"Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See": An Analysis of Workplace Surveillance, Resistance and Consent
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Date
2008-10-20
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Abstract
Since the 1990s, workplace surveillance has become a popular topic of sociological
investigation. Researchers debate whether monitoring schemes elicit consent and self-control
among workers or provoke pervasive worker resistance. I use quantitative data culled from
158 detail-rich, book-length, workplace ethnographies to analyze how direct supervision,
electronic surveillance, peer monitoring, and customer surveillance influence workplace
behavior. I find that workers neither consent wholeheartedly to surveillance, nor do they
uniformly resist their control. Instead, my analyses reveal that the effect of surveillance on
workplace behavior depends on the form of surveillance employed. Notably, the effects of
peer monitoring on resistance and consent differ markedly from those of other forms of
surveillance.
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Keywords
workplace, resistance, consent, surveillance
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Degree
MS
Discipline
Sociology
