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

We examine how call-center employees draw on opposed discourses to understand the purpose and consequences of performance measurement as workplace surveillance. Sometimes the workers saw performance measurement as a legitimate and impartial managerial tool serving the interests of everyone in the or...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Human relations (New York) 2012-02, Vol.65 (2), p.189-215
Main Authors:	Sewell, Graham, Barker, James R, Nyberg, Daniel
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Call centers Call centres Competitiveness Discourse Employees Meaning Measurement Performance evaluation Performance management Sociology Sociology of organizations and enterprises. Bureaucracy and administration Sociology of work Sociology of work and sociology of organizations Studies Surveillance Work organization. Working relations Work place Working conditions
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Summary:	We examine how call-center employees draw on opposed discourses to understand the purpose and consequences of performance measurement as workplace surveillance. Sometimes the workers saw performance measurement as a legitimate and impartial managerial tool serving the interests of everyone in the organization (e.g. by exposing free-riding, etc.). Other times, they saw performance measurement as intrusive and oppressive; imposed on them by managers who, as agents of employers, used it to serve a narrow set of interests (e.g. by intensifying work, etc.). Our analysis depicts how employees used an ironical process of predicate logic to develop flexible meaning-making strategies to cope with the apparent conflicts in meaning that arose from the two opposed discourses. We conclude by developing a three step method for the practical analysis of such ironical situations of competing discourses that facilitates our ability to reconsider and reconfigure meaning in more useful ways.
ISSN:	0018-7267 1741-282X