- Title
- Working under intensive surveillance: when does 'measuring everything that moves' become intolerable?
- Creator
- Sewell, Graham; Barker, James R.; Nyberg, Daniel
- Relation
- Human Relations Vol. 65, Issue 2
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0018726711428958
- Publisher
- Sage
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- 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.
- Subject
- discourse; irony; performance management; performance measurement; surveillance
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1058521
- Identifier
- uon:16438
- Identifier
- ISSN:0018-7267
- Language
- eng
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