Candidate: 4148215

When Pervasive Becomes Invasive: Issues Surrounding e-Monitoring and Surveillance Technology
in the Modern Organisation

In March 2010, BBC News reported upon an overseas development in ubiquitous computing that
may have confirmed the worst fears of a British society to have already vehemently rejected the
government’s plans for a national ID card and had only in the previous year been described by the
Lords Committee as being in serious danger of becoming a ‘surveillance state’ (www.bbc.co.uk,
2009). The article (www.bbc.co.uk, 2010) referred to major Japanese mobile communications
company KDDI Corporation and their development of technology that could track the most specific
of bodily movements via the accelerometer supplied in modern ‘smart phones’. Information on
particular actions could then be relayed wirelessly back to a central location, where managers could
closely monitor the efficiency of employee performance, thus linking the ideals of Total
Management Control (e.g. Delbridge, Turnbull and Wilkinson, 1992) with those of a fully pervasive
technological society.

The application of increasingly complex location-aware technologies to organisations for the

purpose of monitoring employees should perhaps not come as a complete surprise. As Giddens
(1987) proposes: ‘Surveillance in the capitalist enterprise is key to management’ (175: cited in
Timmons 2003: 144). It is in this sense that Bain and Taylor (2000) suggest that close surveillance
essentially propagates a neo-Taylorist approach to optimising workforce productivity; a view shared
by Smith and Thompson (1998: 555): ‘...the shadow of Scientific Management continues to fall over
contemporary work organisation’. Just as low-trust employee-employer relationships and the
separation of the labour process from the skills of the workforce so central to Taylorism (e.g. Pruijt,
2000) have persisted as points of contention since the outset of the century, so too has the issue of
surveillance. Could it be that technologies such as Global Positioning Systems, keystroke analysis and
e-mail monitoring software are simply the modern day manifestations of the foreman on the factory
floor, overseeing and ensuring the workforce perform to optimum levels? As Hoffman, Hartman and
Rowe (2003) contest, employers have gathered information about their employees ever since the
dawn of the 20th Century.

The following essay examines and evaluates an apparent assumption throughout much of the
literature that e-monitoring and surveillance of employees within organisations is inherently
oppressive; with technology in this context effectively being used to enslave workers to their
employers. Seemingly central to this perspective is the metaphor of the ‘electronic panopticon’
(Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992) and the current paper will evaluate whether this is indeed a useful
allegory for examining the relationship between surveillance technology and employees. The

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potential effects of sustained e-monitoring on employees will be outlined and a particular focus will
be afforded to the Call Centre industry, which has received a relatively substantial amount of
attention in the past two decades. The essay will then examine the legal rights that employees hold
with regard to their privacy at work, followed by a conclusion considering where the focus of future
research might lay. First, however, the relationship between e-monitoring and surveillance
technology and the organisation is considered.

e-Monitoring, Surveillance Technology and the Organisation

There can be little doubt that the world of work has become truly global. Just as the development of
what Deleuze (1992: 6) would term as ‘simple machines’ sparked the Industrial Revolution of the
18th Century, the proliferation of computer, satellite and Internet technology has made
communication across the globe instantaneous to the extent that technology and economic
globalization are now ‘so intertwined that they may be indistinguishable [in the post-industrial
world]’ (Chapman, 2004: 445). Whilst it is beyond the scope of the current paper to give full
consideration to the topic of technological determinism, the trajectory of technological
advancement appears to be non-uniform and its relationship with the organisation, apparently
complex and paradoxical by nature:

‘Organisations, especially for-profit organisations, now play a curiously dual role in

promoting the unfettered acceleration of technology. They are simultaneously
technology’s most powerful driver and also its hogtied prisoner.’ (Leavitt, 2002: 126).

Sewell and Wilkinson (1992) contend that a further paradox exists, where modern developments in
managerial strategy has given rise to greater decentralisation of managerial authority and
responsibility for decision making whilst simultaneously generating greater levels of centralised
control and surveillance. Whether technological development has lead to greater centralisation or
decentralisation of organisations is a contentious issue (Dewett and Jones, 2001) but as Button,
Mason and Sharrock (2003) suggest, the disruptive potential of empowered employees in a
decentralised system is likely to lead to countervailing techniques of surveillance; namely, the
development of electronic monitoring and surveillance (EM/S: D’Urso, 2006) technology that can
ensure the actions of employees are fully focused on achieving the productive goals of the
organisation.

What is meant by the concepts of electronic, or ‘e-‘, monitoring and surveillance though? Nebeker
and Tatum (1993: 509 cited in D’Urso 2006: 283) define e-monitoring as ‘the use of electronic
instruments or devices such as radio, video and computer systems to collect, store, analyze, and

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report individual or group actions or performance’. D’Urso (2006: 289) contests that such monitoring
is classed as surveillance if it is used to uncover ‘specific wrongdoing’. Later in the essay, statistics
are presented that illustrate the extent to which organisations use advanced e-monitoring
technology for this very purpose, thus creating a range of privacy-related issues. As the example
provided at the outset of the essay illustrates, EM/S technology has now developed to such a degree
of pervasiveness that keystrokes, body movements and real-time instant messages can be tracked,
stored and analysed with relative ease.

A cursory search of the Internet reveals numerous companies dedicated to providing EM/S software
to organisations, and it appears that business is booming. In the US, Wakefield (2004) reports sales
of computer monitoring and surveillance software as increasing from around $139 million in 2001 to
a vastly inflated $622 million in 2006. One such example is Raytheon’s ‘SilentRunner’ monitoring
software, which can track almost any activity that occurs on an employee’s work network (Hoffman,
Hartman and Rowe, 2003). An Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance Survey conducted by the
American Management Association (AMA, 2007) provides further support for the growth, indicating
that of 304 US-based companies, 45 percent track keystrokes and content and 43 percent store and
review files and monitor e-mail. Mello’s (2003) assertion that employee monitoring is on the rise
appears to be receiving significant support.

However, an important consideration appears to be in striking a careful balance between overstating

the perceived Orwellian-esque intentions of E-M/S technology and ignoring the issues altogether.
The case study of call centres discussed later should illustrate that the relationship between EM/S
technology, organisations and wider society is complex and that any conclusions making a binary
distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or ‘empowerment’ and ‘enslavement’ are likely to be
oversimplifying the matter. Whilst it seems important to consider that there may be valid
organisational arguments for an increase in employee surveillance, the populism of ‘dark side’
research has rendered the latter as having arguably greater appeal throughout the literature (e.g.
Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992; Fernie and Metcalf, 1998). One particularly salient instance of this has
been the application of the ‘electronic panopticon’ metaphor, which shall be discussed in the
following section.

The Electronic Panopticon

The ‘electronic panopticon’ (Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992; Botan, 1996) has been an oft-cited
metaphor throughout the last two decades of research, typically used to convey the notion of covert
surveillance and control through the use of technology. The roots of the concept stem from

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Foucault’s (1977) seminary ‘Discipline and Punish’ text, where he adapted Jeremy Bentham’s late
18th Century idea of a ‘panopticon’ prison design as a metaphor for surveillance throughout what
Foucault described as a ‘disciplinary society’. The underlying idea behind Bentham’s panopticon was
that as part of the prison’s layout, a central observation tower would be designed as such that
individual inmates would never be sure as to whether they were being subjected to the ‘carceral
gaze’ (e.g. Bain and Taylor, 2000) of their unseen jailors. Foucault (1977: 201) summarised the
concept as such: ‘the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its actions’.
Scholars such as Botan (1996) applied the concept to information technology in so much that the
panoptic potential of a technology refers to its capacity to facilitate the surveillance of a workforce.

It is perhaps easy to understand the appeal of the panoptic metaphor when considering the
relationship between EM/S technology and the organisation. For some, conflict and adversarialism –
concepts that are arguably inherent to the carceral system - form a salient characteristic of the
employee-employer relationship, particularly with regards to employee surveillance (Friedman and
Reed, 2007). For instance, a 2006 Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) survey
reported that perceptions of monitoring differed between employees and managers. Reported in
Friedman and Reed (2007), 34 percent of employees surveyed believed that monitoring revealed an
employer’s lack of trust in employees, whereas only two percent of managers listed lack of trust as a
motivation for monitoring them. Such differences in perception could, of course, lead to conflict.

There are a number of issues with the panoptic metaphor, however. First, whilst the analogy of the
carceral-disciplinary form of covert monitoring may hold some intuitive appeal, workplaces are ‘not
simply... site[s] of disciplinary power’ (Bain and Taylor, 2000: 5). Indeed, Bain and Taylor (2000: 5)
proceed to acknowledge the inherent flaw of the panoptic metaphor, in that:

‘The factory or office are not simply paler versions of carceral institutions ... [and] are not
functionally orientated towards the creation of obedient bodies per se but ... towards the
attainment of profit.’

Previously, Thompson and Ackroyd (1995) had criticised proponents, such as Sewell and Wilkinson
(1992), for overemphasising the metaphor and Timmons (2003) further supports this perspective by
concluding from his study of the surveillance of nursing practice that technological workplace
surveillance is far more complex than the application of the electronic panopticon metaphor would
suggest. Finally, Bain and Taylor (2000) point out that the concept of the ‘panoptic gaze’ is merely a
single element of Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power in modern society and is often cited as the
result of an overly superficial understanding of the Foucauldian framework.

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Resisting the seemingly popularist snare of the panoptic metaphor, Deleuze (1992) evolved
Foucault’s notion of the ‘disciplinary society’ to one that addresses the relationship between
modern day technology and the organisation. Eminantly quotable, in no small part due to his vivid
critique of the modern-day corporation (e.g. ‘We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is
the most terrifying news in the world.’ (1992: 5)), Deleuze proposed that following World War II, a
society of control, rather than discipline, has been set in place. For Deleuze (1992: 4), ‘in a society of
control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas’. Further to
this, he notes, ‘In the corporate system... [we see] the progressive and dispersed installation of a
new system of domination’ (1992: 7). Whilst the concepts of ‘enslavement’ and ‘domination’ seem
familiar, instead of the panopticon we are presented with the notion of an ethereal organisation; a
corporation that is omniscient and concerned with control, much like the wider society within which
Deleuze proposes it is positioned.

Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance and the Impact on Individuals

Whilst the electronic panopticon metaphor has been subjected to some criticism, the notion of using
technology to enslave workers remains a fascinating one for many researchers. Perhaps one of the
great paradoxes of organisations investing heavily in e-monitoring and surveillance technologies is
that it seems to be used typically for maintaining and improving levels of productivity throughout
the workforce (e.g. Bain and Taylor, 2000) but as a number of studies have suggested, can lead to a
range of detrimental organisational, and by extension, societal outcomes. A consistent finding
appears to be that electronic monitoring and surveillance can lead to both psychological and
physical health issues for workers, from increased stress, anxiety and anger levels to increased
incidences of musculoskeletal disorders (e.g. Smith et al, 1992; Flanagan, 1994; Lee and Kleiner,
2003). In some instances, absenteeism and turnover rates increase as employees actively seek to
distance themselves from the stressful effects of constant e-monitoring (e.g. Levy, 1994), whereas
for workers who remain with the organisation, there may be decreases in quality of work (e.g. Grant,
Higgins and Irving, 1988) or overall levels of productivity due to diminished levels of trust in the
employer-employee relationship (e.g. Balitis, 1998).

Friedman and Reed (2007) discuss the potential importance of why employers should explain
carefully to employees exactly why it is that they are being monitored. In terms of psychological
theory, one area of interest is the employee’s perception of fairness with regard to the
organisation’s e-monitoring policy itself – termed ‘policy justice’ by Bies and Tyler (1993) - and to its
implementation, termed ‘procedural justice’ (Leventhal, 1980). A recent paper by Brown, Bemmels
and Barclay (2010) suggests that the independence of these two theories is important, which is an

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appealing argument if one considers that most employees explicitly consent to their organisation’s
‘fair use of IT’ policies at the outset of employment – perhaps creating high perceived levels of policy
justice – but may not necessarily agree with their practical application - associated with low
perceived levels of procedural justice. The relationship between workers and surveillance
technologies has been studied in a range of industries, but none more so than the area presented in
the following section.

The Call Centre Industry: a Case Study

Throughout the final decade of the 20th Century, industry experienced an ‘explosion in call centre
employment’ (Bain, Watson, Muvey, Taylor and Gall, 2001: 173), supporting its status as a dynamic
area of economic growth. One broad operational definition of a call centre is ‘…a dedicated
operation in which computer-utilising employees receive inbound – or make outbound telephone
calls...’ (Taylor and Bain, 1999: 102). Within this environment, Thompson (2003) describes how
‘Customer Service Operators’ can be expected to handle around 120 calls per day depending on the
particular organisational context, of which there are many ranging from retail to utilities services to
travel to Higher Educational institutions via Student Services support. In accordance with
Thompson’s (2003) description of the ‘rise of the call centre’, modern call centres find themselves no
longer considered as ‘additional functionality’ by organisations but fully integrated into centralised
customer service structures (Bain et al, 2001).

One of the key reasons why call centres are of such interest with regard to electronic monitoring and
surveillance is that there appears to be a ‘universal practice of monitoring employees’ (Bain et al,
2001: p.172), where important consideration for management includes not simply the quantity of
calls but the quality; the so-called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ aspects, respectively. Bain and colleagues (2001)
propose that surveillance thus plays an important role in maintaining standards throughout the
workforce, providing management with almost unprecedented control over target-setting and real-
time performance monitoring using readily available electronic monitoring software. As Thompson
(2003: 143) indicates, ‘surveillance plays a strong and distinctive role in the labour process’ within
call centres, reflecting ‘the latest phase in Taylorist developments’ (Bain et al, 2001: 173). As with
Taylorism and the related theory of ‘scientific management’ (e.g. Pruijt, 2000), call centres have
found themselves the focus of intense criticism from some academics and the wider media precisely
because of this combination of close and constant surveillance with often heavily scripted, paced
and repetitive tasks.

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Perhaps one of the wider, most prevailing images of the modern call centre is that of an ‘electronic
sweatshop’; a modern version of Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’, representing sites of managerial
oppression, degradation and exploitation of privacy (e.g. Bain and Taylor, 2000; Thompson, 2003).
Infamous advocates of this perspective are Fernie and Metcalf (1998: 2), who analysed a small
number of case studies to conclude emphatically that:

‘The ‘tyranny of the assembly line’ is but a Sunday school picnic compared with the
control that management can exercise in computer telephony.’

This assertion attracted a great deal of criticism, most notably from Bain and Taylor (2000: 7), who
labelled Fernie and Metcalf’s (1998) likening of call centres to the often hazardous assembly lines of
the 1930s as ‘ill-informed’ and ‘absurd’. Furthermore, the authors were felt to have based their
conclusions on methodologically flawed case studies that did not appear to fit the previously
discussed panoptic metaphor that Fernie and Metcalf (1998: 9) declared had been ‘rendered
perfect’ through the monitoring of call centre employees.

Whilst Thompson (2003: 143) found it ‘hardly surprising’ that call centre work has garnered the
attention of Foucauldian-influenced critics, in their paper Bain and Taylor (2000) presented the case
study of a telecommunications call centre to illustrate a number of key issues with likening
electronic monitoring to the implied carceral gaze of panopticism. First, Bain and Taylor (2000) argue
that the ‘remote observations’ conducted by management in their case study rendered supervisory
power and control over the employee far from perfect. Despite the availability and use of
monitoring software, common problems facing management in the call centres continued to persist,
including absenteeism, turnover and motivation levels. Furthermore, more experienced Customer
Service Operators, or ‘agents’, were often able to guess when the supposedly covert remote
observations of their work were taking place simply from cues given by the managers; an event that
should not occur if the environment was truly rendered panoptic by the EM/S technology.

Second, Bain and Taylor (2000) admit that whilst the panoptic metaphor is appealing, it is ultimately
a case of technological determinism. That is, simply because vendors of EM/S technology may claim
to be able to closely monitor every action of the employee and strive to achieve the ideals of Total
Management Control, this is mostly likely far too simplistic, treating management strategy and
practice as a clear-cut endeavour and employees as passive victims. Indeed, an oft-cited
characteristic of panopticism is that it inherently denies the possibility of worker resistance, which a
number of studies have shown to be incorrect in relation to the use of EM/S technology, whether in
a call centre environment (e.g. Bain and Taylor, 2000) or alternatives, such as the print industry

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(Button et al, 2003) and nursing (Timmons, 2003). In all of these instances, employees were shown
to retain an element of individual and group control in their responses to the technology.

A further finding of the aforementioned cases of ‘resistance’ was that managerial practice was
typically found to be more flexible than the portrayal offered by the discipline-influenced notion of
the electronic panoption. For instance, Lankshear et al (2001) proposed that call centre employees
can pursue management-defined goals without necessarily following management demands to the
letter. This leads to a third point: that surveillance in itself may often not be the central reason for
why management monitor employee activity in call centres. As mentioned previously in this section,
call centre managers typically have a dual focus: the quantity and quality of ‘front line’ interaction.
Bain and Taylor (2000) demonstrated, remote observation of employee activity can be used for
disciplinary purposes, such as if the number or quality of calls fielded by operators are below the
requisite standard, but equally, the technology can also be used for productive, developmental
purposes. The panoptic metaphor implies that the relationship between employer and employee is
adversarial, which even in a Tayloristic call centre environment where there is likely to be clear
delineation between management and operator, it may not necessarily be the case. As Bain and
Taylor (2000: 8) point out:

‘Neither surveillance nor control mechanisms are ends in themselves but are the
consequence of the process of perpetual benchmarking by which call centres assess their
performance.’

In other words, control over the workforce may not be the primary focus for management within call
centres, but is arguably more important than the oppressive and omniscient organisational desires
for employee surveillance. We will now consider the issue of employee rights in the face of a rapidly
evolving workplace where affordances for individual privacy may not be quite what they seem.

Legal Rights, Ethical Wrongs?

Although UK-based statistics are relatively elusive, a number of US-based academic papers and
surveys have suggested that around three-quarters of employers record and potentially analyse the
e-mail messages, telephone calls, internet connections and computer files of their employees (AMA,
2007). As detailed previously, just over two-fifths of the companies in the AMA’s 2007 Electronic
Monitoring and Surveillance Survey specifically monitoring the e-mail of their workers, with this
representing the most frequently monitored workplace technology, followed by telephone
conversations (16 percent). This is most likely a result of the almost ubiquitous use of e-mail

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throughout modern-day organisations (e.g. Nord et al, 2006). Thus, Friedman and Reed’s (2007: 76)
assertion of the ‘erosion of workplace privacy’ appears to be an increasingly legitimate concern.

Whilst privacy may be of central concern to workers, unions and society in general, a potentially
more worrying trend is for employers to base disciplinary action and dismissals on data collected
from e-monitoring and surveillance. The aforementioned 2007 survey conducted by the AMA
indicated that more than 25 percent of organisations reported dismissing an employee for misusing
e-mail, with around one-third doing so for employees who abused the use of the internet. It is not
possible to know from this data how many cases were justifiable dismissals and how many were
cases of potentially overzealous surveillance, but one point appears to be becoming abundantly
clear: many workers seem unaware, or are perhaps ill-informed, of the extent to which their privacy
is protected when using their organisation’s IT networks.

In the UK, employers that choose to monitor their employees must adhere to numerous rules and
regulations, including the Human Rights Act (1998), the Data Protection Act (1998), the Regulation of
Investigatory Powers Act of 2000 (RIPA) and the Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice)
(Interception of Communications) Regulations of 2000. Similarly, in the US, employees may be aware
of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA: 1986) and the Fourth Amendment: the right to
freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. However, as Nord et al (2006: 73) point out,
workers tend to expect the same privacy rights within the workplace that they experience at home
and that ultimately ‘employee privacy, long considered a basic right, is often taken for granted by
employees’.

Concern around the level of protection that the aforementioned UK and US governmental laws
afford employees in relation to electronic activity in the workplace have existed almost as long the
use of the systems themselves. For instance, Bockanic and Lynn (1995) had already begun to
consider US Constitutional Privacy Rights, and Common and Statutory Laws relating to the increasing
use of ‘electronic mail’ in the mid-1990s. Perhaps the most telling indictment of how little the
situation has changed is that many articles written on the subject over a decade later (e.g. Nord et
al, 2006; D’Urso, 2006; Friedman and Reed, 2007) refer to the same complexities and inadequacies
of the law – at least from the perspective of the employee – and ultimately draw the same
conclusion: e-monitoring laws almost always tend to favour the employer.

According to Nord et al (2006), most US citizens assume that they withhold a constitutional right to
privacy under the Fourth Amendment. There are issues with this, however. The Fourth Amendment
refers to state actions conducted by Federal government rather than at the organisational level.

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Thus, the amendment appears to be of little use to workers in private-sector organisations. Whilst
the case of Borse vs. Piece Goods Shop Inc. (1992) suggests that the Restatement (Second) of Torts
at 652B –the invasion of privacy as ‘intrusion into seclusion’ – might show some potential for privacy
protection (Nord et al, 2006), establishing that the intrusion is ‘highly offensive to the reasonable
individual’ appears to be difficult for most plaintiffs appealing against their former employers - at
least to date.

Whilst many governmental communication acts and regulations appear to provide the employee
with support and protection from violations of privacy, various loopholes exist for organisations to
exploit should they wish to do so. For instance, whilst electronic communications such as e-mail are
purported to fall under the ECPA, in reality the act offers little protection to employees for a couple
of reasons (e.g. Bockanic and Lynn, 1995). First, the ECPA contains an ‘ordinary course of business’
exemption, providing employers with latitude in monitoring any electronic communications deemed
as work-related activity. For instance, in the case of McLaren vs. Microsoft (1999), the former was
the focus of a harassment investigation and as his employers at the time, Microsoft decrypted
McLaren’s password to a personal folder within his work e-mail account and terminated his
employment based on the information contained therein. Whilst McLaren argued that his password-
protected folder was essentially the same as a physical, locked storage locker and that Microsoft’s
intervention was tantamount to an invasion of privacy, the courts rejected this argument on the
basis that the e-mails had first been received in the general mailbox and then moved across to the
personal folder, thus making them the business of the employer.

Second, even prior agreements of e-mail confidentiality between employee and employer do not
necessarily hold up in the courts. Smyth vs The Pillsbury Company (1996) is a landmark case where
Smyth sent e-mails to his supervisor from his home computer that contained comments deemed to
be inappropriate and unprofessional, which were then accessed at a later date by the employer and
Smyth’s contract was terminated. The court dismissed Smyth’s appeal, stating, ‘Once [the] plaintiff
communicated the alleged unprofessional comments to a second person (his supervisor) over an e-
mail system which was apparently utilized by the entire company, any reasonable expectation of
privacy was lost.’ Despite whatever assurances that employees feel they are provided with in
protecting the privacy of their electronic communications, cases such as the above highlight that the
documents often signed by employees at the outset of their employment, such as IT-based ‘fair use’
agreement policies, provide employers with significant latitude.

A point of potentially greater concern for employees, however, is a question first posited by the
Roman poet Juvat (e.g. Winstedt, 1899): ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodies’. Roughly translated as ‘who

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watches the watchmen?’ or perhaps more appropriately ‘who monitors the e-monitors?’ there is
evidence to suggest that company policies have not developed as rapidly as the implementation of
e-monitoring technologies themselves. According to a survey of over one hundred US-based
organisations conducted by Hoffman and colleagues (2003), around one-quarter admitted that they
did not have any procedures or safeguards in place to ensure that their e-monitoring process was
not abused, and over half reported the absence of any written guidelines, policies or procedures for
e-monitoring guidance. Whilst it is not the intention of the current essay to suggest that
organisations actively seek to exploit the data collected from e-monitoring their employees, the
evidence from just the previously described cases should be enough to emphasise that employee
rights to privacy are already far from clear, without lacking further clarity over how data is handled
within organisations. As Hoffman et al (2003) attest, technological growth only remains responsible
if ethical values are maintained and developed accordingly.

A further ethically contentious issue is the surveillance of electronic communications by workers

using their own private, non-work e-mail accounts, social networks or blogs in their own time, but
on company-owned property, such as laptops. According to the AMA (2007), around 12 percent of
US-based companies monitor the personal blog postings s of their employees to check whether they
are writing about the organisation; a statistic that may be of potential concern given the apparent
increase in the use of social media. For instance, a Princeton University-based survey reported by
the UK’s Guardian website in 2009 (www.guardian.co.uk, 2009) suggests that Facebook had at the
time of publication over 300 million active users, producing 45 million status updates a day, and
other micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter support a user-base of around 100 million people.

The UK’s Trade Unions Congress (TUC) were relatively proactive in issuing a briefing to members
entitled ‘Facing up to Facebook’ (2007: 2), warning that ignoring the growing use of social
networking sites within working hours is an ‘HR accident waiting to happen’. Whilst the rise of social
media presents new issues with regards to e-monitoring in the employee-employer relationship, it is
perhaps important to emphasise that the monitoring of non-work employee activity is by no means
a new issue; for instance, Hoffman et al (2003) describe how at the turn of the 20th Century, both
Herscheys and the Ford Motor Company committed significant resources to monitoring the conduct
of workers away from the factory floor. Whilst examples such as Ford’s Sociological Department
might seem abhorrent to the modern day worker, if we consider social media to be a kind of
‘informal’ e-monitoring and surveillance tool available to the employer, perhaps little has changed.

Consideration must be provided to the perspective of the employer too, however. As Friedman and
Reed (2007) contest, there may be several legitimate reasons for employers to monitor their

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employees’ e-mail or electronic use, ranging from the protection of trade secrets in an increasingly
competitive global market, to concerns over workforce productivity, and to avoid liability from
potential misuse. According to Crimmins (2001), around 10 percent of US companies have received
subpoenas relating to employee e-mails. If organisations are to be held accountable in the eyes of
the law for the digital actions of their employees, e-monitoring could be a justified approach from
the organisation’s perspective; particularly if employees have provided informed consent of ‘fair’
usage policy at the outset of employment. The case of Booker vs. GTE Net (Verizon) (2003)
illustrates that vicarious liability may well become a pressing concern to organisations if an
employee is deemed to be furthering the ‘employer’s interests’ through malicious e-mails or
alternative electronic communication. In this instance, Verizon escaped litigation because their
interests were not deemed to have been furthered, but as Friedman and Reed (2007) warn, other
organisations may not be so lucky in the future.

Conclusion

As illustrated by the example presented at the very outset of this essay, ongoing developments in
technology can fan the flames of an ever-increasing concern that organisations, and the wider
society in which they are positioned, are becoming characterised by pervasive electronic monitoring
and surveillance. In short, technological development may have arrived at a point where pervasive
has become synonymous with invasive. From a Foucauldian and Deleuzian perspective, there is a
philosophical argument that organisational life is an inherent component of a wider culture of
surveillance and control, although many scholars have wrestled with the analogy of surveillance
technology as a kind of electronic panopticon. Much like society, organisations and the management
structures, policies and relationships that lay within are hugely complex and the use of technology
for monitoring and surveillance purposes can vary significantly; a point emphasised by the case
study of call centre research, where e-monitoring has been used to both coach and discipline
workers. So, whilst the panoptic metaphor is alluring, in all likelihood it is probably too simplistic to
fully explain the range of issues that are intrinsic to the application of electronic monitoring and
surveillance systems.

What appears to be increasingly clear is the paradox of organisations investing in such technologies
with the aim of maintaining or increasing managerial control, but experiencing reduced control
through various detrimental outcomes, such as increased stress, absenteeism and attenuated
productivity. Furthermore, workers would appear to be justified in expressing concern over their
rights to privacy in the workplace. Presently, laws and regulations in both the UK and the US offer
some protection to individuals, but in practice, seem to favour the employer through the inclusion of

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various legal loopholes. This is not to deny the number of legitimate reasons for why an organisation
might choose to use surveillance technology to monitor its workforce, and even require its
protection, but current laws would appear to be ambiguous at best.

With the continuous rise of social media and the variety of ways in which contemporary
organisations can informally monitor the behaviour of their employees both in and outside of work,
it would seem that greater clarity with regards to regulating e-monitoring and surveillance activity is
required urgently, for the sake of both employees and employers alike. Whilst changes in law could
be cumbersome and unwieldy to implement, one proactive step might be for organisations to
encourage the involvement of their employees in creating fair organisation-specific e-monitoring
policies that explain with clarity why it is that they are being monitored and how the data will be
used. Ignorance can be no excuse for the organisation that denies the legal and ethical challenges
that lay ahead or similarly, for the worker who assumes the same affordances of privacy in
workplace as at home. It is in this sense that organisational research may serve to provide a useful
model for how wider society can address the rise of electronic monitoring and surveillance
technology and its impact on privacy rights.

Word Count: 5, 491

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Candidate: 4148215

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