Information Control and Workplace Surveillance - Jihae Park and Mariona Fortuny

Information Control and Workplace Surveillance - by Jihae Park and Mariona Fortuny Jané

The Current Governance Issue

There are numerous current governance problems arising from technological innovations, yet here we will specifically focus on the information control and workplace surveillance. Whether intended or unintended, there were certain historical incidents which resulted in social and political consequences. As noticed from the Control Revolution, the dramatic evolution in mass media and telecommunications technologies has led to the reinforcement of the economic and political control during the Industrial Revolution. (Beniger, 1986) By applying this logic to a modern example, this is clearly how many corporations are getting in control of their employees through surveillance technologies. Along with the emergence of remote and hybrid work after Covid-19, employers are now relying on “bossware” to analyze the emails, chats, and messages of their employees on platforms such as Teams or Slack. (Ollier-Malaterre et al., 2026, p.237) Some companies have strict restrictions on transferring data both internally and externally in protection of confidential information and consistently monitor their workers to the certain extent which could slow down their efficiency. This is problematic as it’s not only violating the privacy of their employees but also depriving employees of rights they should be naturally be able to exercise.

Historical Lineage

In relation to the current issue of the information control and workplace surveillance, Max Weber’s argument of bureaucracy and rationalization in the middle and late nineteenth century are good historical examples which are still frequently visible nowadays. Weber stated how the range of control could extend not only by expanding the capability to process information but also by limiting the amount of information to be processed. Here, the former is directly related to the control implemented by bureaucratization (in the mid 19th century) and computerization (in the late 20th century), whereas the latter addresses rationalization. An example from bureaucracy is the expansion of paperwork in response to the growth in information. We can still note these traces of bureaucracy from numerous procedures that we have to go through for a decision-making to take place in corporations. He brings up the example of standardized time zones for rationalization which is simply an example for an omission or a breakdown of information to facilitate its processing. (Beniger, 1986, p.15-16) This is also commonly seen from nowadays as some companies may use internal terminologies for the sake of both confidentiality and efficiency.

==== Mechanism of Path Dependence ====

Following along the line with the historical lineage, there are certain mechanisms at work of path dependence for information control and workplace surveillance. Bureaucracy is closely related with organizational routines. Many companies have already settled down with a fixed workflow and decision-making process, which makes it more costly for one to change from its conventional way of working. This means switching costs from an old system to a new one is clearly high considering its time and capital, not necessarily will guarantee increasing returns. Hence, many firms end up maintaining its old strategy, reluctant to make any modifications or changes.

Politics and Distribution

As businesses grew too large for managers to oversee everything directly, companies replaced human judgment with formal rule-systems, as we see explained by Beniger's 'intellectual technology' (Beniger, 1986, pp. 17, 21). Algorithmic management continues this: a call once made by a supervisor's judgment is now a rule built into software that runs without one, extending a logic Beniger traces as far back as to Taylorism and the so called 'assembly line'. Winner (1980) asks whether such systems must concentrate power this way or were driven there, when other designs were equally possible; nothing required shutting workers out of the decision, so leaving them out was a political choice, and not necessarily a technical necessity. Barbrook and Cameron (1996) explain the reasoning why some can defend this 'domination': they show how 1990s tech culture sold new technologies as freedom even as it tightened control, so the rhetoric could become one of closer oversight as flexibility and autonomy. Together, authority accrues to employers, who in some systems can set and revise these oversight rules unilaterally and face less resistance because the arrangement is framed as freedom; workers bear the cost, losing the informal give-and-take they had with a human supervisor for oversight that is harder to see, question, or contest, while being told it grants them more freedom, not less.

Contingency and Alternatives

A plausible alternative happened on U.S. post WWII: in some workplaces, labor and its pacing was demanded to be set through collective bargaining and enforced jointly, by both management and union stewards monitoring compliance on the line (Breznitz et al., 2025, p. 211). So, in this context, workplace surveillance could have developed as a bargained, dual-administered practice rather than a management monopoly. The 1950 Reuther's Treaty of Detroit cut that possibility off: unions won guaranteed wages and benefits in exchange for surrendering any general claim over how work was supervised (Breznitz et al., 2025, pp. 210–211). Workers depended on wages to survive, and employers controlled the wage relationship. That asymmetry meant employers, given their position of power, were able to arrange things so that, at the very least, workers would have far less capacity to sustain a fight over control itself. Thus, the "trade" wasn't a fair exchange between equals. This reflects which side could afford to hold out on which issue. Hypothetically speaking, had that joint administration model prevailed instead, this could have greatly impacted norms internationally and good practices with worker-union agreed surveillance would have become a widely accepted standard practice.

Governance Implication

An interesting proposition for present-day governance that wants to fill a gap in workplace surveillance is what Kayas, Ong and Belal (2025) are proposing: They argue that EU law, through the GDPR and its required data protection impact assessments (DPIAs), already offers meaningful protection for workers in terms of lawful high-risk data collection and data processing. Nevertheless, these DPIAs are built around data and privacy, so they leave out several dimensions of monitoring itself: its purpose, how intrusive it is, how visible it is to the people being watched, and its effects on workers' autonomy, trust, and standing relative to management. These authors propose a "surveillance impact assessment" scoring a system against these characteristics directly, before any surveillance system is put in place. Although this mechanism "is constrained by its reliance on existing literature and the lack of empirical validation," it feels like a genuine alternative for two reasons: 1. it targets the actual mechanism at issue, and 2. at the same time it builds upon a mechanism of active participatory approach where employees have a direct say in how surveillance is designed (Kayas et al., 2025, p. 11), which, combined with the actual assessment, would put workers' own judgment at the centre of the one decision that affects them. It's important to note that this alternative is proposed as worth piloting, not as a proven fix, and it is fair to ask whether another mandatory assessment stacked on top of DPIAs would function as intended or simply read to workers as more compliance paperwork.

References

Barbrook, R., & Cameron, A. (1996). The Californian Ideology. Science as Culture, 6(1), 44–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505439609526455
Beniger, J. R. (1986). The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Harvard University Press. https://archive.org/details/beniger-james-the-control-revolution 
Breznitz, D., Levy, K., Lipartito, K., & Zehavi, A. (2025). An equity-focused research agenda for workplace surveillance. Industrial and Corporate Change, 35(1), 206–221. https://doi.org/10.1093/icc/dtaf038
Kayas, O. G., Ong, C. E., & Belal, H. M. (2025). From humans to algorithms: A sociotechnical framework of workplace surveillance. Digital Business, 5, 100120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.digbus.2025.100120
Ollier-Malaterre, A., Parent-Rocheleau, X., Benkrid, K., & Provost Savard, Y. (2026). Making Sense of Workplace Surveillance: How Workers and Union Representatives Experience, Imagine, and Resist Surveillance Exposure. Surveillance & Society, 24(3), 236–254. https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/19100/13263
Winner, L. (1980). Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus, 109(1), 121–136. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652