The fine line between coercion and care

• Published in: Communications of the ACM Vol. 62; no. 4; p. 15
• Main Author: Underwood, Sarah
• Format: Magazine Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Association for Computing Machinery 01.04.2019
• Subjects: Airport security; Airports; Closed circuit television; Employee theft; Monitoring; Monitoring systems; Organizational aspects; Organizational behavior; Personnel; Security management; Security systems; Sociology; Surveillance; Theft; Visibility; United States > US
• ISSN: 0001-0782; 1557-7317
• DOI: 10.1145/3311721

Employee monitoring is an age-old practice in industrial society, harking back to manual timesheets. It has since developed in line with technology breakthroughs into a highly sophisticated process that is actively practiced by employers, and not always welcomed by employees. Michel Anteby, associate professor of organizational behavior and sociology at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, relates a rather chilling tale of employee monitoring. In a study he started in 2011 and reported in 2018, he tracked the experiences and resistance strategies of security screening personnel subject to CCTV surveillance at a large urban airport. Ironically, the US Transportation Security Administration that employed the personnel and set up the surveillance to strengthen managerial control of employee theft and reassure the vast majority of employees that they were not responsible for theft, ended up with a disillusioned workforce that felt a sense of visibility of behavior, but a lack of management notice as individuals.