Communication work and electronic surveillance: A model for predicting panoptic effects

By the year 2000, up to 40 million workers are expected to be surveilled electronically in American workplaces. Management often views surveillance as an attempt to achieve certain organizational goals better by more fully utilizing time and other resources. This article adopts the alternative perspective, that of employees/members, from which surveillance can be understood as an attempt to create new power relationships based on an electronic version of Bentham's panopticon. The study postulated four elements of such panoptic relationships and tested the first and most important of these, perception of being surveilled, in a state-wide survey of information workers (n = 465). Results supported the hypotheses that the more surveilled workers perceive themselves to be the less a) privacy, b) certainty about their role in the work place, c) self-esteem, and d) workplace communication they experience.