"Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See": An Analysis of Workplace Surveillance, Resistance and Consent

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.