Abstract:
Owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, millions of people suddenly stopped going to their workplaces and started doing their jobs from home. While this crisis has accelerated the adoption of remote work and has forced employees to adapt their working styles, it had little impact on the popularity of and continued insistence on Taylorist management styles. Worse yet, being unable to directly monitor and surveil their employees, the lockdowns of businesses around the world have highlighted one of the worst fears of managers and administrators: loss of control. Therefore, it is no coincidence that we are seeing a surge in new work surveillance technologies. Promising to make employees happier, more loyal, more productive, collaborative, and innovative, tech companies have developed highly sophisticated systems, going beyond simply recording employees’ digital traces, such as keyboard strokes, mouse movements, or website and file histories. Intending to reduce an employee to a comprehensive score, or to provide instant feedback, these – what we call – connected workplace surveillance solutions scrutinize and integrate unprecedented amounts of work-related and non-work-related personal data. In my talk, I will use examples to explain how work surveillance has changed as datification, sensorization, and artificial intelligence have become more prevalent, and how “organizational control“ needs to be reinterpreted.
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Bio:
Tobias Mettler is Full Professor of Information Management, at the Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research interests are in the area of digital transformation of governments and society at large. His research revolves around societal issues of fundamental rights, health, demographic change, and wellbeing of citizens. His work has appeared, amongst other, in the European Journal of Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, Government Information Quarterly, Information & Organization, Information Systems Journal, and the Journal of Information Technology.
• https://www.unil.ch/idheap/diggov
• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7895-7545
• https://scholar.google.ch/citations?user=cKv0bKQAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Relevant articles:
• Mettler, T. (2023). The connected workplace: Characteristics and social consequences of work surveillance in the age of datification, sensorization, and artificial intelligence. Journal of Information Technology. https://doi.org/10.1177/02683962231202535
• Mettler, T., & Stepanovic, S. (2023). Acceptable nudge strategies to incentivize the use of wearables and physiolytics at work: A Q-methodology examination. Journal of Information Technology. https://doi.org/10.1177/02683962231173706
• Mettler T., & Naous, D. (2022). Beyond panoptic surveillance: On the ethical dilemmas of the connected workplace. Proceedings of the Thirtieth European Conference on Information Systems. https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2022_rp/33/
• Mettler, T., & Wulf, J. (2019). Physiolytics at the workplace: Affordances and constraints of wearables use from an employee’s perspective. Information Systems Journal, 29(1), 245-273. https://doi.org/10.1111/isj.12205