power asymmetries and keeping all of us in our places. And we are all implicated in this. Although the vertical surveillance that nominal superiors exercise over subordinates may obviously seem to us to be their busywork—why are they even bothering to keep an eye on us when we’re clearly getting on with the job?—it may be less obvious to us that the horizontal surveillance we exercise on our peers is our busywork—hmmm, why am I worrying about whether so-and-so really is working as hard as I am and whether they do really deserve to work here? In this way we are all caught in a web of domination and expropriation that is dependent to some extent on our unwitting involvement in scopic labour that turns everybody into objects of relative value. But pointing this out is not simply a consciousness-raising exercise. It is not as if, by simply pointing out that if we all stopped watching each other, things would be so much better. Take the gig economy where the very existence of platforms like Uber depend on the scopic labour of peer surveillance. Here I’m sure a driver who is precariously balanced on the verge of falling below the threshold rating that allows them to work knows that the entire business model is founded on the surveillance of strangers who must treat each other as objects. Indeed, for them to survive and f lourish, like any capitalist enterprise, the firms that make up the gig economy must prevent peers from making common cause.

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As  a  result, we need to find ways to challenge our culturally endemic scopic regime which pits superior against subordinate and peer against peer. I have chosen two things to focus on in my final comments—the problem of privacy and its relation to shame through exposure as they operate under today’s conditions of surveillance at work.

Reclaiming the concepts of privacy and shame in an age of mass surveillance If surveillance at work is ultimately a matter of exposure (Ball, 2009)—that is, of laying bare, one way or another, our status in and value to an organization—then its antithesis is maintaining privacy—that is, the ability to consciously withhold things about ourselves as subjects that others could use to turn us into objects. Although privacy may be in danger of becoming an increasingly devalued commodity in an age of mass surveillance where the default state is to voluntarily disclose almost everything about ourselves, as I mentioned earlier, in the workplace we haven’t even had the option of withholding certain important information. Failing to disclose some things about ourselves (e.g., our health, previous work history, educational attainment, or criminal records) may, for good reason, be a legitimate ground for breach of contract proceedings, but there are a host of other things that have never been considered as legitimately private matters. In this way, even compiling our curriculum vitae or filling out our LinkedIn profile are complicit acts of exposure. It would be hard to persuade people that they are propping up an oppressive scopic regime merely by posting their work achievements online but in doing so they are supporting a so-called meritocratic culture that claims people are justly rewarded based on some rational measure of their contributions to business or society. So the question, as it so often is, runs as follows: where do we draw the line between two contradicting impulses? On one hand, we have the desire to withhold the kind of information about ourselves that could be used to turn us into objects (with all that entails) and expose us in terms of our status in an organization. On the other, we have the desire to demonstrate our true value to our employer and to our colleagues so that we can earn a reward that is deemed to be commensurate with that value. I propose a way of thinking about privacy in today’s circumstances of mass surveillance that is consonant with my discussion of communitarian heterotopias I developed in the previous chapter. We instinctively think of privacy as matter of personal agency, but, as Vincent (2015) points out, this is an invention of the modern era that coincided with the development of Enlightenment ideas about interiority and the sovereignty of the autonomous self-determining subject. With apologies to John Donne, although no man or woman is an island, when it comes to privacy we tend to see it as a form of social isolation. It is, however, eminently possible to think of the pursuit of privacy as simultaneously separating ourselves from one form of sociality while actively engaging with another. Here I am indebted to Vincent’s

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ref lections on the Latin usage of privatus as a withdrawing from a public realm to the enclosed space of the household. He shows that in pre-modern times the wall of privacy was not erected around the individual but the collective entity of the family. Of course, the head of this family could be every bit as tyrannical as the worst despotic public authority, but a retreat from the public view was nevertheless driven by three main impulses: (1) the desire to nurture intimate relations, (2) a quest for quiet ref lection, and (3) the defence of thought and behaviour from external structures of authority (Vincent, 2015). The important thing here is that the household stood as a social space over which standards of thought and behaviour could prevail that were different to those found in the wider public realm. At a time where the scopic labour of surveillance capitalism increasingly enrolls us in the enrichment of an extremely small, elite group of beneficiaries, at the risk of sounding naively utopian, I believe it is time to resurrect this notion of privacy as a space where we collectively make our own decisions about what to expose about ourselves and what to withhold. Here, Privacy involves more than the ability to keep information about oneself away from authorities who might use it to control one’s behavior; it also involves the ability for individual, small groups, and organizations to negotiate mutual demands on time, space, and actions. (Perrolle, 1996: 47) This is why what I’m proposing is a more radical proposition than simply limiting the type or amount of information others extract from us in the pursuit of profit (Véliz, 2020); it involves challenging the very structural basis of the social relations that this information reinforces. Vincent describes this an “informational autarky”; the idea of a self-determining and self-sufficient communitarian heterotopia of reciprocal and mutually supportive surveillance is an attractive one, although we must take care to avoid such social spaces of privacy becoming their own prisons where unedifying relations of power and domination are simply recreated in microcosm. Here, the threat posed by old and new forms of surveillance has been less the destruction of privacy and more its distortion through the misinterpretation of the meanings that are exchanged. (Vincent, 2015: 137) This is because there is a false dichotomy between privacy and the public good (Regan, 1995; Solove, 2008) that is often expressed in the fear that malign actors are using Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren’s juridical concept of the legal right to be left alone in an instrumental manner to conceal illicit thoughts, beliefs, and behaviours. To counter this misplaced belief that only those who have something to hide have something to fear from surveillance, we can turn to the ancient concept of shame.

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Feeling shame has become a deeply unfashionable emotional state. And it’s not just politicians and celebrities who seem shameless these days. Corporations (especially, unsurprisingly, the ones that dominate surveillance capitalism today) and their executives belligerently defend their aggressive avoidance of tax while simultaneously benefiting disproportionally from the very government spending that the taxes of others fund. This is not a recent development though. Since the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s there has been an assumption that shame is a constraint to self-actualization and autonomy and is, therefore, an affront to the forces of reason, science, and self-regulation (Schneider, 1977). In this way shame has been presented an essentially conservative force in societies, and, in direct contrast to this, unconstrained disclosure—the counterculture’s call to “let it all hang out,” if you will—has come to be seen as a powerful antidote to the harmful psychological effects of being beholden to the norms of an “uptight” culture. In this way, shame has become associated with the perception of failing to live up to an outmoded moral code (Manion, 2002). Get with the times and loosen up Daddy-O! But there is a deep irony here for the disciplinary power of surveillance that finds its apotheosis in Foucault’s (1979) self-disciplining subject cannot exist without the operation of shame, either as a powerful feature of an external institutionalized set of norms in the form of a super-ego or as an internal dialogue (Manion, 2002). So, if surveillance requires the possibly of shame to have any impact on thoughts, beliefs, and behaviours, we have to pose the question: who is now setting the norms of behaviour upon which those feelings of shame rely? Again, our previous discussion of the male gaze provides some valuable insights. Think of the problem of body shaming that infests social media. This is obviously a case of peer surveillance which classifies and values participants on the basis of some “desirable” quality they are considered to possess such as thinness, “good” hair, “good” skin, or just general “attractiveness.” Most of the participants in this process are, sadly, young women and their surveillance of each other simply reinforces the standards imposed by a vertical male gaze—a case of a gendered division of scopic labour, if you will. Their shame is based, not on standards that they develop themselves to nurture their own relations of community solidarity, but on standards of bodily beauty that are imposed on them from outside or “above” in the sense that they originate from an orthodox patriarchal hierarchy (cf. Rose, 1995). Yet shouldn’t the shame actually be felt by those participants who reproduce the malign effects of this male gaze and, in the process, undermine the solidarity of their community? In this particular context, it is rather disappointing that Schneider relies on a gendered pronoun, but he still shows us how shame can connect us with others in an alternative community that supports itself through peer surveillance based on care rather than coercion. He implores us to recognize the indispensably positive role a sense of shame plays in protecting the person who, embedded in a community that impinges on him intimately and constantly, is always vulnerable to depersonalization and violation.

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To avoid the witness of shame is to deny part of our experience. When we recognise this, we can understand the partiality of the claim that shame is a repressive mechanism that ought to be eliminated. For instance, just as it is unwise to remove the brakes of a car because they slow it down, an attempt to abolish shame because it inhibits some human expression is a mistaken endeavor. When experience is viewed only in terms of the desire to eliminate restraint, judgment is necessarily warped. From such a perspective, shame stands condemned as “restrictive,” or worse, “repressive.” The falseness of this position is its refusal to recognise its own restrictiveness and repression. (Schneider, 1977: xxii) If shame is indeed indispensable for social cohesion that is enforced through peer surveillance should it not then be based on standards of conduct that we, not they, decide? And, returning to the main topic of this book, if we can never actually totally eliminate surveillance at work, we can certainly mobilize it to challenge a scopic regime that classifies and values us solely on terms dictated by the needs of improved productivity, or customer satisfaction, or research impact (a nod there to my fellow academics), or any other instrumental measure of performance for that matter. We may always be involved in scopic labour one way or another, but the scopic labour we do should be of the sort that liberates us from the coercive effects of managerial surveillance and reinforces the caring surveillance of a community of peers. One day we may be able to cry: The coercive surveillance of managers is dead; long live the caring surveillance of our true peers!

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Index

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes. abstract machine 84–87 academics 116–117 “action space” 127 Act of Parliament in 1575 48 affective labour 32 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff) 118 agoristic dystopia: of heterotopias 138, 138–140 Albarn, Damon 142 Alford, Robert R. 16, 17, 128 all actor network 36–37 All Channel Network 36, 36, 89, 146 “always on” rule 35 Amsterdam rasphuis 8, 43, 46; see also rasphuis anachronism 35, 46 anthropological approach 120 archipelagic power: heterotopias under 136–138, 137 Aristotle 25 assemblage concept 9, 10, 82–84, 87–92 asymmetric relationships 99 Australian Commonwealth 64 authority 98–99 Authority Ranking 99 autonomous human agent 7, 30 autonomy concept 121, 126 Babbage, Charles 34 Ball, Kirstie 18, 19, 22, 31 Ballmer, Steve 115 Bamforth, Kenneth W. 135 Barker, James R. 68, 71, 74, 75, 142 Barker, Jim 22 Barley, Stephen 68

Baudrillard, Jean 80 Bauman, Zygmunt 94, 95 Beck, Harry 9, 81 Bentham, Jeremy 8, 9, 24, 40, 42, 47, 49–58, 60, 62, 66, 67, 82, 85, 87, 89–90, 104, 131, 134, 135, 145; inspection principle 50, 53–56, 58, 60, 62, 66, 67; Outline of a Work Entitled Pauper Management (Improved) 49; Panopticon 50–54, 52 Bentham, Samuel 50, 51, 54, 55 Big Brother 120, 121 Black Death 47 “Bloody Code” 53 Bogard, William 67 Borges, Jorge Luis 122 Bosch, Hieronymus 130, 131, 133, 139, 145 Boynton, William 55 Brandeis, Louis 153 Braudel, Fernand 129, 133 Brave New World (Huxley) 120 Braverman, Harry 9, 61; Labor and Monopoly Capital 61 Brocklehurst, Michael 34 Brooks, Mel 12 bureaucracy 27, 67, 73–75, 79, 135 Burke, Colin 84, 87 Burton-Jones, Andrew 24 busywork, surveillance 11, 146–152, 149–151 Buttimer, Anne 127 Button, G. 77 call-centres 15, 19, 22, 29, 32–33, 35 Calvinists 59

172 Index Capital (Marx) 60 Capital in the Twenty First Century (Piketty) 58 capitalism 45–47, 60, 61, 127, 147, 151, 153 capitalist labour process 60–62 capitalist market 16, 17 caring or protective surveillance 11, 79, 80, 103, 155 Cartesian space 128 cartography 82, 85, 87 The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge 122 Chimerical control 69, 70 Chinese Social Credit System 125 “Christian and social virtues” 44 Church of England 48 Coase, Ronald 36, 37, 138, 145 coercive surveillance 30; liberal discourse of 76–77; radical discourse of 75–76 Cohn, Samuel 47 The Commonwealth of Thieves (Keneally) 50 communicative work 32 communitarian heterotopias 152–153; of sovereign power 130–132, 132; stratum plan 135 complex surveillance 108; epistemological functions 110–111, 114–115; horizontal form 114; ontological functions 110–111, 113–114; vertical form 113 concertive control 68, 71 concrete assemblages 9, 84–86 constant surveillance 52, 74, 75, 125 contemporary surveillance 83 control mechanism 93 counterculture 154 coveillance 116, 130, 136 COVID-Safe 73, 78 critical sociology 68 cultural pessimism 27 Culture of Surveillance (Lyon) 118, 120 Das Kapital (Marx) 9 Deleuze, Gilles 9, 10, 80, 81, 83, 84, 89, 90, 92–94; Difference and Repetition 81; Postscript on the Societies of Control 92; and surveillance 84–87 Delphic statements 35 Democracy and Freedom (Mayo) 64 deskilling of work 62 De Subventione Pauperum (Vives) 41 deterritorialization 90, 94, 97, 122, 135

diagram of power 82, 85, 89, 130, 132, 137 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze) 81 DiMaggio, Paul J. 19 disciplinary effects 75, 77, 94, 96 disciplinary power 51, 86–88, 90–94, 106, 108, 154 disciplinary society 10, 92–94, 130; to societies of control 10, 92–94 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 81, 82, 84–86, 90, 130, 133 discourse of coercion 75, 76 disembodied/technological surveillance 2, 10, 106–108, 111, 139 dispositif of power 89, 90, 96, 97 distal work 8, 33–36, 140, 147; archipelagic power of 136–138, 137 “division of learning” 25, 119 Donne, John 152 double-bind of discretion 68–69 Douglas, Mary 109, 113, 115, 121 Downcast Eyes (Jay) 100 Durkheim, Émile 126 dystopian vision 76, 118 economic liberalism 119 electronic Panopticon 24, 33, 65–66 “electronic sweatshop” 22, 33 Elias, Norbert 133 embodied/sensory surveillance 2, 10, 11, 25, 105–109, 110–111, 112 employment 3, 32, 37–38, 58, 60, 97, 122, 139, 140, 146 employment relationship 3, 37, 58, 97 empowerment 63, 67, 68 English Poor Laws 48 Enlightenment 15, 49, 101, 121, 152 epistemological functions: complex surveillance 110–111, 114–115; simple surveillance 110–111, 112–113 epistemological gazes 10–11, 106, 107, 110, 124, 132, 133, 136–140, 147 equivalence concept 59 Ericson, Richard V. 82–85, 87, 91, 145 Euler, Leonhard 89 execution of work 62, 68, 69 exposure concept 18–20, 31, 70, 73, 152 extensive quality 81, 84, 127 Ezzamel, Mahmoud 12, 13, 77 family resemblance 75, 76 Fernie, Sue 33 Fiske,Alan P. 99

Index

173

Five Dollar Day 1 Ford, Henry 1, 23 Foucault, Michel 9, 11, 20, 24, 28, 29, 40, 46, 51, 70, 72, 74, 80, 81, 83–87, 91, 92, 102, 106, 122–124, 126, 128, 130, 132, 133, 144, 154; Discipline and Punish 81, 82, 84–86, 90, 130, 133; The Subject and Power 29 Foucault’s genealogy 10, 82, 84–86, 92, 94, 100 Fourier, Charles 9, 60 Friedland, Roger 16, 17, 128 frontline customer service work 15

Hochschild,Arlie R. 15 Hofstadter, Richard 4 Holzer, Jenny 148 Homo Economicus 119 horizontal surveillance 9, 67–72, 107, 109, 112, 116, 132, 134–137, 151 Hosfstadter, Richard:“paranoid style” 4 Hoskins, Keith W. 13 “house of correction” 42, 44 Howard, John 53 human nature 3, 15, 99, 126 Hunger Games 115, 135 Huxley, Aldous 120; Brave New World 120

de Gaudemar, Jean-Paul 22, 24 gaze 3, 10, 129–130; asymmetrical nature 101–102; disembodied 106; embodied 106; epistemological effect 107; Foucauldian vs. Lacanian 106; genealogy of power 100; Lacan’s views 103–104; objectifying 102; ontological effect 107; psychoanalysis 102–103; Sartre’s views 101–102; side-to-side 107 Gemeinschaft 130 Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 27, 28 genealogy of power 88, 97, 100 Giddens, Anthony 5 gig economy 37, 39, 94, 138–139, 151 Google 11, 23, 94, 119 Gouldner, Alvin 73–75 governmentality 30, 70, 71, 86, 91–92, 94, 130, 133 “Great Chain of Being” (Lovejoy) 86, 98 “grid and group” analysis 115 Guattari, Félix 81, 83, 89, 90, 105

ideational control 68, 69, 72 “idle hands” 8, 9, 56 “inaugural gesture” 74 inbound call-centres 32 indeterminacy: of knowledge 79; of labour 9, 61–67, 69, 78 indigence 41, 47 Industrial Revolution 3, 60 informating concept 24, 25, 31 information Panopticon 24, 25 information revolution 23, 24 information technology 24, 74, 120 inner-worldly asceticism 59 inspection principle 50, 55, 60, 66, 67 institution(s) 2–4, 8, 15, 16, 19, 23, 38–40, 43, 47–50, 54–56, 60, 64, 82–84, 86, 90, 91, 93–96, 101, 104, 117, 120, 129, 130 “instrumentarian power” 119 intensive quality 9, 10, 22, 30, 35, 81, 82, 85, 125, 127 intersubjective relations 101 In the Age of the Smart Machine (Zuboff) 24 “Iron Law of Oligarchy” 73

Haggerty, Kevin D. 82–85, 87, 91, 145 Hallema, Anne 44 Harvey, David 127 Harwell, Drew 35 Hayek, Friedrich 37, 145 Heidegger, Martin 7 height and sight, theme of 100–104 heterotopias 11, 118, 122, 123, 128; under archipelagic power 136–138, 137; principles of 123–124; quasi-panoptic disciplinary power 132–136, 134, 135; scopic labour 129–130; of sovereign power 130–132, 132; of surveillance 132, 140–141; unbounded agoristic dystopia 138, 138–140 Hier, Sean P. 84 von Hippel, Robert 44

Jay, Martin 7, 10, 18, 100–102, 147; Downcast Eyes 100 JIT see Just-in-Time (JIT) The Jones Recorder 34 Just-in-Time (JIT) 65 Kant, Immanuel 26 Karl Marx: Das Kapital 9 Kay Electronics 65–67, 69, 72, 130, 135, 143 Keneally, Thomas 50 Keneally, Tom: The Commonwealth of Thieves 50 King Phillip III 130, 131

174

Index

Kirchheimer, Otto 45 knowledge work 22, 79 Kruger, Barbara 11, 148, 149, 150, 151 Kurzweil, Ray 23 Labor and Monopoly Capital (Braverman) 61 labour power 60–61 Labour Process Theory (LPT) 8–10, 56, 58, 61, 63, 66, 69, 75, 78–80, 106, 136; critical thrust of 76; origins of 58–60 Lacan, Jacques 10, 103, 104, 106, 148 The Laws 42 “lazy hands” 53, 57 Le Bureau des Légendes 145 Lefebvre, Henri 127–129; The Production of Space 128 legitimate vs. illegitimate surveillance 1–2 Lenin,Vladimir 31 le regard/the gaze 101, 105 lettres de cachet 89 liberal discourse: of coercive surveillance 76–77 liquid surveillance 94–97 Locke, Edwin 13 Locke, John 9, 59–61, 101; Second treatise on government 59 l’oeil/the eye 105–106 London Unground 9, 81–82 Louis XV 89 Lovejoy,Arthur O. 86;“Great Chain of Being” 86, 98 LPT see Labour Process Theory (LPT) Luddites 22, 23 Lupton, Deborah:“quantified self ” 6 Lyon, David 3, 11, 67, 94–96, 118, 120–122, 125; Culture of Surveillance 118, 120 McConville, Seán 49 McKinlay, Alan 77 Macve, Richard H. 13 male gaze, dominance of 102, 148, 151, 154 Malmberg, Thorsten 128 managerial control 9, 23, 25, 60, 62–63, 69, 72, 134 managerialism 4, 46 managerial surveillance 47, 67, 155 de Mandeville, Bernard 31 Mann, Steve 130 Marx, Gary 7, 21, 22, 32, 33 Marxism 44, 46, 58, 84, 127

Marxist critique 58, 73 Marx, Karl 9, 58, 60–62, 119, 122, 127; Capital 60 Marx space 127 Mason, David 77 mass surveillance 143, 152–155 Mauss, Marcel 127 Mayhew, Henry 55 Mayo, Elton 26, 64, 67 Mayo, George Elton: Democracy and Freedom 64 Melossi, Dario 44–47 memory machines 4, 5 mental discomfort 103 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 10, 102, 104, 105, 148 metaphysical pathos of modernity 73–75 Metcalf, David 33 Meyer, John W. 19 Michels, Robert 73 Miller, Jacques-Alain 10, 100, 104–105 Mirror Stage concept 103 “mode of information” (Poster) 68 mode of subjection 28, 29 modernity 94, 118; scopic regime of 147, 150; theorists of 118–119 Modern Life Is Rubbish 142 modern organizational surveillance 29, 100, 134 modern surveillance: silent monitor 13–20 modern workplace discipline 40–56 Mol, Joeri 118 Monahan, Torin 38 monitoring 13, 21, 22, 64, 75–77, 125 “Moral autonomy” 26 Mulvey, Laura 148 Munro, Iain 88, 89, 95, 96 Murakami Wood, David 38 Musson, Gillian 34 Myers-Briggs type indicator 125 The Naked Society (Packard) 4 The National Charity Company 49–50, 53 negative heuristics 8–10, 22, 26, 27, 31, 33, 38, 39, 63, 66, 69, 71, 91, 102, 115, 135, 143 neoclassical economics 17 neoliberalism 17, 23, 39, 119, 146 net-work 8, 35–39, 36, 37, 126, 147; unbounded agoristic dystopia 138, 138–140 Network Diagram 95, 96 New Lanark spinning mill: Silent Monitor 7, 13–15, 19, 29

Index New Musical Express 142 New Poor Law 54 New Surveillance 21, 22 Nietzsche, Friedrich 27, 28; Genealogy of Morals 27, 28 normalization 70–72, 106, 126 Office of Technological Assessment (OTA) 15, 32, –34 ontological functions 10–11, 106, 107, 124, 132, 133, 136–140, 147; complex surveillance 110–111, 113–114; simple surveillance 109, 110–111, 112 The Order of Things 122 Ordinance of Labourers 47 organizational surveillance 75, 76, 100, 136 Orwell, George 83, 120 OTA see Office of Technological Assessment (OTA) the Other/Othering 102, 106 outbound call-centres 32 outdoor vs. indoor relief 48 Outline of a Work Entitled Pauper Management (Improved) (Bentham) 49 Owen, Robert 7, 13–15, 19, 21, 38, 143 Packard,Vance 4, 5, 7, 20–22, 32–34, 100; The Naked Society 4 panoptic diagram 88, 89, 91 Panopticon 8, 9, 20, 40, 47, 66, 74, 78, 81–86, 88–90, 99–100, 131, 134, 137, 147; Bentham views 50–56, 52; diagram of power 85; information or electronic 24, 33, 65–66; Miller’s views 105–106; neologisms 116 panoptic power 89, 92, 95 panoptic surveillance 122 paradoxes 11, 142–146 “paranoid style” (Hofstadter) 4 Parent, Jan 42 Parson, Talcott 27 pauper management 47–50 Pavarini, Massimo 44, 46, 47 peer surveillance 67, 132, 135, 140, 141, 151–152, 154–155 peer-to-peer scrutiny 107, 112, 116–117 Pelz, William A. 98 penitentiary 55 performance monitoring 1, 22, 31, 35, 75, 76, 145 “Philadelphia System” 54 Piketty, Thomas 58; Capital in the Twenty First Century 58 Pioneering in Penology (Sellin) 41

175

platform capitalism 37, 39 platform economy 94, 125, 138, 139 Plato 25, 42, 100–101, 130 Polanyi, Michael 24 policing process 70, 71, 106, 130 political economy 19, 120, 127 poor: form of surveillance 48 Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) 54 Poor Law of 1572 48 Poor Law of 1601 48 Poor Laws 48, 49 Poor Law Unions 55 positive heuristics: of surveillance 8–10, 29, 31, 33, 34, 38, 63, 66, 69, 71, 75, 91, 102, 135, 143 Poster, Mark 67, 68;“mode of information” 68 Poster,Winifred R. 33 Postscript on the Societies of Control (Deleuze) 92 Powell, Walter W. 19 power 98–100 pre-modern sovereign power 88, 140 Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor) 144 prison: discipline 45, 46; and factory 54–56;“factory of men” 46; modern workplace discipline 41, 45, 46; Panopticon 40, 47, 50–56, 52; pauper management 47–50 prisoners: under inspection 52; isolation 54, 91; production process 43; surveillance of 46 privacy 11, 152–155 “private” judgement 109, 112, 113 privatus 153 The Production of Space (Lefebvre) 128 “professional beggars” 42 Protestantism 59 proto-capitalism 134 proto-communism 9, 60 proto-modern work organizations 60, 134 proximal work 8, 9, 31–35; quasipanoptic disciplinary power 132–136, 134, 135 psychoanalysis 102, 104, 105 “public” judgement 113–114 “quantified self ” (Lupton) 6 quasi-panoptic disciplinary power: heterotopias 132–136, 134, 135 radical discourse: of coercive surveillance 75–76

176 Index radical political economy 127 Rand, Ayn 119 rasphuis 8, 41–47, 55, 147; discipline of production 45; importance of 45; rediscovery of 44; systematic nature of 43 “recalcitrant worker problem” 56 reformation 59 regime of accumulation 147 Relational Models Theory 99 relative performance 114–115 representational or analytic work 32 reterritorialization 90, 91, 94, 97, 135 “retreat from society” 7, 17 Robins, Kevin 7, 22–24, 30 Rochant, Éric 145 Rose, Gillian 148 Rowan, Brian 19 Rusche, Georg 45 Rushing, William A. 31 Saint Augustine 25, 26 de Saint-Simon, Comte 9, 60 Sartre, Jean-Paul 10, 101, 148 Schecter, Darrow 27 Schwartz, Barry 98 Scientific Management 23, 57–58, 61–63, 68, 78 scopic labour 7, 8, 11, 18, 20–25, 30, 38, 132, 139–141, 144, 146–148, 150, 152, 153; archipelagic power 136–138, 137; quasi-panoptic disciplinary power 132–136, 134, 135; sovereign power 130–132, 132; unbounded agoristic dystopia 138, 138–140; unnatural history of 3, 129–130 scopic regime 11, 18, 142, 145, 147, 151, 152, 155 scotomization 103 Scott, Sir George Gilbert 55 Second treatise on government (Locke) 59 “secular trends” 129 self-determination 62, 121 self-othering 103 self-policing 28, 30, 133, 140 self-surveillance 6 Sellin,Thorsten 41, 43, 44, 46; Pioneering in Penology 41 separation of conception 62 The Seven Deadly Sins 130, 131, 131, 145 shame 11, 101, 133, 142, 152–155 Sherman, Cindy 148 sight 100; importance of 101; see also height and sight, theme of

Silent Monitor 7, 13–20, 16, 33, 38, 65, 143 Silicon Valley 11, 119, 120 Simon, David 145 simple surveillance 108; epistemological functions 110–111, 112–113; ontological functions 109, 110–111, 112; vertical form 109, 113 Smith,Adam 31, 121 social control 27, 74 socialism 14, 37 social space: capitalism 127; heterotopias as 129; surveillance as 11, 122, 126–129, 136 social stratification 119 societies of control 10, 92–94; to liquid surveillance 94–97 soldiering 57, 58, 61, 64 sousveillance 77, 116, 136, 144, 145 sovereign diagram: topology of 88, 88, 89, 90, 90, 131 sovereign power 87–90, 92, 94, 131–133, 140; heterotopias of 130–132, 132 Spanish Netherlands 41 “spectre of exclusion” 95 speculum mundi 105–106 Spiegel, Jan 42 The Subject and Power (Foucault) 29 “super excellence” 14, 19, 143 Superpanopticon 68 surveillance 84–87; busywork 11, 146–152, 149–150; capitalism 11, 118–122, 138, 141, 147; caring or protective 11, 103, 155; coercive 30 (see also coercive surveillance); committees 2; complex 108 (see also complex surveillance); constant 52, 74, 75, 125; contemporary 83; culture 11, 115; description of 1–2; disembodied/ technological 2, 10, 106–108, 111, 139; embodied/sensory 2, 10, 11, 25, 105–109, 110–111, 112; heterotopias of 132, 140–141; horizontal 9, 67–72, 107, 109, 112, 116, 132, 134–137, 151; legitimate vs. illegitimate 1–2; liquid 94–97; managerial 47, 67, 156; mass 143, 152–155; modern organizational 100; modern surveillance 13–20; New Surveillance 21, 22; organizational 75, 76, 100, 136; origin of 2–3; panoptic 96, 122; peer 67, 132, 135, 140, 141, 152, 154; poor form of 48; positive heuristics of 8–10, 29, 31, 33, 34, 38, 63, 66, 69, 71, 75, 91, 102, 135, 143;

Index of prisoners 46; protective 79, 80; self- 6; simple 108 (see also simple surveillance); social space 11, 122, 126–129, 136; state 94, 115, 130; studies 3–6; two faces of 5, 9, 72–77, 142; vertical 9, 67–72, 107, 109, 112, 114, 134–137, 139, 140, 151; at work 2, 6–11, 18, 19, 21, 24, 30–31, 72–75, 78–80 (see also work, surveillance); workplace 12, 23, 51, 87, 106–107, 124 (see also workplace surveillance); see also individual entries surveillance heterotopia: as social space 126–129; workplace as 122–126 surveillant assemblage 9, 82–84, 87–92 symbolic work 32 tachograph 34 Taskin, Laurent 35, 118 Taylor, Charles 12 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 14, 23, 57, 58, 61, 64, 66–68, 78, 144; Principles of Scientific Management 144 Taylorism 147 Taylor, Phil 77 terra nullius 119 territoriality concept 128 Thompson, E.P. 13, 24 Tietze, Susanne 34 de Tocqueville,Alexis 54 toezicht 44 Toffler, Alvin 35 Tönnies, Ferdinand 130 topological map 9, 81, 82 Total Quality Management (TQM) 65 TQM see Total Quality Management (TQM) track and trace technology 33–34 traditional managerial control 69 traffic light system 65, 67, 69, 70, 143 Trist, Eric 135 Tube map 81, 82, 89 tuchthuis 42–44 two faces: of surveillance 5, 9, 72–77, 142 Uber 19, 37, 38–39, 121, 140–141, 151 Union of Utrecht 41, 43 urban proletariat 44 Urry, Georgie 32

177

valorisation 17, 18 “vehicle for power” 23 vertical separation 98–99 vertical surveillance 9, 67–72, 107, 109, 112, 114, 134–137, 139, 140, 151 Vincent, David 133, 152, 153 visual metaphors 100–101 Vives, Juan Luis 41, 42; De Subventione Pauperum 41 voir of pouvoir 100 voir of savoir 100 Warren, Samuel 153 the watched 101–102 the watcher 101–102 Weber, Max 26–28, 33, 59, 74, 123 Webster, Frank 7, 22–24, 30 Wells, H.G. 23 Wheel Network 36, 37, 89 White, Hayden V. 74 Wilkinson, Barry 65, 72 Williamson, Oliver E. 36, 146 The Wire 145 workers’ autonomy 8, 25–30 workplace surveillance 12, 23, 51, 87, 106–107, 124; assemblage 9, 82–84; employment relationship 58, 80; form of heterotopia 126; heterotopia 122–126; limitations of 78; purpose of 14; scopic labour 129 work, surveillance at 2, 6–11, 18, 19, 21, 24, 30–31, 72–75, 78–80; bad guys 5, 143, 144; capitalist labour process 60–62; distal work 33–35; indeterminacy of labour 9, 61–67, 69, 78; Labour Process Theory 58, 61, 63, 66, 69; liberal discourse 76–77; managerial control 62–63; net-work 35–39, 36, 37; proximal work 31–33; radical discourse 75–76; vertical and horizontal 67–72 World Brain 23 Xenophon 31 zero-sum game 24, 25, 84 Zuboff, Shoshana 7, 11, 24, 25, 31, 32, 118–122, 125, 126, 138, 141; The Age of Surveillance Capitalism 118; In the Age of the Smart Machine 24