KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN

KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN FACULTY OF THEOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS STUDIES

FROM INDIVIDUAL PRIVACY TO SOCIAL

CONUNDRUM

AN ETHICAL EXPLORATION OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL

SURVEILLANCE IN THE ORGANIZATIONAL WORKPLACE

A dissertation presented in partial fulfilment

of the requirements for the

Doctor’s Degree (Ph.D.) in Theology (S.T.D)

Supervisor by

Prof. Dr. Johan VERSTRAETEN Jijo James INDIPARAMBIL

2018

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to express my deep and profound sentiments of appreciation and gratitude to all who

contributed to the completion of this dissertation in one way or another. Acknowledging the great

passage of God’s generous and benevolent disposition towards me, I thank and praise Him for

granting me what I need all throughout my life through His unending goodness and enduring love.

Above all others, I remember with grate gratitude Prof. Dr. Johan Verstraeten, my promoter, for

offering me insightful feedback and enthusiastic encouragement throughout this project that

ultimately made it something I truly feel proud of. His remarkable competence, unfailing scholarship,

academic precision, penetrating insight and prone critique, and warm hospitality have led me to walk

unambiguously through the maze of my academic life. My respected intellectual mentor’s scholarly

corrections have directed this dissertation to reach through a convoluted layout to its final form. His

meticulous guidance ranged from the topic selection to the revision of the outline to the final draft.

No words can convey how truly thankful I am for his intellectual guidance and for both academic

and fraternal mentorship.

I would like to record my sincere gratitude to the reading committee of my dissertation: Prof. Luc

Van Liedekerke, Prof. Domènec Melé and Prof. Johan De Tavernier for their in-depth patience to a

meticulous and systematic reading of the text, and for their valuable and insightful comments,

inspiration and questions which incented me to widen my research from various perspectives. I would

especially thank Prof. Johan Leemans, the vice dean for research of the Faculty of Theology and

Religious Studies and the chair of the reading committee and of the public defense of my dissertation.

I am also greatly indebted to all my Professors at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU

Leuven. My special thanks to Prof. Johan De Tavernier, the present Dean, the former Deans of the

Faculty, and present and former Vice-deans of Research, Prof. Thomas Knieps, the secretary for

research, for their support and guidance during my research at this Faculty. I recall with gratitude all

the library staff of the Faculties of Theology, Sociology and Economics and all our administrative

staff especially Mrs. Ingrid Wouters and Evelien Denecker for all their assistance and support. I also

express my sincere gratitude to the Faculty and its financial committee and all its contributors for the

financial support of my higher studies and research at KU Leuven. Thanks too to my academic

colleagues at the Faculty of Theology for their insightful discussions, constructive suggestion and

evaluations.

This dissertation is a product of various field-visits, surveys, empirical study and interviews. I would

like to express my profound gratitude to all individuals and institutions for playing a positive role for

this achievement. A special note of thanks is also due to Dr. Richard Kocher, Jonathan Sozek, Veenus

Joseph, Gijesh Thomas, Shinto George and Jaya Therese for their many forms of support and

technical assistance. A very special thanks is due to Sebeesh Jacob for portraying his amazing artistic

talent to design a very meaningful cover page to this dissertation.

With a grateful heart I remember and thank Prof. Gabriel Quicke, the president, the former presidents,

the staff, and the international student community at Holy Spirit College, Leuven, for their cordial

friendship and for our lively community life. More personally, I extend my thanks to several friends

and colleagues, priests and sisters and especially the Kerala priests’ community in the Holy Spirit

College for their companionship during my stay in Leuven.

Being a vowed member of the Congregation of the St. Therese of Child Jesus (CST), my sincere

gratitude goes also to my present and previous religious superiors for gifting me with the privilege

iv

Acknowledgements

to pursue my research at KU Leuven. Moreover, my thankfulness is due to Jojo Varakukalayil, Sain

Vadakkan, Gigy Purayidathil, Linto Kallukulangara, Renny Paruthikattil, and Manu Kaithaparambil,

my religious co-pilgrims during my stay in Leuven.

I am also specifically indebted to both my immediate and extended family. Though the graduate

process is largely incomprehensible to them, they remained supportive and very proud. I deeply

acknowledge the love and care of my parents, siblings and family members, whom I keep ever close

to my heart. And finally, last but by no means least, my sincere thanks also to everyone in the Kerala

community, Leuven, for being a hub of great sharing of acquaintance, cheerfulness and friendship

during last four years.

Years of learning enabled me to open my narrow-minded thinking, widen my limited academic

expertise, and leap daringly into a future there out, unknown and undiscovered. Thanks to KU

Leuven…!

Jijo James Indiparambil KU Leuven, December 2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... III

TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................................ V

ABBREVIATIONS ........................................................................................................................ XI

BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................................... XV

GENERAL INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................... 1

CHAPTER ONE

TECHNOLOGY REVISITED: TOWARDS REPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES OF

SURVEILLANCE

1.0 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 11

1.1 Technology and Surveillance: Present Landscape ............................................................ 11

1.1.1 Technology, Workplace and Surveillance: A Conceptual Analysis ............................... 12

1.1.2 Surveillance as Part of Organizational Behaviour .......................................................... 16

1.1.3 Traditional versus Contemporary Electronic (& Cyber) Surveillance ............................ 18

1.1.4 Workplace Surveillance Acts and Other Federal, Constitutional Policies ...................... 20

1.2 Electronic Surveillance Frameworks ................................................................................. 26

1.2.1 The Metaphor of the Panopticon: Structured, Controlled Mechanism ............................ 27

1.2 2 Agency Theory: Process of Hierarchical Regimentation ................................................ 28

1.2.3 Procedural Justice (Fairness) Theory: Principles of Just Bustle ..................................... 30

1.2.4 Information Boundary Theory: Enhancing Central Contour........................................... 31

1.2.5 Structural-Perceptual Model: An Integrated Regime? .................................................... 33

1.3 The Gadgets of “New” Workplace Surveillance ............................................................... 33

1.3.1 Proximity of Access Panels and Audio-Visual Surveillance .......................................... 34

1.3.2 i-Spy: Emergence of Epoch-Making Digitalized Surveillance ........................................ 35

1.3.3 Location-Based Services: From ‘on-the-job’ to ‘off-the-job’ Surveillance..................... 38

1.4 Reasons and Logical Measures Behind the Workplace Surveillance .............................. 39

1.4.1 Promoting Measures: General Causative Factors of Surveillance .................................. 40

1.4.2 Proliferating Measures: Coercive Control and Caring .................................................... 41

1.4.3 Prophylactic Measures: Productivity, Security, and Liability Alleviation ...................... 43

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1.5 The Aftermath: Pros-Cons Polemics Of Workplace Surveillance ................................... 45

1.5.1 The Expected Benefits of Surveillance ........................................................................... 45

1.5.2 The Clustering of Invisible Consequences ...................................................................... 48

1.6 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 52

CHAPTER TWO

INDIAN PROSPECTS FOR SOCIO-ECONOMIC ADVANCEMENT AND THE PLACE

OF EMPLOYEE SURVEILLANCE

2.0 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 55

2.1 Work-Culture and Economic Sectors in India Today ...................................................... 55

2.1.1 The Traditional and the Current Organizational Work Culture in India ......................... 56

2.1.2 Indian Labour Laws and Rights ...................................................................................... 62

2.1.3 IT Industry and Services: The Alteration of Indian Economic Sectors ........................... 64

2.1.4 The IT Workforce as Vanguard of a New Indian Working Class ................................... 69

2.2 Labour (Employment) Trends and Challenges in Globalized IT-India .......................... 73

2.3 Employee Surveillance as a Modern Workplace Challenge in India .............................. 77

2.3.1 Indian Circumstantial Rationale behind the Workplace Surveillance ............................. 78

2.3.2 India’s Legal Frameworks Governing the Workplace Surveillance ............................... 81

2.3.3 Employee Concerns: Power Control and Workplace Bullying ....................................... 83

2.3.4 A Case Study Analysis: The Indian Call Center (BPO) Industry .................................... 85

2.4 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 90

CHAPTER THREE

WORKPLACE SURVEILLANCE AND PRIVACY: AN INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS

PERSPECTIVE

3.0 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 93

3.1 Conceptual Reading and Developments of Privacy .......................................................... 93

3.1.1 Legalistic, Individualistic and Pluralistic Perspectives on Privacy ................................. 96

3.1.2 Critiques of Privacy Arguments .................................................................................... 102

3.1.3 Pro-Privacy Prospects and Positions ............................................................................. 106

3.2 Workplace Surveillance and Privacy Issues: Indian Scenario ....................................... 111

3.2.1 Impacts of Snooping Eye in Indian Call Centres .......................................................... 112

3.2.2 Data Security, Personal Space, Data Mining and Identity Theft ................................... 114

3.2.3 Workplace (Cyber) Bullying and Victimization ........................................................... 118

3.3 Exploring the Taxonomy of Workplace (Informational) Privacy .................................. 120

3.3.1 Information Collection and Privacy .............................................................................. 121

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vii

3.3.2 Information Processing and Privacy.............................................................................. 122

3.3.3 Information Dissemination and the Invasion of Privacy ............................................... 123

3.3.4 The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Data Privacy ............................ 125

3.3.5 Recommendations for a Leading Data Privacy ............................................................. 129

3.4 Workplace Surveillance and Individual Rights Perspective .......................................... 133

3.4.1 Privacy as a Fundamental Moral Right in the Workplace ............................................. 134

3.4.2 Privacy as the Right to Control Access to one’s Personal Affairs ................................ 140

3.4.3 Privacy as Prima Facie Right in the Workplace ........................................................... 143

3.5 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 145

CHAPTER FOUR

POWER DISTANCE AND ‘SOCIAL SORTING’: EFFECTS OF SURVEILLANCE

BEYOND PRIVACY

4.0 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 147

4.1 Social Sorting: A New Mechanism Beyond Privacy ........................................................ 148

4.1.1 Regrettable Reductionism: Human Beings as “Coded” Data Subjects ......................... 150

4.1.2 Searchable Databases and Digital Redlining ................................................................. 152

4.1.3 The Regime of Regulating Mobilities and Virtual Existence ....................................... 153

4.2 Workplace Surveillance and Employee Sorting .............................................................. 155

4.2.1 Statistical Surveillance and Discrimination .................................................................. 156

4.2.2 From Embodied Persons to Disembodied Information ................................................. 158

4.2.3 Surveillance Creep and “At Risk” Categorization ........................................................ 159

4.2.4 Electronic Mediation and Face/Facelessness ................................................................ 161

4.2.5 Gender-Based Discrimination (the Male Gaze) ............................................................ 162

4.3 Surveillance, Organizational Life and Power Culture .................................................... 164

4.3.1 Surveillance Portrays Power Control ............................................................................ 166

4.3.2 Beyond the Normalizing Effect: Discipline and Control after Foucault ....................... 168

4.3.3 Technology Mediated Power Control and Disempowering Experience ....................... 170

4.4 Behavioural Effects Of Employee Sorting And Control ................................................. 173

4.4.1 Unsettled Stress, Emerging Distrust and Deviances ..................................................... 175

4.4.2 The Loss of Self-Determination and Self-Identity ........................................................ 179

4.4.3 Effects on Social Process: The Curtailment of Extra-Role Behaviours ........................ 180

4.5 A Digitalized Caste System and Employee Colonizing: The Indian Scenario .............. 182

4.5.1 A New Caste Structure through Digital Colonizing ...................................................... 183

4.5.2 Behavioural Deviances in Work-Life Attitudes and Practices ...................................... 185

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4.5.3 Surveillance, Occupational Violence and Anti-Social Behaviours ............................... 189

4.6 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 191

CHAPTER FIVE

A QUALITATIVE INSPECTION OF EMPLOYEE SURVEILLANCE IN INDIA

5.0 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 193

5.1 Research Methodology ....................................................................................................... 194

5.2 Sample Collection ............................................................................................................... 196

5.3 Result Section (Data Analysis) .......................................................................................... 199

5.3.1 Result Analysis - Sample A ........................................................................................... 199

5.3.2 Result Analysis - Sample B ........................................................................................... 206

5.4 Discussion of the Results [Samples A & B] ...................................................................... 210

5.4.1 The Scope of the Phenomenographic Approach ........................................................... 211

5.4.2 Against the Performance, Productivity, and Security Claims ....................................... 212

5.4.3 In Defence of Privacy, Impartial Treatment and Dignity .............................................. 215

5.4.4 Other Major Employee Concerns .................................................................................. 217

5.5 Electronic Surveillance: A Poor Solution To Workplace Concerns .............................. 220

5.6 Limitations of the Study..................................................................................................... 222

5.7 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 223

CHAPTER SIX

AN ETHICAL RETHINKING OF WORKPLACE SURVEILLANCE AND MANAGERIAL

BEHAVIOUR

6.0 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 225

6.1 A New Beneficiary View of Workplace and Surveillance Ethics ................................... 225

6.1.1 Defining Workplace Ethics and Workplace Surveillance Ethics .................................. 227

6.1.2 Beyond the Limits of Managerial Rationality ............................................................... 230

6.1.3 Corporate Codes of Ethics for Workplace Behaviour, and Beyond .............................. 233

6.1.4 The Integration of Ethical Theories as Prerequisite for Moral Assessment .................. 235

6.2 Classical Approaches of Ethical Reasoning and Their Relevance for Workplace

Surveillance ............................................................................................................................... 237

6.2.1 A Tripartite (Eclectic) Reading of Workplace Surveillance ......................................... 241

6.2.2 Ethics of Rights, Power and Social Justice ................................................................... 249

6.2.3 The Irreducibility of the Person and the Ethics of Big Data and the Body-Subject ...... 254

6.3 An Amalgamation of an Embedded Religious-Ethical Framework .............................. 260

6.3.1 The Hindu View of Moral Standards in Management Ethics ....................................... 263

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6.3.2 Ethical Tenets of Other Major Religions ...................................................................... 268

6.3.3 Catholic Social Thought and the Call for a New Managerial Ethics............................. 273

6.3.4 Christian Personalism and Meaningful Employment Practices .................................... 278

6.4 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 283

CHAPTER SEVEN

LABOURER VALUED MANAGEMENT AND SELF-MONITORING: A PERSON-

CENTERED MANAGERIAL PARADIGM FOR THE WORKPLACE

7.0 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 287

7.1 Historical and Contemporary Management Theories and Models ............................... 288

7.1.1 Evolving Theories of and Approaches to Management ................................................ 288

7.1.2 Recent Developments in Management Approaches ...................................................... 291

7.1.3 The Sociotechnical and Personalist Expanse of Management ...................................... 293

7.1.4 Purposeful Organization and Sustainable Human Resource Management ................... 296

7.2 Labourer Valued Management (LVM): An Integrative Ethical Alternative ............... 300

7.2.1 LVM: Echoing Employees’ Dignity, Rights and Justice .............................................. 300

7.2.2 Corporate Citizenship and Transactional, Participatory, and Recognition Ethics ........ 306

7.2.3 Organizational Identification and Organizational Justice ............................................. 309

7.2.4 LVM and Rehumanizing Workplace ............................................................................ 311

7.3 Self-Monitoring [Self-Regulation] as a Human Development Alternative ................... 314

7.3.1 Authentic Self-Direction, Creating Capabilities and Self-Monitoring .......................... 321

7.3.2 The Symmetry of Trust and the Transparency for Self-Monitoring ............................. 325

7.3.3 The Notion of Just-Care and Self-Monitoring .............................................................. 329

7.3.4 Personal, Corporate and Social Integrity and Self-Monitoring ..................................... 332

7.4 Domènec Melé and a Harmonizing Personalist Management Review .......................... 336

7.4.1 Integrating Personalist and Common Good Principles ................................................. 337

7.4.2 The Organization as a Community of Persons .............................................................. 339

7.4.3 Humanizing/Rehumanizing the Culture in Organizations ............................................ 343

7.4.4 Human Quality Treatment (HQT) in the Workplace: A Personalist Review ................ 346

7.5 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 349

GENERAL CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................ 351

ABBREVIATIONS

ACD Automatic Call Dialing System

AHT Average Handling Time

AMA American Management Association

ANPP Australian Net Primary Productivity

APEC Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation

BCE Before Common Era

BPO Business Process Outsourcing

BSM Behavioural Self-Monitoring

CA Centesimus Annus

CCTNS Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System

CCTV Closed-Circuit Television

CERT-In Indian Computer Emergency Response Team

CFAA Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

CH Catholic Humanism

CMS Central Monitoring System

CNIL La Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés

CSDC Compendium of the Social doctrine of the Church

CST Catholic Social Teaching

CiV Caritas in Veritate

DCE Deus Caritas Est

DPA Data Protection Act

ECHR European Convention on Human Rights

ECHR European Court of Human Rights

xii

Abbreviations

ECPA Electronic Communications Privacy Act

EG Evangelii Gaudium

EPZs Export Processing Zones

EU European Union

EUDPD EU Data Protection Directives

FDI Foreign Direct Investment

FEPA Federal Employee Polygraph Protection Act

FTC Federal Trade Commission

GDPR General Data Protection Regulation

GIS Geographic Information Systems

GPS Global Positioning System

HRM Human Resource Management

HQT Human Quality Treatment

HRA Human Rights Acts

IBT Information Boundary Theory

ICCPR International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

ICTs Information and Communication Technologies

ILO International Labour Organization

IT Information Technology

ITA Information and Technology Act

ITES Information Technology Enabled Service

JIT Just-In-Time

KPO Knowledge Processing Outsourcing

LBS Location-Based Services

Abbreviations

xiii

LE Laborem Exercens

LPT Labour Process Theory

LS Laudato Si

LVM Labourer Valued Management

MICs Major Indian Companies

MM Mater et Magistra

MNCs Multinational Companies

NCTC National Counter Terrorism Center

NIG National Intelligence Grid

NLRA National Labour Relations Act

NSSO National Sample Survey Office

OB Organizational Behaviour

OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

PC Personal Computer

PDPB Personal Data Protection Bill

PETs Privacy-Enhancing Technologies

PIPEDA Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act

PP Populorum Progressio

QWL Quality of Working Life

RFID Radio Frequency Identification

RN Rerum Novarum

SC Sacramentum Caritatis

SEZ Special Economic Zones

SIP Social Information Processing

xiv

Abbreviations

SMEs Small/Medium Enterprises

SOEs State-Owned Enterprises

SOHO Small Offices and Home Offices

SPM Structural-Perceptual Model

TQM Total Quality Management

TUs Trade Unions

UDHR Universal Declaration of Human Rights

UID Unique Identification

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Ours is a nosy era, in which each day comes to force more intrusions – by government,

corporations, ex-lovers, busybodies, news reporters, or worrisome strangers – encroaching

on our sense of serenity and solitude.1

STATE OF THE ART

Today, information technologies and computer-mediated communications are rapidly conquering the

world with their accelerated and fast-tracked networks. The life prospects of human beings are being

bolstered in many directions by means of these technological advancements and their wide

application in all areas of daily affairs. The information explosion also generates multifaceted

questions regarding access to information, freedom of expression, right to privacy, intellectual

property rights, and matters of cultural diversity, among many others.2 Such extensive use of

Information Technology (IT) devices in the organizational workplace3 paves the way for multiple

forms of surveillance both on an individual and social level,4 with both desirable and undesirable

consequences. This evolution is in tension with another fact: the workplace is today a major locus of

human life, where many possibilities for human interaction and growth are generated and endorsed.

When the workplace itself becomes a centre of information technology,5 the evaluation of

surveillance systems and technologies and their appropriate role beomce especially significant. The

term surveillance, today, once reserved for activities of the police and intelligence community, now

seems as a customary and even unavoidable feature of daily reality.

For many of us are surveilled all day, every day, as we walk beneath street cameras, swipe cards and

surf the internet.6 According to David Lyon, for those being surveilled or watched in the

surveilling/watching process, this watching itself becomes a way of life.7 For instance, Lyon takes it

as a truism that “surveillance is an everyday fact of life that we not only encounter from outside, as

it were, but also in which we engage, from within, in many contexts.”8 In the same way, several

agencies are using increasingly sophisticated computer systems – especially searchable databases –

1 David Brin, The Transparent society: Will Technology Force us to Choose between Privacy and Freedom?

(Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 1998), 54. 2 Michael J. Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age, 5th ed. (Boston, MA: Pearson, 2012), 2-4. 3 In this research, the notion of organizational workplace focuses generally on the IT, ITeS workplaces along

with BPOs and call centres, where the unwarranted monitoring and tracking systems are implemented

thinking of safety and security and where the possible and actual data manipulation and power control are

excessively experienced. 4 John Weckert, Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions (Hershey: Idea Group,

2005), vi-xi. 5 Scott C. D’Urso, “Who’s Watching Us at Work? Toward a Structural-Perceptual Model of Electronic

Monitoring and Surveillance in Organizations,” Communication Theory 16 (2006): 282; Carl Botan,

“Communication Work and Electronic Surveillance: A Model for Predicting Panoptic Effects,”

Communication Monographs 63 (1996): 293-313. 6 David Lyon, ed., Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital Discrimination (London:

Routledge, 2003), 1-8. 7 David Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 2.

Lyon observes that surveillance culture takes shape when ordinary people contribute to surveillance by their

own participation in different ways, such as using websites, etc. and he calls turning of this phenomenon as

the culture of surveillance. 8 Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life, 4. People welcome it as a means to security,

convenience, enjoyable possibility of modern devices, etc. and engage oneself through social media and othe

website activities and contribute to socio-cultural transformation. This surveillance culture, he states, “is

multifaceted, complicated, fluid and rather unpredictable.” Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as

a Way of Life, 10.

General Introduction

2

to keep tabs on us at home, work and play. A digital big brother is at work. Developments in

information technology have made it easier for employers to engage in surveillance of employees in

the workplace. The Internet-of-Things (IoT), for example, has made it possible to monitor both the

location of employees and their physical activities.9 In this milieu, management failure to oversee its

workforce is regarded as a failure in its mandate.10 Academic research11 and management surveys12

have established that electronic surveillance and employee monitoring are increasing every year, and

the past two decades in particular have seen rapid and alarming growth in this area. For instance,

today “the advent of an almost ubiquitous network records, browser history retention, phone apps,

electronic sensors, wearable fitness trackers, thermal sensors, and facial recognition systems”13

increase the capacity for surveillance of workers. Researchers have approached the issue of

workplace or employee surveillance in a variety of ways, showing that organizations and surveillance

go hand in hand and that surveillance occurs in both social and technological forms.14

Today it is possible to assess and monitor employees as never before, and this brings with it a promise

of fundamental changes in how work is done. Inexpensive and user-friendly devices and methods

are used in the workplace to control, monitor, and process information about employees and expose

it to the public. Forms of technology used include “video and audio surveillance, heat, light, motion,

sound and olfactory sensors, night vision goggles, electronic tagging, biometric access devices, drug

testing, DNA analysis, computer monitoring including email and web usage and the use of computer

9 Gundars Kaupins and Malcolm Coco, “Perceptions of Internet-of-Things Surveillance by Human Resource

Managers,” S.A.M. Advanced Management Journal 82, no. 1 (2017): 53-61, 68. The IoT related monitoring

devices will be illustrated in the fist chapter. 10 John Kimani Gichuhi, James Mark Ngari and Thomas Senaji, “Employees’ Response to Electronic

Monitoring: The Relationship between CCTV Surveillance and Employees’ Engagement,” International

Journal of Innovative Research & Development 5, no. 7 (2016): 141. 11 Ifeoma Ajunwa, Kate Crawford, and Jason Schultz, “Limitless Worker Surveillance,” California Law Review

105 (2017): Lisa Guerin, Smart Policies for Workplace Technologies: Email, Social Media, Cell Phones &

More, 5th ed. (Berkeley, CA: Nolo, 2017), 17, 48-55; 735-776; Rebecca M. Chory, Lori E. Vela and Theodore

A. Avtgis, “Organizational Surveillance of Computer-Mediated Workplace Communication: Employee

Privacy Concerns and Responses,” Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal 28, no. 1 (2016): 23-43;

Shuchih Ernest Chang, Anne Yenching Liu and Sungmin Lin, “Exploring Privacy and Trust for Employee

Monitoring,” Industrial Management & Data Systems 115, no. 1 (2015): 88-106; Peter Jeffrey Holland, Brian

Cooper and Rob Hecker, “Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in the Workplace: The Effects on Trust in

Management, and the Moderating Role of Occupational Type,” Personnel Review 44, no. 1 (2015):161-175;

Donald E. Sanders, John K. Ross and Patricia Pattison, “Electronic Snoops, Spies, and Supervisory

Surveillance in the Workplace,” Southern Law Journal 23 (2013): 1-27; Kirstie Ball, “Workplace

Surveillance: An Overview,” Labour History 51, no. 1 (2010): 87-106; G. Stoney Alder, Marshall Schminke,

Terry W. Noel and Maribeth Kuenzi, “Employee Reactions to Internet Monitoring: The Moderating Role of

Ethical Orientation,” Journal of Business Ethics 80, no. 3 (2008): 481-498. 12 Australian Electronic Workplace Survey 2012 (Peter Jeffrey Holland, Brian Cooper and Rob Hecker,

“Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in the Workplace: The Effects on Trust in Management, and the

Moderating Role of Occupational Type,” Personnel Review 44, no. 1 (2015):161-175.); Electronic

Monitoring and Surveillance Survey done by the American Management Association (AMA) and The ePolicy

Institute each year between 2001 and 2009 (2009 Electronic Business Communication Policies & Procedures

Survey, http://www.epolicyinstitute.com/2009-electronic-business-communication-policies-procedures-

survey-results; 2007 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey, http://www.epolicyinstitute.com/2007-

survey-results; 2006 Workplace E-mail, Instant Messaging & Blog Survey,

http://www.epolicyinstitute.com/2006-workplace-e-mail-instant-messaging-blog-survey; 2005 Electronic

Monitoring & Surveillance Survey http://www.epolicyinstitute.com/2005-electronic-monitoring-

surveillance-survey-results; 2004 Workplace E-Mail and Instant Messaging Survey Summary,

http://www.epolicyinstitute.com/2004-workplace-e-mail-and-instant-messaging-survey-summary; and 2001

AMA, US News, ePolicy Institute Survey, http://www.epolicyinstitute.com/docs/ePolicyInstitute-AMA-

2001Survey-SummaryFinal.pdf [accessed October 20, 2015]). 13 Ajunwa, Crawford, and Schultz, “Limitless Worker Surveillance,” 743. 14 Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” 87-106.


3

techniques such as expert systems, matching and profiling, data mining, mapping, network analysis

and simulation.”15 David Wright et al. write that a “surveillance society is one in which the use of

surveillance technologies has become virtually ubiquitous and in which such use has become widely

(but not uniformly) accepted by the public as endemic and justified by its proponents as necessary

for economic, security, or other [such] reasons.”16 Also today, employee monitoring is a familiar

reality.17 Organizations use a variety of technologies and methods both to achieve increased

productivity, performance and profitability on the one hand, and to monitor how employees are

engaged in the workplace on the other. This is generally seen as a means of pursuing their

commitment to the organization’s goals and values.18

However, few studies have suggested a positive correlation between surveillance (CCTV monitoring,

etc.) and employees’ engagement.19 Through strict monitoring, it is generally held that employers

are fulfilling their obligation to prevent the disclosure of the company’s trade and other secrets

(protecting corporate resources) and maintain its good reputation (protecting the organization’s

intellectual property assets from technological and cyber-espionage). Many hold that this generally

couples with ensuring employees’ responsible execution of roles on company activities.20 Through

surveillance and employee monitoring, organizations thus try to harmonize and coordinate employee

behaviours by controlling and directing them towards individual and organizational goal

achievement.21 Some researchers tend to view digital surveillance as an acceptable means of

promoting both employee discipline and efficiency, regarding it as a ‘good watchdog’ in the

organization and unbiased method of performance evaluation.22 Attention is given here to employee

performance, as well as to the implementation and use of ICTs within the means of an organization.

15 Gary T. Marx, “What’s New about the ‘New Surveillance’? Classifying for Change and Continuity,” in The

Surveillance Studies Reader, eds. Sean P. Hier and Josh Greenberg, 83-94 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007),

83-84. 16 David Wright et al., “Questioning Surveillance,” Computer Law & Security Review 31 (2015): 281. We

admit here that job relevance of few professions (e.g., defence sector) necessitates some form of surveillance. 17 Though there is a conceptual difference between the terms monitoring (“generic and applicable to all

automated collecting of information regardless of purpose”) and surveillance (“refers to a relationship

between some authority and those whose behaviour it wishes to control”), and the former is generally

considered as a precondition for the later, both these terms are interchangeably used in this research. Carl

Botan and Mihaela Vorvoreanu, “What Do Employees Think about Electronic Surveillance at Work?” in

Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions, ed. John Weckert, 123-144 (Hershey:

Idea Group Publishing, 2005): 125. Cf. Simon Rogersson and Mary Prior, “New Monitoring and Surveillance

Technology,” in The Ethics of Workplace Privacy, eds. Sven Ove Hansson and Elin Palm, 57-72 (Brussels:

P.I.E. Lang Publisher, 2005), 57-58. Many other researchers of workplace surveillance also use these terms

interchangeably and as synonyms. For instance, Jonathan P. West and James S. Bowman, “Electronic

Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” Administration & Society 48, no. 5 (2016): 628-651; Sam

Sarpong and Donna Rees, “Assessing the Effects of “Big Brother” in a Workplace: The Case of WAST,”

European Management Journal 32 (2014): 216; Kirstie Ball, “Workplace surveillance: An overview,”

Labour History 51, no. 1 (2010): 87-106. 18 Jonathan P. West and James S. Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,”

Administration & Society 48, no. 5 (2016): 630. 19 Gichuhi, Ngari and Senaji, “Employees’ Response to Electronic Monitoring,” 141-150. 20 Martin S. Bressler and Linda Bressler, “Protecting Your Company's Intellectual Property Assets from

CyberEspionage,” Journal of Legal, Ethical and Regulatory Issues 17, no. 2 (2014): 1; Marc J. Epstein and

Adriana R. Buhovac, Making Sustainability Work: Best Practices in Managing and Measuring Corporate

Social, Environmental, and Economic Impacts, 2 ed. (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2014), 126-

131; Gichuhi, Ngari and Senaji, “Employees’ Response to Electronic Monitoring,” 141. 21 Gichuhi, Ngari and Senaji, “Employees’ Response to Electronic Monitoring,” 142. 22 Alex Rosenblat, Tamara Kneese, and Danah Boyd, “Workplace Surveillance,” Data & Society Working

Paper, prepared for: Future of Work Project supported by Open Society Foundations, Data &Society

Research Institute, 2014. http://www.datasociety.net/pubs/fow/WorkplaceSurveillance.pdf [accessed

October 15, 2015]; Ajunwa, Ifeoma, Kate Crawford, and Jason Schultz. “Limitless Worker Surveillance.”

California Law Review 105 (2017): 735-776.


4

Surveillance in the workplace is often viewed as a management strategy and used to control and

manage employees.23 Why is this issue so alarming today? The reason is the impact it has both on

individuals (privacy, ethics and human rights) and society (power, social exclusion, etc.), which has

not yet been sufficiently studied researchers.

Although these advantages are vital and supportive to organizations, the disadvantages of employee

surveillance may outweigh them. There are as many concerns and debates over employee privacy as

over security in organizations.24 The controlling factor of workplace surveillance outweighs its

counterpart, namely, the protective needs of organizations.25 It introduces negative feelings among

employees, affecting their well-being by creating discomfort, frustration and a sense of

vulnerability.26 Organizations often use technology to control and micromanage their employees,

whittling away their rights. Researchers have cast doubt on whether surveillance is implemented

fairly (according to reasonable standards) with regard to its relations and nearness to work scenarios

and how it affects the quality of work life.27 The impact of information gathering on employees

depends largely on how it is collected, processed and used, who has access to it, and how it is

communicated to a third party.28 In this regard, continual surveillance is said to be a dehumanizing

process.29 This shows that the effects of surveillance may not fit with the goals of an institution.30

Such surveillance is often met with resistance from employees, as it raises concerns about employees’

rights, due process, fairness, etc.31 A tangible effect of this scenario is withdrawal behaviour on the

part of the employees.

The irony of electronic surveillance, as researchers have observed, is that it is so frequently used and

so little understood.32 Supporters of surveillance often focus intensively and exclusively on its

potential benefits, whereas critics principally highlight potential abuses of the process and techniques

23 Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” 87-89. Marx, “What’s New about the ‘New Surveillance’?

Classifying for Change and Continuity,” 84. 24 Vidushi Jaswal, “Psychological Effects of Workplace Surveillance on Employees, and the Legal Protection:

An Analysis,” Bharati Law Review (Jan.- March 2017): 60-61; Saby Ghoshray, “Employer Surveillance

Versus Employee Privacy: The New Reality of Social Media and Workplace Privacy,” Northern Kentucky

Law Review 40 (2013): 593-626. 25 Marko Pitesa, “Employee Surveillance and the Modern Workplaces,” Research Collection Lee Kong Chian

School of Business, Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University (2012), 2. 26 Jaswal, “Psychological Effects of Workplace Surveillance on Employees, and the Legal Protection,” 59-69. 27 Johnathan Yerby, “Legal and Ethical Issues of Employee Monitoring,” Online Journal of Applied Knowledge

Management 1, no. 2 (2013): 44-55. 28 France Bélanger and Robrt E. Crossler, “Privacy in the Digital Age: A Review of Information Privacy

Research in Information Systems,” MIS Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2011): 1017-1041; Vidushi Jaswal,

“Psychological Effects of Workplace Surveillance on Employees, and the Legal Protection: An Analysis,”

Bharati Law Review (Jan.- March 2017): 59-69; Shuchih Ernest Chang, Anne Yenching Liu and Sungmin

Lin, “Exploring Privacy and Trust for Employee Monitoring,” Industrial Management & Data Systems 115,

no. 1 (2015): 88-106; Peter Jeffrey Holland, Brian Cooper and Rob Hecker, “Electronic Monitoring and

Surveillance in the Workplace: The Effects on Trust in Management, and the Moderating Role of

Occupational Type,” Personnel Review 44, no. 1 (2015):161-175. 29 Jaswal, “Psychological Effects of Workplace Surveillance on Employees, and the Legal Protection,” 64. 30 Alex Rosenblat, Tamara Kneese, and Danah Boyd, "Workplace Surveillance,” Data & Society Working



October 15, 2018]; David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2008), 86. 31 Chory, Vela and. Avtgis, “Organizational Surveillance of Computer-Mediated Workplace Communication,”

23-43. 32 Michaela Vorvoreanu and Carl Botan, “Examining Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace: A Review of

Theoretical Perspectives and Research Findings,” Paper presented at the Annual International

Communication Association Conference, Acapulco, Mexico, 2000, 4.


5

used for surveillance.33 It is therefore equally and critically important to balance a legitimate need to

safeguard organizational interests with the genuine human concerns of employees. For the issue is

often a matter of conflicting rights and interests: employers have a legitimate interest in increased

productivity, efficiency and profit, direct and vicarious liability alleviation, protection against theft

and fraud, etc. while employees have their own interests and rights to privacy, dignity, autonomous

social status and justice, and self-actualization.34 Moreover, though general surveillance and

attendant privacy issues are often the subject of debate, specifically electronic surveillance in the

organizational workplace is less often debated or researched, due mostly to the great dissensus

between employer and employee perspectives. For this reason, a comprehensive picture has not yet

been adequately mapped in the discussion. Because of this narrow-minded focus, surveillance in the

workplace is seldom interpreted or framed as an ethical issue and the human effects of technological

applications are often overlooked. Administering surveillance technology with ethical analysis,

therefore, is much needed today, given that it involves, in a workplace context, an incessant and

organized collection of personal data that has a significant effect on employees’ personal data.

The dilemma is therefore manifold: First, scholarly studies undertaken on this issue from a

principally administrative and legal point of view tend to lack a moral framework and thus prove

unable to offer an integral understanding of the issues at stake. One organizational or managerial

decision framework for using surveillance technologies in the workplace focuses both on “user

experience, the data collected, business applications, technology effectiveness, security, and legal

standards”35 as well as on “operational intelligence, business rules, social collaboration, and

employee/equipment workflow”36. None of these focus entirely or even partly on the ethics of

surveillance and employee monitoring. Second, many scholars tend to focus exclusively on

individual rights, such as privacy,37 even at the risk of overlooking the social impact and

consequences of these rights and their exercise. Third, the ability of surveillance to become

embedded in work scenarios is ignored rarely scrutinized. Fourth, seeing workplace surveillance as

management strategy leads one to identify only a contractual basis and justification for this practice

and to forget the all-encompassing, instantaneous and persistent nature of surveillance in this

computer age. Fifth, the clutches of technological determinism may disregard the need to value

33 G. Stoney Alder, “Ethical Issues in Electronic Performance Monitoring: A Consideration of Deontological

and Teleological Perspectives,” Journal of Business Ethics 17 (1998): 729-743. 34 Jonathan P. West, and James S. Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,”

Administration & Society 48, no. 5 (2016): 628-651; Mahmoud Moussa, “Monitoring Employee Behaviour

Through the Use of Technology and Issues of Employee Privacy in America,” SAGE Open (April-June 2015):

1-15; Kirstie Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” Labour History 51, no. 1 (2010): 87-106; Myria

Watkins Allen et al., “Workplace Surveillance and Managing Privacy Boundaries,” Management

Communication Quarterly 21, no. 2 (2007): 172-200. 35 Kaupins and Coco, “Perceptions of Internet-of-Things Surveillance by Human Resource Managers,” 54. 36 Kaupins and Coco, “Perceptions of Internet-of-Things Surveillance by Human Resource Managers,” 54. 37 Gianclaudio Malgieri and Bart Custers, “Pricing Privacy – The Right to Know the Value of Your Personal

Data,” Computer Law & Security Review 34 (2018): 289-303; Ajunwa, Crawford, and Schultz, “Limitless

Worker Surveillance,” 735-776; Chory, Rebecca M., Lori E. Vela and Theodore A. Avtgis. “Organizational

Surveillance of Computer-Mediated Workplace Communication: Employee Privacy Concerns and

Responses.” Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal 28, no. 1 (2016): 23-43; Chang, Liu and Lin,

“Exploring Privacy and Trust for Employee Monitoring,” 88-106; Saby Ghoshray, “Employer Surveillance

Versus Employee Privacy: The New Reality of Social Media and Workplace Privacy,” Northern Kentucky

Law Review 40 (2013): 593-626; Daniel J. Solove, Understanding Privacy (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 2009), 1; Daniel J. Solove, “Taxonomy of Privacy,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 154

(2006): 477-564; Philip Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” in The Ethics of Workplace Privacy,

eds. Sven Ove Hasson and Elin Palm (Brussels: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2005), 97-118.


6

employees’ intrinsic worth and pursue a person-centered approach that challenges a strictly

managerial rationality.

This is a non-exhaustive list. Further challenges and responses will be addressed in the progress of

this research. Through this research, in our effort to bild a case for the ethical reform of electronic

surveillance practices, we assume that the absence of integrated socio-ethical principles (rights,

justice and virtues) and practices amounts to a moral vacuum within the workplace. This in turn will

be seen to confirm that employees, with their intrinsic worth and dignity as human persons, should

respected and valued over technologies and the demands of a strictly managerial rationality. The

perception that workplace surveillance is normal and reasonable is hard to challenge. This is so in

part because broader debates around related issues – of information use, rights, power and social

structure, etc. – often suggest that workplace surveillance can violate individual rights, perpetuate

existing inequalities in the workplace, and create new ones.38 This type of evaluation demands a

reasonable, transparent, accountable and proportional workplace management process and model.

Thus, a cross-disciplinary standpoint that includes sociological, psychological, ethical perspectives

is required to develop a new research problematic.

WORKING HYPOTHESIS AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

The working hypothesis of this research is based on the idea that electronic monitoring, though newer

in origin, is more invasive than traditional forms of direct personal supervision in the workplace.

Although general surveillance and subsequent privacy issues are the subject of constant debate, this

research starts from the premise that the use of ICTs within a society (socially, organizationally, and

individually) can create, perpetuate or exacerbate morally undesirable inequalities and have morally

significant effects in areas related to information, societal participation and economics.39 To frame

the hypothesis further: beyond individual constraints such as a person’s right to privacy,

organizational electronic surveillance raises many social concerns, such as social sorting, that often

overshadow its anticipated benefits. Besides, one must consider the relative proficiencies of

employers and employees to manage and ethically explicate electronic monitoring (e-surveillance)

in the workplace, with special attention to actual socio-cultural scenarios and particular business

contexts experienced regionally and globally.

In this context, we formulate the principal research question of this study:

(1) Does the use of electronic surveillance in the organizational workplace, which seems to be

a ‘normal phenomenon’ in today’s multifaceted technological era, ethically endanger

employees’ individual and social rights and interests, in the context of a current socio-economic

and employee management paradigm?

In connection with this key research question, we will address several sub-questions to contextualize

the research:

38 Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” 87-106. 39 Emma Rooksby and John Weckert, “Digital Divides: Their Social and Ethical Implications,” in Social,

Ethical and Policy Implications of Information Technology, eds. Linda L. Brennan and Victoria E. Johnson,

29-47 (Hershey: Information Science Publishing, 2004), 37.


7

(2) Do the characteristics of surveillance practices affect the lives and identities of

organizational workers in India, in particular, by reconfiguring the nature and ethical canvas of

Indian society and its business work-culture? 40

(3) Does David Lyon’s41 analysis of surveillance as ‘social sorting’ contribute to a more

adequate socio-ethical assessment of electronic surveillance in the workplace?

(4) What management strategy could integrate moral principles and norms, and thus provide

an ethical alternative to electronic surveillance in the workplace?

(5) How relevant are various religious teachings, especially a Catholic ethic of work and

concern for human dignity (a person-centered view) and the subjective dimension of work, in

relation to organizational surveillance?

Thus, while assessing the present ways and means of electronic surveillance in the organizational

workplace and its subsequent impact on employees, particularly the aspect of the invasion of privacy,

this research explores the social and ethical concerns and problems of this ubiquitous practice in a

way that goes beyond individual privacy and responds to the issue ethically, pointing to a person-

centered management paradigm. This research generally covers five areas of ethical application –

values, interpersonal relationships, commitment, work ethic and worldview – and analysed the

problem on both a conceptual and theoretical basis with attention to benefits, proportionality (in

terms of goals, means, and costs), alternative means, and appropriateness (informed consent, fair

procedure, job relevance, etc.).

40 Why India? Having a workforce close to half a billion people and witnessing and experiencing a radical

transformation from predominantly rural agriculture-based country to urban industrialized and to the current

ICT based knowledge-service country, India emerges today as a major global power. Besides, being an

important venue for emerging service sectors including financial accounting, call centres, and business

process outsourcing, India has become a leading centre for offshore outsourcing. On account of these reasons,

the experienced rapid growth of ICT in the Indian organizational workplace entails an extensive use of

electronic surveillance means and practices and causes for individual and social impacts in both ways – good

or bad. It requires, therefore, a critical exploration. Thus, it is both appropriate and essential to investigate

how it addresses the needs of the employees and the challenges it brings forward. P.V. Raghavan, R.

Vaithianthan and V.S. Murali, General Economics for the CA Common Proficiency Test, 2nd ed. (Chandigarh:

Pearson, 2015), B.11-23; Institute for Human Development, India Labour and Employment Report 2014:

Workers in the Era of Globalization (New Delhi: AF and IHD, 2014), 75; Sulakshna Dwivedi, Sanjay Kaushik

and Luxmi, “Impact of Organizational Culture on Commitment of Employees: An Empirical Study of BPO

Sector in India,” Vikalapa 39, no. 3 (2014): 77-92; Sumit Kumar Majumdar, India’s Late, Late Industrial

Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 67, 158-166. 41 David Lyon, best known internationally for his contribution as sociologist, is the Director of the Surveillance

Studies Centre, and is Queen’s Research Chair in Surveillance Studies and Professor of Sociology and of

Law in Queen’s University, Canada. He is also the co-editor of the journal Surveillance & Society, Associate

Editor of The Information Society and is on the international editorial board of a number of other academic

journals. He is the author of The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (1994); Surveillance

Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (2001); Surveillance after September 11 (2003); Surveillance as Social

Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination (2005); Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and

Beyond (2006); Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveillance (2009); Eyes Everywhere: The Global Growth

of Camera Surveillance (2011); Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (2013); and The Culture of Surveillance:

Watching as a Way of Life (2018). He is important for this research is also because of his contribution for

surveillance studies especially for the concept ‘surveillance as social sorting’ which is used in this research

as a hermeneutical key to analyse the social effects of workplace surveillance.


8

METHODOLOGY

This study is exploratory, centering on a critical descriptive analysis of the issues described above

meant to ensure familiarity with the phenomenon of digital or electronic surveillance in the

workplace and its individual and socio-ethical effects. This approach makes possible a “flexible

design” that enables us to consider different aspects of the problem addressed, as compared to the

“rigid design” of a descriptive or diagnostic study, meant to maximise protection against bias and

ensure reliability.42 This study also follows the methodology of theoretical analysis (literature

reviews) and a method of critical discourse analysis (how in a discourse, for example a managerial

discourse, one finds elements of inequality, of oppression, of racism, of reductionist vision, etc.).

One can describe this as a critical hermeneutic approach to the discourses we consider. With this

methodology we formulate a problem, related to digital surveillance and its impact on employees,

then undertake a precise investigation from an operational point of view. Along with this general

methodology, an analytic research method is applied in all chapters of this study insofar as each aims

to determine the frequency with which digital surveillance occurs or with which it is associated with

additional trends. The method of examination of records (surveys and case studies) is also applied to

describe the changing behavioural characteristics of employees in relation to digital surveillance.

The primary lens for our social analysis and critical evaluation of organizational surveillance will be

the work of David Lyon on surveillance, which we will compare with various other viewpoints,

ranging from more individualist perspectives to a more social-oriented analyses. We join a qualitative

research methodology with a strongly empirical concern to develop a comprehensive understanding

of the real-time experience of employees in the field. The study is also exploratory in nature in that

it tries to unravel the underlying reasons and motivations of particular patterns of behaviour and

attitude patterns on a a given issue. We adopt phenomenography as our general-background

approach. The insights gained through these methods and techniques will be made available for

critical scrutiny and enable us to derive adequate and substantial conclusions. Finally, we will

consider how our findings about the social consequences of workplace surveillance relate to the work

anthropology and ethics of the Catholic Church (with a focus on its official teaching on work). The

insights gained through these methods and techniques will be made available for critical scrutiny

and, as we have said, enable us to derive adequate and substantial conclusions. The quality of work

life, of which there are many perspectives in various contexts, generally comprises that which

promotes the good life or well-being of the worker. Since employees are placed in “an unrivalled

position when understanding the world of work”43 and discussions have to be “essentially employee-

centered and focus exclusively on what is beneficial for the worker,”44 we concentrate in this research

on employee accounts, experiences and perspectives.

OUTLINE OF THE STUDY

The first part of the study (chapters one and two) borrows from the field of technology and its socio-

cultural background. We consider the background and impacts of various digital technologies used

in workplace surveillance: their means, extents, forms and goals. We follow this with an examination

42 Patricia M. Shields and Nandhini Rangarajan, A Playbook for Research Methods: Integrating Conceptual

Frameworks and Project Management (Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press, 2013), 109-158; Craig L. Brains,

Jarol B. Manheim, Lars B. Willnat and Richard C. Rich. Empirical Political Analysis, 8th ed. (Boston, MA:

Longman. 2011), 76. 43 Z. Nadiyah Hannif, “Job Quality in Call Centres: Key Issues, Insights and Gaps in the Literature,” 6th Global

Conference on Business and Economics (GCBE) Proceedings, 1-13 (Lynchburg USA: Association for

Business and Economics Research, 2006), 2. 44 Hannif, “Job Quality in Call Centres,” 2.


9

of various perspectives and frameworks on monitoring. The first chapter succinctly conceptualizes

and examines the ways and means of surveillance in the workplace as well as the impact of these on

employees. Given the importance of explorations of the nature of surveillance in the workplace in

this technocratic context, we also pose several key questions here, including how surveillance came

to be seen as a ‘normal’ phenomenon and how its use engenders or endangers organizational

behaviour and decision making. The second chapter highlights, from a uniquely Indian work-culture

perspective, themes like the progressive flexibilization of labour; new organizational environments

with their new dynamic engagements; the reinvention of old and invention of new management

styles; and workplace surveillance and implications. Most importantly, it explores socio-ethical

issues faced by employees due to ubiquitous surveillance practices used in the organizational

workplace.

The second part of this research concentrates first on privacy issues (chapter three), which are more

individual in nature, and second on a wide range of social conundrums, which have not yet been

sufficiently plotted in research on workplace surveillance from an employee perspective (chapter

four). The third chapter approaches the concept of privacy from a variety of angles, considering the

views of both its contemporary advocates and critics. The problems of data mining, identity theft and

cyber bullying that endangers the privacy and autonomy of the employee are all evaluated, along

with growing concerns about electronic ‘exhibitionism and voyeurism.’ In addition, this chapter

focuses on privacy issues in Indian organizational workplaces and call centers in particular. The

fourth chapter examines and explores the more social problem that organizational surveillance leads

to a widening of social distance (adopting a social justice approach). Our argument in this chapter is

developed in dialogue with David Lyon’s conception of surveillance as “social sorting:” Lyon

discusses how the subordination of workers leads to alienation and often dehumanization, and how

it can jeopardize an employee’s reputation. We will also here consider and assess Foucault’s concept

of a “disciplinary society,” according to which persons are “normalized” by their categorical

locations, and Deleuze’s notion of a “society of control,” where people are forced to live in

circumscribed parameters, seeking to go beyond both of these views.

In chapter five, we undertake an empirical investigation of workplace surveillance technologies in

an effort to confirm what has been explored and discussed in previous chapters primarily through

textual studies. This chapter presents and analyses the results of a brief survey we have conducted

online with employees working in BPOs and in information technology-enabled services, and in this

way seeks to more fully understand the employees’ real-time experience of electronic surveillance

in the workplace. This survey asked employees to describe their feelings about working under 24/7

electronic surveillance/monitoring at work. It takes phenomenography as its approach, seeking to

describe and analyse the data collected through open and semi-closed online questionnaires. It aims

to derive additional information on how surveillance in the workplace forms and alters behavioural

tendencies. The overall objective of the study is to discover, from employees’ perspectives, the

adverse effects of electronic monitoring on their attitude, job commitment and satisfaction, and

morale and behaviour.

The third part of this research aims to integrate ethical principles and practices relevant to workplace

surveillance (chapter six) and propose an ethical framework and managerial paradigm (chapter

seven) in the light of the preceding explorations. The sixth chapter again consider the relationship

between workplace behaviours and ethics and identifies several moral behaviours that go beyond

managerial rationality. This section aims to develop a general moral framework to understand and

ethically respond to electronic monitoring and treats ethics as an open-ended, integrated force in

employee management. This demands an ethical rethinking of workplace surveillance and

managerial behaviour. It also calls for consideration of how different technological surveillances in


10

the workplace can be detrimental to an open culture of trust, organizational motivation and social

commitment. After analysing several corporate codes of ethics and various theoretical approaches of

moral assessment, the chapter presents an integrated, alternative approach – a balanced, tripartite

approach – to the task of ethically assessing workplace surveillance. Equipped with this approach of

moral integration, we emphasize the need for personal/moral integrity by drawing on the human

nature approach of Patricia Werhane as well as on the principle of human dignity and ideology of

the subjectivity of work upheld by Pope John Paul II. The chapter also integrates an embedded

religious frame of reference in the study of workplace behaviour and employee management.

The final chapter aims to articulate an alternative framework for thinking about workplace behaviour

and employee management, one that changes how members of an organization tend to think and act.

By integrating managerial strategies and ethics, we respond to the challenges raised by the practice

of workplace surveillance from a humanistic, person-centered perspective, which will in turn mark a

Christian contribution to the debate. This alternative approach aims to ensure that employees’ voices

are heard and to stimulate the capacity to alter both managerial and employee behaviours. Thus, this

section introduces a person-centered managerial paradigm, with its labourer-valued management and

preference for self-monitoring. This approach prioritizes the human character of employees without

neglecting the role played by managerial rules and moral norms. It offers a humanistic, personalist

alternative to economistic conceptions of workplace behaviour, one which we argue opens up a new

direction in workplace surveillance studies. A pictorial representation (Figure 1) of the structure of

this research is given below to enable a better understanding of its evolution and progression.

Figure 1 Evolution and Progress

This schme explains progression of the research in line with the primary question: does workplace

surveillance ethically endangers the individual rights of employees and creates new social issues.

This question has been the starting point of this research and driven its evolution, progression and a

final appraisal.

Part One Part Two Part Three

Surveillance:

Meaning, Systems &

Technologies

Individual Rights

Perspective:

Privacy Invasion

Indian Context:

Socio-Cultural &

Economic Scenarios

Integrated Ethical

(Tripartite) Response

with Strategic

Interactive Management

Model (LVM & Self-

Monitoring)

Social Impacts

Perspective: Social

Sorting & Power

Distance

Socio-Economic

& Ethical

Challenges

A Qualitative

Conformation

(Empirical Study)

CHAPTER ONE

TECHNOLOGY REVISITED: TOWARDS REPRESENTATIONAL PRACTICES OF

SURVEILLANCE

1.0 INTRODUCTION

The convergence of computer-internet technologies and telecommunication methods has given rise

to new ways and means for the surveillance of people as citizens, workers and consumers. This has

had a dramatic effect on our society per se. People are forced to recognize surveillance as a necessary

part of modern society and have largely accepted it as the current norm1 and “an ever-present tool of

our modern offices.”2 Indeed, over the last two decades, the workplace has been drastically

transforming by the interpolation of new information technologies.3 Employee monitoring, which

day-by-day is seen to be more of a necessity in our widespread technological era, becomes more

controversial in its approach and complex in its appearance. It is necessary to develop an integral

understanding of both benefits and detriments of these developments. Several questions are raised

by this new technocratic context, such as: to what extent is surveillance a ‘normal’ phenomenon, and

how does its use engender or endanger organizational behaviour and decision making? This chapter

aims to provide a conceptual framework for mapping the multifaceted interactions of technology,

workplace and surveillance, following a methodology that combines descriptive, theoretical and

meta-analysis. This analytic conceptualization will provide guidance in the effort to identify some of

the underlying surveillance frameworks and to classify and examine certain current technological

devices and methods used in the workplace. Following this, we provide a set of justifications for or

against digital workplace surveillance and will further clarify the subject matter and scope of this

research.

1.1 TECHNOLOGY AND SURVEILLANCE: PRESENT LANDSCAPE

This section offers terminological clarifications and related considerations concerning both the

theory and practice of workplace surveillance. The average person who observes modern life finds

that they must steadily and speedily understand and adapt4 to technology, as technology has proven

to be the decisive factor in improved standards of living since the enlightenment and

industrialization.5 As modern life is increasingly immersed in technology, the workplace has of

course been one of the major loci (among others such as transportation, communication, health care

etc.) where technological developments over the past century have been uncritically and extensively

1 David Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 9. Cf.

Zygmunt Bauman et al., “After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of Surveillance,” International Political

Sociology 8 (2014): 121-144: Bernd Carsten Stahl, et al., “Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: If People

Don’t Care, Then What is the Relevance?” in Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and

Solutions, ed. John Weckert, 50-78 (Hershey: Idea Group of Publishing, 2005), 64: David Murakami Wood

and C. William R. Webster, “Living in Surveillance Societies: The Normalisation of Surveillance in Europe

and the Threat of Britain’s Bad Example,” Journal of Contemporary European Research 5, no. 2 (2009):

259-273. 2 Kathy Eivazi, “Computer Use Monitoring and Privacy at Work,” Computer Law & Security Review 27 (2011):

516. 3 Lilian Mitrou and Maria Karyda, “Employees’ Privacy vs. Employers’ Security: Can They be Balanced?”

Telematics and Informatics 23 (2006): 164. 4 Peter Danielson, “Ethics of Workplace Surveillance Games,” in Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace:

Controversies and Solutions, ed. John Weckert, 19-34 (Hershey: Idea Group of Publishing, 2005), 30. 5 Philip J. Vergragt, “How Technology Could Contribute to a Sustainable World,” GTI Paper Series, (Boston:

Tellus Institute, 2006), 1.

Towards Representational Practices of Surveillance

12

applied and utilized. Given this, the workplace has been on the cutting edge of this technological

revolution. This revolution has brought an acceleration of material improvements but also of

environmental degradation and other unwanted or unintended social and ethical implications, a

circumstance which Philip J. Vergragt has called the “paradox of technological development.”6 This

persisting contradiction, in the context of the workplace where the role of technology has become a

more pressing issue, calls for a deeper exploration and comprehension of the nature of technology

and its relationship both to surveillance and to changing workplace behaviour.

1.1.1 Technology, Workplace and Surveillance: A Conceptual Analysis

People understand the term ‘technology’ differently. It is widely used to mean various scientific and

informational systems as well as tasks in connection with everyday life. The Merriam-Webster

Dictionary defines technology as “the practical application of knowledge especially in a particular

area and a capability given by the practical application of knowledge.”7 Read Bain, an American

sociologist, states that “technology includes all tools, machines, utensils, weapon, instruments,

housing, clothing, communicating and transporting devices and the skills by which we produce and

use them.”8 Elaborating on this definition, we will define technology here as the production, use, and

knowledge of tools, machines and systems in order to solve a problem or achieve a goal. More

systematically, technology can be explained as “the intelligent production of new tools, including

conceptual and ideational ones, for dealing with problematic situations.”9 These definitions show

that there is always a link between technology and human history and life. In our present post-modern

technological era, however, we experience the use of technology both in constructive and destructive

ways. It has a multitude of effects on people, society and the environment. The unexpected by-

products of technological inventions and of its multiple implementations have influenced and

impacted the values of society and raised new ethical questions.

Albert Borgmann, an American philosopher specializing in the philosophy of technology, maintains

in his analysis of a determinist view of technology – in both pessimistic and optimistic flavours –

that technology is neither good nor bad in itself; its value depends on us and our own values, which

determine whether it will be used to deserve well or ill.10 Julian Sempill likewise points out, rightly,

that technology is “not some kind of self-perpetuating, independent force, but [...] is developed and

deployed in a manner which serves and buttresses certain power relations and is, in turn, suffused

with those power relations.”11 In these ways and others, technology has been perceived in its multi-

faceted nuances and implications. Likewise, Vergragt suggests, “all human activities, like housing,

transportation, work, leisure, art and imagination, become heavily enmeshed with technology, [and

thus] we are living in a ‘culture technique’ in the sense that our deepest and most private knowledge

6 Vergragt, “How Technology Could Contribute to a Sustainable World,” 1. 7 This definition (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/technology [accessed September 20, 2015])

seems more comprehensible than the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, which defines

technology as “new machines, equipment, and ways of doing things that are based on modern knowledge

about science and computers” (http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/technology [accessed September 20,

2015]), or that of the Oxford Dictionaries, which defines it as “the application of scientific knowledge for

practical purposes, especially in industry.”

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/technology [accessed September 20, 2015]. We thus

use the Merriam-Webster online Dictionary for conceptual clarification. 8 Read Bain, “Technology and State Government,” American Sociological Review 2, no. 6 (1937): 860. 9 Larry Hickman, Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture: Putting Pragmatism to Work (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 2001), 183. 10 Albert Borgmann, “Technology as a Cultural Force: For Alena and Griffin,” The Canadian Journal of

Sociology 31, no. 3 (2006): 353. 11 Julian Sempill, “Under the Lens: Electronic Workplace Surveillance,” Australian Journal of Labour Law

14, no.2 (2001): 113.


13

and emotions are permeated by technology.”12 The human relationship with technology, in this

respect, cannot be overestimated. Today, moreover, technological development offers the promise

of an ever-improving humanity and material improvements to standards of living. It is also obvious

that, while the future might promise a vast acceleration of technological innovation, the scale and

impact of individual, social, communitarian, and environmental degradation may also reflect this

immense increase in speed in the workplace,13 for the workplace is a major locus of human life,

where possibilities of human relationality and interaction are generated and sustained. For technology

helps the workplace to be more intensified and ever-more efficiently. The workplace becomes

increasingly fast-paced and complexly intricate, while technology changes the way it operates, often

in alarming ways.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the workplace as “a place (as a shop or factory) where

work is done.”14 In our present post-modern era of technological advancement, this idea of the

workplace has been changed dramatically: as Esposito and others suggested, “today’s workplace is

a virtual and/or physical environment, characterized by connections, collaboration and user choice,

that enables the worker to be more agile and perform activities anywhere, anytime – ultimately

creating greater enterprise value.”15 The advent of new technologies, particularly the rapid growth in

the use of information technologies in the workplace, fosters efficient and effective business around

the globe, removing the boundaries of space and time and leaving us, so to say, in a ‘digital

workplace.’16 In this new workplace, “technological change and innovations are not perceived in the

traditional neoclassical sense as random, exogenous factors but rather as an endogenous

development, because this change gives companies a competitive edge, and thus directly or indirectly

also secures or enhances positive employment development.”17 In other words, the application of

technology in the workplace has transformed the way work is done, opening up a range of new and

multi-faceted opportunities.

The use of technology reflects a change in how employees carry out their work and enables the

completion of the workload in a more effective and efficient manner.18 It is often heard that “today’s

up-and-coming generation of workers meet, share, discover and get work done via technology [...

and] people used to go to work, now work goes to people – whatever work needs to be accomplished,

anytime it needs to get done, on a multitude of devices.”19 Technology, on the one hand, undoubtedly

12 Vergragt, How Technology Could Contribute to a Sustainable World, 2. 13 Vergragt, How Technology Could Contribute to a Sustainable World, 1. 14 The workplace is traditionally viewed as the physical location where someone works and earns his living.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/workplace [accessed September 22, 2015]. 15 Richard Esposito, Carl J. Kraenzel, Christopher G. Pepin, and Antony I. Stein, “The New Workplace: Are

You Ready? How to Capture Business Value?” IBM Global Technological Services (2011), 2. This is well

illustrated by researchers like Sebastian Köffer and Wayne F. Cascio. Cf. Sebastian Köffer, “Designing the

Digital Workplace of the Future – What Scholars Recommend to Practitioners,” Thirty Sixth International

Conference on Information Systems, Fort Worth, 2015, 1-21; Wayne F. Cascio, “Managing A Virtual

Workplace,” Academy of Management Executive 14, no. 3 (2000): 81-90. 16 The digital workplace comprises the employee’s technological working environment. It encompasses all the

technologies the employee uses to get work done in today’s workplace. Today, as the workplace continues to

evolve, and employee expectations shift, and many believe that organizations that do not embrace the digital

workplace risk falling behind. Mike Harm, “Building the Factory of the Future with Digital Workplace,”

Industry Today 21, no. 2 (2018): 6-21: Amy Colbert, Nick Yee and Gerard George, “The Digital Workforce

and the Workplace of the Future,” Academy of Management Journal 59, no. 3 (2016): 731-739. 17 Miroslav Beblavy, Ilaria Maselli, and Elisa Martellucci, “Workplace Innovation and Technological Change,”

Center for European Policy Studies (2012): 34. 18 Ken Simpson and Marta Byrski, “The 21st Century Workplace: How Personal Technologies Can Make a

Difference,” Asia Pacific Journal of Business and Management 1, no. 2 (2010): 21. 19 Esposito et al., “The New Workplace: Are You Ready? How?” 4. Though new workplace trends offer ample

opportunities for the use of technology in the workplace and further cause for the relative change of working


14

provides companies and any organizational workplace with new opportunities for improving work

performance and the security of their premises, yet on the other hand it presents new potential threats

to the manual labour force and can even pose higher security threats, which often outweigh the

benefits technology provides.20 For technology has brought with it a great many challenges for

organizational behaviour, from the perspective of both employee and employer and in the

organizational structure as a whole.

Widespread automation in the workplace has been successful both in enhancing workplace

performance and adding considerable sophistication to the monitoring and tracking of employee

behaviour.21 Information technology (IT) refers to devices used in the creation, storage,

manipulation, exchange, and dissemination of data, sound, and/or images.22 As the cost of IT devices

continues to fall, and its capabilities continue to increase, people are making greater use of IT in their

everyday lives. Nevertheless, as IT has increasingly come to be used in the workplace for monitoring

purposes, employers keep employees incessantly under a watchful eye. When this surveillance is

intrusive in nature, employees are often led to feel provoked and defensive. In this way, they threaten

the corporate culture and generate opposite effects to those intended by their managers, who

introduce the new surveillance technologies.23 The Privacy Foundation,24 however, in its Workplace

Surveillance Project, has reported that today, globally, 35% of the 100 million online members of

the workforce are monitored.25 Surveillance has, thus, eventually become “components of modern

information systems and the modern work environment” and is viewed as “a ‘value added’ element

of information systems, as designers are often required to design technology, which will capture,

analyse and disclose personal information.”26

Surveillance, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is the act of carefully watching someone

or something especially in order to prevent or detect a crime.27 The word surveillance originates from

the French term for “watching over,” in which “sur” means “from above” and “veiller” means “to

watch.”28 It is observation from a distance. It is a well “focused, systematic and routine attention to

habits, these pose important challenges for their implementation as well. Some of the challenges identified in

researches (Esposito et al. 2011, 4) are: (1) the complexity of devices, where there are more devices there

more applications to support, more systems to coordinate and more connections to maintain; (2) security and

compliance, where there is more assurance of data security and compliance with various regulatory, corporate

and government rules; (3) cost management to supply enough infrastructure; (4) loss of control in delivering

services to a larger number of devices; and (5) support given to the workers who use these devices. 20 By “technology” we mean, for the purpose of this paper, information and communication technology. We

thus for the most part lead aide questions concerning biological technologies (e.g., genetic analysis). 21 Simpson and Byrski. “The 21st Century Workplace,” 21. 22 Michael J. Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age, 5th ed. (Boston, MA: Pearson, 2012), 38. 23 Simpson and Byrski, “The 21st Century Workplace,” 22. 24 The Privacy Foundation of Sturm College of Law at the University of Denver, Colorado conducts

international employee monitoring research. A systematic research on The Extent of Systematic Monitoring

of Employee E-mail and Internet Use is directed by Andrew Schulman under the Workplace Surveillance

Project of Privacy Foundation in 2001. See, http://www.sonic.net/~undoc/extent.htm [accessed October 15,

2015]. 25 Joseph Migga Kizza and Jackline Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” in Electronic Monitoring in the

Workplace: Controversies and Solutions, ed. John Weckert, 1-18 (Hershey: Idea Group Publishing, 2005), 2. 26 Lilian Mitrou and Maria Karyda, “Employees’ Privacy vs. Employers’ Security: Can They Be Balanced?”

Telematics and Informatics 23 (2006): 165. 27 “Surveillance,” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/surveillance [accessed September 20, 2015]. 28 Marvin Minsky, Ray Kurzweil, and Steve Mann, “The Society of Intelligent Veillance,” International

Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS), 2013, 14. The inverse (reciprocal) of surveillance (surveilling

the surveillers) is called ‘sousveillance’ that comes from the French terms “sous” (below) and “veiller” (to

watch), enabling a panoptic gaze directed at those in authority. Sousveillance, according to Steve Mann, is a

form of “reflectionism” that “seeks to increase the equality between surveiller and the person being surveilled


15

personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection or direction, and which directs its

attention in the end to individuals.”29 It is the fact or possibility of being observed by someone else.30

Surveillance could be thought of as “systematic attention to a person’s life aimed at exerting

influence over it.”31 In this vein, the word surveillance covers surreptitious investigations both into

individual activities and routine/everyday activities. Yet, because of its intriguing and highly

sensitive character, surveillance is very ambiguous in nature32 and is called by Graham Sewell and

James R. Barker a ‘double-edged sword,’33 which carries baggage along with its benefits.34 In this

respect, electronic surveillance, which is our main concern here, is generally understood as the

gathering of information by surreptitious, secret and stealthy means using electronic devices. It is an

inconspicuous observation of or snooping on persons, places and activities using electronic devices

such as cameras, microphones, tape recorders, or wire-taps, and more intrudingly by monitoring of

internet, email, and other web activities.35 Workplace surveillance also refers to the intended

activities of observation to collect and record employees’ data and information, often done either in

a systematic or an ad hoc way by using electronic and other technological means.36

In the work context, surveillance refers to “management’s ability to monitor, record and track

employee performance, behaviours and personal characteristics in real time (for example, Internet or

telephone monitoring) or as part of broader organizational process.”37 Corey A. Ciocchetti classifies

surveillance practices as: (1) best practices representing the greatest protection and least invasion of

privacy, (2) risky practices offering low protection and minimal attacks on privacy, (3) borderline

practices providing high protection yet a highly insidious and sinister approach to privacy, and (4)

poor practices affording low protection and an extreme invasion of privacy.38 Though this

classification likely assists in balancing employer-employee interest alike, when it comes in the

matter of legality, it is still disturbing with regard to individual rights and interests. It remains an

open question whether electronic surveillance in the workplace is ultimately beneficial to an

(surveillee), including enabling the surveillee to surveil the surveiller.” Steve Mann, Jason Nolan, and Barry

Wellman, “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in

Surveillance Environments,” Surveillance & Society 1, no. 3 (2003): 332-333. 29 David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 14. For Lyon, surveillance

is focused, means intentionally employed with a purpose. By systematic, he means that attention to personal

details is not random, occasional or spontaneous; it is deliberate and depends on certain protocols and

techniques. This surveillance is routine in that it occurs as a normal part of everyday life in all societies. 30 D. Beu and M. R. Buckley, “The Hypothesized Relationship between Accountability and Ethical Behaviour,”

Journal of Business Ethics 34 (2001): 57-73. Stahl et al., “Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace,” 50-78. 31 James B. Rule, Douglas McAdam, Linda Stearns and David Uglow, “Documentary Identification and Mass

Surveillance in the United States,” Social Problems 31, no. 2 (1983): 223. 32 David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 14-18. 33 Graham Sewell and James R. Barker, “Coercion versus Care: Using Irony to Make Sense of Organizational

Surveillance,” Academy of Management Review 31, no. 4 (2006): 934. For Sewell and Barker, this

development is a double-edged sword because of its protective nature (disruptive or deviant acts of others)

on the one hand, and the challenging results of its extremes (for example the challenge to civil rights

concerning privacy and self-determination) on the other side. Sewell and Barker, “Coercion versus Care,”

934. 34 Eivazi, “Computer Use Monitoring and Privacy at Work,” 517. 35 Along with the expressions of electronic surveillance or monitoring, words such as spying, snooping,

electronic spying, sneaking, espionage, prying, and Big Brother are used to mean the same in a workplace

context. It is surprising to see that these consistent language choices in writings reflect a negative attitude

towards electronic surveillance. 36 Mitrou and Karyda, “Employees’ Privacy vs. Employers’ Security: Can They Be Balanced,” 165. 37 Kirstie Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” Labour History 51, no. 1 (2010): 87. A similar

definition is found also in: Jonathan P. West and James S. Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An

Ethical Analysis,” Administration & Society 48, no. 5 (2016): 628. 38 Corey A. Ciocchetti, “The Eavesdropping Employer: A Twenty-First Century Framework for Employee

Monitoring,” American Business Law Journal 48 (2011): 289.


16

organization. Michael J. Quinn writes that “there is evidence that employee monitoring makes

employees more focused on their tasks, but also reduces job satisfaction.”39 In this respect, Kizza and

Ssanyu rightly observe that “employee monitoring is a dependable, capable and a very affordable

process of electronically recording all employee activities, and the internet and its associated

technologies have accelerated the monitoring processes, substantially making them more evasive and

intrusive.”40 For example, if a company decides to do so, it can track any number of calls its

employees handle, document its employees’ number of keystrokes per minute, view their website

usages (duration and type), and read and assess email communications.41 Given this high incidence

of workplace electronic monitoring, it is important to consider it more closely and assess its influence

and impact on the employees, employment relationships, and organizations at large.

1.1.2 Surveillance as Part of Organizational Behaviour

Gary T Marx, who holds a functional view of general surveillance in the society, interprets it as one

of societies’ functional prerequisites for its existence, and maintains there is nothing really new in

it.42 There is indeed a common tendency to perceive workplace surveillance as a required and even

indispensable part of organizational behaviour for its existence, sustenance, and growth. A detailed

analysis of this changing general response of contemporary surveillance, as part of organizational

behaviour (OB) perspective, is indispensable if we want an impartial and critical understanding of

its practices in the workplace, “as we live in a time of revolutionary change with respect to the

crossing of personal and social borders.”43 For on the one hand, employees “are social creatures and

as such, are concerned with their relationships with others and influenced by what others say and do,

[... and] are concerned about fairness and justice,” and on the other hand, “organizations as

institutions in their own right are also embedded in a social context.”44 Marx underlines this in a

remark that is strikingly innovative, though not philanthropic: that “surveillance is also applied to

contexts (geographical places and spaces, particular time periods, networks, systems and categories

of person), not just to a particular person whose identity is known beforehand.”45 Referring to the

scope of this research: OB is best defined as “an academic discipline that is concerned with

describing, understanding, predicting, and controlling human behaviour in an organizational

environment.”46 It is the way in which individuals and groups work within an organization.

39 Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age, 462. 40 Kizza and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 2. 41 Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age, 37. The 2007 study by the American Management Association about

monitoring reminds us that monitoring has become commonplace in the workplace. As the survey shows,

66% of employers monitor employees’ website activities; 43% review their employees’ emails; 40% analyse

other communications; and 45% monitor audio calls. American Management Association, “2007 Electronic

Monitoring & Surveillance Survey,” American Management Association (AMA) and The ePolicy Institute

(AMA/ePolicy Institute Research), New York, 2007. The detailed summary of the result of the survey is

published online in:

http://www.plattgroupllc.com/jun08/2007ElectronicMonitoringSurveillanceSurvey.pdf [accessed September

22, 2015]. 42 Gary T. Marx, “What’s New about the ‘New Surveillance’? Classifying for Change and Continuity,” in The

Surveillance Studies Reader, ed. Sean P. Hier and Josh Greenberg (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007), 84. 43 Marx, “What’s New about the ‘New Surveillance’?” 84. 44 Jeffrey Pfeffer, “Human Resources from an Organizational Behaviour Perspective: Some Paradoxes

Explained,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 4 (2007): 120. 45 Marx, “What’s New about the ‘New Surveillance’?” 84. Marx also interestingly notes that “the use of

‘contexts’ along with ‘individuals’ recognizes that much modern surveillance also looks at settings and

patterns of relationships.” Marx, “What’s New about the ‘New Surveillance’?” 85. 46 Steven Altman, Enzo Valenzi and Richard M. Hodgetts, Organizational Behaviour: Theory and Practice

(Orlando: Elsevier [first publisher: Academic Press, INC, 1985], 2013), 4.


17

OB is not “a defined business function or area of responsibility similar to finance or marketing,” but

rather “a set of insights and tools that all managers can use to carry out their jobs more effectively.”47

It also involves behaviours that enhance, motivate and maintain a supportive and sustaining socio-

psychological environment.48 “When applied to individuals and groups, it includes norms, values,

perceptions, attitudes, and a series of other behavioural determinants,”49 all of which are important

in the discussion of organizational surveillance practices. It is significant also because the

organizational behaviour includes realms of employee motivation, conflict resolution and

performance evaluation.50 Surveillance is also said to be a task-oriented behaviour that enables

employers to obtain information about employee performance.51 As such, surveillance seems quite

positive insofar as it can increase performance and productivity. However, situational or internal

factors such as organizational culture, procedures or structures all constitute the organizational

behaviour52 in such a way as to determine the behavioural attitudes of managers toward their

employees, and vice versa.

For instance, Niehoff and Moorman, referring to the taxonomy of work-related supervisory

behaviours developed by Komaki and others, categorise and separate supervision or monitoring into:

“(1) performance antecedents (instruction, clarifying work), (2) performance monitors, and (3)

performance consequences (evaluation, giving rewards).”53 Although their analysis finds that

employees who were monitored more were more successful than those who were monitored less,

they also find, alarmingly, among those who were monitored more, a direct decrease in

organizational citizenship behaviour, “defined as extra-role54 behaviour that is discretionary and not

explicitly related to the formal reward system of an organization but is conducive to its effective

functioning.”55 These issues of organizational citizenship and the ‘curtailed extra-role behaviour’

will be discussed in the later part of the research. This research agrees that the implementation of

surveillance technologies and its routine utilization, linking it to the organizational behaviour or to

the management strategy to increase employer control, in turn felt by employees as low-trust

practices and likely to be counterproductive and affects the active human resource management.

47 Ricky Griffin and Gregory Moorhead, Organizational Behaviour: Managing People and Organizations, 7th

ed. (South-Western, Mason, OH: Cengage Learning, 2014), 6. 48 Stefanie E. Naumann, “The Effects of Norms and Self-Monitoring on Helping Behaviour,” Journal of

Business Behavioural Studies 2 (2010): 2. Cf. D. W. Organ, “Organizational Citizenship Behaviour: It’s

Construct Clean-up Time,” Human Performance, 10 (1997): 85-97; W.C. Borman and S. J. Motowidlo,

“Expanding the Criterion Domain to Include Elements of Contextual Performance,” in Personnel selection

in organizations, ed. N. Schmitt, W. C. Borman, & Associates (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993), 71-98. 49 Altman, Valenzi and Hodgetts, Organizational Behaviour: Theory and Practice, 4. 50 Griffin and Moorhead, Organizational Behaviour, 7. 51 Brian P. Niehoff and Robert H. Moorman, “Justice as a Mediator of the Relationship between Methods of

Monitoring and Organizational Citizenship Behaviour,” Academy of Management Journal 36, no. 3 (1993):

527. 52 Ronald R. Sims, Managing Organizational Behaviour (Westport, London: Quorum Books, 2002), 8. 53 Niehoff and Moorman, “Justice as a Mediator of the Relationship between Methods of Monitoring and

Organizational Citizenship Behaviour,” 528. See for instance, J. L. Komaki, S. Slotnick, and M. Jensen,

“Development of an Operant-Based Taxonomy and Observational Index of Supervising Behaviours, Journal

of Applied Psychology 71 (1986): 260-269. 54 The in-role behaviour of employee (or employer) is “the necessary or the expected behaviour for the

accomplishment of job duties,” whereas the “extra-role behaviour refers to the collection of a series of actions

that are not included in the statement of work or related to the employee’s position or the role in the

organization.” Yanhan Zhu, “Individual Behaviour: In-role and Extra-role,” International Journal of Business

Administration 4, no. 1 (2013): 23. 55 Niehoff and Moorman, “Justice as a Mediator of the Relationship between Methods of Monitoring and

Organizational Citizenship Behaviour,” 529.


18

1.1.3 Traditional versus Contemporary Electronic (& Cyber) Surveillance

In the period following the Industrial Revolution, controls exercised in the workplace have been

called ‘surveillance.’56 Today, surveillance, which is augmented with computerization in every field

of human life, has become an intrinsic part of life because, people experience an upsurge in the way

their personal data and information are accessed, collected and stored through various systems due

to increased use of information technology in the workplace.57 This surveillance, according to David

Lyon, is Janus faced.58 For, although employee surveillance in today’s tech-culture is presented as a

fait accompli,59 and there has been an explosion in the use and application of various technological

devices and means in today’s work culture, the haunting fact is that employee monitoring has been

customary and prevalent in one or another form for as long as there has been employment, and has

produced various, sometimes complex results.60 Though management espouses empowerment and

job enlargement, others claim that the process of surveillance reduces employees “to being cogs in a

machine like the old-fashioned assembly line.”61 The diverse dynamics of both traditional and current

surveillance practices can be illustrated by the following observation, which will help the reader

understand the complexities that the workforce faces in present day technocratic culture.

Traditionally, for instance, employers used to monitor the time of arrival and departure of employees

by simple observation, and what any particular employee does at any given time by informal visits.

Today, different timings related to employees’ presence on work premises are recorded automatically

and produce objective data about them.62 What is new in these newer surveillance practices is that

surveillance now progressively depends more on information and communication technologies.

Today, almost all jobs, and some jobs more intensely than others, are subjected or have the potential

to be subjected to several types of electronic or other surveillance practices.63 This tendency of using

and applying increasingly marked surveillance practices intensified after the 1960s and has been

enabled by the large-scale computerization of the workplace.64 This is even marked by the shift in

the nature of work and the society at large, for example in the move from agricultural work to an

industrial-manufacturing society, and to today’s knowledge-based information and communication-

related work culture. The knowledge and the control that workers have formerly possessed over their

work is now removed from them and is organized and overseen scientifically by the manager. In this

way, the work is executed and rationalized into discrete piecework.65

56 David Lyon, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), 34. See also,

N. Ben Fairweather, “Surveillance in Employment: The Case of Teleworking,” Journal of Business Ethics 22

(1999): 40. 57 Sylvia Kierkegaard, “Privacy in Electronic Communication, Watch Your E-mail: Your Boss is Snooping,”

Computer Law & Security Report 21 (2005): 229. 58 David Lyon, “Surveillance Technology and Surveillance Society,” in Modernity and Technology, eds.

Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey and Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 168. 59 Kizza and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 15. 60 Delbert M. Nebeker and B. Charles Tatum, “The Effects of Computer Monitoring, Standards and Rewards

on Work Performance, Job Satisfaction and Stress,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 23, no. 7 (1993):

508. 61 Marlene C. Piturro, “Employee Performance Monitoring... Or Meddling?” Management Review 78, no. 5

(1989): 32. 62 Fairweather, “Surveillance in Employment,” 40. 63 Michaela Vorvoreanu and Carl H. Baton, “Examining Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace: A Review

of Theoretical Perspectives and Research Findings,” Paper from Conference of the International

Communication Association, June 2000, (Acapulco, Mexico), 6. 64 Lyon, “Surveillance Technology and Surveillance Society,” 168. 65 Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New

York: NYU Press, 1998), 80-82.


19

In this same line of thought, managers were traditionally not able to attend to and monitor all workers,

as the proportion of time given to it was comparatively less than that given to their other

responsibilities.66 However, Roland E. Kidwell Jr. and Nathan Bennett observe that unlike traditional

practices, monitoring with electronic and other modern (cyber) devices and methods allow constant

and immediate surveillance with an instant control of employee behaviour.67 Jeffrey Stanton also

stresses this idea, saying, “electronic monitoring can occur continuously, can measure multiple

employees simultaneously, and can record voluminous data especially on quantitative dimensions of

work performance, [whereas] traditional supervisory monitoring usually relies upon the inconstant

presence of a human observer with the many known limitations of perceptual processing and

memory.”68 Moreover, as Laura Lally explains, “the availability of technology based access may

even lead decision makers to seek out information they would not have asked for in person.”69 In the

same vein, one of the greatest differentiating factors between traditional and newer electronic or

cyber monitoring is that earlier workers knew when the boss was present, yet today’s workers often

do not; electronic monitoring can be there all the time.70 A digital sentinel, a ‘Big Brother,’ is always

there, working with everyone as unchecked surveillance exacerbates and continues. We can thus say

that computer-based surveillance is both increasingly powerful and impersonal yet also decreasingly

visible and anonymous.71 Analysing the cost per unit of data surveilled, the traditional methods are

more expensive than new ways and means applied in the same situation, as the traditional methods

often require a separate action while the newer methods are merged with routine activity.72

It is also said that in both traditional and contemporary electronic or cyber surveillance practices,

monitoring “can occur regularly or intermittently, can be expected or unexpected, [and] can occur

with or without employee acceptance or permission.”73 However, the so-called characteristics of fair

procedures of monitoring, which we will explain later in our discussion of surveillance frameworks,

such as consistency, accuracy, control and justification may differ between both traditional and

electronic or cyber-monitoring environments.74 For instance, to summarise, traditional practices tend

to entail face-to-face control, complete disclosure of the doer’s identity, monitoring limited mainly

to working hours alone, experiencing home (outside work premises) as a safe haven, explicit

visibility of the effect on the victim, and having little in the way of an audience. In contrast, the

present electronic or online (cyber) surveillance practices are characterised by their mechanical

nature (with electronic devices), the anonymity of the perpetrator, continuous and extensive

occurrences (24/7 through GPS – and no escape), the invisibility of effects, an unlimited audience,

and a hasty and viral reach. Exhibit-1 below charts these differences.

66 J.R. Aiello, “Computer-Based Work Monitoring: Electronic Surveillance and its Effects,” Journal of Applied

Social Psychology 23 (1993): 499-507. 67 Roland E. Kidwell Jr. and Nathan Bennett, “Electronic Surveillance as Employee Control: A Procedural

Justice Interpretation,” The Journal of High Technology Management Research 5, no. 1 (1994): 43. 68 Jeffrey M. Stanton, “Traditional and Electronic Monitoring from an Organizational Justice Perspective,”

Journal of Business and Psychology 15, no. 1 (2000): 130. 69 Laura Lally, “Privacy versus Accessibility: The Impact of Situationally Conditioned Belief,” Journal of

Business Ethics 15, no. 11 (1996): 1222-1223. 70 Joseph H. Wen and Pamela Gershuny, “Computer Based Monitoring in the American Workplace:

Surveillance Technologies and Legal Challenges,” Human Systems Management 24, no. 2, (2005): 165-173. 71 Brian L. Zirkle and William G. Staples, “Negotiating Workplace Surveillance,” in Electronic Monitoring in

the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions, ed. John Weckert, 79-100 (Hershey: Idea Group Publishing,

2005), 80. Cf. Lyon, “Surveillance Technology and Surveillance Society,” 164; Gary T. Marx, Undercover:

Police Surveillance in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 206-234. 72 Marx, “What’s New about the ‘New Surveillance’?” 87. 73 Stanton, “Traditional and Electronic Monitoring from an Organizational Justice Perspective,” 131. 74 Stanton, “Traditional and Electronic Monitoring from an Organizational Justice Perspective,” 134.


20

Traditional Monitoring Practices Present Electronic (Cyber) Surveillance

Face-to-face control Mechanical (electronic devices)

More expensive Less expensive

Close observation Remote observation

Doer is known Perpetrator is often anonymous

During working hours (on-the-job) Monitored 24/7 (on/off-the-job)

Home as a safe haven No safe haven (GPS, RFID)

Difficult data analysis processes Easier data analysis processes

Effect on victim is visible Effects are invisible

Limited audience Unlimited audience, viral reach

Exhibit-1 Differences in traditional and present workplace surveillance

Therefore, although employee monitoring is not a new phenomenon, the possibility of doing it

without human intervention or interruption is relatively new,75 and it permits “remote access and fast

dissemination of information”76 and offers remarkable speed in processing and assorted opportunities

in application, saving both cost and time.77 As Exhibit-1 shows, one of the advantages of ‘new’

surveillance practices is their ability, on the one hand, to carry out the monitoring from ‘afar’ over

the ‘close’ observation of the ‘traditional’ practices, and on the other hand, to go beyond the sensual

perception and “see through”78 people and situations. The disproportionate availability of

technology,79 which was only available to the elite in the past, is today widely accessible and easy to

use. It is the same with the process of data analysis: present surveillance practices have greater

capacity and data is much easier to organize, store, retrieve, analyse, and communicate (send and

receive).80 In sum, surveillance is nothing new in itself, but its nature is changing and present means

of surveillance, though they have not entirely replaced more traditional methods, have certainly

supplemented them in very transformative ways.

1.1.4 Workplace Surveillance Acts and Other Federal, Constitutional Policies

The prevailing legal uncertainty about the proper balance between the heights and limits of the extent

of surveillance practices and the use of its means and methods often functions as a constraint on this

discussion. The foreseen and the actual tension lies between the rights of the employer, such as

property rights, and the right of the members of the organization, or in other words the employee,

especially the right to privacy.81 However, in some places there is a mixture of federal and state laws,

which are used globally and locally, and even constitutional provisions to institute some boundaries

for the implementation of surveillance practices, which prohibit unauthorized access to persons and

data.82 But this most often function to eventually guarantee employers relative freedom to monitor

75 Mitrou and Karyda, “Employees’ Privacy vs. Employers’ Security,” 164-178. 76 Lally, “Privacy versus Accessibility: The Impact of Situationally Conditioned Belief,” 1222. 77 Kathy Eivazi, “Computer Use Monitoring and Privacy at Work,” Computer Law & Security Review 27

(2011): 516. 78 As Gary T. Marx opines, “indeed ‘seeing through’ is a convenient short hand for the new surveillance.”

Marx, “What’s New about the ‘New Surveillance’?” 85. 79 Marx, “What’s New about the ‘New Surveillance’?” 87. 80 Marx, “What’s New about the ‘New Surveillance’?” 88. 81 Patricia Findlay and Alan McKinlay, “Surveillance, Electronic Communications Technologies and

Regulation,” Industrial Relations Journal 34 (2003): 305-318. 82 Sonny S. Ariss, “Computer Monitoring: Benefits and Pitfalls Facing Management,” Information &

Management 39 (2002): 553-558.


21

and snoop into the private lives of potential or current employees.83 Likewise, delays in the passage

of relevant legislation about the extent of justified use of available technologies often lead to

unconditional breakthroughs in surveillance practices. It is thus all the more important and vital for

top-level managers and company leaders in today’s multi-faceted workplace to familiarize

themselves with traditional employment laws, as well as laws that affect present social media policies

and regulations. For, the emergence and perpetuation of complexities and conflicts in various rights

and interests play a major role in determining any actual action regarding surveillance.

In the U.S., the National Labour Relations Act (NLRA)84 addresses union and non-union employee

rights in regard to the use of social media and acceptable social media policy, and consequently seeks

to ensure employee information protection. Likewise, the new Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

guidelines provide regulations for the endorsement of products on social media sites; collecting and

processing sensitive employee information and publishing it online or using it for other purposes,

and establishing legal responsibility to take steps to properly secure them.85 In the same vein, the

Federal Employee Polygraph Protection Act of 1988 bars employers from using polygraphs (lie

detector), one of the traditional methods of determining employees’ veracity.86 The Electronic

Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA),87 in a law governing wiretapping and electronic

eavesdropping, makes the interception and monitoring of electronic communications unlawful.88

Nevertheless, it allows for significant exceptions under the banner of a consent exception (if one

party in communication gives consent), a course of business exception (by equipment used in the

normal course of business), a provider exception (the provider can retrieve the information stored in

the system), etc.89 The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), enacted in 1986 as an amendment

to the then-existing computer fraud law, prohibits knowingly access[ing] a computer without

authorization or exceeding authorized access.”90 This means that when computer access goes beyond

83 Three responses are possible to the dilemma of conflicting rights and interests of both employer and

employee: “First, that property rights assume priority; secondly, that privacy rights are fundamental rights

that cannot be waived or varied; lastly, that a balance be struck between privacy and property rights.” Findlay

and McKinlay, “Surveillance, Electronic Communications Technologies and Regulation,” 307. 84 National Labour Relations Act (NLRA) was enacted in 1935 to protect the rights of employees, to encourage

collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labour and management practices, which can harm

the general welfare of workers (https://www.nlrb.gov/resources/national-labor-relations-act [accessed

September 30, 2015]). It establishes regulations designed to eliminate personal, psychological, and

informational injuries and harms from occurring in the workplace. 85 The FTC Act 1914 outlaws unfair acts or practices that affect commerce. The FTC today regulates any acts

and practices that involve sensitive consumer and employee information during doing business. The FTC

prohibits deceptive practices (collecting, using, and sharing) employee and consumer data enforcing data

security and preventing identity theft (https://www.sba.gov/content/privacy-law [accessed September 30,

2015]). 86 The EPPA 1988, enforced by the Employment Standards Administration’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD)

within the U.S. Department of Labour (DOL), prohibits employers from using lie detector tests as part of pre-

employment screening or during employment (http://www.dol.gov/compliance/laws/comp-eppa.htm;

http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs36.pdf [accessed September 30, 2015]). 87 According to ECPA and summarized by Doyle, “it is a federal crime to wiretap or to use a machine to capture

the communications of others without court approval, unless one of the parties has given his prior consent.”

Charles Doyle, “Privacy: An Overview of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act,” CRS Report for

Congress (Congressional Research Service), 2012, 7. 88 Doyle, “Privacy: An Overview of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act,” 7. Cf. Daniel J. Solove and

Paul M. Schwartz, Privacy Law Fundamentals (Portsmouth, NH: IAPP, 2017), 69. 89 Caron Beesley, “Email, Phone and Social Media Monitoring in the Workplace – Know Your Rights as an

Employer,” https://www.sba.gov/blogs/email-phone-and-social-media-monitoring-workplace-know-your-

rights-employer [accessed September 25, 2015]. 90 H. Marshall Jarrett and Michael W. Bailie, “Prosecuting Computer Crimes,” Computer Crime and

Intellectual Property Section Criminal Division, 2nd ed. (Washington: Legal Education Executive Office for

United States Attorneys, 2010), 12.


22

the “expected norms of intended use,”91 it becomes a truly blemished intrusion. However, in general,

the legal system in the US upholds the property rights of the employer as well as the rights of the

employee, for example by prohibiting certain unlawful invasions of privacy, determined to be such

by reference to the reasonableness or unreasonableness of the employer’s action.92

Current legal approaches in Britain protecting employee rights and restricting surveillance are

derived both domestically and from the European Union (EU), and thus British law, in the Human

Rights Act 1988 (HRA), establishes the core of employee protection.93 At the same time, the Data

Protection Act (DPA) 1998, enacted to bring British law in line with the 1995 EU Data Protection

Directives, describes UK law on data processing and identifiable living people. In the DPA 1998, the

UK Parliament defines the way and manner in which data about people may be used or handled, in

such a way as to protect people’s fundamental rights and freedom.94 However, this act, according to

Findlay and McKinlay, “further complicates the complex legal and bargaining issues surrounding

surveillance and privacy.”95 For, the traditional stance of British courts, gave priority to management

prerogatives and less recognition to employees’ interests.96 While the basic principles (right to

privacy) and values (freedom and autonomy) are honoured and properly held, the DPA has a

reputation for complexity, as it is not always simple to interpret them due to the existing uncertainty

about their aims, content and principles.97 The Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice)

(Interception of Communications) Regulations 2000 (known as the ‘Lawful Business Practice’

Regulations) provide, in fact, a statutory framework enabling and permitting employers to conduct

and employ certain surveillance technologies and to monitor and record certain communications

without the consent of the caller, sender or recipient.98

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 12, states that “[N]o one shall be subjected to

arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, or to attacks upon his honour

and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or

attacks”99 In the present European context, though there are some fundamental constitutional

91 Jarrett and Bailie, “Prosecuting Computer Crimes,” 9. 92 Findlay and McKinlay, “Surveillance, Electronic Communications Technologies and Regulation,” 305-308. 93 Findlay and McKinlay, “Surveillance, Electronic Communications Technologies and Regulation,” 305-318.

Through these HRA, the UK tried to incorporate European Convention on Human Rights into its legislation

and set out some fundamental rights, such as right to life, liberty and security, insisting on the freedom of

expression and freedom from inhumane or degrading treatment. 94 The DPA grants employees the right to know what information the employers possess about them and

provides a framework for ensuring that their personal and professional information is processed and handled

properly. See the link below for more details of the act:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/29/pdfs/ukpga_19980029_en.pdf [accessed September 30, 2015]. 95 Findlay and McKinlay, “Surveillance, Electronic Communications Technologies and Regulation,” 308. 96 M. Ford, “Two Conceptions of Worker Privacy,” Industrial Law Journal 31, no. 2, (2002): 135–155. 97 David I. Bainbridge, Introduction to Computer Law, 5th ed. (Esse, England: Pearson Education Ltd., 2004),

430. 98 The so-called limited set of circumstances that promotes and legalizes employee monitoring are: to establish

the existence of facts, to identify unauthorized use of the communications system and to ensure the effective

operation of the same, to assess compliance with regulatory practices and procedures applicable to the

business, and to prevent and detect crime in the interest of individual, organizational and national security.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2000/2699/pdfs/uksi_20002699_en.pdf [accessed October 5, 2015]. 99 “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Donegall Pass Community Forum, (2006).

http://donegallpass.org/UNIVERSAL_DECLARATION_OF_HUMAN_RIGHTS.pdf [accessed October 5,

2015]. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a declaration adopted by the United Nations

General Assembly on 10 December 1948 at Palais de Chaillot, Paris. The Declaration arose directly from the

experience of the Second World War and represents the first global expression rights to which all human

beings are inherently entitled. It consists of 30 articles which have been elaborated in subsequent international

treaties, regional human rights instruments, national constitutions and laws.


23

premises, such as those as stated in the French law100 that “workers retain all of their private rights

in the workplace,”101 the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) continues to maintain a

paradoxical position with regard to surveillance and privacy.102 We find no specific EU legislation

regarding the organizational surveillance on employees and the consequent concerns of employee

privacy and protection of their personal data at work. However, the Charter of Fundamental Rights

of the European Union in Article 31 (1) states that “every worker has the right to working conditions

which respect his or her health, safety and dignity.” Article 7 & 8 of the same Charter proclaims that

“everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications”

(article 7), and “everyone has the right to the protection of personal data concerning him or her”

(article 8). 103 In the same way, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of European Union,

which came into force on the 25th of May 2018, regulate workplace monitoring and enforces the

appropriate security for the sensitivity of employees’ data and the risk associated with processing.104

It strives to find a balance between the financial and security interests of the employers and the

privacy interests of employees. The GDPR, its regulations on employee monitoring and its reception

will be further explained in the third chapter. Although European legislation aims to balance workers’

rights such as privacy with the functioning of the company that employs them, it remains subject to

further debate and research insofar as the interest of any company is mainly its own profit and growth.

There are significant differences between employee monitoring laws in various jurisdictions of the

Asia-Pacific regions. Though several of them have adopted regulations on the US model, where a

prior notice is sufficient for the employer to monitor, some countries like Japan have adopted their

own guidelines supplementing the legislative frameworks.105 A range of State and federal legislation

permits and regulates employee surveillance and the handling of personal and professional data. The

federal Privacy Act 1988 in Australia, which was applied to the private sector in 2001, permits

employee monitoring with an ‘employee records exemption’ for data connected to current or former

employment relationship and records.106 Besides, the state level privacy laws in Australia (e.g., the

100 France has not yet enacted any specific legislation on employee monitoring. Yet general labour and other

civil laws are in force, along with French Data Protection Act. For instance, DP Act declares that employee

monitoring must take due consideration of transparency and proportionality. See Miriam Wugmeister,

“Comparing the U.S. and EU Approach to Employee Privacy,” 2008.

http://www.mofo.com/resources/publications/2008/02/comparing-the-us-and-eu-approach-to-employee-

pri__ [accessed September 25, 2015]. French law on Background Checks shows that the employers may take

from job applicants only personal data that have a necessary and direct connection with the actual employment

situation in question. The regulation of automated treatments of data, where there is a possibility of

identification of individuals (the Data Processing and liberty regulation), the protection of the right to respect

private life (1970 amendment to Article 9 of the civil code), and the protection of individual liberties in the

enterprise (1992 amendments to the Labour Code) frame the use of electronic surveillance technologies in

the workplace in France. See Lawrence E. Rothstein. “Privacy or Dignity? Electronic Monitoring in the

Workplace.” New York Law School Journal of International and Comparative Law, 2000.

https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/privacy/PrivacyOrDignity(Rothstein).htm [accessed September 30, 2015]. 101 Findlay and McKinlay, “Surveillance, Electronic Communications Technologies and Regulation,” 307. 102 Findlay and McKinlay, “Surveillance, Electronic Communications Technologies and Regulation,” 305-318. 103 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter

/pdf/text_en.pdf [accessed September 28, 2015]. This charter, consisting of 54 articles under seven titles,

deals with human dignity, freedom, equality, and human rights and justice. 104 European Parliament, “General Data Protection Regulation,” Official Journal of the European Union, May

25, 2018. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679 [accessed May 28,

2018]. 105 Bevitt et al., “Monitoring Employees: Striking a Balance,” 53-59.

http://www.mofo.com/resources/publications/2008/02/comparing-the-us-and-eu-approach-to-employee-

pri__ [accessed September 25, 2015]. 106 Wugmeister, “Comparing the U.S. and EU Approach to Employee Privacy.” See the link given in footnote

111 for more details.


24

Health Records Act 2002) protect private sector employee records. The Workplace Surveillance Act

2005 (NSW) in New South Wales and The Surveillance Devices (Workplace Privacy) Act 2006

(VIC) in Victoria, which were adopted to provide guidelines for workplace monitoring and

surveillance, state that employers can monitor employees either overtly, with prior notice, or

covertly, with the approval of a court and proper consent of employees.107 However, any records and

data related to employees should only be collected, used, processed, stored and disclosed for the

purpose of the employment relationship.

The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, article 12, states that “the people should have

freedom of privacy of correspondence.”108 This Constitutional provision guaranteeing the freedom

and privacy of correspondence becomes ambiguous, however, as it lacks a systematic judicial

interpretation of the ways of implementation in real-life situations, such as employee monitoring and

the whole act of surveillance in the workplace. However, the Legal protection of privacy law in China

demands surveillance within the legal permit. The employee manual, in conformity with the Labour

Contract Law, contains the limit and extent of the implementation of monitoring systems and

practices.109 For the General Provisions of Regulations of the People’s Republic of China, for

Security Protection of Computer Information Systems, states in article 7 that “[N]o organization or

individual may make use of computer information systems to engage in activities harmful to the

interests of the State or collectives, or the legitimate rights of the citizens, nor endanger the security

of computer information systems.”110 Therefore, though China’s Safe Production Law imposes the

implementation of affirmative monitoring procedures in the workplaces for safety reasons,111

citizen’s lawful rights, elaborated in article 7 of the Administration Rules, states that “the

communication freedom and communication privacy of the user [of computer information networks]

are subject to legal protection. No entity or individual may use the internet in a way that violates the

law to harm communication freedom and communication privacy.”112 Thus, in China, the

‘Regulations’ (the 1994 Regulations on Safety and Protection of Computer Information Systems)

107 Bevitt et al., “Monitoring Employees: Striking a Balance,” 53-59. 108 The Constitution of the Republic of China, adopted by the National Constituent Assembly in 1946,

promulgated by the National Government in 1947, revised and amended in 2000,

http://www.taiwandocuments.org/constitution01.htm [accessed January 25, 2016]. The freedom and privacy

of correspondence of all citizens of the People’s Republic of China are protected by law and “no organization

or individual may, on any ground, infringe upon the freedom and privacy of citizens’ correspondence except

in cases where, to meet the needs of state security or of investigation into criminal offences” Constitution of

the People’s Republic of China, http://en.people.cn/constitution/constitution.html [accessed January 25,

2016]. 109 You Yunting, “Infringement on Privacy? Comment on Enterprise’s Monitoring of Employee’s Chat,”

http://www.chinaiplawyer.com/infringement-privacy-comment-enterprises-monitoring-employees-chat/

[accessed January 25, 2016]. See, Miriam H. Wugmeister and Christine E. Lyon, Global Employee Privacy

and Data Security Law, New York: Morrison & Foerster LLP, 2009, 284. 110 The Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council, Laws and Regulations of the People’s Republic of

China, Beijing: China Legal Publishing House, 2001, 2. See Laws of the People’s Republic of China,

Regulations for Safety Protection of Computer Information Systems,”

http://www.asianlii.org/cn/legis/cen/laws/rfspocis719/ [accessed January 25, 2016]. Wugmeister and Lyon,

Global Employee Privacy and Data Security Law, 284. 111 Law of the People’s Republic of China on Work Safety (adopted at the 28th Meeting of the Standing

Committee of the Ninth National People’s Congress on June 29, 2002 and promulgated by Order No. 70 of

the President of the People’s Republic of China on June 29, 2002),

http://english.gov.cn/archive/laws_regulations/2014/08/23/content_281474983042179.htm [accessed

January 25, 2016]. See also, Carlo D’Andrea, “The PRC Safe Production Law,”

http://www.eurobiz.com.cn/prc-safe-production-law/ [accessed January 25, 2016]. 112 Ron Cai, Jojo Bai, and Kevin Moore, “Employee Online Privacy in China,”

http://www.dwt.com/advisories/Employee_Online_Privacy_in_China_05_06_2009/ [accessed January 25,

2016].


25

and the ‘Administration Rules’ (the 1997 Administration Rules on Safety and Protection of

International Connection by Computer Information Networks) along with other directives of

Information Technology (IT), guarantee data and privacy protection of employees in the

organizational workplace.113

The Privacy Commission for Personal Data in Hong Kong, adopted in 2004 as per the Personal Data

(Privacy) Ordinance 1997, sets out guidelines for employee monitoring and insists that the

employer’s legitimate business interests must always be balanced against employees’ personal data

and privacy rights, and it asks for a transparent formulation of monitoring policies and practices.114

Countries like Japan (Law on the Protection of Personal Information 2005), New Zealand (Privacy

Act 1993), Mainland China (Employment Services and Management Regulations 2008), Malaysia

(The Employment Act 1955, The Personal Data Protection Bill 2009 – passed but not yet gazetted

to commence), South Korea (Communications Secrecy Protection Act of 1993, Act on the Promotion

of Information, Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection of 2001 and

Articles 17 and 18, Constitution 1948) and Taiwan (right to privacy – article 12, Constitution 1946

and in amendment in 1995; district court case law from 2003) propose the same frameworks of

proportionality, prior notification and proper consent for permitting companies to conduct employee

monitoring.115

Until previous decade, there was no specific law concerning or permitting employee monitoring and

the regulation of employee personal data in India. However, Article 21 of the Indian Constitution,

entitled “Protection of Life and Personal Liberty,” states that “no person shall be deprived of his life

or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.”116 It assures the right to live

with human dignity, free from exploitation and intrusion by others. Hence, the right to privacy is

implied in this right to life and liberty. Although the Constitution of India does not obviously grant

its citizens a fundamental right to privacy, the Courts have identified a right to privacy in other

existing fundamental rights, as we see in Article 21. However, in the 2017 landmark case of Justice

K S Puttaswamy (Retd.) & Anr. vs. Union of India and Ors., the constitution bench of the Honourable

Supreme Court has upheld the Right to Privacy as a fundamental right (under Articles 14-19 and 21

of the Constitution of India),117 subject to certain reasonable restrictions.118 The Information and

Technology Act 2000,119 which is amended in 2008 and named the Information and Technology

113 Wugmeister and Lyon, Global Employee Privacy and Data Security Law, 284. 114 Wugmeister, “Comparing the U.S. and EU Approach to Employee Privacy.” Cf. Bevitt et al., “Monitoring

Employees: Striking a Balance,” 53-59. 115 Wugmeister, “Comparing the U.S. and EU Approach to Employee Privacy.” Cf. Bevitt et al., “Monitoring

Employees: Striking a Balance,” 53-59. 116 Vidhan Maheshwari, “Article 21 of the Constitution of India – The Expanding Horizons,”

http://www.legalserviceindia.com/articles/art222.htm [accessed October 6, 2015]. 117 These rights range from rights relating to equality (Articles 14 to 18); freedom of speech and expression

(Article 19(1)(a)); freedom of movement (Article 19(1)(d)); protection of life and personal liberty (Article

21) and others. 118 Supreme Court of India, Case: Justice K. S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) & Anr. vs. Union of India and Ors.,

https://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/pdf/jud/ALL%20WP(C)%20No.494%20of%202012%20Right%20to%2

0Privacy.pdf [accessed October 10, 2018]; Vrinda Bhandari, Amba Kak, Smriti Parsheera and Faiza Rahman,

“An Analysis of Puttaswamy: The Supreme Court’s Privacy Verdict,” IndraStra Global, November 08, 2017,

https://www.indrastra.com/2017/11/An-Analysis-of-Puttaswamy-Supreme-Court-s-Privacy-Verdict-003-

11-2017-0004.html [accessed October 10, 2018]. Reasoable restrictions within the context of Article 21

consists of an reasonable invasion of privacy by a federal governament on the basis of a law which stipulates

fair, just and reasonable procedure. It demands also a three-fold requirement of (i) legality (existence of law);

(ii) need, (a legitimate state aim); and (iii) proportionality (rational nexus between the objects and the means

adopted to achieve them). 119 The Information Technology Act, 2000 (ITA-2000), as an act of Indian Parliament first notified in 2000

and amended in 2008 as primary law dealing with cybercrime and electronic commerce, provides legal


26

(Amendment) Act 2008, reaffirms the fundamental right to life and liberty (including right to

privacy) as guaranteed by the Indian Constitution. This requires the prior consent of employees

before collecting and processing personal data.

The IT Act of 2000, with its amendments in 2008, deals with issues relating to the payment of

compensation (Civil) and punishment (Criminal) in case of wrongful disclosure and misuse of

personal data and violation of contractual terms with respect to personal data.120 It enables a corporate

body to possess and handle sensitive personal data so long as it implements reasonable security

practices. Similarly, the Information Technology Rules of 2011 (Reasonable Security Practices and

Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) seeks to protect the sensitive personal data

or information of all persons.121 It identifies reasonable security practices and procedures for a person

or a corporate body to collect, receive, possess, store or handle information. Apart from these IT

Rules of 2011, a Personal Data Protection Bill122 was introduced in 2018 and at the time of this

writing is under consideration by parliament, yet to be enacted into law. This proposed Privacy Bill

may create a Data Protection Authority in India to monitor and enforce the proposed laws. A detailed

analysis of this Bill and the Data protection will be provided in the third chapter. As a final comment,

we may note that all legal bases of employee surveillance are based, on the one hand, on the premise

that they are necessary for the proper development of the employment relationship, in order to secure

business operations and comply with legal obligations, and founded, on the other hand, on the

principles of necessity (with prior consent and proper notification), proportionality and transparency.

However, the sanitizing role of surveillance123 in shaping organizational and social behaviours124 and

reshaping employee perspectives may be questioned in light of their unintended individual and social

consequences, which will be meticulously analysed in the later part of this research.

1.2 ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE FRAMEWORKS

This section presents five theories in recent literature in monitoring and surveillance. These are

clustered together as ‘electronic surveillance frameworks’ to clarify and analyse the legitimate and

expected use of surveillance in the organizational workplace. Although people, both advocates and

frameworks for electronic governance and monitoring computer/network records and data. It defines

cybercrimes and clusters them into three basic groups: those against the individual (email harassment, cyber

stalking, dissemination of obscene material, hacking, indecent exposure, network trespassing, etc.), against

organizations (hacking/tracking, possession and transmission of unauthorised information, cyber-terrorism,

etc.), and against society at large (scandalizing the youth by indecent exposure, trafficking, pornography,

etc.). “The Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008,” Ministry of Law and Justice, The Gazette of

India, 2009.

http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/downloads/itact2000/ it_amendment_act2008.pdf [accessed

September 30, 2015]. 120 Information Technology Act, 2000, http://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text.jsp?file_id=185999 [accessed

October 12, 2018]. 121 Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or

Information) Rules, 2011, http://www.wipo.int/edocs/lexdocs/laws/en/in/in098en.pdf [accessed October 12,

2018]. 122 Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, “The Personal Data Protection Bill 2018,” Government

of India, http://meity.gov.in/writereaddata/files/Personal_Data_Protection_Bill%2C2018_0.pdf [accessed

October 16, 2018]. Here after this source will be cited as The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018 with Article

number. 123 K.D. Haggerty and R.V. Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage,” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 3

(2000): 605-622. 124 David Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns: Examining Psychological Boundary Violations as

a Consequence of Electronic Performance Monitoring,” in Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace:

Controversies and Solutions, ed. John Weckert, 101-122 (Hershey: Idea Group Publishing, 2005): 102.


27

critics recognize the need for some form of monitoring in particular contexts,125 the possible extent

of the applications and devices used and the boundary between persistent and benevolent or insidious

and fair technologies remain a complex factor in the discussion of workplace surveillance. In the

following, we will first illustrate the five theoretical frameworks, then, elaborate them with an

analysis of the effects of electronic surveillance in the workplace.

1.2.1 The Metaphor of the Panopticon: Structured, Controlled Mechanism

The metaphor of the panopticon,126 first proposed in the early nineteenth century by Jeremy Bentham,

can help us understand the presence and effects of surveillance in the workplace. For, some of the

frameworks that have emerged in tandem with electronic monitoring are, potentially and actually,

linked to this paradigm. The aim of a panopticon, as a distinct architectural form, is to allow for

constant surveillance of all the inmates in a prison.127 Since, in this situation, people cannot determine

when they are being watched, they are forced to act as if they are constantly viewed and scrutinized.

Michel Foucault, referring to the panopticon metaphor, tries to show how our contemporary society

is structured as this kind of surveillance system, stating that we now live in the panoptic machine:

“We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its

effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism.”128 Without a

proper orientation toward Foucault’s understanding of discipline and the panopticon, the theorization

of workplace surveillance practices today becomes very hazardous. Certain parallels in the structures

of the panopticon and the monitored workplace are immediately apparent, such as “the employment

of Panoptic-like surveillance as an attempt to subjugate employees to the power of management [...

which] often instils a sense of powerlessness and fear among the observed.”129 Moreover, from the

observer’s perspective, the desired outcome permits easier control of the observed and, hence,

employees themselves feel that they are isolated in their own communication environment.130

The panoptic structure exposes the helplessness of individuals in the face of the overwhelming force

of institutions such as workplaces to establish the terms of life within their boundaries.131 Carl Botan

and Mihaela Vorvoreanu give an operational understanding of the panoptic effect, arguing that each

situation involves “(1) employee perception of being surveilled; (2) surveillance potential of the

125 Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns,” 102. 126 A panopticon is a prison built so radially that a guard at a central position can see all the prisoners. An

architectural design of a panopticon was conceived by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy

Bentham in the late 18th century. This design allowed for the observation of a large number of prisoners from

a central location without their knowledge of when and how often they were being observed. Foucault uses

this metaphor of the panopticon in his theory of surveillance (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The

Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1997). Here the subjects under surveillance become the source

of information rather than a participant in any communication. In the modern scenario of the organizational

workplace, communication technologies allow for an even greater monitoring of its employees without any

overt signs of surveillance. See Scott C. D’Urso, “Who’s Watching Us at Work? Toward a Structural-

Perceptual Model of Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in Organizations,” Communication Theory 16

(2006): 288. 127 Bentham emphasizes the totality of observation that, for him, unobserved space always encourages

unregulated behaviour. Hence, he writes that “cells, communications, outlets, approaches, there ought not

anywhere to be a single foot square, on which man or boy shall be able to plant himself – no not for a moment

– under any assurance of not being observed. Leave but a single spot thus unguarded, that spot will be sure

to be a lurking-place for the most reprobate of the prisoners, and the scene of all sorts of forbidden practices.”

Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 86. 128 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 217. 129 D’Urso, “Who’s Watching Us at Work?” 288. 130 D’Urso, “Who’s Watching Us at Work?”288. 131 Bart Simon, “The Return of Panopticism: Supervision, Subjection and the New Surveillance,” Surveillance

& Society 3, no. 1 (2005): 3.


28

technology; (3) management policy; and (4) maturation.”132 This panoptic effect is generated through

a suspicion of being always surveilled even in its absence. It also looks for the extent of employee

visibility and employer invisibility through the implementation of technology and the quantity and

permanence of records and their analysis through its performance.133 The effectiveness of

surveillance practices is determined by measuring the time and cost of data analysis, which is the

function of management policy. The maturation, finally, calls for the integration of this management

policy and surveillance technologies. In this particular context of panoptic relationship, which is

based on the disparity between the visible and the invisible,134 employees are vulnerable because

they are visible and “that vulnerability is magnified by the invisibility of the observer.”135 In this

regard, as Foucault rightly observes, “surveillance is permanent in its effects even if it is

discontinuous in its action”136 in the workplace.

Information technology, which is broadly used in any work context today, intrinsically turns out to

be surveillance technology when it is used “as a tool not just for work but for establishing and

enforcing a particular kind of power relationship and for producing desired effects.”137 As a result,

in the workplace, the desirable freedom of the employees is restricted, and strain may be placed on

the relationship between the employer and the employee. Botan and Vorvoreanu explain that

alongside the creation of false impressions, such as that the management is really interested in

quantity not in quality, the feeling and actual perception of being distrusted and being treated as

children become aloft in this particular context.138 Furthermore, increased uncertainty and reduced

workplace communication is also adequately observed in this panoptic surveillance.139 The various

and multi-faceted effects of surveillance, which is panoptic in particular, always include both the

desired or sought after and the unexpected or unwanted, and a detailed description of the same will

be exposed in the final section of this chapter.

1.2 2 Agency Theory: Process of Hierarchical Regimentation

Agency theory is a supposition or a theory developed in the 1960s and early 1970s that explains the

relationship between principals and agents.140 Agency theory focuses on engagements between the

principal (one or more persons) and the agent (another person), who are “assumed to be rational

economic-maximizing individuals,” to perform some work.141 It focuses on the way in which the

132 Carl Botan and Mihaela Vorvoreanu, “What Do Employees Think about Electronic Surveillance at Work?”

in Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions, ed. John Weckert, 123-144

(Hershey: Idea Group Publishing, 2005): 132-134. 133 Otis and Zhao, “Producing Invisibility,” 151. 134 Carl Botan, “Communication Work and Electronic Surveillance: A Model for Predicting Panoptic Effects,”

Communication Monographs 63 (1996): 298. 135 Botan and Vorvoreanu, “What Do Employees Think about Electronic Surveillance at Work?” 131. 136 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Penguin

Books, 1991), 201. This work was first published in 1975 as Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison by

Éditions Gallimard. This translation was first published by Allen Lane in 1977. 137 Botan, “Communication Work and Electronic Surveillance,” 299. 138 Botan and Vorvoreanu, “What Do Employees Think about Electronic Surveillance at Work?” 135-136. 139 Botan, “Communication Work and Electronic Surveillance,” 299. 140 The principal is the one who has the legal capacity to perform an act or empower an agent, who is capable

of comprehending the act to be undertaken, to carry out that act. Principals can be persons, corporations,

partnerships, non-profit organizations, and government agencies. The principal-agent relationship

understands that “the agent will perform for and on behalf of the principal, in which agents assume an

obligation of loyalty to the principal and principal, in turn, reposes trust and confidence in the agent.” See

“Principal-Agent Relationship,” http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~schuler/principal-agent.html [accessed January 10,

2015]. 141 Hans Landstrom, “Agency Theory and Its Application to Small Firms: Evidence from the Swedish Venture

Capital Market,” The Journal of Entrepreneurial Finance 2, no. 3 (1993): 205.


29

work is delegated from a superior – a principal, here the supervisor – to an inferior who does the

work – an agent, here the subordinate.142 A hierarchy of control is automatically generated to manage

business operations through a systemic approach. The problem in any action, according to this theory,

arises when there is a division of labour and orientation towards different goals within the

organization.143 For, the relationship between two parties is mostly described using the contract

metaphor144 and theory according to which the written or unwritten contracts in a particular

organization specify the rights of both the principal and the agent as well as evaluation criteria.

According to Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, this theory is concerned with resolving two problems that can

occur in agency relationships: “The first is the agency problem that arises when (a) the desires or

goals of the principal and agent conflict and (b) it is difficult or expensive for the principal to verify

what the agent is actually doing” and “the second is the problem of risk sharing that arises when the

principal and agent have different attitudes toward risk.”145 While the major difficulty in the former

category seems to be the inability of the principal to verify the agent’s appropriate behaviour, the

latter covers both the principal and the agent, given that they may prefer different actions as different

risk preferences arise.146

The key idea of this theory is that the principal-agent relationships entail both human/individual

assumptions, such as self-interest and risk aversion, and also organizational assumptions, such as

partial goal conflict among participants, efficiency as the effectiveness criterion, and so on.147

Therefore, on the one side, when the contract between the principal and the agent is outcome-based,

the latter is more likely to behave in the interests of the former; and conversely, on the other side, the

agent does the same when the principal has information to verify the agent behaviour.148 However,

one of the common elements in the principal-agent model, according to Gottschalk, is that “principals

are unable to monitor agents’ actions or information; the heart of these models involves setting a

wage for an agent without fully knowing the agent’s effort (moral hazard) or ability (adverse

selection).”149 This means that the principal places the agents’ behaviour under surveillance when he

is unable to possess complete information about him/her. Our major concern with respect to the

agency theory, in line with current surveillance practices in the workplace, is the principal’s

(employer’s or management’s) ability to monitor the agent’s (employee’s) behaviour due to the

increased use of present technological advancement. For present monitoring, in addition to observing

and measuring the behaviour of the agent, also tries and formulates the efforts to control them.

However, the assumption of agency theory that self-interest motivates all parties, both principals and

agents, is challenged when each and every move of an employee is monitored in the workplace. For

often, electronic surveillance in the workplace disrupts individual motivation and interest, which in

turn leads to conflicts between employer and employee.

142 Devasheesh P. Bhave, “The Invisible Eye? Electronic Performance Monitoring and Employee Job

Performance,” Personal Psychology 67 (2014): 608. 143 Landstrom, “Agency Theory and Its Application to Small Firms,” 205. 144 Petter Gottschalk, Knowledge Management Systems in Law Enforcement: Technologies and Techniques

(Hershey: Idea Group Publishing, 2007), 13. Cf. Landstrom, “Agency Theory and Its Application to Small

Firms,” 205. 145 Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, “Agency Theory: An Assessment and Review,” The Academy of Management

Review 14, no. 1 (1989): 58. 146 Landstrom, “Agency Theory and Its Application to Small Firms,” 205. Cf. Eisenhardt, “Agency Theory:

An Assessment and Review,” 58. 147 Eisenhardt, “Agency Theory: An Assessment and Review,” 59. 148 Eisenhardt, “Agency Theory: An Assessment and Review,” 60. 149 Gottschalk, Knowledge Management Systems in Law Enforcement, 13.


30

1.2.3 Procedural Justice (Fairness) Theory: Principles of Just Bustle

Among the three dimensions of justice, namely distributive, procedural, and interactional,150

procedural justice concerns people’s subjective evaluations of the justice of procedures – whether

they are in conformity with the norms of society in a fair process of social interaction and decision-

making.151 It refers to the “perceived fairness of the policies, procedures, and criteria used by decision

makers in arriving at the outcome of a dispute or negotiation.”152 Usually, distributive justice, which

refers to “the perceived fairness of the tangible outcome of a dispute, negotiation, or decision

involving two or more parties,”153 is discussed in relation to the organizations in which organizational

resources are distributed among personnel and considers their reactions to it. The major focus of

these discussions is the outcomes of distributive decisions, which cannot on its own provide a

complete picture of justice. For this reason, concerns about the processes through which decisions

are made form the basis of what is referred to as procedural justice.154 This is further defined as “the

perceived fairness of the procedures used in making decisions,”155 which refers to the ‘means’

whereby various ‘ends’ are attained, and in particular to an individual’s perception that an activity,

in which he/she is a participant, is fairly conducted.156 Fair procedures are said to be more “consistent,

unbiased and impartial, representative of all parties’ interests, and are based on accurate information

and on ethical standards.”157 This procedural fairness, which we call “just bustle,”158 marks the

novelty of the treatment deployed in any specific problematic context with legitimate expectations,

and does so in circumstances where a contrary statutory intention is clearly manifested.

150 E.C. Clemmer and B. Schneider, “Fair Service,” in Advances in Services Marketing and Management, vol.

5, ed. S.W. Brown. D.A. Bowen, and T. Swartz (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1996), 109-126. 151 Tom R. Tyler and Avital Mentovich, “Mechanisms of Legal Effect: Theories of Procedural Justice,” Public

Health Law Research, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2011, 12. Stanton explains this tripartite split of

fairness perceptions by reference to Niehoff and Moorman (1993), writing that: “Procedural fairness was

defined as the extent to which workers felt that the procedures followed by organizational decision-makers

were appropriate for assuring fair outcomes. Interactional fairness was defined as the extent to which workers

believed they had been treated with honesty, sincerity, and respect by organization decision-makers. Finally,

distributive fairness was defined as the extent to which workers felt appropriately rewarded for their efforts

in the workplace.” Stanton, “Traditional and Electronic Monitoring from an Organizational Justice

Perspective,” 131. See also Brian P. Niehoff and Robert H. Moorman, “Justice as a Mediator of the

Relationship between Methods of Monitoring and Organizational Citizenship Behaviour,” Academy of

Management Journal 36, no. 3 (1993): 527-556. 152 Jeffrey G. Blodgett, Donna J. Hill and Stephen S. Tax, “The Effects of Distributive, Procedural, and

Interactional Justice on Postcomplaint Behaviour,” Journal of Retailing 73, no. 2 (1996): 189. 153 Blodgett, Hill and Tax, “The Effects of Distributive, Procedural, and Interactional Justice on Postcomplaint

Behaviour,” 188. 154 Robert Folger and Jerald Greenberg, “Procedural Justice: An Interpretive Analysis of Personnel Systems,”

Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management 3 (1985): 141-142. See also, Stanton, “Traditional

and Electronic Monitoring from an Organizational Justice Perspective,” 131; C.L. Martin and D.H. Nagao,

“Some Effects of Computerized Interviewing on Job Applicant Responses,” Journal of Applied Psychology

74 (1989): 72-80. 155 Folger and Greenberg, “Procedural Justice,” 143. 156 Mary J. Culnan and Pamela K. Armsstrong, “Information Privacy Concerns, Procedural Fairness, and

Impersonal Trust: An Empirical Investigation,” Organization Science 10, no. 1 (1999): 107. 157 Blodgett, Hill and Tax, “The Effects of Distributive, Procedural, and Interactional Justice on Postcomplaint

Behaviour,” 189. 158 Procedural justice, in our view, also concerns people’s objective evaluations of the justice of procedures,

along with its subjectivity as much as it is about the compliance of fairness under just principles. So, it is a

“just bustle” between the fairness of decision-making and the fairness of interpersonal treatment.


31

Regarding surveillance in the workplace and the perception of procedural fairness, Gerald Leventhal

proposes a two-stage process.159 In the first stage, employees, based on the objective characteristics

of the system, develop a mental map of structural elements, such as who designs and makes decisions

concerning surveillance systems in particular situations, determines criteria of evaluation, takes steps

taken for the consequence analysis, and so on. In the second stage, employees evaluate the same

elements, applying procedural fairness rules about the consistency, flexibility, bias and the

compatibility of the system with the framework of their own moral and ethical values.160 In the same

way, as Folger and Greenberg (1985) elucidate, we can distinguish two conceptual perspectives on

procedural justice. The first “examines various dispute resolution procedures with respect to the types

of control they afford the disputants,” and the second, which is more structural in nature, “proposes

a list of procedural elements that contribute to fairness and a system of rules used in evaluating

procedural fairness.”161 Procedural justice in organizations can refer to objective (actual or factual)

justice and/or to subjective circumstances (perceptions of objective procedures or of the capacity of

an objective procedure to enhance fairness judgements) and the objective or subjective fairness of a

given decision.162

There is also an instrumental model effect for procedural justice, which claims that individuals

attribute no value to fair procedures independent of their association with fair outcomes.163 In this

case, electronic performance monitoring and control systems will be viewed as procedurally just

insofar as they adhere to certain predictors or principles and procedural rules and lead to fair

outcomes.164 Stanton, referring to Leventhal (1980), labels these predictors as follows: consistency

(over time and in different cases) in monitoring, accuracy (sufficient knowledge of job performance

as prerequisite) of knowledge of performance, monitoring control (the extent and degree of evidence

collection and presentation) and justifications (proportionality in allocation process and outcomes)

for monitoring.165 As today electronic surveillance is raising new concerns about privacy and

fairness, the model of procedural justice theory should be integrated into our analysis in order to

prioritize the values at stake in the process of monitoring employees.

1.2.4 Information Boundary Theory: Enhancing Central Contour

Information Boundary Theory (IBT) was developed in the context of a programme of research that

investigated the impacts of monitoring and surveillance technologies on worker privacy.166 Since

159 Gerald S. Leventhal, “What Should be Done with Equity Theory? New Approaches to the Study of Fairness

in Social Relationships,” in Social exchange: Advances in theory and research, ed. K. Gergen, M. Greenberg,

and R. Willis, (New York: Plenum Press, 1980), 27-55. 160 Providing consumers with voice and control over actual outcomes are the two contributing aspects of

procedural fairness. Mary J. Culnan and Pamela K. Armsstrong, “Information Privacy Concerns, Procedural

Fairness, and Impersonal Trust: An Empirical Investigation,” Organization Science 10, no. 1 (1999): 107.

Referring to the Personal Security Procedural Fairness Guidelines approved on 2010 (by Australian

Governament), the rules of procedural fairness require: a hearing appropriate to the circumstances; lack of

bias; evidence to support a decision; and inquiry into matters in dispute. See

https://www.protectivesecurity.gov.au/personnelsecurity/Documents/Procedural%20fairness%20guidelines.

pdf [accessed October 5, 2015]. 161 Folger and Greenberg, “Procedural Justice,” 144. 162 Mary A. Konovsky, “Understanding Procedural Justice and Its Impact on Business Organizations,” Journal

of Management 26, no. 3 (2000): 489-511. 163 Konovsky, “Understanding Procedural Justice and Its Impact on Business Organizations,” 493. 164 Bradley J. Alge, “Effects of Computer Surveillance on Perceptions of Privacy and Procedural Justice,”

Journal of Applied Psychology 86, no. 4 (2001): 797. 165 Stanton, “Traditional and Electronic Monitoring from an Organizational Justice Perspective,” 132-134. 166 Jeffrey M. Stanton and Kathryn R. Stam, “Information Technology, Privacy, and Power within

Organizations: A View from Boundary Theory and Social Exchange Perspectives,” Surveillance and Society


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information technology plays a more significant role today in the surveillance of worker behaviour

in organizations, it is more important than ever to understand information boundary theory, as it deals

with the collection and control of the information resources of workers. Information Boundary

Theory holds that “motivation to reveal or withhold valued information via a given medium follows

rules for ‘boundary opening’ and ‘boundary closure,’ [which] are dynamic, psychological processes

of regulation by which people attempt to control flows of valued information to other people.”167 In

this respect, the unique domain of IBT is to envisage individual preferences and motivations

regarding the amount and type of valuable information the individual would be willing to reveal,

then to foresee the nature of the relation between this information and the message audience, its

expected use, and the benefits of revealing information.168 In other words, IBT, with its internal

disciplinary bodies, provides room for enhancing a central contour in the discussion accorded with

multiple nuances and legitimate interests of different parties involved. This boundary represents a

symbolic line denoting the extent to which potential and actual vulnerable information is closed off

from or disclosed to the other.169 These lines become thick when the disclosure is less likely, and thin

when more so.170

Moreover, Stanton and Stam have developed motivational variants of IBT using a regulatory focus

perspective of promotion and prevention. For example, on the one hand, in a boundary opening

perspective, information is revealed in a way that focuses on promotion in order to achieve or solidify

gains, and on prevention in order to prevent or mitigate losses. On the other hand, in a boundary

closure perspective, information is withheld for the same purposes.171 In a nutshell, information

boundary theory holds that the “individual can articulate a personal ‘calculus’ of boundary

negotiation, i.e., the conditions under which permitting information flow is acceptable or

unacceptable and this negotiation boundaries depends in part upon the status of the relationship

between the sender and the audience (individual or institutional) receiving it.”172 This model of

information boundary theory will contribute to the determination of a boundary in dealing with

individual and organizational information, and establish the extent to which information may be

monitored, collected, stored, and further used.

It remains unclear, however, to what extent these boundaries can clarify, negotiate, and foster

relationships and meet expectations in the workplace. Identifying the boundary itself is the first

ethical challenge. Besides, so long as status differences in the workplace limit collaboration among

workers, and the complexity of the contrast between the personalized and relational as well as the

situational and the value-based approach to the problem persists, it becomes even more critical to

employ and apply IBT. Moreover, a necessary variable must exist to facilitate the boundary opening

and boundary closure of information and the self. Hence, this discussion is moved to another

framework of a workplace surveillance called the Structural-Perceptual Model (SPM).

1, no. 2 (2003): 154. See also, Jeffrey M. Stanton, “Information Technology and Privacy: A Boundary

Management Perspective,” in Socio-Technical and Human Cognition Elements of Information Systems, ed.

Steve Clarke, Elayne Coakes, M. Gordon Hunter and Andrew Wenn (Hershey: Idea Group Publishing, 2003),

79-103. 167 Stanton and Stam, “Information Technology, Privacy, and Power within Organizations,” 154. 168 Stanton and Stam, “Information Technology, Privacy, and Power within Organizations,” 155. 169 Sandra Petronio, Boundaries of Privacy: Dialectics of Disclosure (Albany, NY: State University of New

York Press 2002), 6-9. 170 Sandra Petronio and Wesley T. Durham, “Communication Privacy Management Theory,” in Engaging

Theories in Interpersonal Communication: Multiple Perspectives, ed. L.A. Baxter and D.O. Braithwaite

(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008), 338. 171 Stanton and Stam, “Information Technology, Privacy, and Power within Organizations,” 156. 172 Stanton and Stam, “Information Technology, Privacy, and Power within Organizations,” 155.


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1.2.5 Structural-Perceptual Model: An Integrated Regime?

The structural-perceptual model (SPM) of electronic surveillance, developed by Scott C. D’Urso in

relation to the panopticon metaphor, which we have already dealt with above, includes three primary

components: communication technologies, organizational factors, and organizational electronic

surveillance policies.173 These in turn yield panoptic effects in the organizational environment. Apart

from the individual perception of these effects, the structural-perceptual model aims to offer an

integrated overall consideration of all the components, and combines structural and perceptual

elements to make possible a full understanding of the impact of electronic surveillance in the

workplace.174 Through analysing these three components, the structural-perceptual model proposes

that the “relationship between key outcomes and the overall panoptic effect potential (from

communication technology, organizational factors, and policy) is moderated by employee concern

for surveillance.”175 In this regard, “the key components comprising the overall panoptic effect

potential contain inherent structural elements as well as the individual elements that employees

perceive.”176

Reflecting further on the structural-perceptual model, we find that the perceived concern for

surveillance may moderate individuals’ perception of electronic surveillance practices and policies

within an organization, as well as the organization’s willingness to give due respect to the employee.

However, SPM also lacks a critical criterion for determining what is expected and accepted for

different members of the organization and how the norms and policies are to be implemented

impartially. Again, it is also of prime concern to determine how to deal with social structures and

social actors/agents in the workplace (here every member of an organization) without compromising

its individual or subjective and structural or functional dimensions. The various models and theories

discussed above in the framework of electronic surveillance have shown their strengths and

weaknesses in the context of the organizational workplace, both individually and collectively.

Nevertheless, before beginning the task of framing a new structure and model, it is all the more

essential to consider currently predominant employee monitoring technologies and practices in the

workplace.

1.3 THE GADGETS OF “NEW” WORKPLACE SURVEILLANCE

The three groups described in this section include all the various technological ways and means

currently implemented in the organisational workplace. The number of organizations engaged in one

or another form of electronic employee monitoring has been steadily increasing over the past three

decades.177 The multitude of devices and approaches available today makes surveillance very easy

173 D’Urso, “Who’s Watching Us at Work,” 281-303. 174 D’Urso, “Who’s Watching Us at Work,” 292. 175 The following propositions are made on the basis of these three components: (1) that the overall panoptic

effect potential of communication technology is created through a combination of achievability and perceived

surveillance potentials; (2) that the combination of organizational need and perceived surveillance forms the

overall panoptic effect potential from organizational factors, and (3) that the combination of policy

restrictiveness and the perceived surveillance potential of an electronic surveillance policy gives rise to the

overall panoptic effect potential of organizational electronic surveillance policies. See, D’Urso, “Who’s

Watching Us at Work,” 293-298. 176 D’Urso, “Who’s Watching Us at Work,” 299. 177 Ifeoma Ajunwa, Kate Crawford, and Jason Schultz, “Limitless Worker Surveillance,” California Law

Review 105, no. 3 (2017): 735-776; Sherri Coultrup and Patrick D. Fountain, “Effects of Electronic

Monitoring and Surveillance on the Psychological Contract of Employees: An Exploratory Study,”

Proceeding of ASBBS 19, no. 1 (2012): 220; Christiane Spitzmüller and Jeffrey M. Stanton, “Examining

Employee Compliance with Organizational Surveillance and Monitoring,” Journal of Occupational and

Organizational Psychology 79 (2006): 245. See also J.M. Stanton and E.M. Weiss, “Electronic Monitoring


34

to conduct inside the workplace and makes it possible even to extend this monitoring outside the

workplace, going beyond the scope of the employment relationship. Among the common practices

of workplace surveillance, such as drug testing and biometric and electronic monitoring, today also

electronic surveillance practices are used to gather information by surreptitious, secret and stealthy

means and are of high concern because of their inexpensive and user-friendly nature.

Electronic surveillance, as analysed by Kizza and Ssanyu, generally includes: audio surveillance

(phone-tapping, voice over internet protocol, listening devices, etc.); visual surveillance (hidden

video surveillance devices, body-worn video devices, CCTV, etc.); tracking surveillance (global

positioning systems/transponders, mobile phones, radio frequency identification devices, biometric

information technology, etc.); and data surveillance (computer/internet, keystroke monitoring,

etc.).178 In other words, the present IoT-related monitoring devices include “ubiquitous network

records, browser history retention, phone apps, electronic sensors, wearable fitness trackers, thermal

sensors, and facial recognition systems.”179 Likewise, The recent development of sociometric

solutions are being used in the organizational offices to capture employees’ physical movements and

interactions everytime across desk spaces.180 These monitoring practices generally fall either overt

(the presence and applications of surveillance methods are made known and the devices are visible)

or covert (nothing is revealed to the worker).181 Both have challenging repercussions in the life of

employees. In the following, we will analyse some of the new data-gathering capabilities of

information technology and its practices in order to examine their expected benefits and possible

detriments with respect to employee life and organizational behaviour.

1.3.1 Proximity of Access Panels and Audio-Visual Surveillance

Access panels are electronic devices programmed to control entry into doorways, stairwells,

elevators, parking garages, or other restricted areas in the workplace to increase and stabilize

workplace security. They enable employees to access company facilities and enter into particular

areas and restrict access in case of specific threats, thereby securing sensitive areas and information

against unauthorized access.182 Either by electronic keypads or by swiping identification badges,

employees gain access to restricted areas. Access panels and access control points monitor what time

employees report to work and leave and enable employers to regularly review access logs, which

reveal employee’s misuse of time on the company premises. Sometimes, access panels are used to a

great degree to monitor and track employee behaviour by placing them on restrooms or break-room

doors, for instance to monitor how often and for how long employees use these areas.183 For these

reasons, the use of access panels in certain locations and zones is often hotly debated.

in Their Own Words: An Exploratory Study of Employees’ Experience with New Types of Surveillance,”

Computers in Human Behaviour 16 (2000): 423-440. 178 Kizza and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 1-18; West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work,”

628-651. 179 Kaupins and Coco, “Perceptions of Internet-of-Things Surveillance by Human Resource Managers,” 54;

Torin Monahan, “Built to lie: Investigating Technologies of Deception, Surveillance, and Control,” The

Information Society 32, no. 4 (2016): 229-240. 180 Moore and Piwek, “Regulating Wellbeing in the Brave New Quantified Workplace,” 311. 181 Dave Nevogt, “Employee Monitoring Software and Tools - The Top 10 Options,” 2015.

http://blog.hubstaff.com/10-employee-monitoring-software-options-monitor-activity/ [accessed September

28, 2015]. 182 Corey A. Ciocchetti, “The Eavesdropping Employer: A Twenty-First Century Framework for Employee

Monitoring,” American Business Law Journal 48, no. 2 (2011): 302. 183 Ciocchetti, “The Eavesdropping Employer,” 303.


35

Similarly, video or camera surveillance is used in the workplace both to single out people who are

acting suspiciously and also to help observers take pre-emptive action upon detecting some unusual

behaviour.184 It is mainly used by manufacturing and hospitality industries, and cameras serve as

deterrents to loafing around.185 Though such surveillance is primarily intended “to increase safety of

employees by decreasing violence and threatening behaviour and locating workplace risks and to

discourage drug and alcohol use, theft or sabotage, and otherwise to protect employer property and

monitor employee productivity,” it often amounts to an invasion of privacy and may “decrease

employee morale, increase stress, lead to distrust, and decrease productivity.”186 The Automatic Call

Dialing System (ACD), used typically in BPOs and call centres, can feed time and record calls, and

simultaneously tracks administrative work between calls.187 Besides, recording an employee’s

telephone call188 with a third party, which tracks the amount of time spent on calls, the number of

calls dialled, sent, and received, and breaks between giving and receiving calls, etc., though

conducted in the name of quality-control,189 always carry a great risk factor both for the employer

and the employee as well as concerned third parties. For when there is third party participation, the

liabilities of civil litigation may appear on the scene for its assessment. Hence, it is essential to

carefully assess the establishment and use of these surveillance systems and their full impact so that

the hazy lines between the hazard and security can be clarified.

1.3.2 i-Spy: Emergence of Epoch-Making Digitalized Surveillance190

Computer monitoring is likely the most widely used form of surveillance in the workplace,191 as

developments in snooping software products have made it possible to monitor employees and other

persons without their consent or even knowledge that they are being monitored.192 Computer-

184 George Reynolds, Ethics in Information Technology, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Thomson Course Technology,

2007), 130. See also Ronald E. Kidwell and Robert Sprague, “Electronic Surveillance in the Global

Workplace: Laws, Ethics, Research and Practice,” New Technology, Work and Employment 24, no. 2 (2009):

194-208; P. Kleve, R.V. De Mulder and K. van Noortwijk, “Surveillance Technology and the Law: The Social

Impact,” International Journal of Intercultural Information Management 1, (2007): 2-16; David Zweig,

“Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns: Examining Psychological Boundary Violations as a Consequence

of Electronic Performance Monitoring,” in Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and

Solutions, ed. John Weckert (Hershey: Idea Group Publishing, 2005): 101-122; K. Townsend, “Electronic

Surveillance and Cohesive Teams: Room for Resistance in an Australian Call Center,” New Technology,

Work and Employment 20, no. 1 (2005): 47–59; and J.M. Stanton and E.M. Weiss, “Electronic Monitoring in

Their Own Words: An Exploratory Study of Employees’ Experience with New Types of Surveillance,”

Computers in Human Behaviour 16 (2000): 423-440. 185 Dave Nevogt, “Employee Monitoring Software and Tools - The Top 10 Options,” 2015.

http://blog.hubstaff.com/10-employee-monitoring-software-options-monitor-activity/ [accessed September

28, 2015]. See also, John Kimani Gichuhi, James Mark Ngari and Thomas Senaji, “Employees’ Response to

Electronic Monitoring: The Relationship between CCTV Surveillance and Employees’ Engagement,”

International Journal of Innovative Research & Development 5, no. 7 (2016): 141-150. 186 Ciocchetti, “The Eavesdropping Employer,” 322-324. 187 R. Valsecchi, “Visible Moves and Invisible Bodies: The Case of Teleworking in an Italian Call Centre,”

New Technology, Work and Employment 21, no. 2 (2006): 123-138. See also, Gloria Lankshear, Peter Cook,

David Mason, Sally Coates and Graham Button, “Call Centre Employees' Responses to Electronic

Monitoring: Some Research Findings,” Work, Employment & Society 15, no. 3 (2001), 595-605. 188 Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns,” 102. 189 Ciocchetti, “The Eavesdropping Employer,” 321. 190 Mark Andrejevic uses the term iSpy, in his work “iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era,” to

denote the digital enclosure of this rapidly advancing technocratic era. For him it is a new, easy, and persistent

channel of monitoring. See, Mark Andrrejevic, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (Kanas:

University Press of Kanas, 2007), 212-240. 191 Ronald E. Kidwell and Robert Sprague, “Electronic Surveillance in the Global Workplace: Laws, Ethics,

Research and Practice,” New Technology, Work and Employment 24, no. 2 (2009): 194-208. 192 Kizza and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 7.


36

monitoring programmes can record every command and key-stroke sent to the computer by an

employee, translate these signals into data, and remotely transmit this information to the employer,

which can track the opened software applications including tracking passwords and usernames,

taking screenshots, and tracking all open windows.193 The demand for employee monitoring software

products is skyrocketing today, easing the access to persons and information.194 According to Kizza

and Ssanyu, “software products like Investigator, WinWhatWhere, and TrueActive can, once

installed, secretly record all activities conducted on a suspect computer, including Websites visited,

documents created, files deleted, and e-mails received and sent.”195 For instance, facial recognition

software, originally developed to help to identify (criminal) suspects and other such characters, is

now one of the many types of monitoring software used by employers in the workplace.196

The monitoring of e-mails and text messages, implemented via software programmes able to track

the content, timing, volume, and recipients of sent and received messages, is becoming very

common.197 These instant messaging services, which are often private, are scanned to track offenders

and spammers.198 E-mails and text messages are monitored to track productivity, to look for sexual

harassment and discrimination, to look for offensive language and pornography, and to monitor

language for the transmission of trade secrets or other confidential information.199 Filters and

firewalls are also designed to make employees more productive by curtailing non-work related

193 Ciocchetti, “The Eavesdropping Employer,” 307. See also Scott Cox, Tanya Goette, and Dale Young,

“Workplace Surveillance and Employee Privacy: Implementing an Effective Computer Use Policy,”

Communications of the IIMA 5, no. 2 (2005): 57-66; David Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns:

Examining Psychological Boundary Violations as a Consequence of Electronic Performance Monitoring,” in

Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions, ed. John Weckert (Hershey: Idea

Group Publishing, 2005): 101-122; and Sonny S. Ariss, “Computer Monitoring: Benefits and Pitfalls Facing

Management,” Information & Management 39 (2002): 553-558. 194 Sylvia Kierkegaard, “Privacy in Electronic Communication, Watch Your E-mail: Your Boss is Snooping,”

Computer Law & Security Report 21 (2005): 226-236. Monitoring software are easy-to-use free cloud-based

services allowing employers of on-the-job, including on-site and remote workers, to monitor and track.

According to Kizza and Ssanyu, “Wensense, a monitoring software company and one of the big eight

monitoring software developers that also include Baltimore MIMEsweeper, SurfControl, Symatec I-Gear,

Elron Internet Manager, Tumbleweed MMS, N2H2, and Telemate, reported a growth rate of around 33% per

year in 2000.” Kizza and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 2. 195 Kizza and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 8. 196 George Reynolds, Ethics in Information Technology, 2nd ed. (Boston, MA: Thomson Course Technology,

2007), 130. Some software used in today’s workplace are: Accountable2You (offers Windows and Mac

software to record and report applications used and websites visited); Ashnah Ltd. (offers the Windows

application ‘Spysure’ for keylogging, screen capture, and Internet monitoring with versions for home, office

or network); Cogilab (offers the Windows application SurfPass for Internet monitoring, access control, URL

blocking, and time metering for sectors including corporate, education and health); Covenant Eyes (logs

clients’ web usage and sends the end-user and two others a report of the sites visited and time spent online);

Cyclope (Computer monitoring and Internet filtering solutions designed to increase employee productivity);

GigaWatch (records keystrokes typed, applications usage and internet activity on websites and social

networks); and WorkExaminer (offers software for business to track employee Internet usage).

https://www.dmoz.org//Computers/Software/Internet/Monitoring/ [accessed September 20, 2015]. In

addition, there are products like Content Technologies, MIME sweeper, WordTalk World Secure Server,

Elfron Software Message Inspector, Trend Micor emanager and Ten Four TFS Secure Messaging Server, etc.

See Sylvia Kierkegaard, “Privacy in Electronic Communication, Watch Your E-mail: Your Boss is

Snooping,” Computer Law & Security Report 21 (2005): 226-236. 197 Scott Cox, Tanya Goette, and Dale Young, “Workplace Surveillance and Employee Privacy: Implementing

an Effective Computer Use Policy,” Communications of the IIMA 5, no. 2 (2005): 59. See also, Zweig,

“Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns,” 101-122. 198 A. Martinez-Balleste and Agusti Solanas, “An Introduction to Privacy Aspects of Information and

Communication Technologies,” World Scientific Review 4, no. 5 (2009): 8. 199 Ciocchetti, “The Eavesdropping Employer,” 308.


37

activities during work hours.200 The programme of content filtering201 and blocking allows the

supervisor to filter and block content that goes to or from a given host on the network, and then to

remotely freeze or lockup that host when there are dubious activities.202 However, when the tracking

and monitoring of personal mail and messages occurs using these programmes, which are not directly

linked to work-related matters, one’s personal rights are often threatened.

In the same way, ‘Internet and Clickstream Monitoring’203 tracks the web activity of an employee

over a period of time and can range in scope from the minimal to the all-encompassing. This form of

monitoring records each mouse clicks on each web page visited as a user navigates the World Wide

Web. Although employees are restricted from viewing and surfing offensive or otherwise

inappropriate content by this tracking, there is also a tension between employee privacy and employer

interests and potentially a severe curtailment of an individual’s personal freedom of expression. Still

another form of monitoring, called keystroke logging, occurs when key strokes are recorded and

made available to employers, who can access them using a logging programme which allows them

to enter a password and convert keyboard-based activities into text.204 Thus, in keystroke logging and

monitoring, every character that is typed, erased or deleted is logged and secretly sent to the central

monitoring server. Although its results are used to determine employee effectiveness and

productivity, this form of monitoring also flags keywords typical of harassment and bullying.205

Hence, these ever-present ‘watched over’ experiences of people in the organizational workplace are,

technically, brought into the i-spy syndrome,206 which again produces multiple challenges of

enclosure and disclosure. This problem of the digital enclosure and disclosure of ‘omnipresent’

surveillance, technically called the ubiquitous interactivity of the wired world, which mainly

comprises the commodification of the information, 207 will be critically analysed in the next part of

this paper.

The most recent and readily affordable forms of employee monitoring track social networking and

search engine use.208 This enables an employer to find, together with essential information about

their employees, various salacious or negative information about them, since the primary purpose of

these social networking sites is to publish personal information.209 Misuse of this information is today

200 Ciocchetti, “The Eavesdropping Employer,” 309. 201 Cox, Goette, and Young, “Workplace Surveillance and Employee Privacy,” 60. 202 Kizza and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 9. 203 Every session of web surfing generates a massive amount of personal information about a web surfer.

Clickstream analysis is the process of collecting, analyzing, and reporting aggregate data of the pages browsed

by a visitor on the web. This is possible because, whenever a user clicks anywhere in the webpage or

application, this action is logged on a client or inside the web server, as well as possibly the web browser or

the router. Along with its use of web activity analysis, it also used to analyze market research and employee

productivity and so forth. Hence, clickstream data are defined as the electronic record of Internet usage

collected by Web servers or third-party services. Randolph E. Bucklin and Catarina Sismeiro, “Click Here

for Internet Insight: Advances in Clickstream Data Analysis in Marketing,” Journal of Interactive Marketing

23, no. 1 (2009): 35-48, 36. 204 Ciocchetti, “The Eavesdropping Employer,” 315. 205 Ciocchetti, “The Eavesdropping Employer,” 316. 206 Mark Andrejevic, “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure,” The Communication Review 10, no. 4 (2007):

295-317. 207 Andrejevic, “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure,” 297. 208 Ciocchetti, “The Eavesdropping Employer,” 320. 209 For instance, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are now increasingly used to pass

and gather information. Facebook, for example, encourages its users to upload all personal information with

more intimate details on their profile page which cannot be taken back even if one wishes to do so, and

collects all this data into a central repository of information which is archived persistently and cumulatively.

In this way, sensitive and potentially damaging information is made public, such as users’ health conditions

or treatments, their birth dates (which could be used for identity theft), plans to take an outing on certain day


38

quite common. Employers now widely utilize these sites to screen potential and current employees

as these networks grow increasingly pervasive. In the workplace, information from social network

sites, particularly Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn, is tracked to filter employees on the

basis of their attitudes and aptitudes, which many holds infringes their autonomy and privacy. In the

same way, a word or a phrase entered a search engine is stored and could be released in the future.210

Though the quality of search results is amazing and progressively viewed and experienced as time-

saving, the concerned people are anxious about the personal information collected by search engines.

In this respect, given the huge amount of storage space available, companies and organizations save

enormous amounts of data about and their employees’ activities.

Cookies also function in this way. Cookies are files, small pieces of information that a web site stores

on a visitor’s computer. Within each cookie, the site stores, and then uses, the information about the

visitor’s activity.211 Cookies are used to track user preferences, habits, and identity. A central third

party, such as an internet marketing company, can track users across several websites and create

precise profiles of their interests. Likewise, spyware, small pieces of software installed on a computer

often without the consent of the user, have the same capacity to send information to a remote

database. They also determine and establish the user’s habits.212 Both cookies and spyware can be

used in the workplace to track employees’ activities on many web sites, which could be later retrieved

for manipulative uses.

1.3.3 Location-Based Services: From ‘on-the-job’ to ‘off-the-job’ Surveillance

Advances in mobile networking and positional technologies allow for what is called “ubiquitous

computing”213 and encourages information systems to interact in different locations. Location-Based

(which could be traced by burglars), finance status, ethnic, racial or religious affiliations, sexual orientations,

recreational use of alcohol, and so forth. See Tonis Vassar, “Privacy Concerns Regarding Social Networking

Services,” Privacy Issues of Social Networks, http://social-networks-privacy.wikidot.com/ [accessed March

12, 2015]. The risk lies here since this information can be accessed and further processed by virtually every

member of the social networks. LinkedIn, in the same vein, is a widely-used professional connection tool that

is currently the largest business-oriented social and professional networking, making it a huge platform for

connecting and sharing. It is used by recruiters and sales professionals, given that LinkedIn users, who share

both personal and professional information on this system, both want to be visible to recruiters and also hope

to find customers. Inadvertently blurting out confidential data in the system can damage the reputation of

one’s company or oneself and the content published could be used as a parameter to hire, deny promotion or

to terminate employees. 210 Search engines have the capacity to collect many terabytes of data daily. A terabyte is a trillion bytes. It

would have been absurdly expensive to store so much data in the recent past, but no longer. See Sara Base, A

Gift of Fire: Social, Legal, and Ethical Issues for Computing and the Internet. 3rd ed. (New Jersey: Pearson

Prentice Hall, 2009), 64. 211 Base, A Gift of Fire, 64. 212 Spyware often comes bundled with free software and automatically gets installed as browser helpers or

toolbars. It ultimately slows down the system and causes pop-up and advertisements at random, which

negatively affects the user, causing a lag in his work time. Martinez-Balleste and Solanas, “An Introduction

to Privacy Aspects of Information and Communication Technologies,” 9-12. 213 Computing technology is developed today in such a way that these means are available anywhere anytime,

anyone, completely interconnected, embedded in different environment, and has become the fabric of

everyday life. See https://www.ics.uci.edu/faculty/area/area_ubi.php [accessed September 18, 2015].

Ubiquitous Computing is defined as “a paradigm in which the processing of information is linked with each

activity or object as encountered. It involves connecting electronic devices, including embedding

microprocessors to communicate information. Devices that use ubiquitous computing have constant

availability and are completely connected.”

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/22702/ubiquitous-computing [accessed September 18, 2015]. One of

the ever-challenging risks of this ubiquitous computing is that the “timely and accurate location data for an

individual (both real-time and historical) [will be] made available.” Blaine A. Price, Karim Adam, and Bashar


39

Services (LBS) integrate the geographic location of an entity, human or nonhuman, with the notion

of a service.214 LBS are significantly related to ubiquitous computing and, by means of mobile

devices and fixed network infrastructure, allow people to locate others in range.215 Global Positioning

System (GPS) chips, an emerging technique of LBS, are being placed in many employee devices,

from automobiles to cell phones, in order to locate employees and track their movements.216 Even

the wireless appliances employees carry almost always contain a global positioning system and other

location devices that enable others, such as employers, to determine a person’s location and track his

or her movements.217 Along with GPS, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is also now often

used to track employees.

RFID devices in general “allow objects to be identified without visual contact and help in improving

and automating many processes.”218 Many objects today carry a tag and RFID readers integrate these

RFID tags with information systems. By using “several readers strategically deployed, the location

of tags can be tracked and consequently, the motion of the scanned people.”219 RFID tracks the

precise location of individuals or objects on a real-time basis can be known by triangulating satellite

signals.220 Real-time recording and surveillance is possible using these system trackers.221 These

devices can track them down at any time and even determine where they were at a particular time in

the past. In this regard, tracking devices shift or extend the surveillance practices from ‘on-the-job’

to ‘off-the-job’ particulars, and in this pose a major privacy invasion when employers track the off-

duty behaviour of employees. More critical reflections on the use and effect of these advanced

electronic devices will be offered in the next section, where we analyse the impacts of these

procedures, particularly in organizational behaviour. In the following, we will first consider the

theoretical arguments in favour of surveillance, then elaborate this my examining the effect of

surveillance in the workplace.

1.4 REASONS AND LOGICAL MEASURES BEHIND THE WORKPLACE SURVEILLANCE

This section identifies and examines the anticipated and widely accepted specific justifications of

surveillance. We divide these into three groups. We have perceived that employers adopt and adapt

a wide range of techniques and methods to monitor and learn the particulars – facts and specifics –

of employees and often unwanted access to their lives and information. Companies have valid

Nuseibeh, “Keeping Ubiquitous Computing to Yourself: A Practical Model for User Control of Privacy,”

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 63, nos. 1-2 (2005): 229. 214 Iris A. Junglas and Richard T. Watson, “Location-Based Services: Evaluating User Perceptions of Location-

Tracking and Location-Awareness Services,” Communications of the ACM 51, no. 3 (2008): 66. See also,

Jochen Schiller and Agnes Voisard, eds., Location-Based Services (San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann

Publishers, 2004), 1. Schiller and Voisard perceive Location-Based Services as “a recent concept that denotes

applications integrating geographic location (i.e., spatial coordinates) with the general notion of services.” It

allows one to acquire, for instance, location-based rout guidance and tourist information. Martinez-Balleste

and Solanas, “An Introduction to Privacy Aspects of Information and Communication Technologies,” 12. 215 Kidwell and Sprague, “Electronic Surveillance in the Global Workplace: Laws, Ethics, Research and

Practice,” 194-208. See also, D. Kushner, “Big Brother at Work,” IEEE Spectrum 41, no. 12, (2004): 57–58. 216 Reynolds, Ethics in Information Technology, 131. 217 Base, A Gift of Fire, 64. 218 Martinez-Balleste and Solanas, “An Introduction to Privacy Aspects of Information and Communication

Technologies,” 14. 219 Martinez-Balleste and Solanas, “An Introduction to Privacy Aspects of Information and Communication

Technologies,” 14. 220 Ciocchetti, “The Eavesdropping Employer,” 310. 221 It is called real-time surveillance because in several ways, including the use of very small Internet cameras

that record and transmit real-time pictures over the internet, it continuously tracks employee activities. Kizza

and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 9-10.


40

reasons and argue about their responsibility to provide safe and secure ambiance and unbiased

environment in the workplace.222 As Findlay and McKinlay observe, “employers regard control of

the workplace as their prerogative, including the right to protect and control their property, and the

right to supervise and manage employee performance in terms of productivity, quality, training, and

the recording of customer interactions.”223 In addition to that, employers are liable for employees’

actions, done with or without employers’ consent, during the time of employment.224 But why are

they so fixated or sometimes preoccupied with this? Surveillance will be accepted or rejected

depending on whether it is regarded, on the one hand, as a legitimate technology that allows managers

to care for everyone’s interests, or, on the other, as a powerful instrument of managerial coercion and

employee subordination.225

The most powerful legitimation of employer surveillance is to “guard the organization against crime,

fraud, theft, and to protect the integrity of business-critical information systems.”226 Surveillance

may also appear vindicated when one considers its productive and disciplinary powers;227 it can

discourage undesirable behaviours and promote desirable ones.228 We understand workplace

surveillance at this moment to mean “any systematic monitoring by management of individual

employees’ job performance, where carried out with an eye to ensuring compliance with

management expectations.”229 Yet to determine what constitutes an acceptable form of surveillance,

morally and rationally, is a matter of great concern. It is, therefore, all the more essential and

indispensable to consider some normative statements made by advocates of workplace surveillance

about the main purposes of the surveillance practices and the legitimate and rational arguments for

the same in the workplace. We group together and examine several of the most illuminative factors

contributing to and fuelling this organizational surveillance.

1.4.1 Promoting Measures: General Causative Factors of Surveillance

First and foremost the possibility of monitoring exists,230 and then, falling prices of its devices and

the experienced sweeping descent of the vendor ratio (the average price per monitored employee)

encourage the use of such technological means in the workplace.231 In other words, the

miniaturization of monitoring products and their user-friendliness enable anyone in reach to use these

technologies without much technical know-how.232 The principle that lies behind this is recognized

as ‘less costly and easier to implement’ in today’s tech-world. It is widespread also because some

222 Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns,” 112. See also, Carl Botan and Mihaela Vorvoreanu,

“What Do Employees Think about Electronic Surveillance at Work?” in Electronic Monitoring in the

Workplace: Controversies and Solutions, ed. John Weckert (Hershey: Idea Group Publishing, 2005): 123-

144; Sonny S. Ariss, “Computer Monitoring: Benefits and Pitfalls Facing Management,” Information &

Management 39 (2002): 553-558. 223 Findlay and McKinlay, “Surveillance, Electronic Communications Technologies and Regulation,” 306. 224 Samantha Lee and Brian H. Kleiner, “Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace,” Management Research

News 26, nos. 2, 3, 4 (2003): 73. 225 Sewell and Barker, “Coercion versus Care,” 934-935. 226 Findlay and McKinlay, “Surveillance, Electronic Communications Technologies and Regulation,” 310. 227 Eivazi, “Computer Use Monitoring and Privacy at Work,” 516-523. See also Ball, “Workplace Surveillance:

An Overview,” 87-116. 228 H. Oliver, “Email and Internet Monitoring in the Workplace: Information Privacy and Contracting-Out,”

Industrial Law Journal 31, no. 4 (2002): 321–352. See also Sewell and Barker, “Coercion versus Care,” 934-

935. 229 James Rule and Peter Brantely, “Computerized Surveillance in the Workplace: Forms and Distributions,”

Sociological Forum 7, no. 3 (1992): 410. 230 Vorvoreanu and Baton, “Examining Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace,” 8. 231 Kizza and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 2-6. 232 Stanton, “Traditional and Electronic Monitoring from an Organizational Justice Perspective,” 129.


41

employers anticipate that monitored employees will be more productive than unmonitored ones,233

even though there are studies purporting to prove both sides. The legal permission of conducting

surveillance for business purposes in many countries persuades and often favours employers.234 For

instance, Telecommunications Regulations 2000 provides ample opportunity to monitor employees

when this is done for the reasons of recording evidence of a business transaction, ensuring

compliance with regulatory or self-regulatory guidelines, maintaining training or service and

effective operations of the employer’s systems and preventing unauthorized use of the workplace

technologies.235 Jessica Fink observes that “the courts have adopted a surprisingly permissive attitude

toward employer snooping, issuing decisions that leave employers with broad leeway to monitor

employees without any legal sanction.”236

The over-sharing mentality of employees through social media and networks, such as Facebook and

LinkedIn, encourages employers to peer into their employees lives, often because of today’s display

culture.237 In the same vein, reputational concerns on the part of the employer motivate employee

monitoring, as there are ample opportunities and occasions where an employee may represent his/her

employer in many respects.238 There seems also to be a financial motivation for snooping, which

plays a large role during the hiring process itself.239 An employer’s reputation is more vulnerable to

disparaging statements or mischaracterizations by their employees. Apart from the expensive

endeavour of interviewing and recruiting, employers may end up wasting considerable resources due

to poor hiring decisions. Hence, researchers observe that responsible managers will conduct such

easy and cost-effective due diligence internet searches for potential employees before hiring or

promotion.240 In a similar manner, employers are keen to maximize profitability and efficiency, and

many believe they can do so in part by employee monitoring. Financial motives thus include avoiding

direct financial harms and protecting trade secrets and strategies. Therefore, monitoring in lieu of

promoting profit is a commonplace in today’s work scenario.

1.4.2 Proliferating Measures: Coercive Control and Caring

Monitoring is used in effect as a supervisory resource.241 It can be approached from two perspectives:

coercion and care. In this regard, the concept of ‘coercion,’ which is an act or practice of compelling

someone to do something through the use of force or threats, is seen as a radical perspective on

organizational surveillance, whereas the concept of ‘care’, which is an effort to do something

correctly, safely, or without causing damage, is viewed as a more liberal perspective on the same.242

233 Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” 87-106. See also, Kizza and Ssanyu, “Workplace

Surveillance,” 1-18. 234 Findlay and McKinlay, “Surveillance, Electronic Communications Technologies and Regulation,” 306-307. 235 “Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice) (Interception of Communications) Regulations 2000,”

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2000/2699/pdfs/uksi_20002699_en.pdf [accessed September 28, 2015]. 236 Jessica Fink, “In Defense of Snooping Employers,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law

16, no. 2 (2014): 582. Jessica Fink, Associate Professor in California Western School of Law, corroborates

these legal permissions with substantial proofs referring handful of cases (e.g., City of Ontario v. Quon) where

the courts create strong incentives and encourages employers to snoop into their employees, and some of

which even failed to establish clear legal guidelines and boundaries regarding what can and cannot do in the

surveillance practices (Fink 2014). 237 Fink, “In Defense of Snooping Employers,” 581. 238 Fink, “In Defense of Snooping Employers,” 577. 239 Fink, “In Defense of Snooping Employers,” 570. 240 Fink, “In Defense of Snooping Employers,” 559-563. See also, Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An

Overview,” 87-106. 241 Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns,” 112. 242 Sewell and Barker, “Coercion versus Care: Using Irony to Make Sense of Organizational Surveillance,”

938-940.


42

According to Myria W. Allen, “coercive control assumes that surveillance is needed to expose and

coerce unruly or deviant employees to constantly work hard.”243 Moreover, the resurgence of interest

in Labour Process Theory (LPT) 244 has played a role in bringing forth the idea of managerial control

as a form of coercion. According to Sewell and Barker, “the organizational surveillance of the few

watching the many is justified because it enables a small number of managers to exercise control

over a larger and potentially unruly mass of employees through the monitoring of individual

behaviour.”245 Yet we cannot simply overlook the risks of surveillance, allowing the more powerful

to dominate the less powerful as surveillance technologies become more convenient and easier to

employ. Marx rightly points out that “it is more likely to involve manipulation than direct

coercion.”246 For, the potentially self-serving desires of powerful employers may threaten and

intimidate their less privileged employees in even undemanding matters. The principle of

‘employment at will’247 also gives employers the legal freedom and justification to execute

surveillance.248

By contrast, a care-inspired understanding of surveillance focuses on its potentially positive practical

aspects, such as its fairness, effectiveness, and possibility it offers of drawing a clear boundary in

terms of its intrusions.249 For surveillance as a form of caring assumes that “surveillance protects the

many from the disruptive, lazy, or incompetent few.”250 Sewell and Barker argue in this regard that:

[O]rganizational surveillance could be legitimate as long as (1) it prevents antisocial individuals

from taking advantage of the organization and their colleagues, (2) its operation is invested in the

hands of an impartial third party who mediates the relationship between the principal and the

243 Myria Watkins Allen, et al., “Workplace Surveillance and Managing Privacy Boundaries,” Management

Communication Quarterly 21 (2007): 174-175. 244 Labour Process Theory generally analyses how a workforce’s labour power (its ability to work) is directed

towards the production of commodities (goods and services). Profit is the basis of this process, which is

accumulated through the extraction of the surplus value of labour. Here, managers try to control, on the one

hand, the way work is organized, and on the other hand, the pace and duration of work, which are crucial to

profitability. See “Labour Process Theory,” http://www.answers.com/topic/labor-process-theory [accessed

November 28, 2014]. 245 Sewell and Barker, “Coercion versus Care,” 938. 246 Marx, “What’s New about the ‘New Surveillance’?” 88. 247 The doctrine of employment at will is “based on the idea that the employer had the right to set virtually any

condition of employment for those who accept his wages, and to fire any worker for any reason.” H. Donnelly,

“Privacy in the Workplace,” Editorial Research Reports 1, no. 11 (1986): 218-219. We cited this from: Botan

and Vorvoreanu, “What Do Employees Think about Electronic Surveillance at Work?” 126. See also, Charles

J. Muhl, “The Employment-at-Will Doctrine: Three Major Exceptions,” Monthly Labour Review (2001): 3. 248 The Industrial Revolution planted the seeds for the erosion of the employment-at-will doctrine. When

employees began forming unions, the collective bargaining agreements they subsequently negotiated with

employers frequently had provisions in them that required just cause for adverse employment actions, as well

as procedures for arbitrating employee grievances. The employment-at-will doctrine avows that, when an

employee does not have a written employment contract and the term of employment is of indefinite duration,

the employer can terminate the employee for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all. Traditionally, and as

recently as the early 1900s, courts viewed the relationship between employer and employee as being on equal

footing in terms of bargaining power. Thus, the employment-at-will doctrine reflected the belief that people

should be free to enter into employment contracts of a specified duration, but that no obligations attached to

either employer or employee if a person was hired without such a contract. Because employees were able to

resign from positions they no longer cared to occupy, employers also were permitted to discharge employees

at their whim. Muhl, “The Employment-at-Will Doctrine: Three Major Exceptions,” 3. See also D’Urso,

“Who’s Watching Us at Work,” 288-303. 249 Sewell and Barker, “Coercion versus Care,” 938-940. 250 Allen, et al., “Workplace Surveillance and Managing Privacy Boundaries,” 175.


43

agent; and (3) all members of the organization both recognize the reasonableness of surveillance

as a course of action and trust in the impartiality of those responsible for its operation.251

Nevertheless, though surveillance as coercive control and as caring, discussed here, seem to provide

the best arguments for its vindication, its justification must be further discussed given the unresolved

problems of curtailed freedom, power suppression, and constrained behavioural patterns due to

anxiety, fear and irrational stress. For even the argument based on care, outlined here, still remains,

and in some cases leaves employees with an attitude of distrust. Its singular application thus seems

insufficient, again, since it lacks empirical accuracy and encourages the possibility of sliding into a

kind of sentimentality.

1.4.3 Prophylactic Measures: Productivity, Security, and Liability Alleviation

Employee monitoring and control developed alongside the evaluation of workplace design and is

symptomatic of changing technologies that often limit or reduce employee autonomy and

concentration to a managing elite.252 Referring to the rule of the ‘Taylorist system,’253 namely that

the unobserved worker is an inefficient one, Nikil Saval writes that monitoring prevents workers

from sabotaging and disrupting the modes of production.254 Surveillance motivates employees to

work hard. For managers are able to fairly evaluate performance by obtaining a clear picture of

employee actions and outcomes through monitoring, and the timely intervention of managers, when

needed, can alleviate unwanted tension over the expected productivity.255 Yet a kind of natural

curiosity about what others do256 also motivates surveillance, and most important for our subject of

interest here are its legal and economic frameworks.257

Prophylactic measures of surveillance are also meant to prevent legal exposure. The most serious

problem that a company faces is the danger of economic loss due to a misuse of resources.258 A

251 Sewell and Barker, “Coercion versus Care,” 940. 252 Alex Rosenblat, Tamara Kneese, and Danah Boyd, “Workplace Surveillance,” Data & Society Working



October 15, 2015]. 253 Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose mission was to map the knowledge of how a task was done by identifying,

fragmenting and regimenting workflows and deploy methods of ‘performance monitoring’ to reach

production targets (Graham Sewell, “Nice Work? Rethinking Managerial Control in an Era of Knowledge

Work,” Organization 12, no. 5 (2005): 691), was a measurement-obsessed mechanical engineer and an

efficiency consultant to various businesses in the United States. He gave an actionable answer to the question

of what structures and technologies can ensure efficiency and integrity in the organization of business and

labour. Elia Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: the Case of the Workplace,” in Surveillance as Social Sorting:

Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination, ed. David Lyon (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 48. 254 Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2014), 42. 255 Lee and Kleiner, “Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace,” 78. 256 G. Gumbert and S.J. Drucker, “The Demise of Privacy in a Private World,” in Cyberethics: Social and

Moral Issues in the Computer Age, ed. R.M. Baird, R. Ramsower and S.E. Rosenbaum (New York:

Prometheus Books, 2000), 171-197. 257 Bernd Carsten Stahl, et al., “Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: If People Don’t Care, Then What is

the Relevance?” in Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions, ed. John Weckert

(Hershey: Idea Group of Publishing, 2005), 64. See also D’Urso, “Who’s Watching Us at Work,” 285. 258 Bernd Carsten Stahl and others view that the “abuse of company resources includes accessing irrelevant

Websites, chatting, gaming, downloading mp3 files, etc. and this problem is sufficiently serious to warrant

the invention of new terms to denote it, terms such as ‘cyber-slacking’ or ‘cyber-slouching’” (Stahl, et al.,

“Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace,” 64). This phenomenon is also called “cyber-loafing.” Cyber-

loafing generally refers to “the actions of employees who use their internet access at work for personal use

while pretending to do legitimate work.” Today, terms such as cyber-slacking, cyber-bludging and cyber-

slouching are also used to portray the phenomenon of cyber-loafing. See


44

majority of scholars, including McHardy et al.,259 hold that employee monitoring leads to greater

organizational security, as “corporations that do not adequately secure their systems risk unwanted

dissemination, retrieval, or modification of private information.”260 When this information is

monitored, security breaches can be detected and halted.261 Fraudulent activity is also a real risk here,

as employees possess and have access to sensitive personal and organizational information, which

could be misused or sold to a third party, in either case causing heavy liabilities for employers.262

Therefore, the top reported reasons for surveillance concern performance, productivity, and security.

Video camera surveillance, for example, is particularly used to minimize theft, curtail sabotage263

and thwart vandalism.264 Christopher McHardy and others are of the same opinion that “increasing

attacks, robberies, violence, workplace mishaps, other workplace safety issues, and associated

liabilities and damages provide motivation for employers to monitor the workplace.”265 There is also

a possibility that proprietary information about business strategy data integrity and consumer

confidentiality might be revealed. In other words, safeguarding confidential information and

potential legal liability resulting from employee computer misuse or misconduct are often regarded

as key motivating factors for employee monitoring. Thus, monitoring becomes a risk-management

tool and is used to limit cost and risk, protect value and maintain quality.266 Though employers

regularly offer employees incentives and enticements to legitimately induce them to submit to

monitoring and snooping, these approaches do not mean that employees should agree that all facets

of their private lives should be monitored.

To wrap up this discussion of contributing factors, we can say that the workplace has become a

carefully observed space, with the ‘sharp-eyed watchdogs’ of various mechanisms being used to

ensure a lawsuit-proof workplace. Trends such as financial pressures and risk factors have driven the

http://www.techopedia.com/definition/2390/cyberloafing [accessed December 5, 2014]. See also, J.M.

Stanton and E.M. Weiss, “Electronic Monitoring in Their Own Words: An Exploratory Study of Employees’

Experience with New Types of Surveillance,” Computers in Human Behaviour 16 (2000): 424; Botan and

Vorvoreanu, “What Do Employees Think about Electronic Surveillance at Work?” 123-144; and S. Elizabeth

Wilborn, “Revisiting the Public/Private Distinction: Employee Monitoring in the Workplace,” Georgia Law

Review 32 (1998): 825-887. It is also to be noted that, according to Kizza and Ssanyu, 29.2% monitor for

productivity, simply because many believe that employees spent a lot of time doing their own thing while at

work, and 3.1% monitor to prevent personal use of company computers and other articles for unproductive

activities. 29.2% monitor for theft of company property, while 21.5% monitor for espionage. In addition to

this, while security is an economically motivated argument for surveillance, as it is believed to discourage

misuse, prevent theft, secure proper access, etc., other reasons are also given prime importance, such as

performance review (9.2%) and harassment prevention (6.2%), both between employers and employees and

among employees. Kizza and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 5-6. 259 Cristopher McHardy, Tina Giesbrecht and Peter Brady, “Workplace Monitoring and Surveillance,”

McCarthy Tétrault, 2015. http://www.mccarthy.ca/pubs/Monitoring_and_Surveillance.pdf [accessed

October 2, 2015]. Part of this paper, prepared by Christopher McHardy, is adapted from “New Privacy

Legislation in the Workplace: Issues of Surveillance and Monitoring” authored by Nancy A. Trott and Rosalie

A. Cress. 260 Kristen Martin and R. Edward Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” Journal of Business

Ethics 43 (2003): 354. 261 Mark Sanderson, “Big Brother’s Day at the Office,” Computer Fraud and Security 12 (2000): 9-11. 262 Rohnda Turner, “Employee Monitoring: An Essential Component of Your Risk Management Strategy,”

Deep Software (2007): 4. See http://www.softactivity.com/employee-monitoring-softactivity.pdf [accessed

December 5, 2013]. See also, S. Elizabeth Wilborn, “Revisiting the Public/Private Distinction: Employee

Monitoring in the Workplace,” Georgia Law Review 32 (1998): 825-887. 263 Frederick S. Lane III, The Naked Employee: How Technology is Compromising Workplace Privacy (New

York: Amacom, 2003), 11-12. 264 Stanton and Weiss, “Electronic Monitoring in Their Own Words,” 424. 265 McHardy, Giesbrecht and Brady, “Workplace Monitoring and Surveillance,” 2005. 266 Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” 93.


45

increase in monitoring. All these types of monitoring practices noted above, as Al-Rjoub and others

have demonstrated, can be grouped into various categories: those which focus on performance

(measuring time used on computer, keystrokes, content on telephone, etc.), those which focus on

employee behaviour (measuring the resources usages, error predisposition, location tracking, etc.),

those which focus on employee characteristics (truthfulness, state of health, etc.).267 Though the

predominance of surveillance is often justified in terms of the reasons stated above, namely to

improve employee behaviour and create a peaceful and encouraging environment in the workplace,

they are often regarded as minimum standard motives compared to the impacts and consequences of

their results.

1.5 THE AFTERMATH: PROS-CONS POLEMICS OF WORKPLACE SURVEILLANCE

This section surveys the desired and undesired effects of surveillance practices and the issues to

which they give rise. Since employers and employees possess different rights and interests that often

appear in contrast to one another in particular situations, the efficacy of this practice is determined

by considering the impacts and consequences and the goals achieved. For judicious employers who

are suspicious of their employees may strike against cautious employees with a palliative sentiment

in any milieu. An American Management Association Survey examining workplace surveillance

practices at different levels is also reviewed in order to capture the entire picture that is prevalent

today.

1.5.1 The Expected Benefits of Surveillance

Many of the reasons for or causative factors of surveillance, which we have discussed above, appear

as its benign effects as well. Surveillance is regarded as a management technique useful in ensuring

quality service and increased productivity268 and guaranteeing protection from theft, legal liabilities

and over expenditures due to fraud, dishonesty, or misconduct.269 For instance, software filters used

in computers restrict online shopping and the use of social networks during work hours. A GPS

device in a vehicle, in the same way, allows dispatchers to give specific location directions to the

drivers.270 Systems of surveillance track employees’ positions in time and space and expose

employees who are ‘working hard’ and those who are ‘not pulling their weight.’271 Monitoring

employee internet use ensures that employees use it only for employment related activities. It also

obstructs external encroachment by way of data transactions and blocks the sensitive, confidential

267 Hamed Al-Rjoub, Arwa Zabian and Sami Qawasmeh, “Electronic Monitoring: The Employees Point of

View,” Journal of Social Sciences 4, no. 3 (2008): 190. 268 Sewell and Barker, “Coercion versus Care,” 939. See also, Julie A. Flanagan, “Restricting Electronic

Monitoring in the Private Workplace,” Duke Law Journal 43, no. 6 (1994): 1260; Michael Levy,

“Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Power through the Panopticon,”

http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/impact/s94/students/mike/mike_paper.html [accessed October 12, 2015]; R.L.

Worsnop, “Privacy in the Workplace,” CQ Researcher (1993, November 19): 1025. 269 Allen, et al., “Workplace Surveillance and Managing Privacy Boundaries,” 175, 186. See also Findlay and

McKinlay, “Surveillance, Electronic Communications Technologies and Regulation,” 306-309; Seumas

Miller and John Weckert, “Privacy, the Workplace and the Internet,” Journal of Business Ethics 28 (2000):

256; and Jitendra M. Mishra and Suzanne M. Crampton, “Employee Monitoring: Privacy in the Workplace?”

S.A.M. Advanced Management Journal 63, no. 3 (1998): 4-15. 270 Richard Alaniz, “The Advantages and Pitfalls of Employee Monitoring,” Fleet Financials, 2008.

http://www.fleetfinancials.com/article/story/2008/07/the-advantages-and-pitfalls-of-employee-

monitoring.aspx [accessed October 12, 2015]. 271 Sewell and Barker, “Coercion versus Care,” 939.


46

and sometimes dangerous information being received or sent outside of the company.272 Monitoring

employee phone calls gives insight into how employees interact with their colleagues.

A study conducted by Allen et al. regarding workplace surveillance, collecting data from 154 face-

to-face interviews with employees from a range of organizations in the United States, reveals that

68% of respondents feel that the surveillance is beneficial, while 17% gave a mixed reaction, 10%

appeared ambivalent and 6% were sad. However, among those who indicated surveillance as

beneficial or necessary, 74% are managers while only 26% are non-managers.273 This means that,

from management perspectives, employee monitoring is needed to sustain a competitive and

productive workplace. Although the obvious beneficiary of employee monitoring is the

employer/management, since monitoring complies with set policies and improves quality and

performance, it also can be quite useful to employees as it motivates them to do their jobs more

effectively and make them feel accountable in their work. For the data collected through monitoring

is increasingly used to coach employees for better and more accurate performance and behaviour in

the workplace.274 Along with improving work practices, it enables companies to “get rid of ‘dead

wood’, workers who are not doing their fair share of the work.”275 According to Michale Smith and

Benjamin C. Amick, “monitoring, and its related motivational process such as feedback, goal setting

and performance evaluation, are keys to the success of electronic workplace enhancement.”276 It leads

to more objective and fact-based feedback and performance appraisal.277 Effective monitoring thus

provides effective feedback and improved performance. In addition, providing an unbiased

evaluation and preventing emotional break ups is said to be another major advantage of electronic

monitoring.278 It also marks the accuracy of the information collected and the generality of the system

commonly used to gather data.

Electronic monitoring systems allow businesses to have good transactions, avoid mortgages and

liabilities, conduct needed investigations and interactions, and help to ensure their success in a

competitive global environment. In the computer monitoring debate, Sonny S. Ariss argues in favour

of surveillance, saying: it prevents misuse of company resources; ensures that company security is

not breached; guards against legal and economic liabilities resulting from employee communication

and other activities; and keeps performance up to par.279 Also, Julie A. Flanagan opines that

computer-based monitoring can “chart future workloads to increase productivity [...] reduces the

need for managers to give personal attention to employees because computer can provide feedback

[...] and can improve compliance with company policies and safety guidelines.”280 In studying

employee behaviour as a psychological scientist, Devasheesh P. Bhave, found an association of high

performance with employee monitoring and writes that workers monitored more frequently perform

272 Bahaudin G. Mujtaba, “Ethical Implications of Employee Monitoring: What Leaders Should Consider,”

Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship 8, no. 3 (2003): 34. 273 Allen et al., “Workplace Surveillance and Managing Privacy Boundaries,” 183. 274 Miller and Weckert, “Privacy, the Workplace and the Internet,” 259. See also, K.B. DeTienne, “Big Brother

or Friendly Coach,” Futurist 27 (1993): 33-37. 275 Miller and Weckert, “Privacy, the Workplace and the Internet,” 260. 276 Michale J. Smith and Benjamin C. Amick III, “Electronic Monitoring at the Workplace: Implications for

Employee Control and Job Stress,” in Job Control and Worker Health, ed. Stephen L. Sauter, Joseph Hurrell

and Cary Cooper (Chichester: Wiley, 1990), 285. 277 Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns,” 114. See also, B.P. Neihoff and R.H. Moorman, “Justice

as a Mediator of the Relationship between Methods of Monitoring and Organisational Citizenship

Behaviour,” Academy of Management Journal 36 (1993): 527-556. 278 Miller and Weckert, “Privacy, the Workplace and the Internet,” 260. See also Worsnop, “Privacy in

the Workplace,” 1025. 279 Ariss, “Computer Monitoring: Benefits and Pitfalls Facing Management,” 555-556. 280 Flanagan, “Restricting Electronic Monitoring in the Private Workplace,” 1260-1262.


47

better than unmonitored workers.281 Nevertheless, he continues that “although the results of this study

indicate a positive association between supervisory use of Electronic Performance Monitoring and

employee performance dimensions, excessively high levels of [... its] use may be detrimental to

employee performance on account of fairness and autonomy concerns.”282 Similarly, even without

advanced electronic intimation, there is an automatic electronic trail created by all transactions done

in and through the internet and other electronic devices that allow others to peep into our lives at any

time they wish. This is a discomforting fact that both employers and employees often forget. The

Exhibit-2 below charts the main contributors of electronic surveillance in the organizational

workplace.

Exhibit-2 Contributors and Benefits of Electronic Surveillance

The 2009 Electronic Business Communication Policies & Procedures Survey283 surprisingly suggests

the relevance of employers’ security concerns, citing that 14% of employees admit to misusing

281 Bhave, “The Invisible Eye?” 605-635. Bhave discovered a correlation between electronic monitoring

systems and the presence of the employer. If employees are under the impression that they are under

surveillance 24/7 through these practices, they are encouraged and motivated to perform at their best in the

workplace. Bhave observed and analysed call quality assessments from a call centre for about three months

with the assistance of a third-party that evaluate the call quality for standardized measures adherent to

company protocols. He found, after analyzing over 4,200 calls from 248 employees, that the performance

ratings were better in those who were frequently monitored. However, it is also mentioned that monitoring

facilitates performance mainly for simple tasks and hinders performance for complex tasks. He also observed,

in addition, that the managers place higher emphasis on quantitative aspects of work lowering the focus on

quality of the work being done. Bhave, “The Invisible Eye?” 605-635. 282 Bhave, “The Invisible Eye?” 629. 283 2009 Electronic Business Communication Policies & Procedures Survey is conducted by The ePolicy

Institute in collaboration with and supported by American Management Association. Among the 586

companies participated in the survey, 24% are with 100 or fewer workers, 22% with 101-500, 10% with 501-

1000, 8% with 1001-2500, 8% with 2501-5000, and 29% with 5001 or more.

http://www.epolicyinstitute.com/2009-electronic-business-communication-policies-procedures-survey-

results [accessed October 25, 2015].

Top contributing factors to and expected benefits of workplace surveillance

➢ In relation to the organization, it is expected to:

• Enhance productivity, improve performance and control quality

• Prevent fraudulent activities and theft of property and equipment

• Ensure responsible use of organization’s assets (risk management tool)

• Guarantee rule abiding employees

• Protect organization’s intellectual property and reputation

• Reduce liability costs and increases financial stability

• Function as a supervisory resource and hence as management process

• Provide a professional environment

➢ In relation to employees, it is expected to:

• Increase employee safety and security

• Support to do the tasks, develop and reach goals

• Give adequate feedbacks and to reward good employees

• Protect from harassment, threats and from loafers

• Ensure fairness in employment


48

proprietary information and intellectual property of the company by means of external third-party

communication, and an additional 6% engage in transmitting customers’ primary and confidential

data to outsiders. Moreover, 61% of businesses use policy governing the extent of exposure of

company secrets and confidential information; another 41% have policies pertaining to business-

related social networking sites, and 54% regulate personal social networking sites during work

hours.284 Furthermore, and more to the point here, 40% of organizations establish written e-mail

etiquette (netiquette)285 policies and 30% launch guidance for cell phone and language uses in

internal and external communication. The deplorable irony, however, of interest in our discussion

here, is that both intended and unintended fraudulent activities and misbehaviours still continue and

alarmingly grow regardless of prior warnings and precautions. Rules and regulatory measures are

more and more being implemented to govern and control employee behaviour and to retain business

particulars in various situations, especially concerning litigation, productivity, risk alleviation and

security preservation. As described by Johnathan Yerby and S. McEvoy,286 however, one persistent

and, in fact, mounting dilemma in workplace monitoring is that despite employees’ being well

informed about monitoring, many still let their guard down and commit acts that subject them to

disciplinary action. This reminds also the inadequacy of surveillance practices, which again brings

the scope of further research in the discussion of the effectiveness of surveillance practices.

1.5.2 The Clustering of Invisible Consequences

Though many companies and managers believe that surveillance practices alter employee behaviour,

in most cases, as studies show, this objective is not achieved; instead, surveillance practices have

been shown to cause behavioural bondage in the workplaces. These unintended, often undesired

effects are generated and made worse when workplace surveillance is introduced without adequate

justification, consultation and controls. The consistent business need and lack of alternative

approaches in a given situation (e.g., in professions where human lives are at high risk) may probe

to implement reasonable and justifiable monitoring practices. Nevertheless, these practices have

challenged conventional understandings of the relationship between the employer and the

employee287 and between technology and human life by suffusing the workplace with power relations

and the consequences of this new climate. Ken Simpson and Marta Byrski substantiate this impact,

saying that “electronic workplace monitoring is often undertaken for largely positive reasons,

frequently related to productivity enhancement, but tends to result in unforeseen damage to

workplace relationships, [...] and deteriorating organizational culture.”288 Although monitoring,

along with the expectations of employers, does in certain ways benefit employees, as it keeps them

284 With regard to the use of social networks, 60% of business executives surveyed by Deloitte, LLP in 2009,

expressed a belief that they have the right to know their employees’ activities online. However, in contrast to

that, 53% of employees feel “social networking pages are none of an employer’s business.” See “Social

Networking and Reputational Risk in the Workplace,” Deloitte LLP 2009 Ethics & Workplace Survey Results,

2009, http://www.csrwire.com/press_releases/26972-Deloitte-s-2009-Ethics-Workplace-Survey-Examines-

the-Reputation-Risk-Implications-of-Social-Networks [accessed October 30, 2015]. 285 Netiquette is a portmanteau word denoting network etiquette or internet etiquette. It refers roughly to the

informal rules of the internet usage and behaviour adjacent to it, reminding the do’s and don’ts of online

communication. http://www.albion.com/netiquette/ [accessed October 25, 2015]. See also Sally Hambridge,

“Netiquette Guidelines,” Network Working Group, 1995, http://tools.ietf.org/pdf/rfc1855.pdf [accessed

October 25, 2015]. 286 Yerby, “Legal and Ethical Issues of Employee Monitoring,” 44-55; S. McEvoy, “E-mail and Internet

Monitoring and the Workplace: Do Employees have a Right to Privacy?” Communications and the Law 24,

no. 2 (2002): 69-84. 287 Kizza and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 12-14. See also Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness

Concerns,” 102; Stanton, “Traditional and Electronic Monitoring from an Organizational Justice

Perspective,” 130-134. 288 Simpson and Byrski, “The 21st Century Workplace,” 22.


49

efficient and focused and discourages unethical or illegal conduct, it becomes problematic when

every word, action, behaviour, communication and movement of employees is tracked and

monitored. Such excessive and unreasonable monitoring and the feeling of total surveillance can,

Ciocchetti explains, (1) “invade an employee’s reasonable expectation of privacy,” (2) “lead

employees to sneak around to conduct personal activities on work time,” (3) “lower morale,” (4)

“cause employees to complain and, potentially, quit,” and (5) “cause employees to fear using

equipment even for benign work purposes.”289 Ciocchetti gives more individualized nature of its

detrimental effects.

Kristen Martin and R. Edward Freeman write that “[i]t is important to note that increased surveillance

of Internet and e-mail usage will only make prosecution of transgressions more difficult – it will not

stop the wrong behaviour. Hence the ‘liability argument’ should not be confused with a non-existent

‘employee security’ argument. Harassment existed before computers and will persist once all

computers are monitored.”290 In addition to this argument, we can point out that surveillance

negatively affects employee feelings about work and about their workplace291 and reduces their

motivation to improve the quantity or quality of the work they are doing.292 Besides, when one is in

a space of continuous surveillance, one is forced to act and even think according to the requisites of

the actual or virtual observer. This encroaches on the personal, intellectual space of the worker (the

all-encompassing term could be ‘privacy’), whereby his or her autonomy, creativity and freedom

shrink drastically.293 Another detailed approach to surveillance in the workplace shows that it “not

only produces measurable outcomes in terms of targets met or service levels delivered, but also

produces particular cultures which regulate performance, behaviours and personal characteristics in

a more subtle way.”294 Moreover, the monitored employees reported “higher workload, less workload

variation and greater workload dissatisfaction than the unmonitored employees [... and] reported less

control over their jobs [...], less fairness of their work standards and more frequent interactions with

difficult customers.”295 More behavioural effects are also foreseen here.

Martin and Freeman claim that actual control over one’s information considerably decreases when

one is subjected to unrestricted surveillance, and this “deprivation of privacy can inhibit maturity and

keep the observed in a childish state due to a loss of privacy and autonomy.”296 Bahaudin G. Mujtaba

stresses this adverse aspect of monitoring very well, claiming that “this surveillance can inject an air

of suspicion and hostility into the workplace and it can be counterproductive as it can cause

resentment in employees at being treated like children, and the culture also can become one of a

mistrust and hostile work environment when employees do not see the justification of monitoring.”297

In connection with the infringement of privacy, surveillance also affects the basis of self-

289 Ciocchetti, “The Eavesdropping Employer,” 285-369, 357. 290 Martin and Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” 355. 291 Stanton and Weiss, “Electronic Monitoring in Their Own Words,” 425. See also, Watson, N. “The Private

Workplace and the Proposed “Notice of Electronic Monitoring Act”: Is “Notice” Enough?” Federal

Communications Law Journal 54, no. 1 (2001): 79-104; Yerby, “Legal and Ethical Issues of Employee

Monitoring,” 46-47. 292 Peter Danielson, “Ethics of Workplace Surveillance Games,” in Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace:

Controversies and solutions, ed. John Weckert, 19-34 (Hershey: Idea Group Publishing, 2005), 30. 293 Martin and Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” 354. Cf. Botan and Vorvoreanu, “What

Do Employees Think about Electronic Surveillance at Work?” 128-129. 294 Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” 91. 295 M.J. Smith, P. Carayon, K.J. Sanders, S.Y. Lim, and D. LeGrande, “Employee Stress and Health Complaints

in Jobs with and Without Electronic Performance Monitoring,” Applied Ergonomics 23 (1992): 21. 296 Martin and Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” 357. 297 Mujtaba, “Ethical Implications of Employee Monitoring,” 37.


50

determination and self-identity and jeopardises and imperils employees’ mental health.298 Disorders

arise at an alarming rate in such a setting, both psychological (high tension, extreme anxiety, intense

depression, increased boredom, etc.) and physical (musculoskeletal problems, carpal tunnel

syndrome, etc.),299 and this eventually raises stress, diminishes employee job satisfaction,300 and

leads to fatigue and other chronic havoc and turmoil.301 Employees may also be subjected to verbal

bullying, and thus grow more frustrated with their own workplace.302

Still with respect to the privacy issues raised by workplace monitoring, we find that problems related

to ‘data mining’303 and ‘identity theft’304 are on the rise more than ever before. Individual privacy

concerns one of the key issues raised by data mining in an organizational workplace. Employees

have a right to privacy in their personal records. James H. Moor explains that an “individual has

privacy if and only if information related to this individual is protected from intrusion, observation

and surveillance by others.”305 Personal records are disclosed only in certain specific circumstances.

Data mining, however, can yield a very significant amount of information about employees’ habits

and preferences. Identity theft is a growing problem related to data mining. Any transactions

performed by people who have stolen the identities of others will create major problems in the

298 Helen Nissenbaum, “Toward an Approach to Privacy in Public: Challenges of Information Technology,” in

Readings in Cyberethics, eds. R.A. Spinello and H.T. Tavani (Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 2001), 392-

403. See also, Richard J. Severson. The Principles of Information Ethics. Abington, OX: Routledge, 1997. 299 Martin and Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” 355. Cf. Laura Pincus Hartman, “The

Rights and Wrongs of Workplace Snooping,” The Journal of Business Strategy 19, no. 3 (1998): 16-19; G.

Stoney Alder. “Ethical issues in Electronic Performance Monitoring: A Consideration of Deontological and

Teleological Perspectives.” Journal of Business Ethics 17 (1998): 729-743. 300 Yerby, “Legal and Ethical Issues of Employee Monitoring,” 46-47; Aiello, J.R. “Computer-based Work

Monitoring: Electronic Surveillance and its Effects.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 23 (1993): 499-

507. 301 Stanton, “Traditional and Electronic Monitoring from an Organizational Justice Perspective,” 130. See also,

Kizza and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 12-14. 302 J. Lund, “Electronic Performance Monitoring: A Review of the Research Issues,” Applied Economics 23,

no. 1 (1992): 54. 303 Data mining, known as data or knowledge discovery, is the process of analyzing data from different

perspectives and summarizing it to derive useful information. Through data mining software and tools, the

user analyzes data from many different dimensions and angles and categorizes it, then summarizes the

identified relationships. Thus, data mining technically finds out the correlations or patterns among dozens of

fields in large relational databases. It is primarily used by companies and other organizational workplace

managers and marketing organizations. It enables these companies and other organizations to determine

relationships among "internal" factors (price, product positioning, or staff skills) and "external" factors

(economic indicators, competition, and customer demographics). Subsequently, it enables them to determine

the impact on sales, customer satisfaction, and corporate profits. Problems arise when collected data are used,

with or without the consent of the persons concerned, beyond the context in which they are collected and the

reasons for which they were stored.

http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/teacher/ technologies/palace/datamining.htm [accessed

December 5, 2014]. 304 Identity theft occurs when a person disguises or pretends someone else’s by assuming their identity in order

to attain some resources or benefits in that person’s name. The victim, whose identity is stolen, has to suffer

the adverse consequences of the actions the other takes in his/her name. This can happen when the other gets

our personal details by mistake or steals our personal information by fraud and uses it without our explicit

permission. This is a serious crime that can destroy our reputation, finances, etc. Identity theft is defined as

“the misuse of another person’s identity, such as name, social security number, driver’s license, credit card

numbers, and bank account numbers. The objective is to take actions permitted to the owner of the identity,

such as withdraw funds, transfer money, charge purchases, and get access to information, or issue documents

and letters under the victim’s identity”. Originally in: Dorothy E. Denning, Information Warfare and Security,

(Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1999). See also, Michael J. Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age (Boston:

Pearson-Addison-Wesley, 2005), 224. 305 James H. Moor, “The Ethics of Privacy Protection,” Library Trends 39, nos. 1 & 2 (1990): 76.


51

database by giving the false impression that they are the activities of the actual person.306 Adjacent

to this, Cyber-bullying307 is one of the major issues an employee faces in this environment of

monitoring and information tracking. This is defined as “wilful and repeated harm inflicted through

the use of computers, cell phones, and other electronic devices.”308 Employees may be threatened in

multiple ways by cyber-bullying. For instance, in online fights using electronic messages with angry

and vulgar language (flaming), in being made the subject of gossip or rumours meant to damage his

or her reputation or friendships (denigration), in having her secrets or embarrassing information or

images put online (outing), etc.309 These are frequently reported problems in the workplace today.

When all activities and information are electronically monitored, either with or without proper

consent, this poses a grave threat to employees.

In particular, of course, employee privacy is compromised, in especially three respects (1) when there

is invisible information gathering;310 (2) when surveillance technologies exhibit ‘function creep’,

meaning that monitoring technologies may yield more information than is intended or needed in a

particular situation; and (3) when there is unauthorized disclosure of information and/or its

broadcasted to anonymous third parties.311 It also affects employees’ basic desire and aspiration for

respect and trust and often leads them to feel demeaned by the practice,312 as the “responsibility for

making decisions about performance is embedded in the information system.”313 In this regard,

Rebecca M. Chory et al. illustrate that surveillance technology tools can also cause security breaches,

financial loss, trust relation disintegration, employee distraction, and lawsuits.314 The feeling of

distrust of both management and employees leads to increases in absenteeism and turnover315 as

Pfeffer rightly points out, this sense of “pervasive distrust and dissatisfaction manifests itself in

decreasing job tenure, increasing turnover and intentions to quit, and higher levels of voluntary

absence.”316 This decreased trust, coupled with the violation of privacy and fairness concerns,

diminishes organizational commitment per se.317 Employees, as a result of surveillance, experience

different treatment from both management and fellow workers. This may become a sorting tool, since

306 Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age, 222. 307 Cyber-bullying is defined as “the use of information technology to harm or harass the people in a deliberate,

repeated, and hostile manner.” It generally involves sending or posting harmful or cruel text and/or images

using the internet or other digital communication devices, such as cell phones. It may occur on personal

websites or may be transmitted via e-mail, social networking sites, chat rooms, message boards, instant

messaging, or cell phones. Ted Feinberg and Nicole Robey, “Cyber-bullying: Intervention and Prevention

Strategies,” National Association of School Psychologists (NASP),

http://www.nasponline.org/resources/bullying/Cyberbullying.pdf [accessed December 8, 2013]. 308 Sameer Hinduja and Justine Patchin, “Cyber-bullying,” Cyberbullying Research Center, 2010.

http://www.cyberbullying.us/Cyberbullying_Identification_Prevention_Response_Fact_Sheet.pdf [accessed

December 8, 2014]. 309 Del Siegle, “Cyberbullying and Sexting: Technology Abuses of the 21st Century,” Gifted Child Today 33,

no. 2 (2010): 15. 310 Base, A Gift of Fire, 66. 311 Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” 93. 312 Wilborn, “Revisiting the Public/Private Distinction,” 838. 313 B. C. Amick and M. J. Smith, “Stress, Computer-Based Work Monitoring and Measurement Systems: A

Conceptual Overview,” Applied Ergonomics 23, no. 1 (1992): 11. 314 Rebecca M. Chory, Lori E. Vela and Theodore A. Avtgis, “Organizational Surveillance of Computer-

Mediated Workplace Communication: Employee Privacy Concerns and Responses,” Employee

Responsibilities and Rights Journal 28, no. 1 (2016): 23-43. 315 Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns,” 105. 316 Jeffrey Pfeffer, “Human Resources from an Organizational Behaviour Perspective: Some Paradoxes

Explained,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 4 (2007): 116. 317 Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns,” 113.


52

it increases differences and reinforces existing inequalities.318 Hence, ruptures emerge in employee

relationships, which diminished employees’ ability to see a promising future and motivated to work

for it. The exhibit-3 highlights the above-mentioned invisible consequences of workplace

surveillance.

Invisible Consequences

➢ In relation to the organization, it:

• allows power to rest in those who monitor and hence loss of employee power

• requires employees’ behaviour modification, often in response to monitoring (chilling

effect)

• gives direct message to employees as wrong doers and to be watched constantly

• creates a false sense of security through control

• involves more control monitoring than the positive reinforcement through rewards

• entails enhanced mechanistic replacement of human supervision

• increases paranoia in the workplace (panoptic surveillance)

• deteriorates pro-employee organizational culture

➢ In relation to employees, it:

• creates feeling of distrust and resentment between employers and employees

• is linked to fewer rewards and more punishment and treats employees as criminals

• invades privacy (loss of identity) and violation of such civil liberties (lack of freedom)

• generates discrimination (hierarchical & among employees) and consequent biased or

unfair treatment

• increases competition and stress and upsurges pressure to high performance & increased

productivity

• creates bigger data breach and misuse of information

• imperils employees’ mental health and raises physical disorders

• leads to fatigue and job dissatisfaction and changes employee behaviour – act at work

and act in personal life.

• limits control of personal data & self-efficacy and thus loss of self-determination

• reduces organizational citizenship behaviour and restricts social exchange practices

(behavioural bondage)

• shrinks autonomy and creativity, which discourages employees and hence increased

turnover

• causes resentment in employees and injects suspicion and hostility into the workplace

Exhibit-3 Invisible Consequeences

1.6 CONCLUSION

To sum up, the five concise sections of this chapter succinctly conceptualize and examine the ways

and means of surveillance in the workplace, as well as their effect on employees. By meticulously

observing and critically analysing the anticipated and actual effects of workplace surveillance, this

part of our study has identified and explored the forgotten issues of workplace surveillance and

argued that the benefits engendered by surveillance practices cannot overrule the individual, social

and ethical concerns of employees heightened by them. There are several ways, discussed above, in

which excessive monitoring can become detrimental to employees, for it invades workers’ privacy,

318 Soraj Hongladarom, “Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace: A Buddhist Perspective,” in Electronic

Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions, ed. John Weckert, 208-225 (Hershey: Idea Group

Publishing, 2005): 213.


53

disturbs their physical and psychological serenity, erodes their sense of dignity and frustrates their

efforts to do high-quality work by promoting a single-minded emphasis on speed and other purely

quantitative measurements. Besides, the system of differentially rewarding or punishing, basing on

entirely collected data, creates and perpetuates distinctions among employees and fractures the

relationship among employees and between employees and management, thereby increasing social

distance in the workplace. Of all these effects of electronic monitoring in the workplace, two key,

competing employee consequences seem most fundamental and beneficial to investigate: namely

privacy and social distance, along with the challenge the latter poses to employee tranquillity. This

study will thus focus on these especially relevant consequences.

Moreover, a comparative and critical reading of surveys reveal that there is no substantial change or

decrease in the misconduct of employees even after implementing a wide range of monitoring

systems and practices; quite on the contrary, indeed, misbehaviour and fraudulent activities increase.

Identifying and firing employees guilty of misconduct is not, therefore, a tenable and justifiable

solution, and recognizing this opens a new and plausible avenue for the integration of ethical

principles and practices along with moral behavioural and character formation, which we argue for

in the third part of this study. Before this, however, the next chapter focuses on the unique

organizational workplace scenario in India, both socio-culturally and economically, to contextualize

and be more meticulous in our discussion of the problem. Besides being an important venue for

emerging ICT-based knowledge service sectors, including financial accounting, call centres, and

business process outsourcing, India has become a leading centre of global IT headquarters. In this

period of rapid growth of ICT in the Indian organizational workplace, one of the emerging and

persistent questions, within the scope of this study, is ‘how the use of electronic surveillance in Indian

organizational workplaces affects and perhaps endanger employees and give rise to new social

dilemmas in the particular context of its socio-cultural and occupational hierarchy?’ This will be

explored in the next chapter.

CHAPTER TWO

INDIAN PROSPECTS FOR SOCIO-ECONOMIC ADVANCEMENT AND THE PLACE

OF EMPLOYEE SURVEILLANCE

2.0 INTRODUCTION

The organizational workplace in India today is characterized by a reliance on extensive technological

assistance, which has duly prompted debates on the nature, effects and future of these technologies.

Alongside its constructive progression, several internal and external employment problems and

challenges have emerged as India has become a major “recipient of outsourced technology-based

and mediated work mainly from the post-industrial economies,”1 including the alienation of workers

and inadequate infrastructure. The subsequent integration of India into the global economy through

the emergent information technology (IT) and its succeeding service industries also fuel this blaze.

In order to effectively understand the problems of such adaptation and adequately design and manage

the use of technology in India’s globalized-organizational workplace, one must consider the

individual, social and ethical aspects and effects of these practices along with the idiosyncratic

business contexts and culture of India. There is a dearth of research on these topics, however.

Moreover, we know far too little about the nature and structure of the new workforces created in IT

industrial organizations, with their multi-faceted concerns over new work processes and

organizational behaviours. To this end, this chapter analytically and critically examines the human

side of the use of these new forms of electronic surveillance in the Indian organizational workplace.

Our aim will be to meticulously contextualize the discussion undertaken in the previous chapter,

which had a more global scope.

This chapter thus revolves around a question: how do surveillance practices affect the lives and

identities of Indian organizational workers by reconfiguring the nature of work and the ethical canvas

of Indian business culture and society? In the effort to answer this, the first section provides a brief

historical overview of Indian-specific business work culture and management models, along with a

short description of general labour laws and rights in India. The second section offers a more nuanced

contemporary picture of the Indian labour market, highlighting some features of certain work sectors,

employment practices and labour market functions. This is followed, in the third section, by analysis

of labour trends and challenges in globalized IT in India. The fourth section explores Indian legal

frameworks, briefly presents a schematic expression of specific parameters of surveillance and makes

a case for regarding our present time as a new age of challenge for Indian IT workplaces. Employee

concerns related to power-control and power-distance and consequent workplace bullying, discussed

in this section, leads to a detailed analysis of Indian call centres in the fifth and final section.

2.1 WORK-CULTURE AND ECONOMIC SECTORS IN INDIA TODAY

The concept of culture generally encompasses the many and various ways in which people

understand, interpret and relate to one another. It offers a pattern for one’s response to one’s

environment and the world as a whole. Jeremiah J. Sullivan defines culture as “the shared set of

symbols, values, beliefs, and rituals which are used to make sense of the World.”2 By and large, the

1 Carol Upadhya and A. R. Vasavi, “Outposts of the Global Information Economy: Work and Workers in

India’s Outsourcing Industry,” in In an Outpost of the Global Economy: Work and Workers in India’s

Information Technology Industry, eds. Carol Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi, 9-49 (London: Routledge, 2008): 9. 2 Jeremiah J. Sullivan, Exploring International Business Environments (Needham Heights, NJ: Pearson

Custom Publishing, 1999), 335. Edward Burnett Taylor defines culture as “that complex whole which

includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as

Indian Prospects for Socio-Economic Advancement and Employee Surveillance

56

term refers to the beliefs, customs, arts, etc., of a particular society, group, place, or time3 that are

valued, at least virtually, by everyone concerned. Thus, it is called the ‘way of life’ of a segment or

group, small or large. Because India is a pluralistic society including different ethnic groups, such as

the Indo-Aryans (72%), Dravidians (25%), Mongoloid and others (3%), it is hard to talk about one

‘Indian culture’ pertaining to the whole nation.4 However, across its entire complex multiplicities,

India is deeply rooted in some form of traditional cultural values just like any other country.

‘Work culture,’ specifically, refers to a “system of personally and collectively accepted meaning of

work, operating for a give group at a given time [...], a system of shared values which results in high

performance [...] and common patterns of feeling and behaviour in an organization.”5 The work

culture in any country thus includes all work-related activities based both on traditional and adapted

socio-cultural and economic factors as well as local norms and preconceptions. Geert Hofstede, in

an effort to identify an Indian ‘work culture,’ states that Indian national culture is ‘collectivist’ and

marked by practices of power distance, masculinity, individualism and an avoidance of uncertainty.6

With its cultural, social, religious and linguistic diversity, India is also famous for being home to

many primitive tribes (with their particular ethos and taboos), a distinctive and ancient civilization,

systemic practices of caste and class,7 and increasingly today for her sophisticated, modern,

industrial, and scientific-technological leadership. In what follows, we analyse the traditional and

organizational work culture in India.

2.1.1 The Traditional and the Current Organizational Work Culture in India

The traditional business work culture in India depends to a large extent on its cultural yardsticks

(ethnic heritage), its people (civilization), its land (geographical features and settlements), its

business environment (traditional trade practices and present foreign investments) and its craving to

adapt to changing science and technology. In other words, regional variations with different

geographical scales and cultural complexities, along with diversity in language, customs and

festivals, and tolerance and acceptance of emerging trends, mark the specifics of Indian work

a member of society” while Hofstede defines it as “the collective programming of the mind which

distinguishes the members of one group from another,” and mark small changes as it is passed from one

generation to the next. See Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the development of

mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, originally in 1871 (New York: Gordon Press, 1974), 1;

Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values (Beverly Hills,

CA: Sage, 1980), 21-23. 3 Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/culture [accessed

February 5, 2016]. 4 Dayanand Arora, “Foreign Multinationals in India: Adopting to India’s Work Culture and Management

Practices,” in Internationale Geschäftstätigkeiten in Asien: Länderkulturforschung anhand ausgewählter

Länder, eds. Wilhelm Schmeisser, Thomas R. Hummel, Gerfried Hannemann, and Dirk Ciupka (München:

Rainer Hampp Verlag, 2005), 162-165. 5 Kavita Singh, “Work Values and Work Culture in Indian Organizations: Evidence from Automobile

Industry,” Delhi Business Review 2, no. 2 (2001), http://www.delhibusinessreview.org/v_2n2/dbrv2n2d.pdf

[accessed on February 5, 2016]. 6 Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequence: International Differences in Work-Related Values, vol. 5 (Newbury

Park: Sage, 1980), 65-210. Geert H. Hofstede conducted two surveys (1968 & 1972) as part of his study of

cultural impact on social behaviour. In his study Hofstede identified and explained four factors that make the

cultural differences of both the developed and developing countries: collectivism-individualism, power

distance, masculinity-feminity, and uncertainty avoidance. 7 The caste system which was initially devised “on the basis of division of labour and functions [...] degenerated

later into a rigid system” that had many further socio-economic and political implications and impacts.

Mohamed, The Foundations of the Composite Culture in India, 19.


57

culture.8 It is said to be the reflection of various norms and standards of its people. It is more

hierarchical in leadership structure, more hardworking in customary nature, more task-based than

clock-based in working hours, and more resistive in implementing changes in the work patterns.9 In

the same way, cultural stereotypes can be useful to a business work culture as it tries to improve

productivity and expand services globally by determining definite and explicit standards of

individual performance.10 This shows that India, as a country invested in adhering to traditional

values and beliefs, often stifles its workforce culture at the very moment it is longing to embrace

what is new.

For instance, the caste system as a socio-cultural practice has much affected the Indian approach to

work and life. According to this structure, “Brahmins (priests and teachers) were the apex, Kshatriya

(rulers and warriors), Vaishya (merchants and managers) and Shwdra (artisans and workers)

occupied the lower levels, [and] those outside the caste hierarchy were called ‘untouchables.’”11 This

socio-cultural categorization determined even the hierarchy of social status. The link between this

hierarchy and workplace behaviour will be addressed later in this research. To elaborate the

discussion further and set in relief another characteristic of the Indian cultural practice, we may point

to the process of socialization as a form of passing culture and feature of growing Indian work culture

that promotes a ‘collectivist mind-set.’12 While being open and flexible in adapting to collective

norms, people are often passive in proposing creative ideas and thus promote a kind of ‘dependency

proneness’ in all their behaviours.13 A similar pattern is followed in the workplace, where workers

often voluntarily act as the passive receptors of commands issued by others and create a work culture

where each derives his or her security from a dominant other.

In the same way, there is a ‘hierarchy orientation’ in Indian traditional work culture, which continues

to this day in many internal circles and private spheres of work.14 Those at the top of the hierarchy

hold the power and enact it over their inferiors. Nevertheless, this power gradation also shows aspects

of respect, loyalty, affection, and bonding, which are more clearly cultural tendencies and more

directly linked to a particular management style. We will further analyse and elaborate this in the

next section. This hierarchical orientation is similarly rooted, along with an attitude of dependency,

in the caste-based thinking prevalent in various forms in almost all parts of India, though today often

less in urban areas. Likewise, nepotism is common in work culture, as family, cast, locality, language

and other such factors have their effect on job attainment. There is a widespread disparity of

outcomes among workers based on family background and geography. For example, according to

Hofstede, Roli Nigam and Zhan Su maintain that family interests and the continuity of business are

highly important for Indian business culture, as opposed to the custom in many Western countries.15

8 Soniya Jhunjhunwala, “Review of Indian Work Culture and Challenges Faced by Indians in the Era of

Globalization,” Interscience Management Review 2, no. 2 (2012): 67. 9 Jhunjhunwala, “Review of Indian Work Culture and Challenges Faced by Indians in the Era of Globalization,”

69. 10 Pam D. Stokes examines culture in line with the national and international corporate environments. Pam D.

Stokes, “The Corporate and Workforce Culture of India,” 2003,

http://www.sixsmart.com/SSPapers/psw10.htm [accessed February 8, 2016]. 11 Samir R. Chatterjee, “Human Resource Management in India: ‘Where From’ and ‘Where To’?” Research

and Practice in Human Resource Management 15, no. 2 (2007); 92-93. 12 Arora, “Foreign Multinationals in India,” 163. 13 Arora, “Foreign Multinationals in India,” 163-164. 14 Arora, “Foreign Multinationals in India,” 163-164 15 Roli Nigam and Zhan Su, “Management in Emerging versus Developed Countries: A Comparative Study

from an Indian Perspective,” Journal of CENTRUM Cathedra 4, no. 1 (2011): 124; Geert Hofstede, Culture’s

Consequence: International Differences in Work-Related Values, vol. 5 (Newbury Park: Sage, 1980), 13-252.


58

Religion also plays a crucial role in the formation of work culture. For religion, beyond being a matter

of mere belief, also involves institutionalized patterns of behaviour such as rituals, ceremonies, art,

and other such practices.16 Religious sentiments concerning what will be an auspicious or

inauspicious day to begin or alter work, for instance, provide an understanding of religious influences

in the work culture. Over 80% of the Indian population follows Hinduism and its cultural legacy,

including its ideology of reincarnation (rebirth), its ‘law of karma’ (expectation of the fruits of

human action), and its goal of Moksha (Liberation). In view of this, people tend to be more fatalistic

and less deterministic in their work and life and thus accord less importance to material wealth and

possessions.17 In the same way, as opposed to the Western practice of prioritizing performance-based

career opportunities and payments, Indian culture promotes relationships and values the loyalty of

employees and their years of experience in assigning promotions. It also shows more flexibility in

enforcing rules and regulations in cases where personal relationships exist.18 All this appears against

the background of the ‘cosmic vision’ of Indian religious and cultural values, which holds that “the

quality of man is judged by the quality of his mind and spirit, the quality and depth of his perceptions,

not by the quantity of his possessions.”19 The intrinsic worth of every individual is valued and given

utmost importance.

Labourers’ personal relationships with one another are the hallmark of traditional Indian work

culture. It is the labour class in India, constituting a major portion of the society, that contributes

most to its socio-economic life and development, as is the case in many developing countries. In this

context, this cultural milieu in fact conversely affects workplace behaviour, and one must consider

the disparities in wage and reward. A majority of jobs in the informal sector are underpaid or low-

paying opportunities, which increases inequalities in income and wealth. People belonging to certain

socio-religious groups or those from disadvantaged regions suffer more from this segregating

situation.20 However, a new middle class (the labouring class) emerged in the 1990s and played a

leading role in modernizing India while influencing socio-economic and political developments.21 A

middle class social order in work culture has been developing from the time of British rule in India,

and in post-independent India, “the power and constitution of the middle class was based not on the

economic power it wielded, which was minimal, but on the ability of its members to be cultural

entrepreneurs.”22 To understand and adapt to this transformation, one needs to analyse and

contextualize the nature and present status of organizational work culture in India, as we aim to do

below.

16 Mohamed, The Foundations of the Composite Culture in India, 33. It is something like the fusion of religion

and culture we see in Islamic states or like the role of Zen Buddhism in Japanese culture and like Christian

communities in the West. According to the data of India Census 2011 released in 2015 by Government of

India: Hinduism 79.80%; Islam 14.23%; Christianity 2.30%; Sikhism 1.72%; Buddhism 0.70%; Jainism

0.37%; and other religions / no religion 0.9%. Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, “India Census

2011,” http://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011census/c-01.html [accessed February 5, 2016]. See also Sagnik

Chowdhury, Abantika Gosh and Ruhi Tewari, “Census 2011: Hindus Dip to Below 80 per cent of Population;

Muslim Share Up, Slows Down,” The Indian Express, August 27, 2015,

http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/indias-population-121-09-crores-hindus-79-8-pc-

muslims-14-2-pc-census/ [accessed February 5, 2016]. 17 Arora, “Foreign Multinationals in India,” 165; Nigam and Su, “Management in Emerging versus Developed

Countries,” 124. 18 Nigam and Su, “Management in Emerging versus Developed Countries,” 124. 19 Mohamed, The Foundations of the Composite Culture in India, 30. 20 Institute for Human Development, India Labour and Employment Report 2014: Workers in the Era of

Globalization (New Delhi: AF and IHD, 2014), 75. 21 Arora, “Foreign Multinationals in India,” 166. 22 Arora, “Foreign Multinationals in India,” 166. Originally in, Sanjay Joshi, Fracture Modernity: Making of

a Middle Class in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2.


59

Since ancient times, India has been known as an industrial exporter. Archaeological evidence as well

as other records, inscriptions and writings enable us to trace the history of human occupations of the

Indian subcontinent back ten thousand years and calculate gross domestic product figures since the

start of the Common Era.23 The ruins of the great Indus Valley civilization gives indisputable

evidence of well-developed trade and business in India even in 2500 B.C., which has been, since

then, playing a significant role in the socio-cultural, political and economic history and development

of the country, and vice versa.24 The trade history of India reveals that even in Phoenician times,

spices, ivory, silks, fine cotton and precious stones were carried by Indian merchants to Egypt and

the countries of Asia Minor. Both internal and external trades were at a peak.25 Ancient India had

different forms of business, such as the family-run business, individually owned business enterprise

and other forms of collective activity, among which the most common was the ‘Sreni’, something

similar to the modern corporate form of organization with codes of conduct and general rules

regulating business.26

The construction of commercial cities like Harappa and Mohenjedaro in the fourth and third centuries

BCE proves the same.27 Even though India was an industrial country thousands of years ago, there

was an interruption, as Sumit Kumar Majumdar opines, and only in the last 150 years has India

resumed her way on the path of industrialization.28 The Indian economy at the time of independence

had been dramatically drained, and as Uma Kapila writes, the “Indian economy was overwhelmingly

rural and agricultural in character with nearly 85 per cent of population living in villages and deriving

their livelihood from agricultural and related pursuits using traditional, low productivity

techniques.”29 Besides, the industrial sector was underdeveloped due to the policy of exploitation

and destruction of the British Raj, its weak infrastructure, and other factors.30 However, India, even

at the time of the English East India Company, played a leading role in trade, exporting spices and

other luxury items from India to Europe.31

It is also interesting to observe that in the 1920s, after the First World War, still a time of colonialism

in India, an extensive and affirmative burst of Indian entrepreneurship started in eastern India. The

consequent effective competition by these Indian enterprises challenged, weakened (in 1930s) and

eventually destroyed (in 1945) the British hold on industry in India.32 It also raised awareness about

the importance of the Swadeshi (native) economic ideology, after which Indian industries and

business interests were growing steadily. This Indian industrial sector, after independence, divided

into a public sector and a private sector and a substantial expansion was made in both.33 Nevertheless,

23 P. Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 2nd ed. (New Delhi: PHI

Learning, 2009), 6. 24 Abhoy K. Ojha, “Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Indian IT Industry: Contextual Impediments,” in

Corporate Governance and Stewardship: Emerging Role and Responsibilities of Corporate Boards and

Directors, ed. N. Balasubramanian (New Delhi: Tata McGraw Hill Education, 2010), 89. 25 Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 14-15. 26 Sreni is a legal entity composed of a collection of people who were normally engaged in a similar trade.

Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 25. 27 Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 161. See also, P.N. Agarwala, A

Comprehensive History of Business in India – From 3000 BC to 2000 AD (New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill,

2001), 265. 28 Sumit Kumar Majumdar, India’s Late, Late Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2012), 67. 29 Uma Kapila, ed., Indian Economy since Independence, 14th ed. (New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2002-

03), 26. 30 Kapila, Indian Economy since Independence, 63. 31 Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 164. 32 Majumdar, India’s Late, Late Industrial Revolution, 117. 33 Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 167.


60

industrial policy in post-independence India from 1947 to 1991 and the political economy of

industrial development presented major challenges. For at this time, certain industries like ordinance,

public utilities, and railways were nationalized and some others were established as state-owned, and

still others sought private investment.34 With its recently flourishing local industries and businesses,

the Indian economy started growing after independence as the government stepped up investments

with its own policy making.

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a number of subtle changes, ranging from socio-

cultural upgrading, political integrations, and economic growth. Majumdar rightly observes:

The changes in the outlook of the governments since the mid 1980s, and the liberalization process

initiated since the beginning of the 1990s, heralded new developments in the industrial and

business scenario of the country. [...] Business was becoming global and many business centres

were gaining attention at the international level. [...] The new era witnessed the entry of an

increasing number of foreign business interests in different sectors.35

Contemporary Indian industrial and business development shows that India has moved from being

an agricultural country to a service producing country. In view of this, the Indian work culture seems

dualistic, as a large traditional economy (i.e., agriculture) coexists alongside an economy of industry

and services that produce a high level of growth and productivity. As a result, there is in India, the

advancement and growth of Multinational Companies (MNCs), Information Technology (IT) &

Information Technology Enabled Service (ITES) sectors, Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO)

& Knowledge Processing Outsourcing (KPO) and other globalized tendencies of business and work

practices. A substantial amount of attention is given today to the service sector in India, through the

performance of IT and the related software, outsourcing, and back office services.36 This experience

of radical change in the structure, policies and work pattern in India has also led to a paradigm shift

in Indian work culture, understood as an expression of the norms and standards of the Indian people.

The organizational work culture in India now differs in important ways from the traditional structure,

as uniquely Indian labour characteristics adapt to the new economic and procedural structures of the

globalizing world. Organizational work culture, in general, is the sum of long lasting and largely

accepted ideologies (values, beliefs, objectives, policies) and practices (rules, regulations, norms,

traditions, rituals) in any organization. It is formed as a consequence of “values and beliefs carried

forward from long time and has substantial impact in the behaviour, quality, and quantity of work

done by the employee in an organization.”37 In other words, the common atmosphere in the

organization and the prevailing or expected relational framework among the employees determine

the specific work culture in any organization.

This work culture is marked by the fair and transparent use of equal opportunities for employees, a

refusal of damaging disparities or thoughts of incapacity, and increased trust in the organization. All

this certainly contributes to the cordial organizational climate and work culture.38 This specific

34 Majumdar, India’s Late, Late Industrial Revolution, 158. 35 Majumdar, India’s Late, Late Industrial Revolution, 167. 36 Majumdar, India’s Late, Late Industrial Revolution, 218-220. 37 Jhunjhunwala, “Review of Indian Work Culture and Challenges Faced by Indians in the Era of

Globalization,” 67. See also Samta Jain, Namrata Mehta, and Varun Bagai, “A Study of Organizational

Climate and Culture in an Indian Nationalized Bank Using and Octapace Survey,” aWEshkar: A Peer

Reviewed Research Journal 18, no. 2 (2014): 52-53. 38 Naveen Kumar Bandari and N. Uday Kumar, “Key Imperatives of Talent Management: The Indian IT and

ITES Industry Perspective,” in Managing Human Resoruce in Global Era – Prspects & Challenges, ed. Ravi

Aluvala (Hyderabad: Zenon Academic Publishing, 2014), 115.


61

pattern of behaviour and practices is important for generating a unique corporate identity, which has

“a strong bearing on the character and persona of an organization.”39 The culture we speak of here is

always people-oriented and promotes a team spirit to enhance its function, sustenance and success.

Sadly, however, this work culture is often inhibited and prevented, since the factors of power distance

and uncertainty avoidance that are so characteristic of Indian culture prompt top-level directors,

executors, and managers to be more authoritative and lower-level workers to be more dependent on

them.40

The nature of high power distance in Indian work culture enforces employees not to welcome

empowerment of any type in the organizational workplace. This passivity is also heightened due to

the ‘dependency proneness’ noted above. Hence, it is interesting to observe that power is an

important part of the cultural milieu that continues to be a strong motivational factor in the Indian

organizational workplace. The reasoning of modern achievement theory that links the level of

achievement with the strength of the power motive in fact supports these same ideologies.41 Likewise,

collectivistic attitudes and tendencies “emphasise co-operation, endurance, persistence and

obedience [and] tend to have long-term orientation, leading to long-term commitment to the

organization.”42 In the same way, the collectivist nature of Indian work culture practices and

promotes a philosophy of equality in matters of employment compensation, in contrast to the equity

philosophy of more individualistic societies.43

There is also a change in the work culture of Indian organizations due to the industrialization of

Information Technology and consequent new style of manufacturing. This has been defining of

India’s contemporary evolution in business and commerce. It has provided more internal

employment, created added revenue, gained additional export earning, and increased competition by

intensifying external investment in the sector. For instance, Madhu Ranjan Kumar and Shankar

Sankaran observe that within the context of new organizations, there is a decrease in the preference

for both power distance and collectivistic orientation, and an aspiration to embrace global work

values.44 In this context, Jai B.P. Sinha identifies three phases of evolving organizational culture in

India: first, making a pure replication of Western theories and concepts; second, a kind of total

disenchantment with them; and third, an integration of Western and Indian contents and processes of

organizational behaviour.45 This type of adaptation or integration brings a gradual but steady change

in the organizational work culture and behaviour. The rapid advancement and strong adaptation of

IT work patterns in India as it stands now has several effects: it contributes to the availability of all

kinds of information worldwide on all conceivable topics, it increases the communication and

39 Jain, Mehta and Bagai, “A Study of Organizational Climate and Culture in an Indian Nationalized Bank

Using and Octapace Survey,” 52. 40 Nigam and Su, “Management in Emerging versus Developed Countries,” 124. 41 Nigam and Su, “Management in Emerging versus Developed Countries,” 126. Achievement motivation

theory developed by David McClelland in 1961 explains individual behaviour and any performance based on

his or her need (intrinsic and learned) for achievement, power, and affiliation. See Lori L. Moore, Dustin K.

Grabsch, and Craig Rotter, “Using Achievement Motivation Theory to Explain Student Participation in a

Residential Leadership Learning Community,” Journal of Leadership Education 9, no. 2 (2010): 25. David

McClelland in his work “The achieving society” identifies three motivators – need for achievement, need for

affiliation, and need for power – that all people possess, and by depending on the dominant motivator among

these, people also show different characteristics in their work and life. He also observes that the dominant

motivator in a person is largely culture and life experience dependent. David C. McClelland, The Achieving

Society (New York: Free Press Paperback Edition, 2010, originally in 1961), 36-62. 42 Madhu Ranjan Kumar and Shankar Sankaran, “Indian Culture and the Culture for TQM: A Comparison,”

The TQM Magazine 19, no. 2 (2007): 178. 43 Nigam and Su, “Management in Emerging versus Developed Countries,” 127. 44 Kumar and Sankaran, “Indian Culture and the Culture for TQM: A Comparison,” 179. 45 Jai B.P. Sinha, Culture and Organizational Behaviour (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008), 15.


62

connectivity with anyone-anytime-anywhere, and it enables one to work even with only a virtual

presence, and thus revolutionizes the individual and organizational work culture.46

Next to this IT revolution in business and work culture, a consequent structural change in the nature

of organizations has facilitated the emergence of more transnational organizations. These

transnational or multinational organizations, according to Sinha, “instead of being totally embedded

in a particular culture and obliged to serve the interests of a single nation, [...] reflect many cultural

shades, tend to satisfy many stake-holders, and respond to highly complex and turbulent international

market.”47 There is great longing for this structural change due to the high competition within and

among the organizations to match with the multinational standard (both commercial and market

driven) and to meet the emerging and changing demands of national and international clients and

customers.48 Finally, as any organizational culture is formed by the shared values of people and

“transmitted among employees through behavioural expectations and normative beliefs [...], shared

values and norms focus employees’ attention on organizational priorities and guide their behaviour

and decision making.”49 Also interesting is that corporate leadership looks for effective managerial

strategies based on these cultural phenomena. Both traditional and new management models in India,

as well as more global management practices, will be explored in the final part of his research.

At this juncture, staying within the scope of our research and keeping in mind all the features of the

Indian socio-cultural and economic framework mentioned above, we shall turn our attention to the

electronic surveillance or employee monitoring in the workplace as managerial workplace behaviour

and critically delve into its possible and actual impacts on employees. For the new organizational

environment is not the same as a conventional, fixed set of behavior. Rather it is a complex, dynamic

web where people interact with one another for effective work performance. Before entering into

this, let us examine some key features of Indian labour laws and rights pertaining to both the

employer and the employee.

2.1.2 Indian Labour Laws and Rights

Given that labour is a significant component in the economic and social development of any country,

a well-protected policy of regulation should be put in place to ensure its welfare and growth. India

has always had a protected and growing economy with many labour welfare norms and rules,

consisting both of legislation and other industrial policies and acts. The Constitution of India, in

article 21, guarantees the ‘right to life’ of every citizen, which is the most fundamental of all rights.50

Along with the protection of life and personal liberty, this article assures the right to livelihood,

which is inherent in it, and to live with human dignity, freed from exploitation and intrusion of any

kind, to every citizen, providing in this way a kind of innate social security. Article 39 of the Indian

Constitution states certain principles of policy to be followed by the State, to the effect that the state

shall secure for its citizens, men and women equally, (a) the right to an adequate means of livelihood;

(b) equal distribution of ownership and control of material resources; (c) equal pay for equal work;

and (d) no abuse of the health or strength of workers and surety of not being forced to enter avocations

46 Sinha, Culture and Organizational Behaviour, 20. 47 Sinha, Culture and Organizational Behaviour, 21. 48 Sweety Pohankar, “Research Article on Organizational Culture as a Driving Tool for Developing and

Improving Managerial Effectiveness,” Research Journal of Management Sciences 4, no. 11 (2015): 11. 49 Sanjeev K. Sharma and Aditi Sharma, “Examining the Relationship between Organizational Culture and

Leadership Styles,” Journal of the Indian Academy of Applied Psychology 36, no. 1 (2010): 98. 50 It is well explained in the first chapter (1.1.4) with reference.


63

unsuited to one’s age and strength.51 In the same way, the constitution also calls upon the state to

secure the right to work, within the state’s economic capacity and development (article 41), to ensure

that this work is done in just and humane conditions (article 42), that an appropriate and rightful

living wage be paid to all workers - agricultural, industrial, or otherwise – and that conditions of

work ensure a decent standard of life and full enjoyment of leisure and social and cultural

opportunities (article 43).52 Thus, it ensures a decent standard of life for every citizen in India.

In addition to establishing and honouring these labour rights, the Government of India has also

enacted additional labour laws to protect and secure the rights of the labour class. Some legislation

in India is from the time of British rule, such as: (1) the Workmen’s Compensation Act of 1923 that

assures the payment of compensation on various occasions; (2) the Trade Unions Act of 1926 that

provides for registration of trade unions (TUs), protects registered TUs and members with collective

procedures; and (3) the Payment of Wages Act of 1936 that ensures the right and equal distribution

of payments and wages. Other later piece of legislation also plays a role: The Industrial Disputes Act

of 1947; the Minimum Wages Act of 1948; the Maternity Benefit Act of 1961; the Contract Labour

(Regulation and Abolition) Act of 1970; the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act of 1976; and

the Equal Remuneration Act of 1976. These pieces of legislation, along with several others enacted

in line with International Labour Organization (ILO) recommendations, cover everal key areas: (a)

compensation, equal pay, minimum wages; (b) freedom of association, freedom from exploitation;

and (c) labour welfare systems such as maternity benefits, employee insurance, old age benefits,

retiral/retirement benefits, redundancy and termination benefits, and accident/injury benefits.

These regulations were largely designed to secure labour supply and control, to eradicate subhuman

working conditions in factories, and to improve standards of life for every labourer.53 The ILO began

to influence Indian labour policy after the 1920s, and India progressively responded to the ratification

of various ILO conventions.54 In the same way, the post-independence central government of India

was responsible to promote legislation favourable to labour and deal with all phases of worker’s life,

with particular commitment to socio-economic values and justice and with a democratic-egalitarian

conception and praxis of national development.55 These, along with other industrial laws, continue

to form the body of Indian labour law that on the one hand respects the relation between employer

and employee and on the other affirms job security and employment protection.56 However, in the

post-1990s, adaptation to economic globalization and liberalization led to an alteration of Indian

labour laws in accordance with global trends.

51 Legislative Department, “The Constitution of India,” Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of India, as

on November 9, 2015, 21-22. See, http://lawmin.nic.in/olwing/coi/coi-english/coi-4March2016.pdf [accessed

February 2, 2016]. 52 Legislative Department, “The Constitution of India,” 22-23. 53 Richard Mitchell, Petra Mahy and Peter Gahan, “The Evolution of Labour Law in India: An Overview and

Commentary on Regulatory Objectives and Development,” Asian Journal of Law and Society 1 (2014): 415. 54 Mitchell, Mahy and Gahan, “The Evolution of Labour Law in India,” 416. 55 Mitchell, Mahy and Gahan, “The Evolution of Labour Law in India,” 421. 56 Mitchell, Mahy and Gahan, “The Evolution of Labour Law in India,” 423. Examples for other particular

legislations are: Dock Workers (Regulation of Employment) Act 1948; Employees’ State Insurance Act 1948;

Plantations Labour Act 1951; Mines Act 1952; Employees’ Provident Fund and Miscellaneous Provisions

Act 1952; Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act 1970 (amended in 1986 and 2005); Maharashtra

Recognition of Unions and Prevention of Unfair Labour Practices Act 1971; Bonded Labour System

(Abolition) Act 1976; Interstate migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service)

Act 1979; Industrial Disputes (Amendment) Act 1982; Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986;

Building & Other Construction Workers (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act 1996;

and Private Security Agencies (Regulation) Act 2005.


64

This reform of the Indian labour market was grounded in an urge for economic stability and growth

after the monetary and fiscal crisis of the late 1980s. Thus the new labour policies were introduced.

However, some proposals and Bills initiated and effected by the central government and enforced by

the state government, in both the organized and unorganized sectors, were criticized by many labour

analysts. For these neoliberal reformed measures, they argued, “weaken union power, [...]

individualize labour relations, privatize public enterprises, dilute labour laws [with] freedom to hire

and fire and close undertakings, [...].”57 Similarly, more flexible ‘hire and fire’ laws in the Special

Economic Zones (SEZ) created by some state governments to attract the foreign business

investments, have been severely criticized.58 Liberalization, in fact, paved the way for a drastic

relaxation in labour laws with regard to contract labours, the flexibility of employment and thus

crucial labour challenges as well. The cluster of present Indian labour laws, which still has an ILO

standard and influence, is relatively progressive and has “immediate and fundamental implications

for the social and economic stability and progress, and [...] inevitably exist in relations between

capital and labour, and in the regulations of labour markets.”59

The above descriptions of the labour laws generally point out the broad parameters of government

and legislative policies and regulations. The main reasons for the passage of these labour laws are

“power imbalances between labour and capital, the need for ensuring social justice, and to promote

rather conducive industrial relations to ensure uninterrupted industrial production.”60 These are the

body of administrative rulings or precedents that address the legal rights, restrictions, and duties of

working people by meeting both worker demands for better working conditions and employer

demands for efficient management. Indian liberal labour policy attracts both domestic public/private

investments and foreign direct investments and creates new job opportunities, thus promoting the

emergence of new employment trends in India with MNCs and the IT & ITES service sectors. Most

of these sectors and services function under the rule of ‘corporate governance’ and encourage global

capital financing, investments and economic progress.61 In a latr section, we will discuss more

specific rules and acts governing the Indian IT service sectors and electronic surveillance and data

protection in the workplace, within the scope of our research, paying attention to elements such as

the quality, practice, purpose and impact of these laws and policies on employees. In the following,

we note several features of India’s economic sectors by analysing differences between traditional

and modern Indian labour systems and identifying some characteristics of work sectors, employment

practices and labour market functions.

2.1.3 IT Industry and Services: The Alteration of Indian Economic Sectors

We present in this section the Indian economic sectors and activities, which are broadly categorized

into a primary sector, a secondary sector, and a tertiary sector.62 The economic activities of the

57 Mitchell, Mahy and Gahan, “The Evolution of Labour Law in India,” 426. 58 Mitchell, Mahy and Gahan, “The Evolution of Labour Law in India,” 427-428. Special Economic Zones

(SEZ) were created by the central government of India as part of its Export-Import Policy 1997-2002. 59 Mitchell, Mahy and Gahan, “The Evolution of Labour Law in India,” 429-430. 60 Institute for Human Development, India Labour and Employment Report 2014, 117. 61 Jairus Banaji, “India: Workers’ Rights in a New Economic Order,” Workers’ Rights and Labour Laws, A

Backgrounder for the Workshop on Labour to be held from 29-31 December 2000 at the National Conference

on Human Rights, Social Movements, Globalization and the Law (Mumbai: India Centre for Human Rights,

2000), 2. The formal expression of the rules of corporate governance is called ‘codes of corporate governance’

and rapidly spread in late 1990s. 62 The division of the Indian economy as primary, secondary and tertiary sectors is based on the nature of the

activities performed. At the same time, based on ownership it is divided into private sector and public sector

and on the basis of the condition of workers, organized and unorganized sectors. These will be elaborated

later in the following sections.


65

primary sector, also called the ‘agricultural sector,’ concern the direct use of natural resources and

comprises agriculture, forestry, fishing, fuels, metals, minerals, etc. The secondary sector, also called

the manufacturing sector or ‘industrial sector’ (automobiles, textiles), uses the produce of the primary

sector as raw materials and engages in further invention, fabrication, and creation. The tertiary sector

is known as the service sector and produces or generates different services, such as education,

banking, insurance, etc., and contributes to the development of the primary and secondary sectors.63

The Indian economy, which has been primarily an agrarian economy until independence with its

more domestic orientation, now revolves around the industrial and service sectors.64 Exhibit 1

below,65 shows the economic growth from the early 1980s and is self-explanatory in this regard.

Exhibit 1 – Percentage of GDP

When the primary sector possesses a share of 50 percent or more of the total output (GDP) of the

economy of the country, it is an agrarian economy. The same principle applies to the secondary sector

(the industrial economy) and the tertiary sector (the service economy). Almost 60 percent of the

Indian population at the time of independence depended on the primary sector for its livelihood,

which gradually and consistently decreased with increased industrialization and new emphasis on

post-industrial societies or services societies.66

The share of the service industry in GDP grew gradually but steadily in these decades and contributed

to the process of India developing into a service economy.67 For although the Indian economy

63 Ramesh Singh, Indian Economy: For Civil Services Examinations, 7th ed. (New Delhi: McGraw Hill

Education, 2015), 1.13. 64 Singh, Indian Economy: For Civil Services Examinations, 1.14. 65 Singh, Indian Economy: For Civil Services Examinations, 1.22. See also the reference links here below for

a detailed analysis and clarification of the data given in the graph. Research & Publication Unit, “India in

Figures 2015,” Central Statistics Office, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government

of India, New Delhi, 2015, 1-25; http://statisticstimes.com/economy/sectorwise-gdp-contribution-of-

india.php [accessed January 25, 2016]; Planning Commission, Government of India, updated in 08 July 2015.

http://planningcommission.gov.in/data/datatable/data_2312/DatabookDec2014%202.pdf [accessed January

25, 2016]; Jayan Jose Thomas, “Explaining the ‘Jobless’ Growth in Indian Manufacturing,” Journal of the

Asia Pacific Economy 18, no. 4 (2013): 673-692. 66 Singh, Indian Economy: For Civil Services Examinations, 1.14. 67 The contributors of Indian service (tertiary) sector are: trade, transport (rail and other means),

communication, banking & insurance, hotels & restaurant, public administration & defence, legal services,

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

1983 1993-94 2004-2005 2014-2015

4030

20.2 14.1

24.3

25.226.1

18.4

35.748.8 53.7

67.5 Service

Industry

Agriculture


66

underwent a structural change in production, shifting from agriculture towards industry and service,

the diversification of GDP occurred mostly with the shift not from agriculture to industry but from

agriculture to services.68 For instance, the share of agriculture or the primary sector in real GDP

declined from 40 percent in 1983 to 20.2 percent in 2005, whereas the share of industry and services

increased from 24.3 percent to 26.1 percent and 35.7 percent to 53.7 percent respectively in the same

period. The margin of industrial growth is minimal compared to that of the service sector. Moreover,

the agriculture sector drastically declined during the period 2005-2015, from 20.2 per cent in 2005

to 14.1 per cent in 2015, along with a gradual decline in the industrial sector from 26.1 per cent in

2005 to 18.4 per cent in 2015. However, the service sector output increased by 13.8 per cent during

these periods, from 53.7 per cent in 2005 to 67.5 per cent in 2015. This shows that in India, the

service sector has emerged as the major sector of the economy both in terms of growth and share of

GDP.

In addition to the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, India today primarily invests in trade,

education, entrepreneurship, technology, modern means of communication and transportation, and

social development. The considerable increment in foreign investment and consequent incredible

growth of Indian IT services makes the service sector the largest contributor to the GDP of globalized

India.69 Likewise, with its positive investment climate, India has become the world’s most attractive

IT market hub, with excellence in digital skills and business delivery. It mainly “comprises of

instance System Integration, Software experiments, Custom Application Development and

Maintenance (CADM), network services and IT Solutions.”70 An extensive leapfrogging has allowed

India and any developing countries to bypass the various stages and generations of technological

growth and situate itself directly in a service-dominated economy.71 In this way, in India, information

technology services have become high productivity services and make for a different workplace

system and work culture. These salient factors we examine in the following segment.

The IT industry and Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) sprouted and developed in

India with the help of foreign investments from IBM and ICL and prospered tremendously after the

successful issuance and reception of liberalization policies in the 1990s and many more investments

thereafter.72 The IT sector generally refers to the digital processing, storage and communication of

information of all kinds.73 As part of an inclusive and large-scale transformation belonging to global

services of the 21st century, the IT boom hit the shores of India with tags such as “Served from India”

real estate, personal services and storage. Bharti Singh, “Is the Service-Led Growth of India Sustainable?”

International Journal of Trade, Economics and Finance 3, no. 4 (2012): 317-318. 68 Thomas, “Explaining the ‘Jobless’ Growth in Indian Manufacturing,” 674. 69 Seema Joshi, “From Conventional to New Services: Broadened Scope of Tertiary Sector,” The Indian

Journal of Labour Economics 49, no. 2 (2006): 327. 70 G.V. Vijayasri, “The Role of Information Technology (IT) Industry in India,” International Monthly

Refereed Journal of Research in Management & Technology 2 (2013): 54. 71 S. Annapoorna and Siddappa T. Bagalkoti, “Development of IT Sector in India: Analysis of Reasons and

Challenges,” Journal of Economics and Sustainable Development 2, no. 2 (2011): 28; Jeemol Unni and Uma

Rani, “Globalization, Information Technology Revolution and Service Sector in India,” Indian Journal of

Labour Economics 43, no. 4 (2000): 803-828. 72 Sumit K. Majumdar, Kenneth L. Simons and Ashok Nag, “Body Shopping Versus Offshoring among Indian

Software and Information Technology Firms,” Information Technology and Management 12 (2011): 19. 73 Nirvikar Singh, “Technology and India’s Economic Development,” UC Santa Cruz Economics Working

Paper No. 523 (2002): 1-32. The revised form of this paper is available also at SSRN:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=345940 [accessed February 10, 2016]. Different types of

information are generally related to goods and services, about a subject or activity, arts or entertainment,

mentally processed and consumed information, and that which connected to sensation. However, here we are

concerned about the computer programming, system design, telecommunications, etc. that produce, process,

sell, and disseminate the information goods and services.


67

and “Destination India,” bringing a new and broad-ranging appeal to its business and work culture.74

Additionally, a new recognition is given to India, acknowledging and appreciating her destiny as an

“IT Superpower” or “knowledge-based society” by outsiders and investors, and the IT industry thus

functions as a vehicle of this new and rapid socio-economic transformation.75 Increased initiatives

such as permitting 100 percent foreign investments, creating Export Processing Zones (EPZs) with

tax incentives and duty free exports and imports, etc., have been the general causative factors in

India’s IT boom.76 The supporting components for this development include: Indian professional and

technical education emphasis and the generation of a highly educated workforce in contrast to the

global shortage of IT talent, seemingly startling lower wages (a quarter of the US wages) and

comparatively low telecommunication costs, and factors like time difference, institutional changes

and quality reputation.77 Indian work culture and customs drastically changed due to the adoption

and adaptation of the ICT-driven globalized work practices and must be understood, therefore, within

the larger political and economic context. This will be analysed and explained in the later parts of

this section.

The Indian IT industry has been fertile ground for the growth of a new socio-economic and cultural

structure employing and encouraging innovative corporate practices and has been instrumental and

influential “in reversing the brain drain, raising India’s brand equity and attracting foreign direct

investment (FDI).”78 Referring to notable features in India’s IT industry, S. Annapoorna and

Siddappa T. Bagalkoti note the domination of software, BPO and recent KPO operations in the Indian

IT industry and its upward movement in the value chain by offering system interaction package

implementation and IT sourcing and consultancy.79 It is also said to have been mainly export driven,

with its excess export orientation and increased quality of products and services. Another salient

feature of this industry is its growing interest in visualizing an increased scope for the enlargement

of the domestic market through SOHO (small offices and home offices) and E-governance

initiatives.80 Thus, IT services lead to economic and social transformation, altering and upgrading

India’s position in the global economy.

Various IT services from India generally comprise ‘high end’ computer science research as well as

‘low end’ data entry or back office process services and function in various segments, such as IT

services (IT & ITES), business process management (BPM [includes BPO & KPO]), software

products and engineering services, and hardware manufacturing, processing and services.81 These

services largely invest in innovation, automation, and the Internet of Things (IoT)82 and adapt to the

74 Joshi, “From Conventional to New Services: Broadened Scope of Tertiary Sector,” 328. 75 Venkatanarayana Motkuri, “Workforce in Indian Information Technology (IT) Industry: Exploring NSS

Employment and Unemployment Survey,” MPRA Paper No. 48411, Centre for Economics and Social

Studies, Hyderabad (March 2009): 1. 76 Joshi, “From Conventional to New Services: Broadened Scope of Tertiary Sector,” 328. 77 Majumdar, Simons and Nag, “Body Shopping Versus Offshoring among Indian Software and Information

Technology Firms,” 19-20. See also, Annapoorna and Bagalkoti, “Development of IT Sector in India:

Analysis of Reasons and Challenges,” 30. 78 Nagesh Kumar and K. J. Joseph, “Export of Software and Business Process Outsourcing from Developing

Countries: Lessons from the Indian Experience,” Asia-Pacific Trade and Investment Review 1, no. 1 (2005):

91. 79 Annapoorna and Bagalkoti, “Development of IT Sector in India: Analysis of Reasons and Challenges,” 29. 80 Annapoorna and Bagalkoti, “Development of IT Sector in India: Analysis of Reasons and Challenges,” 30. 81 Carol Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi, “Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry: A Sociological

Study,” Final Report to the Indo-Dutch Program for Alternatives in Development, Indian Institute of Science,

Bangalore, 2006, 16. See also, India Brand Equity Foundation, “IT & ITES Industry in India,” Sectoral Report

2016, http://www.ibef.org/industry/information-technology-india.aspx [accessed February 28, 2016]. 82 The concept of Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as “a global infrastructure for the information society,

enabling advanced services by interconnecting (physical and virtual) things based on existing and evolving


68

changing marketplace of this era.83 Depending on their type, size and ownership, IT firms in India

are categorised as small/medium enterprises (SMEs), major Indian companies (MICs), and

multinationals or firms with foreign equity participation (MNCs/Fes).84 They are mostly engaged in

hardware and software production (development, maintenance, coding and testing) and solutions and

outsourcing services. In addition, it is now generally agreed that “[h]aving proven its capabilities in

delivering both on-shore and off-shore services to global clients, emerging technologies now offer

an entire new gamut of opportunities for top IT firms in India”85 and leads to a structural change in

India’s organizational workplace practices.

Nevertheless, as in the case of any structural change and development, researchers have criticised

and raised challenges that question the growth and sustainability of the Indian IT industry. These

arguments are directed at different areas of IT works and services. According to Annapoorna and

Bagalkoti, the first concern is about extensive export orientation, which becomes highly volatile with

varying international pressures. An excessive dependence on government concessions and

liberalizing state forms has created concerns about a time when these benefits may cease due to a

change of policies. Another concern is related to declining technical efficiency, or lower or

inadequate attention paid to the domestic market, and the emergence of serious competitors around

the globe.86 Finally, some have pointed to the problem of attrition and scarcity of specialized and

technical workforce as well as the issue of employment security, as “[t]here is no longer a guarantee

of lifetime employment, but lifetime employability is assured through continuous upgradation.”87

Despite all these lines of criticism, it is important to mention that lately the service sector, and its IT

industry in particular, have been a significant contributor to employment generation and the removal

of regional disparities with regard to work culture and practices, and thus been the largest provider

of the young Indian workforce with long-term careers and work plans.88 The initial fear of a large

amount of possible worker redundancy and increased unemployment from the advancement of

technology and computerization has been largely outweighed and surpassed as these revolutionary

processes have become the great employer of new technocratic era.89 For instance, many in the young

generation aspire to enter the Indian IT industry, both those who are highly skilled (employed in

interoperable information and communication technologies.” Ovidiu Vermesan et al., “Internet of Things

Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda,” in Internet of Things: Converging Technologies for Smart

Environments and Integrated Ecosystems, eds. Ovidiu Vermesan and Peter Friess (Alborg: River Publishers,

2013), 15. This definition was originally formed in the overview of the Internet of things by the International

Telecommunication Union (ITU-T Y.2060) in 2012. The impact of IoT is evidently visible in various arenas

of human life such as education, work life, communication, business, science, health, government, and

humanity itself and leaped enormously in data collection and distribution in particular. 83 Venkatesha Babu, “The Dream peddlers,” Business Today In, India Today Group Digital Magazines, 2015.

http://www.businesstoday.in/magazine/cover-story/bt-500-2015-indian-information-technology-services-

industry/story/224947.html [accessed February 28, 2016]. 84 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry,” 18. 85 India Brand Equity Foundation, “IT & ITeS Industry in India,” Sectoral Report 2016,

http://www.ibef.org/industry/information-technology-india.aspx [accessed February 28, 2016]. 86 Annapoorna and Bagalkoti, “Development of IT Sector in India: Analysis of Reasons and Challenges,” 31.

See also, Nagesh Kumar and K. J. Joseph, “Export of Software and Business Process Outsourcing from

Developing Countries: Lessons from the Indian Experience,” Asia-Pacific Trade and Investment Review 1,

no. 1 (2005): 91-110. 87 Annapoorna and Bagalkoti, “Development of IT Sector in India: Analysis of Reasons and Challenges,” 32. 88 Joshi, “From Conventional to New Services: Broadened Scope of Tertiary Sector,” 329. Indian IT industry

firms like Infosis, Cognizant, Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services, Accenture, etc. operating in different states

of India opens the windows of new job opportunities and thus takes away the Indian age-old dearth of

workforce to a great extent. See also, Mohit Dubey and Aarti Garg, “Contribution of Information Technology

and Growth of Indian Economy,” Voice of Research 2, no. 4 (2014): 50. 89 Annapoorna and Bagalkoti, “Development of IT Sector in India: Analysis of Reasons and Challenges,” 28.


69

hardware and software sectors) and relatively less technically trained or even differently graduated

(admitted and occupied in ITES, BPO, and KPO industry).90 Seema Joshi writes, in this regard, that,

“with a phenomenal increase of employment in IT, BPO, etc. [...] it can be hoped that this primary

employment generation will also have a trickle-down effect in that the newly employed skilled

worker will create lots of secondary employment for semi-skilled and unskilled workers.”91

Acknowledging these new brackets of employment generation, we will analyse in what follows the

nature, structure and practices of the current Indian labour force.

2.1.4 The IT Workforce as Vanguard of a New Indian Working Class

The Indian labour force consisted of 430 million workers in 2004-2005, growing 2% annually in the

above discussed three sectors: (1) the rural (agricultural and allied sectors) workers (60%); (2) urban

organized (industrial) sector (8%); and the (3) urban informal (service) sector (32%).92 However,

there was incredible growth in the labour force later, with the increase in IT enabled services in India

for multiple reasons, which will be elaborated in the next section. Meanwhile, the Ministry of

Statistics and Programme Implementation of the Government of India, in its National Sample Survey,

shows in India, the labour force (employed & unemployed) increased from about 468.8 million (rural

male: 235.7, rural female: 106.5, urban male: 102.7 and urban female: 24.2) in 2010 to 483.7 million

(rural male: 238.8, rural female: 103.6, urban male: 112.5 and urban female: 28.8) in 2012.93 As per

the 2011-2012 survey of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO), the total workforce is estimated

at 47.41 crore94 (470 million; rural: 33.69 crore; urban: 13.72 crore) among which 23.18 crore (230

million) persons were employed in agriculture and allied sectors, 11.50 crore (110 million) in

industries sector and 12.73 (120 million) in the service sector.95 Similarly, according to a report of

the World Factbook, in India, the labour force by occupation was 49% in agriculture, 20% in industry,

and 31% in services in 2012.96

Survey results of World Development Indicators by the World Bank, as shown in Exhibit 2,97 and of

National Sample Survey Office of Government of India, as in Exhibit 3,98 reveal that there has been

a rapid increase in the industrial and service sectors workforce during these years of technological

advancement, and that Indai has experienced progress in IT enabled services along with it.

90 Annapoorna and Bagalkoti, “Development of IT Sector in India: Analysis of Reasons and Challenges,” 29. 91 Joshi, “From Conventional to New Services: Broadened Scope of Tertiary Sector,” 329. 92 Growth of Trade Union Movement, http://www.whatishumanresource.com/growth-of-trade-union-

movement [accessed February 15, 2016]. 93 National Sample Survey Office, “Key Indicators of Employment and Unemployment in India,” NSS 6 th

Round, July 2011 – June 2012, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Government of India,

2013, 25. 94 A crore denotes ten million in the Indian numbering system and is equal to 100 lakhs. In other words, it is

the sum of ten million of rupees. 95 National Sample Survey Office, “Key Indicators of Employment and Unemployment in India,” 25. 96 The World Factbook, “Economy: India,” Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Provider, the USA,

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/in.html [accessed February 16, 2016]. 97 World Development Indicators, “India: Distribution of the Workforce across Economic Sectors from 2000-

2012,” World Bank, http://www.statista.com/statistics/271320/distribution-of-the-workforce-across-

economic-sectors-in-india/ [accessed February 18, 2016]. 98 This is computed from unit level data of various NSSO rounds and published by the Institute for Human

Development, New Delhi and Academic Foundation, New Delhi, in the India Labour and Employment Report

2014. See for instance, India Labour and Employment Report 2014: Workers in the Era of Globalization

(New Delhi: AF and IHD, 2014), 51.


70

Exhibit-2 Workforce Percentage 2000-2012

Exhibit-3 Sector-wise employment growth 1972-73/1983 to 2004-2005/2011-12

Analysing these studies, one can see a structural transformation in the labour force, as it shifts away

from agricultural labour, the share dropping from 59.8% in 2000 to 47.2% in 2012. An increased

movement of the workforce from industry to services can also be seen. However, since, India is still

classified as an agrarian economy and society in terms of workforce with a strong domestic

orientation99, we shall now analyse in detail India’s labour force in a tripartite system of agricultural-

rural, industrial-urban and service/knowledge-metropolitan workforce.

Agriculture is labour intensive in India, because it depends less on machines. The Green Revolution,

which started in 1966, was thus experienced as a significant breakthrough and led to a great increase

in the production of food grains and commercial crops. The agriculture sector spread over the entire

rural region of India provided employment (direct or indirect) to 53% of population in 2011-12,

compared to 72% of 1947.100 In 2011-12, in rural India, almost 59 percent of male workers and 75

percent of female workers were engaged in the agriculture sector. Recent studies observe a gradual

99 More labour-intensive sector in India remains as traditional agriculture than modern manufacturing or service

industries. It is because of the labour in production, manufacturing and service process extensively and largely

depends upon the technologies that are used across the industries and sectors. 100 P.V. Raghavan, R. Vaithianthan and V.S. Murali, General Economics for the CA Common Proficiency Test,

2nd ed. (Chandigarh: Pearson, 2015), B.11-12.

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

2000 20052010

2012

59.855

51.147.2

16.1 1922.4

24.7

24.1 25.2 26.5 28.1

Services

Industry

Agriculture

1.7

4.4 4.2

1.4

2.8

3.8

0.7

43.4

-2

4.5

2.1

-3

-2

-1

0

1

2

3

4

5

Primary Secondary Tertiary

1972-73/83

1983/93-94

1993-94/2004-05

2004-05/2001-12


71

decline in the rural India agriculture workforce, from 81% rural male in 1977-78 (67% in 2004-05)

to 59% in 2011-12 and from 88 % rural female in 1977-78 (83% in 2004-05) to 75% in 2011-12.101

This decrease is due to a lack of interest in agricultural labour caused by problems such as slow and

uneven growth, slow modernization of agriculture, defective land reforms and even problems related

to agricultural credit, marketing and warehousing.102 Further in this line, new use of modern

agricultural machinery reduced the need for a manual workforce.

At the same time, industrialization, largely in urban areas, absorbs people in large scale work and

offers productive employment. Almost 21.5% of the Indian labour force (31% of workers in medium

and small industries and 43% in large industries) was employed in the industrial sector in 2009-10.103

Among urban India male workers, 26% are engaged in trade, hotel and restaurant work, 22% in

manufacturing, and 21% in other service sectors such as construction (11%), transportation (12%)

and agriculture (6%), whereas urban female workers are engaged mostly in ‘other service’ sectors

(40%), manufacturing (29%), trade and restaurant (13%) and agriculture (11%).104 P.V. Raghavan

and others have noted some of the problems of industrial development in India, such as shortfalls in

industrial targets, under-utilization of capacity, inadequate infrastructure, high costs, sectoral and

regional imbalances, and industrial sickness.105 There is, thus, a conspicuous decrease of workers in

agriculture sectors or rural regions and an increase in industrial manufacturing and other services

based in urban areas.

However, just as in all developing countries, today the service sector is growing faster than in any of

the other commodity producing sectors in India.106 Being a prime destination for ‘high-tech’ and

information technology enabled services, India has transformed her local labour markets into a new

‘knowledge’ workforce, ushering in an entirely new epoch in her work-history.107 India’s tertiary

educational institutions and professional and technical colleges produce a large number of young

workers who are talented and skilled and trained in software services and ITES/BPO, and thus it has

a pool of graduates equipped to meet the demands of the IT industry.108 IT professionals and related

service workers are concentrated, according to the NSS 61st (2004-05),109 in the urban areas (93.2%)

allocated into various categories such as software consultancy and supply (49%), computer related

activities (15%), database activities (11.7%), and manufacture, repair and maintenance of computers

(22.3%).110 Today most outsourcing services and off-shoring firms and organizations function in

101 National Sample Survey, “Employment and Unemployment Situation in India 2011-12,” NSS 68th Round,

National Sample Survey Office, Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation, Government of India,

issued in 2014, 114. http://mospi.nic.in/Mospi_New/upload/nss_report_554_31jan14.pdf [accessed

February 25, 2016]. 102 Raghavan, Vaithianthan and Murali, General Economics for the CA Common Proficiency Test, B. 15-17. 103 Raghavan, Vaithianthan and Murali, General Economics for the CA Common Proficiency Test, B. 18-19. 104 National Sample Survey, “Employment and Unemployment Situation in India 2011-12,” 114. 105 Raghavan, Vaithianthan and Murali, General Economics for the CA Common Proficiency Test, B. 22-23. 106 Joshi, “From Conventional to New Services: Broadened Scope of Tertiary Sector,” 321. See also, Joshi,

Seema, “Tertiary Sector-Driven Growth in India: Impact on Employment and Poverty,” Economic and

Political Weekly 39, no. 37 (2004a): 11-17. 107 The hi-tech work stands for computer programming and software developing, whereas ITES looks for BPOs

and call centres. Cf, Carol Upadhya, “Taking the High Road? Labour in the Indian Software Outsourcing

Industry,” in Labour in Global Production Networks in India, eds. Anne Posthuma and Dav Nathan (New

Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2010), 301. 108 Thomas Barnes, “The IT Industry and Economic Development in India: A Critical Study,” Journal of South

Asian Development 8, no. 1 (2013): 66. 109 NSS 61st (2004-05) means the National Sample Survey 2004-2005 (61st round) on Employment and

Unemployment by National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) – Government of India. 110 Venkatanarayana Motkuri, “Workforce in Indian Information Technology (IT) Industry: Exploring NSS

Employment and Unemployment Survey,” MPRA Paper No.48411, Centre for Economics and Social Studies,


72

India are based in metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Calcutta,

etc. and create a service/knowledge-metropolitan workforce. Thus, urban workers are increasingly

transformed into a metropolitan knowledge/service workforce, giving rise to a new Indian working

class.

In the traditional and conventional practices of India, presented in the first section above, “class

formation is substantively shaped by the reworking of inequalities of caste, language, religion and

gender [and] class as a category is constituted by these structures.”111 However, in close conjunction

with the transnationalized class identification of globalized and liberalized economic development,

the mounting IT workforce creates a new social structure that is forming and experiencing the

emergence of a new working class in India. This has happened in tandem with India’s engagement

with the global economy through her openness and participation in global IT trends. In any society,

determinations of class largely depend on an interplay of socio-cultural and economic factors, along

with a tendency to adopt and adapt to changing scientific and technocratic trends.112 Hence, workers

employed in the IT industry (or industries in the process of automated or computer based and non-

computer based service sectors) have been called the ‘new working class,’ and members of this

Indian IT & ITES workforce are portrayed as ‘proletarians within global business process’ and called

a white collar working class.113 This new working class functions as an agent of the globalized nation,

associating labours with high-tech, managerial efficiency and global economic competitiveness.114

This emerging workforce can be categorized generally as ‘service-contract’ employees and ‘labour

contract’ employees, depending on their characteristics such as duration (long-term or short-term),

authority, expertise (with or without qualifying degree), and employment security.115 These two types

of labourers, however, are identified, by themselves and by others, as the ‘creamy layers,’ given that

their status marked by Western-oriented lifestyles and professional identification with global

industry, and thus they gradually “[tend] to portray themselves as cosmopolitan, trendy, liberated

and global in outlook.”116 To identify some of defining features of this new working class, Maureen

O’Dougherty writes that they it tries to present and prove its status outwardly by both symbolic and

material actions of global consumption and seeks to secure a modern life at home and in society.117

In the same way, since English language facility and fluency are prerequisites of all transnational

outsourcing positions, language proficiency is a must for this workforce. This is a novel feature that

shows the convolution of old and new class structures.118

Although the service sector provides greater employment opportunities with wide-ranging high

growth of GDP, there have been consistent and multiple employment convolutions and labour

setbacks in this tertiary sector services, and in IT-related workplaces in particular. It is often noted

that the industry, for instance, with its functional and behavioural patterns creates “an increasingly

Hyderabad, 2009, 6. Also available at: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/48411/1/MPRA_paper_48411.pdf

[accessed February 18, 2016]. 111 Leela Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform

(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 222. 112 Jonathan Murphy, “Indian Call Centre Workers: Vanguard of a Global Middle Class?” Work, Employment

and Society 25, no. 3 (2011): 418. 113 Murphy, “Indian Call Centre Workers: Vanguard of a Global Middle Class?” 420. 114 Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class, 35. 115 John Scott, “Social Class and Stratification in Late Modernity,” Acta Sociologica 45, no. 1 (2002): 25. 116 Murphy, “Indian Call Centre Workers: Vanguard of a Global Middle Class?” 420. 117 Maureen O’Dougherty, Consumption Intensified: The Politics of Middle-Class Daily Life in Brazil

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 112. O’Dougherty tries to explain the form of new middle class

by linking the consumer culture and social status. 118 Murphy, “Indian Call Centre Workers: Vanguard of a Global Middle Class?” 423.


73

sharp and visible social and economic divide between those who work in the IT industry and those

who do not,” reflecting an enclave-type dynamic.119 Though the IT industry epitomizes the so-called

‘middle class’ and provides for upward mobility, social disparities tends to arise as the new IT

workforce emerges only from a “relatively affluent, forward caste, urban-dwelling, highly educated

and English-speaking background” and subsequent negligence and inattention of those who cannot

afford to participate in this movement.120 Various studies also suggest that employees “face acute

problems of excessive working hours, management pressure and the lack of opportunities for career

progression.”121 Although numerous studies have been conducted about the emergence, growth and

structure of India’s IT industry, the ethical and sociological implications of these changes for its

workforce, its most crucial resource, have not been sufficiently critically analysed. A brief account

of labour challenges and constraints is given in the following section, as these are among the least

addressed areas in the discussion of globalized IT employees in India.

2.2 LABOUR (EMPLOYMENT) TRENDS AND CHALLENGES IN GLOBALIZED IT-INDIA

Globalization, with its increased “cross-border transactions in the production and marketing of goods

and services that facilitates firm relocation to low labour cost countries,”122 deserves credit for

creating increased privilege many new opportunities for high-quality employment in developing

countries like India. As globalization has led to the increased mobility of persons as well as goods,

capital, data, and ideas, and thus enabled the free movement of labour, information technology (IT)

professionals have gained a privileged status with higher salaries, many employment opportunities

and comfortable working environments.123 However, the survival of domestic industries, small-scale

traders, and local products were at stake, as these same dynamics have led to a commercial

colonialism marked by the dominance of foreign industries and exploitation of human resources.124

Along this same line, we can see that factors such as privatization, flexibilization, and

individualization, along with excessive labour control and moitoring, coalesce the major labour

trends and challenges in globalized IT-India, which will be further discussed below.

Privatization is broadly defined as “the deliberate sale by a government of state-owned enterprises

(SOEs) or assets to private economic agents [...] and is one of the most important elements of the

119 Barnes, “The IT Industry and Economic Development in India: A Critical Study,” 67. Originally in Carol

Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi, “Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry: A Sociological Study,”

Final Report to the Indo-Dutch Program for Alternatives in Development, Indian Institute of Science,

Bangalore, 2006, 159. 120 Tom Barnes, “India’s IT Industry & Trade Unions: Are IT Workers Joining the ‘Precariat’? Labour in the

Asian Century: Thoughts and Analysis on Labour Movements in Asia and Beyond, 2015. See,

http://tombarnes.info/?p=259 [accessed February 25, 2016]. Also, in Jonathan Murphy, “Indian Call Centre

Workers: Vanguard of a Global Middle Class?” Work, Employment and Society 25, no. 3 (2011): 417-433. 121 Barnes, “The IT Industry and Economic Development in India: A Critical Study,” 67. See for instance,

Babu P. Remesh, “Work Organization, Control and ‘Empowerment’: Managing the Contradictions of Call

Centre Work,” in In an Outpost of the Global Economy: Work and Workers in India’s Information Technology

Industry, eds. Carol Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi (London: Routledge, 2008): 235-262. 122 Katherine VW Stone, “Flexibilization, Globalization, and Privatization: Three Challenges to Labour Rights

in Our Time,” in Regulating Labour in the Wake of Globalization: New Challenges, New Institutions, eds.

Brian Bercusson and Cynthia Estlund (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2008), 115. Stone defines globalization as

“the cross-border interpretation of economic life.” Stone, “Flexibilization, Globalization, and Privatization,”

119. 123 Carol Upadhya, “Taking the High Road? Labour in the Indian Software Outsourcing Industry,” in Labour

in Global Production Networks in India, eds. Anne Posthuma and Dav Nathan (New Delhi, India: Oxford

University Press, 2010), 300. The employee comfort is often only projected, and not in effect because the

notion of ‘decent work environment’ is at risk when these jobs are highly insecure with long working hours,

monotonous work and volatility of demand. 124 Raghavan, Vaithianthan and. Murali, General Economics for the CA Common Proficiency Test, 151.


74

continuing global phenomenon of the increasing use of markets to allocate resources.”125 According

to Stone, privatization refers to “policies that shift responsibilities and resources from the public

sphere to the private sector” based on the ideology of free market ‘neo-liberalism’.126 It entails the

reassigning of assets or service functions from public to private control, facilitating a dominance of

the private sector in wide areas of investments. It replaces government monopolies with private

competitive business groups and thus reduces the liability of the public sector and revives torpid

public firms by diversification and modernization.127 This is not without its setbacks. The

privatization of public goods always bring challenges. The aggregation of monopoly power to private

companies may encourage minimum investment and a drive for quick/maximum returns. This profit

motive alone makes companies less interested in social justice and public welfare, and disparities in

the distribution of income and wealth leads to class struggle and thus social inequality.128

The current process of privatization and the emerging IT trends in India face the challenge of rigid

labour contracts. New enterprises restructure workloads and hours and mount pressure to work

beyond individuals’ capacities, leading to a deterioration of employees’ mental and physical strength.

Minimum adherence to public labour laws and rights and a maximum observance of private

particular regulations and norms ruptures lasting relationships between management and labourers.

The ease of labour adjustments, compounded by the lack of labour social welfare systems, is an

emerging sensitive aspect of IT labour trends in the wake of privatization, and a discrepancy in the

distribution of welfare is often apparent.129 The loss of collective power and association is another

major challenge. A new global market logic questioned the value of state intervention and the

established rights of workers and led to another labour reform, one that caused a disappearance of

regular and sustaining jobs and weakened the conventional base of unions.130 This type of neo-liberal

reform individualizes labour relations and promotes the independent freedom to hire and fire workers

at will. In the same way, despite the alleged labour market rigidity in the organized IT sectors, job

security is highly uncertain as people are not able to protest the loss of their jobs.

The flexibilization of labour is one of the key trends in IT-enabled India, as well as a major challenge.

The presence of a large informal economy in developing countries such as India makes the labour

situation highly flexible. Stone defines flexibilization as “the changing work practices by which firms

no longer use internal labour markets or implicitly promise employees lifetime job security, but

instead seek flexible employment relations that permit them to increase or diminish their workforce

and reassign and redeploy employees with ease.”131 Spatial mobility provides significant socio-

cultural and economic exposure, by enabling employees to work in different countries. However, a

high rate of short-term projects and contract works within and outside the country to increase labour

mobility and often goes into a ‘human resource augmentation mode,’ disregarding the stable life

125 William L. Megginson and Jeffry M. Netter, “From State to Market: A Survey of Empirical Studies on

Privatization,” Journal of Economic Literature 39 (2001): 321. According to Megginson and Netter, “there

has been a mixture of public and private ownership of the means of production and commerce [...], state

ownership of the means of production, including mills and metal working [...] while private ownership

[which] was more common in trading and money lending.” Megginson and Netter, “From State to Market: A

Survey of Empirical Studies on Privatization,” 322. 126 Stone, “Flexibilization, Globalization, and Privatization,” 121. 127 Raghavan, Vaithianthan and. Murali, General Economics for the CA Common Proficiency Test, B.146-147.

See also, John Vickers and George Yarrow, “Economic Perspectives on Privatization,” Journal of Economic

Perspectives 5, no. 2 (1992): 111-132. 128 Raghavan, Vaithianthan and. Murali, General Economics for the CA Common Proficiency Test, B.147. 129 Kikeri, “Privatization and Labour: What happens to Workers when Governments Divest?” 9. 130 Shyam Sundar, “Trade Unions and the New Challenges,” 905. 131 Stone, “Flexibilization, Globalization, and Privatization,” 115.


75

chances and leading to adverse consequences for labourers.132 This is fundamentally detrimental to

job performance and individual career success. For space plays a crucial role in enhancing and

refining human feeling and perception and in materializing human values, and contributes “to

demarking social roles and defining relations and thereby broadly serving to predispose individuals

to act and perceive actions in certain ways rather than others.”133

Furthermore, in India, employment takes different and more flexible forms as part-time, temporary,

or contract work with regard to time limits, as well as in further flexible progress in the work process,

in workforce itself, and in organizational forms.134 This is called the ‘temporal flexibility’ of labour.

It dismantles or abandons the consistency, permanence, and longevity of the ‘internal labour market’

built during the twentieth century.135 It also facilitates or enables lower capital costs and raises output

capacity and potential employment. However, the formality of contract here is frequently low, and

the length of engagement is typically short. Christine B. Tayntor rightly observes in this regard that

“[b]ecause of the short-term and ad hoc nature of hiring contractors, IT can move quickly, bringing

on additional staff for specific projects and removing them as soon as the work is complete.”136

Although Carol Upadhya acknowledges that “[f]rom the industry point of view, temporary staffing

enhances flexibility in the deployment of human resources,” she adds that “but for employees it is a

highly insecure form of employment.”137 This contingent nature of flexibility, with short-term or

episodic characteristics, breaks the bond between worker and firm138 and reduces the likelihood of

convening non-wage labour costs and the demands of job protection legislation.139 Even though

labour flexibility has “implications for building careers, organizing workers, and developing

progressive labour market policies,” it can also “worsen wage inequality, job insecurity, and other

labour market conditions and outcomes”140 along with causing spatio-temporal alienation of

employees’ work satisfaction and inhibiting their work progress.

132 Human resource augmentation model or staff augmentation allows contract basis or temporary staff for a

particular project in a particular place and avoids general hiring/de-hiring costs and full-time payments. The

economic benefits are at best in this practice when specific skills are required for short-term engagements.

However, employees are terminated as the contract (short-term) expires along with the completion of

particular task and thus the job security is at risk and these employees are not entitled to the employee benefits

and rights. The project requirements as special skills make it training intensive and labour engagements with

the hard requisites in short notice and in different locations bring further challenges of health and life. See,

Christine B. Tayntor, “A Practical Guide to Staff Augmentation and Outsourcing,” Information Management:

Strategy, Systems, and Technologies, 2001.

http://www.ittoday.info/AIMS/Information_Management/2-01-01.pdf [accessed February 28, 2016]. 133 Värlander, “Individual Flexibility in the Workplace: A Spatial Perspective,” 38. This conceptualization of

space is adopted from the work of Yi-Fu Tuan originally published in 1997 and has 8th reprint in 2001. See,

Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press,

2001), 102. 134 Upadhya, “Taking the High Road? Labour in the Indian Software Outsourcing Industry,” 305. Several

distinct process of labour flexibilization as a feature of the Western post-industrial economy is well explained

by Chris Benner. He explains the nature of labour market flexibility and how it is related to the deep structural

transformations of the economy. He develops a conceptual frame work of flexibilization denoting the

distinction between the flexibility in work and in employment. Cf. Chris Benner, Work in the New Economy:

Flexible Labour Markets in Silicon Valley. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, 11-21. 135 Stone, “Flexibilization, Globalization, and Privatization,” 116. 136 Tayntor, “A Practical Guide to Staff Augmentation and Outsourcing,” 4. 137 Upadhya, “Taking the High Road? Labour in the Indian Software Outsourcing Industry,” 306. 138 Stone, “Flexibilization, Globalization, and Privatization,” 116. 139 Klau and Mittelstadt, “Labour Market Flexibility,” 14. 140 Chigon Kim, review of Work in the New Economy: Flexible Labour Markets in Silicon Valley, by Chris

Benner, American Journal of Sociology 109, no. 1 (2003): 233-234. For detailed description see for instance,

Benner, Work in the New Economy: Flexible Labour Markets in Silicon Valley, 203-231.


76

The process of individualization, however, as a symptom of advanced modernization, marks another

trend in IT workplaces and poses further challenges for the workforce. For instance, recruitment,

sustenance, promotions and salaries all reasonably depend upon an individual’s performance, and

thus individual competition is increasingly encouraged for rewards and job security. This

compromises workers’ sense of collective identity, however, fragmenting the collectivity.141 The

increased employee individualization, according to Irakli Gvaramadze, “contributes to outsourcing

responsibilities and duties, which increases stress, doubt, uncertainty and ambiguity among the

employees.”142 Excessive individual competition in the IT workplace gradually leads to over-work,

long working hours, and stress. There is an effort to clear one’s career path and protect one’s position

in the organizational context rather than showing a commitment to individual, organizational, or

societal development. Consequently, individualization in the IT workplace, as Upadhya illustrates,

acts against the ideals of teamwork, cooperation, and sociability.143 It tends to intensify competition

and mobility, to increase levels of stress and lead one to refuse collective structures.144

Individualization in IT workplaces in India adversely intensifies individualistic labour relations over

against a traditional sense of collective identity. Continuous re-skilling has to be encouraged to

ensure that employees are able to compete with the fast-changing needs and requirements of IT jobs

and secure a place in the job market.

Global “body shopping” and “off-shoring” and their respective consequences of transnationalization’

and ‘virtual migration’ have been identified as alarming challenges facing the Indian IT industry.145

Body shopping, according to Xiang Biao, “is arguably a uniquely Indian practice whereby an Indian-

run consultancy (body shop) anywhere in the world recruits IT workers, in most cases from India, to

be placed out as project-based labour with different clients.”146 However, contrary to what is

generally assumed, IT services of programming, testing, debugging, etc. are very labour intensive

and thus most Indian IT workers who have migrated through body shopping are forced to work in

tedious and repetitive “donkey work” situations.147 Body shopping leads to the selling of ‘bodies’ as

if they were Indian groceries, as opposed to earlier practices of ‘head-hunting’ in business-related

recruitments. In the same vein, off-shoring produces new forms of mobility (since ‘knowledge work’

moves) and immobility (since a body never moves) in the body shopping process. This has been

called ‘virtual migration’.148

The process of the spatial and temporal integration of virtual migration brings with it further labour

challenges, such as “spatio-temporal alienation.”149 Spatial integration occurs when data

141 Upadhya, “Taking the High Road? Labour in the Indian Software Outsourcing Industry,” 308. See also,

Laurent Taskin and Velérie Devos, “Paradoxes from the Individualization of Human Resource Management:

The Case of Telework,” Journal of Business Ethics 62, no. 1 (2005): 14. 142 Gvaramadze, “Human Resource Development Practice,” 466. 143 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry,” 84. 144 Mythen, “Employment, Individualization and insecurity,” 133. 145 There are three types of IT outsourcing services in India: (1) onsite consultancy (working within the client’s

premises), (2) contract work (getting contracts and work from different localities), and (3) the mixed case of

onsite and offsite work or services. Sumit K. Majumdar, Kenneth L. Simons and Ashok Nag, “Bodyshopping

versus Offshoring among Indian Software and Information Technology Firms,” Information Technology and

Management 12 (2011): 19. 146 Xiang Biao, Global “Body Shopping”: An Indian Labour System in the Information Technology Industry

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 4. 147 Biao, Global “Body Shopping”: An Indian Labour System in the Information Technology Industry, 5. 148 Upadhya, “Taking the High Road? Labour in the Indian Software Outsourcing Industry,” 303. Upadhya

opines that in the off-shore model of working, professionals “located in India are logged onto the computer

networks of their customers abroad, working on projects as part of ‘virtual teams’ consisting of colleagues,

managers, and customers spread across several geographical locations.” 149 Aneesh, Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization, 67-98.


77

communication networks unfasten work performance from a worksite, while temporal integration

brings together different time zones. Finally, in a nutshell, as Seema Joshi rightly observes, “[t]he

close monitoring, continuous work assessments, less number of holidays, absence of organizational

activities and promotion of individualization leads to isolation on the one hand and reduces the scope

for establishing trade unions on the other.”150 Among these challenges the issue of ‘close monitoring,’

within the scope of our research, will be elaborated on and further discussed in the following section.

For unlike conventional workplaces and offices, organizational workplace in the software industry,

ITES offices and BPOs track and monitor employees both on-the-job and off-the-job with the help

of various tools of technological advancement, and these employees often experience adverse effects.

2.3 EMPLOYEE SURVEILLANCE AS A MODERN WORKPLACE CHALLENGE IN INDIA

Modern management practices in general try to solve the challenges of maximizing control,

conformance, discipline, reliability, and predictability.151 Along with these important organizational

virtues, managers often create other challenges related to the very technologically dependent

agencies of work, especially in the IT and ITES workplaces and among those employing electronic

surveillance. Though the specific parameters of surveillance vary both in quantity and quality in

relation to organizational differences, performative and behavioural monitoring and the ubiquitous

nature of its applications are mostly increasing in Indian workplaces, and particularly in those

enabled with ICT152. The management ideology of monitoring practices is being criticized:

[T]he availability of a technological capacity does not mean it will necessarily be deployed [...].

Managers may or may not be aware of the potential of technologies for monitoring, and if they

are aware, they will still weigh the benefits of implementing surveillance process against the

perceived costs and benefits to the organization. Further, even in sites [...] where surveillance is

routine, whether or not staff are disciplined or penalized for variations form the normative

procedures depends on management practices and priorities.153

Technology provides or functions only as a tool for data to be collected, analysed and interpreted.

Yet continuous and easy monitoring through technological viability makes and transforms

‘monitoring work’ to ‘surveillance of workers’ and demands a transformed management strategy.154

It has been observed that employees face new forms challenges due to the volatile requirements of

global standard business and its functional practice of direct or ‘panoptical’ control over workers and

150 Joshi, “From Conventional to New Services: Broadened Scope of Tertiary Sector,” 330. See also, Babu P.

Ramesh, “‘Cyber Coolies’ in BPO: Insecurities and Vulnerabilities of Non-Standard Work,” Economic and

Political Weekly 39, no.5 (2004): 496. 151 Polly LaBarre, “New Management Principles for a New Age,” Management Innovation eXchange (MIX),

http://www.managementexchange.com/blog/new-management-principles-new-age [accessed February 15,

2016]. 152 Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D’Cruz, Employee Identity in Indian Call Centres: The Notion of

Professionalism (New Delhi: Response Books, 2009), 12. 153 David Mason, Graham Button, Gloria Lankshear, and Sally Coetes, “Getting Real about Surveillance and

Privacy at Work,” in Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, Steve Woolger, ed. (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2002), 100. Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D’Cruz are of the same opinion that “it is relevant

to acknowledge that management has a choice about whether to implement any or all of the monitoring

capacity of the ICTs. [...] the ability to monitor calls does not necessarily translate into the practice of

monitoring.” Noronha and D’Cruz, Employee Identity in Indian Call Centres, 12. 154 Mary Prior, “Surveillance-Capable Technologies in the Workplace,”

http://rccs.southernct.edu/surveillance-capable-technologies-in-the-workplace/ [accessed February 18,

2016]. Further problems and emerging challenges of this gradual but auto-transformation, from ‘work

monitoring’ (performance monitoring or process monitoring) to ‘monitoring of workers,’ will be critically

and extensively analysed in the second part of this study.


78

the work process.155 This practice has been called the ‘electronic panopticon’ by Graham Sewell and

Barry Wilkinson, “where a disembodied eye can overcome the constrains of architecture and space

to bring its disciplinary gaze to bear at the very heart of the labour process.”156 This has a drilling

effect on employees and is a major challenge of the Indian organizational workplace today. However,

before explaining this, next in order, by placing the distinctive socio-cultural and economic scenarios

at the forefront, we need to consider the reasons why electronic monitoring and surveillance is so

widely used today in Indian organizations.

2.3.1 Indian Circumstantial Rationale behind the Workplace Surveillance

The emergence of sophisticated monitoring technologies around the globe, often at affordable prices,

has led to an increase in employee surveillance in Indian organizations. Apart from the previously

discussed purposes of electronic surveillance, such as measuring and improving performance,

preventing theft and other risk factors, and ensuring proper adherence to the rules and policies of the

workplace, there are few specific reasons for its implementation in thean Indian organizational

context, due to India’s particular socio-cultural and economic scenarios.

Quality Management is for the most frequently cited justification for surveillance in Indian

organizations.157 In the wake of globalization, liberalization, and privatization, Indian organizations

now find themselves in a quality race with regard to their products and services. Quality is redefined

in the Indian organization, extending to client and consumer satisfaction as well as the redesign of

products and services.158 The quality of products or services from India introduces, in addition to the

anticipated benefits, new and increased forms of surveillance that are “in apparent contradiction to

the official rhetoric of worker initiative and autonomy.”159 The quality assessing processes of ‘Just-

In-Time’ (JIT) and ‘Total Quality Management’ (TQM), for instance, enlarge the profit motive and

lead to a substantial increase in surveillance practices. Just-in-time is a strategy to increase efficiency

by utilizing a company’s full capacity and decreasing inventory costs by eliminating waste and

receiving only vital goods, and thereby maximizing a company’s benefits and profit.160 According to

Vikas Kumar, JIT “combines apparently conflicting objectives of low cost, high quality,

manufacturing flexibility, and delivery dependability.”161 Total Quality Management offers a

different but complementary means to reach the quality objective of a product or service. TQM

155 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry,” ii. 156 Graham Sewell and Barry Wilkinson, “Someone to Watch Over Me: Surveillance, Discipline and the Just-

in-Time Labour Process,” Sociology 26 (1992): 283; Prasad, “International Capital on “Silicon Plateau”:

Work and Control in India’s Computer Industry,” 444. 157 Rosemary Batt, Virginia Doellgast, Hyunji Kwon and Vivek Agarwal, “Service Management and

Employment Systems in U.S. and Indian Call Centres,” Brookings Trade Forum, Offshoring White-Collar

Work (2005): 341. 158 Raj Kumar, Dixit Garg and T.K. Garg, “Total Quality Management in Indian Industries: Relevance,

Analysis and Directions,” The TQM Journal 21, no. 6 (2009): 607. 159 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry,” 64. Monika Prasad,

“International Capital on “Silicon Plateau”: Work and Control in India’s Computer Industry,” Social Forces

77, no. 2 (1998): 439-440. 160 Sultan Singh and Dixit Garg, “JIT System: Concepts, Benefits and Motivation in Indian Industries,”

International Journal of Management and Business Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 26. Cf. Gurinder Singh and

Inderpreet Singh Ahuja, “An Evaluation of Just-in-Time Initiatives in the Indian Industries,” International

Journal of Quality & Reliability Management 32, no. 6 (2015): 559-588. 161 Vikas Kumar, “JIT Based Quality Management: Concepts and Implications in Indian Context,”

International Journal of Engineering Science and Technology 2, no. 1 (2010): 40.


79

involves the study of customer satisfaction, effective coordination of management and employees,

statistical quality control, communication systems, and cost involvement, etc.162

However, although JIT and TQM include inventory control, quality control, and production

management, the lack of an adequate standard for implementing them and a lack of internalization

of these concepts163 leads also to the maximization of other external forces, such as electronic

surveillance methods. This is done with an aim to make best use of available time and resources and

thus perk up the quality of products and services. The initiatives of JIT and TQM, according to

Monika Prasad “were associated with intensification, job-loss, increased monitoring and direct

control and limited promotion opportunities.”164 Similarly, quoting Sewell & Wilkinson (1992), she

notes that in the Indian organizational context these regimes of JIT and TQM “create and demand

systems of surveillance which improve on those of the traditional bureaucracy in instilling discipline

and thereby consolidating central control and making if more efficient.”165 Both JIT and TQM

recognize the capacity of workers to become quality analysers and thus participants in the decision-

making process. But the application and practice of intrusive monitoring techniques to manage

quality conversely erodes the trust and responsibility invested in them and enforces more rigid

workplace control.

Concomitant with these strategies is Technological Over-Dependency and the misuse of technology

by both employees and management.. The improper use of technologies, for instance, has become a

pervasive problem in the workplace, with rigorous implications for management and organizations

in the forms of low productivity, security breaches and liability and legal concerns.166 To explain this

further, cyberslacking – the misuse of time, resources, etc., for non-work purposes during working

hours (known also as cyberloafing or cyberbludging) – is widespread in Indian organizational

workplaces due to employees’ easy access to internet.167 Similarly, Cyberbullying, as a catch-all term

to represent this misuse, is defined “as a behaviour that involves the use of cell phones, instant

messaging, e-mail, chat rooms or social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to harass,

threaten or intimidate or support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behaviour by an individual or group

intended to harm others.”168 This is often done on the presumption that no one knows the

162 Kumar, Garg and Garg, “Total Quality Management in Indian Industries,” 608-609. Harjeev Kumar

Khanna, S.C. Laroiya and D.D. Sharma, “Quality Management in Indian Manufacturing Organizations: Some

Observations and Results from a Pilot Survey,” Brazilian Journal of Operations & Production Management

7, no. 1 (2010): 141-162; Namish Mehta, Prakash Verma and Nitin Seth, “Understanding Total Quality

Management in Context: International and Indian Service Industry,” Current World Environment 4, no. 2

(2009): 285-292. 163 Kumar, “JIT Based Quality Management,” 40; B. Mahadevan, “Are Indian Companies Ready for Just-in-

Time,” IIMB Management Review 9, nos. 2, 3 (1997): 86. 164 Prasad, “International Capital on “Silicon Plateau”: Work and Control in India’s Computer Industry,” 443.

Originally in Janette Webb, “Vocabularies of Motive and the ‘New’ Management,” Work, Employment, and

Society 10 (1996): 269. 165 Prasad, “International Capital on “Silicon Plateau”: Work and Control in India’s Computer Industry,” 443;

Graham Sewell and Barry Wilkinson, “Someone to Watch Over Me: Surveillance, Discipline and the Just-

in-Time Labour Process,” Sociology 26 (1992): 277. 166 Joseph C. Ugrin, J. Michael Pearson and Marcus D. Odom, “Profiling Cyber-Slackers in the Workplace:

Demographic, Cultural, and Workplace Factors,” Journal of Internet Commerce 6, no. 3 (2007): 76. 167 Premilla D’Cruz and Ernesto Noronha, “Navigating the Extended Reach: Target Experiences of

Cyberbullying at Work,” Information and Organization 23 (2013): 324-325; R. Venkatapathy and

Madhumathi M., “Use of Technology and Counterproductive Work Behaviour,” Paripex: Indian Journal of

Research 5, no. 4 (2016): 56; and Joseph C. Ugrin, J. Michael Pearson and Marcus D. Odom, “Profiling

Cyber-Slackers in the Workplace: Demographic, Cultural, and Workplace Factors,” Journal of Internet

Commerce 6, no. 3 (2007): 75-89. 168 Rotimi Taiwo, “Cyber Behaviour,” in Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, 3rd ed., ed.

Mehdi Khosrow-Pour (Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 1015), 2979.


80

wrongdoings,169 suggesting that the absence of a moral check increases distraction among employees.

Therefore, it is essential at this point from an employers’ perspective to uncover the dynamics of this

growing issue in the Indian organizational workplace and take various remedial or preventive

measures. To this end, and to eliminate the pressure and opportunities monitoring mechanisms have

been largely used in the Indian organizational work context.

The Performance Attributes of the Indian socio-cultural scenarios, discussed above, and the

workplace behavioural patterns they promote, seem to further necessitate the monitoring of

employees in Indian organizational workplaces. For example, Indian workers often take a cautious

approach (non-committal) in complex decision-making situations and avoid making a decision until

they are assured of a favourable outcome by a superior, or until a superior simply decides for them.170

Low work-quality consciousness and the ready postponing of delayed or incomplete work to the next

day are quite normal in the Indian work contexts.171 Similarly, another rampant problem in

organizational workplaces in India is wasting time, and “coupled with dishonesty and bureaucracy,

this issue poses a formidable challenge to [...] business in India.”172 To maintain an expected level of

performance, external monitoring is implemented. Likewise, workers’ priorities are widely linked to

family, caste, religious adherence, political ideologies, etc.,173 and these outside pressures often lead

employees to use workplace resources in matters beyond the working process and relationships. To

ward off these employees’ vulnerability and concerns, employers apply strict monitoring procedures.

Power Control and Inequality in the contractual relationship174 between employer and employee in

the organizational work context in India, discussed above, enables a superior to monitor an inferior

with or without his or her consent. Surveillance in this contextual scenario of power is perceived as

exploiting the vulnerability of the subordinate: “the organization that might have higher power in the

contractual relationship is infringing the employee’s [...] individual rights.”175 It is seen also as an

effort to maintain technological decorum by imitating Western models of management, which

invariably highlight contractual power distance. To the same extent, the practice of subcontracting

work in Indian organizations encourages employee monitoring, since the organization wants to keep

performance metrics always far above the ground.176 Forcontract enforcement, as researchers like

Rosemary Batt, Virginia Doellgast and Hyunji Kwon opine, is ensured through extended and

continuous monitoring practices, which articulate in turn subcontractors’ adherence to performance

metrics and place them under intense pressure to meet the same efficiency goals and targets.177

Human Resource Profusions in India have also encouraged the use of electronic and other monitoring

systems in organizations. For since India has an abundance of qualified labour force, rigid

surveillance practices allow management to screen, select and retain honest and suitable employees

and, even in an unfair manner, to dismiss poor performers and replace them with others who are

169 Ugrin, Pearson and Odom, “Profiling Cyber-Slackers in the Workplace,” 87. 170 Anshuman Khare, “Japanese and Indian Work Patterns: A Study of Contrasts,” in Management and Cultural

Values: The Indiginization of Organizations in Asia, Henry S. R. Kao, Durganand Sinha, and Bernhard

Wilpert, (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2002), 127. 171 Khare, “Japanese and Indian Work Patterns: A Study of Contrasts,” 127. 172 Khare, “Japanese and Indian Work Patterns: A Study of Contrasts,” 131. 173 Khare, “Japanese and Indian Work Patterns: A Study of Contrasts,” 129. 174 Sandeep K. Krishnan, Biju Varkkey, and Anush Raghavan, “Employee Privacy at Workplaces: Some

Pertinent Issues,” Research and Publication Department (No. WP2006-02-04), Indian Institute of

Management Ahmedabad, 2006, 4. 175 Krishnan, Varkkey, and Raghavan, “Employee Privacy at Workplaces: Some Pertinent Issues,” 4. 176 Batt, et al., “Service Management and Employment Systems in U.S. and Indian Call Centres,” 339. 177 Batt, et al., “Service Management and Employment Systems in U.S. and Indian Call Centres,” 339.


81

skilled and efficient.178 In this way, we can also see an economic reason for the use of monitoring

technologies in the Indian workplace. For instance, a human supervisor is substituted for a

technological supervisor, and constant observation and control are exacerbated and intensified,

which articulate not the scarcity of human resource but the strategic economic agenda. Electronic

monitoring systems are used here only as performance management technologies, which are

invariably used by client companies to monitor the employees of their contracted companies.179 Here,

man-power is not replaced by techno-power, but unconstructively complemented and broadened by

it. Premilla D’Cruz and Ernesto Noronha observe the same, and opine that “the employment of call

centre technology as a monitoring and measurement device did not spell the end of human

supervision.”180 For, with a master screen at a centre point there are persons overlooking and keeping

an eye on every operation. Our point here is that this situation exacerbates the effects of power control

and enlarges power distance.

For many reasons, then – decreasing job performance and productivity, misuses of company

resources, and issues such as cyber slacking –espionage in the Indian organizational work context is

on the rise. This orientation of surveillance practices in India is also similar to the classical Taylorism,

which held that “to increase productivity and reduce costs by monitoring the use of time and the

performance of tasks, and by devising methods to save time and increase productivity.”181 However,

invasive and persistent practices of surveillance can be manipulative and focus so much on the

activities being monitored and the effort to alter statistics that the organization’s overall performance

is negatively affected.182 Poor Constitutional and Legislative Security with regard to surveillance and

employee rights increases the outsized implementation of such technologies and practices in India to

scrutinize the individual worker.183 Apart from the constitutionally recognized fundamental rights –

including the right to freedom and right to life and personal liberty – there is no explicit reference to

the nature or extent of surveillance or to a right to privacy. The following section provides an

overview of constitutional rights, acts, or legislative regulations in India related to workplace

surveillance and statutory safeguards.

2.3.2 India’s Legal Frameworks Governing the Workplace Surveillance

Surveillance systems are used in various agencies and departments of the Indian central Government.

These include: the National Intelligence Grid (NIG), the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network

System (CCTNS), the Central Monitoring System (CMS), the Unique Identification Authority of

India (UID Scheme), the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), and the National

Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC).184 Though these agencies administer and exercise their functions

with specific rules and regulatory norms pertaining to each department, the lack of laws specifically

governing surveillance in India hinders its general application. To contextualize this issue, we should

178 Krishnan, Varkkey, and Raghavan, “Employee Privacy at Workplaces: Some Pertinent Issues,” 4. 179 Batt, et al., “Service Management and Employment Systems in U.S. and Indian Call Centres,” 339. 180 Premilla D’Cruz and Ernesto Noronha, “Hope to Despair: The Experience of Organizing Indian Call Centre

Employees,” The Indian Journal of Industrial Relations 48, no. 3 (2013): 473. 181 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry,” 65. 182 Michael Blakemore, “Surveillance in the Workplace: An Overview of Issues of Privacy, Monitoring, and

Ethics,” Briefing Paper for GMB, 2005, http://www.mindfully.org/Technology/2005/Surveillance-

Workplace-Blakemore1sep05.htm [accessed April 10, 2016]. 183 Krishnan, Varkkey, and Raghavan, “Employee Privacy at Workplaces: Some Pertinent Issues,” 6. 184 Maria Xynou and Elonnai Hickok, “Security, Surveillance and Data Sharing Schemes and Bodies in India,”

2015, 1-15, http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/security-surveillance-and-data-sharing.pdf

[accessed April 18, 2016]. Partha Pati and Nishith Pandit, “Surveillance in India and Its Legalities,” Legally

India, June 2013, http://www.legallyindia.com/Blogs/surveillance-in-india-and-its-legalities [accessed April

10, 2016].


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note that the advent of globalization and its consequent liberalization and privatization marked the

shift in labour laws and policies with a global framework, which prompted new measures to handle

the new labour situations and its challenges. Increased mass surveillance, made possible by

technological advancement, creates along with its benefits an extensive infringement of privacy and

individual liberty. In this milieu of invasion into human rights and interests, it is untoward and

regrettable that specific laws governing surveillance in India are lacking, especially in the corporate

and organizational workplace context.

However, the Indian legislature has passed certain rules and acts that indirectly govern surveillance,

such as the Information Technology Act of 2000 (“IT Act”), the Information Technology

Amendment Act of 2008, the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885, Information Technology (Procedure and

Safeguard for Interception, Monitoring and Decryption of Information) Rules of 2009, and the Right

to Privacy Bill of 2011.185 These acts deal with digital and telephonic surveillance in general. The IT

Act of 2000, for example, “widely regulates the interception, monitoring, decryption and collection

of information of digital communications in India.”186 It also ensures civil and criminal liability in

regard to hacking, electronic voyeurism, identity theft, redundant and unauthorized disclosure of

obtained information, etc. Likewise, the amendment introduced to the IT Act in 2008 grants

mandatory data protection in Indian law related to the protection of individual rights. The Information

Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and procedures and Sensitive personal information)

Rules of 2011 further guarantees reasonable security for sensitive personal information.187

Workplace surveillance remains an unregulated area, however, that has not been specifically

addressed either by the Indian cyber laws or by labour laws. Labour laws widely focus on the safe

working conditions, assuring workers non-discriminatory wages in the organized sectors and seeking

to ensure fair and secured work environments.

A.C. Fernando observes that unlike in countries like the United States, where privacy and individual

rights are valued and legally guaranteed against invasion of any kind, in India the focus is on

employee surveillance to protect corporate interests, not employees’ interests or individual rights

such as a right to privacy.188 Having no proper and relevant legislation, the imposed technological

monitoring exposes the individual worker to unprecedented and constant scrutiny, and there is

nothing an employee can do so long as this absence of specific surveillance or privacy laws

persists.189 Remarkably, the cyber laws address the issue of data privacy and rights of both the

employer and the employee on to a minimum extent.190 We will explain this in detail in the next

chapter, where we deal with the nature and issues of privacy and individual rights.

The IT (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information)

Rules of 2011 nevertheless provide detailed guidelines about the limit and extent of data collection,

185 Partha Pati and Nishith Pandit, “Surveillance in India and Its Legalities,” Legally India, June 2013,

http://www.legallyindia.com/Blogs/surveillance-in-india-and-its-legalities [accessed April 10, 2016]. 186 This IT Act 2000, especially its section 69, directs and empowers both central and state governments to

issue directives for monitoring via computer and internet resources, and its succeeding collection, retention,

and transmission of data. “Sate of surveillance India,” March 2016.

https://privacyinternational.org/node/738 [accessed April 25, 2016]. 187 The Information Technology Rules 2011.

http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/GSR3_10511(1).pdf [accessed April 20, 2016]. 188 A.C. Fernando, Business Ethics and Corporate Governance (Delhi: Pearson, 2010), 6.8. 189 Fernando, Business Ethics and Corporate Governance, 6.9. 190 Rakhi Jindal, Gowree Gokhale and Vikram Shroff, “The Indian Legal Position on Employee Data Protection

and Employee Privacy,” Employment & Industrial Relations Law (March 2012): 47-49.


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retention and transmission.191 Likewise, even though no particular law governs the extent of allowed

monitoring in the workplace, Indian Constitution provides and directs States to ensure and secure

just and humane work conditions.192 However, the problem continues as this framework does not

provide workers any remedy for unjust and inhumane work environments. Since these regulations

and restrictions are neither comprehensive nor particular enough to the practices of surveillance in

the organizational workplace, the government should issue a legal framework specific to workplace

surveillance.

2.3.3 Employee Concerns: Power Control and Workplace Bullying

Technologically enabled mechanisms of surveillance generally allow organizations to obtain the

objectives of rationalization (performance maximization, cost minimization) and standardization

(quality check).193 However, Babu P. Ramesh compares the degree of surveillance at work with the

situation in nineteenth century prisons, or even the Roman slave ships.194 For when employees

become subjects of incessant monitoring and all workplace interactions and behaviours are recorded,

creating a feeling among employees of being constantly observed and scrutinized, this can be a

psychological torture for many.195 From the same angle, the Foucauldian concept of the ‘panoptic

gaze’ in relation to workplace surveillance has further implications, such as “the institutionalized

acceptance of management prerogatives, [...] an inevitable extension of the managerially imposed

control system, [...] the intensification of labour process,”196 and goes beyond the limits of mere

disciplinary control. Thus the work processes and behaviours that are closely monitored are in

conflict with an Indian work culture traditionally based on openness, individual initiative, loyalty,

trust and informality,197 and brings about unequal power relationships by bestowing power on the

monitoring agent over the monitored.198

This unequal power relation exacerbates workplace bullying.199 Adapting from Stale Einarsen et al.,

workplace bullying is defined by Premilla D’Cruz as “subtle and/or obvious negative behaviours

embodying aggression, hostility, intimidation, and harm, characterized by repetition and persistence,

displayed by an individual and/or group and directed towards another individual and/or group at

work in the context of an existing or evolving unequal power relationship.”200 The growing and

191 It expresses also the necessity of the informed consent for the collection and disclosure of information. See

for instance, The Gazette of India: Extraordinary, Part II-Sec 3 (i), Ministry of Communication and

Information Technology, New Delhi, April 2011.

http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/GSR313E_10511(1).pdf [accessed April 18, 2016]. 192 The Constitution of India, article 42. This we have already discussed and referred in the first chapter. 193 Babu P. Remesh, “Work Organization, Control and ‘Empowerment’: Managing the Contradictions of Call


Industry, eds. Carol Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi (London: Routledge, 2008): 246. 194 Babu P. Ramesh, “‘Cyber Coolies’ in BPO: Insecurities and Vulnerabilities of Non-Standard Work,”

Economic and Political Weekly 39, no.5 (2004): 495. See also Remesh, “Work Organization, Control and

‘Empowerment’: Managing the Contradictions of Call Centre Work,” 246. 195 Remesh, “Work Organization, Control and ‘Empowerment’: Managing the Contradictions of Call Centre

Work,” 246. 196 Peter Bain and Phil Taylor, “Entrapped by the ‘Electronic Panopticon’? Worker Resistance in the Call

Centre,” New Technology, Work, and Employment 15, no. 1 (2000): 4. 197 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry,” 66. 198 Neil M. Richards, “The Dangers of Surveillance,” Harvard Law Review 126 (2013): 1954. 199 Premilla D’Cruz and Charlotte Rayner, “Bullying in the Indian Workplace: A Study of the ITES-BPO

Sector,” Economic and Industrial Democracy 34, no. 4 (2012): 599. 200 Premilla D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2012), xv; Stale Einarsen, Helge

Hoel, Dieter Zapf, and Cary L. Cooper, “The Concept of Bullying and Harassment at Work: The European

Tradition,” in Bullying and Harassment in the Workplace: Developments in Theory, Research, and Practice,

2nd ed., eds. Stale Einarsen, Helge Hoel, Dieter Zapf, and Cary L. Cooper (London: Taylor & Francis, 2011),


84

excessive monitoring of work is an example of bullying in the Indian workplaces. Involving an abuse

or misuse of power, workplace bullying in Indian organizational workplace context refers to a

repeated and unreasonable act directed towards employees that intimidates, degrades, offends or

humiliates them.201 The hierarchical nature of Indian society, which is also reflected in the

organizational workplace and its management models, is much linked to issues of the exercise of

power domination in the surveillance process. Thus, workplace bullying through excessive

monitoring in India isolates or stigmatizes individual employees who experience severe adverse

effects of this phenomenon.202 This brings forth unwarranted criticism, indifferent treatment via

exclusion and social isolation, and high stress and consequent increase in psycho-physical problems,

and invariably affects employees’ well-being.

The rigid and panoptical systems and techniques of monitoring fasten the individual employee

sturdily to his or her machine.203 Closed-circuit video cameras around the workplace bring further

panoptical capacity, which is even continued and fostered by centralized computer systems that make

it possible to map all activities of the employee.204 It leads to lesser task performance in complex

situations and impedes working relationships. As Monica T. Whitty reports, the presence of the other

– the other’s social presence, that is – often impairs performance on a difficult task and has

deleterious effects on employees, leading to greater stress and less satisfaction.205 It makes

employees feel insecure and decreases their morale, leading to a gradual decline in the quality and

duration of relationship. Likewise, along with disrupting employees’ “right to work at their own pace,

[surveillance] guided by their own moral compass, [...] fosters mistrust”206 and proves detrimental to

productivity and the overall performance of organizations. Some studies reveal that the decrease in

monitoring reduces quit-rates in organizations – high monitoring leads to high quit rates.207 This

means that extensive and repetitive monitoring, along with high performance targets, has increased

attrition rates in the Indian organizational workplace.208

Several researchers observe in the same way that surveillance increases stress, and causes depression

and emotional exhaustion and burnout.209 For instance, Daria Panina opines that in any general

context, “electronic monitoring is an intrusion into worker privacy, represents a lack of trust toward

employees, and often leads to excessive control and work pacing by management.”210All those

3-28. See also Stale Einarsen, “The Nature and Causes of Bullying at Work,” International Journal of

Manpower 20, nos. 1/2 (1999): 16-27. 201 D’Cruz and Rayner, “Bullying in the Indian Workplace,” 599-600; D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India,

xv. 202 D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, xvii. 203 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry,” 139. 204 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry,” 141. 205 Monica T. Whitty, “Should Filtering Software be Utilized in the Workplace? Australian Employees’

Attitudes towards Internet Usage and Surveillance of the Internet in the Workplace,” Surveillance and Society

2, no. 1 (2004): 41. 206 Priya Iyer, “Electronic Surveillance of Employees – Pros and Cons,” Human Resources, December 07,

2012.

http://www.supportbiz.com/articles/human-resources/electronic-surveillance-employees-%E2%80%93-

pros-and-cons.html [accessed April 15, 2016]. 207 Batt, et al., “Service Management and Employment Systems in U.S. and Indian Call Centres,” 343. 208 Stephen Deery, Vandana Nath and Janet Walsh, “Why do Off-Shored Indian Call Centre Workers Want to

Leave Their Jobs?” New Technology, Work and Empowerment 28, no. 3 (2013):213. 209 Batt, et al., “Service Management and Employment Systems in U.S. and Indian Call Centres,” 342. David

Holman, “Employee Well-Being in Call Centres,” in Call Centres and Human Resource Management, eds.

Stephen Deery and Nick Kinnie (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 223-244. 210 Daria Panina, “Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace,” in Encyclopedia of Human Resources Information

Systems: Challenges in e-HRM, eds. Teresa Torres-Coronas and Mario Arias-Oliva (Hershey, NY:

Information Science Reference, 2009), 314.


85

globally experienced impacts of employee monitoring, such as a loss of self-esteem, lack of fair-

process, increased voyeurism, persecution of whistleblowers, and detrimental effects on productivity,

etc.,211 are equally experiences in the Indian organizational workplace. For surveillance proves

detrimental to the normal expectations and concerns of Indian employees in regard to work, namely,

freedom in their job, creative performance, trust from their employer and colleagues, reliable

commitment, security of personal data, efficiency in work, and understanding and appreciation, etc.

Extensive monitoring leads employees to work in a stereotypical way – like a robotic image or in a

mechanized form. They become, as George Ritzer and Craig D. Liar claim, overly regimented,

dependent and overwhelmed by this practice of control, and thus devoid of autonomy and unable to

bring their ‘selves’ to work.212

The virtual possibility and actual usage of data collected through monitoring to intimidate and punish

employees rather than help them improve is quite common in India. In this context, workers

individually and collectively demonstrate their capacity to resist this increasing control of electronic

panopticon.213 Quoting Alan McKinlay and Phil Taylor, Benjamin P.W. Ellway argues that worker

resistance has been a ‘daily reality’ at different “levels of consciousness, effectiveness and strength

across a workplace and over time.”214 Similarly, a few researchers such as Ellway and David Knights

and Darben McCabe admit the risks entailed by the individualistic and fragmentary nature of this

resistance.215 New and emerging forms of employee resistance will be illustrated in the following

section, on the call centre industry. All these consequences are clearly apparent in the Indian

organizational situation, along with their socio-ethical response. This will be investigated in the

second and third part of this research. However, in view of the increasing experience of a high degree

of monitoring and extensive use of technology-aided control mechanisms in the Indian call centres,216

in the final section here we take Indian call centres as an example to further investigate and elucidate

the challenges of electronic surveillance in the Indian context.

2.3.4 A Case Study Analysis: The Indian Call Center (BPO) Industry

In this final section, we discuss issues related to one of the most central problems experienced in the

Indian call centre sector: increasing workplace monitoring, its implications, how to tackle this

growing problem.217 It is useful to investigate the call centre industry because, despite its

211 Jay P. Kesan, “Cyber-Working or Cyber-Shirking? A First Principles Examination of Electronic Privacy in

the Workplace,” Florida Law Review 54 (2002): 319-320. 212 George Ritzer and Craig D. Liar, “The Globalization of Nothing and the Outsourcing of Service Work,” in

Service Work: Critical Perspectives, eds. Marek Korczynski and Cameron Lynne MacDonald (New York:

Routledge, 2009), 31-52. 213 Benjamin P.W. Ellway, “Making It Personal in a Call Centre: Electronic Peer Surveillance,” New

Technology, Work and Employment 28, no. 1 (2013): 38; Peter Bain and Phil Taylor, “Entrapped by the

‘Electronic Panopticon’? Worker Resistance in the Call Centre,” New Technology, Work, and Employment

15, no. 1 (2000): 2-18. 214 Ellway, “Making It Personal in a Call Centre: Electronic Peer Surveillance,” 5. Originally in Alan McKinlay

and Phil Taylor, “Commitment and Conflict: Worker Resistance to HRM in the Microelectronics Industry,”

in The Handbook of Human Resource Management, 2nd ed., ed. B. Towers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 470. 215 Ellway, “Making It Personal in a Call Centre: Electronic Peer Surveillance,” 5. See also David Knights and

Darben McCabe, “What Happens When the Phone Goes Wild? Staff, Stress and Spaces for Escape in a BPR

Telephone Banking Work Regime,” Journal of Management Studies 35, no. 2 (1998): 163-194. 216 Babu P. Remesh, “Work Organization, Control and ‘Empowerment’: Managing the Contradictions of Call


Industry, eds. Carol Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi (London: Routledge, 2008): 246. 217 A call centre is defined generally as “any communication platform from which firms deliver services to

customers via remote, real-time contact.” Per Norling, “Call Centre Companies and New Patterns of

Organization,” Economic and Industrial Democracy 22, no. 1 (2001): 155. However, a tripartite definition

expresses that, in call centres, (1) employees are engaged in specialist operation which integrate


86

contemporaneous emergence and considerable growth and employment rates, little research has been

done about the experiences of employees in this sector. Our analysis is based on studies conducted

by Carol Upadya and A.R. Vasavi on the Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry (2006)

and other studies of more limited relevance, for instance, Winifred R. Poster (2011) and Premilla

D’Cruz and Ernesto Noronha (2013), on workers in India’s information technology industry, with a

specific focus on call centres.218 As a cornerstone in service industries and part of Business Process

Outsourcing (BPO), call centres in India, unlike in any other developing countries, have been

growing at a fast pace especially in the past decade.219 As noted, the liberalization of the Indian

economy from 1991 onward, other subsequent changes in government policy, and the emergence of

high quality academic institutions have all driven this phenomenal growth.220 The availability of a

well-educated, qualified and English speaking workforce, combined with relatively low labour costs,

time zone advantages, favourable state and central government policies and regulations, and rapid

and constant adaptation to new and emerging technologies, have all in fact increases this boom in

India.221

This phenomenal success notwithstanding, this growth has also created numerous problems, such as

poor career development, increased stressful working conditions, enlarged concerns for security, and

high employee turnover, etc., that have even had an impact on the growth rate of this industry.222

Moreover, call centres are said to be the “archetypal organization to represent Foucault’s application

of Bentham’s Panopticon to the workplace.”223 Computer and information technologies are widely

used in the call centres, and besides helping to increase work efficiency, they can also be exceedingly

ruthless monitoring tools.224 Thus, the panopticon is a predominant metaphor for surveillance and

telecommunications and information systems technologies; (2) their work is controlled by automatic systems

which virtually simultaneously distribute work, control the pace of that work and monitor their performance;

and (3) they are in direct contact with the customer through dealing with in-bound calls, making out-bound

calls or a combination of the two.” N. Kinnie, J. Purcell and S. Hutchinson, “Modelling HR Practices and

Business Strategy in Telephone Call Centres,” Paper presented to the Workshop on Call Centres, Center for

Economic Performance, London School of Economics, March 19, 1999, 6. 218 Carol Upadya and A.R. Vasavi conducted their studies basing on the call centres of South India (especially

in Bangalore) where as Winifred R. Poster based himself on call centres in North India (New Delhi, Gurgaon,

Noida). 219 Pawan S. Budhwar, “Doing Business in India,” Thunderbird International Business Review 43, no. 4 (2001):

554-556. The inception, growth, and nature of the call centre industry in India is well explained by Ernesto

Noronha and Premilla D’Cruz (2009). They illustrate first the sectoral overview of India’s ITES-BPO industry

and then continue explaining its organizational landscape, nature of work, and employment patterns. Basing

on the empirical research on working in Indian call centres, they also elucidate the features of recruitment

and training, work systems and job design, personal and social life, remuneration and working conditions,

cultural dimensions and gender issues, and managerial concerns. See for instance, Noronha and D’Cruz,

Employee Identity in Indian Call Centres, 33-58. Babu P. Remesh also gives the same descriptions on Indian

call centres from a control and empowerment perspective. See Babu P. Remesh, “Work Organization, Control

and ‘Empowerment’: Managing the Contradictions of Call Centre Work,” in In an Outpost of the Global

Economy: Work and Workers in India’s Information Technology Industry, eds. Carol Upadhya and A.R.

Vasavi (London: Routledge, 2008): 235-262. 220 Budhwar, “Doing Business in India,” 558-560. 221 Winifred R. Poster, “Who’s on the Line? Indian Call Center Agents Pose as Americans for U.S.-Outsourced

Frims,” Industrial Relations 46, no. 2 (2007): 274; Kavil Ramachandran and Sudhir Voleti, “Business Process

Outsourcing (BPO): Emerging Scenario and Strategic Options for IT-enables Services,” Vikalpa 29, no. 1

(2004): 49-62; Rafiq Dossani and Martin Kenney, “Lift and Shift; Moving the Back Office to India,”

Information Technologies and International Development 1, no. 2 (2003): 21-22. 222 Harsimran Singh, “Is the BPO Iceberg Melting Under Attrition Heat?” The Economic Times, February 10,

2005, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2005-02-10/news/27490856_1_attrition-heat-bpo-hr-

managers [accessed April 5, 2016]. 223 Ray Hingst, “Perceptions of Working Life in Call Centres,” Journal of Management Practice 7, no. 1

(2006): 2. 224 Hingst, “Perceptions of Working Life in Call Centres,” 2.


87

management in these call centres. Interpreting call centre surveillance, Sue Fernie and David H.

Metcalf write that the panopticon was truly the vision of the future for call centres.225 However, Peter

Bain and Phil Taylor critically respond to this in a polemic way, expressing uncertainty about the

intruding and invasive gaze and exercise of such a prototypical form of discipline and control.226

Bain and Taylor rigorously point to the ideological narrowness of regarding workplace surveillance

as part of a management control strategy and regard the Foucauldian notion of discipline in the same

way.227 For them, it is a mistake to believe that monitoring will result in complete managerial control.

Upadya and Vasavi, comparing the studies of various ‘critical organizational’ theorists with their

own research, argue that the nature and methods of control employed globally in BPOs are the same

in the Indian call centre context.228 Work in the call centre is distributed by an Automatic Call

Distribution (ACD) system, which also controls the flow of calls and services to the centre and to

employees. This automated system functions as a tracking tool and continually monitors the

concerned parameters of the work, such as average handling time (AHT) and number of calls handled

in a shift, etc., to evaluate the performance and productivity.229 The same system can be said to

amount to a panoptical controlling system, by which all movements of individual employees are

known to the management230 and in this way it can be a complete intruding phenomenon. This

concept of functional systems becoming an ‘electronic panopticon’ has been discussed by

mainstream researchers of call centre work and progression. For instance, Diane van den Broek,

analyzing two Australian call centres, argues that these call managing and distributive systems, when

they function as a control system to capture the minute details of each call, not only reduce employees

to ‘self-disciplining subjects’ of the organization but often amount to managerial coercion.231 Along

this same line, Donald J. Winiecki writes that this electronic panopticon is “a technological practice

of surveillance that facilitates the objectification and subjectification and occasionally domination of

the labouring subject.”232 These concepts will be analysed in detail later in this research.

Upadhya and Vasavi observe that these digitalized systems of control “create ranks of ‘cyborg’

workers who are completely welded to their workstations.”233 The term “cyborg” is an abbreviated

form of the term “cybernetic organism,” i.e. a being which has both organic and biomechatronic body

parts.234 Insistent and continuous monitoring of both quantitative and qualitative aspects of employee

225 Sue Fernie and David H. Metcalf, (Not) Hanging on the Telephone: Payment Systems in the New Sweatshops

(London: Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, 2000), 2. 226 Peter Bain and Phil Taylor, “Entrapped by the ‘Electronic Panopticon’? Worker Resistance in the Call

Centre,” New Technology, Work, and Employment 15, no. 1 (2000): 4. 227 Bain and Taylor, “Entrapped by the ‘Electronic Panopticon’?” 5. 228 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry,” 144. 229 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry,” 145. 230 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Work, Culture and Sociality in the Indian IT Industry,” 146. 231 Diane van den Broek, “We have the Values: Customers, Control and Corporate Ideology in Call Centre

Operations,” New Technology, Work and Employment 19, no. 1 (2004): 2-13. Broek here identifies the

management imposed normative and cultural control and such mechanisms impacts employees and negatively

influence their behaviours. Donald J. Winiecki, adapting Foucauldian genealogical perspective in analysing

technology-mediated labour in call centres, also makes the same observation in his study. See, for instance,

Donald J. Winiecki, “Shadowboxing with Data: Production of the Subject in Contemporary Call Centre

Organizations,” New Technology, Work and Employment 19, no. 2 (2004): 78-95. 232 Winiecki, “Shadowboxing with Data,” 79. 233 Carol Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi, “Outposts of the Global Information Economy: Work and Workers in

India’s Outsourcing Industry,” in In an Outpost of the Global Economy: Work and Workers in India’s

Information Technology Industry, ed. Carol Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi (London: Routledge, 2008): 30. 234 The term cyborg is first used by Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in 1960 to explain artifact-organism

systems that would extend man’s unconscious, self-regulatory controls. See for instance, Manfred E. Clynes

and Nathan S. Kline, “Cyborgs and Space,” Astronautics (September 1960): 26-27, 74-76. Donna Haraway

defines cyborg as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as


88

performance make them typical cyborgs in the organization. Upadhya and Vasavi emphasize this

fact when they argue that this type of control via the electronic panopticons by management in Indian

call centres “is near-complete and workers have little autonomy or space for manoeuvre.”235 This

situation of excess control, according to Upadhya and Vasavi, becomes the foundation or source of

indispensable resistance on the part of employees taking up, though weighed down with difficulties,

formal and informal strategies.236 These resistance strategies include, on the one hand, regular and

constant absenteeism, high labour turnover, and acts of sabotage and subversion, and on the other,

employees often find ways to outmanoeuvre these persistent and insidious technologies of control.237

Several researchers, such as George Callaghan, Paul Thompson (2001) and Alison Barnes (2004),

on the nature and features of monitoring and control in the call centre industry, have observed the

same concept of resistance invariably practiced among employees, and opine that employees

manipulate control systems and technologies to gain control over performance statistics and work

processes, 238 and thus support the observation of Upadya and Vasavi.

In view of their potential to optimize supervision and control process, electronic monitoring and other

surveillance practices have become central to a new managerial strategy for human resource

management.239 This shows that, as part of this new management strategy, surveillance “has

introduced novel and insidious structures of power and inequality”240 by allowing management “to

extract ever more surplus value from workers.”241 Referring to the concept of ‘coercion versus care’

of Sewell and Barker (2006), which we have discussed already in our first chapter, Upadhya

elucidates that along with its panoptical effect, organizational control colonises the very selves of

workers through its insidious modes of subjective control.242 Besides, employees often perceive the

surveillance practices imposed on them, such as the pressure to increase the performance rate to a

standard level and minimize errors and faults, as highly oppressive and emotionally demanding.243

In an equal manner, the constant pressure of being under the watchful eye of the other, the ‘big

brother,’ affect and associate negatively with the well-being of employees.244 This severely inhibits

a free and open working environment.

well as a creature of fiction.” Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

(New York: Routledge, 1991), 149. She writes that “by the late twentieth century we are all chimeras,

theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are Cyborgs.” Haraway, Simians,

Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 150. See also David Gunkel, “We Are Borg: Cyborgs and

the Subject of Communication,” Communication Theory 10, no. 3 (2000): 332. 235 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Outposts of the Global Information Economy,” 31. 236 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Outposts of the Global Information Economy,” 31. 237 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Outposts of the Global Information Economy,” 31. 238 George Callaghan and Paul Thompson, “Edwards Revisited: Technical Control and Call Centres,”

Economic and Industrial Democracy 22, no. 1 (2001): 13-37; Alison Barnes, “Diaries, Dunnies and

Discipline: Resistance and Accommodations to Monitoring in Call Centres,” Labour and Industry 14, no. 3

(2004): 127-137. 239 Panina, “Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace,” 315. 240 Carol Upadhya, “Controlling Offshore Knowledge Workers: Power and Agency in India’s Software

Outsourcing industry,” New Technology, Work and Employment 24, no. 1 (2009): 6. 241 Upadhya, “Controlling Offshore Knowledge Workers,” 9. 242 Upadhya, “Controlling Offshore Knowledge Workers,” 9. 243 David Holman, “Employee Well Being in Call Centres,” Human Resource Management Journal 12, no. 4

(2002): 35; Josh Healy and Tom Bramble, “Dial ‘B’ for Burnout? The Experience of Job Burnout in a

Telephone Call Centre,” Labour and Industry 14, no. 2 (2003): 39-59; and Sebastiano Bagnara and Patrizia

Marti, “Human Work in Call Centres: A Challenge for Cognitive Ergonomics,” Theoretical Issues in

Ergonomics Science 2, no. 3 (2001): 223-237. 244 Holman, “Employee Well Being in Call Centres,” 36; Healy and Bramble, “Dial ‘B’ for Burnout? The

Experience of Job Burnout in a Telephone Call Centre,” 49.


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Winifred R. Poster, in his research on Indian call centres, observes that monitoring extends its targets

beyond the physical movements of employees to a deeper level, touching their inner emotional states

and features of their identity.245 Given that the work done in call centres concerns interactive services

and not goods production, there is a high probability that surveillance will extend to a “radically

invasive technological control on people’s bodies and mental constitution”246 and have more coercive

consequences. By disentangling the structure of seeing surveillance as a singular practice of control

of the privileged few (with employers as the elites) over subordinates (employees as the herd), Poster,

in his assessment of Indian call centres, proposes a framework for pluralizing the web of multi-

surveillances by which many groups participate in monitoring and exert power in certain degrees

over one another.247 These include, as Poster illustrates, managers (local staff who runs call centres),

workers (employees in Indian call centres), vendors (firms that design, market and sell technologies

to call centres), clients (who purchase or contract customer support services from call centres), and

customers (consumers or the target groups that clients sell products to or handle questions from).

Each of these actors uses surveillance and uses the power it affords then in different ways and at

various levels.248 This marks, for Poster, the pluralisation of surveillance and ensuing spectrum of

power in Indian call centres.

Poster, in his research, also identifies a spectrum of motives behind the use of surveillance in Indian

call centres. In his view, the exercise of power in Indian call centres in a surveillance context is

twofold: on the one hand, “the exercise of authority can be hidden,” and on the other, “the range of

power can extend beyond just the ostensible targets.”249 Though he tries to “reframe surveillance as

social movement strategy – one that is used for the purpose of rebalancing power in favour of the

marginalized,”250 the other motives and agencies such as domination, emotional displays and identity

crisis are equally and critically prevalent in employee surveillance. For instance, the process of

domination is evidently observed, as surveillance technology is used to impose power over a good

number of employees and thus equalize their performance standards.251 In the same way, surveillance

targets features of individual identity such as emotional displays of anger and pleasantness, and these

expressive and non-expressive factors of employees are detected and often further analysed.252

Hence, finally, in the context of surveillance in Indian call centres, the relationship between

management and employees is an interesting question and worthy of its own investigation. To an

extent, surveillance opens the way for corrupt or improper behaviour by the controller of data,

increasing the risk of coercion, blackmail, and discriminative practices.253

Equally important are the observations of Premilla D’Cruz and Ernesto Noronha, who confirm the

same problem of the possibility and nature of the corrupt behaviour of surveilling agent(s). According

to them, managers often use the data from continuous monitoring of employees for instant messaging

and alerts even outside of a work context. This often turns out to be a threatening formula for

employees and a typical example of harassment, technically called cyberbullying.254 To the same

extent, Noronha and D’Cruz, in their work Employee Identity in Indian Call Centres, write, quoting

245 Winifred R. Poster, “Emotion Detectors, Answering Machines, and E-Unions: Multi-Surveillances in the

Global Interactive Service Industry,” American Behavioural Scientist 55, no. 7 (2011): 868-901. 246 Poster, “Emotion Detectors, Answering Machines, and E-Unions,” 869. 247 Poster, “Emotion Detectors, Answering Machines, and E-Unions,” 871. 248 Poster, “Emotion Detectors, Answering Machines, and E-Unions,” 873-874. 249 Poster, “Who’s on the Line?” 276. 250 Poster, “Emotion Detectors, Answering Machines, and E-Unions,” 896. 251 Poster, “Emotion Detectors, Answering Machines, and E-Unions,” 896. 252 Poster, “Emotion Detectors, Answering Machines, and E-Unions,” 896. 253 Richards, “The Dangers of Surveillance,” 1935. 254 Premilla D’Cruz and Ernesto Noronha, “Navigating the Extended Reach: Target Experiences of

Cyberbullying at Work,” Information and Organization 23 (2013): 324-343.


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Knights and McCabe (1998), that “while management is achieving increased control in one way,

they are losing it in another. [...] management can pinpoint their staff’s productivity in terms of idle,

wrap or live time; however, statistics can be, and are being, manipulated by staff.”255 Similarly,

Brenda McPhail observes that as the face of management shifts from personal or direct control to

statistical or indirect control, the possibility of these statistics being manipulated by staff and other

members becomes very high.256 Recognizing this, D’Cruz argues for a well-designed practice that

aligns with employee needs and expectations in the organizational workplace. For, the mode of

relationship between management and staff is changing in Indian call centres, as the task of personal

supervision is now largely performed with the aid of information and communication technologies.257

This change happens also in relation to the tight control and extensive measurement, that invariably

intrudes into the life of employees as well as to the increasing experiences and events of further

manipulation of the data and life chances.

To conclude this section, we may note that surveillance and its attendant power control totalizes all

aspects of regulating employee behaviour. Through this type of total control, organizations guarantee

that “employee self-interests and disruptions are minimized and organizational objectives are served,

[...] whereby organizations seek to shape the subjectivity of their employees with a view to ensuring

organizational effectiveness.”258 However, this type of subjectivity alteration or identity regulation,

according to Noronha and D’Cruz, forms part of organizations’ socio-ideological (values, beliefs,

emotions, etc.) control process that reaches to the very core of employees’ identity.259 To the same

extent, the imposition of power, controlling employees’ cognition and emotions, manipulates

employees’ very being,260 eliminates all possibility for self-expression and self-realization and

causes work intensity and stress. Similarly, job quality in general is one of the major concerns of

Indian call centres, which have often been investigated from a labour process perspective concerned

with specific aspects of work-related behaviours of employees.261 However, these impose an

unprecedented degree of control over employees that negatively affect their effectiveness,

productivity and well-being. In the following chapters, we analyze the problems posed by excessive

and persistent electronic surveillance and its impacts and implications, along with the labour process

and employment relationships from an interdisciplinary perspective. To this end, by analysing the

Foucauldian electronic panopticon perspective, we employ sociological, ethical, and theological

frameworks.

2.4 CONCLUSION

The themes highlighted in this chapter from a unique Indian work culture perspective include the

following: cultures and multiculturalism; transferring concentrations of activity in different sectors

and a progressive flexibilization of labours; ethics, moral values and social responsibilities; new

organizational environments with new dynamic engagements; a reinvention of old and invention of

new management styles; globalization, liberalization, privatization and labour consequences; and

workplace surveillance and its implications. The sum of India’s business culture is the sum of various

socio-cultural and economic norms and standards followed by its people. The foregoing overview of

255 Noronha and D’Cruz, Employee Identity in Indian Call Centres, 15. Originally in David Knights and Darben

McCabe, “What Happens When the Phone Goes Wild? Staff, Stress and Spaces for Escape in a BPR

Telephone Banking Work Regime,” Journal of Management Studies 35, no. 2 (1998): 183. 256 Brenda McPhail, What is ‘On the Line’ in Call Centre Studies? A Review of Key Issues in the Academic

Literature (Toronto: Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, 2001), 46. 257 Knights and McCabe, “What Happens When the Phone Goes Wild?” 183. 258 Noronha and D’Cruz, Employee Identity in Indian Call Centres, 158. 259 Noronha and D’Cruz, Employee Identity in Indian Call Centres, 160. 260 Noronha and D’Cruz, Employee Identity in Indian Call Centres, 160. 261 Hannif, “Job Quality in Call Centres: Key Issues, Insights and Gaps in the Literature,” 2.


91

Indian workplace culture and management models shows that work organizations (national,

transnational, multinational, or international) in India are open to socio-cultural, political and

economic (inherent and adapted) forces and trends. Traditional business and organizational work

culture in India is largely influenced by high power distance (hierarchical), a high level of

collectivism, the caste system, rigidities of the labour market, and religious orientations towards the

sacred and profane, which comprise national, sociological, institutional, and religious features

respectively. Both value-based and faith-based practices and transactions make work culture of India

distinct.

Central to this chapter is the claim that, although it makes available a great deal of objective

information, electronic surveillance in the Indian organizational work context is unable to provide

unobtrusive control and these surveillances turn out to be highly costly and contested. Along with

quality management and performance attributes, in the Indian organizational context, power control

and power distance play a major role in the use of surveillance technologies. Poor constitutional and

legislative security over surveillance and individual rights of privacy fuels workplace bullying and

leads to employee mechanization and dehumanization, thus increasing the rate of both forced and

voluntary attrition.

Our analysis of surveillance in Indian call centres has (1) shown that treating surveillance as part of

management control strategy exhibits an ideological narrowness that even goes beyond the

Foucauldian notion of discipline; and (2) identified the danger that workers will become ‘cyborg’

workers, with consequent identity regulation and subjectivity alteration. Further analysis of the

implications of workplace surveillance will draw on the context of the Indian work cultural pattern

presented in this chapter. Our assessment will move toward a convergent and focused point

concerning quality of governance in the organizational workplace from two directions: (1) how

entrepreneurship could emerge as a new, predominant management style; and (2) how employee

behaviour and performance can be made more professional, ethical and dedicated.

CHAPTER THREE

WORKPLACE SURVEILLANCE AND PRIVACY: AN INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS

PERSPECTIVE

3.0 INTRODUCTION

The increased use of modern technology in the workplace has created new concerns for both

employers and employees in the area of privacy. Privacy is defined in a narrow sense, as the right

of the individual to determine the type and amount of information disclosed about themselves.1

Generally, privacy involves, but is not limited to, control over information about oneself and control

over who can observe or examine it by way of monitoring or scrutiny.2 For according to Ferdinand

Schoeman, “a person has privacy to the extent that others have limited access to information about

him, limited access to the intimacies of his life, or limited access to his thoughts or his body.”3

Considering today’s business world, this right to privacy is exposed in the workplace in an alarming

way, as a consequence of recent developments in technology and its subsequent privacy-invasive

implementation.4 Privacy in the workplace is under assault, and the organizational workplace in

particular has become the venue for a virtual panopticon, where the employee is made into a “naked

object of assessment”5 and control. The point of departure in this exploration will be a fuller depiction

of the contemporary understanding of the invasion of privacy in the workplace, concentrating on the

taxonomy of privacy.

This chapter considers a range of facts concerning privacy as a way to sharpen our ethical reflections.

It includes a conceptual analysis of privacy along with a wide-ranging investigation into the work of

its contemporary advocates and critics. The chapter is divided into four sections: first, we undertake

a conceptual analysis of privacy and its relation to and impact upon employee monitoring. We also

discuss the critiques and pro-privacy prospects identified by several contemporary scholars. The

second section will focus on a specific theme of investigation, namely electronic surveillance and

privacy in the workplace, followed by a brief analysis of the taxonomy of privacy in the third section.

The fourth section concludes the chapter by taking more of an ‘individual rights approach’ and

presenting an evaluation of the significance of employee privacy in the workplace.

3.1 CONCEPTUAL READING AND DEVELOPMENTS OF PRIVACY

The concept of privacy is more than ever relevant in today’s world, as it is more and more embraced

by the revolutionary advancement of information and communication technologies. It denotes a state

of being free from unwanted intrusion or disturbance in one’s life and affairs. Privacy may be

regarded as a value for individuals, for society, and for government, in connection respectively with

dignity, freedom, and good governance. The three aspects of privacy explained by Sara Baase are

1 Charles Fried, An Anatomy of Values: Problems of Personal and Social Choice (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1970), 141. 2 Richard L. Lippke: “Work, Privacy, and Autonomy,” in Ethics in the Workplace, ed. Robert A. Larmer

(Minneapolis: West Publishing Company, 1996), 111. 3 Ferdinant D. Schoeman, Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1984), 3. 4 Lisa Guerin, Smart Policies for Workplace Technologies: Email, Social Media, Cell Phones & More, 5th ed.

(Berkeley, CA: Nolo, 2017), 2. 5 Richard A. Spinello, John Gallaugher and Sandra Waddock, “Managing Workplace Privacy Responsibly,” in

Social, Ethical and Policy Implications of Information Technology, eds. Linda L Brennan and Victoria E.

Johnson, pp. 74-97 (Hershey: Information Science Publishing, 2004), 83. Originally in Matthew W. Finkin,

“Employee Privacy, American Values, and the Law,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 72 (1996): 267.

Workplace Surveillance and Privacy

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freedom from intrusion (being left alone), freedom of control of information about oneself, and

freedom from surveillance (from being followed, tracked, watched, and eavesdropped).6 However,

these three aspects alone do not present a complete and comprehensive view. Joseph Kupfer writes

in this regard that “[p]rivacy contributes to the formation and persistence of autonomous individuals

by providing them with control over whether or not their physical and psychological existence

becomes part of another’s experience. Just this sort of control is necessary for them to think of

themselves as self-determining.”7 Thus the concept of privacy not only concerns one’s personal

information, but also applies to human behaviours and relations, the human body and activities, and

even one’s home and personal belongings. All these factors contribute to the importance of the

privacy in the workplace today. Therefore, scrutinizing what privacy means today requires that one

examine the many debates on this subject.

Etymologically, the term privacy derives from the Latin term privatus, which means ‘separated from

the rest.’8 Thus privacy is a state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one’s private9 life or

affairs. Privatus in turn stems from privo, meaning ‘to deprive’. Privatus is also the participle of

privare, which means to set free. In Roman law, the Latin adjective privatus makes a legal distinction

between that which is “private and that which is publicus, public in the sense of pertaining to the

Roman people. The basic Latin form is the adjective privus, the original archaic meaning being

“single.” A standard later use of the same signifies that which is particular, peculiar, or one’s own –

the implied context being not the solitary human being but rather the individual facing the potential

claims of other persons.10 Privatus is also usually used in classical Latin to refer to a person who is

acting outside the bounds of political office, who has been freed or separated from office.11 Thus it

is all the more a herculean task to define privacy in a singular way, given its many and various

nuances in a contemporary world dominated by computers and information technologies. Arthur R.

Miller has already expressed this concern: as he states, “[t]he concept of privacy is difficult to define

because it is exasperatingly vague and evanescent, often meaning strikingly different things to

different people. In part this is because privacy is a notion that is emotional in its appeal and embraces

a multitude of different ‘rights’, some of which are intertwined, others often seemingly unrelated or

inconsistent.”12

The term privacy, however, is frequently used in different areas of scholarly discussions, such as in

philosophical, legal, and political contexts, as well as in ordinary language, including in social and

cultural reflections. Some scholars rarely use the term, stating that it is too vague. For instance,

6 Sara Baase, A Gift of Fire: Social, Legal, and Ethical Issues for Computing and the Internet, 3rd ed. (New

Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009), 61. 7 Joseph Kupfer, “Privacy, Autonomy, and Self-Concept,” American Philosophical Quarterly 24 (1987): 81-

82. 8 J. A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, “Privacy,” The Oxford English Dictionary XII (1989): 515. 9 The Greek word for private – idiotes (person lacking professional skill) – is the source of our term “idiotic.”

Ancient Greeks saw the private realm as a circumscribed realm that could never be a source of identity or

self-respect. Actions develop character by giving rise to praise and blame. Actions must occur in the public

realm where they are visible to other people who judge these deeds. Privacy as such became valued only in

the nineteenth century as people sought to protect themselves from attempts by the social body and corporate

institutions to press for conformity or to manipulate their identity. See, Daryl Koehn, “Ethical Issues in

Human Resources,” in The Blackwell Guide to Business Ethics, ed. Norman E. Bowie (Malden, MA:

Blackwell, 2002), 234. 10 Jack Hirshleifer, “Privacy: Its Origin, Function, and Future, Prepared for the Conference,” The Economics

and the Law of Privacy, University of Chicago, (1979): 3.

http://www.econ.ucla.edu/workingpapers/wp166.pdf [accessed November 28, 2012]. 11 “Privatus,” http://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-forum/viewtopic.php?t=11280&p=83694 [accessed

November 15, 2012]. 12 Arthur R. Miller, The Assault on Privacy (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1971), 25.


95

Robert C. Post, at the beginning of his article ‘Three Concepts of Privacy,’ states that “privacy is a

value so complex, so entangled in competing and contradictory dimensions, so engorged with various

and distinct meanings that I sometimes despair whether it can be usefully addressed at all.”13 Before

we can achieve a clear understanding of the issues at stake in workplace monitoring, then, it is

essential that we have an precise concept of privacy. Traditionally, privacy has been conceived either

by attempting to identify its essence or by identifying the core characteristics that link together

various things referred to by the term.14 In doing this, one can neither narrow down its extensiveness

and depth-dimension by excluding things commonly known to be private, nor make it too broad,

since some things we would consider intrusions we may not consider violations of privacy. In like

manner, Julie Inness writes that “the content of privacy cannot be captured if we focus exclusively

on either information, access, or intimate decisions because privacy involves all three areas.”15 All

these facts make clear the complexity in addressing the issues at stake.

The concept of privacy is in such disarray, Daniel Solove writes, that nobody can articulate fully

what it means.16 Privacy, for Solove “is a sweeping concept, encompassing (among other things)

freedom of thought, control over one’s body, solitude in one’s home, control over personal

information, freedom from surveillance, protection of one’s reputation, and protection from searches

and interrogations.”17 Solove expresses here the difficulty of explaining what privacy means as the

essence and scope of this right are wide and complex. It is because for him the conceptualization of

privacy involves both defining and articulating its value.18 Even though privacy is recognized as “an

essential issue for freedom and democracy,” he writes, “widespread discontent over conceptualizing

privacy persists” and since problems of privacy have been given only a limited articulation, “we

frequently lack a compelling account of what is at stake when privacy is threatened and what

precisely the law must do to solve these problems.”19 To properly conceptualize privacy one must

have an adequate understanding of the notion of privacy in any context. Based on this background,

Solove explains that privacy is “a fundamental right, essential for freedom, democracy, psychological

well-being, individuality, and creativity.”20 This will be further explored in the following section.

Privacy, therefore, is a special kind of independence, securing autonomy in one’s personal life

concerns even in defiance of all the pressures of culture and society.21 The complexity of the

contemporary world constantly causes difficulties for the privacy of the individual and of society as

a whole. Being as we are in an unprecedented information age, the definition of privacy can be stated

as the ability of an individual to prevent information pertaining to himself or herself from becoming

known to people other than those they choose to give the information to, and to limit and restrict

physical or bodily access unless the person himself or herself desires to grant such access. However,

privacy is something people don’t think much about until it is lost or breached. This is what precisely

happening because of evolutions in biometric technologies, video surveillance, online privacy,

workplace monitoring, data profiling, financial privacy, medical privacy, genetic privacy,

behavioural targeting, and religious and spiritual beliefs and practices. Thus, there are several

13 Robert C. Post, “Three Concepts of Privacy,” The Georgetown Law Journal 89 (2001): 2087. 14 Daniel J. Solove, “I’ve Got Nothing to Hide and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy,” San Diego Law

Review 44 (2007): 754. 15 Julie Innes, Privacy, Intimacy, and Isolation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 56. 16 Daniel J. Solove, Understanding Privacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 1. 17 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 1. 18 Daniel J. Solove and Paul M. Schwartz, Information Privacy Law, 6th ed. (New York: Wolters Kluwer,

2018), 43-45. 19 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 2. 20 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 5. 21 Miller, The Assault on Privacy, 24.


96

different and nuanced ways of interpreting of privacy, which can be summarized under three

perspectives.

3.1.1 Legalistic, Individualistic and Pluralistic Perspectives on Privacy

The right to privacy concerns all spheres of modern life and is recognized as a fundamental human

right in many countries. Privacy was first legally defined as a right in 1890 by the American Justices

Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis,22 who stated that privacy is “the right to be let alone.”23 This

could be the first categorical description of privacy, which in my own view is not polemic but

explication. Warren and Brandeis tried also to connect the right to privacy to one’s thoughts and

emotions, and pointed to a “principle of ‘inviolate personality’ which was part of a general right of

immunity of the person, ‘the right to one’s personality’ [...and recognized] this protection under the

name of privacy.”24 For them, the public dissemination of the details of private life constitutes an

invasion of privacy. They tried to define the boundary between personal and public space and

opposed unsanctioned intrusion of any kind.25 The privacy rights of individuals are protected and

preserved either by the constitution of a country or by the declaration of various acts and laws

promulgated for this purpose.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 12, states that “[N]o one shall be subjected to

arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, or to attacks upon his honour

and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or

attacks.”26 In 1965, a quite different right to privacy, independent of informational privacy and the

22 Dorothy J. Glancy argues that Warren and Brandeis did not even coin the phrase, “right to privacy,” nor its

common soubriquet, “the right to be let alone.” Indeed, much of the force of their argument for legal

recognition and enforcement of the right to privacy derives from their ingenious evocation of a broad

historical sweep in which such legal recognition and enforcement appears as a natural and inevitable

development. All that Warren and Brandeis ever claimed to have developed was a legal theory which brought

into focus a common “right to privacy” denominator already present in a wide variety of legal concepts and

precedents from many different areas of the common law. Their original concept of the right to privacy thus

embodied a psychological insight, at that time relatively unexplored, that an individual’s personality, and

especially his or her self-image, can be affected, and sometimes distorted or injured, when information about

that individual’s private life is made available to others. In simplest terms, for Warren and Brandeis the right

to privacy was the right of each individual to protect his or her psychological integrity by exercising control

over information which both reflected and affected that individual’s personality. Dorothy J Glancy, “The

Invention of the Right to Privacy,” Arizona Law Review 21 (1979): 2-3. 23Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review 4 (1890): 193-220.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html [accessed February

18, 2014]. After Warren and Brandeis, authors like Daniel Solove uses the term ‘let alone’ while few authors

like Patricia Werhane and Sara Baase, however, use the concept ‘left alone’ to mean the same. Cf. Daniel J.

Solove, Understanding Privacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 12-13; Patricia Werhane,

Persons, Rights, and Corporations (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 118; Sara Baase, A Gift of Fire: Social,

Legal, and Ethical Issues for Computing and the Internet, 3rd ed. (New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009),

61. 24 Sylvia Kierkegaard, “Privacy in Electronic Communication Watch your e-mail: Your Boss is Snooping,”

Computer Law & Security Report 21 (2005): 227. See also, Warren and Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,”

193-220. 25 Kierkegaard, “Privacy in Electronic Communication Watch your e-mail,” 227. 26 “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR),” Donegall Pass Community Forum, (2006).

http://donegallpass.org/UNIVERSAL_DECLARATION_OF_HUMAN_RIGHTS.pdf [accessed February 8,

2014]. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a declaration adopted by the United Nations

General Assembly on 10 December 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. The Declaration arose directly

from the experience of the Second World War and represents the first global expression of rights to which all

human beings are inherently entitled. It consists of 30 articles which have been elaborated in subsequent

international treaties, regional human rights instruments, national constitutions and laws.


97

Fourth Amendment, was recognized explicitly by the Supreme Court in the USA.27 It is now

commonly called the constitutional right to privacy.28 Though the right to privacy was not clearly

defined here, it has generally been viewed as a right to the protection of one’s individual interest and

of one’s free choice to take certain vital and personal decisions about one's family, life and lifestyle.29

The European Treaty30, containing the charter of the rights of the European citizens, also places great

emphasis on the right to privacy. The European Convention on Human Rights31 guarantees the right

to privacy for all Europeans. Article 8, 1 of ECHR states that “[E]veryone has the right to respect for

his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.”32 This is further stressed in paragraph

2, which states,

[T]here shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as

is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national

security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder

or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of

others.33

Recognizing the challenges that technological developments and globalization pose for the

protection of personal data, the recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of European

Union states that “the protection of natural persons in relation to the processing of personal data is a

27 Solove and Schwartz, Privacy Law Fundamentals, 67. 28 The right was first announced in the Griswold v. Connecticut (381 U.S. 479) case, which overturned

convictions of the Director of Planned Parenthood and a doctor at Yale Medical School for dispersing

contraceptive related information, instruction, and medical advice to married persons. The constitutional right

to privacy was described by Justice William O. Douglas as protecting a zone of privacy covering the social

institution of marriage and the sexual relations of married persons. Despite controversy over Douglas' opinion,

the constitutional privacy right was soon cited to overturn a ban against interracial marriage, to allow

individuals to possess obscene matter in their own homes, and to allow distribution of contraceptive devices

to individuals, both married and single. The most famous application of this right to privacy was as one

justification of abortion rights defended in 1973 in Roe v. Wade (410 U.S. 113) and subsequent decisions on

abortion. Here the concern was about the marriage and the sexual relations of married persons. The most

famous application of this right to privacy was as one justification of abortion rights defended in 1973. 29 DeCew, “Privacy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, August 9, 2013 (first published: May 14, 2002),

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/privacy/ [accessed February 8, 2014]. 30 European Treaty is a binding agreement between the member countries of European Union that places the

rules and regulations of the decision making and the relationship in and between its members. According to

the preamble of its charter of fundamental rights of the European Union “Conscious of its spiritual and moral

heritage, the Union is founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and

solidarity [...]. It places the individual at the heart of its activities, by establishing the citizenship of the Union

and by creating an area of freedom, security and justice.” These rights enshrined in the treaty are privilege of

all European citizens. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2007:303:0001:0016:EN:PDF [accessed

October 14, 2016]. 31 The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) (formally the Convention for the Protection of Human

Rights and Fundamental Freedoms) is an international treaty to protect human rights and

fundamental freedoms in Europe Drafted in 1950 by the then newly formed Council of Europe, the

convention entered into force on 3 September 1953. All Council of Europe member states are party to the

Convention and new members are expected to ratify the convention at the earliest opportunity. Privacy right

for all individual is guaranteed here. http://www.echr.coe.int/NR/rdonlyres/D5CC24A7-DC13-4318-B457-

5C9014916D7A/0/Convention_ENG.pdf [accessed October 14, 2016]. 32 “European Convention on Human Rights and its Five Protocols,” European Convention on Human Rights,

Section 1, Article 8, 1 & 2. http://www.globaldetentionproject.org/fileadmin/docs/European-Convention-on-

Human-Rights.pdf. [accessed October 14, 2016]. 33 “European Convention on Human Rights and its Five Protocols,” Section 1, Article 8, 1 & 2.

http://www.hri.org/docs/ECHR50.html [accessed October 14, 2016].


98

fundamental right” (Article 1).34 It urges that personal data processing serve mankind, and thus that

this right be considered in relation to its function in society and be balanced against other fundamental

rights. Further discussion on GDPR and data privacy will be added in the later sections of this

chapter.

Considering the Indian context, Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, entitled protection of Life and

Personal Liberty, states that “[N]o person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except

according to procedure established by law.”35 It assures the right to privacy and right to live with

human dignity, free from exploitation and intrusion by others. It shows that the right to privacy may

be considered a ‘penumbra right,’ a right guaranteed by implication in the constitution.36 Within the

scope of this research, we will briefly analyse the Indian legal position on employee privacy as a

guaranteed fundamental human right. The 1994 elaboration of the right to privacy of the Supreme

Court in R. Rajagopal vs. State of Tamil Nadu, involving the balancing of the right of citizens against

the right of the press to criticise, fully expresses the mind of the Indian judiciary: “The right to privacy

is implicit in the right to life and liberty guaranteed to the citizens of this country by Article 21. It is

a ‘right to be let alone.’ A citizen has a right to safeguard the privacy of his own [...].”37 Although

Indian labour legislation in particular contains no provision with respect to employee privacy, the

right to privacy has been recognized under the above mentioned article (21) of Indian constitution

by the Supreme Court of India in the case of Kharak Sing v State of UP, AIR 1963 SC 1295 and

People’s Union of Civil Liberties v the Union of India (1997) 1 SCC 318, where it has been treated

as a subset of the larger right to life and personal liberty.38

Next to this is the case of PUCL v. Union of India (1997) over the issue of wiretapping, in which the

Supreme Court went on to hold that:

[T]he right to hold a telephone conversation in the privacy of one’s home or office without

interference can certainly be claimed as right to privacy [and] conversations on the telephone are

often of an intimate and confidential character [...]. Telephone conversation is an important facet

of a man's private life. Right to privacy would certainly include telephone-conversation in the

privacy of one's home or office. Telephone-tapping would, thus, infract Article 21 of the

Constitution of India unless it is permitted under the procedure established by law.39

This case, in fact, made prior judicial scrutiny mandatory before any wiretapping can be carried out,

and prescribed a clear list of procedural guidelines to follow.40 Another famous verdict and

description on privacy by the Delhi High Court is illustrated in Naz Foundation v. Government of

NCT of Delhi WP(C) No.7455/2001, which states that “the right to privacy thus has been held to

protect a ‘private space in which man may become and remain himself’. The ability to do so is

34 European Parliament, “General Data Protection Regulation,” Official Journal of the European Union, May

5, 2016. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679 [accessed May 28,

2018]. The GDPR pursues to form a harmonised data protection law framework across the EU. It aims to give

the control of the personal data to data subjects and imposes strict rules and regulations on those hosting and

processing this data. 35Vidhan Maheshwari, “Article 21 of the Constitution of India – The Expanding Horizons,”

http://www.legalserviceindia.com/articles/art222.htm [accessed October 14, 2016]. 36 Prashant Iyengar, Privacy in India - Country Report - October 2011, October 30, 2011, 5. http://cis-

india.org/internet-governance/country-report.pdf [accessed September 25, 2016]. 37 Iyengar, Privacy in India - Country Report - October 2011, 9. 38 Rakhi Jindal, Gowree Gokhale and Vikram Shroff, “The Indian Legal Position on Employee Data Protection

and Employee Privacy,” Employment & Industrial Relations Law (2012): 47. 39 Iyengar, Privacy in India - Country Report - October 2011, 10. 40 Iyengar, Privacy in India - Country Report - October 2011, 10-11.


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exercised in accordance with individual autonomy.”41 The constitutionally guaranteed right to liberty

and right to freedom of speech is broadly interpreted here, and it is a right to get on with one’s life

and personality.

Similarly, the Information Technology Act of 2000 (IT Act) addresses, though in very minimal way,

issues related to data protection and privacy under its sections 43A, which provides for the protection

of sensitive personal data or information, and 72A, which protects the same from unlawful disclosure

in breach of contract.42 This Act deals with online/computer related privacy issues such as “hacking

(Secs 43 & 66), [...] electronic voyeurism (Sec 66E), phishing and identity theft (66C/66D), offensive

email (Sec. 66A),” etc.43 The right to privacy is expressed in a limited way in Indian legislation, in

this regard, not in an absolute way. In the same way, this Act amended in 2008 under section 43

“obliges corporate bodies who ‘possess, deal or handle’ any ‘sensitive personal data’ to implement

and maintain ‘reasonable security practices,’ failing which, they would be liable to compensate those

affected by any negligence attributable for this failure.”44 Moreover, the data protection liability for

‘body-corporates’45 under Section 43A of the IT Act and the subsequent Reasonable Security

Practices Rules 2011 introduce a mandatory data protection regime for organizational workplaces,

which also shows concern about the protection of the sensitive personal information in the workplace

and provides mandatory privacy policies for body-corporates.46

Correspondingly, Rule 4 of the Reasonable Security Practices Rules of 2011 “[enjoin] a body

corporate or its representative who collects, receives, possesses, stores, deals or handles data to

provide a privacy policy for handling of or dealing in user information including sensitive personal

information.”47 It calls for details of the type of information collected, its purpose, means and modes

of usage, and the manner of its disclosure.48 Moreover, India is a signatory to the International

Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)49 and thus upholds the right to privacy affirmed

there in article 17, which states that, “no one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference

with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and

reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”50

However, recognizing the growing issues of privacy violations due to the absence of a comprehensive

and solid law to safeguard workplace privacy in India,51 the government is now drafting legislation

to protect individual privacy breached through unlawful means. The groups supporting this privacy

bill recommend that “the new legislation should protect all types of privacy, such as bodily privacy

41 Ajit Prakash Shah, “Naz Foundation vs Government of NCT of Delhi and Others WP(C) NO.7455/2001,”

High Court of Delhi, July 2, 2009. https://indiankanoon.org/doc/100472805/ [accessed September 25, 2016]. 42 Jindal, Gokhale and Shroff, “The Indian Legal Position on Employee Data Protection and Employee

Privacy,” 47. 43 Iyengar, Privacy in India - Country Report - October 2011, 12. 44 Iyengar, Privacy in India - Country Report - October 2011, 13. 45 A body corporate is defined as a person, association, or group of persons legally incorporated. It is nothing

but a corporation itself. In other words, it is a legal entity or a corporate entity - an association, company, or

institution - identified by a particular name that has its own legal rights and responsibilities. 46 Iyengar, Privacy in India - Country Report - October 2011, 14. 47 Iyengar, Privacy in India - Country Report - October 2011, 15. 48 Iyengar, Privacy in India - Country Report - October 2011, 15. 49 The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) is a multilateral treaty signed by the United

nations General Assembly and in force from 1976. The respect of civil and political rights of individual is

given paramount importance here. 50 “International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” United Nations Human Right, Adopted and opened

for signature, ratification and accession by General Assembly resolution 2200A (XXI) of 16 December 1966

entry into force 23 March 1976. http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx [accessed

September 25, 2016]. 51 Iyengar, Privacy in India - Country Report - October 2011, 112.


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(DNA and physical privacy); privacy against surveillance (unauthorised interception, audio and

video surveillance); and data protection.”52 However, a comprehensive privacy policy or bill has not

yet been published by the Indian government and is still in the drafting process. Recommendations

from the Planning Commission of India for comprehensive privacy legislation will be discussed in

the later part of this chapter.

Generally, to understand the notion of the right to privacy better, Patricia Werhane has proposed that

this right includes (1) the right to be left alone, (2) the related right to autonomy, and (3) “the claim

of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent

information about them is communicated to others.”53 Thus privacy as a right actually creates a

private sphere into which one can retreat to escape from unwanted observation, exposure, or

publicity. And this in fact fosters the right use of one’s own freedom and creativity and right functions

in life. Reflecting upon workplace privacy, Werhane writes that “unless privacy is respected persons

lose a sense of self identity and without privacy, one’s personal freedom is, at best, restricted, and

one’s autonomy is not safeguarded.”54 A right to privacy protects personal freedom and autonomy

by keeping personal information in the hands of its rightful owner. Moreover, respect for privacy

prevents the misuse of personal information, guarantees freedom of thought and expression, and

enables the creative use of one’s skills for self-actualization and eventually better job situation, to

the benefit of the owner. Werhane’s idea could be better summarized by noting that privacy, as a

fundamental right, consists of the claim that “as a rational adult one has the right to autonomy: the

right to make choices and to direct one’s own life so long as these choices do not affect the freedom

of others. If one has the right to choose for oneself, one also has the right to protect oneself from

outside interference. If personhood is individual, I have a right to isolate myself from the invasion of

others.”55 The following section will continue our analysis of these various perspectives on privacy.

Ruth Gavison describes privacy as a condition of life that has to be protected by law rather than an

individual issue based on choice.56 In the same way, a structuralistic understanding of privacy defines

it as “a specific social structure, a moral or legal right, which is used to enable someone’s ability to

limit or restrict others from access to persons or information” and assumes that privacy includes

freedom from unwarranted intrusion and should be protected.57 This understanding in fact paves the

way for the view that more privacy can be attained when one keeps one’s information more secret.

Nevertheless, a structuralistic understanding of privacy often underestimates the role of individual

control and choice, because an individual can also limit or restrict the flow of personal information.58

Yet the structuralistic understanding of privacy, as a restricted access definition, assumes that privacy

is a moral right which is to be protected and includes freedom from unwarranted intrusion.59 The

individual approach, on the contrary, by giving more importance to the individual, understands

privacy to mean that one has control over information about oneself or an ability to maintain one’s

information either by way of its acquisition or release.60 Froomkin notes that privacy “encompasses

ideas of bodily and social autonomy, of self-determination, and of the ability to create zones of

52 Hars Imran, “Are We Closer to a Law on Privacy?” The PRS Blog, October 19, 2012,

http://www.prsindia.org/theprsblog/?tag=right-to-privacy [accessed October 10, 2016]. 53 Patricia Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 118. 54 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 118. 55 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 117-118. 56 Ruth E. Gavison, “Privacy and the Limits of Law,” Yale Law Journal 89, no. 3 (1980): 425. 57 Thomas Allmer, “A Critical Contribution to Theoretical Foundations of Privacy Studies,” Journal of

Information, Communication and Ethics in Society 9, no. 2 (2011): 87. 58 Herman T. Tavani, “Philosophical Theories of Privacy: Implications for an Adequate Online Privacy Policy,”

Metaphilosophy 38, no. 1 (2007): 9. 59 Allmer, “A Critical Contribution to Theoretical Foundations of Privacy Studies,” 85. 60 Allmer, “A Critical Contribution to Theoretical Foundations of Privacy Studies,” 88.


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intimacy and inclusion that define and shape our relationship with each other.”61 Hence, from an

individualistic perspective, privacy is understood as the ability to exert individual control over one’s

personal information by the individual him or herself. In this manner, it is held that:

Privacy is a personal interest, or/and privacy includes the freedom from external interference in

one’s personal choices, and plans, or/and the degree of personal choice indicates how much

privacy an individual has, or/and restrictions of privacy are losses, or/and privacy should be

defined in a descriptive way, or/and full privacy is reached as long as the individual is able to

choose which personalities should be disclosed.62

However, just as in traditional liberalism, if privacy is seen as a value or right possessed by

individuals alone, the premises of individualism may lead one to the extremist position that the exists

only to promote the worth and dignity of the individual, and thus that the right to privacy is nothing

but a right not to participate in collective or societal life, something like the right to shut out the

community.63 Thus the term privacy, explained thus exclusively in individualistic terms, may lead

one to underestimate its predominance in human life. This shows that the individualist view on

privacy often underestimates the constraining effects of social structures that may, in turn, restrict

individual control over information.64 Privacy is not an external constraint, however, but an internal

dimension of society that protects individuals based upon the norms of the society.65 This includes

an integrative perspective on privacy which combines both individualistic and structuralistic notions

and regards privacy as a right to be protected and a kind of individual control.66 Hence the

individualist perspective both recognizes that social structures often restrict individual control over

information, and considers the role of individual control and choice. Integrative notions thus show

that, although full control over personal information cannot be maintained, individuals can to a

certain extent limit or restrict access to this information and thus hope to avoid the pitfalls of both

individualism and structuralism.67

Solove also proposes a pluralistic understanding of privacy, stating that privacy is not reducible to a

singular essence since it functions as a plurality of different things.68 A restrictive and narrow

conceptual understanding of privacy leads one to overlook the harm privacy can cause. It does not

have any single, core element but rather exhibits many natures, all related to each other.69 This

observation is the basis for a pluralistic understanding of privacy that even includes confidentiality,

data security, and the regulation of information flow. Solove’s extensive analysis of scholarly and

judicial writings on privacy leads him to classify notions of privacy into six general types, each of

which, though they often overlap, offers a distinctive perspective on privacy. These six types are the

following:

(1) the right to be let alone – formulation on the right to privacy by Warren and Brandeis;

(2) limited access to the self – freed from unwanted access by others;

(3) secrecy – certain matters are concealed from others;

(4) control over personal information;

61 A. Michael Froomkin, “The Death of Privacy?” Stanford Law Review 52, no. 5 (2000): 1466. 62 Allmer, “A Critical Contribution to Theoretical Foundations of Privacy Studies,” 88. 63 Thomas I. Emerson, The System of Freedom of Expression (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 545-549. 64 Tavani, “Philosophical Theories of Privacy,” 9. 65 Robert C. Post, “The Social Foundations of Privacy: Community and Self in the Common Law Tort,”

California Law Review 77, no. 5 (1989): 968. 66 Allmer, “A Critical Contribution to Theoretical Foundations of Privacy Studies,” 92. 67 Allmer, “A Critical Contribution to Theoretical Foundations of Privacy Studies,” 92. 68 Daniel J. Solove, Understanding Privacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 98-100. 69 Solove, “I’ve Got Nothing to Hide,” 756.


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(5) personhood – protection of individuality and dignity; and

(6) intimacy – control over or limited access to one’s intimate relationships or aspects of life.70

Hence, Solove calls privacy a concept in disarray, as already noted, that in fact consists of many

different yet interrelated things. In fact, Solove’s approach to privacy has four dimensions, namely:

(1) a method that abandons the traditional way of conceptualizing privacy and looks for a common

pool of similar elements; (2) a degree of generality that conceptualizes privacy from the bottom up

and in relation to particular contexts; (3) a variability that looks for lasting or widespread usefulness

while avoiding being too variable and contingent; and (4) a focus that unravels the complexities of

privacy in a consistent manner.71 A clear pluralistic conception of privacy will be relevant in multiple

contexts yet not tied to any one specific context. That means that privacy is not about anyone thing,

but rather about many distinct and often interrelated things. A myopic and too-narrow perception of

privacy fails to recognize its plural nature and the issues and problems that consequently arise from

it.

Additionally, though it is difficult to assign an overarching value of privacy, as Solove puts it, valuing

privacy protects many other things as well: intimacy, dignity, individuality, autonomy, freedom,

independence, psychological well-being, and so forth.72 In this way, more than merely a unitary

value, privacy consists of a plurality of protections in various activities in different contexts. In

agreement with what has been said, therefore, “we must value privacy on the basis of the range of

activities it protects beyond the specific activities involved in the situation.”73 Therefore, for Solove,

there is no common denominator to properly conceptualize privacy. For the broad denominator will

risk being over-inclusive or too vague, while the narrow denominator may be too restrictive.74

Privacy is also a product of diverse norms and activities which are culturally contingent. However,

since the notion of privacy is not fully conceptualized in a uniform way and confusion remains

concerning its meaning, value and scope, one can argue that there is nothing special about privacy

and that its promulgation makes no distinct claim other than the claim to be a moral value. These

explorations invite us to consider critical accounts of privacy, analysing different perspectives: we

will consider the “nothing to hide” argument, the reductionist observation, economic and legal

criticisms, and others.

3.1.2 Critiques of Privacy Arguments

There are quite different sceptical and critical accounts of privacy. Scholars who decline to interpret

privacy as a single concept, refer to a diversity of values at stake and relate it to other social and

cultural issues that overlap with privacy interests. These scholars are reluctant to accept that there is

something coherent and distinctive about privacy claims.75 For instance, Collin J. Bennett writes

that, “privacy and all that it entails is argued to be too narrow, too based on liberal assumptions about

subjectivity, too implicated in rights-based theory and discourse, insufficiently sensitive to the social

sorting and discriminatory aspects of surveillance, culturally relative, overly embroiled in spatial

metaphors about ‘invasion’ and ‘intrusion’, and ultimately practically ineffective.”76 In the same

70 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 12-13. 71 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 9. 72 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 98. 73 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 99. 74 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 9. 75 Ferninand Schoeman, ed., Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1984), 5. 76 Colin J. Bennett, “In Defence of Privacy: The Concept and the Regime,” Surveillance & Society 8, no. 4

(2011):485. Cf. Kaupins and Coco, “Perceptions of Internet-of-Things Surveillance by Human Resource

Managers,” 54.


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way, critics of privacy argue that it may be used to conceal deception, hypocrisy, and wrongdoing,

thus enabling fraud and protecting the guilty. This section analyses major criticisms levelled against

the protection of privacy.

First, we evaluate the “nothing to hide” argument. Discussion of privacy issues is often discouraged

on the premise that no privacy problems exists so long as a person has nothing to hide. According to

the “nothing to hide” argument, “there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers

unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remains

private.”77 Data mining and surveillance programmes thus do not threaten privacy, presuming that

one has nothing to hide. Moreover, Solove observes that the nothing to hide argument is highly

compelled by of the tension between privacy concerns and the sensitive interests of security

promotion.78 This situation calls for a cost-benefit analysis related to security. Adam D. Moore argues

that “in essence, it is the view that rights are resistant to cost/benefit or consequentialist sort of

arguments [and] here we are rejecting the view that privacy interests are the sorts of things that can

be traded for security.”79 The reasoning of the nothing to hide argument, as Solove frames it, is that

“when it comes to government surveillance or use of personal data, there is no privacy violation if a

person has nothing sensitive, embarrassing, or illegal to conceal.”80 The problem with this argument,

for Solove, lies in its underlying assumption that privacy is about hiding bad things, because it views

only privacy as a form of concealment or secrecy. Therefore, Solove argues that to understand

privacy, we must first conceptualize it and its attendant values more pluralistically.81 The simple

reasoning is that the term privacy denotes many factors relating to the physical, psychological and

informational scenarios of one’s life.

Secondly, reductionists often argue that privacy can be reduced to other conceptions and rights.

Judith Thomson, basing her argument on a conception of the multifaceted and unresolved disunity

of claims to privacy, holds that the various alleged invasions of privacy are adequately well explained

as violations of property rights or other personal rights.82 For her, privacy is merely a cluster of rights

that overlap with and can always be fully explained by property rights or rights to bodily security.

Thomson writes that “the right to privacy is itself a cluster of rights [...] that it is not a distinct cluster

of rights but itself intersects with the cluster of rights which the right over the person consists in and

also with the cluster of rights which owning property consists in.”83 Since any privacy violation could

be understood as the violation of a more basic right, such as the right to property, Thomson suggests

that it is better perceived as merely derivative in its importance and justification and merely imitative,

due to its alleged lack of originality and uniqueness.84 However, Julie Innes opines that our interest

in privacy cannot be reduced to other interests. She correctly accords a positive normative value to

privacy, holding that it provides the agent with control over intimate decisions, and consists of

intimate reflections and actions.85 Hence, Innes defines privacy as “the state of possessing control

77 Emilo Mordini, “Nothing to Hide: Biometrics, Privacy and Private Sphere,” in Ben Schouten et al., eds.,

Biometrics and Identity Management: First Eurpean Workshop, BIOID 2008 (Denmark: Springer, 2008),

252. 78 Daniel J. Solove, “I’ve Got Nothing to Hide and Other Misunderstanding of Privacy,” San Diego Law Review

44 (2007): 752. 79 Adam D. Moore, Privacy Rights (Pennsylvania: The Penn State University Press, 2010), 204. 80 Solove, “I’ve Got Nothing to Hide,” 764. 81 Solove, “I’ve Got Nothing to Hide,” 764. 82 Judith Jarvis Thomson, “The Right to Privacy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 4 (1975): 304-305. 83 Thomson, “The Right to Privacy,” 306. 84 Thomson, “The Right to Privacy,” 313. 85 Julie Innes, Privacy, Intimacy, and Isolation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), viii.


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over decisions concerning matters that draw their meaning and value from an agent’s love, liking, or

care.”86

Thirdly, the concept of privacy has been criticised from economic and legal perspectives. Robert

Bork uses a legal framework to defend the constitutional right to privacy to criticise the very idea of

privacy, whereas Richard Posner develops a unique critical account, arguing that privacy is protected

in ways that are economically inefficient.87 Analysing the constitutional right to privacy established

in Griswold v. Connecticut by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1965,88 Bork contends that

the right to privacy is not derived from any pre-existing right or from the natural law, but has merely

been created as a new right (the right to privacy) with no foundation in the Constitution or the Bill

of Rights.89 In fact, as is obvious, the term privacy does not appear in these documents. However,

the amendments to these documents do give us some valid ways to argue that it is implied there. For

example, the right of privacy, though not explicitly stated in the Bill of Rights, is a substantive right

of the people stemming from the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.90 A similar

understanding is found in Bork’s criticism that courts never articulated or clarified what exactly this

right is and how far it is to be extended.

According to Judith Thomson, the constitutional right to privacy is more suitably articulated as a

right to liberty, not to privacy.91 As opposed to it, Julie Innes affirms the historical and conceptually

coherent notion of privacy as distinct from any other conception, such as liberty, property rights,

etc.92 Richard Posner, on the other hand, holds that “common law is best explained as if the judges

were trying to maximize economic welfare”93 and an optimal public policy would not stress personal

privacy. Posner defends the significance of organizational or corporate privacy over personal

privacy, because the former is likely to enhance the economy.94 Hence, the element of privacy, as

control over information about oneself, reveals the concealment or selective disclosure of

information. This, for Posner, often misleads and manipulates people and inhibits economic growth.95

86 Innes, Privacy, Intimacy, and Isolation, viii. 87 These differences could be traced by a critical and open-minded scrutiny of the works of both Bork and

Posner. See Robert Bork, The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law (New York: Pantheon,

(1990), and Richard Posner, The Economics of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, (1981). 88 The right was first announced in Griswold v. Connecticut (381 U.S. 479) case, which overturned the

convictions of the Director of Planned Parenthood and a doctor at Yale Medical School for dispersing

contraceptive related information, instruction, and medical advice to married persons. The constitutional right

to privacy was described by Justice William O. Douglas as protecting a zone of privacy covering the social

institution of marriage and the sexual relations of married persons. Despite controversy over Douglas' opinion,

the constitutional right to privacy was soon cited to overturn a ban against interracial marriage, to allow

individuals to possess obscene matter in their own homes, and to allow distribution of contraceptive devices

to individuals, both married and single. The most famous application of this right to privacy was to the matter

of abortion rights, as defended in 1973 in Roe v. Wade (410 U.S. 113) and subsequent decisions on abortion.

Here the concern was about the marriage and the sexual relations of married persons. 89 Bork, The Tempting of America, 95-100. 90 The 5th Amendment states, “nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice guarantees due

process from the federal government, stating no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without

due process of law.” The states are required to provide due process because the 14th Amendment states, “Nor

shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” See “Fifth

Amendment: An Overview,” http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fifth_amendment [accessed February 5,

2014]. 91 Thomson, “The Right to Privacy,” 305. 92 Innes, Privacy, Intimacy, and Isolation, viii. 93 Posner, The Economics of Justice, 4. 94 Posner, The Economics of Justice, 232-252. 95 Posner, The Economics of Justice, 282-286.


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Therefore, privacy domains should be thrown away to promote transparency among people, which

in turn has economic benefits.

Fourthly, Fred Cate, a legal scholar, interprets privacy as an antisocial construct because it conflicts

with other important social values, such as free expression, the prevention and punishment of crime,

the protection of private property, and the function of government operations.96 Solove, however,

claims that although privacy is “proclaimed inviolable but decried [often] as detrimental, antisocial,

and even pathological, it seems, as though everybody is talking about privacy, it is not clear exactly

what they are talking about.”97 Therefore, we need a more comprehensive assessment of privacy to

enable a fuller understanding of what it means today and how its values can be extracted for the

benefit of society as a whole. Fifthly, privacy and its conceptualizations have been criticized as an

expedient means to protect hypocrisy and safeguard the vested interest of certain groups of people at

the expense of the many. Richard Episten opines that privacy is “a plea for the right to misrepresent

one’s self to the rest of the world.”98 Pretence or duplicity is encouraged, he argues, in the name of

privacy, and the effect of this can be socially harmful and detrimental.99 Stephen Taylor writes that

“there is no widely accepted theory of what privacy is and what role it plays in our society, but it can

be usefully viewed as the protection of hypocrisy.”100 According to Bela Szabados and Eldon Soifer,

“it is impossible to have privacy without opening the door for hypocrisy and deceit, since the right

to privacy may be seen as creating the context in which both deceit and hypocrisy may flourish [...]

it provides the cover under which most human wrongdoing takes place, and then it protects the guilty

from taking responsibility for their transgressions once committed.”101 In other words, when the

protection of privacy steadily violates certain other values, we are led to consider whether it should

be valued at all.

However, there are a number of scholars who disagree with the assumption that hypocrisy will be

promoted by privacy protection, depending on how much value they place on privacy and how

abhorrent they consider hypocrisy.102 Nevertheless, although sceptics and reductionists reduce the

privacy argument to an argument concerning other interests, as we have noted above, there is also a

significant number of scholars who refuse to reduce privacy to non-privacy interests. James Rachels,

for example, argues that “[privacy] is a distinctive sort of right in virtue of the special kind of interests

it protects.”103 It is clear, however, that the diverse critiques discussed above are often based on some

faulty assumptions, some pitched at a conceptual level and others on a practical level, about how one

frames privacy and its policy implementation.104 Taking sides with Daniel Solove, who argues that

privacy is a conceptual shorthand for a cluster of problems that are not related by a common

denominator, but has elements in common having resemblances with each other, Bennett

demonstrates that “the critique from surveillance scholars is insufficiently sensitive to the ways in

which the privacy value has been reframed at a governance level to meet the collective challenges

posed by the broadening and deepening of surveillance.”105 In light of this remark, it makes sense to

96 Fred H. Cate, Privacy in the Information Age (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 1997), 29. 97 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 5. 98 Richard A. Epstein, “The Legal Regulation of Genetic Discrimination: Old Responses to New Technology,”

Boston University Law Review 74, no. 1 (1994): 12. 99 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 5. 100 Stephen Taylor, “Privacy is Power, as It Allows Us to be Hypocrites,”

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/stephen-taylor/privacy-is-power-as-it-allows-us-to-be-

hypocrites [accessed February 10, 2014]. 101 Bela Szabados and Eldon Soifer, Hypocrisy: Ethical Investigations (Canada: Broadview Press, 2004), 200. 102 Szabados and Soifer, Hypocrisy: Ethical Investigations, 200. 103 James Raches, “Why Privacy is Important,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 4, no. 4 (1975): 333. 104 Bennett, “In Defence of Privacy: The Concept and the Regime,” 485. 105 Bennett, “In Defence of Privacy: The Concept and the Regime,” 486.


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investigate the arguments of these contemporary scholars who defend privacy as a meaningful and

valuable concept.

3.1.3 Pro-Privacy Prospects and Positions

The criticisms levelled today against privacy are quite diverse, ranging from conceptual level to the

level of practice. However, coherent fundamental values and interests of privacy have led its

advocates to explore the concept further in contemporary multifaceted scenarios. For example,

Ferdinand Schoeman defends the coherent fundamental value of privacy interests by appeal to what

he calls the distinctiveness thesis. He first rejects the argument that privacy issues are diverse and

disparate and are connected only nominally. In other words, he rejects the idea that there is nothing

morally distinctive about privacy, and assumes, on the contrary, that privacy is both a coherent and

distinctive moral value.106 Privacy protects a person from social control by others, who could

otherwise access their information and exercise control over their decisionmaking. Many writers,

despite recognizing the inherent difficulties of a single conceptualization on the one hand, and despite

seeing the potential abuses in diverse realms of human life on the other, defend the value of privacy

protection.107 Researchers put forward numerous arguments as justifications of the need for privacy

protection.

First, we may analyse the ‘core value’ model, along with the conceptual framework of social

importance and the common good. James Moor’s justification of privacy goes beyond appealing to

the instrumental value of privacy (e.g., protection against harm) and points to its intrinsic value. He

assumes that autonomy is intrinsically valuable, and that privacy is a necessary condition for

autonomy.108 According to Charles Fried, however, “we do not feel comfortable about asserting that

privacy is intrinsically valuable, an end in itself privacy is always for or in relation to something or

someone. On the other hand, to view it as simply instrumental, as one way of getting other goods,

seems unsatisfactory too.”109 Reflecting in the same way, and analysing the pros and cons of both

intrinsic and instrumental argumentations, Moor suggests a third approach which he calls “core

value.” This is shared and is fundamental to human evaluation.110 His claim is empirical: “the core

value is that it is a value that is found in all human cultures ... [which] are at the core such as life,

106 The coherence thesis holds that diverse privacy claims and issues have in common the fundamental moral

value of privacy, while the distinctiveness thesis holds that there are moral values and principles distinct from

privacy that can be used to defend privacy claims. Ferdinand D. Schoeman, ed., Philosophical Dimensions of

Privacy: An Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 5-6. 107 Guerin, Smart Policies for Workplace Technologies, 8. 108 James H. Moor, “Towards a Theory of Privacy for the Information Age,” Computers and Society 27, no. 3

(1997): 28. 109 Charles Fried, An Anatomy of Values: Problems of Personal and Social Choice (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1970), 137. 110 Intrinsic value is the value that an object has "in itself" or "for its own sake", as an intrinsic property.

According to Kagan, “the term “intrinsic value” does seem to wear its meaning on its sleeve — at least to the

philosophically trained — and the meaning it seems to wear is not value as an end, but rather the value that

an object has solely by virtue of its intrinsic properties.” S. Kagan, “Rethinking Intrinsic Value,” Journal of

Ethics 2 (1998): 290. Instrumental value, on the other hand, is the value of objects, both physical objects and

abstract objects, not as ends-in-themselves, but as means of achieving something else. It is often contrasted

with intrinsic value. Stanley Riukas indicates the meaning of these two kinds of values as follows, “that the

inherent values are, roughly speaking, the desired results achieved through the operation of the instrumental

values.” Stanley Riukas, “Inherent and Instrumental Values in Ethics,” Philosophy of Values,

http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Valu/ValuRiuk.htm [accessed February 19, 2014]. Apart from these, the core

values provide a common value framework, a set of standards, by which we can assess the activities of

different people and different cultures. It also allows us to make transcultural judgements, and these are the

values that we have in common as human beings. Moor, “Towards a Theory of Privacy for the Information

Age,” 29.


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happiness, freedom, knowledge, ability, resources and security.”111 According to Moor, privacy

protection, as an expression of a core value, such as the value of security, is also a plausible candidate

for an intrinsic good in the context of a highly computerized society in this postmodern era.112 Hence,

Moor argues that “it is important to think of privacy in terms of a control/restricted access account,

because this conception encourages informed consent as much as possible and fosters the

development of practical, fine grained, and sensitive policies for protecting privacy when it is not.”113

According to Bennett, the individualistic understanding of privacy, which we have previously

discussed in this chapter, barely constitutes a paradigmatic understanding of the problem.114 For the

“individualistic conception of privacy that predominates western thinking, is nevertheless inadequate

in terms of recognizing the effect of individual uptake of these kinds of technologies on the level of

privacy we are all collectively entitled to expect.”115 Along these same lines, Priscilla Regan, in her

work Legislating Privacy emphasizes the social importance of privacy by reconsidering its social or

public significance. She shares the growing concern for the value of privacy, extending from the

individual to society in general. She writes that,

Privacy has value beyond its usefulness in helping the individual maintain his or her dignity or

develop personal relationships. Most privacy scholars emphasize that the individual is better off

if privacy exists; I argue that society is better off as well when privacy exists. I maintain that

privacy serves not just individual interests but also common, public, and collective purposes.116

She continues:

Privacy is a common value in that all individuals value some degree of privacy and have some

common perceptions about privacy. Privacy is also a public value in that it has value not just to

the individual as an individual or to all individuals in common but also to the democratic political

system. [...] Privacy is rapidly becoming a collective value in that technology and market forces

are making it hard for any one person to have privacy without all persons having a similar

minimum level of privacy.117

In this way, this notion of social privacy restricts the encroachment on people’s lives of individuals,

institutions and even governments. Post reminds us that our concern for privacy protects the

individual against destructive social norms and promotes the construction of these norms in such a

way as to protect the “rules of civility” that shape life in community.118 Solove also affirms the social

importance of privacy, writing that it “certainly protects the individual, but not because of some

111 Moor, “Towards a Theory of Privacy for the Information Age,” 29. 112 Moor, “Towards a Theory of Privacy for the Information Age,” 29. 113 Moor, “Towards a Theory of Privacy for the Information Age,” 32. Control/restricted access theory is an

integrative theory distinct from the control theory and restricted access theory developed by Fried and

Gavison respectively. The control theory of privacy explains that people have privacy if and only if they have

control of their own information, where as the restricted access theory defines privacy as the limitation of

other’s access to an individual, based on secrecy, anonymity and solitude. Virginia Horniak, “Privacy of

Communication – Ethics and Technology” (unpublished master’s Thesis, Department of Computer Science

and Engineering, Malardalen University, 2004): 16.

See, http://www.idt.mdh.se/utbildning/exjobb/files/TR0390.pdf [accessed February 22, 2014]. 114 Bennett, “In Defence of Privacy: The Concept and the Regime,” 487. 115 Jane Bailey and Ian Kerr, “Seizing Control: The Experience Capture Experiments of Ringley and Mann,”

Ethics and Information Technology 9, no. 2 (2007): 129. 116 Priscilla M. Regan, Legalizing Privacy: Technology, Social Values, and Public Policy (London: University

of North Carolina Press, 1995), 221. 117 Regan, Legalizing Privacy: 213. 118 Robert C. Post, “The Social Foundations of Privacy: Community and Self in the Common Law Tort,”

California Law Review 77, no. 5 (1989): 968.


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inherent value of respect for personhood, [rather] because of the benefits it confers on society.”119

Hence, the failure to conceptualize privacy in a way that sustains public interest and support may

contribute to scepticism about privacy.

Valerie Steeves, in a similar vein, reconceptualizes privacy as a “dynamic process of negotiating

personal boundaries in inter-subjective relations […]. By placing privacy in the social context of

inter-subjectivity, privacy can be more fully understood as a social construction that we create as we

negotiate our relations with others on a daily basis.”120 Priscilla Regan, however, overthrows the

concept of “risk society,”121 a notion expressing the surveillance, monitoring and screening practices

required for managing risk. For her, such practices create an unquenchable thirst for more

information about the risks that exist generally, and the risks posed by certain individuals in

particular. The knowledge afforded by surveillance systems has no yield in the sense of security or

trust, but only produces new uncertainties leading to more surveillance and the collection of more

information.122 Hence, Regan argues that privacy is of value to society in general, a common good,

yet does so without compromising the priority given to it in relation to the individual. Therefore, we

need to treat privacy as an individual right that must be balanced with a concern for the common

good.

Secondly, we may consider the “contextual integrity”123 approach. Privacy is one of the most

enduring ethical issues associated with the adoption and adaptation of modern information

technologies. Helen Nissenbaum introduces in this line the concern for contextual integrity as an

alternative benchmark to identify the challenges of privacy and promote its value. This framework

of contextual integrity provides “guidance on how to respond to conflicts between values and

interests and to provide a systematic setting for understanding privacy expectations and the reasons

that certain events cause moral indignation.”124 This contextual integrity framework is based on two

principles: (i) the activities people engage in in a “plurality of realms” (i.e., spheres or contexts); and

(ii) the fact that each realm has a distinct set of norms that govern it.125 Norms affecting these

119 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 98. 120 Valerie Steeves, “Reclaiming the Social Value of Privacy,” in Lessons from the Identity Trail, eds. Ian Kerr,

Valerie Steeves and Carole Lucock, pp. 191-212 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 193. See also,

Bennett, “In Defence of Privacy: The Concept and the Regime,” 487. 121 The concept of a risk society in fact drives the interest in the actions and transactions of all individuals and

the increase in surveillance throughout society. Institutions that deal with individuals collect all their

information and structure their dealings with those individual accordingly. Ericson and Haggerty however

hold that the concept of a risk society operates within a negative logic focusing on fear. It also underpins the

value system of insecurity and unsafe society that again demands more knowledge of risk. Priscilla M. Regan,

“Privacy as a Common Good in the Digital World,” Information, Communication and Society 5, no. 3 (2002),

382-405. See also, http://mason.gmu.edu/~pregan/commongood.html [accessed February 25, 2014]. 122 Priscilla M. Regan, “Privacy as a Common Good in the Digital World,”

http://mason.gmu.edu/~pregan/commongood.html [accessed February 25, 2014]. 123 Contextual integrity is an account of privacy in terms of the transfer of the personal information. It is a

conceptual framework used to understand the expectations and implications of privacy developed in various

literatures. Though it is not developed so as to offer a full definition of privacy, as a normative model it does

evaluate the flow of information between agents. Contextual integrity is defined with four key constructs:

informational norms, appropriateness, roles, and principles of transmission. Adam Barth, “Privacy and

Contextual Integrity: Framework and Applications,” IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (2006): 184-

185. 124 Adam Barth, Anupam Datta, John C. Mitchell and Helen Nissenbaum, “Privacy and Contextual Integrity:

Framework and Applications,” SP ’06 Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy,

IEEE Computer Society Washington, DC, USA (2006): 184. 125 Helen Nissenbaum, “Privacy as Contextual Integrity,” Washington Law Review 79, no. 1 (2004): 119-120.

See also, Frances Grodzinsky and Herman T. Tavani, “Privacy in “The Cloud”: Applying Nissenbausm’s

Theory of Contextual Integrity,” SIGCAS Computers and Society 41, no. 1 (2011): 40.


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principles, according to Nissenbaum, both shape and limit our roles, behaviour and expectations by

governing the flow of personal information in a given context.126 A central principle of contextual

integrity, Nissenbaum explains, is that “there are no arenas of life not governed by norms of

information flow, no information or spheres of life for which anything goes.”127 She explains privacy

not only in terms of the sharing of information itself, but especially in relation to the inappropriate

or improper sharing of information. The concept of contextual integrity is founded upon social

analysis and has as its fundamental precept that “there are no arenas of life not governed by norms

of information flow, no information or spheres of life for which anything goes.”128 Contexts that are

partly constituted by norms, expectations, and behaviours offer a platform for articulating a

normative account of privacy.

Nissenbaum writes that “contexts, or spheres, offer a platform for a normative account of privacy in

terms of contextual integrity.”129 According to Frances Grodzinsky and Herman T. Tavani “one

virtue of Nissenbaum’s theory is that it illustrates why we must always attend to the context in which

personal information flows, not the nature of the information itself, in determining whether normative

privacy protection is needed.”130 This is because people generally have a sense of what information

in relation to oneself is relevant, appropriate, or proper to particular circumstances.131 For instance,

Nissenbaum writes:

For the myriad transactions, situations and relationships in which people engage, there are norms

– explicit and implicit – governing how much information and what type of information is fitting

for them. Where these norms are respected, I will say that contextual integrity is maintained; where

violated, I will say that contextual integrity has been violated.132

For Nissenbaum, therefore, judgements that privacy has been violated correspond systematically

with branches of contextual integrity. As she explains, informational privacy is of two types,

consisting of norms of appropriation and norms of distribution. The norms of appropriateness

“circumscribe the type or nature of information about various individuals that, within a given context,

is allowable, expected, or even demanded to be revealed.”133 In the same way, the norms of

distribution remind us that “what matters is not only whether information is appropriate or

inappropriate for a given context, but whether its distribution, or flow, respects contextual norms of

information flow.”134 The former norms thus determine whether personal information is either

appropriate or inappropriate to disclose in a given context, while the latter norms restrict its flow

within and across contexts.135 When either of these norms is breached, she argues, a violation of

126 Nissenbaum, “Privacy as Contextual Integrity,” 119-120. 127 Nissenbaum, “Privacy as Contextual Integrity,” 119. 128 Nissenbaum, “Privacy as Contextual Integrity,” 119. 129 Nissenbaum, “Privacy as Contextual Integrity,” 120. 130 Grodzinsky and Tavani, “Privacy in “The Cloud”: Applying Nissenbausm’s Theory of Contextual

Integrity,” 40. 131 Nissenbaum, “Privacy as Contextual Integrity,” 120. 132 Helen Nissenbaum, “Protecting Privacy in an Information Age: The Problem of Privacy in Public,” Law

and Philosophy 17 (1998): 581-582. 133 Nissenbaum, “Privacy as Contextual Integrity,” 120. For instance, Nissenbaum illustrates that it is not

“expected to share our religious affiliation with employers, financial standing with friends and acquaintances,

performance at work with physicians, etc. As with other defining aspects of contexts and spheres, there can

be great variability from one context to the next in terms of how restrictive, explicit, and complete the norms

of appropriateness are.” Nissenbaum, “Privacy as Contextual Integrity,” 121. 134 Nissenbaum, “Privacy as Contextual Integrity,” 123. 135 Nissenbaum, “Privacy as Contextual Integrity,” 125.


110

privacy occurs, and thus every instance of public surveillance violates the right to privacy because it

violates contextual integrity.

To elaborate a little further: “the central concepts drawn from contextual integrity include contexts,

roles, and a focus on the type of information transmitted [...] rather than specifics of the data.”136

These are based on two kinds of norms – positive and negative – that “allow” and “deny” rules to

access/control conditions in a given situation. These rules are interpreted as respecting the norms

model of communication.137 However, “it [contextual integrity] is not proposed as a full definition

of privacy, but as a normative model, or framework, for evaluating the flow of information between

agents (individuals and other entities), with a particular emphasis on explaining why certain patterns

of flow provoke public outcry in the name of privacy (and why some do not).”138 In the same manner,

it is argued that “the intricate systems of social rules governing information flow are the crucial

starting place for understanding normative commitments to privacy.”139 Thus, by bringing the social

layer into view, contextual integrity measures how closely the flow of personal information conforms

to context-relative informational norms.

Thirdly, researchers regard privacy as a universal necessity. Solove, examining different readings

and conceptions of privacy and aiming to develop an all-encompassing theory of privacy, proposes

a taxonomy of privacy as a framework for understanding privacy in a pluralistic and contextual

manner. His taxonomy aims to identify and understand different kinds of socially recognized privacy

violations and order the various harms caused by privacy infringements. It is intended as a

contribution to the development of a body of law that addresses privacy.140 The collection, processing

and dissemination of information, and its invasion, are basic activities included in the taxonomy.

Solove’s model begins with the data subject, the individual, from which other entities like businesses

and governments collect information. This information gathering can in itself be a harmful activity.141

The collected data could be processed as they are stored, combined, manipulated, searched, used and

transferred or released to a third party. This process moves the data away from the individual’s

control, and thus constitutes an invasion privacy that impinges directly on the individual.142 Hence,

with this taxonomy of privacy Solove in fact provides an account of information invasion that enables

a clearer understanding of privacy issues. This model will be used in this chapter to analyse the issue

of privacy and electronic surveillance in the workplace, which is the core element of this research.

Moore begins his reflection on privacy by analysing all previous conceptions of it, arguing that

privacy rights, understood as the ability to regulate access to our bodies, capacities, and powers and

to sensitive personal information, are necessary and essential for human well-being or flourishing.143

136 Barth, Datta, Mitchell and Nissenbaum, “Privacy and Contextual Integrity: Framework and Applications,”

1. 137 Barth, Datta, Mitchell and Nissenbaum, “Privacy and Contextual Integrity: Framework and Applications,”

1. They explain it further that, “a positive norm permits communication if its temporal condition is satisfied,

whereas a negative norm permits communication only if its temporal condition is satisfied.” Besides, it is

access control policies that “enable a system to decide whether to allow or deny a specific action, typically

by deriving a relation between subjects, objects, and actions.” Barth, Datta, Mitchell and Nissenbaum,

“Privacy and Contextual Integrity: Framework and Applications,” 1-2. 138 Barth, Datta, Mitchell and Nissenbaum, “Privacy and Contextual Integrity: Framework and Applications,”

2. 139 Barth, Datta, Mitchell and Nissenbaum, “Privacy and Contextual Integrity: Framework and Applications,”

2. 140 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 10. 141 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 103. 142 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 103. 143 Adam D. Moore, “Privacy: Its Meaning and Value,” American Philosophical Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2003):

223.


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A moral authority to control physical objects in arrangements that support our lifelong goals and

projects is necessary, he argues, for a life to be worth living, and thus he defines the right to privacy

as “a right to control access to, and uses of, places, bodies, and personal information.”144 The

emphasis on control over access in this definition seems very coherent, as it includes bodily privacy,

informational privacy, and decisional privacy. Moore holds that the argument that privacy is a

cultural phenomenon and that its form or content depend on customs and social practices, is shown

to be inadequate when we extend our analysis to include thousands of cultures. Such an analysis

shows that there are exceptionally few cultures that appear to acknowledge no privacy.145 Hence, for

Moore, the need for privacy is not culturally relative, though its forms may be, and therefore, “having

the ability and moral authority to regulate access to and uses of locations and personal information

is an essential part of human flourishing and well-being.”146

A number of interests are evidently harmed by the invasion of privacy, many of which are closely

linked to the accounts of restricted information, control over the body and decision making, and

sustaining human dignity with intimacy, autonomy and so forth. Privacy is supposed to provide

protection against overreaching physical, mental, informational and social control by others. Many

people who view privacy as a valuable interest also realize that it is now threatened more than ever

by technological advances, in view of the massive databases and extensive records that are now

possible. In this regard, we will further examine here particularly electronic surveillance in the Indian

IT/BPO workplace, and the attendant privacy issues, by analysing the taxonomy of privacy. For this

taxonomy, though itself just one among many approaches to privacy, explains very well the kind of

informational invasion that most often intrudes in the workplace.

3.2 WORKPLACE SURVEILLANCE AND PRIVACY ISSUES: INDIAN SCENARIO

Though the invasion of somebody’s privacy is regarded as something distressful and harmful, it is

happening more than ever in the Indian organizational workplace. This coincides with the

overwhelming rise of sophisticated technological advancements and the subsequent growth of the IT

workforce, discussed in the previous chapter, and of BPOs and call centres in particular.147 There has

been considerable debate about the nature of employment created in these ways and the multifaceted

challenges posed by workplace practices in call centres or other service delivery organizations. Many

researchers of call centre work, notably Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D’Cruz, highlight that “the

existence of a paradox of tightly controlled, heavily monitored and scripted work juxtaposed with

high commitment practices.”148 Employee monitoring has emerged as an issue because of the privacy

rights concerns of individuals. When extended monitoring is implemented as part of cost

minimization or other managerial strategies, employees feel dissatisfaction, which leads in turn to

high levels of absenteeism and turnover. For according to Mohan Thite and Bob Russell, “the

inherent negative characteristics of offshored call centre work with high performance monitoring and

144 Adam D. Moore, Privacy Rights: Moral and Legal Foundations (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State

University Press, 2010), 27. 145 Moore, Privacy Rights: Moral and Legal Foundations, 49. 146 Moore, Privacy Rights: Moral and Legal Foundations, 56. 147 Many surveillance researchers opine that the call centres represent most pervasive monitored workplaces

due to their highly techno-mated infrastructure and their services with sophisticated communication

technologies and software systems. Michael Blakemore, “Surveillance in the Workplace: An Overview of

Issues of Privacy, Monitoring, and Ethics,” Briefing Paper for GMB 2005,

http://www.mindfully.org/Technology/2005/Surveillance-Workplace-Blakemore1sep05.htm. [accessed

November 15, 2016]. 148 Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D’Cruz, Employee Identity in Indian Call Centres: The Notion of

Professionalism (New Delhi: Respnose, 2009), 4.


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low job discretion are said to contribute to employee dissatisfaction and therefore, turnover.”149 This

is experienced quite often in Indian call centres, as these practices create an intense pressure to meet

the target by imposing external observing systems and monitoring the employees extensively.

3.2.1 Impacts of Snooping Eye in Indian Call Centres

Researchers on Indian outsourced call centres raise the issue of high levels of labour exploitation due

to constant surveillance.150 Quoting Peter Bain et al., Upadhya and Vasavi state that call centre work

and its subsequent “use of information and communication technologies has elevated management

control to new historical levels by target-setting and monitoring, in real time, both quantitative and

qualitative aspects of employee performance.”151 It is the case globally that call centres which are

most target-focused, or in other words quantity-focused, are the most heavily monitored, while those

which are more oriented to the service, or the quality-focused, are less likely to apply the full range

of surveillance technologies and mechanisms.152 Electronic and other surveillance systems are

extensively used across Indian call centres, however, as part of the expectation that “the work and

employment systems in Indian call centres [are] more tightly constrained and standardised [...].”153

Babu P. Ramesh also opines in the same manner that “technologically aided controls and surveillance

mechanisms allow firms to pursue the twin objectives of rationalization (cost minimisation) along

with standardisation (quality check).”154 But, Ramesh continues, on the contrary, “[t]he domination

of technology over labour is evident in all aspects of workplace design and organization, such as

surveillance and monitoring, fixing and maintaining target and evaluation of performance of the

employee.”155 As noted above, he even compares the degree of surveillance at work in Indian call

centres to the situation of nineteenth century prisons or even Roman slave ships.156 Therefore the

physical and psychological and even torturous effects of workplace surveillance are all the more

clear here in the context of Indian call centre work.

In an interview conducted by Pawan Budhwar, Neeru Malhotra and Virender Singh with regard to

the ever-present surveillance in the call centres, an associate of an Indian voice-based call centre

expressed that “perhaps, the drawback of this kind of supervision system is that people don’t want

to be supervised all the time; they don’t want to be checked and monitored by someone all the

time.”157 The customary Indian hierarchical work culture, discussed in the second chapter, has been

transposed to BPOs and call centres, and surveillance through electronic and other monitoring

systems is reported to be carried out with “managerial and supervisory arbitrariness and authoritarian

149 Mohan Thite and Bob Russel, “Human Resource Management in Indian Call Centres/Business Process

Outsourcing,” in The Next Available Operator: Managing Human Resources in Indian Business Process

Outsourcing Industry, eds. Mohan Thitte and Bob Russell, 34-58 (Los Angeles: Response, 2009), 38. 150 Jake Skeers, “Study Documents Exploitation in Indian Call Centres,” World Socialist Web Site, November

23, 2005, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/11/indi-23n.html [accessed November 12, 2016]. 151 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Outposts of the Global Information Economy,” 30. 152 Philip Taylor and Peter Bain, “Trade Unions, Workers’ Rights and the Frontier of Control in UK Call

Centres,” Economic and Industrial Democracy 22 (2001): 39-66. 153 Rosemary Batt, Virginia Doellgast and Hyunji Kwon, “Employment Systems in Call Centres in the United

States and India,” in The Next Available Operator: Managing Human Resources in Indian Business Process

Outsourcing Industry, eds. Mohan Thitte and Bob Russell, 217-252 (Los Angeles: Response, 2009), 224. 154 Remesh, “Work Organization, Control and ‘Empowerment’,” 246. 155 Remesh, “Work Organization, Control and ‘Empowerment’,” 246. 156 Remesh, “Work Organization, Control and ‘Empowerment’,” 246. 157 Pawan Budhwar, Neeru Malhotra and Virender Singh, “Work Process and Emerging Problems in Indian

Call Centres,” in The Next Available Operator: Managing Human Resources in Indian Business Process

Outsourcing Industry, eds. Mohan Thitte and Bob Russell, 59-82 (Los Angeles: Response, 2009), 68.


113

treatment including disciplinary action and even dismissal on trivial grounds.”158 In the same way,

several studies of Indian call centre workers have found that “routinised work design and high levels

of electronic monitoring lead to stress, anxiety, depression, emotional exhaustion and burnout.”159

Jake Skeers, for instance, express the same concern as he writes, “[c]all centre employees are under

constant stress because of their workload, competitive pressures and surveillance. Workers are

monitored for the number of calls, the average call time and time between calls. Closed circuit

cameras and electronic timers monitor the time staff are away from their desk, including in the

bathroom.”160 Besides, the very sense of self by employees is threatened and devalued in a milieu of

constant monitoring, as Upadhya and Vasavi rightly point out: “the development of subjective

mechanisms of control means that the employment relationship is no longer purely economic but

involves the shaping of the employee’s very sense of self.”161 Electronic and other means of

surveillance permit authorities to achieve ‘panoptic control’ over workers, while creating an ultimate

surveillance regime by which employees lose control over their own self and behaviour.

This panoptic mechanism in Indian call centres does not elude the workers being subjected to “the

gaze of computer, the gaze of supervisor, the manager, the fellow production worker, and finally the

internal gaze of the self.”162 This control also causes the manipulation of data by management and

thus constrains one’s sense of self and his or her physical and informational privacy. The ‘electronic

panopticons’ demonstrate the “control by management over the work process is near-complete and

workers have little autonomy or space for manoeuvre.”163 It also shows that the surveillance systems

are not often technologically deterministic, as G. Lankshear and D. Mason opine: “technology does

not in itself supervise workers. It is a tool giving data to be interpreted and used by supervisors or

managers. It is their choice of how to use it that affects the nature of social interaction within the call

centre.”164 This means that, in situations where data is handled by a third party, the capacity or right

of every individual to informational and bodily self-determination, which is a prerequisite to the

human capacity of social discourse participation, is violated and infringed.165

In like manner, although quality control and the careless release of sensitive data are matters of

constant concern for employers and often lead them to implement surveillance practices, certain

surveillance practices often create oppressive working regimes. Amrit Dhillon illustrates this based

on Indian call centre scenarios that several people express either resignation or acceptance, as there

158 Phil Taylor, Premilla D’Cruz, Ernesto Noronha and Dora Scholarios, “Union Formation in Indian Call

Centres,” in The Next Available Operator: Managing Human Resources in Indian Business Process

Outsourcing Industry, eds. Mohan Thitte and Bob Russell, 145-181 (Los Angeles: Response, 2009), 153-154. 159 Batt, Doellgast and Kwon, “Employment Systems in Call Centres in the United States and India,” 225. See

also, David Holman, “Employee Well-Being in Call Centres,” in Call Centres and Human Resource

Management, eds. Stephen Deery and Nick Kinnie (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004): 223-244; Jagdip Singh,

“Performance Productivity and Quality of Frontline Employees in Service Organizations,” Journal of

Marketing 64, no. 2 (2000): 15-34. 160 Jake Skeers, “Study Documents Exploitation in Indian Call Centres,” World Socialist Web Site, November

23, 2005, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/11/indi-23n.html [accessed November 12, 2016]. Cf.

Kaupins and Coco, “Perceptions of Internet-of-Things Surveillance by Human Resource Managers,” 54. 161 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Outposts of the Global Information Economy,” 23. 162 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Outposts of the Global Information Economy,” 30. 163 Upadhya and Vasavi, “Outposts of the Global Information Economy,” 31. 164 G. Lankshear and D. Mason, “Within the Panopticon? Surveillance, Privacy and the Social Relations of

Work in Two Call Centres,” Paper presented to the Work, Employment and Society Conference, September

11-13, 2001, 19. 165 Lilian Mitrou and Maria Karyda, “Employees’ Privacy vs. Employers’ Security: Can They Be Balanced?”

Telematics and Informatics 23 (2006): 167.


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is no other way than to do so, while others find it intrusive, threatening, and oppressive.166 let us

explore now the issues of privacy in Indian organizational workplaces by analysing an exploratory

study conducted by Ponnurangam Kumaraguru and Lorrie Cranor.167 This will enable us to

understand Indian attitudes about privacy and assess privacy-related issues in the Indian context.

3.2.2 Data Security, Personal Space, Data Mining and Identity Theft

In India, where data security is seen to be of paramount importance, there is growing concern about

the loss of data security due to various forms of surveillance used in the workplace and the threat this

poses to employee privacy.168 Any unauthorized intrusion to one’s freedom to be oneself is invasion

of one’s privacy. With the data security, it is hard to determine the extent of information needed from

employees. For instance, though there are strict policies regarding non-disclosure of employee

records in many organizations in India, the queries, for example, regarding the authenticity of an

employee’s records for marriage proposals, are often ridiculous and amount to clear invasions of

individual privacy since these types of queries often exceed the context of employment.169 This is a

typical example of unwanted information seeking that invades employee privacy, even at the time of

employee recruitment. Similarly, employee communications are not private.170 As already discussed,

Indian workers have almost no proper legal protection, constitutional or federal, from employers who

want to poke or prod into their personal and work lives. Kumaraguru and Cranor observe, at the

beginning of their surveys and personal interviews, that several organizations push government and

industry for adequate data protection laws as they foresee and fear the limit of its future growth,

given that India lacks proper privacy legislation.171

As India today experiences the increased presence of BPOs and call centres, there is a remarkable

amount of data flow into India. Since India lacks constitutional privacy laws, concerns have arisen

as to whether this data will remain private and confidential.172 This is a general privacy concern that

Indian organizations face. With respect to the Indian high-tech workforce and the specific privacy

issues they face in the workplace, 76% of respondents to this survey were very or somewhat

concerned about personal privacy, and over 80% about personal privacy on the internet.173 At the

same time they also conclude that the Indian high tech workforce is often not sufficiently aware of

privacy issues.174 This may be because of Indian cultural values related to its character as a

collectivistic society with lower individualism and high power distance, as discussed in our analysis

of Hofstede in the second chapter. India possesses more trust and faith in other people than anyone

in countries with more individualistic cultural values. Kumaraguru and Cranor opine the same, and

write that the value of trust that any collectivistic society invariably holds will play a leading role,

166 Amrit Dhillon, “Big Brother Keeps Eye on Indian Call Centres,” South China Morning Post, September 1,

2015, http://www.scmp.com/article/514350/big-brother-keeps-eye-indian-call-centres [accessed November

12, 2016]. 167 Ponnurangam Kumaraguru and Lorrie Cranor, “Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness,” in Privacy

Enhancing Technologies, eds. George Danwzis and David Martin (Berlin: Springer, 2005): 243-258. 168 Krishnan, Varkkey and Raghavan, “Employee Privacy at Workplaces: Some Pertinent Issues,” 4. 169 Krishnan, Varkkey and Raghavan, “Employee Privacy at Workplaces: Some Pertinent Issues,” 5. 170 Guerin, Smart Policies for Workplace Technologies, 10. 171 Kumaraguru and Cranor, “Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness,” 243. 172 Kumaraguru and Cranor, “Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness,” 243. However, as we have noted,

privacy is read as a fundamental right and an intrinsic part of Article 21 that protects life and liberty of the

citizens and as a part of the freedoms guaranteed by Part III of the Indian Constitution. The new privacy Bill

is under consideration of the government. 173 Kumaraguru and Cranor, “Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness,” 249. This study was a qualitative

research survey conducted through interviews among various stakeholders in Delhi and National Capital

Region (NCR). 174 Kumaraguru and Cranor, “Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness,” 255.


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and thus people generally will trust that their personal information will not be misused and are

“largely unaware of the extent to which databases of personal information are sold and traded among

companies.”175 In the same manner, the Indian traditional joint family system increasingly enables

people to share personal information with a wider group,176 and thus people are less bothered about

issues of privacy protection.

Though privacy is generally defined as the “claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine

for themselves when, how and what extent information about themselves is communicated to

others,”177 in India privacy is more often thought of in terms of personal space and subjects, and only

then in connection with the issue of data mining, identity theft, and workplace bullying. This is

different than in the US, where privacy is explained more in terms of information privacy, financial

information and identity theft.178 Thus workplace monitoring and watching over employees through

electronic and other technologies is a real intrusion of personal space for Indian workers, as it controls

one’s physical being along with one’s personal information. With regard to data protection, whether

in-house or off-shore, the issue concerns the ethical behaviour of both employers and employees.

Indian companies have taken steps to improve these security measures.179 Any workplace monitoring

should respect the “boundary around the person, a personal space that ought not to be entered by the

other” and this right to non-interference is part of privacy and the most valued right.180 It is interesting

and essential at this stage to see how the normal watching over and supervision of employees can

become, respectively, spying and intrusion.

We take, for instance, the issue of electronic monitoring that continues its relentless advance in the

booming Indian IT industry. The problem of this ever-present surveillance is that “it is dehumanizing

to be judged by a machine, that the machine cannot measure good work as opposed to much work,

and that the devices regularly permit employers to read e-mail and notes stored on the computer for

personal reference only.”181 This issue of dehumanization in the workplace will be analysed in detail

in the following chapters.

India, as one of the leading IT service providers and a rapidly emerging platform for business process

outsourcing, experiences in its workplaces an increased number of internet users and amazing

penetration of technology. This has brought with it greater employee exposure to newly recognized

e-threats and breaches of informational and other kinds of individual privacy. According to Simpson

and Byrski, “electronic workplace monitoring is often undertaken for largely positive reasons,

frequently related to productivity enhancement and liability alleviation, but tends to result in

175 Kumaraguru and Cranor, “Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness,” 245. To know the current laws and

trends of data transfer see, Clarisse Girot, ed., Regulation of Cross-Border Transfers of Personal Data in Asia

(Singapore: Asian Business Law Institute, 2018), 117-141. 176 Kumaraguru and Cranor, “Privacy in India: Attitudes and Awareness,” 245. 177 S.K. Sharma, Privacy Law: A Comparative Study (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 1994), 1. 178 Anjaly Agarwal, “Data Protection and Privacy Laws,” The International Journal of Science & Technology

2, no. 2 (2014): 15. For instance we see in the interview report typical responses of Indian subjects that,

“Privacy for me is my personal territory” and “personal privacy,” where as a typical response from a US

subject was: “[Privacy is] not allowing other people to have your information. It is protection of your

information from outside people.” Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Lorrie Faith Cranor, and Elaine Newton,

“Privacy Perceptions in India and the United States: An Interview Study,” The 33rd Research Conference on

Communication, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC), 2005.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ponguru/tprc_2005_pk_lc_en.pdf [accessed October 5, 2016]. 179 Nipul Patel and Susan E. Conners, “Outsourcing: Data Security and Privacy Issues in India,” Issues in

Information Systems 9, no. 2 (2008): 15. 180 Lisa Newton, Business Ethics in the Social Context: Law Profits and the Evolving Moral Practices of

Business, (New York: Springer, 2014), 36. 181 Newton, Business Ethics in the Social Context, 36.


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unforeseen damage to workplace relationships, [...] and deteriorating organizational culture.”182 For

example, in India, though monitoring does have certain benefits for the employee, as it keeps them

efficient and focused and discourages unethical or illegal conduct, it becomes very problematic when

every detail of the words, actions, behaviours, communications and whereabouts of employees are

tracked and monitored. Such excessive and unreasonable monitoring and the feeling of total

surveillance it produces can, Ciocchetti explains, “(1) invade an employee’s reasonable expectation

of privacy; (2) lead employees to sneak around to conduct personal activities on work time; (3) lower

morale; (4) cause employees to complain and, potentially, quit, and (5) cause employees to fear using

equipment even for benign work purposes.”183 Monitoring is also linked with physical and mental

illness and other health hazards, such as “increased boredom, high tension, extreme anxiety,

depression, anger severe fatigue and musculoskeletal problems.”184 These problems continue to

increase and often adversely affect employee behaviour and well-being.

According to Kizza and Ssanyu, “the most devastating effect of employee monitoring is the fear of

losing one’s job.”185 They summarize the most influential effects of employee monitoring, as follows:

Employee monitoring has the potential to undermine workplace morale and create distrust and

suspicion between employees and their supervisors. It may also create high levels of stress and

anxiety in the workplace due to constant monitoring. Fear that employees feel when they are being

monitored in this way may result in repetitive strain injuries. It also inhibits individual creativity and

self-esteem. Reduced or absent networks of peer social support may produce worker alienation,

which may in turn have adverse psychological effects.186 Botan and Vorvoreanu also opine that the

possible detrimental effects of electronic surveillance are not restricted to legal risks alone, but also

concern the possibility that employee relations and morale may be negatively affected.187 Mujtaba

stresses this adverse aspect of monitoring very well, claiming that “this surveillance can inject an air

of suspicion and hostility into the workplace and it can be counterproductive as it can cause

resentment in employees at being treated like children, and the culture also can become one of a

mistrust and hostile work environment when employees do not see the justification of monitoring.”188

Diminishing personal privacy, according to Botan and Vorvoreanu, is one of the most ethically

important effects of surveillance, because “it infringes upon the human right to a private identity and

the decision making autonomy based on it.”189 Kizza and Ssanyu add that this type of monitoring has

found its way beyond employee monitoring into the field of crime fighting.190

However, in workplace monitoring in India, problems related to ‘data mining’, ‘identity theft’ and

cyber-bullying are on the rise more than ever before.191 Conceptual clarification of these have already

182 Simpson and Byrski, “The 21st Century Workplace,” 22. 183 Ciocchetti, “The Eavesdropping Employer,” 285-369. 184 Martin and Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” 354. 185 Kizza and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 12. 186 Kizza and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 12-14. 187 Botan and Vorvoreanu, “What Do Employees Think about Electronic Surveillance at Work?” 129. 188 Bahaudin G. Mujtaba, “Ethical Implications of Employee Monitoring: What Leaders Should Consider,”

Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship.

http://www.huizenga.nova.edu/Jame/articles/employee-monitoring.cfm [accessed December 8, 2013]. 189 Botan and Vorvoreanu, “What Do Employees Think about Electronic Surveillance at Work?” 130. 190 Kizza and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 8. 191 Tina K. Stephen, and Arun Sasi, “Analysis of Potential Legal Strategies for Mitigation of Workplace

Bullying in India,” Management and Labour Studies 42, no. 1 (2017): 20-38; Premilla D'Cruz, Megan Paull,

Maryam Omari and Burcu Guneri-Cangarli, “Target Experiences of Workplace Bullying: Insights from

Australia, India and Turkey,” Employee Relations 38, no. 5 (2016): 805-823; Vimal Kumar M. and Sriganga

B.K., “A Review on Data Mining Techniques to Detect Insider Fraud in Banks,” International Journal of

Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering 4, no. 12 (2014): 370-380; and Vijaya


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been given in previous chpaters. Data mining, known as data or knowledge discovery, is the process

of analyzing data from different perspectives and summarizing it into useful information.192

According to Michael J. Quinn, “Data mining is the process of searching through one or more

databases looking for patterns or relationships, and it is a way to generate new information by

combining facts found in multiple transactions. [...] By drawing upon large number of records, data

mining allows an organization to build an accurate profile of an individual from a myriad of

snapshots.”193 It is actually the search for new, valuable and nontrivial information in a large volume

of data, and now is a cooperative effort of both human beings and computers.194 Through data mining

software and tools, the user can analyze data from many different dimensions and angles and

categorize it, then summarize the identified relationships.195 Thus, data mining technically finds out

the correlations or patterns among dozens of fields in large relational databases.196 Individual privacy

is one of the key issues raised by data mining in the organizational workplace.

Data mining consists of five major elements: (1) the extraction, transformation, and loading of

transaction data onto the data warehouse system, (2) the storage and management of the data in a

multidimensional database system, (3) the provision of data access to business analysts and

information technology professionals, (4) the analysis of this data by application software, and (5)

the presentation of the data in a useful format, such as a graph or table.197 However, the ‘secondary

use’198 of this data raises several issues related to data collected, which in turn affects the person to

whom the data pertains. In the Indian workplace, a key issue raised by data mining is the protection

of individual privacy. Employees have a right to privacy in their personal records. Moor explains

that an “individual has privacy if and only if information related to this individual is protected from

intrusion, observation and surveillance by others.”199 Personal records, therefore, are disclosed only

Geeta, “Online Identity Theft – An Indian Perspective,” Journal of Financial Crime 18, no. 3 (2011): 235-

246. 192 Pinelopi Troullinou, “Rethinking Privacy and Freedom of Expression in the Digital Era: An Interview with

Mark Andrejevic,” Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 12, no. 3 (2017): 76. 193 Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age, 219. 194 Stephen, and Arun Sasi, “Analysis of Potential Legal Strategies for Mitigation of Workplace Bullying in

India,” 20-38; Colleen McCue, Data Mining and Predictive Analysis: Intelligence Gathering and Crime

Analysis, 2nd ed., (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 3-33; Shu-Hsien Liao, Pei-Hui Chu and Pei-Yuan Hsiao, “Data

Mining Techniques and Applications – A Decade Review from 2000 to 2011,” Expert Systems with

Applications 39 (2012): 11303. Data mining methods include generalization, characterization, classification,

clustering, association, evolution, pattern matching, data visualization and meta-rule guided mining. 195 Geeta, “Online Identity Theft – An Indian Perspective,” 235-246; Ball, “Workplace Surveillance,” 91. 196 It is primarily used by companies and other organizational workplace managers and marketing

organizations. It enables these companies and other organizations to determine relationships among "internal"

factors (price, product positioning, or staff skills) and "external" factors (economic indicators, competition,

and customer demographics). Subsequently, it enables them to determine the impact on sales, customer

satisfaction, and corporate profits. Problems arise when collected data are used, with or without the consent

of the persons concerned, beyond the context in which they are collected and the reasons for which they were

stored.

http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/teacher/ technologies/palace/datamining.htm [accessed

December 5, 2013]. 197 “Data Mining: What is Data Mining,” Technology Note prepared for Management 274A, Anderson

Graduate School of Management at UCLA (1996). For detailed description of the issue of data mining, see,

http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/jason.frand/teacher/technologies/palace/datamining.htm [accessed

April 30, 2013]. 198 Secondary use of information is very frequent today. When the information collected is used for another

purpose than its actual intention, it is called the secondary use of the information. The information then

becomes a commodity when organizations sell or exchange information with other organizations, and it

became a common way to gather large databases of information they can mine. See Quinn, Ethics for the

Information Age, 219. 199 James H. Moor, “The Ethics of Privacy Protection,” Library Trends 39, nos. 1 & 2 (1990): 76.


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in certain specific circumstances. Data mining, however, garners a significant amount of information

about employees’ habits and preferences. To what extent one can keep and share the record of an

employee’s data is a delicate issue and worthy of reflection. Here the integrity of data gathered is

also questioned, because data analysis is only as good as the data being analyzed. Very often, when

data from different or even sometimes opposing or contradicting sources is collected, it is difficult

to integrate.

Identity theft is a growing problem related to data mining and is defined as “the misuse of another

person’s identity, such as name, social security number, driver’s license, credit card numbers, and

bank account numbers.200 The objective is to take actions permitted to the owner of the identity, such

as withdraw funds, transfer money, charge purchases, and get access to information, or issue

documents and letters under the victim’s identity.”201 Any transactions performed by people who

have stolen the identities of others will create major problems in the database by giving the false

impression that they are the activities of the actual person.202 This occurs when a person disguises or

pretends to be someone else by assuming their identity, in order to attain some resource or benefit.

The victim, whose identity is stolen, suffers the adverse consequences of the actions the other takes

in his/her name. This can happen when the other gets a person’s personal details by mistake or steals

one’s personal information by fraud and uses it without permission.203 This is a serious crime that

can lead to disaster in one’s reputation, finances, etc. Thus, all information relating to an employee’s

personal life, other behavioural characteristics and traits is private and confidential, and this

information should be released only in certain specific cases where it is necessary.

3.2.3 Workplace (Cyber) Bullying and Victimization

Premilla D’Cruz, Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour at the Indian Institute of

Management in Ahmedabad, defines workplace bullying as “subtle and/or obvious negative

behaviours embodying aggression, hostility, intimidation, and harm, characterized by repetition and

persistence, displayed by an individual and/or group and directed towards another individual and/or

group at work in the context of an existing or evolving unequal power relationship.”204 In this way,

such bullying is a negative behavioural pattern in the workplaces. D’Cruz illustrates two types of

bullying in the workplace: (1) personal bullying, consisting of behaviours of “making insulting

remarks, excessive teasing, spreading gossip or rumours, persistent criticism, playing practical jokes,

200 Annie Qureshi, “Big Data is Both a Weapon and Liability with Identity Theft,” SmartDataCollective,

March 6, 2018, https://www.smartdatacollective.com/big-data-weapon-liability-identity-theft/ [accessed

October 28, 2018]. Cf. Vidushi Jaswal, “Psychological Effects of Workplace Surveillance on Employees, and

the Legal Protection: An Analysis,” Bharati Law Review (Jan.- March 2017): 67. 201 Originally in Dorothy E. Denning, Information Warfare and Security, (Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley,

1999). Cf. Michael J. Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age (Boston: Pearson-Addison-Wesley, 2005), 224.

According to current federal law, identity theft is a federal crime when someone knowingly transfers,

possesses, or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person with the intent to

commit, or to aid or abet, or in connection with, any unlawful activity that constitutes a violation of Federal

law, or that constitutes a felony under any applicable State or local law (18 U.S.C. §1028(a), 7). Kristin M.

Finklea, “Identity Theft: Trends and Issues,” Congressional Research Service,

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40599.pdf [accessed February 15, 2013]. Cf. Dan Boneh, Joan

Feigenbaum, Avi Silberschatz and Rebecca N. Wright, “PORTIA: Privacy, Obligations, and Rights in

Technologies of Information Assessment,” Bulletin of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on

Data Engineering 27, no. 1 (2004): 10-18. 202 Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age, 222. Cf. Heidi A. McKee, “Policy Matters Now and in the Future:

Net Neutrality, Corporate Data Mining, and Government Surveillance,” Computers and Composition 28

(2011): 276-291. 203 Quinn, Ethics for the Information Age, 224. 204 Premilla D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2012), xv.


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and intimidation; and (2) work-related bullying, consisting of giving unreasonable deadlines or

unmanageable workloads, excessive monitoring of work and assigning meaningless tasks.205 This

shows that excessive monitoring itself is a sort of bullying that causes unnecessary stress in the

workplace. She continues to observe that:

Though these behaviours may be relatively common in workplaces, when frequently and

continually directed towards the same individual and/or group of individuals with increasing

intensity, they undermine, demoralize and humiliate the latter, draining his/her/their coping

resources and resulting in his/her/their stigmatization and victimization.206

It is true with the electronic surveillance used in the organizational workplace that “where one party

systematically targets another party and exhibits repeated and persistent aggressive and hostile

behaviours towards the latter leading to his/her/their victimization.”207 We also experience here an

illegitimate use of power on the part of the authority, or in other words power imbalances between

employers/managers and employees and the consequent interpersonal bullying and de-personal

bullying.208 In this sense, some peculiar and atypical characteristics of workplace bullying are “target

orientation, persistence (including frequency and duration), escalation, harm, power disparity, and

intent.”209 That means that, in Indian organizational workplaces, employees experience being singled

out or stigmatized because of widespread and deeply target-oriented surveillance practices.

Cyber-bullying, as a newer form of workplace bullying, is a major issue an employee faces in the

environment of monitoring and information tracking. Cyber-bullying is defined as “the use of

information technology to harm or harass the people in a deliberate, repeated, and hostile manner.”210

It generally involves sending or posting harmful or cruel text and/or images on the internet or other

digital communication devices such as cell phones. It may occur on personal websites or be

transmitted via e-mail, social networking sites, chat rooms, message boards, instant messages, or cell

phones.211 It is also defined as a “wilful and repeated harm inflicted through the use of computers,

cell phones, and other electronic devices.”212 Employees may be threatened in multiple ways by

cyber-bullying. For instance, it may occur in online fights using electronic messages with angry and

vulgar language (flaming), in being made the subject of gossip or rumours meant to damage his or

her reputation or friendships (denigration), in having her secrets or embarrassing information or

images put online (outing), etc. These are frequently reported problems in the workplace today.213

205 D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, xv. See also, Premilla D'Cruz, Megan Paull, Maryam Omari and

Burcu Guneri-Cangarli, “Target Experiences of Workplace Bullying: Insights from Australia, India and

Turkey,” Employee Relations 38, no. 5 (2016): 805-823. 206 D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, xv. 207 D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, xvi. 208 Tina K. Stephen, and Arun Sasi, “Analysis of Potential Legal Strategies for Mitigation of Workplace

Bullying in India,” Management and Labour Studies 42, no. 1 (2017): 20-38. 209 D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, xvii. 210 Ted Feinberg and Nicole Robey, “Cyber-bullying: Intervention and Prevention Strategies,” National

Association of School Psychologists (NASP).

http://www.nasponline.org/resources/bullying/Cyberbullying.pdf [accessed December 8, 2013]. 211 Feinberg and Robey, “Cyber-bullying: Intervention and Prevention Strategies.”

http://www.nasponline.org/resources/bullying/Cyberbullying.pdf [accessed December 8, 2013]. 212 Sameer Hinduja and Justine Patchin, “Cyber-bullying,” Cyberbullying Research Center, 2010.

http://www.cyberbullying.us/Cyberbullying_Identification_Prevention_Response_Fact_Sheet.pdf [accessed

December 8, 2013]. 213 Del Siegle, “Cyberbullying and Sexting: Technology Abuses of the 21st Century,” Gifted Child Today 33,

no. 2 (2010): 15.


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They become a great threat to employees when all their activities and information are electronically

monitored either with or without their proper consent.

Workplace bullying and cyber-bullying are prominent examples of how surveillance can be corrupt.

A study on the Indian workplace context conducted by Premilla D’Cruz and Ernesto Noronha show

that employers, team leaders or even colleagues use various and multiple forms of technological

devices to harass workers.214 Employers, they observe, monitor workers continuously from their

desks, and thenuse instant text messaging, email, cell phone calls, computer software alerts, etc., to

send a continuous flow of questions and comments, often in the form of warnings or threats on the

performance of the worker – a trend of cyber-bullying at work.215 In their study, D’Cruz and Noronha

identify many cases of managers and other authorities having acquired the personal information of

employees, contacting employee and their families outside of work, threatening to post collected data

on social media websites or to make it known to other actual and potential employers. This can even

lead to physical threats on workers’ bodies.216 In the same manner, Winifred R. Poster in his research

on Indian call centres indicates how the targets of electronic and other forms of monitoring extend

far beyond workers’ physical movements and into their inner personal cores – their emotional states

and features of their identities.217 More in these two categories – bodily and emotional threats – will

be discussed in the next chapter.

In the same way, a study conducted by Abihijeet Singh Tomar et al. from the Management

Development Institute in Gurgaon, India, shows that monitoring does affect employees by limiting

productivity and efficiency and reducing commitment and trust towards the organization.Employees

“find it harsh enough to leave the organization for the breach of privacy at workplace due to

monitoring.”218 Likewise, systems of surveillance track employees’ positions in time and space and

expose employees who are ‘working hard’ and those who are ‘not pulling their weight’.219 Here,

individuals may come to be seen differently by themselves and by others. Moreover, “if employees

realize that their actions and communications are monitored, then their creative behaviour may be

reduced if they are worried about monitoring and judgement.”220 All these effects and consequences

require ethical evaluation.

3.3 EXPLORING THE TAXONOMY OF WORKPLACE (INFORMATIONAL) PRIVACY

Several researchers, including Hall Adams (2000), limit the scope of employees’ privacy in the

workplace, focusing on the idea of “reasonable expectation.” Adams states that such a reasonable

expectation of privacy in the workplace is not to be found, for several reasons: (1) the work is done

at the employer’s place of business; (2) the employer owns the equipment being used; (3) it is the

employer’s business being conducted through use of the equipment; (4) the employer has a strong

interest in monitoring employee activity to ensure quality and quantity of work; and (5) the employer

214 Premilla D’Cruz and Ernesto Noronha, “Navigating the Extended Reach: Target Experiences of

Cyberbullying at Work,” Information and Organization 23 (2013): 324-343. 215 D’Cruz and Ernesto Noronha, “Navigating the Extended Reach,” 324-343. See also, Winifred R. Poster,

“Socially Benevolent Workplace Surveillance?” Work in Progress: Sociology on the Economy, Work and

Inequality, April 30, 2015. https://workinprogress.oowsection.org/2015/04/30/socially-benevolent-

workplace-surveillance/ [accessed November 10, 2016]. 216 D’Cruz and Ernesto Noronha, “Navigating the Extended Reach,” 324-343. 217 Winifred R. Poster, “Who’s on the Line? Indian Call Centre Agents Pose as Americans for U.S.-Outsourced

Firms,” Industrial Relations 46, no. 2 (2007): 271-304. 218 Abihijeet Singh Tomar et al., “Workplace Monitoring in India,” RM Project: MDI Gurgaon, 2013, 18. 219 Sewell and Barker, “Coercion versus Care,” 939. 220 Ball, “Workplace Surveillance,” 93.


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has a right to protect his or her property against theft and fraud.221 This illustration seems to show

that though the right to privacy is generally expected to be protected for all people, when it comes to

the privacy of employees in a workplace context, fair application is not possible. However, Samantha

Lee and Brian H. Kleiner opine that since the work-life and private-life of employees cannot be

categorically separated, the privacy rights of these people must be considered and approved.222

Though generally theories of privacy “allude to privacy as a right of persons that is to provide

protection against interference by third parties into their private affairs [...] in terms of access and

control,”223 a few researchers, as noted, have identified notions of information or knowledge as

defining characteristics of privacy.224 Workplace privacy and the privacy of employees in particular

is therefore also defined in terms of “restrictions on access to, or control over, personal information,

and intrusions on privacy are defined as situations in which personal information is collected or

disseminated without consent of the individual who is the topic of this information.”225 So the

violation of privacy in the organizational workplace seems to concern both informational and

physical affairs.

Solove, in this regard, analyses various arguments concerning privacy and its advantages and takes

seriously the criticism that the concept of privacy is problematically subject to diverse meanings. He

likewise acknowledges that new technologies have given rise to an extensive collection of new

privacy harms. In his taxonomy of privacy, Solove identifies a wide range of privacy problems

coherently and comprehensively.226 In what follows, we will use Solove’s taxonomy to critically and

later ethically evaluate the excessive use of electronic surveillance in the workplace. The taxonomy,

as noted, indicates the principal types of harmful activities. We will apply these to privacy problems

that arise specifically in relation to surveillance in the workplace.227 Surveillance affects the basis of

self-determination and the self-identity of employees.

3.3.1 Information Collection and Privacy

Information collection, the first group in Solove’s taxonomy, often threatens privacy because it

creates disruption through the process of gathering data by surveillance and interrogation.

Surveillance, visual or audio, is viewed as troublesome insofar as it leads to a situation in which a

person feels uncomfortable and is led to alter his or her behaviour. Too much social control adversely

221 Hall Adams III, Suzanne M. Scheuing and Stacey A. Feeley, “E-mail monitoring in the workplace: The

good, the bad and the ugly,” Defense Counsel Journal 67, no. 1 (2000): 32-46. See also, Samantha Lee and

Brian H. Kleiner, “Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace,” Management Research News 26, nos. 2/3/4

(2003): 75. 222 Lee and Kleiner, “Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace,” 76. 223 Philip Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” in The Ethics of Workplace Privacy, eds. Sven Ove

Hasson and Elin Palm (Brussels: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2005), 97-98. 224 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 98. See also, C. Fried, “Privacy,” The Yale Law Journal 77,

no. 3 (1986): 475-493; W. Parent, “Privacy, Morality and the Law,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1983):

269-288. 225 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 98. 226 Daniel J. Solove, “Taxonomy of Privacy,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 154 (2006): 477-564.

There are four basic groups of harmful activities that follow in the taxonomy: information collection,

information processing, information dissemination, and invasion. The first group of activities includes

surveillance and interrogation for the collection of the information, while the second group consists of

aggregation, identification, insecurity, secondary use, and exclusion involves information processing. Then

comes the dissemination of information, which includes breach of confidentiality, disclosure, exposure,

increased accessibility, blackmail, appropriation, and distortion. The final group, termed invasion consists of

the intrusion and decisional interference. Solove, Understanding Privacy, 103-105. 227 This whole section will be examined by analysing the taxonomy model of privacy illustrated and

exemplified by Solove in his latest work ‘Understanding Privacy’. Cf. Daniel J. Solove, Understanding

Privacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 101-170.


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impacts freedom, creativity and self-development.228 A sweeping form of investigatory power is a

system that records every behavioural pattern and potentially all social interactions, and thus exerts

a chilling effect on behaviour.229 In the context of the organizational workplace, different forms of

electronic surveillance impede the freedom of choice, impinge upon self-determination, and

demonstrate a lack of respect for the employee as an autonomous person. In the workplace, electronic

monitoring constrains the usual range of belief and behaviour, and thus “threatens not only to chill

the expression of eccentric individuality, but also, gradually, to dampen the force of our aspirations

to it.”230 Moreover, such surveillance discourages employees from associating with one another,

making some wary of speaking at meetings and the like.

As the watching, listening to, or recording of activities, surveillance can amount to a kind of

clandestine interrogation, according to Solove. It consists of various forms of questioning or probing

for information and often pressures employees to divulge this information in ways that impinge upon

their freedom of association and belief.231 In a workplace, though employees will be conscious of

interrogation, the compulsion to probe and search may make them uncomfortable. It also poses the

risk that the information acquired may be distorted. As a result, the compulsion and divulgence of

private information makes this kind of interrogation an invasion of the employee’s privacy in the

workplace. Monitoring affects an employee’s feelings, attitudes, emotions, beliefs, and norms

concerning both work and the workplace and can adversely affects an employee’s behaviour and

create “paced work, lack of involvement, reduced task variety [...], reduced peer social support [...],

fear of job loss, routine and lack of control over tasks.”232 It is also reported that monitored workers

experience “decreased job satisfaction and a decline in the quality of relationships with peers,

supervisors, and senior management.”233 In the same way, surveillance for reasons of mere personal

curiosity, which hurt an employee’s development or trust in the organization, cannot be legitimized

under any circumstances, as it abolishes the expectation that personal information will remain

private. Along with the assorted ways of collecting information, the way in which this data is handled

and disclosed also often threatens privacy. This possibility is discussed in the next two groups of the

taxonomy, called information processing and information dissemination.

3.3.2 Information Processing and Privacy

The process of using, storing, and manipulating data already collected is known as information

processing, which is discussed by Solove in five forms: aggregation, identification, insecurity,

secondary use, and exclusion. Solove writes,

Aggregation involves the combination of various pieces of data about a person. Identification is

linking information to particular individual. Insecurity involves carelessness in protecting stored

information from leaks and improper access. Secondary use is the use of collected information for

a purpose different from the use for which it was collected without the data subject’s consent.

228 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 108. 229 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 109. 230 Julie E. Cohen, “Examined Lives: Informational Privacy and the Subject as Object,” Stanford Law Review

52, no. 5 (2000): 1426. 231 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 113-114. 232 J.M Stanton and E. M. Weiss. “Electronic Monitoring in Their Own Words: An Explanatory Study of

Employee’s Experiences with New Types of Surveillance,” Computers in Human Behaviour 16 (2000): 424.

Effy Oz, et al., “Electronic Workplace Monitoring: What Employees Think,” Omega, The International

Journal of Management Science 27 (1999):168. 233 Oz, “Electronic Workplace Monitoring: What Employees Think,” 168.


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Exclusion concerns the failure to allow the data subject to know about the data that others have

about [him or] her and participate in its handling and use. 234

In a workplace, the consolidation and use of information collected through various methods of

electronic surveillance technologies raises a new and wide range of privacy issues. For example,

when some information is aggregated, it can reveal new facts about a person that he/she does not

wish to be divulged. The aggregation of data also increases the power of an employer over employees

by arming the employer with a dossier, by which employees are evaluated and judged. Identification,

positively taken, connects information to an individual and can prevent the rise of misleading factors.

However, in an organizational workplace it can also be used as a form of surveillance and thus

threaten privacy.235 For it is clear that in today’s work contexts, individuals as employees are less

able than ever before to control the quantitative and qualitative flow of data about themselves,

whether it be private or work-related.

The manipulation of information in the workplace also refers to the integration of information and

the possibility that it will be altered by electronic means and techniques. According to Britz, “The

main problems include the fact that the individual [employee] is not aware of personal information

being integrated into a central database, that the individual does not know the purpose/s for which

the integration is effected, or by whom or for whose benefit the new database is constructed and

whether the information is accurate.”236 This problem of insecurity, caused by the way in which any

information is collected, protected and processed, also carries the threat that negligence will lead to

potential future harms.237 Identity theft in the workplace could be a result of this feeling of insecurity

that in turn recognizes this insecurity as a threat to privacy. The secondary use of data, in the same

way, becomes problematic when information is used in ways to which a person has not consented,

and for Solove it “resembles breach of confidentiality in that there is a betrayal of the person’s

expectations when giving out information.”238 It is something like citing information out of context,

which can be misleading. Exclusion that fails to provide individuals with details about their records

exhibits a lack of transparency and creates a sense of vulnerability and uncertainty.239 Thus, in the

workplace information processing, which may adversely affect the privacy of the individual

employee by leaving him or her with a feeling of insecurity, negligence, and lack of confidentiality,

must be carefully attended to.

3.3.3 Information Dissemination and the Invasion of Privacy

Information dissemination consists of revealing or threatening to reveal personal information. This

can include the breach of confidentiality, disclosure, exposure, undue accessibility, blackmail,

appropriation, and distortion.240 In any form, it ultimately breaks trust in a relationship, while the

234 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 117. 235 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 125. 236 J.J. Britz, “Technology as a Threat to Privacy: Ethical Challenges and Guidelines for the Information

Professionals,” Microcomputers for Information Management 13, no. 3-4 (1996): 178. 237 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 127. 238 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 131. 239 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 134. 240 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 136. Solove offers through explanations of these forms in his taxonomy.

“Breach of confidentiality is breaking a promise to keep a person’s information confidential. Disclosure

involves the revelation of truthful information about a person that affects the way others judge her reputation.

Exposure involves revealing another’s nudity, grief, or bodily functions. Increased accessibility is amplifying

the accessibility of information. Blackmail is the threat to disclose personal information. Appropriation

involves the use of the data subject’s identity to serve another’s aims and interests. Distortion consists of

disseminating false or misleading information about individuals.” Solove, Understanding Privacy, 105.


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unauthorised and unwanted disclosure of information may damage one’s personal, emotional, and

financial reputation.241 In a workplace, electronic surveillance often adversely affects employees.

While trust is essential for all sorts of business transactions, it has been argued that surveillance

becomes “an expression of distrust, and, worse, continued surveillance may make it hard, or

impossible, to establish trusting relationships.”242 The disclosure of certain information in the

workplace can also inhibit people from associating with each other and compromise anonymity.

Moreover, when surveillance is viewed by an employee as expressing a lack of trust, it becomes

more harmful to the functioning of the organization than the expected advantages of surveillance. In

the same way, the exposed physical and emotional attributes of a person often create embarrassment

and humiliation, because it is primarily related to his or her body and health.243 Today, the internet

makes a wide range of information easily accessible.

For Solove, blackmail is prohibited not only in order to limit disclosure, but also to prevent the threat

of disclosure from being used as a tool for exerting power and domination over others.244 Two

significant ways in which information dissemination can harm employees are, according to Muller:

(1) by disseminating evidences of present or past actions or associations to a wider audience than

the individual consented to or anticipated when he originally surrendered the information

(deprivation of control over access), and (2) by introducing factual or contextual inaccuracies in

the data that create an erroneous impression of the subject’s actual conduct or achievements in the

minds of those to whom the information is exposed (deprivation of control over accuracy).245

Therefore, losing control over access to one’s information and inaccurate disclosure of the same are

two dangers that damage individual privacy. The effect of information manipulation in the workplace

due to disclosure can be called a loss of dignity and spontaneity and a threat to one’s freedom and

right to privacy. Similarly, the final group of the taxonomy, comprising physical invasion and

decisional interference, also undoubtedly reflects the marked recent increase in assaults on privacy.

For Moore, the downside of the revolution of digital technology surveillance, in the workplace in

particular, has been tedious working conditions and a loss of privacy and autonomy.246 Apart from

informational assault, as Solove highlights, some activities involve invasions into one’s private

affairs that may disturb one’s tranquillity or solitude impede his or her decision-making process.247

For Botan and Vorvoreanu, the diminishment of personal privacy is probably the most ethically

important panoptic effects of surveillance because “it infringes upon the human right to a private

identity and the decision-making autonomy based on it.”248 In order to live a life according to one’s

decision and design, an individual requires an unobserved space, the lack of which becomes an

expression of lack of respect for his or her wishes and needs.249 In the same way, computer

programmes that enable employers to monitor and record every keystroke and employee badges that

241 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 142. 242 Bernd Carsten Stahl et al., “Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: If people Don’t care, Then What is the

Relevance?” 67. 243 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 147. 244 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 153. 245 Miller, The Assault on Privacy, 26. 246 Adam D. Moore, “Employee Monitoring and Computer Technology: Evaluative Surveillance v. Privacy,”

Business Ethics Quarterly 10, no. 3 (2000): 697. 247 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 104. 248 Carl Botan and Mihaela Vorvoreanu, “What Do Employees Think about Electronic surveillance at Work?”

in Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions, ed. John Weckert (Hershey: Idea

Group Publishing, 2005), 130. 249 Stahl et al., “Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace,” 67.


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allow the recording of every movement and time spent in various locations in the workplace clearly

violate both physical and informational privacy.

Zirkle and Staples write: “[T]hese new meticulous rituals of power often appear as the technological

progeny of the ‘Panopticon’ in that they often operate in a hidden or random fashion, leaving those

under their scrutiny supposedly internalizing the ‘gaze’ of the authorities and thus rendering

themselves docile.”250 Since this technological sophistication has given the employer added power

and control over both employees and the workplace, the fundamental uncertainty about the privacy

rights of employees is also quickly amplified and employees may become merely submissive

occupants of an employer-determined power system. Arthur R. Miller observed this a few decades

back, when he wrote that “when an individual is deprived of control over the spigot that governs the

flow of information pertaining to him, in some measure he becomes subservient to those people and

institutions that are able to manipulate it.”251 Thus, monitoring and keeping track of every movement

has implications for the privacy rights of workers and threatens to lead to the dehumanization and

deskilling of work. For these reasons, privacy appears as a value able to protect the individual against

all types of harms of abuses of power in the workplace. However, the increasing sophistication in

ICT, with its capacity to collect, analyse and disseminate various types of data simultaneously its

widespread implementation in workplaces, has introduced an urgent demand for privacy

legislation.252 However, it is significant to discuss the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

of European Union that deals with data protection of all its citizens.

3.3.4 The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Data Privacy

How might the GDPR253 inform our perspective on the processing of personal data and data

protection in an employment context? The GDPR does not protect employees from any particular

data subject.254 However, it does affirm the importance of individual rights in the workplace and

prohibits processing sensitive data in the labour field. The GDPR offers an example of how

acceptable legal structures could be developed to achieve a more acceptable balance between the use

of electronic surveillance systems and technologies in the workplace and employee privacy and data

protection. Its aim is to protect citizens from privacy invasions and data breaches. The GDPR

incorporates several fundamental principles, including transparency and fairness, guarantees specific

rights to individuals, and warrants the exercise of those rights by organizations.255 It legally entitles

employers to monitor employees, but on condition that employees grant consent through advance

communication.256 The GDPR thus ensures the legitimate collection and processing of personal data

as well as its limitation and protection. It is designed to protect the personal data of individuals,

250 Brian L. Zirkle and William G. Staples, “Negotiating Workplace Surveillance,” in Electronic Monitoring

in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions, ed. John Weckert (Hershey: Idea Group Publishing, 2005),

80. 251 Miller, The Assault on Privacy, 25. 252 Nivedita Debnath and Kanika T. Bhal, “Polarization of Perceptions of IT-enabled Privacy Violations at

Workplace: Impact of Respondent Position, Peer Belief and Peer Pressure,” Global Journal of Flexible

Systems Management 4, no. 3 (2003): 16. 253 The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as we have mentioned at the first section of this chapter,

is a European Union regulation to protect the personal data of its individuals. It is the new data protection

regulation from the EU, released in May 2016 and implemented on May 25, 2018 and this regulation replaces

the 20-year-old Directive 95/46/EC. 254 Ogriseg, “GDPR and Personal Data Protection in the Employment Context,” 10. 255 European Parliament, “General Data Protection Regulation,” Official Journal of the European Union, May

5, 2016. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679 [accessed October

5 28, 2018]. 256 Claudia Ogriseg, “GDPR and Personal Data Protection in the Employment Context,” Labour & Law Issues

3, no. 2 (2017): 1-24.


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though it also applies to data control and processing and related activities.257 In order for the interests

of employers to process employee data to qualify as legitimate and legal, the employer must balance

the interests, rights and freedoms of employees.258 Likewise, the GDPR enables employers to

establish compelling legitimate grounds to process data. It is argued, however, that the imbalance of

power in organizations and in the employer-employee relationship makes it difficult to rely on

employee consent to collect and process the data.259 For under such conditions, the legitimate

interests of the employer or the data controller emerge as the deciding factor in an organizational

context. In the same way, consent may be given unwillingly when employees face a potential

negative effect from withholding consent.

Chapter II of the GDPR in Article 1 (a) guarantees that personal data shall be processed lawfully,

fairly and in a transparent manner (fulfilling specific requirements by securing the data subject’s

consent or by another legitimate means prescribed by law or the legitimate interests pursued by the

controller).260 This makes clear that the GDPR regards the lawfulness, fairness and transparency of

data processing as of vital importance. Article 1 (b) states that personal data shall be collected only

for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and that the data collected should not be further

processed if not compatible with those purposes (purpose limitation).261 It also seeks “data

minimisation” in Article 1 (c), where data shall be “adequate, relevant and limited to what is

necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed.”262 This principle of data

minimisation is significant in the DGPR, given that frequent data collection for multiple reasons and

treatments is alarmingly on the rise in the domain of digital transformation and data exchange.263

Moreover, according to Articles 6 and 7, data controllers must perform an analysis and risk

assessment (physical, logical and organizational) to ensure that the data to be collected is adequate,

relevant, limited, accurate (inaccurate data must be rectified), and not stored beyond a reasonable

date.264 The values of confidentiality (against accidental loss, destruction or damage) and

accountability (controller responsibility) are similarly ensured by the GDPR.265 The GDPR also

provides tools to guarantee that data subjects are free to decide upon which of their personal data can

be collected and processed to define their “personal identity,”266 and thus secures the rights of data

subjects to receive transparent information and communication (Articles 12-15).

Article 16 provides data subjects the right to rectify inaccurate personal data.267 It also guarantees the

right to erasure when the collected data is no longer necessary in relation to the purpose for which it

257 Bernadette John, “Are You Ready for General Data Protection Regulation?” BMJ 360:k941 (2018): 1;

Ogriseg, “GDPR and Personal Data Protection in the Employment Context,” 7-8. 258 Mira Burri and Rahel Schär, “The Reform of the EU Data Protection Framework: Outlining Key Changes

and Assessing Their Fitness for a Data-Driven Economy,” Journal of Information Policy 6 (2016): 479-511. 259 Michelle Goddard, “The EU General Data Protection (GDPR): European Regulation That Has a Global

Impact,” International Journal of Market Research 59, no. 6 (2017): 703-705. 260 General Data Protection Regulation, Official Journal of the European Union (L 119) 59 (2016): L119/35;

Goddard, “The EU General Data Protection (GDPR): European Regulation That Has a Global Impact,” 704. 261 General Data Protection Regulation, Official Journal of the European Union (L 119) 59 (2016): L119/35.

See also, Ogriseg, “GDPR and Personal Data Protection in the Employment Context,” 8; Goddard, “The EU

General Data Protection (GDPR): European Regulation That Has a Global Impact,” 703-704. 262 General Data Protection Regulation, Official Journal of the European Union (L 119) 59 (2016): L119/35. 263 Ogriseg, “GDPR and Personal Data Protection in the Employment Context,” 8. 264 General Data Protection Regulation, Official Journal of the European Union (L 119) 59 (2016): L119/35.

See also, Ogriseg, “GDPR and Personal Data Protection in the Employment Context,” 8. 265 General Data Protection Regulation, Official Journal of the European Union (L 119) 59 (2016): L119/36. 266 Ogriseg, “GDPR and Personal Data Protection in the Employment Context,” 9; General Data Protection

Regulation, Official Journal of the European Union (L 119) 59 (2016): L119/41-43. 267 General Data Protection Regulation, Official Journal of the European Union (L 119) 59 (2016): L119/43-

44.


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was collected or processed. If data is collected unlawfully, the data subject may withdraw consent

on how that data is processed. It also includes a right to restriction of data processing (Article 18), a

right to data portability (Article 20), and a right to automated individual decision-making (Article

21).268 This automated individual decision-making includes profiling. The GDPR strengthens and

confirms the freedom and rights of data subjects, the right to live without arbitrary and unwarranted

interference, intrusion or limitation, and thus the right to individual profiling.269 As a continuation of

this, Article 35 treats any excessive use of electronic monitoring (such as CCTV monitoring) to

profile employees as “high risk” profiling. According to this article, excessive electronic surveillance

results in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons. Such profiling further requires a

Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) to demonstrate the need for and proportionality of the

employer’s interests in seeking employee data.270 For instance, Article 35 (1) states that “where a

type of [data] processing, in particular using new technologies, and taking into account the nature,

scope, context and purposes of the processing, is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and

freedoms of natural persons, the controller shall, prior to the processing, carry out an assessment of

the impact of the envisaged processing operations on the protection of personal data.”271 Given this

requirement of a systematic and extensive evaluation of personal aspects, it is clear that the rights

and freedom of natural persons are highly valued by the GDPR.

Articles 45-50 outline legal measures for transferring personal data to a third-party, whether to

countries or to national or international organizations.272 Article 45 (1) speaks about data transfers

on the basis of an adequacy decision, ensuring that the third-party will provide an adequate level of

protection for the data. This adequacy level is determined by several factors, including the rule of

law, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, relevant general and sectoral legislation,

public security, etc. Articles 46 and 47 state, respectively, that a data controller or processor may

transfer the data subject to appropriate safeguards and that this should be done by means of binding

corporate rules. However, according to Article 49, when the adequacy decision and binding corporate

rules are absent, the explicit consent of the data subject must be obtained for any data transfer. Based

on the preceding elaborations of the GDPR, employee monitoring has to be in compliance mainly

with the principles of data protection, including, as already discussed, lawful and fair processing,

transparency, purpose limitation and necessity (data minimization), proportionality, integrity and

confidentiality.273 Providing adequate protection of personal data in a work context is among the

safeguards meant to ensure the privacy of employees.274 Within the workplace context, the employer

is classified as a data controller with regard to its employees’ personal data. For this reason,

applicable data protection rules are directly relevant to workplace privacy. However, we have already

noted concerns over the legitimate interests and practice of data protection.

The indicated ambiguity of the data subject’s consent – whether it is freely given, with full

knowledge, with specificity, based on prior information, etc., along with the nature of the relationship

between employer and employee – puts in question the legitimacy of employee monitoring and data

268 General Data Protection Regulation, Official Journal of the European Union (L 119) 59 (2016): L119/44-

45. 269 General Data Protection Regulation, Official Journal of the European Union (L 119) 59 (2016): L119/51;

Burri and Schär, “The Reform of the EU Data Protection Framework,” 491. 270 General Data Protection Regulation, Official Journal of the European Union (L 119) 59 (2016): L119/53;

Burri and Schär, “The Reform of the EU Data Protection Framework,” 494. 271 General Data Protection Regulation, Official Journal of the European Union (L 119) 59 (2016): L119/53. 272 General Data Protection Regulation, Official Journal of the European Union (L 119) 59 (2016): L119/60-

65. 273 Goddard, “The EU General Data Protection (GDPR): European Regulation That Has a Global Impact,” 704. 274 Seda Gürses and Jose M. del Alamo, “Privacy Engineering: Shaping an Emerging Field of Research and

Practice,” IEEE Security & Privacy 14, no. 2 (2016): 41.


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processing.275 The nature of the data to be processed also matters, having adverse effects on

employees, when it comes to highly sensitive and confidential data about an individual employee. It

is also needed to establish the impact of monitoring on employees, including individual risks and

concerns (privacy related, identity manipulation) as well as social ones (power distance,

discrimination). The GDPR (Recital 75) in this regard provides a list of possible risks in data

processing and managing:

The risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons, of varying likelihood and severity, may

result from personal data processing which could lead to physical, material or non-material

damage, in particular: where the processing may give rise to discrimination, identity theft or fraud,

financial loss, damage to the reputation, loss of confidentiality of personal data protected by

professional secrecy, unauthorised reversal of pseudonymisation, or any other significant

economic or social disadvantage; where data subjects might be deprived of their rights and

freedoms or prevented from exercising control over their personal data; where personal data are

processed which reveal racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religion or philosophical beliefs,

trade union membership, and the processing of genetic data, data concerning health or data

concerning sex life or criminal convictions and offences or related security measures; where

personal aspects are evaluated, in particular analysing or predicting aspects concerning

performance at work, economic situation, health, personal preferences or interests, reliability or

behaviour, location or movements, in order to create or use personal profiles; where personal data

of vulnerable natural persons, in particular of children, are processed; or where processing

involves a large amount of personal data and affects a large number of data subjects.276

Therefore, any assessment of the impact of employees’ data monitoring requires an assessment of

these risks and their applicability to the proposed monitoring. A key contribution of the GDPR in

employee monitoring is that “it marks a fundamental change in the balance of power between

organisations and individuals in the collection, processing and storage of personal data elevating

individuals’ right to access and control use of their personal data.”277 With the advent of the GDPR

as law, rather than merely a recommendation, the notion of a right to privacy in the context of data

is particularly well-defined. Now, the question is about the correlation between the data protection

principles noted above and their relative weight in balancing employees’ rights to privacy and

freedom with employers’ legitimate interests. This has to be further researched based on other

potential and actual impacts of these practices on both employers and employees.

In this regard, what constitutes “private matter” for a typical employee in India, and what concessions

an employee in this regard an employee might have to make as an organizational member, are two

major concerns of privacy in the Indian context. Given the lack of legal systems to generate a generic

cause of employee privacy, this makes clear the need for general organizational policies that support

and value employee privacy. The following section includes some recommendations concerning data

privacy based on a proposed privacy act in India.

275 Goddard, “The EU General Data Protection (GDPR): European Regulation That Has a Global Impact,” 704.

It is to be noted in this regard the notion of “notice and choice” stated by Daniel Solove. For him the important

component of privacy management is the adequate informtion given to the individual (notice) about the data

collected and used as well as allowing him or her to decide whether they accept (choice) this data collection

and use. Daniel J. Solove, “Introduction: Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Dilemma,” Harvard Law

Review 126, no. 7 (2013): 1883. 276 General Data Protection Regulation, Official Journal of the European Union (L 119) 59 (2016): L119/15. 277 Goddard, “The EU General Data Protection (GDPR): European Regulation That Has a Global Impact,” 705.


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3.3.5 Recommendations for a Leading Data Privacy

The Planning Commission of India is a group of experts under the chairmanship of former Chief

Justice Ajit Prkash Shah, tasked with identifying privacy issues in the private and public spheres in

relation to several national or state level programmes implemented through ICT platforms. They then

prepared a document to facilitate the proposed Privacy Act.278 The recommendations of this

committee are framed around nine national privacy principles, which we will explain briefly here.279

The committee acknowledges that:

At the moment there is no overarching policy speaking to the collection of information by the

government. This has led to ambiguity over who is allowed to collect data, what data can be

collected, what are the rights of the individual, and how the right to privacy will be protected. The

extent of personal information being held by various service providers, and especially the

enhanced potential for convergence that digitization carries with it is a matter that raises issues

about privacy.280

Today, data flows rapidly and globally, as any transaction initiated on the internet simultaneously

causes multiple data flows and transfers via the phenomenon of so-called Web 2.0, including online

social networking, search engines, and cloud computing.281 These data flows occur more recurrently

in organizational workplaces in India, as they make extensive use of all these information

technologies in their normal functioning, and especially make use of employee monitoring

technologies. This shows that the present ubiquitous nature of global data transfer through computer-

mediated internet networking exposes individuals to more privacy risks. As we read in the report:

While this is exposing individuals to more privacy risks, it is also challenging businesses which

are collecting the data directly entered by users, or through their actions without their knowledge,

- e.g. web surfing, e-banking or e-commerce - and correlating the same through more advanced

analytic tools to generate economic value out of data. The latter are accountable for data collection

and its use, since data has become one of the drivers of the knowledge-based society which is

becoming even more critical to business than capital and labour.282

The data exposed could be manipulated in various ways, taking it out of context and using it for

further demands. Acknowledging this possibility of both data flow and data manipulation and in

agreement with the various international privacy protection principles,283 the privacy

278 Some of the present National Programmes that raises privacy concerns are: Unique Identification number

issued by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) that collect the biometric and demographic

data of its citizens and store them in a centralized database and is identified with a twelve digit number

(Aadhar), NATGRID (The National Intelligence Grid is the integrated intelligence grid connecting databases

of core security agencies of the Government of India), DNA profiling, Reproductive Rights of Women,

Privileged communications and brain mapping, etc. 279 Ajit Prakash Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” Planning Commission, Government of

India, October 16, 2012. http://planningcommission.nic.in/reports/genrep/rep_privacy.pdf [accessed

November 10, 2016]. 280 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 3. 281 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 3. 282 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 3. 283 Chapter two of the Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy entitled International Privacy Principles,

illustrate the international privacy requirements articulated by the OECD Privacy Guidelines (United States’

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), EU Data Protection Directives, APEC Privacy

Framework (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), Canada PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and

Electronic Documents Act), and Australia ANPP (Australia National Privacy Principles). Shah, “Report of

the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 10-20. Indian Data Privacy Protection recommendations are in line with

these international principles, that: “Privacy Principles such as Notice, Consent, Collection Limitation, Use


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recommendation committee enumerates a set of National Privacy Principles that can best be

implemented in Indian conditions and that safeguard “procedures over the collection, processing,

storage, retention, access, disclosure, destruction, and anonymization of sensitive personal

information, personal identifiable information, sharing, transfer, and identifiable information.”284

The proposed privacy principles are: the Principle of Notice; the Principle of Choice and Consent;

the Principle of Collection Limitation; the Principle of Purpose Limitation; the Principle of Access

and Correction; the Principle of Disclosure of Information; the Principle of Security; the Principle of

Openness; and the Principle of Accountability.285 Let us consider each briefly.

The first two principles, the principle of notice and the principle of choice and consent, deal with the

need for prior information when dealing with any data concerning individuals.286 Before the

collection of any personal data, proper information should be given and the person in question should

be notified of the relevant information practices. This concerns what data is collected, for what

purpose, whether or not or to what extent data will be disclosed to a third party, and notifying

individuals when personal data is breached. The rationale behind this principle is that “the notice

principle ensures that individuals are informed of how their information will be used, allows data

controllers to communicate their intents and practices to data subjects and other stakeholders, and

allows the individual to hold the data controller accountable to the practices articulated in the

notice.”287 In the same way, individuals should be given the choice to opt-in or opt-out of disclosing

their data and the data controller should secure the consent of the person concerned.288 The rationale

behind this principle explains that:

The choice and informed consent principle empowers the individual to approve and authorise

collection and usage of personal information for defined purposes. The principle ensures that data

controllers provide simple choices to data subjects that allow them to make informed decisions

about the extent to which they would like to share their personal information, prior to collecting

that information. When individuals are mandated by law to share information, the principle

ensures that this is done in accordance with the other National Privacy Principles, and that the

information, if shared in public databases, is not retained in an identifiable form longer than is

necessary.289

The third and fourth principles concern limiting the amount of data collected and ensuring it is done

for a clear and proper purpose. The collection of personal information from data subjects should be

strictly limited - collection limitation - according to the purposes identified for such collection and

should be always adequate and relevant to the purposes - purpose limitation - for which they are

Limitation, Access and Corrections, Security/Safeguards, and Openness cut across these frameworks. The

principle of Enforcement, which APEC calls as Preventing Harm, is introduced by APEC, EU and the

Canadian privacy enforcement regimes. The EU Data Protection Directive, OECD Guidelines and APEC

framework additionally deals with the subject of Trans-border data flow. Australia’s ANPP specifically

prescribes de-identification of the personal information.” Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,”

10. 284 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 21. 285 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 21-27. 286 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 21-22. For further elaboration on notice and consent:

Fred H. Cate and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, “Notice and Consent in a World of Big Data,” International

Data Privacy Law 3 no. 2 (2013): 67-73; Richard Warner and Robert Sloan, “Beyond Notice and Choice:

Privacy, Norms, and Consent,” Journal of High Technology Law (2013): 1-34. 287 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 22. 288 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 22-23. 289 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 23. It also further ensures to keep the data accurate,

complete, current and reliable for its intended use. This is discussed next. In the same way, the accuracy of

the data is important to verify the enforced security, accountability and accessibility.


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processed. Notice should be provided concerning both collection and purpose and consent from the

individual secured.290 The committee makes clear that “the collection limitation principle ensures

that data controllers only collect personal information that is necessary for achieving the stated

objective, and that all collection is lawful and fair,” and hope that “this reduces the probability of

misuse of individuals’ personal information.”291 Besides, the purpose limitation principle

additionally ensures that “personal information is used only in compliance with the National Privacy

Principles and only for intended and agreed purposes [... and] that personal information is retained

by the data controller only as long as is necessary to fulfill the stated purposes.”292 This personal data

or information, when it is no longer required, is to be destroyed in accordance with identified

procedures.293

Fifth, the principle of access and correction states that individuals should have the right to access

their personal information and make necessary corrections, additions or deletion if needed.294 The

rationale behind this access and correction principle is that it “ensures that data controllers provide

access mechanisms to data subjects for inquiring if a data controller is holding their personal data,

and for viewing, modifying and deleting their personal information.”295 Sixth, the principle of

disclosure of information prohibits the data controller from disclosing personal data to third parties

without informed consent. This principle ensures that:

[D]ata subjects are informed and consent taken [except when an exemption exists] when their

personal information is transferred to third parties. The principle requires data controllers ensure

that third parties also adhere to the National Privacy Principles. The principle also ensures that

any disclosure by the data controller to a third party that has been authorized and is a governmental

agency is in compliance with the National Privacy Principles. Furthermore, the principle makes

any de-anonymization of information that was anonymised/aggregate information for the transfer

a violation of the principle.296

The seventh principle of security deals with the security of personal data while held in the custody

of the data controller. It aims to ensure that “data controllers put in place the necessary technical,

administrative, and physical safeguards for protecting personal information in their custody from

unauthorised use, destruction, modification, access, and retention etc. – both from insiders and

outsiders.”297 Eighth, the principle of openness calls for practices, procedures, policies and systems

to be implemented in proportion to the sensitivity of the data, and thus for the information to be made

available in an intelligible form.298 The final principle of accountability correspondingly states that

the data controller or overseeing body shall be accountable or responsible for complying with these

290 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 24. 291 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 24. 292 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 24. It ensures that obtaining personal data from a data

subject must be of specific, lawful and clearly stated purposes. Collecting and processing data routinely and

indiscriminately goes against the identified norms of legitimate purpose. The processing must be in

compatible with the original purpose(s). 293 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 24. See also, Jaspreet Bhatia and Travis D. Breaux, “A

Data Purpose Case Study of Privacy Policies,” Proceedings of the International Requirements Engineering

Conference. IEEE Computer Society, 2017, 394-399; Nikolaus Forgó, Stafanie Hänold and Benjamin

Schütze, “The Principle of Purpose Limitation and Big Data,” in New Technology, Big Data and the Law,

eds. Marcelo Corrales, Mark Fenwick and Nikolaus Forgó (Singapore: Springer, 2017), 17-42. 294 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 25. 295 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 25. 296 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 25. See also, Yuriko Haga, “Right to be Forgotten: A

new Privacy Right in the Era of Internet,” in New Technology, Big Data and the Law, eds. Marcelo Corrales,

Mark Fenwick and Nikolaus Forgó (Singapore: Springer, 2017), 97-126. 297 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 26. 298 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 26.


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privacy principles.299 In short, it is recommended that these national privacy principles be applied to

cases of interception of communications, access to data and audio/video and other electronic

recording in different areas of citizens’ work and life in India.

The previous chapter (chapter one) mentioned the Personal Data Protection Bill of 2018, which

concerns data protection and privacy across India.300 This Bill considers the laissez-faire approach

of the US legal framework, Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act

(PIPEDA), and the EU’s focus on individual privacy and data protection (GDPR), and in view of all

these adopts a comprehensive data protection law.301 Yet the Bill takes a specifically Indian approach

by establishing, on the one hand, the role of the State to protect the common good, while on the other

guaranteeing an enforceable framework for the individual right to privacy. It recognizes the right to

privacy as a fundamental right and the need to protect personal data as an essential facet of

informational privacy. The Bill establishes legal requirements for the collection and processing of

personal data and limits the processing of sensitive personal data as well as the period of its

retention.302 The data protection obligations stated in the second chapter of this Bill explicate this

further. For instance, Article 4 guarantees a fair and reasonable processing of data, respecting the

privacy of the data subject, or data principal.303 For data collection and processing, the Bill includes

a purpose limitation (clear, specific and lawful - Article 5) and a collection limitation (limited and

necessary – Article 6). In the same way, the data fiduciary is obliged to provide the data principal

with adequate notice prior to the collection of personal data (Article 8). The Bill also requires that

data processing be of a certain quality (complete, accurate, not misleading – Article 9), that data

storage be limited (Article 10), and accountability on the part of those conducting this data processing

(Article 11).304

The Bill guarantees that organizations designate a Data Protection Officer and conduct a third-party

audit of the processing of personal data (Article 36). It assures that security safeguards will be

implemented, including (where appropriate) de-identification and encryption, as well as safeguards

to prevent misuse, unauthorized access to, modification, disclosure or destruction of personal data.305

The Bill would also require regulator notification of any data breach (Article 32 (1-7)).306 Along with

299 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 27. 300 The initial form of this Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018 could be found in the Privacy (Protection) Bill,

2013 proposed by the Centre for Internet and Society. Though this Bill of 2013 does not provide any definition

on privacy, it focuses on the protection of sensitive personal data of persons. The Centre for Internet &

Society, “The Personal Data (Protection) Bill, 2013,” https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-

personal-data-protection-bill-2013 [accessed October 16, 2018]; Vishalashi Singh, “An Analysis of Personal

Data Protection with Special Emphasis on Current Amendments and Privacy Bill,” International Journal of

Law and Legal Jurisprudence Studies 4, no. 1 (2017): 144-152. 301 Amba Kak, “The Emergence of the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018 - A Critique,” Economic & Political

Weekly 53, no. 38 (2018): 12-16. Nishith Desai Associates, “New Data Protection Law Porposed in India!

Flavors of GDPR,” July 30, 2018, http://www.nishithdesai.com/fileadmin/user_upload/pdfs/NDA_

Summary.pdf [accessed October 16, 2018]. 302 The sensitive personal data includes personal data revealing or relating to password, financial data, health

data, official identifier, sex life, sexual orientation, biometric data, genetic data, transgender status, intersex

status, caste or tribe. This broad definition of sensitive personal data that includes passwords and financial

data is a landmark step taken in this Bill and thus marks its distinction from other international data protection

laws. The Personal Data Protection Bill 2018, Article 3 (35). 303 The Personal Data Protection Bill 2018, Article 4. 304 The Personal Data Protection Bill 2018, Articles 5-11. 305 The Noncompliance of the organizations and of individuals concerned with the Bill would result in penalties

up to 50 million Rupees (approximately USD $728,000), or two percent of global annual turnover of the

preceding financial year, whichever is higher. 306 Article 3 (30) defines persona data breach as “any unauthorised or accidental disclosure, acquisition,

sharing, use, alteration, destruction, loss of access to, of personal data that compromises the confidentiality,


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the wide definition of sensitive personal data, the Bill guarantees data localization (Article 40). Every

data fiduciary is required to store a copy of personal data on a server or data centre located within

the territory of India. This will restrict the global transfer of the data. It is also to be noted here that

the core concepts of the EU’s GDPR, discussed above, is reflected in this proposed Personal Data

Protection Bill of 2018 (PDPB). For instance, the core principles of data protection in the GDPR,

namely lawfulness, fairness and transparency, purpose limitation, collection and storage limitation,

accountability, etc., are all a part of the proposed PDPB as well. Similarly, one can compare the

GDPR and PDPB in terms of the rights of data subjects, such as a right to correction, confirmation

and access, a right to portability, and a right to be forgotten. There is also a development in the PDPB:

namely that a clearer legal ground of personal data processing in relation to employment is

guaranteed while this is left not very explicit in the GDPR. A few more observations based on the

previous analysis of the taxonomy of privacy and surveillance in the workplace are in order, however,

for a complete and comprehensive understanding of these issues.

3.4 WORKPLACE SURVEILLANCE AND INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS PERSPECTIVE

Electronic surveillance in the workplace has ethical implications related to the privacy expectations

of employees, fairness and employees’ quality of work life, which may be affected by anxiety and

stress-related illnesses. According to Miller and Weckert, “possibly the greatest threat to privacy is

posed by the possibility of combining these new technologies and specifically combining the use of

monitoring and surveillance devices with certain computer software and computer networks,

including the internet.”307 In this regard, analysis of the taxonomy of privacy can help us appreciate

the amount and kind of personal information that can be gathered and how long it can be retained. It

is clear by now that the “new technologies have ushered in many ways to overhear, watch, or read

just about anything in the workplace.”308 In the workplace, privacy violations involving information

collection and dissemination are known respectively as snooping and exposure, while a physical

invasion of privacy is known as a disturbance.309 Taking into account these facts, it is clear that

privacy intrusion in the workplace may take the form of unauthorized cognitive or physical access

or informed consent. Thus, privacy, at its accessible, decisional, and informational levels, has to be

protected in the organizational workplace to ensure the productive functioning of that workplace.

At this stage, it should be clearly noted that “the basic attribute of an effective right of privacy is the

individual’s ability to control the circulation of information relating to him – a power that often is

essential to maintaining social relationships and personal freedom.”310 Camera surveillance in the

workplace reveals private information about the bodies or bodily condition of employees. When this

surveillance takes place in more private environments, such as offices, restrooms and comfort zones,

it invades privacy. Background checks on prospective employees through the internet and electronic

integrity or availability of personal data to a data principal.” The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018, Article

3 (30). Daniel J. Solove and Danielle Keats Citron write about the problem of data breaches and the

confounded issue of harm related to it. They speak in relation to data breaches creating a risk of future injury,

such as identity theft, fraud, or damaged reputations. According to them people expirience anxiety about this

risk. Daniel J. Solove and Danielle Keats Citron, “Risk and Anxiety: A Theory of Data-Breach Harms,” Texas

Law Review 96 (2018): 737-786. 307 Seumas Miller and John Weckert, “Privacy, the Workplace and the Internet,” Journal of Business Ethics 28

(2000): 255. 308 Paul E. Hash and Christina M. Ibrahim, “E-mail, Electronic Monitoring, and Employee Privacy,” South

Texas Law Review 37 (1996): 896. 309 Philip Brey, “The Importance of Privacy in the Workplace,” in Privacy in the Workplace, eds., S.O. Hansson

and E. Palm (Brussel: Peter Lang, 2005), 77-82. 310 Miller, The Assault on Privacy, 25.


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databases are also considered violations of privacy when they are done without prior consent.311 Even

unauthorized access to one’s personal workspace and searches of the contents of one’s personal

computer (PC) by employers or fellow-workers can constitute a privacy invasion. Camera

surveillance that makes it possible to record and observe every movement of employees, and PC and

internet monitoring that give detailed and complete information on an employee’s activities, are the

most powerful techniques used in the organizational workplace to monitor individual conduct, and

these do often invade or violate the privacy of employees.312

Practices that endorse invasive monitoring in the workplace create an adversarial relationship

between employer and employee and between employees themselves. Computer monitoring has also

been linked with increased emotional and physical stress among employees and often leads to

unnecessary employee pressure. For all these reasons, intrusive and ongoing monitoring often leads

to under-performance, since employees rarely feel free to take responsibility for outcomes and so are

more likely to engage in corrupt practices.313 Some scholars also argue that such surveillance is really

the characteristic modern method of exerting control and power over labour. Monitoring can be

intrusive and the potential for abuse exists. For instance, computer databases, telephone and

video monitoring, active badges, and other monitoring techniques often used in the workplace, make

the private lives of workers easier to delve into without detection.314 Such monitoring and

surveillance leads employees to think of themselves as a part of a technological panopticon and

compromises their sense of freedom and of the originality of their work.

3.4.1 Privacy as a Fundamental Moral Right in the Workplace

Despite the many unresolved problems and vagueness related to the present stand of privacy in

modern society and in the workplace in particular, the concept of privacy has been extensively

analyzed by by contemporary thinkers, as we have seen. Study of this analysis will help us to deepen

its meaning. Because it is difficult to give a concrete positive definition of privacy, in terms of liberty,

autonomy, secrecy, solitude, etc., Herman prefers a negative definition in terms of “something that

cannot be ‘intruded upon,’ ‘invaded,’ ‘violated,’ ‘breached,’ ‘lost,’ ‘diminished,’ and so forth. Each

of these metaphors reflects a conception of privacy that can be found in one or more standard models

or theories of privacy”315 in relation to workplace and leads to a percepton of it as a fundamental

right. Thus, the diminishment of personal privacy is the defining panoptic effect of surveillance, as

it infringes upon the employee’s right to a private identity and consequent autonomy in any decision-

making process.

A review of some theories of privacy will better explain this. To begin with, privacy is well explained

as non-intrusion316 on one’s personal realm. According to Warren and Brandeis:

311 Brey, “The Importance of Privacy in the Workplace,” 81-87. 312 Brey, “The Importance of Privacy in the Workplace,” 88-95. 313 Miller and Weckert, “Privacy, the Workplace and the Internet,” 261. 314 This paragraph is the summary of an idea proposed by Mishra and Crampton, who present information on

the issue of employee privacy in Human Resource Management which has been fuelled by the use of various

electronic monitoring systems. See Jitendra M. Mishra and Suzanne M. Crampton. “Employee Monitoring:

Privacy in the Workplace?” S.A.M. Advanced Management Journal 63, no. 3 (1998): 4-14.

http://faculty.bus.olemiss.edu/breithel/final%20backup%20of%20bus620%20summer%202000%20from%2

0mba%20server/frankie_gulledge/employee_workplace_monitoring/employee_monitoring_privacy_in_the

_workplace.htm [ accessed March 09, 2014]. 315 Tavani, “Philosophical Theories of Privacy,” 3. 316 A variation of the non-intrusion theory, which also appeals to the notion of being let alone, is what can be

described as the ‘‘non-interference’’ theory of privacy. Whereas the non-intrusion theory focuses on being


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The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered

necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has

become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to

the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasion upon his privacy,

subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily

injury.317

The right to privacy, for Warren and Brandeis, is not something to be found by squinting at the

Constitution, but by admitting that cultural values and new technologies play a large role in

developing new understandings of our rights.318 James H. Moor takes a more comprehensive

approach, stating that “an individual or group has privacy in a situation if and only if in that situation

the individual or group or information related to the individual or group is protected from intrusion,

observation, and surveillance by others.”319 Privacy is also frequently defined in terms of the control

of information in the workplace. According to Rogene Buchholz, many of the issues that involve

privacy in our society today can be stated in terms of the tension between an individual’s right to

privacy and society’s need to know.320 Charles Fried states that “[p]rivacy is not simply an absence

of information about us in the minds of others; rather it is the control we have over information about

ourselves.”321 As Werhane notes, privacy as the control of information can be understood in two

ways. First, the employee has a right to limit access to information he or she gives to an employer,

and in no case should this information be given to any outside person or organization without the

express permission of the employee. Second, employers have the right to the privacy of business

information so long as this information does not threaten public welfare.322

Alan Westin articulates this idea in the same line, stating that privacy is the claim that individuals

and groups should be allowed to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information

about them is communicated to others.323 Solove and Schwartz summarise, in this regard, Westin’s

four basic status of individual privacy, namely: solitude (freedom from observation), intimacy (acting

as part of small group), anonymity (acting public but seek freedom from identification and

surveillance) and reserve (psychological barrier against unwanted intrusion).324 Elizabeth Beardsley

also suggests that persons have the right to decide when and how much information about themselves

will be revealed to others.325 According to Parent, “Privacy is the condition of not having

undocumented personal knowledge about one possessed by others”326 Hence privacy is explained as

control of information about oneself. Next to this, privacy is understood in this context as liberty or

freedom to act in personal matters.327 Private situations give us zones of protection to do what we

want to do within the limits of personal freedom. We have to note here the crucial distinction between

let alone with respect to privacy invasions involving physical space (affecting one’s papers, home, and so

forth), the non-interference theory is concerned with the kind of intrusions that affect one’s ability to make

important decisions without external interference. The latter view traces its origins to an interpretation of

privacy advanced in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965. See Tavani, “Philosophical Theories of

Privacy,” 5 n. 13. 317 Warren and Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” 196. 318 James H. Moor, “The Ethics of Privacy Protection,” Library Trends 39 (1990): 71. 319 Moor, “The Ethics of Privacy Protection,” 76. 320 Buchholz, “Privacy,” 505-506. 321 Fried, An Anatomy of Values, 137. 322 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 119. 323 Fried, An Anatomy of Values,74. See also Westin, Privacy and Freedom (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 65. 324 Solove and Schwartz, Information Privacy Law, 45-48. 325 Fried, An Anatomy of Values,74. 326 Adam D. Moore, “Privacy: Its Meaning and Value,” American Philosophical Quarterly 40 (2003): 217. See

also W. A. Parent, “Privacy, Morality, and the Law,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (1983): 269. 327 Fried, An Anatomy of Values, 72. Cf. Solove and Schwartz, Information Privacy Law, 45-48.


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privacy and liberty. Privacy provides an umbrella under which we are able to act freely, but there are

limits.328 We should exclude the tendency of at least some to use the right to privacy as a screen to

conceal harmful actions they may be doing. Privacy has also been described as the kernel of freedom

and the most basic right from which all other freedoms stem.329

When we think of privacy as the freedom to act, it should not be confused with liberty, though the

two are closely related. Herman Tavani invites us to “[c]onsider that privacy is essential for liberty

in that it makes possible the exercise of liberty. Whereas liberty allows individuals to hold ideas that

might be politically unpopular, it is privacy that enables them to disclose their ideas to certain

individuals while concealing from others the fact that they hold those unpopular ideas.”330 Werhane

emphasises this freedom of the employee to act even more when she states that “an employee has a

right to activities of his or her choice outside the workplace. Otherwise the employee is literally part

of the corporation and cannot have an independent life. Such dependence is tantamount to slavery.”331

Hence privacy can be explained as the freedom to act. Likewise, since this right potentially involves

values of confidentiality, trust, and intimate relationships between employer and employee and

among employees themselves, our discussion is now moving to yet another perspective on privacy,

as a moral right.

Werhane begins her discussion on privacy in the workplace from her interest in the “nature of moral

rights, the ontological character of corporations, and the status of employee rights.”332 In her view,

“corporations are created by, operate because of, and are run by persons – employees, employers,

and, to a lesser extent, stock holders. But the problem perceived was that the employees have

traditionally enjoyed only few rights at work. Even standardly recognized political rights to due

process, to freedom, and to privacy are not universally honoured.”333 Business ethicists argue here

for a variety of employee rights, such as a right to privacy, a right to be paid in accordance with

comparable worth, a right not to be the victim of discrimination, etc.334 Werhane approaches this

problem in relation to the concept of moral rights, assuming that all human beings, and in particular

rational adults, have an inherent value.335 Because of this inherent value, human beings also have

certain rights. These rights are moral rights, since everyone possesses them, but they are not

328 Fried, An Anatomy of Values, 79. 329 Buchholz, “Privacy,” 505. 330 Tavani, “Philosophical Theories of Privacy,” 5. 331 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 119. 332 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, ix. 333 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 1. 334 Daryl Koehn, “Ethical Issues in Human Resources,” in The Blackwell Guide to Business Ethics, ed. Norman

E. Bowie (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 225. 335 Inherent value, otherwise called the ‘intrinsic value’ is an ethical and philosophic property. It is the

value that an object has "in itself" or "for its own sake", as an intrinsic property. According to Kagan, “[T]he

term “intrinsic value” does seem to wear its meaning on its sleeve — at least to the philosophically trained

— and the meaning it seems to wear is not value as an end, but rather the value that an object has solely by

virtue of its intrinsic properties.” See S. Kagan, “Rethinking Intrinsic Value,” Journal of Ethics 2 (1998):

290. Instrumental value, on the other hand, is the value of objects, both physical objects and abstract objects,

not as ends-in-thmeselves, but a means of achieving something else. It is often contrasted with items of

intrinsic value. Stanley Riukas indicates the meaning of these two kinds of values, “that the inherent values

are, roughly speaking, the desired results achieved through the operation of the instrumental values. Another,

and less etymological way of defining inherent values is that they are things, thoughts, emotions, etc. desired

for their own sakes whereas the instrumental vales are always intended for the sake of inherent values.” See

Stanley Riukas, “Inherent and Instrumental Values in Ethics,” Philosophy of Values,

http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Valu/ValuRiuk.htm [accessed November 9, 2012].


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everywhere recognized or exercised.336 We may now examine how Werhane presents her

understanding of the right to privacy in theworkplace.

First, we must distinguish between natural rights and moral rights. Herman defines natural rights as

“rights people have simply by virtue of being people.”337 In this regard, any right that exists by virtue

of natural law338 can be called a natural right. According to Philip A. Hamburger, “Natural rights are

understood in terms of freedom and natural liberty339 of an individual. It can be categorized as

consisting of life, liberty and property, or life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It also includes

free exercise of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, right of self defence, right to

assemble and even the right to reputation.”340 Christopher W. Morris also contends, in this respect,

that

Natural rights are those rights held prior to and independently of institutional arrangements (e.g.,

legal systems) and they derive from or have their basis in human nature or activity; they flow from

336 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 3. 337 Gilbert Harman, “Moral Relativism as a Foundation for natural Rights,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 3

(1979): 367. 338 Natural law is basic and fundamental to human nature. It is something that is inherent in human behaviour

and human reasoning that governs human conduct. Since it is based on human nature many Philosophers and

theologians have expressed their views on it. According to St. Thomas, the natural law is nothing else than

the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law. The eternal law is God’s wisdom, in as much as it is

the directive norm of all movement and action. For Thomas Aquinas, the law that is in us by nature is

promulgated by God implanting it in our minds as something we know by nature. See Thomas Aquinas,

Summa Theologiae, ed. Timothy McDermott (Westminster: Christian Classics, 1989), 280-289. The natural

law was invoked as a ‘higher authority’ in ancient Greek philosophy to challenge reigning political structures

and it became an argument for the possibility of the universal knowledge of good and evil. Reflecting upon

Aquinas’ idea of natural law as person’s rational participation in the eternal law, Joseph Selling would suggest

that the position of Aquinas was very close to what is today referred as ‘autonomous ethics’, although the

lack of cultural pluralism in his environment still makes it difficult to picture him within this school of

thought. See Joseph Selling, “The Human Person” in Christian Ethics: An Introduction, ed. Bernard Hoose

(London: Cassell, 1998), 62. The claim that natural law is based on nature as interpreted by human reason

shows that the reasoning or the human capacity to reason is also part of natural law. Therefore, natural law is

not something static but dynamic by our reflections on it. Natural law does not necessarily give

straightforward and dogmatic answers to every situation, rather involves a measure of interpretation and can

be applied in a flexible way. It does not simply present a fixed ‘law’ dictated by nature. See Mel Thompson,

“Natural Law,” http://www.mel-thompson.co.uk/lecture%20notes/Natural%20Law.pdf [accessed November

15, 2012]. Natural law is also said to be an ethical system of beliefs inherent in human nature which is

discovered by reason. Modern analysis of natural law differs fundamentally from that of pre-modern concern.

Here the natural law is treated independently, and it becomes more natural public law. In the modern

development, natural law is replaced by ‘the rights of man’ that emphasises a shift from man’s duties to his

rights. Whereas pre-modern natural law was on the whole ‘conservative,’ modern natural law is essentially

‘revolutionary.’ See “Natural Law,” International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1968)

http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/natural_law.aspx#1-1G2:3045000862-full [accessed February 15,

2013]. 339 Liberty and freedom is often seen as an absence of opposition and used even interchangeable in the

literatures. I see them as a capacity to do or not do something according to the will of the individuals and

distinguish freedom as something connected to the individual and liberty as the common concern of the

society as a whole. According to Hannah Arendt liberation and freedom are not the same. She explains it in

her book ‘On Revolution’ that the liberation may be a condition of freedom, but no means leads automatically

to it. According to her, liberty can be enjoyed in private isolation and can exist even without democracy,

under a monarch or in a feudal hierarchy, though not under tyranny or despotism. The actual content of

freedom, by contrast, is participation in public affairs, or admission to the public realm. It requires a political

way of life, which means the constitution of a republic. See, Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York:

Viking, 1965), 22-25. 340 Philip A. Hamburger, “Natural Rights, Natural Law, and American Constitutions,” The Yale Law Journal

102 (1993): 919-920.


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some attribute(s) of the person rather than of the situation. They provide the framework within

which teleological moral considerations (if any) may operate and they include rights against

coercion.341

Based on the assumption that all human beings have value just because they are human, Werhane

writes that the moral rights derived from those qualities are uniquely characteristic of human beings.

These rights are so fundamental and inviolable that every human being possesses them despite his or

her particular social, political, historical, or even cultural situation.342 From this idea of moral rights,

she focuses on certain rights that have a concrete influence on every human life.

Article 1, 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted by the General

Assembly of the United Nations in 1966, declares that, “All peoples have the right of self-

determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue

their economic, social and cultural development.”343 In her discussion of moral rights, Werhane

distinguishes between political rights and economic rights: “[P]olitical rights are rights propounded

to establish a just political state. The right to life, the rights to freedom of speech, assembly,

movement and the press, the right to due process and a fair trial, the right to equal opportunity, and

the right to vote, are all political rights.”344 Rights bound up with survival, substance, labour and

ownership, she says, are classified as economic rights, though she admits the difficulty of

distinguishing between the two. Legitimate rights in the workplace also include rights to freedom

and privacy, to safe working conditions, to fair pay, to participation, and even to a meaningful job.345

Keeping these interests in mind, Werhane describes the important employer and employee political

rights, such as the rights to free expression, to due process, and to privacy in the workplace. The

distinction made by the author about political and economic rights is worthy of consideration,

because it concentrates on the right to privacy and insists on including it among the basic rights of

every individual in any working situation. Therefore, let us now consider the right to due process and

freedom that has a close relation with privacy in the workplace.

The phrase ‘due process’ is often understood to refer to any of society’s basic notions of legal

fairness: the legal requirement that the state must respect all legal rights owed to a person.346 It is a

means by which a person can appeal a decision, demand an explanation of that action, and be granted

an opportunity to argue against it.347 It balances the power of the law of the land and protects the

individual person from it. Due process generally refers to the regularity, fairness, equality and degree

of justice in both procedures and outcomes.348 According to Werhane, ‘due process’ is a means by

which one can appeal a decision to get an explanation of that action and/or a disinterested, objective,

or fair judgment of its rightness or wrongness.349 The right of corporations to due process and free

341 Christopher W. Morris, “What are the Natural Rights? A New Account,” Reason Papers 9 (1983): 62. 342 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 7. 343 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Part 1, Article 1,1 (adopted by the General Assembly

of the United Nations on 19 December 1966 and registered ex officio on 23 March 1976), United Nations -

Treaty Series, vol. 999, I-14668, 173. http://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%20999/volume-

999-I-14668-English.pdf. [accessed November 25, 2012]. 344 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 22. 345 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 22. 346 “Due Process,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition, Encyclopaedia Britannica.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/173057/due-process [accessed February 16, 2013]. 347 Patricia H. Werhane and Tara J. Radin, “Employment at Will and Due Process,” in Ethical Issues in

Business: A Philosophical Approach, eds. Thomas Donaldson and Patricia H. Werhane (New Jersey: Prentice

Hall, 1996), 365. 348Mark Stevens, “Due Process of law: Procedural and Substantive Issues,” Military Law Associates

http://faculty.ncwc.edu/mstevens/410/410lect06.htm [accessed November 25, 2012]. 349Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 110.


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speech is recognised traditionally by courts, even where the principle of employment at will350 for

employees is upheld. Hence, Werhane states that “every employee has a right to a public hearing,

peer evaluation, outside arbitration of some other open and mutually agreed upon grievance

procedure before being demoted, unwillingly transferred, or fired.”351 There are two types of due

process: procedural and substantive.352

Procedural due process is based on the concept of fundamental fairness. It means that a person

must be notified of the charges and proceedings against him or her and have an adequate

opportunity to respond. This is done through an indictment, which is a formal document detailing

the charges. Substantive due process, on the other hand, just as procedural due process, extends

beyond the context of criminal prosecutions.353

For example, the right to privacy, although not explicitly stated in the US Bill of Rights, is a

substantive right of the people that stems from the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.354

Thus the right to due process in the workplace is justified on both legal and moral grounds.

At this point, it is worth noting the role of the freedom of the employees, who act as the driving force

in any business. Along with building a democratic workplace that is result-oriented, the freedom of

the employee is the key to keeping employees engaged and improving their productivity. In the

workplace, as Werhane expresses, “[t]he right to freedom is expressed in the rights to free expression

and to bargain collectively and strike. And these rights are challenge in two circumstances: (1) when

there is a conflict between and employee and the employer and the employee feels she needs to ‘blow

the whistle’355 on the employer, and (2) when the rights to bargain collectively and to strike are

curtailed.”356 In workplace, this includes freedom from discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity,

350 The Industrial Revolution planted the seeds for the erosion of the employment-at-will doctrine. When

employees began forming unions, the collective bargaining agreements they subsequently negotiated with

employers frequently had provisions in them that required just cause for adverse employment actions, as well

as procedures for arbitrating employee grievances. The employment-at-will doctrine avows that, when an

employee does not have a written employment contract and the term of employment is of indefinite duration,

the employer can terminate the employee for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all. Traditionally and as

recently as the early 1900s, courts viewed the relationship between employer and employee as being on equal

footing in terms of bargaining power. Thus, the employment-at-will doctrine reflected the belief that people

should be free to enter into employment contracts of a specified duration, but that no obligations attached to

either employer or employee if a person was hired without such a contract. Because employees were able to

resign from positions they no longer cared to occupy, employers also were permitted to discharge employees

at their whim. Cf. Charles J. Muhl, “The Employment-at-Will Doctrine: Three Major Exceptions,” Monthly

Labour Review (2001): 3. 351 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 110. 352 Werhane and Radin, “Employment at Will and Due Process,” 365. 353 Grand Jury, “Double Jeopardy, Self-Incrimination, Due Process,” (1791). http://public.getlegal.com/legal-

info-center/fundamental-rights/5th-amendment;

http://resources.lawinfo.com/en/articles/constitutional/federal/what-is-due-process--basic-rights-and-

fund.html [accessed December 1, 2012]. 354 The 5th Amendment states, “nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice guarantees

due process from the federal government, stating no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property,

without due process of law.” The states are required to provide due process because the 14th Amendment

states, “Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fifth_amendment [accessed November 25, 2012]. 355 Whistle-blowing is generally considered from the viewpoint of professional morality. Whistle-blowing is

the act, for an employee (or former employee), of disclosing what he believes to be unethical or illegal

behaviour to higher management (internal whistle-blowing) or to an external authority or the public (external

whistle-blowing). Mathieu Bouville, “Whistle-Blowing and Morality,” Journal of Business Ethics 81 (2008):

579. For example, employees are more likely to blow the whistle on bad behaviour when they feel good about

their company and believe management has a strong commitment to ethical conduct. 356 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 113.


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sexual orientation, age, gender, social or economic backgrounds, and freedom from sexual

harassment, unfair working conditions and freedom of conscience and speech. According to Andrew

Crane and Dirk Matten, “though the right to freedom of conscience and speech is guaranteed by

governments, within the boundaries of the firm there might occur situations where the right of speech

might face certain restrictions such as confidential matters regarding to the firm’s R&D, marketing

and accounting plans.”357 According to Werhane, the right to freedom is related to the right to

privacy. Privacy protects personal freedom and autonomy by keeping personal and intimate

information in the hands of its rightful owner. It is in fact a necessary condition for autonomy.358 She

even states that “without privacy one’s personal freedom is, at best, restricted, since the source of

free choice, one’s autonomy, is not safeguarded.”359 Hence the right to privacy is another important

basic moral right closely related to freedom. Privacy is also a relational concept. Lukas D. Introna’s

definition identifies three distinct and exclusive categories, namely: (a) privacy as a denial of access

to the person or the personal realm; (b) privacy as control over personal information; and (c) privacy

as freedom from judgement or scrutiny by others.360

Discussing these points, Introna concludes that, “privacy is a relational concept. Where people

interact, the issue of privacy emerges. It is directed towards the personal domain [...]. To claim

privacy is to claim the right to limit access or control access to my personal or private domain.”361 In

a narrow sense, privacy relates exclusively to personal information and concerns the extent to which

others have access to this information. But a broader conception of privacy extends beyond the

informational domain and encompasses anonymity and restricted physical access.362 According to

Charles Fried, “we do not feel comfortable about asserting that privacy is intrinsically valuable, an

end in itself--privacy is always for or in relation to something or someone. On the other hand, to view

it as simply instrumental, as one way of getting other goods, seems unsatisfactory too.”363 In this

regard, one of the questions raised by Buchholz in his article ‘Privacy,’ concerns “[w]hat protections

are needed to preserve that core of the individual and protect that space that is necessary for human

beings to function, and what intrusions on this space are valid to promote other people’s legitimate

interests in knowing something about that individual and what he or she is doing.”364 This in fact

presents privacy as a relational concept. Hence decisions have to be made about where the zone of

privacy ends and what information other members of the public have a legitimate right to know in

order to protect their own interests.365 The concept of privacy, even within the context of workplace,

is a topic that certainly calls for further research.

3.4.2 Privacy as the Right to Control Access to one’s Personal Affairs

The increased use of information technology in the organizational workplace, as explored in the first

chapter, raises different concerns about the privacy rights of employees. One such concern is the

right to control access to personal affairs, as explained by Philip Brey.366 This is nothing but a

357 Andrew Crane and Dirk Matten, Business Ethics: Managing Corporate Citizenship and Sustainability in

the Age of Globalization, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 293. 358 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 118. 359 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 118. 360 Lukas D. Introna, “Privacy and Computer: Why We Need Privacy in the Information Society,”

Metaphilosophy 28 (1997): 261. 361 Introna, “Privacy and Computer,” 264. 362 Buchholz, “Privacy,” 504-505. 363 Fried, An Anatomy of Values, 137. 364 Buchholz, “Privacy,” 507. 365 Buchholz, “Privacy,” 507. 366 Philip Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” in The Ethics of Workplace Privacy, eds., Sven Ove

Hasson and Elin Palm (Brussels: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2005), 97-118. Personal affairs or ‘private affairs’ is


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persons’ right to protection from unwanted interference in their private affairs by a known or

unknown other and is illustrated in terms of access and control.367 In other words, privacy rights in

the workplace restrict access to private affairs. According to Brey, “there are various sorts of

intrusions into private affairs in which the violation of privacy seems to consist on the fact that these

affairs are disturbed or disrupted, rather than that information is acquired about them.”368 Privacy in

relation to access, therefore, involves both informational or cognitive access and physical access.

Cognitive access concerns information about private affairs, while physical access concerns a more

direct intrusion into people’s private affairs.369 This fact is already emphasized by Ferdinand

Schoeman, who write that that “[a] person has privacy to the extent that others have limited access

to information about him, limited access to the intimacies of his life, or limited access to his thoughts

or his body.”370 All these areas of human life feature the right to privacy, along with the right to

control and limit access to one’s personal affairs.

Along with the violation of cognitive and physical accesses, privacy issues concern the control of

one’s behaviour and living circumstances.371 Though not directly controlling a person’s thoughts and

behaviour, informed control exercises control by the acquisition of knowledge about the concerned

person and affects several aspects of that person’s life.372 Therefore, privacy intrusions in the

workplace, Brey proposes, are of different kinds: unauthorized cognitive and physical access, and

informed control.373 Brey further distinguishes five basic kinds of private affairs in relation to privacy

rights: (1) the human body; (2) personal spaces and objects; (3) bearers of personal information; (4)

individual conduct and (5) social conduct.374 In the following, we analyse these rights in relation to

workplace privacy. The concept of the human body, according to Brey, applies physically or

biologically to a specific person, and many biochemical properties are privacy-sensitive and may

even be conditioned by cultural, religious and gender factors.375 In the same way, one’s personal

space (one’s home) and the objects one owns, hires or appropriates may be privacy-sensitive.376 The

next factor, “bearers of personal information are media that contain information about aspects of a

person,” such as files, records, notes, electronic database etc., are often handled by third parties and

defined by Brey “as things connected to one’s private life or work that one considers to be private [... and]

include behaviours, information bearers, aspects of the body, private rooms, personal objects and social

events. Corresponding to these different types of private affairs are different types of intrusions on privacy.”

Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 100. 367 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 98. 368 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 98. 369 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 99. See also, Yuriko Haga, “Right to be Forgotten: A new

Privacy Right in the Era of Internet,” in New Technology, Big Data and the Law, eds. Marcelo Corrales, Mark

Fenwick and Nikolaus Forgó (Singapore: Springer, 2017), 97-126; Helen Nissenbaum, “Protecting Privacy

in an Information Age: The Problem of Privacy in Public” (first published in 1998), in Privacy, ed. Eric

Barendt (Oxon: Routledge, 2017), 177-215; David M. O’Brien, “Privacy and the Right of Access: Purposes

and Paradoxes of Information Control,” Administrative Law Review 30, no. 1 (1978): 45-92; and Omer Tene

and Jules Polonetsky, “Big Data for All: Privacy and User Control in the Age of Analytics,” Northwestern

Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property 11, no. 5 (2013): 239-273. 370 Ferdinand Schoeman, ed., Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1984), 3; Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 99. 371 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 99. 372 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 99. 373 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 100. Cf. Helen Nissenbaum, “Protecting Privacy in an

Information Age: The Problem of Privacy in Public” (first published in 1998), in Privacy, ed. Eric Barendt

(Oxon: Routledge, 2017), 177-215. 374 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 101. 375 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 102. Nissenbaum, “Protecting Privacy in an Information

Age: The Problem of Privacy in Public,” 177-215. 376 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 102.


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thus become privacy-sensitive.377 Finally, the conduct of an individual both alone and in public is

also said to be privacy-sensitive. The former, non-social behaviour, one performs when alone; the

latter, social behaviour, is one thatperforms with others.378 Based this categorization of private affairs,

Brey analyses workplace privacy and relates it to the unauthorised cognitive or physical access or

informed control. We explore this in the following.

Already in our first chapter, we have discussed medical and drug tests, body scans and other forms

of biometric authentication and electronic monitoring used in the organizational workplace. Brey

describes these practices as forms of unauthorized physical access by which workers’ bodies are

made the subject of scrutiny and assessment.379 Though generally electronic and camera surveillance

do not reveal one’s physical condition or other such information, they can violate one’s privacy. For

sometimes, it is “used in areas where employees (partially) undress or take care of their body [... or]

takes place in more (semi-) private environments, like offices, restrooms and leisure areas and has

been argued to invade privacy.”380 In the case of electronic surveillance, bodily privacy in the

workplace is most often a matter of cognitive access, while physical access is limited to medical/drug

tests and body searches. In the same way, workers do typically use a space within the workplace to

keep their personal belongings and like to have control over this space. Brey expresses the same,

stating that “workers tend to have privacy expectations concerning the access by others to personal

belongings brought to work, and often also have an expectation of privacy regarding their workspace,

e.g., the expectation that no one enters their office unannounced or goes through the contents of their

filing cabinets or computer hard drive without their consent.”381 Privacy issues here include

unauthorized access to personal space and objects through the unwanted physical presence of an

undesired other through electronic surveillance, whether by employing cameras, other devices, of

other kinds of workplace searches.

Breaches of privacy may also occur due to the number of different bearers of personal information.

As Brey explains, data about employees may be held in numerous media - employees themselves,

organizations, or agencies outside organization - and this data could be seen later by anyone else,

though initial access may be limited to a small number of people.382 Electronic databases also pose a

great threat to the privacy expectations of employees in this regard. Correspondingly, unauthorized

access to a person’s temporarily private space or private behaviour is related to the privacy of one’s

individual conduct in the workplace, which may be monitored using camera surveillance and PC and

internet devices that “theoretically [make] it possible to record and observe an employee’s each and

every movement.”383 Furthermore, the social conduct of the individual employee, which is more

work-related than personal behaviour, is also privacy-sensitive, as work-related social interactions in

the workplace may also concern a private character and involve confidentiality and trust.384 Finally,

377 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 103. 378 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 104. 379 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 105. Brey points out some of the leading workplace privacy

issues in relation to employee’s bodies, such as: medical tests and medical background checks including

psychological assessments, drug testing, genetic testing, ‘pat down’ searches that often require partial

undressing, and X-ray body scans that can see in some cases beneath a person’s clothing and undergarments.

The technologies for these tests can be used and is used with the consent of the person or secretly. Brey, “The

Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 105-106. 380 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 106. 381 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 107. 382 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 108. 383 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 109. 384 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 109-110.


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analysing workplace monitoring through the prism of fivefold private affairs, along with Brey, we

argue that privacy ought to be conceived as a right that limits access to one’s personal affairs.

3.4.3 Privacy as Prima Facie Right in the Workplace

Researchers generally agree that workplace privacy is not an absolute right but a prima facie right,

as it stands in relation to the employer’s right to acquire relevant information in the workplace and

to protect his or her property.385 No corporation or company can maintain growth without collecting

a certain amount of information about its employees. Quality control and security are also valid

concerns, as is the desire to predict human behaviour to a certain degree, for “companies believe that

the more detailed the profiles of their workers, the greater their ability to predict the probability of

their long-term success within the organization.”386 Moreover, while employee privacy concerns the

amount and kind of monitoring that takes place, it has been argued that not every instance of

accessing employee’s bodies or information is necessrily a matter of privacy.387 Anders J. Persson

and Sven Ove Hansson speak about a limited “sphere” or zone of individual privacy, and distinguish

between the private sphere and the sphere of privacy. As they write, “The private sphere is a zone in

which the individual should be allowed to make her own decisions, whereas the sphere of privacy is

a zone in which legitimate concerns may arise about others’ access to and information about her.”388

They also express concern that the boundaries of the sphere of privacy could be influenced by the

preferences of the individual employee.389

In the same vein, according to Tom McEwan, an individual’s right to privacy cannot be absolute, for

otherwise a democratic civil society would be impossible.390 The rights and interests of different

parties have to be balanced so that individual privacy is protected and balanced against the legitimate

needs of government and firms in a society that is increasingly dependent on technology.391 For

instance, there could be reasons for employers to use computer monitoring or block access to certain

websites in the workplace. It is a legitimate interest of employers to prevent employees from visiting

adult websites, spending time on social networks, blogging, tweeting and gaming during working

hours. Besides, web browsing may do damage to workplace computer systems due to viruses and

malware that could carry a high cost for the company. Some kind of regulation is therefore necessary

and generally accepted. This means that employee privacy must be protected unless a higher prima

facie right of this kind needs to be protected. Werhane also supports this view when she writes that

“strict confidentiality and employee privacy must sometimes be sacrificed for an employer’s business

freedom and to protect other employees and consumers.”392 The essence of a privacy right is not lost

in a situation where it is reasonable and justifiable to infringe on privacy to achieve a greater purpose.

For example, a majority of the population accepts that the media will publish intimate information

385 Richard A. Spinello, John Gallaugher, and Sandra Waddock, “Managing Workplace Privacy Responsibly,”

in Social, Ethical and Policy Implications of Information Technology, eds. Linda L. Brennan and Victoria E.

Johnson, 74-97 (Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing, 2004), 88. 386 Spinello, Gallaugher, and Waddock, “Managing Workplace Privacy Responsibly,” 89. 387 Anders J. Persson and Sven Ove Hansson, “Privacy at Work: Ethical Criteria,” Journal of Business Ethics

42, no. 1 (2003): 61. 388 Persson and Hansson, “Privacy at Work: Ethical Criteria,” 61. According to Persson and Hansson the notion

of private sphere is very much central to liberal political thought after John Stuart Mill and the concept of

sphere of privacy is not identical, but analogues to it. Persson and Hansson, “Privacy at Work: Ethical

Criteria,” 61. 389 Persson and Hansson, “Privacy at Work: Ethical Criteria,” 62. 390 McEwan, Managing Values and Beliefs in Organisations, 155. 391 McEwan, Managing Values and Beliefs in Organisations, 155. 392 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 119.


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about criminals, terrorists, etc. and even desire this, so that dangers will be blocked and the genuine

interest of the people will be safeguarded.

Moreover, as Werhane continues, “[i]nformation on employees or prospective employees is

necessary to protect the employer against possible employee actions that would incriminate the

business and sometimes to protect honest and innocent employees against wrongful

incrimination.”393 It is also argued that although employees have a right to privacy, in order to

safeguard the welfare of the company employers have a duty to monitor employees during working

hours and claim that this right of the company outweighs the individual rights of employees.394

Relying on existing privacy norms and laws, Brey proposes in this regard “that prima facie privacy

rights apply to a thing or activity in the workplace (e.g., the use of a toilet, an e-mail message, the

contents of a purse) when such things or activities are generally considered to be private outside the

workplace.”395 He comments on the privacy rights that in ordinary circumstances relate to a person,

such as

Aspects of the human body that are not visible in everyday life; the contents of purses, shopping

bags, desk drawers and lockers; rooms that function as a working or living environment for a

person or group of persons; solitary forms of behaviour like toilet visits and solitary work breaks;

conversations about personal or leisure subjects; person-to-person postal, voice mail or e-mail

messages; and files or records with personal information.396

Therefore, according to Brey, “prima facie privacy rights apply less obviously to activities that are

strongly work-related and that involve few personal elements [...]. This is because these activities

often do not include many privacy-sensitive aspects like personal information, intimacy or

confidentiality.”397 However, he agrees with Helen Nissenbaum, who has argued for justifiable

privacy expectations even in a public context, though in public places privacy expectations are

alarmingly diminished.398 Applying Nissenbaum’s acount of privacy in public areas to the workplace,

Brey argues that,

[s]olitary working activity and work-related interactions and conversations are not usually

privacy-sensitive to the extent that accidental or intentional intrusions on them by third parties

necessarily constitute serious violations of privacy, but sustained intense surveillance of such

activities, possibly even done in secret and possibly performed without accountability for the use

of the information thus collected, appears to run contrary to normal information-governing norms

and normal expectations of contextual integrity, and can therefore be identified as prima facie

violations of privacy.399

Such a violation of privacy, in his opinion, causes “diminished worker autonomy, the erosion of trust

between employee and employer, lower morale, and stress and health problems.”400 However, the

extent to which personal privacy can be compromised is a matter of continued debate, and employers

need to take into account employees’ basic human rights and privacy issues. Employers should be

393 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 120. 394 Lee and Kleiner, “Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace,” 73. 395 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 111. 396 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 111. 397 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 111. 398 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 111-112. See also, Helen Nissenbaum, “Protecting Privacy

in an Information Age: The Problem of Privacy in Public,” Law and Philosophy 17 (1998): 559-596. 399 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 112. 400 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 112-113.


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held accountable in each case to justify their reasons for monitoring and demonstrate that it is

motivated by a legitimate business interest and not mere curiosity or private interest.

Two arguments are often made to limit workplace privacy, as discussed in the previous chapters:

ensuring good performance by employees and preventing harm to the organization. Brey poses a

question: if limiting privacy is not necessary to ensure work performance, how can such limitation

on privacy be justified? If good performance is the result of the quality and quantity of work output

by each employee completing the responsibilities proper to his or her role without harming the

organization, then none of these employer’s interests require strong workplace surveillance.401

Therefore, close surveillance is not necessary to ensure such output, and the normal interaction

between employees and management should increase the fulfilment of role responsibilities. In the

same way, Brey also states that:

[W]hen there are clear indications that an employee is engaging in fraud or theft [...] invasions of

the employee’s privacy, including searches and e-mail and telephone monitoring, may be justified.

At issue, however, is whether the prevention of harm to the organization justifies routine searches,

routine e-mail and telephone monitoring, extensive camera surveillance, and so on. This would,

indeed, be hard to justify as it would run counter to the way security is balanced against privacy

and civil liberties in other sectors of society.402

Thus, Brey even denies that probable cause theory is applicable in this context, and thus is not a

justification for strong workplace surveillance. Researchers also opine that “since workers have to

spend much time in the workplace and their private lives cannot be separated completely, employers

should approve employees’ privacy rights partially during the working hours, [... and] to keep a good

relationship with employees, management has to balance employees’ privacy against the company’s

total benefit.”403 For though very often the employer sets and defines a reasonable expectation of

privacy, establishing further policies and procedures, “given the large number of legitimate business

interests that can be advanced through the use of electronic monitoring devices, it is often difficult

for an employee to establish a reasonable expectation of privacy.”404 Employees often feel that

electronic monitoring is unlawful conduct interfering with their private affairs, and therefore insist

that all such forms of monitoring be abolished.405 Therefore, there is a delicate balance indeed

between employers’ need to collect information and employees’ experience of intrusiveness. To

achieve and maintain this balance requires an acceptable management model, which we will explore

in the last part of this research.

3.5 CONCLUSION

This chapter has explored of the concept of privacy, including many facts about privacy, its various

conceptualizations, critiques, supporting arguments, and its relationship with electronic surveillance

in the organizational workplace. Concern for the protection of privacy, particularly in a workplace

context, is a crucial element in national and international movements for human rights and freedoms.

With regard to the workplace, we have discussed several privacy interests of individuals that are of

primary concern as fundamental rights, including the right to individual autonomy, the right to be let

alone, the right to a private life, the right to control information about oneself, the right to limit

accessibility, the right to minimize intrusiveness, the right to expect confidentiality, and others.

401 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 114. 402 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 115. 403 Lee and Kleiner, “Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace,” 76. 404 Kevin J. Conlon, “Privacy in the Workplace,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 72, no. 1 (1996): 290. 405 Lee and Kleiner, “Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace,” 75.


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Conversely, privacy is also a moral right, and as such there is a presumption against its

contravention.406 New technological developments have led to a diminution of privacy in the

workplace especially because of electronic surveillance. As a majority of scholars agree, workplace

surveillance invades workers’ privacy, erodes their sense of dignity and frustrates their efforts to do

high-quality work by promoting a single-minded emphasis on speed and purely quantitative

measurements.407 Extreme positions regarding electronic surveillance in the workplace, based on a

view that employees ought to be monitored each and every minute of the working day or even outside

of the workplace, often are willing to allow unjustified infringements of privacy. Though job

relevance and informed consent can justify some monitoring in the workplace, most employees do

not want their every sneeze registered and monitored, even for legitimate business reasons. The need

for privacy, as Solove would put it, is arises from the fact that we have social relationships and

concomitant norms of dignity and decorum.408 Thus, despite the technological and technical

possibilities of infringing on privacy, particularly in the case of electronic monitoring in the

workplace, the protection of privacy ought to be given a higher priority.

The protection of personal privacy and thus of the individuality of each employee will foreseeably

remain a significant workplace issue in this increasingly automated era of information technology.

For workplace surveillance, carried out for different purportedly benevolent purposes, has several

detrimental consequences and has the potential to hinder employee liberty and erode one’s

individuality and right to be oneself. In India, as economic activity has changed from manufacturing

to service, as analysed in the second chapter, the workplace is now very often an electronic office,

and thus the method of monitoring and controlling workers have dramatically changed. Visual

observation has given way to electronic monitoring devices and brought a kind of Big Brother into

the office in an obvious way. Thus “the use of bugging devices, employee monitoring computers and

video cameras has turned jobsites into detention centres where the rights of privacy are surrendered

at the door.”409 In brief, workplace privacy rights are a prerequisite for the safeguarding and

preservation of the individuality and dignity of employees in the workplace. The above discussed

employee privacy violations, due to the use of electronic surveillance devices in the workplace, can

also in many cases be linked directly or indirectly to justice violations. This fact leads our discussion

beyond of the concerns of an individual rights perspective to a more inclusive rights perspective,

encompassing issues related to employee sorting and discrimination. Besides, privacy advocates and

regulators today commonly address social problems that are far wider than individual privacy

invasions and raise broader questions about discrimination, social control and the dangers of the

creeping surveillance society. We analyse these questions in the following chapter.

406 Miller and Weckert, “Privacy, the Workplace and the Internet,” 263. 407 J. Lund, “Electronic Performance Monitoring: A Review of the Research Issues,” Applied Economics 23,

no. 1 (1992): 54. 408 Solove, Understanding Privacy, 148. 409 Conlon, “Privacy in the Workplace,” 296.

CHAPTER FOUR

POWER DISTANCE AND ‘SOCIAL SORTING’: EFFECTS OF SURVEILLANCE

BEYOND PRIVACY

4.0 INTRODUCTION

Do the privacy concerns of individual employees give us a complete picture of the significance of

contemporary electronic surveillance in the organizational workplace? The answer is no. The

implementation of extensive employee monitoring is unwaveringly linked to justice (social)

violations - discriminatory and control practices - that have several detrimental outcomes.1 David

Lyon, for instance, argues that the issue of surveillance impact goes beyond privacy invasions and

wonders “where the human self is located if fragments of personal data constantly circulate within

computer systems beyond any agent’s personal control.”2 For him, privacy interpretations of

surveillance “tend not to see surveillance as a social question or one that has to do with power.”3

Besides, he thinks, it expresses an intense contradiction: “privacy answers, consistently but

paradoxically, to personal fears of invasion, violation and disturbance [and] having successfully

prised each of us from our neighbours so that we could be individuated social actors, amenable to

classification and sorting and disembodied abstractions, privacy responses echo just such

individuation.”4 This chapter, therefore, within the scope of our study, applies this urge to go beyond

privacy to consider its social effects in a particular organizational workplace context, in dialogue

with David Lyon’s concept of social sorting.

The chapter is organized into five sections. Each critically and ethically discusses the social aspects

and effects of workplace surveillance. We begin with a descriptive analysis of the concept ‘social

sorting’ and thus the non-identified impacts of everyday surveillance on the individual. The second

section methodically and dialogically delves into the more concrete situation of workplace

surveillance and its sorting impacts, and further describes how a variety of social identities are being

constructed and reinforced. In the third section, power culture, a progeny of the technological

surveillance, will be analyzed as an instrument of managerial coercion and employee subordination

or subjectification. The fourth section, analysing the disconcerted stress, increased distrust, and the

ensuing deviances and resistance, focuses on the forgotten behavioural effects of employee sorting

and control. Along with and apart from these issues, what makes the Indian situation distinct is the

subject of the fifth section. While concerns about personal privacy invasion are a very important

aspect of workplace surveillance, this chapter aims to show that its social aspects are no less

significant.

1 Kaupins and Coco, “Perceptions of Internet-of-Things Surveillance by Human Resource Managers,” 54. 2 David Lyon, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1994), 18. Critiquing the critics of privacy advocates, who say that the concept of privacy is rooted in

liberal individuation, trying to protect the self and reinforcing individuation risking sociability, Colin J.

Bennett quotes David Lyon and argues that “the individualistic conceptions of privacy, however, hardly

constitute a paradigmatic understanding of the problem, and there have been a number of attempts to realign

the issue in ways that perhaps hold more contemporary relevance.” Colin J. Bennett, “In Defence of Privacy:

The Concept and the Regime,” Surveillance & Society 8, no. 4 (2011): 487. 3 David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001),

150. 4 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 150.

Power Distance and Social Sorting

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4.1 SOCIAL SORTING: A NEW MECHANISM BEYOND PRIVACY

In their analyses researchers have identified some new trends in surveillance: that it (1) “entails a

process of blurring boundaries,” (2) “has become simultaneously more visible and invisible,” (3) and

“involves the democratization.”5 That means that surveillance operates at different levels, sometimes

visible with a clear use of cameras and other times with a curious invisibility, using embedded

sensors. In this context, “new asymmetries have emerged, such that the surveillance of more powerful

groups is often used to further their privileged access to resources, while for more marginalized

groups surveillance can reinforce and exacerbate existing inequalities.”6 This discriminative

character, which will be analysed in detail in the following sections, is now subject to serious and

deep discussion as it relates to all life chances. Similarly, since new surveillance processes are largely

associated with electronic technologies, an adequate understanding of this practice requires, along

with an appreciation of privacy concerns, also newer concepts like social sorting and surveillance

assemblage.7 This prepares us to recognize new dimensions of its social and other particular

practices. The concept of “surveillance assemblage” is used to describe “the complex assortment of

machines and procedures for extracting, sorting and delivering information today.”8 Nevertheless,

within the scope of this study, we will focus on the concept of “social sorting” to explore the

detrimental effects of surveillance in the organizational workplace.

In a general sense, ‘sorting’ refers to arranging things of the same class or nature in a certain

sequence, categorizing them according to a grouping, or labeling things with similar properties or

characteristics. Social sorting, along these same lines, refers to the categorization or separation of

persons or groups into various segments based on various ethno-geographic, economic, occupational

and other details of social status. In fact, social sorting is of an ancient practice,9 as the differentiation

of society into distinct categories or strands is necessary for the sustenance and progression of social

life. Due to the modern desire to augment all practices using technology, it has also been central to

contemporary societies.10 It is facilitated today by networked computer database and is intended to

reduce risk and anticipate certain objectionable behaviours by using simulations. As Lyon rightly

states, this successive “categorization is not a neutral process because it constitutes an intervention

in the social world of those classified.”11 Lyon’s research on the concept of surveillance explores it

as a mechanism of social sorting12 and reminds us that while the significance of individual rights and

interests are not to be minimized, broader concerns of ethics and social justice must be envisaged in

its discussion and understanding. It is observed that for some, the ICT-mingled post-modern world

5 David Lyon, Kevin D. Haggerty and Kirstie Ball, “Introducing Surveillance Studies,” in Routledge Handbook

of Surveillance Studies, eds. Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty and David Lyon, 1-11 (Oxon: Routledge, 2014),

2-3. 6 Lyon, Haggerty and Ball, “Introducing Surveillance Studies,” 3. 7 Lyon, Haggerty and Ball, “Introducing Surveillance Studies,” 5. While social sorting highlights its

categorizing tendencies (amplifying social divisions) initiated by various statistical and software practices

enabled due to the implementation of current technological advancements, the surveillant assemblage looks

for “how discrete and varied surveillance systems tend to converge into flows of personal data, drawing

members of any and all populations into their purview.” Lyon, Haggerty and Ball, “Introducing Surveillance

Studies,” 5-6. 8 William Bogard, “Simulation and Post-Panopticism,” in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, eds.

Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty and David Lyon, 30-37 (Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 30. 9 David Lyon, “Facing the Future: Seeking Ethics for Everyday Surveillance,” Ethics and Information

Technology 3 (2001):172. 10 Lyon, “Facing the Future: Seeking Ethics for Everyday Surveillance,” 172. 11 Lyon, “Facing the Future: Seeking Ethics for Everyday Surveillance,” 173. 12 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 51-66; David Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting:

Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” in Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital

Discrimination, ed. David Lyon (London: Routledge, 2003), 13-30.


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makes surveillance-metaphors such as Big Brother or panopticon less relevant as technologies

increasingly creep into everyday life of individuals.

Though Lyon acknowledges the appropriateness and benefits of the kinds of surveillance

technocratic societies13 have come to take for granted, his primary concern is “the apparently

innocent embeddedness of surveillance in everyday life [that] does raise some important questions

for sociological analysis.”14 As he observes, this social sorting aims to “a world well beyond

nightmare fears of the Big Brother state [and…] is one in which surveillance is diffused throughout

society, whether at work or play, in worship or performance, whether web-surfing or purchasing.”15

For this concept of ‘social sorting’ highlights that contemporary surveillance sieves and sorts people

for assessment and judgement. People are sorted into multiple categories, “assigning worth or risk,

in ways that have real effects on their life-chances.”16 Roy Coleman later adds that, “[i]n its many

guises, surveillance aims to place people into categories underpinned by notions of ‘worth’ or ‘risk’.

Surveillance therefore has a relational link to assigning social status, with the consequences of

promoting the life chances of some while curtailing those of others.”17 According to Lyon

“categorization is endemic and vital to human life, especially to social life [… and] received a major

boost from modernity.”18 In his view, modernity has, in fact, given populations their institutional

and/or organizational identities, and this has strongly determines their life-chances.

Likewise, Lyon observes, “[w]hile discourses of privacy have become crucial to legislative and

political efforts to deal with what is perceived to be the darker face of surveillance they frequently

fail to reveal the extent to which surveillance is a site of larger social contests. [...] Surveillance

practices and technologies are becoming a key means of marking and reinforcing social divisions

[...].”19 Surveillance is here viewed as a matter of social justice, not only of personal privacy.

Referring to Oscar Gandy’s work on the “panoptic sort,” Lyon illustrates how database marketing

companies can use wide-scale consumer surveillance to cream off certain groups and cut off others,

resulting in discriminatory practices.20 Lyon argues that this type of discriminative practices in the

consumer realm can be experienced in other areas of human life as well. The concept of surveillance

as social sorting focuses “on the social and economic categories and the computer codes by which

personal data is organized with a view to influencing and managing people and populations.”21 The

stored data similarly creates a different profile of people and channels the life-choices and life-

chances of their everyday lives. This can lead to social stratification. Though certain kinds of personal

and social categorization are an everyday part of human life, the automation of this process can

13 The concept ‘technocratic society’ is used here to refer any society governed using more technical expertise,

where the technical superiority facilitates the influence of one this society over the other. 14 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 18. 15 David Lyon, “Introduction: Surveillance as Sorting,” in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, eds.

Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty and David Lyon (London: Routledge, 2014), 119. 16 David Lyon, “Introduction,” in Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination,

ed., David Lyon (London: Routledge, 2003), 1. 17 Roy Coleman, “Surveillance and Social Ordering,” in Criminal Justice: Local and Global, eds. Deborah

Drake, John Muncie and Louse Westmarland (Cullompton: Willan, 2010), 150. 18 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 21. 19 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 143. 20 Lyon, “Introduction,” 1. The panoptic sort is said to be a complex discriminatory technology, that, according

to Oscar H. Gandy Jr., “[i]t is panoptic in that it considers all information about individual status and

behaviour to be potentially useful in the production of intelligence about a person’s economic value [and] it

is a discriminatory technology because it is used to sort people into categories based upon these estimates.”

Oscar H. Gandy Jr., “Coming to Terms with the Panoptic Sort,” in Computers Surveillance, and Privacy, eds.

David Lyon and Elia Zureik, pp. 132-155 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133. Cf.

Kaupins and Coco, “Perceptions of Internet-of-Things Surveillance by Human Resource Managers,” 54. 21 Lyon, “Introduction,” 2.


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become detrimental.22 Here the use of technology itself becomes an engine of exclusion and

increased inequality, as we explore in the following segments.

4.1.1 Regrettable Reductionism: Human Beings as “Coded” Data Subjects

Social sorting is viewed also as a mechanism of structuring a society to enable identification and as

means of maintaining order. Today, the question of “who you are” is basic to surveillance and is

answered in multiple ways due to the advancement of sophisticated digitalized technology: with

“passports, identity cards and social security numbers,” etc.23 Lyon, in line with Richard Jenkins,

writes that “surveillance, that is a means to an end, one-sided, increasingly impersonal, intrusive and

yet distant, routine and banal, is what today frames identification. Thus, categorization may be on its

way to achieving dominance in identification.”24 New electronic infrastructures and subsequent

sophisticated datamining techniques raise the issue of identification and social sorting by “increasing

concern with recording, retrieving, and analysing personal data to manage risks effectively” and “do

so by sorting population and individuals into categories of risk so that they can be treated

accordingly.”25 The risk formulated here is that the lives of ordinary people are sorted for better or

for worse as their data are scrutinized and they, human beings, are no longer “bodies” but rather mere

“matter” to be displayed.

The rapid advancement in ICTs makes it possible to do things at a distance. Modern surveillance, in

this regard, has raised the issue of “disappearing bodies”26 in societal human interactions and thus

reconfigures the way social relationships are generated and fostered.27 The idea of disappearing

bodies shows “how surveillance systems have arisen in an attempt to compensate for the

disembodiment of many social relationships. And it reminds us that contemporary surveillance

practices tend overwhelmingly to base themselves on abstractions rather than on embodied

persons.”28 Human persons thus become data subjects as social power of information is reinforced

in the modern context and this data is on the move now. Lyon observes that “[d]ata doubles – various

concatenation of personal data that, like it or not, represent “you” within the bureaucracy of the

network – now start to flow as electrical impulses, and are vulnerable to alteration, addition, merging,

and loss as they travel.”29 Any assessment or judgement about a person is made based on coded

criteria through surveillance practices. It might place one person in an affluential category and

another as a victim of Big City Stress or a part of the impoverished or impecunious class. One might

have health risks and hazards, while another has good prospects and profiles.30 Lyon rightly adds,

quoting Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, that “values, opinions, and rhetoric are frozen

22 David Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” in Surveillance as Social

Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination, ed., David Lyon (London: Routledge, 2003), 13. 23 Lyon, “Introduction: Surveillance as Sorting,” 120. 24 Lyon, “Introduction: Surveillance as Sorting,” 120. 25 David Lyon, “Surveillance, Security and Social Sorting: Emerging Research Priorities,” International

Criminal Justice Review 17, no. 3 (2007): 163. 26 The presence of the other was a meeting point, at one point of time, to conduct all human daily affairs in the

society. There fostered the face to face interaction and thus the decision-making process and identity

authentication. Beside face to face interaction, today, practices of relying “on tokens of trust (e.g., PIN

numbers and passwords) and electronically mediated networks to accomplish daily tasks that do not involve

other human being at the point of contact” are common. Sean P. Hier and Josh Greenberg, “Surveillance, the

Nation-State and Social Control,” in The Surveillance Studies Reader, eds. Sean P. Hier and Josh Greenberg,

11-17 (Berkshire, England: McGraw-Hill, 2007), 11. 27 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 15-27. 28 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 26. 29 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 22. 30 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 23.


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into codes.”31 This shows the intensity and gravity of surveillance that reduces the human person to

a collection of coded data. This phenomenon can be called a regrettable.

A person is thus reduced to a series of various codes, and these coded bodies provide information

without any physical nearness. In this way often one is included into or excluded from various public

platforms. What happens here we can call reductionism, and specifically an ontological reductionism

by means of representation, whereby the physical and the natural are symbolized, represented or

embodied through the media of abstract data and codes. According to Lyon, unlike modern

surveillance that distinguishes one identifiable individual subject from others and thus furthers the

process of individuation, postmodern surveillance looks for a multiplication of identities by a process

of splitting and reconnecting with current data analysis.32 Here, electronic technologies being the

key, “[v]irtual replace actual processes and electronic signs and images of objects and events replace

their real counterparts.”33 Hence, the actual and the real are represented by something else that could

well be misread or manipulated due to the lack of immediate presence. Referring to the idea of

simulation as a “reproduction of the real by means of codes and models,” Lyon writes that,

“[s]imulation tries to achieve a reality effect while simultaneously concealing the absence of the real.

The real becomes redundant as a referential ground for the image – hence, hyper-reality. The

hyperreal, then, is the code (the ‘technologies of signalization’) that precedes that ‘real’ and brings

it into being. […] This is how the code comes to prominence as the mode of domination and

control.”34 Now there is no real, there is only representation, and thus we see an ‘end of the social.’

This claim calls for verification and further analysis.

Another danger arising from seeing persons as mere bodies with information to be tracked or

displayed is that “when information about the body in part constitutes what we understand as the

body, telling the difference between the one and the other becomes increasingly hard.”35 In the same

way, reflecting on contemporary practices of surveillance with a critical and humanistic

understanding reveals that our highly mobile bodies are, today, “traced and tracked unceasingly by

computer codes with which simultaneously we interact both to display our data and to determine

directions we take in response to the process.”36 Lyon demonstrates that, “codes usually processed

by computers, sort out transactions, interactions, visits, calls, and other activities; they are the

invisible doors that permit access to or exclude from participation in a multitude of events,

experiences, and processes.”37 These types of classification also influence and manage the life

chances of people. Lyon goes on to illustrate, in this regard, that “[i]n all its ambiguity and

31 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 23. Cf. Geoffrey C. Bowker

and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1999), 135. 32 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 115-116. 33 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 116. 34 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 116. See, Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York:

Semiotext(e), 1983), 82-84. William Bogard explains the simulation of surveillance as “a control strategy that

informs most of the latest diagnostic and actuarial technologies we associate with the information age –

computer profiling and matching, expert decision-systems and cybernetic intelligence, electronic polling,

genetic mapping and recombinant procedure, coding practices of all sort, virtual reality.” William Bogard,

“Surveillance, Its Simulation, and Hypercontrol in Virtual Systems,” in The Surveillance Studies Reader, eds.

Sean P. Hier and Josh Greenberg, pp. 95-103 (Berkshire, England: McGraw-Hill, 2007), 96. This

surveillance, as Bogard continues, is simulated by preceding and redoubling the means of observation through

available advanced technologies. For instance, computer profiling is a surveillance before an actual

surveillance – a technology of “observation before the fact” as a kind of prior ordering for an actual act.

Bogard, “Surveillance, Its Simulation, and Hypercontrol in Virtual Systems,” 96. 35 Lyon, “Introduction: Surveillance as Sorting,” 121. 36 Lyon, “Introduction: Surveillance as Sorting,” 119. 37 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 13.


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complexity, surveillance is rationalized and automated through searchable databases and statistical

techniques and the resulting classifications directly and indirectly affect people’s choices and life-

chances.”38 This searchable database and its adverse effects are discussed in the following.

4.1.2 Searchable Databases and Digital Redlining

A database is an organized or structured collection of information or related data stored in a common

file or collection of files, often created by commercial vendors.39 It is “an integrated collection of

data, usually so large that it has to be stored on secondary storage devices such as disks or tapes.”40

One of the key trends of today’s surveillance, according to Lyon, is the use of searchable databases

to process personal data for many purposes. Similarly, Elia Zureik quotes Robert Castle, who says

that “surveillance is practiced without any contact or any immediate representation of the subjects

under scrutiny.”41 From this, Zureik concludes that, “as a matter of fact, the subject that is exposed

to the ‘observable gaze’ dissolve and is reconstituted in the abstract through categorization.”42 For

instance, access to “richer sources of information about individuals and populations is believed to be

the best way to check and monitor behaviour, to influence persons and populations, and to anticipate

and pre-empt risks.”43 Explaining this further, Lyon illustrates an example from current marketing

practices, namely that marketers often sift and sort populations according to their spending patterns

– how they act as consumers - then treat different clusters accordingly.

For Lyon, “groups likely to be valuable to marketers get special attention, special deals, and efficient

after-sales service, while others, not among the creamed-off categories, must make do with less

information and inferior service.”44 This process of classifying customers according to their relative

38 Lyon, “Introduction: Surveillance as Sorting,” 119. 39 As a structured collection of records, databases add, remove, update records and can retrieve data that match

certain criteria and can use manipulative or progressive manner. Bhavesh Pandya, Safa Hamdare and Asim

Kumar Sen, Database Management System (Noida, New Delhi: Vikas, 2015), 2. For a fuller understanding,

it is right to quote that “databases play a critical role in almost all areas where computers are used, including

business, electronic commerce, engineering, medicine, genetics, law, education, and library science. [...] A

database represents some aspect of the real world, sometimes called the miniworld or the universe of discourse

(UoD). Changes to the miniworld are reflected in the database. A database is a logically coherent collection

of data with some inherent meaning [... and] is designed, built, and populated with data for a specific purpose.

It has an intended group of users and some preconceived applications in which these users are interested.”

Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe, Fundamentals of Database Systems, 6th ed. (Boston: Addison-

Wesley, 2011), 4. 40 Raghu Ramakrishnan and Johannes Gehrke, Database Management Systems Solutions Manual, 3rd ed. (New

York: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 1. See also, Thomas Connolly and Carolyn Begg, Database Systems: A Practical

Approach to Design, Implementation, and Management, 4th ed. (Harlow: Addison Wesley, 2005), 15. 41 Robert Castle, “From Dangerousness to Risk,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with two

Lectures by and Interview with Michel Foucault, eds. G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1991), 288. 42 Elia Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” in Surveillance as Social Sorting:

Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination, ed., David Lyon (London: Routledge, 2003), 39. 43 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 14. 44 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 14.


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worth is known as “digital redlining”45 or “weblining”46 and continues as long as acting through these

indicators of worth remains profitable.47 In general, “redlining is a spatially discriminatory practice

among retailers, of not serving certain areas, based on their ethnic-minority composition, rather than

economic criteria, such as the potential profitability of operating in those areas.”48 The term “digital

redlining” is derived from this practice of redlining or in other words drawing a “red line” around

disadvantaged populations, refusing or restricting their access to different modes of life chances. A

morphed version of redlining in the digital age can be called weblining or internet redlining, and is

more related to retail redlining, which takes place not in physical space but in cyberspace.49

In the same way, “redlining refers to physical spaces and neighbourhoods but discrimination can

occur in virtual spaces like Web sites where people are profiled and sorted into groups that are

categorized for differential pricing and services.”50 Weblining is moreover a process or practice of

denying or restricting certain opportunities to people due to various observations about their digital

selves.51 It thus involves an obvious process of grading actual or virtual customers and projects by

means of an illegitimate dissemination of personal information and subsequent engagement in

redlining, which unfairly discriminates against certain persons or groups. For instance, “[w]eblining

refers to the exclusion of classes of consumers from the marketplace based on characteristics of

groups not individuals […]. People are not treated as individuals and therefore unjust and unfair

practices may prevail.”52 The risk of database discrimination is, thus, “the possibility of better – or

worse – targeting of those customers who might be profitable and either the neglect or the hyper-

exploitation of the less profitable.”53 Digital redlining or digital weblining, therefore, is an alleged,

purposively discriminative, practice that occurs side-by-side with monitoring populations in any

form by means of digital and electronic media. It purportedly occurs when organizations and

institutions bypass poor populations or neighbourhoods due to the data collected through employing

various monitoring systems. The problem is also due to the lack of concern and interest shown to the

representation of minorities.

4.1.3 The Regime of Regulating Mobilities and Virtual Existence

As we live today in an increasingly mobile world with much increased physical and virtual mobility,

surveillance practices have also evolved in a parallel way and been implemented by various means

45 Redlining is generally perceived as an unethical practice where financial institutions and organizations are

extremely reserved and make it difficult or in some cases impossible for residents of poor inner-city

populations and neighbourhoods to carry certain financial transactions such as borrowing money or gain

access to other financial services because of a history of high default rates. Here the rejection or reservation

does not take the individual's qualifications and creditworthiness into account. Denver D’Rozario and Jerome

D. Williams, “Retail Redlining: Definition, Theory, Typology, and Measurement,” Journal of

Macromarketing 25, no. 2 (2005): 175. People in these areas become economically and socially more

vulnerable. 46 Weblining is generally viewed as “the tracking of information as people work their way through the web.”

Jennifer Ellis, “Internet Privacy: What is Weblining and Does it Really Exist?” Quara, November 6, 2013.

https://www.quora.com/Internet-Privacy-What-is-weblining-and-does-it-really-exist [accessed January 10,

2017]. Weblining is an abusive online conduct that have emerged due to the proliferation of the internet in

our lives. Andra Gumbus and Patricia Meglich, “Abusive Online Conduct: Discrimination and Harassment

in Cyberspace,” Journal of Management Policy and Practice 14, no. 5 (2013): 47-49. 47 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 14. 48 D’Rozario and Williams, “Retail Redlining: Definition, Theory, Typology, and Measurement,” 175. 49 D’Rozario and Williams, “Retail Redlining: Definition, Theory, Typology, and Measurement,” 186. 50 Gumbus and Meglich, “Abusive Online Conduct: Discrimination and Harassment in Cyberspace,” 48 51 Gumbus and Meglich, “Abusive Online Conduct: Discrimination and Harassment in Cyberspace,” 48. 52 Gumbus and Meglich, “Abusive Online Conduct: Discrimination and Harassment in Cyberspace,” 48-49. 53 Perri 6 and Ben Jupp, Divided by Information? The 'Digital Divide' that Really Matters and the Implications

of the New Meritocracy (London: Demos, 2001), 47.


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and techniques in everyday life. It is observed that “in a rapidly moving mobile world, our modes of

social integration are increasingly abstract and surveillance practices try to keep up with our

movements. They locate us, target us, and attempt to coordinate our activities.”54 Moreover, as Lyon

continues, “nomadic bodies and digital personae are the subjects of contemporary computer-based

surveillance, and are categories altogether more slippery and malleable than those utilized in previous

surveillance regimes.”55 Lyon mentions how the use of CCTV in Europe and Asia to control crime

and maintain social order is applicable in different situations. According to him,

[i]n most cases, searchable databases are not yet used in conjunction with CCTV, though the aim

of creating categories of suspicion within which to situate unusual or deviant behaviours is firmly

present. In some cases, however, searchable databases are already in use in public and private

situations, to try to connect facial images of persons in the sight of the cameras with others that

have been digitally stored.56

Today, apart from fixed the CCTV operations of varied sites of interest, moving targets have also

been subjected to monitoring due to technological advancements such as the use of the Global

Positioning System (GPS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which has been already

discussed in the first chapter. Also, today, wireless telephony is a powerful means of mobile

surveillance. Spatio-temporal barriers disappear and become less problematic as concerns of distance

and time vanish and mobilities are regulated. Here we can see a new virtual existence, beyond the

presence of embodied persons. It is no longer the case that a person’s image and his or her embodied

relationships are co-present with each other.57 These digital personae occupy no space and pertain

only to virtual space or virtual existence. Lyon, in this regard, rightly points out that,

Abstract data and images stand in for the live population of many exchanges and communications

today. Some of those abstract data and images are deliberately intercepted or captured in order to

keep track of the now invisible persons who are nonetheless in an immense web of connections.

Thus, the disappearing body is made to reappear for management and administrative purposes by

more or less the same technologies that helped it to vanish in the first place.58

Technologies that enable mobility simultaneously enable surveillance, and in turn this regulates

mobilities. The creeping ability or capacity of the “expandable mutability”59 of surveillance

technologies contributes to these restrictions. Surveillance, as we have seen in the first chapter, is

indeed intensified in a world of remote relations, unlike the direct contact of earlier times. For Lyon,

many connections and relations today “do not directly involve co-present embodied persons, and

[…] no longer see the face of those with whom we are “in contact” or with whom we engage in

exchange.”60 This type of virtual existence continues and has further implications if people are

represented only by data abstracted from them with no reference to themselves as a living, embodied

person. Likewise, the remaining problem, as Lyon rightly notes, is that the data created as coded

categories are not innocent or harmless. For as Lyon observes, as data circulate, “they serve to open

and close doors of opportunity and access […and] affect eligibilities for credit or state benefits and

54 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 27. 55 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 35. 56 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 17. 57 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 18. 58 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 18. 59 The term “expandable mutability” is coined by Norris and Armstrong to refer to “the capacity of surveillance

cameras, installed for one purpose, ending up carrying out other tasks also.” Andrew McStay, The Mood of

Information: A Critique of Online Behavioural Advertising (New York: Continuum, 2011), 76. Cf. Clive

Norris and Gary Armstrong, The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of Cctv (London: Berg, 1999), 58. 60 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 27.


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they bestow credentials or generate suspicion.”61 The relation between the abstracted data and the

embodied social persons, therefore, must be at the forefront of this discussion.

Given that the new organizational workplace is one of the most prominent surveillance-implemented

arenas today, where electronic-digitalized technologies are frequently and systematically employed,

the above discussed theme of social sorting can be usefully applied and analysed in that context.

Systems of surveillance track employees’ positions in time and space and distinguish employees who

are ‘working hard’ from those who are ‘not pulling their weight,’ creating a stratification.62 Here,

individuals may come to be seen differently by themselves and by others, which may in turn lead to

physical and mental illness and other health hazards, such as “increased boredom, high tension,

extreme anxiety, depression, anger severe fatigue and musculoskeletal problems.”63 Researchers

continuesly demonstrate the depression and precarity emerging in environments of overly invasive

surveillance.64 Bahaudin G. Mujtaba stresses this adverse aspect of monitoring very well, claiming

that “this surveillance can inject an air of suspicion and hostility into the workplace […], can be

counterproductive as it can cause resentment in employees at being treated like children [… and] the

culture can become one of a mistrust and hostile work environment when employees do not see the

justification of monitoring.”65 Apart from the unilateral focus on individual rights by scholars who

overlook the social impact of workplace surveillance, the following section analyses the fundamental

social challenges and implications of surveillance, making particular reference to “social sorting” as

a way in which surveillance goes has significance beyond individual privacy concerns in the

workplace.

4.2 WORKPLACE SURVEILLANCE AND EMPLOYEE SORTING

In all societies with modern informational infrastructures, surveillance happens and is “seen in terms

of an intensified attention to personal data and a desire to influence everyday life.”66 Though earlier

nation-wide rational surveillance was installed to “instil rational discipline and to create order,”

contemporary rational surveillance practices go beyond this and “slips into simulation mode,”67 thus

having effects in all life chances. The surveillance gaze is more enhanced and affected in the

organizational workplace and encompasses all spheres of work-life beyond any limits of the here and

now. Deskilling and the disciplining of labour were the source of workplace surveillance in the early

twentieth century, when the fragmentation of tasks, regimentation of work and subsequent

subordination of labour to capital and profit became the prime motive.68 In relation to the context of

the call centre, Kirstie Ball calls electronic surveillance “the technological whip of the electronic

age,” because of its strong implication that essentially of control.69 Likewise, the power of this

surveillance in the workplace and its subsequent effect of “panopticon is not just embodied in its

61 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 27. 62 Graham Sewell and James R. Barker, “Coercion versus Care: Using Irony to Make Sense of Organizational

Surveillance,” The Academy of Management Review 31, no. 4 (2006): 934-961. 63 Kirsten Martin and R. Edward Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” Journal of Business

Ethics 43, no. 4 (2003): 354. 64 Phoebe Moore and Lukasz Piwek, “Regulating Wellbeing in the Brave New Quantified Workplace,”

Employee Relations 39, no. 3 (2017): 311; Phoebe Moore and Andrew Robinson, “The Quantified Self: What

Counts in the Neoliberal Workplace,” New Media and Society 18, no.1 (2016): 2774-2792. 65 Bahaudin G. Mujtaba, “Ethical Implications of Employee Monitoring: What Leaders Should

Consider,” Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship 8, no.3 (2003): 37. 66 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 35. 67 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 35. 68 Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” 31. 69 Kirstie Ball, “Categorizing the Workers: Electronic Surveillance and Social Ordering in the Call Center,” in

Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination, ed. David Lyon (London:

Routledge, 2003), 203.


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ability to subject all to a surveillance gaze, but in the ability to link observation to a named subject

through an individualized record, which can then be used for the purposes of identification,

bureaucratic codification, and eventual classification.”70 This type of ensuing categorization through

profiling has adverse effects on employees, as it tends to give rise to categorical suspicion.

The problem of ethnic or other forms of profiling and categorical suspicion also reminds us of the

implied issue of making valid judgements about people based on their appearances. For “appearance

is readily manipulated, may legitimately change from one situation to another, and without adequate

knowledge of cultural, local and context may be enigmatic or unreadable.”71 The possibility of

deceiving the watched is thus foreseen, and this also, on the contrary, presupposes an adequate prior

ability to interpret the same with precision. This prior knowledge, however, is problematic as it is

“[…] incomplete and is also likely to be bundled up with stereotypes of others (and Others) that are,

at best, superficial and partial and, at worst, wrong.”72 Richard Jenkins sums up the challenges

encompassed within the watcher’s capacity to interpret the collected and stored data, stating that

they:

[…] (a) lack one of the most important sources of information that we routinely use to identify

people, i.e. language and specifically, conversational inquiry; (b) rely on their individual and

cultural prior knowledge, with all of its inadequacies, not least its stereotypical nature, to interpret

appearances; and (c) also depend on a different kind of prior knowledge, intelligence, with all of

its shortcomings. As a result, their capacity to know “who’s who,” and consequently “what’s

what” is likely to be problematic, at best.73

In this context, Jenkins argues, there seems to be a problem for both the watched and the watchers

concerning the validity of data stored and its interpretation. This functions to render employees

reputationally vulnerable through the theft of their identities (phishing). Similarly, the epistemic

effects of forms of surveillance that aim to classify and differentiate human conduct have important

ramifications for employees who are “subjected to numerous forms of scrutiny and measurement that

render them […] – ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ ‘compliant’ or ‘recalcitrant,’ ‘effective’ or ‘non-effective,’ etc.”74

In what follows, we consier the highly discriminative effects of organizational surveillance.

4.2.1 Statistical Surveillance and Discrimination

Statistical surveillance functions in various areas of human life, such as in business institutions.

According to Oscar H. Gandy, it signifies “the role of data and statistical analysis in the identification,

classification and representation of social reality […].”75 It places individual employees “within a

dynamic multidimensional matrix of identities” in a work context and often “reflects the interests of

the institutional actors seeking to influence how individuals understand and respond to the options

set before them.”76 It also determines and increasingly assists in the process of modern surveillance

70 Clive Norris, “From Personal to Digital: CCTV, the Panopticon, and the Technological Mediation of

Suspicion and Social Control,” in Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination,

ed. David Lyon (London: Routledge, 2003), 256. 71 Richard Jenkins, “Identity, Surveillance and Modernity,” in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies,

eds. Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty and David Lyon, 159-166 (Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 163. 72 Jenkins, “Identity, Surveillance and Modernity,” 163-164. 73 Jenkins, “Identity, Surveillance and Modernity,” 164. 74 Graham Sewell, “Organization, Employees and Surveillance,” in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance

Studies, eds. Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty and David Lyon, 303-312 (Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 304. 75 Oscar H. Gandy, Jr, “Statistical Surveillance: Remote Sensing in the Digital Age,” in Routledge Handbook

of Surveillance Studies, eds. Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty and David Lyon, 125-132 (Oxon: Routledge,

2014), 125. 76 Gandy, “Statistical Surveillance: Remote Sensing in the Digital Age,” 125.


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and identification systems “to link names and other unique identifiers to markers or traces from

individuals who would otherwise be anonymous […].”77 It is important to note here that this

identification is part of a statistical determination and is done largely by institutional others. Thus it

is mainly informational and alters the life chances of individuals. Besides, through statistical data

analysis, employees are made part of various analytically determined groups. This is done by a

simultaneous maximization of both similarities and differences.78 This means that, in a workplace,

the personal or autonomous choices of employees do not possess any assigning power, as one’s

membership in a group is statistically determined.

It has been noted that “surveillance, the systematic watching of people – a means to an end, one-

sided, increasingly impersonal, intrusive and yet distant, routine and banal – has come to frame

individual and collective identification in the modern human world.”79 This again reminds one of the

reductionist arguments raised against surveillance and may lead one to perceive this reductionism as

a form of determinism. However, within the contexts of the organizational workplace, an evaluative

assessment by a powerful actor basically demands a choice between individual employees and

groups, and thus discrimination happens due to the subject’s inability to intervene in the process. The

concept of statistical discrimination is thus used “to characterize a decision to exclude or deny

opportunity to an individual on the basis of the attributes of the group to which he or she is assumed

to belong.”80 Gandy uses the term “segmentation” to designate the activity by which statistical

discrimination is accomplished. According to him, segmentation refers to “the classification of the

objects of analysis into distinct categories on the basis of their relative status as objects of interest,

as well on the basis of their statistically determined linkages or associations with costs, benefits and

risks.”81 Employees are often granted or denied various opportunities based on this statistical data.

To process this action, a powerful actor targets the subjects through specialized communications and

requires unregulated assess to information about the status and activities of employees in different

contexts. The ethical issues implied here are many, ranging from reductionism to the forgetfulness

of human uniqueness and the need for a principled code of behaviour.

In addition to this, one of the main characteristics of statistical surveillance is its remoteness in

distance, time and manner, in which respect it differs from direct or indirect visual or auditory

surveillance.82 Here the transaction-generated information is combined with other digitally encoded

information and serves to regulate interactions and other activities in the workplace. In this

surveillance, which is “panoptic in the sense of its inclusive ‘field of view,’ very little […] sensing

will take place under the active control of human agents.”83 This will produce adverse effects, such

as increasing the development of profiling. Moreover, statistical surveillance, through its statistical

packages or algorithms, including “rule engines,” “expert systems” or data mining tools, transforms

mountains of data into “statements” or “graphic representations.” It makes predictions about

employee behaviours, but these could be “in error because of irregularities in the systems and

routines that capture information about individuals [… and] because of biases inherent in the

77 Gandy, “Statistical Surveillance: Remote Sensing in the Digital Age,” 126. 78 Gandy, “Statistical Surveillance: Remote Sensing in the Digital Age,” 126. 79 Jenkins, “Identity, Surveillance and Modernity,” 165. See also, Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance, 2-9. 80 Gandy, “Statistical Surveillance: Remote Sensing in the Digital Age,” 126. The act of discrimination

associated with workplace surveillance is illustrated by various researchers like: Jenkins, “Identity,

Surveillance and Modernity.” 159-166: Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An overview,” 87-106; Ball, Kirstie

S. and Stephen T. Margulis. “Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in Call Centres,” 113-126; Lyon,

“Surveillance, Security and Social Sorting,” 161-170. 81 Gandy, “Statistical Surveillance: Remote Sensing in the Digital Age,” 127. 82 Gandy, “Statistical Surveillance: Remote Sensing in the Digital Age,” 127. 83 Gandy, “Statistical Surveillance: Remote Sensing in the Digital Age,” 127.


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selection of measures.”84 The adverse effect of statistical surveillance also involves the differential

treatment of employees, to the extent that they are categorically placed into disfavoured groups.

Human subjectivity itself becomes a matter of a reductionist plot in this perceived disparity, and one

forgets to emphasise the whole together with its constituent parts. This also leads to a shift in the

focus of surveillance from work (performance, in terms of productivity) to persons (the active agent

himself or herself) and also shifts the discussion from a focus on the embodied person to a focus on

disembodied information about a person. This will be elucidated in the following section.

4.2.2 From Embodied Persons to Disembodied Information

Today’s digitalized forms of surveillance, according to Irma van der Ploeg, have increasingly

extended its focus on people’s body (by scrutinizing, identifying, and assessing) and “brought forth

an unequalled pervasiveness and intensity, an unprecedented number of ways in which bodies can

be monitored, assessed, analysed, categorized, and, ultimately, managed.”85 It does not regard the

person or individual in his or her totality; when one speaks only in terms of the body of a person,

one’s approach is too reductionist. Likewise, electronic or digitalized surveillance practices in the

workplace translate physical bodies into digital code, and there emerge new bodies defined in terms

of mere information. These bodies of digitally processable data are easily amenable to different forms

of analysis and categorization.86 Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson write, in this regard, that any

observed body, which is of a hybrid composition, “is broken down by being abstracted from its

territorial setting” and then reassembles through data flows, resulting in generation of a

decorporealized body, “a ‘data double’ of pure virtuality,” and a cyborg – “a flesh-technology-

information amalgam.”87 This shows that a new type of body is formed, transcending human

corporeality, reducing flesh into mere information and appearing as a ‘data double,’ a double which

involves “the multiplication of the individual, the constitution of an additional self.”88 This also refers

back to the previously discussed (first chapter) reductionist challenges of employee surveillance.

In addition to this challenge, as Lyon illustrates, surveillance, as it happens today mainly

electronically, concerns only information fragments abstracted from individuals, which in turn stress

the disembodied nature of the gathered information.89 His wide and deep research on the subject

shows that in various domains and spheres of the activities of any society, ranging from work to

leisure, the generation, collection, and processing of ‘body data’ is increasing.90 However, Lyon’s

definition of surveillance as the “collection and processing of personal data, whether identifiable or

not, for the purposes of influencing or managing those whose data have been garnered […] does not

usually involve embodied persons watching each other,”91 is nothing but an indication of a kind of

personification of information. This shows the emergence of new social categories that intertwine

84 Gandy, “Statistical Surveillance: Remote Sensing in the Digital Age,” 128. 85 Irma van der Ploeg, “The Body as Data in the age of Information,” in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance

Studies, eds. Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty and David Lyon, 176-183 (Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 177. 86 Ploeg, “The Body as Data in the age of Information,” 177. 87 Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson, “The Surveillance Assemblage,” in The Surveillance Studies Reader,

eds. Sean P. Hier and Josh Greenberg, 104-116 (Berkshire, England: McGraw-Hill, 2007), 109. 88 Haggerty and Ericson, “The Surveillance Assemblage,” 109. Originally in, Mark Poster, The Mode of

Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 97. 89 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 38. 90 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 38-39. For example, law enforcement is the one of

the largest domains “traditionally concerned with the legitimate enrolment of individual bodies in the process

of generating, storing and processing of (identifying, physical) information […].” Irma van der Ploeg,

“Biometrics and the Body as Information: Normative Issues of the Socio-Technical Coding of the Body,” in

Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination, ed., David Lyon (London:

Routledge, 2003), 62. However, the effects of these practices are both transforming and challenging. 91 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 2.


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individual physical characteristics with information systems, producing a dichotomy between

embodied physical identity or existence and the information or physical characteristics of embodied

persons.92 In this situation, it is essential to consider how this monitored or collected ‘information of

the body’ affects the embodiment and identity of the individual self.

Speaking of an emerging “assemblage” characterizing a rhizomatic structure in regard to new

surveillance, Haggerty and Ericson write that, “at the centre of surveillance are attempts to capture

the human body,” and continue to speak about the above mentioned “decorporealization” of the body

that happens “through its reconfiguration into binary digits (bits) of information and its hybridity

with machines.”93 As embodiment remains the most basic experience of ‘being in the world,’ the

convergence of body as an ‘ontology of information’ has profound normative and moral

implications.94 For this body ontology, as Ploeg illustrates, “redefines bodies in terms of, or even as,

information [… that] quite explicitly construe the body in terms of flows of information and

communication patterns.”95 The body is perceived as a collection of discrete pieces of information,

unlike the Foucauldian treatment of it as a unitary entity.96 This body ontology, which sees the body

as information, has normative implications, since the generation and processing of ‘body data’ is

highly vulnerable to data misuse and information manipulation. Therefore, in a nutshell, the

discussion of the issue of ‘privacy’ alone is an inadequate way to deal with the larger issues arising

from the proliferation of personal information in searchable databases and other electronic storage

systems.97 Continuing in the same line, Lyon states, “if it is correct to mount a critique of surveillance

on the analysis of the disappearing body and the vanishing face, then only remedies that refer to the

body and the face will do.”98 This will be further critically analysed and ethically responded to in the

final part of this section. The next section considers another adverse practice of surveillance –

namely, “at risk” categorization - of employees that is often done in a prejudiced or predetermined

manner.

4.2.3 Surveillance Creep and “At Risk” Categorization

Contemporary surveillance technology and its key component, the searchable database, according to

David Lyon and Felix Stalder brings with it a “New Penology”: they write, “[w]hile the Old Penology

tried to identify criminals to ascribe guilt and blame and to impose punishment and treatment, the

New Penology seeks techniques for identifying, classifying, and managing groups sorted by levels

of dangerousness.”99 As they continue, “individualized suspicion with reasonable cause gives way to

categorical suspicion where, […] even intending employees may be tested to discover drug use.”100

An example could be derived from the development of DNA tests, by which “revealing information

about health and predisposition […] can expose a person to the workplace […] creating categories

92 van der Ploeg, “Biometrics and the Body as Information,” 58. 93 Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” 41. 94 van der Ploeg, “Biometrics and the Body as Information,” 59. 95 van der Ploeg, “Biometrics and the Body as Information,” 64. The anatomy and later added physiology

function as building blocks of this ‘body ontology’ and thus it is a historical construction. With modern

technology representation, emerged a new body ontology – “the modern body,” – laying down the anatomical

discourses, and acted upon the very nature of our bodies. This notion of “new body was subsequently

performed through and in the fast-proliferating practices, discourses, technologies, and architectures of

medicine, law, education, public policy, etc., thus gradually and fundamentally altering the experience of

being embodied.” van der Ploeg, “Biometrics and the Body as Information,” 65. 96 Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” 41. 97 Lyon, “Facing the future: Seeking ethics for everyday surveillance,” 171. 98 Lyon, “Facing the future: Seeking ethics for everyday surveillance,” 171-172. 99 Felix Stalder and David Lyon, “Electronic Identity Cards and Social Classification,” in Surveillance as Social

Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination, ed., David Lyon (London: Routledge, 2003), 89. 100 Stalder and Lyon, “Electronic Identity Cards and Social Classification,” 89.


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of those ‘at risk’.”101 The data could be further used to reinforce ethnic or other such stereotypes.

Kevin D. Haggerty, in this regard, compares this type of surveillance, in line with the panoptic model

of hierarchy, to the functioning of a microscope. So-called “marginalized” or “dangerous” persons

or groups are always under the unidirectional gaze and scrutiny of the powerful, who are often

invisible.102 This means that, in the workplace, biographical and various ethno-demographical data

of employees are used to profile them in terms of probabilities and possibilities about the future.

Often, every one of them is assumed to be ‘guilty’103 until the risk channelizing system says

otherwise.

Electronic surveillance as a primary means of reducing employee risks in the workplace also classify

all employees for risk assessment and put them in a position of being subject to unwanted

observation. This means that, although it attempts risk minimization by identifying law-breakers, its

huge databases facilitate these classified categories for a variety of purposes, placing the innocent

under suspicion, and thus risks their further life chances.104 In this way, workplace surveillance

creates further categories of suspicion among the workforce. Categorization, by which those who are

classified experience an interrupting intervention in their social world, can never be a neutral process

and, as Lyon observes, it often has further unintended consequences such as coercive social control,

as we have already discussed, and transforms into a process of “contingent categorization,”105 subject

to various external determinations. This suspicion encourages one to freeze the exercise of civil

liberties and increase power distance, leading to discriminative or coercive practices and a kind of

selective enforcement of rules and norms. It increases, for the watcher, the power to persuade the

watched – augumenting his or her known/unknown influence or control –and leads further to

blackmail and manipulation of people’s vulnerabilities, leads them to succumb by retargeting,106 and

produces imbalances in proactive power reflection.

However, my contention is that ‘suspicious behaviour’ was not the only important way in which the

subjects of surveillance are chosen. Many employees are surveilled for no reason. A study of Clive

Norris and Gary Armstrong reveals that 36 percent of people were subject to continued surveillance

for “no obvious reason” and 34 percent were surveilled because they belonging to a particular social

or subcultural group.107 Since the proportion of people who were targeted for surveillance due to

their behavioural pattern is only 24 percent, and since unwarranted suspicion in no way falls equally

on all social or cultural groups, Norris and Armstrong conclude that “[a]s this differentiation is not

based on objective behavioural and individualized criteria, but merely on being categorised as part

of a particular social group, such practices are discriminatory.”108 In this way, categorical suspicion

not only intensifies the gaze of those who have already been marginalized, but increases

101 Dorothy Nelkin and Lori Andrews, “Surveillance Creep in the Genetic Age,” in Surveillance as Social

Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination, ed., David Lyon (London: Routledge, 2003), 95. 102 Kevin D. Haggerty, “Tear Down the Walls: On Demolishing the Panopticon,” in Theorizing Surveillance:

The Panopticon and Beyond, ed., David Lyon, 23-45 (Cullompton: Willan publishing, 2008), 29. 103 Wright et al., “Questioning Surveillance,” 290. 104 Lyon, “Facing the future: Seeking ethics for everyday surveillance,” 172. 105 Lyon, “Facing the future: Seeking ethics for everyday surveillance,” 173. Contingent categorization

emphasizes “the flexibility of the information processing system in its response to important contextual

factors and describes empirical procedures useful in identifying categorization processes.” Joel B. Cohen and

Kunal Basu, “Alternative Models of Categorization: Toward a Contingent Processing Framework,” Journal

of Consumer Research 13, no. 4 (1987): 455. 106 Neil M. Richards, “The Dangers of Surveillance,” Harvard Law Review 126 (2013): 1955. 107 Norris, “From Personal to Digital,” 266. See, Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong, The Maximum Surveillance

Society: The Rise of CCTV (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 112-113. 108 Norris and Armstrong, The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV, 150.


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stigmatization.109 Thus, in a workplace context, exclusionary strategies are intensified. These

previously discussed effects of the disappearing body and face are further analysed below within the

framework of electronic mediation.

4.2.4 Electronic Mediation and Face/Facelessness

The increase in electronic or digital surveillance, with its capacity to do things at a distance,

accentuates the swiftness of disappearing bodies in this modern technocratic era. Previous sessions

show that, with information systems, our day-to-day lives invariably produce an increased mediation

of our identities as citizens, workers, etc. This happens through the interconnection of our bodies

through digitization, which can be called electronic mediation. Analysing both CCTV systems and

focusing on suspicion and social control in the digital age, Norris argues that “with digital systems

there is the potential to transform radically the nature of decision-making that can both bypass the

need for human mediation of the cameras and significantly reduce the need for human intervention

at all.”110 One of the drawbacks of this digital mediation is the “danger that our judgement falls prey

to stereotypical prejudice and results in the dehumanization of the other.”111 In other words,

embodied persons, and the concept of ‘co-presence’ – “being in the same place with someone else”

- have been vanishing as modes of interaction have been altered.112 In the same way, remote relations,

neglecting involvement of co-present embodied persons, also negates the possibility of being “in

contact” with others for social exchanges. Many social interactions are now facilitated and arbitrated

by electronic means, and thus relationships are now possible without co-presence.

New surveillance thus creates a new personhood in the workplace, such that “in the contemporary

surveillance situation, the digital persona seems to pass as a representation of the subject for some

purposes, the body can be genetically or biometrically interrogated without speech, and places are

only fleetingly occupied.”113 This confirms that everyone who passes under this digitized gaze of

surveillance can be classified as “lawbreaker/law-abiding,” “suspected/unsuspected,” “wanted/not

wanted,” and so forth, and this sorting no longer relies on face-to-face knowledge or interaction but

only on the data inscribed in the recorded database.114 Lyon here doubts the ethical standpoints of

surveillance that neglect or circumvent the required or anticipated relations of coded data with

embodied social persons and thus illustrates the facelessness that results, which is exacerbated by

this electronic mediation.115 This missing face raises new ethical concerns in the workplace.

Moreover, the classification of employees according to the data obtained, as Lyon fears, is

pernicious116 and results in differential treatment of employees. Referring to this, Soraj Hongladarom

writes:

If the data show that the employee only seems to be predisposed to neglecting to work diligently,

then this could be a cause for discrimination, even though there is no direct evidence that the

employee in question has really neglected the work. The employee might be a competent worker

who works fast, but is fond of relaxing in a chat forum. There might be no real indication that the

109 Norris, “From Personal to Digital,” 266. 110 Norris, “From Personal to Digital,” 274. 111 Norris, “From Personal to Digital,” 251. 112 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 15-16. 113 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 19. 114 Norris, “From Personal to Digital,” 270. 115 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 27. 116 Lyon, “Facing Future: Seeking Ethics for Everyday Surveillance,” 173.


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employee is an irresponsible worker, but the data obtained might be interpreted differently by the

employer.117

This remark indeed shows that the issue is a matter of serious concern in the analysis of workplace

surveillance. More in this regard is expressed by Lyon, who states that when new surveillance

systems are employed that can do things at a distance, the resultant data becomes the source and

means of judgements on a person or group and there emerges a delinquency of moral distancing.118

Strictly speaking, this moral distancing, through this virtual gaze, does away with moral solidarity.

For as previously discussed, technological mediation, by contributing to a simultaneous visibility-

invisibility contrast, dilutes responsibility.119 This means that electronic mediation, often through

searchable databases and video capturing, in fact erodes the relation between the self and the other,

and thus the sociality of each individual is threatened.120

Another emerging problem of the present data-driven economy is the commodification of digital

identities.121 The personal data of individuals represent a monetary value in the market, and data and

profiling algorithms represent a new organizational asset.122 The commodification of consumer data

in this era is common and widespread and is becoming more easily accessible to many companies,

who use it for commercial purposes.123 The same fate often affects the data of employees in

organizations. For through the digitalization of employee data, as we have seen, there arises a

possibility that this data will be manipulated of used excessively by organizations.124 Collecting and

using of employees’ health data is an example of this manipulative use. For instance, a Fitbit or

iPhone app tells an employer how much an employee has exercised, what her heart rate is, or how

high her blood sugar levels are. Employers can make key decisions based on employees’ biometric

data, collected from specialized devices like these, and the potential misuse of these data will always

exist.125 Elizabeth A. Brown states, on this point, that “gathering employee data from health

monitoring devices and apps provides a substantial benefit to employers and poses substantial risks

to employees.”126 Employees thus become increasingly vulnerable to data breaches through data

manipulation, cyberattacks and other malpractices of those who hold their data. This type of

discussion raises the prospect of possible or actual gender biased discrimination in the workplace.

4.2.5 Gender-Based Discrimination (the Male Gaze)

When we discuss gender in the context of the workplace, it is generally held that “gender is

inextricably interwoven into our images of authority,”127 and thus that women are subject to

subordination. According to Hille Koskela, “[g]ender is embedded in a complex range of relations

where power and repression are associated with the exercise of surveillance. […] Today, surveillance

117 Soraj Hongladarom, “Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace: A Buddhist Perspective,” 213. 118 Lyon, “Facing the future: Seeking Ethics for Everyday Surveillance,” 173-174. 119 Lyon, “Facing the future: Seeking Ethics for Everyday Surveillance,” 174. 120 Lyon, “Facing the future: Seeking Ethics for Everyday Surveillance,” 179. 121 Gianclaudio Malgieri and Bart Custers, “Pricing Privacy – The Right to Know the Value of Your Personal

Data,” Computer Law & Security Review 34 (2018): 289-303. 122 Malgieri and Custers, “Pricing Privacy – The Right to Know the Value of Your Personal Data,” 290. 123 Stacy-Ann Elvy, “Commodifying Consumer Data in the Era of the Internet of Things,” Boston College Law

Review 59, no. 2 (2018): 423-522. 124 Shah, “Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy,” 10. 125 Elizabeth A. Brown, “The Fitbit Fault Line: Two Proposals to Protect Health and Fitness Data at Work,”

Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics 16, no. 1 (2016): 5. 126 Brown, “The Fitbit Fault Line: Two Proposals to Protect Health and Fitness Data at Work,” 5. 127 Randi Markussen, “Constructing Easiness – Historical Perspectives on Work, computerization, and

Women,” in The Cultures of Computing – Sociological Review Monograph, ed. Susan Leigh Star (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1995), 178. See, Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” 50.


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helps to reinforce sexual norms by creating pressures for self-regulation. The operation of

surveillance is also full of male assumptions and assorted gendered dynamics.”128 In the same way,

researchers such as Koskela recognize that “the gendered nature of power relations” matter in the

discussion of surveillance and gender, not so much notions of sexual qualities or biological

essence.129 For “gender is hard to escape,” and bodily appearances can make people “prisoners of

those gendered bodies”; they can be “judged” by others on this basis.130 Likewise, drawing on

Foucault, Koskela identifies a connection between bodies, space and power, which is crucial in

maintaining control, where the visibility of the body becomes a vital element. For instance, vision

being an essential element, video surveillance makes the experience of “being watched” highly

gendered, for without any ties to security and crime control such video monitoring can be a powerful

site for the expression of gendered desires (often voyeuristic attention) and increases the “being-

looked-at-ness” of being a woman.131 In relation to CCTV and video monitoring, Galič, Timan and

Koops referring to David Lyon, state that “despite increased reliance on software and protocol, social

sorting still occurs often as a result of a white, male gaze in the CCTV control room, having a

particular bias that leads to certain profiles of deviance.”132 This type of voyeuristic surveillance

gaze, therefore, turns out to be a gendered targeting of surveillance systems experienced in the

workplace.

According to Elia Zureik, the unwanted male gaze is the source of gender-based surveillance in the

workplace. “[S]urveillance and privacy,” she writes, “are associated with authority structures, body

representations, and consequent sexual harassment and discrimination.”133 For instance, analysing

the study of Jeffrey Rosen concerning e-mail use in the workplace, Zureik states that “the intersection

of gender and e-mail has revolved around cases of sexual harassment, with implications for

discrimination.”134 Koskela, likewise, referring back to video surveillance and of the view that it is

justified by the need for security and protection, writes that “[t]he prominent desire to use video

surveillance to increase security is complicated by the particularly pernicious tendency of the gaze

to turn the body into sexualized object without a mutual commitment to such sexualization. […] So,

for women in particular, being an object of surveillance does not necessarily or uniformly foster a

reassuring sense of security.”135 Workplace surveillance consequently produces a deep feeling of

insecurity among women and reinforce their sense of being constantly looked at. Thus they are

“paradoxically marginalized while being at the centre (of the gaze), something that reproduces the

embodiment and sexulization of women.”136 Koskela also points to the possible misuse of

surveillance tapes,137 thus illustrating instances of surveillance that remain oppressive, produce

unequal power relations, and lead women to worry about becoming the victim of a “Peeping Tom.”

128 Hille Koskela, “You Shouldn’t Wear that Body: The Problematic of Surveillance and Gender,” in Routledge

Handbook of Surveillance Studies, eds. Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty and David Lyon, 49-56 (Oxon:

Routledge, 2014), 49. 129 Koskela, “You Shouldn’t Wear that Body: The Problematic of Surveillance and Gender,” 49. 130 Koskela, “You Shouldn’t Wear that Body: The Problematic of Surveillance and Gender,” 56. 131 Koskela, “You Shouldn’t Wear that Body: The Problematic of Surveillance and Gender,” 51. 132 Maša Galič, Tjerk Timan and Bert-Jaap Koops, “Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of

Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation,” Philosophy & Technology 30, no. 1 (2017): 28. 133 Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” 50. 134 Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” 51. Jeffrey Rosen, The Unwanted Gaze:

The Destruction of Privacy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 80. 135 Koskela, “You Shouldn’t Wear that Body: The Problematic of Surveillance and Gender,” 52. 136 Koskela, “You Shouldn’t Wear that Body: The Problematic of Surveillance and Gender,” 53. 137 Koskela, “You Shouldn’t Wear that Body: The Problematic of Surveillance and Gender,” 53-54.


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Researching and examining ‘time-space surveillance’138 and the ensuing ‘gender dynamics’

embedded in this practice of surveillance in the work place, David L. Collinson and Margaret

Collinson expose its increasingly adverse and disproportionate effects on women relative to men and

the emerging ‘macho’ culture, which is often manifested in assertive and often aggressive

expressions of masculinity.139 Referring to Anthony Giddens’ claim that “modern organizations […]

involve the intensification of surveillance as a means of accumulating, collating and retrieving

information so as to maximize control over space-time,”140 Collinson and Collinson express the effect

of a calculative division of time and space on social control and its tendency to endanger women

workers. For example, the blurring of private (home) and public (work) life becomes problematic for

women workers as “[t]he world of work encroaches on the home life in a gendered fashion.”141 The

research of Collinson and Collinson suggests that monitoring practices have particularly adverse

effects on women worker’s ability to maintain balance between the spatio-temporal pressures of work

and home.142 They observe that:

the growing requirement to subordinate ‘personal’/ ‘private’ concerns to those of the corporation

indicates that organizations may be increasingly concerned to collapse the distinction between

home and work, […]. By continue to erode ‘free time’, capitalist organizations […] are breaking

down the time-space differentiation between office and domicile. Surveillance practices often

render ‘public’, time and space previously as ‘private’.143

The gendered consequences of time-space monitoring is therefore due to the intensified work

demands that make it difficult for women to simultaneously manage both home and work. Women

are also being marginalized as they internalize the panoptical gaze of the male authority. Women live

their bodies in the organization as “seen by another, by an anonymous patriarchal Other,”144 and this

subjective experience further evokes feelings of embarrassment, shame and fear. It is clear that this

type of discrimination is also intimately involved with a commercial appeal in the exercise of power.

The following section, therefore, deals with surveillance and the concept of power culture in

organizational life.

4.3 SURVEILLANCE, ORGANIZATIONAL LIFE AND POWER CULTURE

The word surveillance also covers surreptitious investigations into individual activities. A transition

is experienced in the workplace from simple to technical and bureaucratic forms of control, much

138 The interconnections between time and space, within the scope of this study, is taken here as socially

constructed and argues that “the command over space as well as time is a key element in social control […].”

David L. Collinson and Margaret Collinson, “Delayering Managers: Time-Space Surveillance and its

Gendered Effects,” Organization 4, no. 3 (1997): 381. 139 Collinson and Collinson, “Delayering Managers: Time-Space Surveillance and its Gendered Effects,” 375-

407. The concept ‘macho’ is used to describe men who are very proud of their masculinity. However, macho

culture is generally a male dominated trend with a strong sense of power or the right to dominate - women -

manifested in an assertive, self-conscious, or controlling way. William Safaire illustrates it in line with

American political usage that it refers to the “[…] condescension of the swaggering male; the trappings of

manliness used to dominate women and keep them ‘in their place’ […].” William Safire, Safire's New

Political Dictionary: The Definitive Guide to the New Language of Politics (New York: Random House,

1993), 427. 140 Collinson and Collinson, “Delayering Managers: Time-Space Surveillance and its Gendered Effects,” 389.

See, Anthony Giddens, Social Theory and Modern Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, (first published,

1987), 2007. 141 Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” 50. 142 Collinson and Collinson, “Delayering Managers: Time-Space Surveillance and its Gendered Effects,” 401. 143 Collinson and Collinson, “Delayering Managers: Time-Space Surveillance and its Gendered Effects,” 401. 144 Angela Trethewey, “Disciplined Bodies: Women’s Embodied Identities at Work,” Organization Studies 20,

no. 3 (1999): 425.


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advanced by the use of computerized monitoring.145 Organizational surveillance, as the “new

meticulous rituals of power often appear as the technological progeny of the ‘panopticon’ in that they

often operate in a hidden or random fashion, leaving those under their scrutiny supposedly

internalizing the ‘gaze’ of the authorities and thus rendering themselves docile.”146 This panopticon

metaphor also acknowledges the vulnerability of employees due to its visibility and psychological

effect on employees, which is often magnified by the invisibility of the observer.147 Unlike control

through direct visual monitoring of an agent, new mechanisms of electronic-computerized

surveillance allow management or employers to control the bodies of workers more efficiently and

in a more routinized way.148 Hence, workplace surveillance can be accepted or rejected depending

on whether one judges it to be a legitimate technology that allows managers to care for everyone’s

interests, or rather a powerful instrument of managerial coercion149 and employee subordination.150

Sewell and Barker explore the nuances of the conceptual opposition between ‘coercion’ and ‘care’

to make sense of organizational surveillance.

The concept of ‘coercion’, as an action or practice of compelling someone to do something using

force or threats, presents a radical perspective on organizational surveillance. The concept of ‘care’,

by contrast, is understood as an effort to do something correctly, safely, or without causing damage

and seen as a more liberal perspective on the same.151 However, care indicates, in this context, the

means of more efficient work and increased productivity, with no regard to the fact that care always

directs one’s attention towards a needful responsiveness in his/her behaviour and relationships and

implies dependencies in human life. Hence, coercion is explained as an instrument of social control

and domination, while care accounts for public order and social cohesion. Coercion functions

primarily in relationships of power, whereas mutual obligation under some form of social contract is

foundational to the concept of care.152 On the competing discourses of coercion and care, Sewell and

Barker propose an ironic perspective that stirs-up the discussion beyond this paradox153 and forces

145 Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” 31. 146 Brian L. Zirkle, and William G. Staples, “Negotiating Workplace Surveillance,” in Electronic Monitoring

in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions, ed. J. Weckert, 79-100 (Hershey: Idea Group Publishing,

2005), 80. 147 Eileen M. Otis and Zheng Zhao, “Producing Invisibility,” in Invisible Labour: Hidden Work in the

Contemporary World, eds. Marion Crain, Winifred R. Poster and Miriam A. Cherry, 148-169 (California:

University of California, 2016), 151. 148 Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” 32. 149 Surveillance is coercive due to the mere fact that there is someone always observing. It can also, in an

organizational setting, include a positive act of coercion from the organizer/the employer. We, rather,

distinguish here the latter from the former to avoid the pseudo effect due to its Gnostic cliché- knowledge

saves, and mean a massive growth in surveilling the individual and groups even in indirect observation

without the determination and containment of particular spaces (Graham & Wood 2003). 150 Graham Sewell and James R. Barker, “Coercion versus Care: Using Irony to Make Sense of Organizational

Surveillance,” The Academy of Management Review 31, no. 4 (2006): 935. 151 Sewell and Barker. “Coercion versus Care,” 938-940. 152 Sewell and Barker. “Coercion versus Care,” 939. One of the more recent social contract theorists is John

Rawls whose revised idea of social contract goes in line with political liberalism and progresses with the

concepts of impartiality and fairness. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1971, rev. ed. 1999). 153 In the context of workplace, the irony of surveillance and ‘resistance’ explores deep concern. Sewell and

Barker observe that in the workplace, “by participating in ‘resistance by negotiation,’ members are ironically

appropriating the discourse of care while also relying on the ability of a liberal conception of participation

and legal protection to identify and prevent egregious instances of coercion.” Sewell and Barker, “Coercion

versus Care,” 949. Hence, legitimate and enabling practices are embraced while rejecting repressive and

constraining ones. In a paradoxical situation, organizational members understand the meaning of surveillance

by negotiating the simultaneous truths of coercion and care and try to bring value-based judgements about

situational surveillance practices. Here the balance of rational and moral status of surveillance involves the

practice of the combination of coercion and care.


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us to see things from diverse perspectives, thus crumbling the undue domination of a single and

limited view.

In the context of the workplace, the ironic relationship between surveillance and ‘resistance’ is of

great concern. Sewell and Barker observe that, in the workplace, “by participating in ‘resistance by

negotiation,’ members are ironically appropriating the discourse of care while also relying on the

ability of a liberal conception of participation and legal protection to identify and prevent egregious

instances of coercion.”154 Hence, legitimate and enabling practices are embraced while repressive

and constraining ones are rejected. In a paradoxical situation, organizational members understand

the meaning of surveillance by negotiating the simultaneous truths of coercion and care and try to

form value-based judgements about situational surveillance practices. At this juncture, the balance

between the rational and moral status of surveillance can be secured by properly combining coercion

and care. It also involves the appreciation of the fallibility of one’s own conceptions and creatively

uses various formations to make sense of an ambiguous situation.

The dilemma unravelled here, however, is the polarized mentality that conceives of surveillance as

a legitimate system for caring for the interests of everyone, and also as a powerful instrument of

managerial coercion and employee subordination. Yet, as we perceive in both circumstances,

surveillance functions as a form of ‘disciplinary power.’ This has to be discussed further, as it

anticipates a deviation from the desired norms of the organization – with the more powerful

dominating the less powerful and thus completing the subjugation of employees.155 Here,

relationships of power dominate organizational members, making the work-life balance more

controlled and predictable. The predominance of hierarchy and rule-based conduct will be strongly

established in this context, , often to the advantage of the hierarchy itself. For example, from an

employee-centred perspective, the previously discussed panoptic metaphor of Jeremy Bentham, later

analysed and applied by Foucault, also shows the gravity of this power relationship in the context of

organizational surveillance. According to Foucault, “the major effect of the panopticon was to induce

in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of

power.”156 The employees as inmates in an organizational context have no choice but to act as if they

are being watched incessantly, even when they are not. Thus, we are forced to consider the

relationship between organizational surveillance and the exertion of power.

4.3.1 Surveillance Portrays Power Control

Power is an ability to act that often produces decisive effects in the act itself and results in control

over things and people. It is broadly defined as asymmetric control of valuable resources,157 and

therefore is inherently relational. For this reason, power always exists in relation to others. It also has

dominion over human relationships, influencing others through the predominance and supremacy of

an acting agent - an individual, group or organization. Foucault as an observer of human relations

examines the nature of power in society and states that power “reaches into the very grain of

individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses,

learning processes and everyday lives.”158 Thus, for Foucault, knowledge is power and is fully

154 Sewell and Barker. “Coercion versus Care,” 949. 155 Positive implications of the concept ‘care’ in combination with the concept of transparency’ will be analysed

in the last part of this research. 156 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 201. 157 Joe C. Magee and Adam D. Galinsky, “Social Hierarchy: The Self-Reinforcing Nature of Power and Status,”

The Academy of Management Annals 2, no. 1 (2008): 351-398. 158 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, trans. Colin

Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 30.


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immersed in every human activity and relation. He also writes that “there is no power relation without

the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and

constitute at the same time, power relations.”159 Nevertheless, Foucault reviews the effects of power

and affirms that “it produces domains of objects and ritual of truth.”160 Clegg et al. also express that

“[...] power need not always be regarded as something to be avoided. Power can be a very positive

force; it can achieve great things.”161 Conversely, power, with its inherent capacity to influence and

control others, is also a resource to achieve certain goals with often vested interest in mind, and these

interests may be shared or contested.

However, power, according to Peter Fleming and Andre Spicer, is an endemic part of organizational

life, and we need today a careful and vigorous conceptualization and articulation of how

organizational power functions.162 Although in general power functions in positive way, within the

context of organizational surveillance it is important to discuss how employee lives and conduct can

be negatively affected by this power relation. For constant observation turns out to be a control

mechanism in an organization, and when few people control the knowledge acquired through

observation, oppression and subjugation of the observed is likely. Electronic and other data-based

surveillance in the organizational context also reveal of the few of the powerful possess control or

command over the many. In this regard, electronic surveillance may also be considered in terms of

the discretion of power. We would draw attention here to the taxonomy of Fleming and Spicer, who

identify four faces of power: coercion, manipulation, domination, and subjectification. This

taxonomy is helpful in understanding the nuances of electronic surveillance and power relations.163

Taking a sociological and ethical approach, we agree with Fleming and Spicer that these expressions

of power may be “episodic” (in the case of coercion and manipulation) or “systemic” (in the case of

domination and subjectification).164 For power both appears and occurs at different or irregular times,

as well as in a way that spreads throughout a system.

Electronic surveillance, as an exercise of coercive power, focuses on the direct implementation of

power to achieve certain desired ends. This becomes problematic when an individual or a group who

exercises such power goes beyond the legitimate authority vested in their position. This power, as a

result of the knowledge or data gathered through observation, may be used to secure certain

outcomes, and this may in turn produce a sense of powerlessness and low expectations among

employees. Surveillance itself seems again a process of domination, whereby the agents influence

the targets through a reconstruction of ideological values, which reshapes the preferences, attitudes

and outlooks of the targets. Finally, reflecting on subjectification, we articulate that surveillance in

an organization also seeks to determine an actor’s very sense of self, emotions and identity, and thus

normalizes a particular way of being in the organization. Power thus becomes an inescapable factor

in organizational surveillance, establishing more systemic power relations.

In organizations, employees are often the visible prey of surreptitious surveillance, and the practice

such surveillance itself becomes a tool for establishing and enforcing a hierarchical power

relationship, often under the pretext of securing certain management outcomes. The subtle

combination of coercion and care in the critical evaluation of surveillance can only be seen as a

continuation of the power relationship, even when it is analysed and scrutinized in terms of liberal

159 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 27. 160 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 194. 161 S. R. Clegg, D. Courpasson and N. Phillips, Power and Organization (London: Sage, 2006), 3. 162 Peter Fleming and Andre Spicer, “Power in Management and Organization Science,” The Academy of

Management Annals 8, no. 1 (2014): 238. 163 Fleming and Spicer, “Power in Management and Organization Science,” 237 – 298. 164 Fleming and Spicer, “Power in Management and Organization Science,” 240.


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and radical traditions, as explained above. Pragmatic arguments are often made to justify the use of

surveillance as coercive control and as care. This justification must be further discussed, however,

given the unresolved problems of curtailed freedom, power suppression, and constrained behavioural

patterns due to anxiety, fear and irrational stress that affect organizational and social culture. For this

reason, we need to revisit the surveillance debate. In what follows, we discuss the traditional

understanding of the normalizing effects of surveillance, then aim to move beyond this.

4.3.2 Beyond the Normalizing Effect: Discipline and Control after Foucault

Organizational surveillance is a powerful means of creating and re-inforcing long-term social

differences, as it “engages many kinds of power, and is both productive and, sometimes,

pernicious.”165 According to Clive Norris, “[a]t the heart of the panoptic project is the collection of

individualized codified information, and this provides the rationale for classification and subsequent

authoritative intervention.”166 In the same way, coercive power in surveillance, as noted, secures

greater power and privilege for the one doing the surveillance, and tends thereby to devalue and

discredit the target.167 Moreover, “the dominant groups determine how and in what interests the

material infrastructure operates,”168 and thus, as a form of power discharge through detailed

observation and examination, the subjects become objectified. As Foucault rightly observes in his

Discipline and Punish, the observed becomes “the object of information, never a subject in

communication.”169 This is a wonderful insight from Foucault, and our own argument here could be

read as an effort to draw out the implications of this.

Panopticism, discipline, and control are the three key themes in Foucault’s work that are still relevant

in surveillance studies, as these themes recur in any ethical analysis of surveillance.170 As we have

illustrated in the first chapter, Foucault provides a ‘disciplinary model’ and a ‘control model’

understanding of surveillance. Though Foucault’s emphasize is on discipline in general, surveillance

in a modern organizational context always involves a “power” mechanism over the life chances of

employees. In this regard, electronic surveillance might also concern the discretion of power.

Surveillance itself seems again a process of domination, whereby the agents influence the targets

through a reconstruction of ideological values as noted above. This is turn reshapes the preferences,

attitudes and outlooks of the targets. Power is the logic of this domination, and because of the

increased impact of this power as power distance, the relevance of this logic in the context of

surveillance debates is questionable. At this juncture, particularly interesting is that Lyon’s

understanding of surveillance goes beyond Foucault’s notion of a disciplinary society, where persons

are “normalized” by their categorical locations, and also goes beyond Gilles Deleuze’s “society of

control” argument.171

165 Lyon, “Facing the Future: Seeking Ethics for Everyday Surveillance,” 173. 166 Norris, “From Personal to Digital,” 251. 167 Bertram H. Raven, “The Basis of Power: Origins and Recent Developments,” Journal of Social Issues 49

(1993): 242. 168 David Lyon, “Everyday Surveillance: Personal Data and Social Classifications,” in The Surveillance Studies

Reader, eds. S. P. Hier and J. Greenberg, 136-146 (New York: McGraw-Hill. 2007a), 140. 169 Foucault. Discipline and Punish, 200. Foucault expressed the panopticon as “the epitome of social control

in modern times” and stimulated the association of panopticon and electronic surveillance. See, Lyon,

Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 115. 170 Maša Galič, Tjerk Timan and Bert-Jaap Koops, “Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of

Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation,” Philosophy & Technology 30, no. 1 (2017): 15-

18. 171 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 23. See, Gilles Deleuze,

“Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3-7. This essay first appeared in L’Autre Journal


169

Foucault explains how techniques developed for innocuous purposes create the system of

disciplinary power. The three primary techniques of control in any society, according to Foucault,

are hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination.172 Organizations function

mainly based on managerial rules and regulations, which maintain order and move the organization

towards its goals. However, surveillance as a managerial norm of a hierarchical observation also

creates a power culture in the organization. Normalization means discipline through the impositions

of precise norms, that is the judgement that an action is or is not allowed by the law.173 This

normalization means further, first, the awareness of being tracked, and then the encouragement to

accept it as an unconscious reality, without worrying much about it. The examination at the end is

the prime example of power that combines both hierarchical observation and normalizing

judgment.174 The ‘normalization judgement,’ for Foucault, is an action referring to a whole that

occurs through comparison, differentiation and following the principle of a rule. It could be defined

as invoking a standard, but often it is imposed by an outsider, not as a result of consensus. In this

regard, control over people attained through merely observing them hierarchically, and a culture of

power prominence through normalizing and examining, both diminish the genuineness of

employees’ sense of mutual obligation and social responsibility.

Reflecting on Foucault, Deleuze argues that a strategic shift in power relations is underway.175 Rather

than speaking of a ‘disciplinary society,’ Deleuze develops the notion of ‘societies of control’ that

focus on how modern surveillance tracks persons rather than imposing disciplines.176 According to

Deleuze, bodies resists the concentrated containment of military strategy and its regimentation

characteristic of disciplinary power, and thus a new form of control emerges in reaction to this. This

new mechanism of power fixes the body independently of its location. Thus, though power extends

its territory, its functional and informational parameters are controlled so much that soon we live in

circumscribed parameters.177 From this perspective, surveillance ultimately conceives a society of

control, which is well suited to the power relations of any organizational structure. At this point,

Lyon’s view is akin to Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care, proposing that “care should be highlighted as

a countervail against mere control.”178 Proposing a new conception of the person as a node in a

complex web of relations, which is more social than other, more traditional conceptions of the person,

he adds that “[...] if the social, embodied person is seen in a web of relationships in which, at best,

care is paramount, then this stance provides a truly critical ethical starting point for situating and

assessing surveillance.”179 Here we see a move from the sociology of surveillance to a new and strong

ethical starting point. This will serve as a guide for our critical analysis, as it always swings between

the notons of passive surveillance and the active body.

1 (1990). Here Lyon compares also Michel Foucault and William Bogard that “[f]or Foucault, discipline

normalizes people to moral standards of behaviour or to institutional requirements. For Bogard, in ‘telematic’

societies, individuals are ‘supernormalized’ according to codes, managed as flows of data.” Lyon,

Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 117. See, William Bogard, The Simulation of Surveillance:

Hyper-Control in Telematic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3-50. 172 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 170-194. 173 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 170-183. 174 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 184-194. 175 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” 3-7. 176 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 35. Cf. Galič, Timan and Koops, “Bentham, Deleuze

and Beyond,” 19. 177 Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” 3-7. 178 Lyon, “Facing the Future: Seeking Ethics for Everyday Surveillance,” 180. 179 Lyon, “Facing the Future: Seeking Ethics for Everyday Surveillance,” 179.


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Priscilla Regan, however, challenges the notions of a “risk society,”180 highlighting the surveillance

and other monitoring and screening practices required to manage risk. For her, surveillance and

monitoring practices create an unquenchable thirst for more information about the risks that exist

generally, as well as the risks posed by particular individuals. The knowledge afforded by

surveillance systems does not result in a sense of security or trust, but rather produces new

uncertainties, leading to still more surveillance and the collection of still more information.181 Hence,

Regan argues that privacy is of value to society in general and should be recognized as a common

good, yet without compromising the priority given to it in relation to the individual. Surveillance in

an organization thus leads first to the categorization of people, assigning each individual or group a

certain worth or risk, and then to the subordination of real persons to abstracted data. Facing this

individual and social moral dilemma, we need a more concrete evaluative model that goes beyond

customary managerial laws and precepts. This model will be investigated in the last part of this

research. The next portion of this section will clarify the relation between technology-mediated

power control and the disempowering experience of workplace surveillance.

4.3.3 Technology Mediated Power Control and Disempowering Experience

It is hard to imagine any continuing social arrangements without some means of exercising social

control. However, certain forms of social control in modern life raise distinctive value issues, for

example a concern that “the collective consequences of their abuse are likely to be more

sweeping.”182 Individual experiences in certain situations make this form more oppressive and

destructive. It is true with the phenomenon of workplace surveillance: many find it really the easiest

modern method of generating and exerting control and power over labour, labour processes and

performance alike. The imposition and use of various deposits of monitoring technologies in the

workplace erodes employment relationships and contributes to the increased feeling of

powerlessness among employees. These systems, argue Peter Jeffrey Holland, Brian Cooper and Rob

Hecker, further “reinforce employer power by promoting the enforcement of employee obedience –

a panopticon approach.”183 Similarly, in line with social facilitation theory, Aiello and Svec contend

that just like the ‘physical presence’ of supervisory monitoring, the ‘electronic presence’ of

technology mediated monitoring also leads employees to perform a complex task more poorly than

180 The concept of a risk society in fact drives the interest in the actions and transactions of all individuals and

the increase in surveillance throughout society. Institutions that deal with individuals collect all their

information and structure their dealings with those individual accordingly. Ericson and Haggerty however

hold that the concept of a risk society operates within a negative logic focusing on fear. It also underpins the

value system of insecurity and unsafe society that again demands more knowledge of risk (Regan 2002).

Priscilla M. Regan, “Privacy as a Common Good in the Digital World,” Information, Communication and

Society 5, no. 3 (2002): 382-405. 181 Regan, “Privacy as a Common Good in the Digital World,” 382-405. 182 James B. Rule, “High-Tech Workplace Surveillance: What’s Really New?” in Computers, Surveillance,

and Privacy, eds. David Lyon and Elia Zureik, 66-76 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996),

69. 183 Holland, Cooper and Hecker, “Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in the Workplace,” 165.


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the unmonitored employees.184 The ‘social presence’ of the supervising authority,185 through

technology mediation, functions as an actual presence, and even more so given that the actuality of

this presence is never known. The remote technological presence functions in the same way as the

here-and-now actual physical presence.186

William G. Staples interprets the Foucauldian understanding of surveillance as “micro techniques of

discipline that target and treat the body as an object to be watched, assessed and manipulated.”187

For, like the panopticon, consistent electronic surveillance, which often makes it impossible to

recognize that one is being monitored, induces in the employees a state of conscious and permanent

visibility and thus enables the automatic functioning of power.188 For the purpose and major effect

of surveillance, according to Foucault, was to induce consciousness of “permanent visibility” and

thus achieve the “automatic functioning of power” in a given situation.189 So, when systems of

surveillance try to rationalize employee skill and knowledge of the labour process and other job

performance criteria, in order to assign these to management to ensure employees’ compliance and

replaceability.190 Automated judgements of social or economic worth, according to one’s surveilled

performance, causes social exclusion in the workplace and alienates workers.191 Analysing some case

studies in the literature, Elia Zureik argues that “surveillance in the workplace is clearly implemented

in order to disempower workers, exploit them, and reduce any appearance of management’s concern

for employee well-being to a disguise for continued employee discipline.”192 Along with this

disempowerment of workers, hard deterioration happens and surveillance technologies possess the

responsibility for making decisions about job performance.

Adding to this understanding, David Mason et al., quoting Graham Sewell and Barry Wilkinson,

opine that “despite apparently radical changes in the organization and management of work,

management retained, and continues to pursue through new means, its traditional interest in

challenging worker empowerment and autonomy.”193 A simple assumption here seems to be that

employment relationships have become manipulative and conflictual and that employees resist this

184 John R. Aiello and Carol M. Svec, “Computer Monitoring of Work Performance: Extending the Social

Facilitation Framework to Electronic Presence,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 23, no.7 (1993): 537-

548. Same reference is also found in: Devashieesh P. Bhave, “The Invisible Eye? Electronic Performance

Monitoring and Employee Job Performance,” Personnel Psychology 67 (2014): 607. Social facilitation theory

states that the physical presence of the other causes an individual poor performance in complex tasks and

better performance in simple tasks. It is also called as the ‘audience effect’ as people tend to perform

differently when alone and when with others. Robert B. Zajonc, “Social Facilitation,” Science 149, no. 3681

(1965): 269-274. See also, Bernd Strauss, “Social Facilitation in Motor Tasks: A Review of Research and

Theory,” Psychology of Sport and Exercise 3, no. 3 (2002): 237-256. 185 Jeffrey M. Stanton and Amanda L. Julian, “The Impact of Electronic Monitoring on Quality and Quantity

of Performance,” Computers in Human Behaviour 18 (2002); 86. 186 Stanton and Julian, “The Impact of Electronic Monitoring on Quality and Quantity of Performance,” 88. 187 William G. Staples, The Culture of Surveillance: Discipline and Social Control in the United States (New

York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), ix. See, Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” 39. 188 Norris, “From Personal to Digital,” 249. Cf. Galič, Timan and Koops, “Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond,”

16. 189 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 201. 190 Zirkle and Staples, “Negotiating Workplace Surveillance,” 80. 191 Stephen Graham and David Wood, “Digitizing Surveillance: Categorization, Space, Inequality,” in The

Surveillance Studies Reader, eds. Sean P. Hier and Josh Greenberg, 218-230 (Berkshire, England: McGraw-

Hill, 2007), 219. 192 Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” 47. 193 David Mason et al., “On the Poverty of Apriorism: Technology, Surveillance in the Workplace and

Employee Responses,” Information, Communication & Society 5, no. 4 (2002): 560; Graham Sewell and

Barry Wilkinson, “Someone to Watch over Me”: Surveillance, Discipline and the Just-in-Time Labour

Process,” Sociology 26, no. 2 (1992): 271-289.


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with altered behavioural patterns. For instance, when workplace relations become negative in

character, this is reflected in workers’ efforts to take control of or accommodate organizational rules

and may bring only judicious responses to it.194 All these altered behaviours or responses are part of

workers’ resistance to the subduing effects of panoptic surveillance. It is still difficult to identify

instances of resistance and the criteria by which such would be judged, as it depends on specific

contexts and must be done on an individual basis. However, different ‘shortcuts’ are being used to

resist company policies when they become too intrusive. For, as David Mason et al. illustrate,

referring to Patricia K. Edwards’ work on employment and new ‘enterprise culture,’ “the term

'resistance' itself is endowed with a strategic ambiguity, one which enables it to sound as though it

captures a strong, determined and explicit rejection of managerial domination, while it is deployed

as an expression with a merely technical content, identifying merely those actions which happen - in

one way or another - to deviate from management expectations.”195 So, finally, Mason et al. recognize

the widespread tendency among employees to commit non-complaint acts of resistance, asserting

their power against management interests or requirements and thus seeking to protect their individual

privacy and autonomy.196

Carl Botan likewise discusses the effects of surveillance in the workplace. The more employees feel

surveilled, he states, the less they feel like receiving adequate feedback on job performance or even

communicating with fellow employees. Often, they develop the feeling of being isolated in the

clutches of the electronic panopticon,197 and thus sink into alienation. Worker alienation in a

surveillance context is “the lack of worker freedom and control, purpose and function, and self-

involvement in employees’ work” due to the unprecedented use of highly automated technologies.198

Workers’ alienation is illustrated as “a lack of worker freedom and control, purpose and function and

self-involvement in their job.”199 In the same way, one of the alienating experiences of workplace

monitoring is the possibility of having little or no peer social support, since individuals or groups are

often placed at separate stations in full view of monitoring gadgets and forced to remain in a place

where they can be “seen” all time.200 This feeling of isolation leads to stress and repetitive strain

injuries. This will be further explored in the next section.

Practices of surveillance also result in the commodification of labour and the accumulation of

interests. Accumulation of interest is a result of the commodified use of data or information. As

already discussed, strategies implemented to keep track of things often also keep track of

employees.201 Referring to E.P. Thompson’s seminal essay, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial

Capitalism,” Lyon illustrates a labour commodification medium called ‘time-discipline’ that focuses

on “task-oriented” time over value- or “labour-oriented” time.202 Anytime surveillance in the

workplace tries to regularize labour and structure work habits, and thus commodify the subjective

dimension of labour. As Lyon quotes, “socially necessary labour time […] became the main

194 Mason et al., “On the Poverty of Apriorism,” 560. 195 Mason et al., “On the Poverty of Apriorism,” 561. See for instance, Patricia K. Edwards, “Patterns of conflict

and accommodation,” in Employment in Britain, ed. Duncan Gallie (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 187-217. 196 Mason et al., “On the Poverty of Apriorism,” 562. 197 Carl Botan, “Communication Work and Electronic Surveillance: A Model for Predicting Panoptic Effects,”

Communication Monographs 63, no.4 (1996): 294-313. 198 Kissa and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 13. 199 Hamed Al-Rjoub, Arwa Zabian and Sami Qawasmeh, “Electronic Monitoring: The Employees Point of

View,” Journal of Social Science 4, no. 3 (2008): 191. 200 Kissa and Ssanyu, “Workplace Surveillance,” 13; Otis and Zhao, “Producing Invisibility,” 151. 201 James Rule and Peter Brantley, “Computerized Surveillance in the Workplace: Forms and Distributions

Source,” Sociological Forum 7, no. 3 (1992): 416. 202 David Lyon and Elia Zureik, “Surveillance, Privacy, and the New Technology,” in Computers, Surveillance,

and Privacy, eds. David Lyon and Elia Zureik, 1-18 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 9.


173

ingredient in the conversion of labour to its corresponding exchange value […and] the

commodification of labour via its transformation into labour-power.”203 It creates in turn, to borrow

the critical reading of Karl Marx by Paul Warmington,204 a commodity-determined society and

functions to generate a commodity-determined social universe. Zureik explains the impacts of this

commodification further in our particular context, that “because of the commodification of labour as

a wilful, artful and living subject, complete systems of surveillance ignore the day-to-day encounter

between workers and management and the potential for resistance, thus leading management to

exercise control through employee consent.”205 This power also relates to the accumulation of

information and thus the supervision of subordinates. It leads to questions about the sanitizing role

of surveillance in shaping the organizational and social behaviour of employees. This same question

is addressed in the succeeding section.

4.4 BEHAVIOURAL EFFECTS OF EMPLOYEE SORTING AND CONTROL

Because surveillance increases management power control, as discussed above, it also produces or

directs employee behaviour. For instance, analysing a notion of ‘surveillance capitalism’206 as it

“involves real-time monitoring of contractual performance along with real-time, technology-enabled

enforcement of the contract,”207 Galič, Timan and Koops, quoting Shoshana Zuboff, state that:

In a world where such a system of contractual monitoring and enforcement is the norm, ‘habitats

inside and outside the human body are saturated with data and produce radically distributed

opportunities for observation, interpretation, communication, influence, prediction and ultimately

modification of the totality of action,’ establishing a new architecture from which there is no

escape, making the Panopticon seem prosaic. Where power was previously identified with

ownership of means of production, it is now constituted by ownership of means of behavioural

modification.208

Employee behaviour is modified or rather often manipulated and is “subjugated to commodification

and monetisation”209 in line with present day market dynamics.

Michael J. Smith and Benjamin C. Amick III maintain that the general ‘paranoia’ induced by

electronic monitoring is “the backbone of an impersonalized workplace in which every ‘sneeze’ or

203 Lyon and Zureik, “Surveillance, Privacy, and the New Technology,” 10. 204 Paul Warmington, “From ‘Activity’ to ‘Labour’: Commodification, Labour Power and Contradiction in

Engeström’s Activity Theory.” Outlines. Critical Practice Studies 10, no. 2 (2008): 5. 205 Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” 48. 206 The notion of surveillance capitalism is derived from conceptualising surveillance as a dominant feature of

captial society. It is first used by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney and developed by Shoshana

Zuboff. Surveillance capitalism is said to be “a new subspecies of (information) capitalism [...] in which

profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behaviour.” Galič, Timan and

Koops, “Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond,” 24. Cf. Shoshana Zuboff, “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism,”

Frankfurter Allgemeine, Feuilleton, (2016). http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-

debate/shoshana-zuboff-secrets-of-surveillancecapitalism-14103616.html [accessed October 20, 2018];

Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,”

Journal of Information Technology 30 (2015): 75-89; John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney,

“Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age,”

Monthly Review 66, no. 3 (2014): 1-31. 207 Galič, Timan and Koops, “Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond,” 25. 208 Galič, Timan and Koops, “Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond,” 25. Cf. Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other:

Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information

Technology 30 (2015): 82. 209 Galič, Timan and Koops, “Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond,” 25. Cf. Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance

Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” 85.


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every ‘breath’ of a worker will be recorded and analysed; and more importantly will be used in some

way to punish workers, or to change their behaviour in an unsatisfactory way.”210 The loss of control

on a basic ‘instrumental’ level, for example through restrictions on employee opportunities to use

available tools to change the environment or product, can affect employees’ perception of control

and diminish their self-esteem by limiting their freedom to use their skill and decisional authority.211

A major concern here is the influence of electronic monitoring and instrumental control on worker

self-image and on feelings of self-worth. Just above the instrumental level of control is an individual

employee’s ‘discretionary latitude’ concerning how various tasks and work are to be scheduled and

carried out.212 Workplaces with extensive electronic monitoring most often give employees low

decision latitude and high job demands, which of course carries with it an increased risk of job

dissatisfaction and employee exhaustion and depression.

One major focus of workplace surveillance is the work related feelings of employees, including

attitudes and emotions, belief systems and inherited norms. All of these in turn modify employees’

productive/unproductive and citizenship behaviour.213 J.M. Stanton and E.M. Weiss refer in this

context to the declension of prosocial or extra-role behaviour.214 By analysing Social Information

Processing (SIP) theory, they predict on-the-job behavioural change.215 Stanton and Weiss observe

that “SIP predicts that normative social cues that workers receive from a variety of sources in the

workplace will influence their attitudes and behaviors,” and that often shapes their behavior “by

drawing attention to what was valued and rewarded in the organization and draw “attention away

from those activities that are shunned or proscribed.”216 Referring to Robert Beno Cialdini’s

suggestions concerning social influence and organizational dishonesty, David Zweig writes that

employees attribute their special monitored behavioural pattern not to their desire for effective

performance but to monitoring itself.217 Here the chance that employees will engage in an undesired

behavior may actually increase, just as soon as the employee can get away form the surveillance

gaze.

Employee resistance to invasive surveillance in this regard leads to a different stance in their

behaviour. According to the study of Peter Bain and Phil Taylor, it leads employees “to search for

and exploit gaps in the monitoring system”218 and try to take advantages of various opportunities.

Moreover, it generally leads to undesirable employee responses and behaviours, such as frequent and

210 Michael J. Smith and Benjamin C. Amick III, “Electronic Monitoring at the Workplace: Implications for

Employee Control and Job Stress,” in Job Control and Worker Health, eds. Steven L. Sauter, Joseph J. Hurrel

jr. and Cary L. Cooper, 275-289 (Chichester, New York: Wiley, 1989), 277. 211 Smith and Amick III, “Electronic Monitoring at the Workplace: Implications for Employee Control and Job

Stress,” 278. 212 Smith and Amick III, “Electronic Monitoring at the Workplace: Implications for Employee Control and Job

Stress,” 278. 213 J.M. Stanton and E.M. Weiss, “Electronic Monitoring in Their Own Words: An Exploratory Study of

Employees’ Experience with New Types of Surveillance,” Computers in Human Behaviour 16 (2000): 424. 214 Along with the decrease in productive behaviours, it is researched that, employee prosocial or extra-role

behaviours drastically decline when intensive or sever monitoring is performed. Stanton and Weiss,

“Electronic Monitoring in Their Own Words,” 424. 215 Stanton and Weiss, “Electronic Monitoring in Their Own Words,” 425. 216 Stanton and Weiss, “Electronic Monitoring in Their Own Words,” 425. 217 David Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns: Examining Psychological Boundary Violations as

a Consequence of Electronic Performance Monitoring,” in Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace, ed., John

Weckert, 101-122 (Hershey: Idea Group Publishing, 2005), 112. 218 Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns,” 113. Peter Bain and Phil Taylor researched extensively

about the employee resistance in the workplace in special reference to call centres. Peter Bain and Phil Taylor,

“Entrapped by the ‘Electronic Panopticon’? Worker Resistance in the Call Centre,” New Technology, Work

and Employment 15, no. 1 (2000): 216.


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unexpected withdrawal, irritating interruption and deliberate sabotage, and diminished citizenship.

Employees, in this respect, also become resistant to taking the risk associated with executing an

activity in a different way or undertaking an activity that requires more time than standard ones.

Employees here adjust or rather manipulate their acts and behaviours to accord with the expectations

of the one who monitors. Thus, both electronic systems of surveillance, through their own self-

monitoring and discipline, and the attitudinal canvases of employees themselves can and do control

and reshape their behaviour. In what follows, we discuss the resulting behavioural effects of

employee sorting and control.

4.4.1 Unsettled Stress, Emerging Distrust and Deviances

An very significant effect of monitoring and resultant employee sorting and control concerns the

psychological functioning of employees, including the production of fear, anxiety, hatred, loss of

self-image and both physical and mental stress.219 According to Sonny S. Ariss, “some have linked

anxiety, depression, and nervous disorders to the stress induced by workplace monitoring. Those

who are monitored may be ‘constantly apprehensive and inhibited’ due to the constant presence of

an ‘unseen audience.’ Some employees have even compared electronic monitoring to “working as a

slave and being whipped, not in our bodies but in our minds.”220 This leads to commitment problems

in the workplace and increases, along with the risk of serious health hazards, undesired behaviours

such as absenteeism, turnover, burn out and lowered productivity.221 Likewise, electronic monitoring

and the resultant creation of ‘electronic sweatshops’ further leads to unintended stress and social

isolation and as well as negative behavioural changes. Evolving the notion of a ‘panopticon’ – the

‘all-seeing place’ – of traditional discussion, the concept of ‘omnipticon’ by Rosen Jeffrey has

become today a pointer representing the surveillance of all people, everywhere, at all time222 that

creates an ‘electronic sweatshop’ in the workplace.223 Michel Foucault’s notion of a ‘panopticon’ –

the few watching the many - can be contrasted with Thomas Mathiesen’s ‘synopticon’ – the many

watching the few – and now in this age of internet also by Jeffrey Rosen’s ‘omnipticon’ – the many

watching the many. The realities designated by these terms are increasingly crucial today, as “no

one knows precisely who is watching or being watched at any given time.”224 This is indeed a stress

generating situation in the workplace.

219 Samantha Lee and Brian H. Kleiner, “Electronic surveillance in the workplace,” Management Research

News 26, nos. 2/3/4 (2003): 72-81. The increased electronic monitoring and resulting close supervision and

unrelenting control are certainly associated with high mental stress and leads to further burnouts and become

a drive to job-dissatisfaction. See for instance, Bradley J. Alge and S. Duane Hansen, “Workplace Monitoring

and Surveillance Since “1984”: A Review and Agenda,” in The Psychology of Workplace Technology, eds.

M.D. Coovert and L. Foster Thompson (New-York and London: Routledge, 2014), 209-237. Gomes-Mejia

et al. illustrate how well the electronic surveillance poses serious challenges on employees leading to stress

and dehumanizing effects. Luis R. Gomez-Mejia, David B. Balkin and Robert L. Cardy, Managing Human

Resources, 4th ed. (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education, 2004), 11-62. 220 Sonny S. Ariss, “Computer Monitoring: Benefits and Pitfalls Fasing Management,” Information &

Management 39 (2002): 556; N. Ben Fairweather, “Surveillance in employment: the case of teleworking,”

Journal of Business Ethics 22, no. 1 (1999): 39-49. 221 Smith and Amick III, “Electronic Monitoring at the Workplace: Implications for Employee Control and Job

Stress,” 277. David Zweig expresses the same idea of negative effects on employee stress, satisfaction, and

resulting turnover. Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns,” 105. 222 Rosen Jeffrey, The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age (New York:

Random House Trade Paperbacks, (2005), 11. 223 Kathy Eivazi, “Computer Use Monitoring and Privacy at Work,” Computer Law & Security Review 27

(2011): 517. 224 Jeffrey, The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age, 11; Thomas Mathiesen,

“The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault’s ‘Panopticon’ Revisited,” Theoretical Criminology 1, no. 2 (1997):

215-234.


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Several researchers, after comparing monitored employees with non-monitored employees in both

laboratory and field studies, reported that the monitored employees, unlike the nonmonitored,

experienced higher levels of stress, job dissatisfaction, depression, anger and fatigue.225 M.J. Smith

et al. in their study on worker’s stress illustrate that “the monitored employees reported higher

workload, less workload variation and great workload dissatisfaction than the unmonitored

employees the monitored employees also reported less control over their jobs […] less fairness of

their work standards and more frequent interaction with difficult customers.”226 Researchers like

Mahmoud Moussa identify both positive and negative features of stress in human life.227 Referring

to R.W. Griffin’s description of the consequences of stress, Mahamoud Moussa writes that the

“employee level of satisfaction, motivation, commitment, loyalty, and integrity in the workplace can

be affected as a result of extreme levels of stress”228 and leads to tension and pressure among

employees. Moussa, quoting Schermerhorn, further explains that,

[s]tress is comprised of two types: (a) “constructive stress,” and sometimes called “eustress,” is

personally energizing and performance-enhancing, urges greater endeavours, inspires creativity,

and enhances commitment, while still not devastating the individual or causing undesirable

consequences, and (b) “destructive stress,” which arises when there is a severe stress that may

affect an individual’s physical and mental systems and lead to job burnout or aggressive behaviour

toward others in the workplace.229

This stress leads, as discussed in the previous chapters, to psychological complaints (emotional

disorders) and physical complaints (health hazards). These effects are even accentuated by various

studies, which highlights that electronic monitoring is a major cause of psychological and physical

complaints among workers and that “monitoring makes us feel like prisoners hooked up to a

computer; mistreated, guilty, paranoid, enslaved, violated, angry, and driven at a relentless pace.”230

To further understand this stressful condition, M. J. Smith et al. point to what they call as “bathroom

break harassment,” where “workers’ stress becomes unbearable because employees fail to take

needed bathroom breaks out of fear of termination.”231 Stress is high and severe indeed when such

225 J. R. Aiello and K.J. Kolb, “Electronic Performance Monitoring and Social Context: Impact on Productivity

and Stress,” Journal of Applied Psychology 80 (1995): 339–353; R. David and R. Henderson, “Electronic

Performance Monitoring: A Laboratory Investigation of the Influence of Monitoring and Difficulty on Task

Performance, Mood State, and Self-Reported Stress Levels,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 30,

(2000): 906–920; M. J. Smith, P. Carayon, K. J. Sanders, S. Y. Lim, and D. LeGrande, “Employee Stress

and Health Complaints in Jobs With and Without Monitoring,” Applied Ergonomics 23 (1992): 17–27; David

Holman, Claire Chissick and Peter Totterdell, “The Effects of Performance Monitoring on Emotional Labour

and Well-Being in Call Centers,” Motivation and Emotions 26, no. 1 (2002): 60. 226 M.J. Smith, P. Carayon, K.J. Sanders, S-Y. Lim, and D. LeGrande, “Employee Stress and Health Complaints

in Jobs with and Without Electronic performance monitoring,” Applied Ergonomics 23, no.1 (1992): 21. For

the same reference, see: Jitendra M. Mishra and Suzanne M. Crampton, “Employee Monitoring: Privacy in

the Workplace?” S.A.M. Advanced Management Journal 63, no. 3 (1998): 8. 227 Mahmoud Moussa, “Monitoring Employee Behaviour Through the Use of Technology and Issues of

Employee Privacy in America,” SAGE Open 5, no. 2 (2015): 1-13. Some kind of stress is recommended for

organizations that value a healthier atmosphere as it increases employee energy. DeCenzo, David A. and

Stephen P. Robbins, Fundamentals of Human Resource Management, 8th ed. New Delhi, India: John Wiley,

2005. 228 Moussa, “Monitoring Employee Behaviour Through the Use of Technology and Issues of Employee Privacy

in America,” 7. 229 J. R. Schermerhorn Jr. Introduction to management, 11th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2011); Moussa,

“Monitoring Employee Behaviour Through the Use of Technology and Issues of Employee Privacy in

America,” 7. 230 Richard L. Worsnop, “Privacy in the Workplace,” CQ Researcher 3, no. 43 (1993): 1025. 231 Mishra and Crampton, “Employee Monitoring: Privacy in the Workplace?” 8. See also, Kristen Bell

DeTienne, “Big Brother or Friendly Coach? Computer Monitoring in the 21st Century,” The Futurist 27, no.


177

basic needs are restricted and when employees are deprived of even the most elementary amenities

of human life. Here also there can be a psychological reaction to complete monitoring, a motivational

reaction to persons or systems, when employees feel restrictions or regulations that curtail, threaten

or even eliminate their personal autonomy or desired behavioural patterns.232 Employees thus adopt

and adapt to certain behaviours that are contrary to those intended or expected. As it occurs in

response to threats of behavioural freedom, this also leads to social isolation in the workplace and

subjective behavioural changes.

Another theme that we need to emphasize here, apart from growing stress, is trust and mistrust. As

the term surveillance is also equated with “supervision, close observation, and invigilation of

individuals who are not trusted to work or go about unwatched,”233 the element of trust and mistrust

are prominent in this definition. Carolyn W. Baarda writes that “close monitoring of work is an

employment practice based on mistrust and lack of respect for basic human dignity.”234 Several

studies have identified that trust between employees and management is reduced when extensive

surveillance is put in place and quantity is preferred to quality.235 Employees typically interpret

increased surveillance as a sign of managerial distrust, which adversely affects their relationship with

managers and a lack of trust.236 There emerges a new behavioural pattern, as Zuboff calls it, an

“anticipatory conformity” to the surveillance systems as full cooperation in order to avoid or reduce

the risk of “unwanted discovery,” and this often diminishes trust and confidence both among workers

and between workers and management.237 It also, in course of time, creates a hostile work

environment.238 This shows that control systems like electronic monitoring communicate distrust to

employees, which often leads to retaliation and deviance.

For instance, the feeling of stringent role obligation defaulted on employees by employers

encourages them to engage in “reciprocal deviance,” which in turn affects their performance in the

workplace.239 This deviance, according to Sandra L. Robinson and Rebecca J. Bennet, can also be

called ‘production deviance,’ as it exhibits counterproductive behaviours, such as intentionally

5 (1993): 35-36. Cf. Kaupins and Coco, “Perceptions of Internet-of-Things Surveillance by Human Resource

Managers,” 54. 232 The theory of psychological reactance is developed by Jack William Brehm and is defined as “an aversive

reaction in response to regulations or impositions that impinge on freedom and autonomy.” Sharon S. Brehm

and Jack W. Brehm, Psychological Reactance: A Theory of Freedom and Control (San Diego, CA: Academic

Press, 1981), 1-6; Jack W. Brehm, A theory of psychological reactance (New York: Academic Press, 1966);

Jack W. Brehm, “Psychological Reactance: Theory and Applications,” in NA - Advances in Consumer

Research 16, eds., Thomas K. Srull and Provo, UT (Association for Consumer Research, 1989): 72-75. 233 Zureik, “Theorizing Surveillance: The Case of the Workplace,” 37. 234 Carolyn W. Baarda, Computerized Performance Monitoring: Implications for Employers, Employees and

Human Resource Management (Kingston, ON: IRC Queen’s University, 1994, 17. 235 Botan and Vorvoreanu, “What Do Employees Think about Electronic Surveillance at Work?” 130; Yerby,

“Legal and ethical Issues of Employee Monitoring,” 47; Effy Oz, Richard Glass and Robert Behling,

“Electronic Workplace Monitoring: What Employees Think,” OMEGA, The International Journal of

Management Science 27 (1999): 168. 236 Peter Jeffrey Holland, Brian Cooper and Rob Hecker, “Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in the

Workplace: The Effects on Trust in Management, and the Moderating Role of Occupational Type,” Personnel

Review 44, no. 1 (2015): 162. 237 Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart machine: The Future of Work and Power (New York: Basic,1988),

345; Susan Bryant, “Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace,” Canadian Journal of Communication 20, no.

4 (1995): 505-521. 238 Hamed Al-Rjoub, Arwa Zabian and Sami Qawasmeh, “Electronic Monitoring: The Employees Point of

View,” Journal of Social Science 4, no. 3 (2008): 191. 239 Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns,” 112.


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working more slowly or taking excessive breaks.240 For example, ‘employee-shirking’ behaviours –

not working as hard as expected or as called for – are notably increasing patterns of behaviours

observed in the organizational workplace by higher forms of electronic surveillance.241 This also

fosters an ‘opportunistic-act’ behaviour among employees, such that neither unrewarded actions nor

helpful behaviour are exhibited.242 Likewise, employees engage in impression management to

influence, often manipulatively, evaluations and supervisory assessments.243 Impression

management is defined as a process where “people attempt to influence the image others have of

them.”244 It is now a common phenomenon in the workplace and affects any areas, including

performance appraisal, information/feedback seeking, etc.245 It is driven, in such cases, by the prime

human motivationto be viewed in a favourable or conducive manner, avoiding the negative opinion

of others.246 Such behaviours, in turn, may lead employers to suspect the authenticity of the conveyed

impression. Hence, employees often exploit opportunities to increase their own welfare by enhancing

their own self-interest.

The intentional reduction of work effort is another common response of employees to monitoring.247

A study by Armin Falk and Michael Kosfeld on the consequences of control on employee motivation

reveals that tighter monitoring and control of employees entails various hidden costs in response,

including a deliberate performance drop.248 According to their study, employees consider “the

controlling decision as a signal of distrust and a limitation of their choice autonomy,”249 and thus as

counterproductive in many instances. However, workplaces with a climate of higher levels of

expressed trust exhibit higher responsibility norms and less deviance.250 That means that the higher

the trust climate, the less deviance occurs. When electronic monitoring is implemented in response

to any deviant behaviour, organizations only strike the symptoms, forgetting to root out the basic

cause of these behaviours thus triggering feelings of distrust. Zweig write that “decreased trust,

coupled with an electronic monitoring system that violates boundaries and triggers privacy and

fairness concerns, might lead to a decrease in organizational commitment.”251 Several researchers,

such as Sonny S. Ariss, express that employees’ strong feeling of being disresepected and distrusted

240 Sandra L. Robinson and Rebecca J. Bennett, “A Typology of Deviant Workplace Behaviours: A

Multidimensional Scaling Study,” The Academy of Management Journal 38, no. 2 (1995): 555-572; Bhave,

“The Invisible Eye? Electronic Performance Monitoring and Employee Job Performance,” 611. 241 Bhave, “The Invisible Eye? Electronic Performance Monitoring and Employee Job Performance,” 611. 242 Bhave, “The Invisible Eye? Electronic Performance Monitoring and Employee Job Performance,” 612. 243 Bhave, “The Invisible Eye? Electronic Performance Monitoring and Employee Job Performance,” 613. 244 Mark C. Bolino, “Citizenship and Impression Management: Good Soldiers or Good Actors?” The Academy

of Management Review 24, no. 1 (1999): 84. 245 Bolino, “Citizenship and Impression Management,” 84. Referring to Jones and Pittman, five categories of

impression management tactics are indicated: “(1) ingratiation, where individuals seek to be viewed as

likable; (2) exemplification, in which people seek to be viewed as dedicated; (3) intimidation, where

individuals seek to appear dangerous or threatening; (4) self-promotion, in which individuals hope to be seen

as competent; and (5) supplication, where people seek to be viewed as needy or in need of assistance.” Bolino,

“Citizenship and Impression Management,” 84-85. See for instance, Edward E. Jones and Thane S. Pittman,

“Toward a General Theory of Strategic Self-Presentation,” in Psychological Perspectives on the Self, vol.1,

ed., Jerry Suis (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1982), 231-262. 246 Bolino, “Citizenship and Impression Management,” 85.

247 Bruno S. Frey, “Does Monitoring Increase Work Effort? The Rivalry with Trust and Loyalty,” Economic

Inquiry 31, no. 4 (1993): 663. 248 Armin Falk and Michael Kosfeld, “The Hidden Costs of Control,” The American Economic Review 96, no.

5 (2006): 1611-1630. 249 Falk and Kosfeld, “The Hidden Costs of Control,” 1611. 250 Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns,” 113. 251 Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns,” 113.


179

leads to decreased performance252 and deviant behaviours as well as low morale. All these, finally,

lead to more absenteeism253 and a high level of employee turnover. How surveillance and resultant

denial of self-respect lead to such a loss of self-determination and self-identity is further explored

here below.

4.4.2 The Loss of Self-Determination and Self-Identity

The panoptic effects of surveillance are generally perceived, according to Botan and Vorvoreanu, to

be both internal and behavioural.254 The effects become internal when the contrast between visibility

and invisibility creates internal vulnerability in workplace performance and processes, then has

behavioural effects as employees behave differently in response to that vulnerability. An altered

social relationship thus result from both the relative isolation imposed by surveillance and

employees’ felt need to maintain their privacy, individuality, and dignity as human persons.255

Previously discussed effects of surveillance, in the form of a reduced sense of privacy, reduced self-

esteem, increased uncertainty, reduced workplace communication and commitments, etc., all in fuel

a sense among employees that their self-determination has been lost. Due to the visibility-invisibility

contrast,256 where employees feel the continuing presence of surveillance whether or not it is being

done, propagates itself and leads to a sense of materialistic determinism. As discussed, surveillance

thus directly implies distrust and attacks the self-esteem of employees, implicitly suggesting that

“they are bad enough, or lazy enough, to make surveillance necessary.”257 It is a kind of meta-

communication that creates a distrusting scenario in the workplace.

This also has another negative psychological effect, in that the intrinsic motivation of employees

distressingly decreases and their identity assessment and sense of self-determination are impaired.

This situation worsens when employees feel that, on the one hand, that their involvement and

competence are not thought to be enough, and on the other hand, that their choice autonomy is limited

by external forces and that they are being forced to act only in a certain specified manner.258 This

shows that self-determination involves the characteristics of both internal and external motivations,

and the distinction between the two – the former being autonomous, the latter controlled – contributes

heavily to it. Maryléne Gagné and Edward L. Deci write, in this respect, that “autonomy involves

acting with a sense of volition and having the experience of choice […] in contrast, being controlled

involves acting with a sense of pressure, a sense of having to engage in the actions.”259 Here, over

against integrated self-regulation, we find, as Gagné and Deci put it, a kind of introjected regulation

that aims to exercise full control over persons.260 So, in a work-context, when employee behaviour

is controlled and restricted through external electronic monitoring, the capacity of self-determination

is lost and there arises, instead, only materialistic determination, which is more technological and

with a kind of ‘other-determination.’ Ultimately, this causes undesired behavioural regulations in the

workplace.

252 Sonny S. Ariss, “Computer Monitoring: Benefits and Pitfalls Fasing Management,” Information &

Management 39 (2002): 557. 253 Al-Rjoub, Zabian and Qawasmeh, “Electronic Monitoring: The Employees Point of View,” 191. 254 Botan and Vorvoreanu, “What De Employees Think about Electronic Surveillance at Work?” 133. 255 Botan and Vorvoreanu, “What De Employees Think about Electronic Surveillance at Work?” 133. 256 Carl Botan, “Communication Work and Electronic Surveillance: A Model for Predicting Panoptic Effects,”

Communication Monographs 63, no. 4 (1996): 298. 257 Botan, “Communication Work and Electronic Surveillance,” 302. 258 Maryléne Gagné and Edward L. Deci, “Self-Determination Theory and Work Motivation,” Journal of

Organizational Behaviour 26, no. 4 (2005): 331-362. 259 Gagné and Deci, “Self-Determination Theory and Work Motivation,” 333-334. 260 Gagné and Deci, “Self-Determination Theory and Work Motivation,” 334-335.


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Lyon speaks also about a socio-ethical disjuncture over the identity of the surveilled subjects. For

him, there seems to emerge a separation between two identities of the subject: a categorical profile

identity, and the subject’s ‘self-identity.’ The former of these, “the data image or digital persona that

circulates within risk assessment and other cognate surveillance communications,” Lyon writes, “is

increasingly distanced from the person from whom the data was initially obtained.”261 This

distinction produces low self-esteem and negatively wired individuality among employees, as they

are being looked down at and treated as mere identity profiles. Employees at this juncture emerge as

‘virtual robots,’ behaving only at the will and whim of employers, diminishing their self-respect and

sense of identity.262 Further, employees with this type of low self-identity also exhibit ‘anticipatory

conformity,’ behaving in passive, submissive or tolerant way in order to be accepted in work-related

situations. They often display a very minimal level of motivation and commitment.263 Thus,

employees’ controlled orientation and this kind of non-autonomous work climate that reduces self-

determinism have pervasively negative effects on employee behaviour, and thus negative work

outcomes. By contrast, maximizing employees’ opportunities to self-determinism and thus to take

initiatives leads to positive work outcomes.

One of the other key problems identified in relation to self is that when employees have internalised

the imperative to perform in any condition in the workplace, a subjectification process happens where

they become “observing entrepreneurial subjects and observed, objectified labouring bodies.”264

Moore and Robinson further explaine that the “[p]sychological changes arising from precarity

contribute to the formation of anxious selves who have internalised the imperative to perform a two-

part subjectification of workers as observing entrepreneurial subjects and observed, objectified

labouring bodies.”265 These issues are crucial mostly because the transcendence of the person makes

him or her unique relative to all other individuals. Persons cannot be understood as automated

machines or a mere “work force.” More than a member of a work force, an individual is unique

because he or she has more than the mere minimum status of an object. Individuals cannot be replaced

by any power system, since persons are beyond all systems of power and force. Therefore, any

devaluation of the value of a person does violence to his or her transcendence and uniqueness. This

will be discussed in detail in the concluding chapter. Finally, the above-mentioned negative work

outcomes also include depersonalization and even emotional exhaustion and collapse, which has the

further detrimental effect of curtailing extra-role behaviours in the workplace, leading employees to

do only what is minimally required. In what follows, we discuss this curtailment of extra-role

behaviours.

4.4.3 Effects on Social Process: The Curtailment of Extra-Role Behaviours

Most agree that environmental interaction plays a role in the process of social learning or behaviours,

and this introduces social process theories, such as social learning theory, into our discussion.

Learning is always a cognitive process in a social context that happens by observation, imitation and

modelling of behaviours and attitudes, then a reinforcement of the same (by means of reward or

punishment).266 Thus, there are both internal and external processes in learning and developing

261 Lyon, “Facing the future: Seeking ethics for everyday surveillance,” 173. 262 Jane Ragoo and Reeaz Chuttoo, “The Negative Effects of CCTV Workplace Surveillance,” Le Mauricien,

April 24, 2015. http://www.lemauricien.com/article/negative-effects-cctv-workplace-surveillance [accessed

March 15, 2017]. 263 Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” 93. 264 Moore and Robinson, “The Quantified Self: What Counts in the Neoliberal Workplace,” 2776. 265 Moore and Robinson, “The Quantified Self: What Counts in the Neoliberal Workplace,” 2776. 266 Any human behaviour, according to social learning theory, is developed in a reciprocal process of

continuous interaction and influence of cognition, behaviour and environment. Albert Bandura and Richard

H. Walters, Social Learning and Personality Development (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963);


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behavioural patterns. To secure a fuller understanding of monitoring effects on employees, in

addition to the societal implications of social sorting, categorical suspicion, power control,

surveillance creep, etc., we need to consider its effects on social process. For, as our previous

discussions show, from the perspective of those who are the subjects of monitoring, “a more sinister

facet of choice, power and empowerment arises”267 and bring adverse effects of social processes.

This means that any monitoring, now trying to be embedded in workplace cultures, alters working

conditions, often by way of unwanted policing and creating another undesired social order.268 This

leads to social exclusion as employment opportunities are stratified due to the biased rules of thumb,

and if “left unchecked, such biases may develop into the exclusion of particular groups of candidates

from recruitment processes through the use of particular keywords, and hence leaves the organization

open to discrimination claims.”269 Therefore, monitoring does have adversarial effects on employee

behaviours in given social situations.

Surveillance in the workplace is not an equal-opportunity endeavour, as its internal and external

effects are not equally distributed. Nevertheless, we know that management practices of

“acknowledging others’ perspectives, providing meaningful rationales, and minimizing controls

[are] autonomy supportive”270 and redirect employee behaviours. Individual-centred behaviour is

fostered when an employee is monitored on an individual basis, and this discourages any employee

from working on a team basis to achieve organizational goals. This in turn, according to Mishra and

Crampton, destroys community-spirit among workers.271 According to Ball, “where monitoring was

less emphasized, there was relatively more opportunity for personal development, challenge, self-

pacing and promotion.”272 This phenomenon, indeed, promotes constructive relationships among

employees themselves, disregarding a mere rule-based compliance to build the same. In addition to

this, more recurrent surveillance processes seem to curtail frequent positive and constructive “above-

and-beyond” behaviours in the workplace. Researchers, in this line, observe that “employees’ sense

of emotional and mental resource depletion avert them from putting extra effort or spending personal

time in activities that exceed job requirements.”273Extra-role behaviours, which “are discretionary

workplace behaviours that exceed employees’ basic job requirements”274 are curtailed. Contrary to

this, employees may engage in additional positive behaviours to create a good impression and stay

“on the good side” of evaluators, leading to defective work performance.

A deep analysis of surveillance and social process shows that changes in employees’ social

preferences is also relevant here. For limitations of surveillance also challenge the dynamic features

and characteristics of social life and the well-being of all individual employees. The previously

discussed study by Falk and Kosfeld on the hidden costs of control also concludes that employees’

willingness to act selflessly is reduced and interest in improving performance decreases.275 This study

confirms that most employees exhibit “control-averse behaviour,” i.e., they are less motivated to

Albert Bandura, Social Learning Theory (New York: General Learning Press, 1971), 3-11; and, Robin M.

Hartinger-Saunders and Christine M. Rine, “The Intersection of Social Process and Social Structure Theories

to Address Juvenile Crime: Toward a Collaborative Intervention Model,” Journal of Human Behaviour in the

Social Environment 21, no. 8 (2011): 910-911. 267 Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” 98. 268 Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” 96. 269 Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” 99. 270 Gagné and Deci, “Self-Determination Theory and Work Motivation,” 350. 271 Mishra and Crampton, “Employee Monitoring: Privacy in the Workplace?” 10. 272 Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” 96. 273 Laura Petitta and Michele Vecchione, “Job Burnout, Absenteeism, and Extra Role Behaviours,” Journal of

Workplace Behavioural Health 26, no. 2 (2011): 98. 274 Petitta and Vecchione, “Job Burnout, Absenteeism, and Extra Role Behaviours,” 105. 275 Falk and Kosfeld, “The Hidden Costs of Control,” 1616.


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strive for high performance if employers unnecessarily force them to perform.276 Falk and Kosfeld

prefer trusting relationships over controlling relationships. Observing surveillance and the resulting

changes in the social process also identifies the emergence of a “virtual self,” a new form of the

employee as a social being with “a composite of multiple digital information sources,” whose

“ubiquity and multidimensionality […] pose greater threats to personal freedom and social

security.”277 By this, employees feel captive while engaged in different activities in the workplace.

Thus, complete monitoring changes our social order, and in particular how employees as citizens

live, explore, define, and sometimes limit their physical, moral, and institutional boundaries.

To sum up this section, electronic surveillance creates adverse employee behavioural patterns in

organizations, leading to job dissatisfaction and decreased productivity and reduced trust. It also

leads to mental illnessness such as increased stress, a sense of powerlessness and vulnerability, and

heightened rates of turnover, absenteeism purposeful negligence of extra-role behaviours. In

continuation to this, what effects make the the Indian context distinctive are explored in the

concluding section.

4.5 A DIGITALIZED CASTE SYSTEM AND EMPLOYEE COLONIZING: THE INDIAN SCENARIO

Since systems of surveillance are identified as “mechanisms for societal differentiation,”278 it is high

time to examine a few unique impacts of workplace surveillance in the previously discussed cultural

and socio-economic context of India. A sudden progression or change is experienced in Indian work

situations, as a previously discussed, including the shift from agriculture-based rural society to

industry-based urban society and from there to the present information-based metropolitan society.

This is rapid and difficult to handle. The adaptation to the industrial revolution itself, for example,

brought with it, along with economic advancement and employment specification, an altered work

method reflecting and synchronizing Western lines of work structures and processes and a Western

worldview. Premilla D’Cruz, analysing this fatalistic outlook of Indian work scenario alterations,

rightly points out that “rooted in the logical imperatives of industrialism, which dictates movement

away from traditional social and economic patterns where familial, filial and ethnic factors

predominate, these workplaces emphasize universalism, professionalism, rationality, functional

specificity, and contractual relations, privileging merit, competence, rules, and interest-based/class-

based associations.”279 However, D’Cruz observes that, though exposed to Western influences and

hence undergoing a subsequent assimilation and transformation, “the Indian ethos continues to

prevail and thus Indian workplaces reflect a confluence between Indian culture and Western

industrialism.”280 This in fact indicates the need for a investigation of the distinctive Indian work

scenario.

Technology has today taken centre stage in Indian organizational workplaces and has had both

constructive and destructive features. The widely-implemented surveillance systems and

technologies in the organizational workplaces, with their classifying drive, function through different

perspectives and must be examined in view of proper circumstantial evidence. As we have discussed

above, the drive for “classification does not emerge naturally from some intrinsic characteristics of

276 Falk and Kosfeld, “The Hidden Costs of Control,” 1628. 277 Mun-Cho Kim, “Surveillance Technology, Privacy and Social Control: With Reference to the Case of the

Electronic National Identification Card in South Korea,” International Sociology 19, no. 2 (2004): 202. 278 Surveillance systems, in line with the assigned status of populations now construct differences and by

normalizing this difference, regulate them. Torin Monahan, “Editorial: Surveillance Inequality,” Surveillance

& Society 5, no. 3 (2008): 219. 279 D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, 13. 280 D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, 13.


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persons or things but rather from culturally defined perspectives that are often associated with

economic and political power.”281 For any shared and structured values and beliefs systems

underlying a cultural context result in generating norms for commonly accepted behaviours in a

society. The same principle is applied in an organizational context too, where various background

cultures have considerable influence on employee behaviours and attitudes. Thus, long-term

exposure to continuous monitoring and the consequent forceful behavioural alteration adversely

affects their motivations and brings about job exhaustion and a detached response.

Indian society has been conceived generally as having a relational character, where there is a

coexistence of individualism and collectivism. We have already explored this in the second chapter.

Due to this, generally, the social affiliation of each member has been endorsed, providing mutual

support and sense of belonging.282 Geert Hofstede observes that power distance has been generally

endorsed in Indian workplace culture, and hence that employees tend to be willing to accept an

unequal power distribution. Accordingly, as D’Cruz contends, “favouritism and nepotism thrive,

with ingroup members receiving privileges and outgroup members being discriminated against.”283

Along this same line, the mirroring phenomena of collectivism, hierarchical power distance, low

gender egalitarianism and other-oriented social practices mark the distinctiveness of employee

behaviour in organizations in India. Employees tend to accept this type of power gap and perceive it

as a part of workplace discipline. Social power control exercised by electronic surveillance systems

and simultaneous instructive and punitive communications of management about those systems have

put in place various sets of behavioural norms among employees. In this field, we can distinguish the

following three categories: (1) the emergence of a new caste structure and digital colonising; (2)

deviant attitudes and behavioural practices; and (3) perceived occupational violence and resultant

anti-social behaviours.

4.5.1 A New Caste Structure through Digital Colonizing

High power distance and the hierarchical systems that result determine the interpersonal and

intergroup interactions in India, and “those higher up in the hierarchy enjoy power over those

below.”284 Employee surveillance now re-creates an ingrained mindset of power distance, and thus

promotes caste differentiation in Indian workplaces. In many workplaces today, employees are

digitally connected with one another through computer and internet systems, and this linked

association changes employee lives. The ethnographic example of the Indian caste system has been

previously explained in the second chapter. The re-formed classless social groups and working class

of this post-modern era are now differentiated through digital monitoring technologies in workplaces.

We recall that the Criminal Tribes Act, enacted in India in 1871 by the British colonial government

declared that people from certain casts have inherent criminal tendencies (presumed guilty by birth),

falsely targeted people by accusing them criminal and illicit activities (without confirming reports),

and restricted their movements and socialization. In the same way, electronic monitoring practices

target suspected groups in high volume and isolate them by attributing to them an assumption of bad

character.285 As previous observations prove, the use of unobtrusive technologies to monitor the

281 Kim, “Surveillance Technology, Privacy and Social Control,” 197. Originally from: Philip Doty, “Digital

Privacy: Toward a New Politics and Discursive Practice,” Annual Review of Information Science and

Technology 35 (2001): 151. 282 D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, 9. 283 D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, 9. 284 D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, 10. 285 Ramnarayan Rawat, Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011): 26–27; Henry Schwarz, Constructing the Criminal Tribe in

Colonial India: Acting Like a Thief (USA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010): 69–78; Birinder P. Singh, Criminal

Tribes of Punjab: A Social-Anthropological Inquiry (New York: Routledge, 2010): liv–lvi; Vinayak


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workplace and activities implicitly presumes that every employee is “potentially guilty.” This leads

to a segregation of human rights in ways equivalent to other dimensions of citizenship.

Similarly, just like some caste identities and memberships are being criminalised while others enjoy

preferential treatment in India today, some employees are perceived to be predisposed to criminal

behaviours, both due to their supposed hereditary dispositions and due to socio-cultural norms,

traditions and practices. Employers often act upon this presumption in workplaces.286 This employee

discrimination though digital captivity may be identified as India’s old practice of maltreatment of

Dalits - India’s hidden apartheid - that reappears in modern workplaces in a more polished form.287

Referring to the ‘2006 Khairlanji murder case’ – the brutal murder of an entire Dalit family – Anand

Teltumbde, for instance, argues that, though the constitution of India formally abolished the caste

system, this system persists and is well assimilated to globalizing India, and it expresses itself through

acts of crime against members of the Dalit castes.288 This caste differentiating practices now finds a

new ally and is reflected in several areas of human life mediated through technological

advancements. Referring to a study by David Flaherty on privacy protection, James Rule and Peter

Brantley point out that surveillance is directed more specifically at employees who represent the less

powerful segments of society, such as typists or low-level data processers.289 The less powerful are

more affected by the system. In India, the above said differential surveillance is also articulated as

marginalizing surveillance, such that “the creation or enforcement of conditions of marginality

through the application of different surveillance systems for different populations.”290 This would

mean that the cultural and class domination of Indian caste practices are re-enacted in organizational

workplaces through a new “digital domination” by hierarchical authorities, enabled by digital

monitoring systems.

According to a study by Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D’Cruz, the negative effects of stringent

monitoring in Indian organizational workplaces, especially in IT, ITeS workplaces, BPOs and call

centres, is closely related to psycho-physical health problems. Employees detail how difficult it is to

leave the system even to use the restroom or “get a breather” when strict monitoring and the resultant

time binding is at hand.291 This amounts to a colonising experience among employees – a new form

of digital or electronic colonizing. For “the intensive and individualistic nature of the work, the

inability to interact with colleagues or leave work stations, […] complex and variable shift patterns,

Chaturvedi, Peasant Pasts History and Memory in Western India (Berkeley, USA: University of California

Press, 2007): 122–126; Jagan Karade, Development of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in India

(Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2014): 25, 23–28; Schwarz, Constructing the criminal tribe in colonial

India: acting like a thief, 99–101. 286 Nicholas B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Harvard: Harvard

University Press, 2006), 27; Frank de Zwart, “The Logic of Affirmative Action: Caste, Class and Quotas in

India,” Acta Sociologica 43, no. 3 (2000): 235. 287 Gopal Guru and Shiraz Sidhva, “India’s “Hidden Apartheid”,” UNESCO Courier, 2001,

https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-79007221/india-s-hidden-apartheid [accessed March 25, 2017]. See

also the reference for this hidden apartheid, the caste segregation of entire villages, in: William A. Haviland,

Harald E.L. Prins, Dana Walrath and Bunny McBride, The Essence of Anthropology, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA:

Wadsworth, 2013), 284. 288 Anand Teltumbde, The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid

(London: Zed Books, 2010), 9-39, 173-188. 289 Rule and Brantley, “Computerized Surveillance in the Workplace: Forms and Distributions Source,” 417. 290 Monahan, “Editorial: Surveillance Inequality,” 220. 291 Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D’Cruz, “Engaging in Professional: Organising Call Centre Agents in India,”

Industrial Relations Journal 40, no. 3 (2009): 219.


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management control strategies such as close monitoring,”292 etc. This leads to an upsurge in this

captivity in the digital workplace. The hypersensitivity of management to comply with targets and

deadlines leads them, for example, to watch and check employees who are on sick leave, asking for

their mandatory return with warnings of blocking salaries, and thus tends to produce a colonising

experience.293 Another example is the practice of employees’ self-enforced ‘long hours of working’

beyond shift hours to impress authorities and ensure their own positions. Noronha and D’Cruz

illustrate in this regard that,

These long hours at work were extended by the ordeal of road travel, leaving agents with no time

to take care of their family chores or attend social gatherings, which included religious festivities,

at times making them question their own existence. They seemed helpless at having to

compromise on culture, friends and family. For instance, there was nothing that employees could

do even when their spouses complained of not having the time to speak to each other or share a

meal with family members for weeks on end.294

This monitoring through technology-based mechanisms causes added dissatisfaction in the

workplace and has effect we have discussed above: employee turnover, absenteeism and a sense

among employees that they are being colonised. A plethora of employee monitoring and control

mechanisms, which reduce the chance of self-discretion and collective representation, broadens the

intensity and extension of this experience.

4.5.2 Behavioural Deviances in Work-Life Attitudes and Practices

The above-discussed general behavioural patterns of labour turnover, attrition, and absenteeism are

alarmingly on the increase in the Indian IT/BPO sectors.295 The main factors that determine

employment exit or absenteeism are job security and job stress, along with the “nature of the

organization such as supervision” and other such intruding industrial conditions.296 For instance, the

work traditions of India, which enabled workers to devote their whole being to a company and spend

their entire work lives in a single career, even with low financial rewards, is challenged and altered

with the current short-termist attitude of the labour market. This is exacerbated by issues like a “lack

of control, extensive monitoring, the prevalence of targets and the brevity and infrequency of breaks

all leads to emotional exhaustion and withdrawal”297 and leads to high levels of job dissatisfaction

and the consequent increased job attrition and absenteeism.298 Absenteeism in work is defined as

292 Noronha and D’Cruz, “Engaging in Professional: Organising Call Centre Agents in India,” 215. See also,

Patricia Todd, Joan Eveline, Leonie Still and Judy Skene, “Management Responses to Unions in Australian

Call Centres: Exclude, Tolerate or Embrace?” Australian Bulletin of Labour 29, no. 2 (2003): 162–176. 293 Noronha and D’Cruz, “Engaging in Professional: Organising Call Centre Agents in India,” 220. 294 Noronha and D’Cruz, “Engaging in Professional: Organising Call Centre Agents in India,” 220. 295 Aruna Ranganathan and Sarosh Kuruvilla, “Labour Turnover in the Business Process Outsourcing Industry

in India,” in Management Practices in High-Tech Environments, eds. D. Jemielniak and Kociatkiewicz

(Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2008), 110–132; Pawan Budhwar, Neeru Malhotra and Virender Singh, “Work

Processes and Emerging Problems in Indian Call Centres,” in The Next Available Operator: Managing

Human Resources in Indian Call Centres/BPO Providers, eds. Mohan Thite and Bob Russell (Delhi: Sage,

2009), 59–82. 296 Demirbag et al., “Employee Service Abandonment in Offshore Operations,” 179. 297 Demirbag et al., “Employee Service Abandonment in Offshore Operations,” 179. 298 Pawan S. Budhwar, Arup Varma, Virender Singh and Rohin Dhar, HRM Systems of Indian Call Centres:

An Exploratory Study, International Journal of Human Resource Management 17, no. 5 (2006): 881–897;

Neeru Malhotra, Pawan Budhwar and Peter Prowse, “Linking Rewards to Commitment: An Empirical

Investigation of Four UK Call Centres,” International Journal of Human Resource Management 18, no. 2

(2007): 2095–2127; and, Phil Taylor and Peter Bain, “India Calling to the Far Away Towns: The Call Centre

Labour Process and Globalisation,” Work Employment and Society 19, no. 2 (2005): 261–280.


186

“workers absence from their regular task when he is normally schedule to work”299 and thus is the

“lack of presence of an employee for a planned work.”300 A close study of absenteeism in the Indian

organizational workplace reveals that there are many factors that lead to this, in addition to

commonly perceived reasons such as sickness and low vitality, lack of available transport facilities,

long hours of work, nightshift, rural exodus, accidents, social and religious functions, drinking and

amusement, the nature of work, etc. As S. Rabiyathul Basriya argues, these include other personal

factors such as personal attitude, age, seniority, and gender, as well as workplace factors such as

stress, work routine, and satisfaction.301 It also becomes a part of employees’ resistance to such unfair

practices.

Several studies of Indian organizational employees and call centre workers have found that elevated

levels of electronic monitoring lead to increased stress, higher emotional exhaustion, and predicted

burnout, with dimensions of frustration and cynicism. They result in reduced efficacy and high rates

of absenteeism.302 Research in the same field shows again that employee quit rates are lower when

electronic monitoring is lower.303 Another form of workplace deviance is “presenteeism”304 – where

employees are physically present but mentally absent. The phenomenon of presenteeism is generally

defined as “attending work while ill,” which adversely affects the productivity and well-being of

employees.305 One cannot always view presenteeism negatively, however, as leading to decreased

health and thus productivity loss, since it also possesses more positive aspects, given that employee’s

presence at work can be motivated by other interests such as the aim to satisfy monitory or appraisal

intentions or garner praise.306 It often leads employees to assume a sick role while at work and to be

generally disengaged. Gary Johns, in this regard, speaks about the “draconian monitoring” that

299 S. Rabiyathul Basriya, “Employee Absenteeism in Indian Industries,” International Journal of Science and

Research 4, no. 10 (2015): 141. 300 Basriya, “Employee Absenteeism in Indian Industries,” 145. 301 Basriya, “Employee Absenteeism in Indian Industries,” 142-143. 302 R. Batt, V. Doellgast and H. Kwon, “Service Management and Employment Systems in U.S. and Indian

Call Centres,” in Brookings Trade Forum 2005: Offshoring White-Collar Work – The Issues and Implications,

eds. S. Collins & L. Brainard, 335-372 (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2005), 342. See other

references: Jagdi Singh, “Performance Productivity and Quality of Frontline Employees in Service

Organizations,” Journal of Marketing 64, no. 2 (2000): 15–34; David Holman, “Employee Well-Being in

Call Centres,” in Call Centres and Human Resource Management, eds. Stephen Deery and Nick Kinnie

(Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2004), 223–244; David Holman, Claire Chissick and Peter Totterdell, “The Effects

of Performance Monitoring on Emotional Labour and Well-Being in Call Centres,” Motivation and Emotion

26, no. 1 (2002.): 57–81. 303 Batt, Doellgast and Kwon, “Service Management and Employment Systems in U.S. and Indian Call

Centres,” 343. See, Rosemary Batt, Alex Colvin and Jeffrey Keefe, “Employee Voice, Human Resource

Practices, and Quit Rates: Evidence from the Telecommunications Industry,” Industrial and Labour Relations

Review 55, no. 4 (2002): 573–593; Jason D. Shaw, John E. Delery, G. Douglas Jenkins Jr., and Nina Gupta,

“An Organization-Level Analysis of Voluntary and Involuntary Turnover,” Academy of Management Journal

41, no. 5 (1998): 511–525. 304 Gunnar Aronsson and Klas Gustafsson, “Sickness Presenteeism: Prevalence, Attendance-Pressure Factors,

and an Outline of a Model for Research,” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 47, no. 9

(2005): 958–966; Prageetha G. Raju, “Different Manifestations of Presenteeism at Workplace: A Study of

Behaviour of Employees in I.T. Sector in India,” SSRN eLibrary, (April 15, 2012).

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2039848 [accessed April 10, 2017]; Petri Bockerman

and Erkki Lakkenen. “What Makes You Work while You are Sick? Evidence from a Survey of

Workers.” European Journal of Public Health 20, no. 1 (2010): 43-46. 305 Stephen Deery, Janet Walsh and Christopher D. Zatzick, “A Moderated Mediation Analysis of Job

Demands, Presenteeism, and Absenteeism,” Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 84

(2014): 352; Gary Johns, “Presenteeism in the Workplace: A Review and Research Agenda,” Journal of

Organizational Behaviour 31 (2010): 519. 306 Johns, “Presenteeism in the Workplace: A Review and Research Agenda,” 521.


187

stimulates employee presenteeism.307 Systemic pressure, such as continuous monitoring and “fixed

trigger points” for absence, leads to disciplinary action and stimulates higher attendance, though also

intentional presenteeism can be a form of a resistance to these practices of management.308 Likewise,

fear of job loss and commonly experienced unfavourable and impartial employee treatments and job

insecurity all reduce absenteeism and increase presenteeism in the workplace. Similarly,

presenteeism is a more dangerous form of occupational deviance than absenteeism, since it is not

always evident with what intention an employee is present for work.

Beyond the challenges of absenteeism, presenteeism and “high and chronic employee turnover,”

researchers have also examined the phenomenon of “job abandonment.” This becomes more

problematic and challenging in the context of BPO organisations in India.309 This job abandonment,

mostly described as “no-call/no-show” involves the “abrupt and un-informed departure of employees

to join another call centre.”310 This means that the organizational workforce, including both software

professionals and BPO employees, for example, who have come to believe that working in an

electronically monitored environment makes their tasks more complex, are dissatisfied and leave

their job.311 Electronic monitoring in the organizational workplace both directly and indirectly

envisages reduced job performance and negative job attitudes, leading to lower job satisfaction and

less affective commitment due to the above-discussed perception of power control among employees.

This also fosters employee turnover and reduces organizational citizenship behaviours. Brian P.

Niehoff and Robert H. Moorman also state that frequent electronic supervisory control often

functioned to encourage employee behaviours associated with reciprocity, altruism, courteousness,

conscientiousness, and civic virtue and minimized opportunities for social exchanges.312 Thus, all

these analyses point to main factors determining employment exit, which include job security and

job stress as well as other intruding industrial conditions of employee electronic supervision.

It is observed that Indian call centres “exhibit particularly egregious conditions of surveillance.”313

In a case study of multi-surveillances in the global interactive service industry, based on the Indian

call centre industry, Winifred R. Poster expresses concern: “why are Silicon Valley entrepreneurs

producing software to monitor digitally the emotions of Indian call centre workers?”314 Analysing

and exploring the effects of surveillance in Indian call centres, apart from and beyond concepts

associated with classical labour theories such as the “electronic sweatshop,” Poster identifies the role

307 Johns, “Presenteeism in the Workplace: A Review and Research Agenda,” 527. 308 Johns, “Presenteeism in the Workplace: A Review and Research Agenda,” 525. 309 Mehmet Demirbag, Kamel Mellahi, Sunil Sahadev and Joel Elliston, “Employee Service Abandonment in

Offshore Operations: A Case Study of a US Multinational in India,” Journal of Business Ethics 47 (2012):

178. 310 Demirbag et al., “Employee Service Abandonment in Offshore Operations,” 178. 311 Geetha Kumari, Gaurav Joshi and K.M. Pandey, “Factors Influencing of Job Satisfaction among Employees

in Software Industries: A Case Study of Wipro Ltd., Greater Noida, India,” Advances in Economics and

Business Management 2, no. 7 (2015): 752. 312 Brian P. Niehoff and Robert H. Morman, “Justice as a Mediator of the relationship between Methods of

Monitoring and Organizational Citizenship Behaiour,” Academy of Management Journal 36, no. 3 (1993):

527-556; Russell Cropanzano and Marie S. Mitchell, “Social Exchange Theory: An Interdisciplinary

Review,” Journal of Management 31, no. 6 (2005): 874-900; and, Debora Jeske and Alecia M. Santuzzi,

“Part-Time Workers’ Responses to Electronic Performance Monitoring,” International Journal on Working

Conditions 8 (2014): 63-82. 313 B. P. Remesh, “Work Organization, Control, and “Empowerment”: Managing the Contradictions

of Call Centre Work,” in In an Outpost of the Global Economy, eds. C. Upadhya and A. R. Vasavi (London:

Routledge, 2008), 235-262. See, Winifred R. Poster, “Emotion Detectors, Answering Machines, and E-

Unions: Multi-Surveillances in the Global Interactive Service Industry,” American Behavioural Scientist 55,

no.7 (2011): 869. 314 Poster, “Emotion Detectors, Answering Machines, and E-Unions,” 869.


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of ICTs and the resultant web of multi-surveillances in control process today exercised by

management against employees. Poster describes Indian call centres as “sites of radically invasive

technological control on peoples’ bodies and mental constitutions.”315 This situation of complete

surveillance and monitoring, in turn, leads to disengagement in the workplace. This means that

employees who are not fully engaged in the workplace, as a matter of passive resistance to ubiquitous

monitoring, also spread negativity among co-workers, prompting them to be disengaged in the

workplace in one form or another. The percentage of the disengaged workforce, according to the

Gallup global performance-management consulting company, in a study on the State of the Global

Workplace, states that only 13% of global employees are engaged at work.316 According to the study,

only 10% of workforce is fully engaged in South Asia, and only 9% in India.

Another form of behavioural deviance is attention seeking or impression management. Employees

with dependence proneness try to be profligately obliging to authorities, accepting their power

domination.317 A person with an active self-presentation seeks to make a positive impression on the

dominant agent in order to enhance their image before others. Jai B.P. Sinha indicates how an

impression is formed and managed, stating that “impression formation is about how and what picture

or impression a perceiver forms about another person who is being perceived. In impression

management, the person being perceived manages the perception of the perceiver hoping to have a

positive impact.”318 Employees manipulate this impression by being even dis-comfortably obedient

to the dominant authority in order to seek their attention and praise and secure a good image among

their co-workers. Employees respond differently to surveillance, altering their behaviour to secure

the same. According to D’Cruz, “there is acceptance, accompanied by both acquiescence and

deference to those in superior positions and a desire to acquire such a position and enjoy the benefits

that come with it. This instance is characterized by the view that a positive relationship with the

superior figure will prove advantageous.”319 Employees thus highlight constructive and optimistic

attributes for favoured treatment and restrain purposefully deficient and risky activities to achieve

desired outcomes, often in manipulative ways.

315 Poster, “Emotion Detectors, Answering Machines, and E-Unions,” 869. Researching in Indian context,

multi-surveillance model speaks over-against the technological determinism emphasised by the sweatshop

model that the power accumulated and exercised by the elites [managers] is now vested in all actors and

embedded in social relations depending upon each context. He proposed this multi-surveillance model and

proved his premises by analysing the shift form electronic sweatshop to the present multi-surveillance model.

The site of surveillance is internal to call centres in the electronic sweatshop model, whereas it reaches

worldwide interactive service web, both internal and external, to the call centre in multi-surveillance model.

The agents of surveillance are the managements in the former and uses often computers for the same while

managers, workers, consumers, clients and all stakeholders are functional agents in the latter and uses codes,

internet and all other everyday technologies. In the same way, the former projects a unidimensional dynamism

of surveillance where managers monitor workers, but the latter has a pluralized and networked dynamism

where the possibility of all participants surveille each other is guaranteed. Poster, “Emotion Detectors,

Answering Machines, and E-Unions,” 871. 316 Steve Crabtree, “Worldwide, 13% of Employees Are Engaged at Work,” Gallup, October 8, 2013.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/165269/worldwide-employees-engaged-work.aspx [accessed March 25, 2017].

Gallup is an American research-based company founded by George Gallup in 1935 that functions as a global

performance-management consulting company and now provides research and strategic consulting to huge

organizations and other large establishments in various countries. Ira Boudway, “Right or Wrong, Gallup

Always Wins,” Bloomberg, November 9, 2012. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-

08/right-or-wrong-gallup-always-wins [accessed March 25, 2017]. 317 Jai B.P. Sinha, Culture and Organizational Behaviour (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008), 104. 318 Sinha, Culture and Organizational Behaviour, 104. 319 D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, 10.


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4.5.3 Surveillance, Occupational Violence and Anti-Social Behaviours

Workplace surveillance leads to another recurring behavioural phenomenon called occupational

violence or workplace violence. This is a workplace hazard leading to further adverse occurrences

inside and outside the workplace. Violent actions and harassment (physical, mental, or sexual) are

forms of aggressive behaviours in the workplace and are defined as workplace violence.320 Referring

to the European Commission’s Guidance on the Prevention of Violence at Work, Michele Antoinette

et al. write that this occupational violence involves, “incidents where persons are abused, threatened

or assaulted in circumstances related to their work, involving an explicit or implicit challenge to their

safety, well-being or health.”321 Thomas H. Shea defines occupational or workplace violence as “any

act against an employee that creates a hostile work environment and negatively affects the employee

either physically or psychologically. These acts include all types of physical or verbal assault, threats,

coercion intimidation and all forms of harassment.”322 Another precise definition of workplace

violence is offered by the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission, which states that

“occupational violence is the attempted or actual exercise by a person of any force so as to cause

injury to a worker including any threatening statement or behaviour which gives a worker reasonable

cause to believe he or she is at risk.”323 So, any work-related incident of abuse, assault or threat

happening within or outside the workplace that puts at risk employee health and safety is a workplace

hazard and can be regarded as workplace violence.

Both social and situational factors lead to aggressive behaviours in the workplace.324 Referring to Jai

B.P. Sinha and specifially to the Indian socio-cultural context, D’Cruz observes that “there is

discomfort experienced in terms of restricted autonomy, absence of egalitarianism and lack of

connectedness, all of which could precipitate a sense of alienation, unfairness and even exploitation,

sometimes leading to covert or overt aggression.”325 For as the Indian socio-cultural inclination or

ethos for both individualism and collectivism rightly suggests, employees espouse and long for both,

simultaneously, individualistic autonomy and creativity and collectivistic workplace affiliations.326

320 Kavita Singh, Organizational Behaviour: Text and Cases, 3rd ed. (Noida, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing

House, 2015), 182. 321 R. Wynne, N. Clarkin, T. Cox and A. Griffiths, Guidance on the Prevention of Violence at Work (Brussels:

European Commission, DG-V, Ref.CE/V1-4/97, 1997); Michele Antoinette Paludi, Rudy V. Nydegger and

Carmen A. Paludi, Understanding Workplace Violence: A Guide for Managers and Employees (Westport:

Praeger, 2006), 14; Stephen J. Morewitz, Death Threats and Violence: New Research and Clinical

Perspectives (San Francisco: Springer, 2008), 89. 322 Thomas H. Shea, “Workplace Violence: Turning Down the Heat,” Workplace Violence Prevention Report

6 (2000); Paludi, Nydegger and Paludi, Understanding Workplace Violence: A Guide for Managers and

Employees, 14-15. 323 National Occupational Health and Safety Commission, “Program One Report: Occupational Violence,” 51st

Meeting of NOHSC (Hobart: NOHSC, 1999), 1; Shea, “Workplace Violence: Turning Down the Heat,” 15. 324 Joel H. Neuman and Robert A. Baron, “Workplace Violence and Workplace Aggression: Evidence

Concerning Specific Forms, Potential Causes, and Preferred Targets,” Journal of Management 24, no. 3

(1998): 391-419. 325 D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, 10-11. Jai B.P. Sinha, Culture and Organizational Behaviour (New

Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008), 28-52; Jai B.P. Sinha, “A Cultural Perspective on Organizational Behaviour

in India,” in New Perspectives on International Industrial/Organizational Psychology, eds. Christopher P.

Earley and M. Erez (San Francisco: Lexington Press, 1997), 53-74; Jai B.P. Sinha and R.N. Kanungo,

“Context Sensitivity and Balancing in Organizational Behaviour,” International Journal of Psychology 32,

no. 2 (1997): 93-106. 326 D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, 13. D’Cruz writes, referring to researchers like Jai B.P. Sinha, Sudhir

Kakar and Katharina Kakar, that “personalized relationships and exchanges, identity-based interactions and

hierarchical systems with related ingroup-outgroup affiliations and power distance influences work-life.” Jai

B.P. Sinha, Culture and Organizational Behaviour (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008); Sudhir Kakar and


190

Aggressive behavioural tendencies emerge when the balance between these individual and collective

factors is lost. Ram Raghavan regards this negative behaviour as ‘toxic’ behaviour that “causes harm,

damages relationships or generates endless adverse feeling in other people, [which] can be

detrimental to both individuals and businesses.” In his view, it is on rise in the workplace.327

Concerning this aggressive behaviour, within the scope of this study, we can say that ubiquitous and

constant electronic monitoring (situation factors) and the results of this – unfair treatment, frustrating

events and aggressive norms (social factors) – lead to hostile or biased attitudes and aggressive

thoughts and feelings, and in turn to aggressive and violent responses in the workplaces.

Figure 1, below, offers a pictorial representation of this. As we see, strict monitoring increases levels

of stress and hostility and resentment, which produces anger among employees and may lead to

occupational violence.

Figure 1 Surveillance and Aggressive Behaviours

Violence may occur between employer and employee or among employees themselves, and may

involve workplace bullying, physical and psychological assaults, verbal abuse or intentional

isolation, etc.328 All these phenomena give employees a feeling of being at risk either physically or

mentally or both. This, along with low self-esteem, negative feelings, and employees’ changing

moods, can lead to further aggressive behaviour of employees towards one another, causing physical,

emotional or psychological harm.329 This occupational violence, therefore, is marked by several

behavioural effects in various realms, including individual violence (hurting oneself, substance

abuse, suicide as its extreme form); organizational violence (stealing, damaging property, reputation

mutilation, against co-workers, clients or customers); domestic violence (against intimate partner and

family); and social violence (against friends, peer members, other social groups).330 Other results

Katharina Kakar, The Indians: Portrait of a People (New Delhi: Penguin, 2007); D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying

in India, 13. 327 Ram Raghavan, Human Capital Management Challenges in India (Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2011), 68. 328 J. Barling, “The Prediction, Experience, and Consequences of Workplace Violence,” in Violence on the

Job: Identifying Risks and Developing Solutions, eds. G. R. Vanden Bos and E. Q. Bulatao (Washington DC:

American Psychological Association Press, 1996), 29-51; J. Barling, K. Dupr´e and E. Kelloway, “Predicting

Workplace Aggression and Violence,” Annual Review of Psychology 60 (2009): 671-692. 329 Michele Antoinette Paludi, Rudy V. Nydegger and Carmen A. Paludi, Understanding Workplace Violence:

A Guide for Managers and Employees (Westport: Praeger, 2006), 16, 40. 330 Duncan Chappell and Vittorio Di Martino, Violence at Work (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2006);

Julian Barling, Kathryne E. Dupr´e and E. Kevin Kelloway, “Predicting Workplace Aggression and

Violence,” Annual Review of Psychology 60 (2009): 671-692; Claire Mayhew and Michael Quinlan, “The

Relationship between Precarious Employment and Patterns of Occupational Violence: Survey Evidence from

Thirteen Occupations,” in Health Effects of the New Labour Market, eds. Kerstin Isaksson, Christer Hogstedt,

Charli Eriksson, and Töres Theorell (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers (2002), 183-205;


191

may include sleep disturbances and speech difficulties; aggressive driving and proneness to

accidents; forgetfulness and lack of attention; over-sensitivity, lowered self-esteem and more angry

outbursts; diminished confidence and initiatives, and subsequent momentary escapism; or increased

smoking or drug and alcohol abuse, etc..

Finally, unlike workplace behavioural deviances like absenteeism, job abandonment and passive-

agressivenes, which represent a ‘flight’ response, workplace aggression and subsequent violence

represents a ‘fight’ reaction to stress and other exhausting feelings of working under continuous

monitoring and surveillance.331 Thus, to sum up, feelings of insecurity, uncertainty and deprivation,

along with added stress and distrust, all increasingly contribute to “interpersonal competition and

friction, mutual distrust, rivalry, and destructive behaviour.”332 All these phenomena will be

examined and explored in detail in the next chapter, where we will analyse a narrative and qualitative

empirical study conducted as part ofthis research. The study was conducted online with IT, ITeS,

BPO employees working in different domestic and international sectors in India.

4.6 CONCLUSION

A person is inescapably a social being, an ‘embodied social agent,’ with all the rights and duties this

entails. There is an urgent need, therefore, to reinstate the social and ethical aspects in analysis of

workplace relations within the context of electronic surveillance. This chapter proves that the

concerns noted in the previous chapter – particularly with respect to individual, employee rights of

privacy – do not entirely convey or critically analyse the whole story about surveillance and why it

matters in the workplace. Our comprehensive and critical reading of electronic surveillance in the

workplace has shown that along with employee privacy violations, it was imperative to search for

further detrimental effects that harm employees’ fuller experience of his or her personhood and

individual identity. Therefore, this chapter has dealt with concerns about categorization, coding,

disappearing bodies, and mobilities that have more detrimental and thus more ethical implications.

Although some forms of classification can reasonably be seen as necessary in social situations, for

reasons of maintaining governance and social order, these have become today increasingly invisible,

intruding, dehumanizing and are often taken for granted. This can have adverse effects in particular

contexts. At this stage of the study, surveillance could be explained as ‘policing at a distance’333 and

simultaneously projects power disparities.

This chapter, thus, focused on the complete array of surveillance concepts and going beyond the

range of mere privacy boundaries, has concerned the following: surveillance and discriminating

social relations, surveillance and power asymmetries and control, surveillance and the human body,

Liane Greenberg and Julian Barling, “Predicting Employee Aggression against Co-workers, Subordinates and

Supervisors: The Roles of Person Behaviours and Perceived Workplace Factors,” Journal of Organizational

Behaviour 20, no. 6 (1999): 897-913; Manon Mireille LeBlanc and Julian Barling, “Understanding the Many

Faces of Workplace Violence,” in Counterproductive Workplace Behaviour: Investigations of Actors and

Targets, eds. Suzy Fox and Paul E. Spector (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association,2005),

41-63; Eric F. Sygnatur and Guy A. Toscano, “Work-Related Homicides: The Facts,” Compensation and

Working Conditions 2 (2000): 5; Karl Aquino, “Structural and Individual Determinants of Workplace

Victimization: The Effects of Hierarchical Status and Conflict Management Style,” Journal of Management

26, no. 2 (2000): 171; Aaron C.H. Schat, and E. Kevin Kelloway, “Workplace Aggression,” in Handbook of

Work Stress, eds. Julian Barling, E. Kevin Kelloway, and Michael R. Frone (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,

2005), 189-218. 331 Steven L. McShane and Mary Ann von Glinow, Organizational Behaviour: Emerging Realities for the

Workplace Revolution, 4th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 213. 332 D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, 11-12. 333 David Lyon, “National ID Cards: Crime-Control, Citizenship and Social Sorting,” Policing 1, no.1 (2007):

115.


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as well as surveillance and behavioural alterations. With respect to the IT/ITeS or BPO workplaces

in India specifically, and the ensuing recognition of perceived psycho-physical ‘torture’ and resultant

attitudinal and behavioural alterations, we are forced to compare the degree of surveillance in the

Indian organizational workplace today to the situation of the Roman slave ships, and regard it as a

modern form of digital slavery. This claim will be further explored as we consider the results analysis

of a brief survey conducted online for the purpose of this research with Indian IT/ITeS and BPO

employees. This study collected their real-time responses to electronic surveillance in their

workplaces from an employee perspective.

CHAPTER FIVE

A QUALITATIVE INSPECTION OF EMPLOYEE SURVEILLANCE IN INDIA

5.0 INTRODUCTION

Although workplace surveillance is a global phenomenon, not restricted to any particular

organization, sector, society, region, or country, it has boundless ramifications both at a micro-level

(motivation, competence, motivation) and a macro-level (organizations or sectors) on the cultural or

environmental backgrounds and contexts of a given time and space.1 As a part of this research, we

have conducted a qualitative study of electronic surveillance in the workplace in the Indian context.

We have done so because the literature on electronic surveillance in the Indian organizational

workplace is dominated by theoretical discussions with little empirical support, and especially little

testimony from employees’ perspectives or consideration of ethical frameworks. The study we here

present aims to fill this lacuna and contribute to broader scholarship on these matters. The socio-

cultural and economic backgrounds and present reality of IT, ITeS, and BPO affluence in Indian

workplace culture, which we have already discussed in the second chapter, makes clear the

significance and urgency of this. This enquiry falls within the scope of this research. The aim of this

study was to examine the impact on employees of the implementation of electronic monitoring

technologies and systems in the organizational workplaces. So, the overall objective of the study is

to discover, from employees’ perspectives, the adverse effects of electronic monitoring on their

attitude, job commitment and satisfaction, and morale and behaviour.

The study has been designed to either empirically confirm or disconfirm what we have been

exploring in previous chapters through literature studies. All participants in the study were subjected

to several surveillance practices in their present or previous workplaces, ranging from CCTV

cameras, e-mails and telephone monitoring, biometric identification, and control through GPS and

RFID. This range of exposure contributes to the validity and reliability of the study. The primary

research question around which this whole study revolves was this: as an employee, describe your

feelings about working under 24/7 electronic surveillance/monitoring at work. This was the

fundamental question directed in two samples (A & B) of study, to which additional information was

added concerning how this leads to further behavioural alterations. This chapter thus presents an

overview of employee perspectives in the Indian context, methodologically reviews literature to

substantiate employee experiences, and proposes a heuristic framework for organizing research on

employee reactions to electronic monitoring.

1 David E. Cantor, “Maximizing the Potential of Contemporary Workplace Monitoring: Techno-Cultural

Developments, Transactive Memory, and Management Planning,” Journal of Business Ethics Logistics 37,

no. 1 (2016): 18-25; Steve Lohr, “Unblinking Eyes Track Employees: Workplace Surveillance Sees Good

and Bad,” The New York Times, June 21, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/technology/workplace-

surveillance-sees-good-and-bad.html?_r=0 [accessed May 10, 2017]; Marko Pitesa, “Employee surveillance

and the modern workplace,” in Business Ethics: A Critical Approach: Integrating Ethics Across the Business

World, eds. Patrick O’Sullivan, Mark Esposito and Mar Smith (London: Routledge, 2012), 206-219; John

Weckert, Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions (Hershey: Idea Group

Publishing, 2005): David Lyon, Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination

(London: Routledge, 2003); David Lyon, Surveillance society: Monitoring everyday life (Buckingham:

McGraw-Hill Education, 2001); Jitendra M. Mishra and Suzanne M. Crapton, “Employee Monitoring:

Privacy in the Workplace?” S.A.M. Advanced Management Journal 63, no. 3 (1998): 4-11.

A Qualitative Inspection of Employee Surveillance in India

194

5.1 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

As a systematic way of conducting a research, a methodology consists of “the principles and ideas

on which researchers base their procedures and strategies” (methods).2 A qualitative research

methodology is employed in this study with an aim to secure a comprehensive understanding of the

real-time experience of employees in the field.3 It is intended to be scientific, in that it “systematically

uses a predefined set of procedures to answer the question, collects evidences [and] is especially

effective in obtaining culturally specific information about the values, opinion, behaviours, and social

contexts of particular populations.”4 This qualitative research method, by emphasizing the natural

setting and real viewpoints of research participants, brings, as Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S.

Lincoln describe, takes “an interpretive naturalistic approach to the world, [which] means that

qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of or interpret

phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them.”5 It is exploratory in nature and tries to

unravel the underlying reasons and motivations of particular attitudinal and behavioural patterns

concerning a perceived issue.

Documenting the various methods used in a study enables the reader to better understand the

procedure and way in which the study developed and how it reaches its conclusions. Of the manifold

methods available in qualitative research, such as analytical induction6 and interpretive

phenomenological analysis7, this study takes phenomenography as its general-background approach,

both in its execution and description of the data collected. Phenomenography is a qualitative research

methodology emerged in early 1980s that explores the diverse ways in which different people

experience a reality differently or even contrarily. Though it was initially empirical in nature, its later

added theoretical or philosophical basis enabled it to apply rather extensive fields and disciplines

such as environmental management and workplace competence.8

This approach [phenomenography] has been described as “research which aims at description,

analysis, and understanding of experiences; that is, research which is directed towards experiential

2 Immy Holloway and Kathleen Galvin, Qualitative Research in Nursing and Healthcare, 4th ed. (West Sussex,

UK: Wiley, 2017), 21. 3 Since it is difficult to explain human experiences and behaviours in quantifiable or measurable terms,

researchers in the field of social sciences appropriately use qualitative methods to foster a deep and a

comprehensive understanding of things that occur in the social world. Beverley Hancock, Elizabeth Ockleford

and Kate Windridge, “An Introduction to Qualitative Research,” The NIHR RDS for the East Midlands /

Yorkshire & the Humber 2009 Qualitative Research (The NIHR RDS EM / YH, 2009), 4; Rosalind Edwards

and Janet Holland, What is Qualitative Interviewing? (London: Bloomsebury, 2013), 2-4; and Shoshanna

Sofaer, “Qualitative Research Methods,” International Journal for Quality in Health Care 14, no. 4 (2002):

329-336. 4 Natasha Mack, Cynthia Woodsong, Kathleen M. Macqueen, Greg Guest and Emily Namey, Qualitative

Research Methods: A Data Collector’s Field Guide (North Carolina: Family Health International, 2005), 1. 5 Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, 4th ed. (Los

Angeles: Sage, 2011), 3. 6 Phil Johnson, “Analytic induction,” in Qualitative Methods and Analysis in Organizational Research: A

Practical Guide, eds. Gillian.Symon and Catherine Cassell (London: Sage, 1998), 28-50. 7 Jonathan A. Smith, “Beyond the Divide between Cognition and Discourse: Using Interpretative

Phenomenological Analysis in Health Psychology,” Psychology and Health 11, no. 2 (1996): 261-271. 8 Ference Marton, “Phenomenography: Describing Conceptions of The World Around Us,” Instructional

Science 10, (1981): 177-200; Ference Marton, “Phenomenography - A Research Approach to Investigating

Different Understandings of Reality,” Journal of Thought 21, no. 3 (1986): 28-49; Gerlese S. Akerlind,

“Variation and Commonality in Phenomenographic Research Methods,” Higher Education Research &

Development 31, no. 1 (2012): 115-127.


195

description.”9 By generally placing this phenomenographic approach within the scope of this study,

we aim to ensure that the personalized expression of employees’ real-time experiences of workplace

surveillance and the nuances of their insights are conveyed. Phenomenography is conceived, in this

study, more as an explorative approach10 than a methodology. For it also enables us to identify the

integral meaning of the phenomenon under discussion by contextually interpreting the collected data.

Phenomenography becomes significantly important within the scope of this research for three

reasons: first, due to its implications for the analysis of individual experiences about a social

phenomenon with the involvement in the day-to-day experiences and its added collective meaning-

seeking process; secondly, due to its foundational notion that “people collectively experience and

understand phenomena in a number of qualitatively different but interrelated ways;”11 and finally,

due to the inseparable relation it maintains between its research subjects (people experiencing the

phenomenon) and objects (the phenomenon under discussion).12 The relevant data on a particular

phenomenon obtained in semi-structured online survey (Sample A) and open-ended questionnaire

(Sample B) are described and analyzed using a phenomenographic approach. Following the

explanatory description of Gerlese S. Åkerlind on phenomenography, in this research, outcomes are

thematically categorized and analytically represented in what we call ‘categories of description.’13

This includes consideration of the structural relationships between the diverse ways in which research

subjects experience the same phenomenon.

Similarly, the reflexivity of this methodology is strictly maintained in this study. Reflexivity is

defined as “a process whereby researchers place themselves and their practices under scrutiny

acknowledging the ethical dilemmas that permeate the research process and impinge on the creation

of knowledge.”14 Some researchers claim that qualitative research says more about the subjectivity

of the researcher than about the subjects themselves.15 As Marilyn Lichtman writes, quoting

9 Ference Marton, “Phenomenography: Describing Conceptions of The World Around Us,” Instructional

Science 10, (1981): 180. Referring to Marton (1981,1986), Shahadat Hossain Khan describes

phenomenography as a “qualitative research approach that has been designed to find out peoples’ qualitatively

different experiences of the world in terms of categories of descriptions.” Shahadat Hossain Khan,

“Phenomenography: A Qualitative Research Methodology in Bangladesh,” International Journal on New

Trends in Education and Their Implications 5, no. 2 (2014): 34. 10 Alan Barnard, Heather McCosker and Rod Gerber, “Phenomenography: A Qualitative Research Approach

for Exploring Understanding in Health Care,” Qualitative Health Research 9, no. 2 (1999): 223. The goal of

this approach is “to identify a qualitative, non-dualistic research approach that identified and retained the

discourses of research participants and focused on people’s understanding of their experience of the world

around them.” Barnard, McCosker and Gerber, “Phenomenography,” 212. 11 Christine Yates, Helen Partridge and Christine Bruce, “Exploring Information Experiences through

Phenomenography,” Library and Information Research 36, no. 112 (2012): 97. See also, Marton,

“Phenomenography - A Research Approach to Investigating Different Understandings of Reality,” 28-49. 12 Yates, Partridge and Bruce, “Exploring Information Experiences through Phenomenography,” 98; John A.

Bowden, “The Nature of Phenomenographic Research,” in Phenomenography, eds. John A. Bowden and

Eleanor Walsh (Melbourne, Australia: RMIT University, 2000), 1-18; Louise Limberg, “Phenomenography:

A Relational Approach to Research on Information Needs, Seeking and Use,” The New Review of Information

Behaviour Research 1 (2000): 51-67. 13 Gerlese S. Åkerlind, “Variation and Commonality in Phenomenographic Research Methods,” Higher

Education Research and Development, 24, no. 4 (2005), 322. 14 Chi B. Anyansi-Archibong, Contemporary Issues Surrounding Ethical Research Methods and Practice

(Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2015), 115. Originally in, McGraw, Lori, Anisa M. Zvonkovic, and Alexis J.

Walker, “Studying Postmodern Families: A Feminist Analysis of Ethical Tensions in Work and Family

Research.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 62, no. 1 (2000): 68-77. For further references, Paolo Mura,

“‘To participate or not to participate?’ A reflective account,” Current Issues in Tourism 18, no. 1 (2015): 83-

98. 15 Gavin B. Sullivan, “Reflexivity and Subjectivity in Qualitative Research: The Utility of a Wittgensteinian

Framework,” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung 3, no. 3 (2002): 1-10.


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Morwenna Griffiths, reflexivity is an “explicit self-consciousness about the researcher’s (or research

team’s, and/or the research funder’s) social, political and value positions, in relation to how these

might have influenced the design, execution and interpretation of the theory, data and conclusions.”16

Kirsti Malterud reflects in the same way, stating that, “[a] researcher's background and position will

affect what they choose to investigate, the angle of investigation, the methods judged most adequate

for this purpose, the findings considered most appropriate, and the framing and communication of

conclusions.”17 Therefore, personal bias, including a researcher’s own beliefs, values, backgrounds,

is sternly prevented from influencing this study. We have sought to be fully reflexive about ourselves

and what we are doing.

5.2 SAMPLE COLLECTION

In a research context, a population is defined as “the set of all units or individuals of interest to a

researcher,”18 while samples are described as “observed sets of measurements that are subsets of a

corresponding population.”19 Of the manifold forms of sample collection, such as surveys,

interviews, focus groups discussion, observation extraction, and secondary data sources, for the

purpose of this study we have used survey research. Survey research includes fixed sets of questions

to gather significant data on the subject under discussion.20 It is a specific type of field study that

involves the collection of data from a sample of elements intended to be “representative of a well-

defined, large, and geographically diverse population […] often, though not necessarily, through the

use of a questionnaire.”21 These types of field-experimental or non-experimental survey studies offer

insights able to improve the value of other, less empirical studies. Survey research literature thus

yields findings from subjects’ real-time experiences that engage a particular phenomenon.22 This

study makes use of this features of survey studies.

Data was collected in a two-way process: (1) a semi-structured online survey (Sample A); and (2) a

narrative inquiry (Sample B). A semi-structured interview method was selected, as it, firstly, “allows

depth to be achieved by providing the opportunity on the part of the interviewer to probe and expand

16 Marilyn Lichtman, Qualitative Research for the Social Sciences (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications,

2014), 33. Originally in, Morwenna Griffiths, “Critical Approaches in Qualitative Educational Research: The

Relation of Some Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to these Issues,” Edinburgh Research

Explorer (2009), 17 Kirsti Malterud, “Qualitative Research: Standards, Challenges and Guidelines,” The Lancet 358 (2001): 483-

484. 18 Larry Winner, “Applied Statistical Methods,” University of Florida, Lecture Notes, 2009, 7.

http://www.stat.ufl.edu/~winner/statnotescomp/appstat.pdf [accessed May 20, 2016]. 19 Winner, “Applied Statistical Methods,” 8. The population is all the individuals in whom a researcher is

interested. Besides individuals, it can also be other units such as geographical areas or a particular group of

institutions, etc. For instance, cities with populations of 10,000 or more or all households in a particular area,

etc. are counted as population in a research context. In the data used in this study the population consists of

individuals who are working in organizational workplaces such as IT, ITeS, BPOs, etc. A sample, in this

regard, is the subset or part of the population involved in the study. The process of sample selection for

particular interests of the study is called sampling. Social Science Research & Instructional Center, Survey

Research Design and Quantitative Methods of Analysis for Cross-sectional Data, California State University,

15 August 1998, http://www.ssric.org/trd/modules/cowi/chapter3 [accessed May 15, 2017]. 20 Margaret C. Harrell and Melissa A. Bradley, Data Collection Methods: Semi-Structured Interviews and

Focus Groups (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2009), 6. 21 Jon A. Krosnick, Paul J. Lavrakas and Nuri Kim, “Survey Research,” in Handbook of Research Methods in

Social and Personality Psychology, 2nd ed., eds. Harry, T. Reis, Charles M. Judd, 404-443 (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2014), 406. 22 Krosnick, Lavrakas and Kim, “Survey Research,” 404.


197

the interviewee's responses.”23 Secondly, in this method, researchers can use a basic checklist, which

“allows for in-depth probing while permitting the interviewer to keep the interview within the

parameters traced out by the aim of the study.”24 This type of interviewing method is significant also

because it allows the researcher to cover various issues related to the subject matter. Narrative inquiry

is a part of qualitative research methods in the form of unstructured but in-depth interviews with

specific objectives and features.25

The features of this method “emerge from the life stories of both the respondent and cross-examined

the situational context.”26 The researcher’s influence on the informants or the event is very minimal

and thus the informant alone reconstructs the social event and the “here” and “now” of the situation

in a spontaneous language. Besides, narrative response-seeking and data collection is important in

qualitative research as it seems to be the best way to transmit the experience or communicate

meaningful content.27 Therefore, narrative analysis enables the researcher to achieve a deeper

understanding of the many ways and means that both an individual and group of individuals organize

and derive meaning from an event.28 This method is particularly useful in this research, as it studies

the impact of various social structures and institutional practices on individuals’ identities, relations,

and families.

This two-way process is employed also because many of the contacted employees expressed

discomfort responding to a structured online survey due, which they found to be inconvenient. This

seems to derive from a feeling that others will be made critically aware of them. They expressed

discontent and a fear of getting caught speaking against their company. At the same time, they were

ready to respond to this challenge via private networking tools such as WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.,

as a causal chat/dialogue. There arose a need to collect and include brief narrative responses to the

study, which assures that a more integrated and comprehensive view of employees’s experiences will

be recorded and that their actual feelings will be expressed. So, a majority of employees were asked

to complete the online semi-structured survey (Sample A), and the rest could respond to a question

in a narrative form (Sample B). In pictures 1 & 2, we find examples of the responses several

participants sent back to the collector, either individually or collectively via a social network in the

form of casual chatting.

23 Herbert J. Rubin and Irene S. Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data, 2nd ed. (Thousand

Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2005), 88. 24 Bruce L. Berg, Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences (London: Pearson, 2007), 39. 25 Catherine Kohler Riessman, Narrative Analysis (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1993), 2-16; D. Jean

Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly, Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research (San

Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000), 98-115; Snowden, David. “Naturalizing Sensemaking” In

Informed by Knowledge: Expert Performance in Complex situations, eds. Kathleen L. Mosier and Ute M.

Fischer (New York: Psychology Press, 2010), 223-234. 26 Camila Junqueira Muylaert et al., “Narrative Interviews: An Important Resources in Qualitative Research,”

Revista da Escola de Enfermagem da USP 48, no. 2 (2014): 185. 27 Muylaert et al., “Narrative Interviews: An Important Resources in Qualitative Research,” 185. 28 Donald Polkinghorne, “Narrative Configuration in Qualitative Analysis,” Qualitative Studies in Education 8,

no. 1 (1995): 5-23.


198

Picture 1 Individual Response

Picture 2 Collective Response

The semi-structured survey (Sample A) attempts to measure the real feelings and responses of

employees working under severe monitoring. A rigorous analysis is performed of the responses to

explore and examine various parameters that affect employee performance and life chances under

these conditions. The narrative (unstructured) online interviews (Sample B) were conducted with

both male and female graduate professional techies (IT professionals) employed in different


199

capacities, from business executives to administrators, with both domestic and international IT

companies situated in India. Data was collected from online open-ended question-responses on a

specific question. Table 1 shows the application of methodology and different approaches employed

in this research.

Particulars Sample A Sample B

Types of Research Empirical Research (Qualitative) Empirical Research (Qualitative)

Sample Size 118 34

Sample Unit Employees of IT, ITeS. BPOs and other

Business Organizations

Employees of IT, ITeS. BPOs and other

Business Organizations

Survey Method An online semi-structured

questionnaire through emails and

weblinks (Survey Monkey).

An online narrative response collection

through emails, social networks.

Analysing Tool Microsoft Excel 2010 NVivo, Microsoft Excel 2010

Analysing Method Phenomenography Phenomenography

Table 1 Methodology and Approaches

For this study, data were collected from business executives and IT professionals employed at several

organizations across India. Among them, employees belonged to the IT, ITeS, BPO sectors in South

India and included various tenants in the Infopark (Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Wipro, UST

Global, EXL Services, etc.), Kochi, Kerala; in the Technopark (Infosys Limited),

Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala; and in the International Tech Park (Accenture Services Pvt. Ltd.),

Bangalore, Karnataka. It was decided to focus on these three sites to secure more concentration,

precision and accuracy. This approach also circumvents the problems that may arise from

randomized response collection. Other respondents were from the randomly selected organizations

(TCS, Wipro, WNS, Samsung, AXA, Infosys, HSBC, HCL Technologies, Zenta, Cognizant,

Accenture, IBM, etc.) among the broad range of companies in various parts of India. To enable

employees to freely express their real experiences and feelings about the subject matter without any

hindrances (job security, fear of firing from the authority, etc.), participants were contacted

individually and directly, without consulting the organizations that employ them. In the following, a

detailed analysis of the data collected is provided.

5.3 RESULT SECTION (DATA ANALYSIS)

The main purpose of a result analysis is to present the findings of a study.29 On agreeing to carry out

this research, a total of approximately 200 employees were given the survey questionnaire online. Of

these, a total of 152 usable responses (76.0% response rate) were collected in two forms (Samples A

& B). Of the 118 participants (77.6%) in sample A, 68 were male (57.63%) and 50 female (42.37%),

whereas among the 34 respondents (22.4%) in sample B, 17 each were male and female, comprising

50% each.

5.3.1 Result Analysis - Sample A

The pie charts and bar charts below offer a graphical representation of the data collected from the

random people working in various IT and business firms in India. The total number of respondents

29 Amit Kaura, Evidence-Based Medicine: Reading and Writing Medical Papers (Edinburgh: Mosby Elsevier,

2013), 62.


200

was 118, ranging between 22-36 years of age. Of these, 57.63% were male (68 in number) and

42.37% female (50 in number), as shown in figure 1.

Figure 1 Gender

The second question concerned the presence of ubiquitous surveillance or monitoring practices

within the workplace. From the data analysis, of the 114 people who answered this question, 88.6%

agreed that their company uses ubiquitous electronic monitoring/surveillance at work (CCTV

cameras, phone, computer and internet monitoring, GPS, RFID, etc.), whereas a minor percentage

(11.4%) stated that their company doesn’t use them at all. Four participants skipped this question.

Figure 2 depicts this data.

Figure 2 Use of Electronic Surveillance

The third question was formulated with multiple choice answers, where respondents could choose

one or more answers about the described variables (data items). These variables or data items were

added to the questionnaire according to their rank, both about the positive and negative sides of the

scenario, as determined by analysis of relevant literature on the subject. The data show various

viewpoints of working under 24/7 electronic surveillance in the workplace. Of the 118 respondents,

6 people skipped this question. 112 people answered it, of which almost 50 (44.6%) agreed that it

ensures security. At the same time, 91 respondents, including the few who speak about security,

expressed concern that it compromises privacy at work (42.0%) and restricts freedom and autonomy

(39.3%). 44 people, or 39.3% of the respondents, stated that this adversely affects their work

efficiency and leads them to feel they are not trusted or valued. See Figure 3 a depiction of this data.

57.6%

42.4%

Gender

Male

Female

Gender Answer

Options

Response

Percent

Response

Count Male 57.6% 68 Female 42.4% 50 answered question 118 skipped question 0

Answer Options Response

Percent

Response

Count

Yes 88.6% 101

No 11.4% 13

answered question 114

skipped question 4

88.6%

11.4%

Does your company use ubiquitous

electronic monitoring/surveillance (CCTV

cameras, Phone, computer and Internet

Monitoring, GPS, RFID, etc.) at work?

Yes No


201

How do you feel working under 24/7 electronic surveillance in your work place? [multiple

choice]


Percent

Response

Count

I don't bother about it 31.3% 35

It ensures security 44.6% 50

It increases my productivity 11.6% 13

I feel responsible at work 13.4% 15

I feel completely uncomfortable and thus job dissatisfaction 29.5% 33

I feel no freedom and autonomy 39.3% 44

I feel lack of privacy at work 42.0% 47

I feel dehumanizing and loss of my human dignity 19.6% 22

I feel stress, and too much tensed and worrying 36.6% 41

I feel not being trusted and valued 39.3% 44

I feel like being subjugated to a dominating other 16.1% 18

I become over-conscious leading to behavioral alterations 14.3% 16

Other 8.0% 9


skipped question 6

Figure 3 Employees Responses 1

The percentage of people who reported experiencing physical and mental stress was almost equal to

that of those who feel mistrusted. It covers 41 respondents in number, or 36.6%. About 33 (29.5%)

stated that they experience unease and dissatisfaction at work, whereas another almost equal

percentage (31.3%) say they are not bothered at all about the surveillance. A certain percentage

(19.6%) stated that surveillance has a dehumanizing effect and disrespects their human dignity, and

that they are being subjugated and dominated by a higher official (16.1%). This can generate an

excessive consciousness about one’s work and lead to several behavioural alterations (14.3%).

From all these viewpoints, the most interesting point is perhaps that only a minor percentage (25.0%)

stated that surveillance increases their productivity (11.6%) or helps them to be responsible at work

31.3%

44.6%

11.6%

13.4%

29.5%

39.3%42.0%

19.6%

36.6%

39.3%

16.1%

14.3% 8.0%

How do you feel working under 24/7 electronic surveillance in your workplace?

[multiple choice]

I don't bother about it

It ensures security

It increases my productivity

I feel responsible at work

I feel completely uncomfortable and thus job

dissatisfactionI feel no freedom and autonomy

I feel lack of privacy at work

I feel dehumanizing and loss of my human dignity

I feel stress, and too much tensed and worrying

I feel not being trusted and valued

I feel like being subjugated to a dominating other

I become over-conscious leading to behavioral

alterationsOther


202

(13.4%). A few of the comments collected from the narrative boxes of the questionnaire, which

allowed participants to freely jot down their opinions, are given in the Table 2. These highlight

several issues in particular, including issues of gender discrimination, lack of individual trust,

freedom and innovation, health hazards, and the possibility of manipulative and aggressive

behaviour.

No. Commends

1 I feel like women are more affected with it.

2 It is just to show that employees are always under a surveillance gaze and that limit our freedom

and innovation.

3 Individuals responsibility is not considered worth praising.

4 It is something like spying and feel exhausted and not being trusted.

5 Discrimination due to known data.

6 CCTV kept at my work place is used by securities to ensure safety, I don’t think managers or

higher officials are using it for checking on our way of working or to monitor on us. Managers

are always with us as a helping hand sitting in our nearby cubicles.

7 It also affects my health and diminishes my self-confidence.

8 It leads to exhaustion and aggressive behaviours.

9 It makes me to behave not in my natural way, but for the desired interest of my supervisor.

Table 2 Narrative Comments 1

Of the total participants, 106 (89.83%) responded to the fourth question dealing with behavioural

tendencies that develop, directly or indirectly, due to the ubiquitous surveillance practices. As figure

5 shows, 12 people skipped this question. Among respondents, 52.8% stated that surveillance makes

them less likely to engage in risky behaviour. A certain percentage (42.5%) stated that they make use

of unobserved spaces for private activities. Several of the respondents (46.2%) were concerned about

being categorized and being an object of suspicion. Many held that this ultimately leads to attitudinal

and behavioural deviances such as intentional absenteeism (35.8%) and encourages aggressive

behaviours and occupational violence (33.3%).

Furthermore, many held that this leads to favoritism and preference towards the few with vested

interests (21.7%). The effects of this unwanted surveillance and the stress it creates also adversely

affects employees’ marital relationships (22.6%). Finally, of the three participant who chose to

respond to the option ‘other,’ one said that “it [surveillance] makes me to behave not in my natural

way, but for the desired interest of my supervisor” while other two simply filled “No” and “NA”

respectively.


203

Does surveillance lead to further behavioural tendencies like: [multiple choice]


Percent Response Count

fostering favorable behaviors 21.7% 23

reducing risky actions and performance 52.8% 56

making use of unobserved spaces 42.5% 45

increasing partiality, favoritism, etc. from the authority 32.1% 34

being categorized with suspicion 46.2% 49

(stress) leading to deviance such as intentional absenteeism, etc. 35.8% 38

(stress) affecting family life, marital relationships 22.6% 24

(stress) leading to aggressive behaviors and occupational violence 33.0% 35

Other 2.8% 3


skipped question 12

Figure 5 Employees Responses 2

The fifth question addressed the willingness of employees to work under ubiquitous surveillance. Of

the 118 participants, 108 responded (91.6%), while 10 (8.4%) skipped this question. The data

analysis (Figure 6, A & B) explicates that 75.9% of respondents prefer to work without being

monitored. The other 24.1% prefers various surveillance systems to be used in the workplace. Table

3 shows the comments, both positive and negative, by participants (14.8%) who responded to the

narrative choice of this question.

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

21.7

52.83

42.5

32.1

46.2

35.8

22.6

33

2.8

Does surveillance lead to further behavioural tendencies like: [multiple

choice]


204

Figure 6 Employee Responses 3

No. Narrative Responses

1 It makes me uncomfortable and makes me not to take any risk at work.

2 A person's productivity and talent can be moulded and used effectively only under proper monitoring

and surveillance.

3 Yes or no it doesn't bother me a lot. Work is work. May its strange.

4 It is good in a responsible work environment. Most of the times I don't care much about it, for me it

makes no difference whether if it is under electronic surveillance or not.

5 For security. Security compromise other uncomfortable.

6 It leads to stress.

7 Ensures safety.

8 NA - It doesn't affect my work.

9 Yes, it helps in ensuring the security of employees for critical and unforeseen incidents.

10 Its bring awareness to an employee that what he is doing is looking by the client and can cause

problem to Job, if it is not right.

11 I actually don’t bother having it at my workplace, as long as it is used mostly for security.

12 NA

13 Just for Security Purpose.

14 It is a good measure for security.

15 It takes away my work satisfaction.

16 I am not a slave to work like this.


The sixth question was designed to understand the aspect of individual ability to take responsibility

for one’s actions without the force or constraint of an external monitoring system. Of the 114 people

(96.6%) who responded to this question (4 people skipped it), the highest percentage (98.2%)

confirmed that they are and will be responsible at work without being monitored electronically, while

very minimal respondents (1.8%) said ‘No’ to this (Figure 7). Nine participants commented on this

question in a narrative form, as recounted in Table 4. Those who in favor of monitoring identify

security reasons as their primary concern. Others cite the need for a strong work ethic, consisting of

dedication, responsibility and a commitment to one’s work.

24.1%

75.9%

Do you want to work being under

ubiquitous electronic surveillance?

Yes

No

Answer

Options

Response

Percent

Response

Count

Yes 24.1% 26

No 75.9% 82

Why? 16


skipped question 10


205

Figure 7 Employee Responses 4

No. Narrative Responses

1 Because I am confidant and responsible.

2 I feel I have the dedication and commitment towards the work which I'm doing. My responsibility

does not change according to the level of external monitoring.

3 I feel more comfortable.

4 Of course, each person will have to finish the work assigned to them in the specific period of time.

If he or she is a responsible person they will do their best to complete it on time.

5 Because we have deadlines.

6 It really depends on the work ethic.

7 I am sure that in order to be productive and responsible I do not need an external monitoring

8 NA

9 But need to be monitored for security purpose and even to find the lost thing.


The final question was designed to identify employee preferences concerning monitoring practices

in their organization. They could opt for multiple choices. Out of 114 (96.6%) respondents, 86

(75.4%) preferred self-monitoring to external monitoring (22.8%) or no electronic monitoring

systems (37.7%). A small percent expressed indifference to the question, either by choosing the

option ‘none of above’ (1.8%) or by skipping the question (3.4%). See the depiction of this data in

figure 8.

Figure 8 Employee Preference

98.2%

1.8%

Will you be responsible at work

without external monitoring?

Yes

No

22.8%

37.7%75.4%

1.8%

What do you prefer, if at all given a

chance, as a feasible choice in your

organization?

Yes, electronic monitoring

No electronic monitoring

Prefer Self-monitoring

None of above

Answer

Options

Response

Percent

Response

Count

Yes 98.2% 112

No 1.8% 2

Why? 9


skipped question 4

Answer

Options

Response

Percent

Response

Count

Yes, electronic

monitoring 22.8% 26

No electronic

monitoring 37.7% 43

Prefer Self-

monitoring 75.4% 86

None of above 1.8% 2


skipped question 4


206

The results here show that most respondents prefer self-monitoring. Besides, along with those argued

for ‘no electronic monitoring,’ a few of those who acknowledged a need for electronic monitoring

also prefer self-monitoring as the next best option. We may now turn to the results of Sample B.

5.3.2 Result Analysis - Sample B

The result of the narrative interview (open-ended questionnaire) is given in the following. A total of

34 people responded in this form of sample collection, consisting 22.4% of all respondents. The

ratio of male to female respondents in this sample is similar - 50.0% (Figure 9).

Figure 9 Gender

All responses (sample B), both individual and collective, are combined by the researcher and given

here in Table 5 for the purpose of analysis. Square brackets in the text are the researcher’s own

addition and meant to clarify the presentation of these responses.

Employee Employee Concerns Gender

1 CCTV monitoring is kind of good for monitoring staffs when the

BOSS [higher authorities] is out of town or physically absent in

office. It is a good measure for security. Sometimes it’s really

irritating, staffs mend to hide their faces and work. Privacy is getting

monitored.

Female

2 I feel being spied on and untrusted and [I] loses trust to the

management. It takes away my privacy and work-satisfaction. I am

not a slave to work like this. It also affects my health and diminishes

my self-confidence.

Female

3 I feel always being looked with suspicion and is stressful. I change

my behaviour to please the authority. Feeling exhausted, think to

quit the job.

Male

4 In a professional environment where everyone’s Key Result Area30

is defined and the individual is responsible & accountable, its

unprofessional to have electronic surveillance at work. All

individuals are different and there way of working is also different.

Hence every action of employee shouldn’t be traced & tracked. Most

of the companies use monitoring at work just to stop the unethical

practices or harassment against the women employees for the

Male

30 Key Result Area is generally referred to parameters that any organization fixes for a specific role or job

profile of the employees to have better clarity and experience of their roles. Brian Tracy defines it as “those

things that you absolutely, positively must do to fulfill your responsibilities and achieve your business goals.”

Brian Tracy, “Determine Your Key Result Areas,” American Management Association,

http://www.amanet.org/training/articles/determine-your-key-result-areas.aspx [accessed May 15, 2017]. It

allows to achieve set objectives and goals.

50.0%50.0%

Gender

Male

Female

Gender

Answer

Options

Response

Percent

Response

Count

Male 50.0% 17

Female 50.0% 17

Total Respondents 34


207

security purpose. In the recent past, it was in news companies track

the Idle time of systems to capture employees work, as an employee

it just breaks the trust on employee on the employer/company. The

employee attrition will be more in those kinds of employees.

5 I actually don’t bother having it at my workplace, as long as it is used

mostly for security. But to be productive, no need of monitoring, but

is need for security purpose and even to find the lost thing.

Male

6 Our personal privacy is sometimes compromised, when we are

aware that, we are being monitored then we tend to be more

conscious unsettled.

Male

7 It is important to consider employee rights and the risks involved.

Although the use of CCTV has its advantages, it can be very time-

consuming dealing with employee complaints and ICO

[The Information Commissioner's Office] investigations. It can also

lead to reputational damage and mean that employers are prevented

from relying on data which would otherwise have been very useful

to them.

Male

8 Fear of being on camera – much like public speaking, as soon as we

step in front of the camera, our knees and hands start to tremble, our

voice get soft, it feels like someone looking straight into your eyes

and judging you.

Male

9 CCTV ensures security. Also sees to it that people follow the rules

and agreement as agreed upon with the clients. Thus, increases the

trust of Clients in the organization resulting in company’s and in turn

employer benefit.

Female

10 CCTV at time makes it uncomfortable to work as there is always a

feeling that someone is monitoring every action of the employees

which at times can create feeling of interference in their personal

space.

Female

11 I feel it is good. If in case of any problems tracking becomes easy. I

actually don’t bother having it at my workplace, as long as it is used

mostly for security.

Male

12 No use of CCTV. Most of the cameras won’t work under odc31

[Open Data Commons]. No one monitors even. It’s there just for

formality.

Female

13 Please don’t even ask about CCTV modern slaverism. Female

14 It is good in a responsible work environment. Most of the times I

don't care much about it, for me it makes no difference whether if it

is under electronic surveillance or not.

Male

15 CCTV is one way of monitoring that helps in keeping an eye on the

physical activities of an employee in the area under surveillance. It

is very useful by making people feel safe but in case of CCTVs

specifically, the manipulation of video that is proof of monitoring is

possible in some worst situations that can decrease the reliability in

it.

Male

31 Open Data Commons (ODC) is the home of a set of legal tools to help you provide and use Open Data. It

was initially a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF), Cambridge, UK. Dealing with the legal

questions on open data or on databases, ODC provides licensing agreements (developed in 2009) to it, which

enables individuals and or organizations to make their data legally open. Open Knowledge Foundation, “Open

Data Commons: Legal Tools for Open Data,” https://opendatacommons.org/ [accessed May 15, 2017]; Paul

Miller, Rob Styles and Tom Heath, “Open Data Commons, A License for Open Data,” http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-

369/paper08.pdf [accessed May 15, 2017]; and, Primavera De Filippi and Lionel Maurel, “The Paradoxes of

Open Data and How to Get Rid of It? Analyzing the Interplay between Open Data and Sui-Generis Rights on

Databases,” International Journal of Law and Information Technology 23 (2015): 16.


208

16 With development in technology we can monitor through videos or

by keeping track of activities that uses the network under

surveillance; thus, it can be achieved through omni-channel32

[multiple channels].

Male

17 Monitoring, though helpful in many ways, as it protects company

assets and fosters efficient use of worktime, it leads to increase in

initial expense with extra maintenance costs.

Female

18 In IT industries, another way of surveillance in keeping track of

activities that they perform in the system allotted to them which is

done by monitoring the processes, transactions and searches

performed in the company's network that can increase the

productivity.

Male

19 Monitoring can make a worker more productive on the job by cutting

down on the amount of mistakes made while also allowing for

greater, efficient use of one's time. In addition, the practice could

make the workplace safer.

Male

20 Its bring awareness to an employee that what he is doing is looking

by the client and can cause problem to Job, if it is not right.

Male

21 It limits my freedom, when there is no freedom there is no creativity.

we are not robots to monitor all-time during the work. It makes me

exhausted at work and feel the same when I am back home.

Female

22 Do they not trust us? Surveillance inhibits freedom at work. The

more we are restricted the more rage with others we become.

Female

23 It breeds constraints of automatic self-disclosure (all my moves are

watched and recorded) leading to further behavioural and

performative damages.

Female

24 It reduces the freedom to work freely and reduce creativity. It gives

excessive pressure at work and is a violation of my privacy.

Male

25 Am I a prisoner to be always watched over? Workplace should not

be equated with prisons. Why should a stranger observe women’s

privacy in the name of surveillance?

Female

26 I feel the element of distrust is the key here. It also leads to the

creation of artificial professional behaviour. It is the indication from

the management that they do suspect us.

Female

27 Now, it goes beyond performance evaluation and intrude our privacy

and restrict the freedom It is used because, with a fear tactic, the

management wants to get full control over us. For me it creates an

atmosphere of mistrust at work.

Female

28 For the management, it may act as a moral check on the employees,

but I am too much stressed and feel very uncomfortable to work

being under monitoring. Not allowing us to have or enjoy a bit of

Female

32 Omni-channel is a cross-channel business model, a concept of complete integration of all channels, business

functions and across all products and services and is perceived as an extension of multi-channel approach.

Though it is used mainly to increase customer experiences and satisfaction, it serves in various denominations

like financial services, healthcare services, telecommunications, webpages and social media, etc. Donald

Carroll and Inés Guzmán, “The New Omni-Channel Approach to Serving Customers: Strategy Implications

for Communications Service Providers,” Accenture 2015. https://www.accenture.com/be-

en/~/media/Accenture/Conversion-Assets/DotCom/Documents/Global/PDF/Industries_2/accenture-new-

omni-channel-approach-serving-customers.pdf [accessed May 15, 2017]; Tom Wasserman, “Creating a

Seamless Omni-Channel Customer Experience,” Mobile Business Insights, December 30, 2015.

http://mobilebusinessinsights.com/2015/12/creating-a-seamless-omni-channel-customer-experience/

[accessed May 15, 2017]; and, Nicole Fallon, “The New Customer Service Is Here, There & Everywhere,”

Business News Daily, August 6, 2014, http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6927-omnichannel-customer-

service.html [accessed May 15, 2017].


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own space is like a crime done to our human self and shows the lack

of respect to our needs and wants.

29 The privacy will be lost in work premises as the surveillance cameras

are placed at various locations inside the work place. On the other

hand, the well talented information technical persons can also work

in the systems without even getting caught by the surveillance

cameras.

Male

30 The surveillance cameras can only be acceptable at the main

entrance gate, check in point etc., where there is required a lot of

surveillance for the protection purposes. There are various private

and total personal things that cannot be make publicized.

Surveillance at all corners of the workplace is assumed to be

insulting the personal human dignity.

Female

31 Apart from the industrial and personal issues, there is also a primary

issue to be concerned, the health. The surveillance cameras which is

an electronic device and possess some minor radiation emission.

Though these radiations are emitting in negligible amount, the long-

term exposure of these radiation can cause serious health problems

(eye damage, skin damage, etc.) in humans.

Male

32 We work hard when situation demands it, but will never otherwise.

So, it is good to have control over employees through these types of

monitoring means and measures. But, employees should not be

misunderstood and wrongly judged through external monitoring

without knowing the actuality of a particular action.

Female

33 It helps the management to know how faithfully the employees

spend the work time and accordingly measure the employee

productivity and take other decisions. So, let us say, it in fact prevent

illegal activities at work.

Male

34 It is implemented as part of security, but I feel insecure working

under it, and it also restricts my freedom and privacy. Now-a-days,

monitoring is on ourselves [employees], not on our work or

performance.

Female

Table 5 Narrative Responses

Of the 34 participants in Sample B, 12 (35.3%) responded positively to workplace surveillance, citing

mostly reasons related to security (1, 4, 5, 15, 19, 30, 34); the need to maintain rules and norms (9,

28,32); then need to increase productivity (18); and its ability to serve as a good substitute for one’s

supervisor (1). A few of the respondents were not bothered about surveillance, so long as it leads to

security (5, 11, 14). However, along with these positive responses, several expressed concerns about

privacy invasion (1); a resultant lack of freedom (34), trust (4), self-responsibility (5); the possibility

that data such as CCTV footage and other personal and work life details might be manipulated (15);

and increased stress (28) and health issues (11). The other 22 respondants (64.7%) were entirely

negative or sceptical about the intentions of the surveillance systems used in their workplaces.

The more recurrent issues expressed by employees related to privacy (1,2,6,24,25,27,29,30,34),

freedom (21,22,24,27,34) and a lack of trust (2,4,22,26,27). A few of the respondents were concerned

about health-related hazards (2,31), as they reported feeling more stressed (3,6,24,28) and exhausted

(3) in highly monitored work situations. This in turn generated a fear of the camera (8,27). They

expressed doubt about the effectiveness of the fear tactics used by their employers (27), who spy on

employees (2) with suspicion (3,26). This made them feel as though they were being treated as robots

(24) and prisoners (25) and reduced their self-confidence (2). Moreover, surveillance was perceived

as a form of modern slavery (2,13) and thought to increase attrition and absenteeism (3,4).


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Other important and often neglected views are related to the behavioural alterations caused by

workplace surveillance. Employees tend to hide their faces from CCTV cameras (1) and try to

express themselves in a way that satisfies the desires and interests of the authorities (3), thus creating

an artificial professional behaviour (26). Technically talented and trained persons, they reported, can

escape being caught (29). There is an increasing view that it is unprofessional to employ means of

surveillance that disregard individual differences (4) and that there is no need for external monitoring

to ensure productivity (5). It has become important to consider the risks and rights of both employer

and employee (7), but interferes with ‘personal space’ (10) in each situation. Several respondents

stated that this is just for the sake of formality and that they do not work under open data commons

(12). Also, that it increases initial expenses and creates extra maintenance costs (17). Though

employees sometimes accept monitoring for security reasons, therefore, it nonetheless leaves them

feeling insecure, since monitoring is now focused on employees themselves more than on their work

or performance (34). Thus, employees feel a lack of respect toward their needs and wants as human

beings (28) and perceive surveillance as an insult to their human dignity (30). The more restricted

the workplace setting, one respondant stated, the more rage toward others one will feel (22). All these

experiences, views and observations of employees must of course be examined in detail in order to

derive a conclusive result and identify its ethical implications.

5.4 DISCUSSION OF THE RESULTS [SAMPLES A & B]

The purpose and objective of this discussion section is to provide an interpretation of the study results

and substantiate these with evidence from the literature to derive accurate conclusions.33 We will

identify the theoretical and pedagogical implications of these results in appropriate depth by

answering the research question and critically evaluating the study. Therefore, in this section, we

first comment on the results, interpreting what they mean in the larger context of this research,

explain unexpected results, if any, and then review the findings in the context of existing literature

about our subject.34 Secondly, in a more descriptive fashion, we place this study in the context of a

current and ongoing academic and disciplinary conversations on these matters. The second chapter

of this research has explored the gradual evolution of Indian work culture and workplace processes

from the pre-colonial period to the present. As Pascale Carayon concludes in his research,35 along

with above mentioned factors, the particularities of job demands, job control, and social support all

do much to influence and stimulate employee reactions to it. In addition, the frequency of monitoring

also impacts employee reactions.36 Overall, the results of employee responses, within the scope of

this study, provide a partial support for the socio-ethical concerns already described through the

various literature reviews and discourse analyses we have provided. This makes clear that, along

with organizational contexts with their policies and procedures, other socio-cultural and economic

features and contexts also influence the practice of electronic monitoring and employee reactions to

it. Employees view the workplace as a symbol of their life and as corresponding to the whole of their

33 Kaura, Evidence-Based Medicine: Reading and Writing Medical Papers, 62. 34 Peggie P.K. Chan, “Reporting Research Findings,” in Communicating in the University Culture, eds. T.

Ruanni F. Tupas, Catherine Cook and Norhayati Bte Mohd Ismail (Singapore: NUS, 2009), 27-33. 35 Pascale Carayon, “Effects of Electronic Performance Monitoring on Job Design and Worker Stress: Results

of Two Studies,” International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction 6, no. 2 (1994): 177–190; Pascale

Carayon, “Effects of Electronic Performance Monitoring on Job Design and Worker Stress: Review of the

Literature and Conceptual Model,” Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics

Society 35, no. 3 (1993): 385–395. 36 Brian P. Niehoff, and Robert H. Moorman, “Justice as a Mediator of the Relationship between Methods of

Monitoring and Organizational Citizenship Behavior,” The Academy of Management Journal 36, no. 3

(1993): 527–556.


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life-activities and life-chances. Therefore, it is very important that work engagement and work

satisfaction should respond to the unique identities of employees.

5.4.1 The Scope of the Phenomenographic Approach

Phenomenography ultimately “aims at description, analysis and understanding of experiences.”37 It

aims to describe people’s experience of a phenomenon and to provide the researcher with “content-

oriented and interpretative descriptions of the qualitatively different ways in which people perceive

and understand their reality.”38 The most significant and distinctive feature of this approach is its

“[focus] on the apprehended (experienced, conceptualized) content as a point of departure for

carrying out research and as a basis for integrating the findings.”39 This phenomenographic approach,

therefore, is distinctive in the context of the qualitative research tradition to the extent that “it

identifies similarities and differences in the way we experience and understand phenomena in the

world around us.”40 It follows that in workplace-monitoring research, it is important to recognize and

explore the qualitatively diverse ways a phenomenon is experienced and understood by employees.

Central to improving employee satisfaction and thus increasing productivity is identifying the ways

in which the same phenomenon is captured by them. Especially significant for our current research

is the fact that phenomenography goes beyond individual experiences, emphasizing the collective

meaning of experiences.41 Finally, besides its focus on the experiential, conceptual and lived realm,

phenomenography also deals with what is individually developed and culturally learned.42

In addition to this, Ference Marton draws a useful distinction between different kinds of research

approaches. He speaks of a conventional, ‘first-order’ perspective, where the researcher looks for

how an object really is (‘from-the-outside’ perspective), and also of what he calls a ‘second-order’

perspective, where the researcher looks for how others understand and experience the reality (‘from-

the-inside’ perspective).43 Phenomenography, being based on this second-order perspective, derives

meaning from a subject’s understanding and experience of an object.44 It also focuses on the variation

in how a phenomenon is perceived by participants and by the researcher. This variation is called the

‘theory of variation’.45 Phenomenography thus allows the use of the experiences of the researcher

and participants in the undertaking of a collective analysis of individual experiences.46 In the same

way, its introspective approach47 enables it to adequately describe the real feelings and experiences

37 Marton, “Phenomenography,” 177. 38 Marton, “Phenomenography,” 177. 39 Marton, “Phenomenography,” 177. 40 Barnard, McCosker and Gerber, “Phenomenography,” 212. 41 Barnard, McCosker and Gerber, “Phenomenography,” 213. 42 Marton, “Phenomenography,” 181. 43 Ference Marton, “Phenomenography - A Research Approach to Investigating Different Understandings of

Reality,” Journal of Thought 21, no. 3 (1986): 28-49. Marton, “Phenomenography,” 177-200. 44 Khan, “Phenomenography: A Qualitative Research Methodology in Bangladesh,” 35. 45 Ming Fai Pang, “Two Faces of Variation: On Continuity in the Phenomenographic Movement.”

Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 47, no. 2 (2003): 145-156. 46 Gerlese S. Åkerlind, “Variation and Commonality in Phenomenographic Research Methods,” Higher

Education Research and Development, 24, no. 4 (2005), 321-334; Michael Uljens, “On the Philosophical

Foundation of Phenomenography,” in Reflections on Phenomenography - Towards a Methodology? eds.

Gloria Dall'Alba and Biörn Hasselgren (Goteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothenburgensis, 1996), 105–130; and

Roger Säljö, “Minding Action - Conceiving of the World versus Participating in Cultural Practices,” in

Reflections on Phenomenography - towards a Methodology? eds. Gloria Dall'Alba and Biörn Hasselgren

(Goteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothenburgensis, 1996), 19-33. 47 John T. E. Richardson, “The Concepts and Methods of Phenomenographic Research,” Review of Educational

Research 69, no. 1 (1999): 57.


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of subjects – in our own case, employees’ real feelings and experiences about surveillance practices

in their workplaces.

As indicated above, employees were asked questions in two formats, choosing from pre-determined

themes (Sample A) and freeform expression in a narrative context (Sample B). The questions

concerned whether surveillance practices in their workplace accor with what they want or expect.

There are assorted reasons for the higher percentage of male respondents (58%) than female (42%)

in the survey. A culturally experienced male (patriarchal) domination of workforce ratio, as discussed

in the second chapter, is one major reason for it.48 Less female participation in the urban workforce

is another.49 More female participants shared that they do not want to respond to a survey using

official contact tools such as emails, etc. However, they were ready to respond in a private chat via

social networks. In the same way, equal participation of male and female employees in the narrative

section shows that female participants were reluctant to respond to a structured survey due to the fear

of being discovered by authorities and other concerns of related to job retention. This itself seems to

present evidence of fear and self-censorship. In the following, a detailed discussion of the study

results is presented.

5.4.2 Against the Performance, Productivity, and Security Claims

Is technology the best way to measure productivity? Can employee performance and productivity be

measured by keystrokes, time spent on a computer, or the duration of phone calls? The management

of business organizations and corporations claim to have dramatically improved employee

performance and thus increased levels of productivity thanks to electronic monitoring techniques.

Several studies have conducted from this perspective.50 By contrast, our own study shows that

employees feel otherwise, as their efforts to adhere to the organization’s standard often compromises

their personal and work-related desires. Several other studies have been conducted in this regard and

48 Among women population, only 51% is literate and the labour participation is 33% in 2011-2012. A study

giving socio-economic statistical information about India, by Indiastat, entitled “Workforce Participation

Rate by sex and sector in India” (2013), report that the 2010 workforce participation rate was 26.1% for

women in rural India and only 13.8% for women in urban areas. See for instance, Indiastat, Socio-economic

Statistical Information About India,

https://www.indiastat.com/labourandworkforce/380987/workparticipation/299/stats.aspx [accessed June 20,

2017]; Ritu Bhattacharyya, “Skill Development Among Women – Awareness and Need – Study on Nation

Skill Development Mission,” GE-International Journal of Management Research 5, no. 1 (2017): 338; Tooba

Modassir and Ramesh B., “Women Representation in Corporate Boards of BSE Listed Companies and Causes

of Their Low Workforce Participation in India,” International Journal on Arts, Management and Humanities

4, no. 1 (2015): 53. 49 Bhattacharyya, “Skill Development Among Women,” 338. 50 Hamed Al-Rjoub, Arwa Zabian and Sami Qawasmeh, “Electronic Monitoring: The Employees Point of

view,” Journal of Social Sciences 4, no. 3 (2008): 189-195. Lynne Haley Rose, “The Advantages of

Surveillance in the Workplace,” Chron, http://smallbusiness.chron.com/advantages-surveillance-workplace-

21607.html [accessed June 5, 2017]; Patricia Findlay and Alan McKinlay, “Surveillance, Electronic

Communications Technologies and Regulation,” Industrial Relations Journal 34, no. 4 (2003): 305-314;

Sjaak Nouwt, Berend R. de Vries and Roel Loermans, “Analysis of the Country Reports,” in Reasonable

Expectations of Privacy?: Eleven Country Reports on Camera Surveillance and Workplace Privacy, eds.

Sjaak Nouwt, Berend R. de Vries and Corien Prins (Cambridge: T.M.C. Asser Press. 2005), 323-357; A.

Conry-Murray, “The Pros and Cons of Employee Surveillance.” Network Magazine 12, no. 2 (2001): 62-66;

Elise M. Bloom, Madeleine Schachter and Elliot H. Steelman, “Competing Interests in the Post 9-11

Workplace: The New Line Between Privacy and Safety,” William Mitchell Law Review 29, 3 (2003): 897-

920; Jintae Lee and Younghwa Lee, “A Holistic Model of Computer Abuse within Organizations,”

Information Management & Computer Security 10, no. 2 (2002): 57-63; David Porter, “Insider Fraud:

Spotting the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing,” Computer Fraud & Security 4 (2003): 12-15; Kristen Bell DeTienne,

“Big Brother or Friendly Coach? Computer Monitoring in the 21st Century,” The Futurist 27, no. 5 (1993):

33-37.


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support the results of our own.51 The increasing level of distrust in organizations and among

employees themselves directly causes employees to feel job dissatisfaction. Although several

employees view workplace monitoring as a necessary security tool and try to understand and accept

it, they are not fundamentally pleased with being monitored and would prefer not to work in a 24/7

surveilled environment. Although behavioural patterns in the workplace are experienced as

multidetermined, and as connected in many and various ways with employees’ life chances, it is not

the case that external moderators in the workplace canguide and direct employee behaviours in every

particular way. This study is an initial attempt to explore and commend the employee perceptions,

feelings and opinion about the monitoring practices in their workplaces.

As a means of security and protection, electronic monitoring systems limit the unmannerly work

practices of employees. This fact is often highlighted by surveillance advocators. Though generally

meant to function as a ‘good watchdog’, these systems create negative feelings among workers,

affecting their productivity and well-being. Our data show that the argument ‘security’ remains a key

reason for monitoring and is acceptable to many people and it seems to play a quite prominent role

in its legitimisation. We have already discussed the security-argument of workplace monitoring in

the first chatper. A total of 44.6% respondents (response count 50) expressed surveillance strenthens

business measures security. As this study shows, security-claim enables employees more willing to

subject themselves to different methods of monitoring. Several respondents who accept these systems

as part of security, still express their concerns in terms of a sense of discomfort, susceptibility and

vulnerability.

Out of 112 respondents, 91 people share their deep concern of reduced freedom and autonomy (44

respondents) and lack of privacy (47 respondents). This also gives evidence that employees value

their privacy, autonomy, freedom, fairness, etc. in the workplace, as the workplace is indeed the

major channel for them to express their relationality and sociability. Employees here find workplace

monitoring objectionable. Continuous observation by means of various technologies seems to reduce

employees’ motivation to commit to extra role responsibilities. Many characterized their employer’s

approach to management as cynical and pessimistic, maintaining that this harmed their relationship

with their employers as well as with their fellow workers. This is made worse by employees’ reported

belief that they are treated in an undignified way and disempowered.

Can surveillance function as a performance management tool? Its supporters also claim that it

promotes worker’s training and development. Deviations are rarely pointed out in order to help

improve employee performance and services; rather, it is most commonly used to punish

51 Maria Karyda and Lilian Mitrou, “Bridging the Gap Between Employee Surveillance and Privacy

Protection,” in Social and Human Elements of Information Security: Emerging Trends and Countermeasures,

eds, Manish Gupta and Raj Sharman (Hershey: IGI Global, 2008), 283-300; Lilian Mitrou and. Maria Karyda,

“Employees’ Privacy vs. Employers’ Security: Can they be Balanced?” Telematics and Informatics 23, no. 3

(2006): 164-178; Kirsten E. Martin and R. Edward Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,”

Journal of Business Ethics 43, no.4 (2003): 353-361; Patricia Findlay and Alan McKinlay, “Surveillance,

Electronic Communications Technologies and Regulation,” Industrial Relations Journal 34, no. 4 (2003):

305-314; Gail Lasprogata, Nancy J. King, and Sukanya Pillay, “Regulation of Electronic Employee

Monitoring: Identifying Fundamental Principles of Employee Privacy through a Comparative Study of Data

Privacy Legislation in the European Union, United States and Canada,” Stanford Technology Law Review 4.

(2004). https://journals.law.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/stanford-technology-law-

review/online/lasprogata-regulationelectronic.pdf [accessed June 15, 2017]; Daniel J. Solove, “A Taxonomy

of Privacy,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 154, no. 3 (2006): 477-564; Daniel J. Solove,

“Reconstructing Electronic Surveillance Law,” The George Washington Law Review 72 (2004): 1701-1747;

Laura Pincus Hartman, “Ethics: The Rights and Wrongs of Workplace Snooping,” Journal of Business

Strategy 19, no. 3 (1998):16-19.


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employees.52 As Bhave maintains,53 surveillance in any form can be detrimental to employee

performance. For instance, electronic monitoring inhibits freedom at work. Freedom at work is vital

to construct a freedom-centered approach, leading to a freedom-centered enterprise and authority.

This also supports the claim of employees that they are not robots to be monitored in every moment

of their working day. A lack of freedom constrains one’s self-disclosure as a human self. Freedom

in the workplace indirectly promotes one’s ability to manage one’s own self-expression and to focus

on what one can control by oneself, rather than letting problems define one. Moreover, as illustrated

above, the greater the restriction imposed, the more employees come to feel rage toward those with

whom they work.

Can surveillance provide irrefutable evidence of criminal conduct in the workplace? Does it improve

organizational safety and security? Is it a proper part of law-enforcement efforts to combat work-

related misconduct? Does CCTV deter crimes? Studies point rather to a displacement of crime to

contexts that are less susceptible to surveillance tools. This shows that, although innovative systems

create uncertainty for the offender for a while, as this uncertainty fades, offenders develop new

approaches and commit the same crimes successfully.54 Evidence suggesting a decrease in crime

rates in highly surveilled contexts does not account for a significant number of offenders.55 Moreover,

several researchers have noted that the increased use of surveillance technologies actually make the

prosecution of transgressions more difficult, and seldom if ever preventmisconduct in the

workplace.56 The arguments that increased surveillance has the effects of crime prevention and

liability alleviation, therefore, are not always consistent with the employee security argument.

For instance, as one respondent opines, “… it is implemented as part of security, but I feel insecure

working under it, and it also restricts my freedom and privacy. Now-a-days, monitoring is on

ourselves [employees], not on our work or performance.” These specific monitoring technologies

are now targeted at employees themselves rather than at their work activities. Besides, the power

exercised by employers over employees is today virtually unrestricted and unchallenged. In the same

way, it must be noted, employees (30.0% of respondents in this study) generally admit that stress,

anxiety and other detrimental outcomes of surveillance lead to aggressive behaviours and

occupational violence. Employees in this realm make use of unobserved spaces (42.5%) to behave

differently. They resent that employers treat them with suspicion (46.2%) or biased favouritism

(increasing nepotism, for instance). This response substantiates our earlier discussion of social

sorting, where employees are sorted out and discriminated against by being categorized into groups

and thus assigned a certain worth or risk. This also threatens the reputations of employees both inside

and outside the workplace. When it starts to affect marital relationships and family life (22.6%),

employees develop further attitudinal and behavioural tendencies, such as absenteeism or

presenteeism.

52 Michael J. Smith and Benjamin C. Amick III, “Electronic Monitoring at the Workplace: Implications for

Employee Control and Job Stress,” in Job Control and Worker Health, eds. S. L. Sauter, J. J. Hurrell Jr and

C. L. Cooper (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1989), 275-290. 53 Devasheesh P. Bhave, “The Invisible Eye? Electronic Performance Monitoring and Employee Job

Performance,” Personnel Psychology 67, no. 3 (2014): 605-635. 54 Nick Tilley, “Whys and Wherefores in Evaluating the Effectiveness of CCTV,” International Journal of

Risk, Security and Crime Prevention 2, no. 3 (1997): 175-185. 55 Colin J. Horne, “The Case For: CCTV Should Be Introduced,” International Journal of Risk, Security and

Crime Prevention 1, no. 4 (1998): 323. 56 Martin and Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” 355.


215

5.4.3 In Defence of Privacy, Impartial Treatment and Dignity

Employees offer justifications for workplace privacy, impartial treatment and human dignity that go

beyond our own conceptual considerations above and include pragmatic concerns.57 Does electronic

surveillance in the workplace respect employee privacy? This study shows that the necessity of

“personal space” is highly valued by employees.58 To know the nature of workplace privacy, the

third chapter, above, has explored the argument of control theory, restricted access theory, etc.

However, developments in available information technologies have forced employees and the public

to reconsider the concept of privacy.59 Privacy is viewed here as a “good for its own sake and not

merely as a means to protect an individual or to increase productivity.”60 This study clearly suggests

that ubiquitous and pervasive monitoring hinders one’s privacy at work and restricts one’s freedom

and autonomy.61 Though there is a reasonable expectation that some space will be “left

unmonitored,” this is often not satisfied. A substantial number of respondents claimed that

surveillance invades privacy (42.0%) by restricting freedom and autonomy (39.3%), which also

affects the basis of self-determination and self-identity.

Employees expect unbiased/unprejudiced and equitable treatment that respects their dignity as

human beings. Several (19.6%) expressed a view that continuous surveillance practices are

dehumanizing and a threat to human dignity. Indeed, electronic surveillance, and the use of CCTV

in particular, often leads to prejudicial treatment of employees basing on certain stereotypical

assumptions held by those who are conducting the surveillance.62 Clive Norris’ research on CCTV

use and crime prevention points out that “[t]he young, the male and the black were systematically

and disproportionately targeted, not because of their involvement in crime or disorder, but for “no

obvious reason” and on the basis of categorical suspicion alone.”63 The use of data for confirmatory

57 Jay R. Lund, “Electronic Performance Monitoring: A Review of the Research Issues,” Applied Ergonomics

23, no. 1 (1992): 54-58. 58 The apparent necessity of personal space in the workplace is already discussed by number of researchers like

Philip Brey (2001), Dag Elgesem (1996), and Richard Spinello (1997). Cf., Philip Brey, “Disclosive

Computer Ethics,” in Readings in Cyber Ethics, eds. Richard A. Spinello and Herman T. Tavani (Sudbury,

MA: Jones and Barlett, 2001), 51-62; D. Elgesem, “Privacy, Respect for Persons, and Risk,” in Philosophical

Perspectives on Computer-Mediated Communication, ed. Charles Ess (Albany: State University of New York

Press, 1996), 45-66; and R. Spinello, Case Studies in Information and Computer Ethics (Upper Saddle River,

NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997). 59 Martin and Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” 355. Michael Selmi, “Privacy for the

Working Class: Public Work and Private Lives,” Louisiana Law Review 66, no. 4 (2006): 1043. 60 Martin and Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” 357. 61 The argument and ethical consideration of autonomy centralizes the individualized or ‘own’ design of life

to develop and prosper in worklife. Not allowing employees to generate or possess this personal space,

according to Stahl et al., “is thus an expression of a lack of respect for their wishes and needs.” Stahl et al,

“Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace,” 67. 62 Michael J. Dee, “The Use of CCTV to Police Young People in Public Spaces - A Case of Big Brother or Big

Friend?” Paper presented at the 27th International Conference on Making Cities Livable, Vienna, Austria. De

Montfrot University, Youth and Community Division, Scraptoft Campus, Leicester, LE7 9SU, U.K., 2000;

Simon G. Davies, “The Case Against: CCTV Should Not Be Introduced,” International Journal of Risk,

Security and Crime Prevention 1, no. 4 (1996): 327-331; Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong, The Unforgiving

Eye: CCTV Surveillance in Public Space (Mimeo. Hull, UK: Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice,

University of Hull, 1997); Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong, “CCTV and the Social Structuring of

Surveillance,” In Surveillance of Public Space: CCTV, Street Lighting and Crime Prevention. Crime

Prevention Studies. Vol. 10, eds. Kate Painter and Nick Tilley (Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 1999a),

157-178. 63 Clive Norris, “From Personal to Digital: CCTV, the Panopticon, and the Technological Mediation of

Suspicion and Social Control,” in Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination,

ed. David Lyon (London: Routledge, 2003), 266. See also, Norris and Gary Armstrong, “CCTV and the

Social Structuring of Surveillance,” 175-176.


216

or manipulative purposes largely depends on the one who holds the data. As Peter French opines,

“[a]lthough cameras work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year; rarely go sick; do not

take maternity leave, refreshment or smoking breaks; and do not go to the lavatory - they don't

actually do anything. It is the operators that produce the results required.”64 In this research context,

employees experience that the data collected is used for biased treatment. Just as the research findings

of Norris and Armstrong reveal, this discrimination is based not on individualized behavioural

criteria, but on one’s belonging to a particular group65 or situation. This study identifies these same

experiences in the workplace. This type of categorical suspicion and the ensuing discriminatory

practices intensify “the surveillance of those already marginalized and further increases their chance

of official stigmatization.”66 This leads, in turn, to a lack of autonomy,67 causes an affront to human

dignity,68 and dilutes the humanity of employees according to their merely peripheral features.

This phenomenon is evident when the target of monitoring changes. There is a shift happening, as

this study also observes, from monitoring work or performance towards monitoring employees

themselves, and from employees’ work lives to monitoring their private lives. It is especially difficult

to evaluate employees based on data taken directly or indirectly from electronic monitoring systems

that include an assessment of the “human” aspects of employees and their work, including their

motivation and performance and the quality of their work. Similarly, claims of safety and security

(employer, employee, property and service) can never wholly dispel the ontological insecurity one

feels in the workplace. The all-pervasive external power control envelops the person and induces a

feeling of powerlessness and even worthlessness. The problem of power distance and the unequal

use and distribution of power in the Indian workplace is evident here.69 The previous discussion in

the fourth chapter, on Michael Foucault’s discourse on surveillance and power, offers a theoretical

framework for understanding this debate. The quality of human [employee] existence is thoroughly

challenged here.70 Therefore, though workplace monitoring seems to comply with a legal or

regulatory framework, the impact assessment from the perspective of employees shows that

ubiquitous surveillance becomes problematic and cannot in the end be ethically justified.

64 Peter French, “Video Nation,” Police Review (3/7/98).

http://www.1in12.com/publications/cctv/bubble.html [accessed June 10, 2017]. The CCTV can be socially

beneficial and harmful as Jock Young rightly elucidates that “it can invade privacy and make Orwell’s 1984

a reality. But it can also […] be liberating and protective.” Jock Young, The Exclusive Society (London:

Sage, 1999), 192. So, its usage and effects depend also upon the one who holds the data and process further

for a desired result. 65 Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong, The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV (Oxford: Berg,

1999b), 150. See also, Norris, “From Personal to Digital,” 266. 66 Norris, “From Personal to Digital,” 266. 67 Martin and Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” 357. 68 Thomas Hoeren and Sonja Eustergerling, “Privacy and Data Protection at the Workplace in Germany,” in

Reasonable Expectations of Privacy: Eleven Country Reports on Camera Surveillance and Workplace

Privacy, eds. Sjaak Nouwt, Berend R. de Vries and Corien Prins (The Hague, PA: TMC Asser Press, 2005),

211-244; Michael Selmi, “Privacy for the Working Class: Public Work and Private Lives,” Louisiana Law

Review 66, no. 4 (2006): 1035, 1042-1049. 69 The same result is found analyzing researchers like Forester and Morrison. Cf., Tom Forester and Perry

Morrison, Computer Ethics – Cautionary Tales and Ethical Dilemmas in Computing, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:

The MIT Press, 1994). 70 Some traces of this argument can be seen in William S. Brown. See for instance, Brown, “Ontological

Security, Existential Anxiety, and Workplace Privacy,” 65.


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5.4.4 Other Major Employee Concerns

Conditions in a highly surveilled workplace negatively impact the trust and mutual confidence

between employer and employee.71 This study shows that ubiquitous monitoring inhibits employee

creativity and innovation. Employees feel overwhelmed when they are aware that every word they

utter, every keystroke they make, every movement they take, and every document they analyse are

recorded and can be retrieved at will by their employer, even after a long time. According to this

study, close to half of the respondents (employees) in India reported excessive pressure at work.

Almost all of them pinned the blame on the overwhelming pressure exerted by employers through

monitoring. This corresponds to the findings of previously conducted studies.72 In the same way, a

full-time mask is worn by employees when they deal with unconventional or sweeping ideas. They

consistently feel a need to filter their communication and its content.73 The monitoring process forces

employees to conform to the express desires and demands of their employers,74 and thus creativity is

stifled and work performance decreased. In this situation, employees are encouraged to value work-

quantity over work-quality.75 Concern about the desire and decisions of their observers is constant

and hinders innovation.

Gradually, this leads one to submit to the‘paternalistic expectations’ of the authorities.76 In the

employer-employee relationship, “employees began to act like children with parental

expectations.”77 In this situation, “employees may begin taking on the role of children as their

employer decreases their level of privacy.”78 This ‘meekness’ responds to the challenging

expectations of work by surrendering entirely to the ‘mentors’ in the workplace. We see this

phenomenon as part of traditional ‘role’ fixing in the Indian socio-cultural context. A feeling of

vulnerability and powerlessness is the key result here. Another disturbing effect of this compulsive

submission is, –according to Erich Fromm’s psychoanalytic work, that the “individual becomes an

automaton, loses his self, and yet at the same time consciously conceives of himself as free.”79 The

distinction that Fromm makes between ‘freedom from’ (from restrictions imposed by others or by

institution) and ‘freedom to’ (to engage in creative and spontaneous acts out of the fullness of one’s

71 Stéphane Desrochers and Alexia Roussos, “The Jurisprudence of Surveillance: A Critical Look at the Laws

of Intimacy,” Lex Electronica 6, no.2 (2001): 1-12. 72 For instance, see the study Towers Watson/NBGH 2013/2014: Employer Survey on Purchasing Value in

Health Care conducted by Towers Watson. Willis Towers Watson, “Full Report: Towers Watson/NBGH

2013/2014 Employer Survey on Purchasing Value in Health Care,” May 2014,

https://www.towerswatson.com/en/Insights/IC-Types/Survey-Research-Results/2014/05/full-report-towers-

watson-nbgh-2013-2014-employer-survey-on-purchasing-value-in-health-care [accessed June 20, 2017]. See

the reference also in: Preeti Kulkarni and Neha Pandey Deoras, “Why Employees in India are Stressed at

Workplaces,” The Economic Times, June 19, 2015,

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/why-employees-in-india-are-stressed-at-

workplaces/articleshow/47655329.cms [accessed June 15, 2017]. 73 Martin and Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” 356. 74 Martin and Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” 356. 75 John R. Aiello and Carol M. Svec, “Computer Monitoring of Work Performance: Extending the Social

Facilitation Framework to Electronic Presence,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 23, no. 7 (1993): 537-

548; R.H. Irving, C. A. Higgins and F.R. Safayeni, “Computerized Performance Monitoring Systems: Use

and Abuse,” Communications of the ACM 29, no. 8 (1986): 794-801; and, A. F. Westin, “Two Key Factors

That Belong in a Macroergonomic Analysis of Electronic Monitoring: Employee Perceptions of Fairness and

the Climate of Organizational Trust or Distrust,” Applied Ergonomics 23, no. 1 (1992): 35-42. 76 Hartman, “Ethics: The Rights and Wrongs of Workplace Snooping,” 16-19; Martin and Freeman, “Some

Problems with Employee Monitoring,” 356. 77 Martin and Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” 356; Hartman, “Ethics: The Rights and

Wrongs of Workplace Snooping,” 16-19. 78 Martin and Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” 357. 79 Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (Avon Books, New York, 1969), 269.


218

integrated personality) causes “the spontaneous realization of the self,” in which “man unites himself

anew with the world.”80 A lack of this form of freedom in the workplace and the complete subjugation

of employees to their employer as a paternalistic figure leaves one uncertain how to engage in one’s

work in a systematic and innovative way.

Workplace monitoring also leads to behavioural alterations. Individuals think and act differently

when they are being monitored and when they are not.81 One’s feeling towards one’s work and

workplace, as well as one’s attitudes and beliefs, emotions and behaviours, can be adversely affected

when working under continuous surveillance.82 Those who are being observed start to think and act

according to the expectations and demands of the observer. This is called “anticipatory conformity,”

whereby “the socially desirable response is presented in anticipation of the demand.”83 One presents

a desired [or occasionally undesired] response in anticipation to these demands. This results in the

creation of an inauthentic self and often, as Brown states, “leads to feelings of guilt over perceived

unworthiness of the authentic self, and awareness of the gulf between the idealized self and the

realized self.”84 The end-result of this is a cavernous feeling of alienation,85 which is reflected in the

workplace in the form of absenteeism, presenteeism and high levels of attrition.

Working under continuous monitoring also heightens levels of depression and anxiety, stress and

related health hazards among monitored employees as compared to non-monitored employees.86

Electronic monitoring in the workplace, according to Richard L. Worsnop, makes employees “feel

like prisoners hooked up to a computer; mistreated, guilty, paranoid, enslaved, violated, angry, and

driven at a relentless pace.”87 In our present study, it is observed that the percentage of people

experiencing physical and mental stress are about 37%. This also leads to somatic health complaints

80 Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 261. 81 Martin and Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” 357. 82 Stanton, Jeffrey M. “Reactions to Employee Performance Monitoring: Framework, Review, and Research

Directions.” Human Performance 13, no, 1 (2000): 85-113. 83 William S. Brown, “Ontological Security, Existential Anxiety, and Workplace Privacy,” Journal of Business

Ethics 23, no. 1 (2000): 64. 84 Brown, “Ontological Security, Existential Anxiety, and Workplace Privacy,” 64. 85 Brown, “Ontological Security, Existential Anxiety, and Workplace Privacy,” 64. Brown, quoting Richard

Schacht, explains three forms of alienation: (1) alienation as separation - estrangement from someone or

something other than oneself, with which one should ideally be united; (2) alienation as transfer – one gives

up or no longer has ownership over something that belonged to one; and (3) alienation as derangement – one

is not oneself – in other words – one is a stranger to oneself.” Brown, “Ontological Security, Existential

Anxiety, and Workplace Privacy,” 64-65; Richard Schacht, The Future of Alienation (Urbana and Chicago:

University of Illinois Press, 1994), 38. 86 Christopher Pearson Fazekas, “1984 is Still Fiction: Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace and U.S.

Privacy,” Duke Law & Technology Review 3, no. 1 (2004): 1-17; Michael J. Smith, Pascale Carayon, K. J.

Sanders, S Y Lim and David LeGrande, “Employee Stress and Health Complaints in Jobs with and Without

Electronic Performance Monitoring,” Applied Ergonomics 23, no. 1 (1992): 17-27; Benjamin C. Amick III

and Michael J. Smith, “Stress, Computer-Based Work Monitoring and Measurement Systems: A Conceptual

Overview,” Applied Ergonomics 23, no. 1 (1992): 6-16; Michael Levi, “Electronic Monitoring in

the Workplace: Power through the Panopticon.” 1994.

http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/impact/s94/students/mike/mike_paper.html [accessed June 15, 2017]; and U.S.

Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, “The Electronic Supervisor: New Technology, New Tensions,”

OTA-CIT-333 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987), 50-54. 87 Richard L. Worsnop, “Privacy in the Workplace: Does Electronic Monitoring Violate Workers’ Privacy?”

CQ Researcher 3, no. 43 (1993): 1025. Cf. Kaupins and Coco, “Perceptions of Internet-of-Things

Surveillance by Human Resource Managers,” 54.


219

and emotional disorders.88 About 30% of respondents state that they experience unease and various

other health-related problems and dissatisfactions at work.

One adverse effect of CCTV camera use on employee health is due to radiation emission.89 CCTV

cameras, as electronic devices, emit some minor radiation.90 Some surveillance cameras have

infrared (IR) emitters around the lens so they can capture images even in complete darkness. Being

an electronic device, these produce a small electromagnetic field and transmit radio frequency (RF)

signals to a base station. Though these radiation emissions are in themselves negligible, long-term

exposure to them can cause serious health problems.91 For instance, people who work in

circumstances where they are exposed to infrared radiation for prolonged periods may experience

damage to their eyes, skin and other body tissues.92 Long-term exposure to this radiation can cause

other health problems as well, such as cardiac problems, iron deficiencies in the blood, etc. Radiation

can damage the DNA inside a cell's nucleus, and if the DNA is sufficiently damaged, the cell can

become cancerous. Exposure to excessive amounts of radiation, or lower amounts over an extended

period, can significantly increase the risk of developing these diseases.

IR frequencies can scratch tissues and lead people to develop tissue-specific lesionsover a period of

months or years of continuous exposure.93 The severity of the radiation-induced skin injury and other

complications and health hazards largely depends on the dose received, the surface area of exposed

skin and the radio sensitivity of individuals.94 Besides this, studies on hearing deficiencies caused by

prolonged exposure to radiofrequency radiation95 can be applied to the workplace. Similarly, the GPS

devices used in automobiles generate large amounts of radiation during use, which, after continued

88 Köksal Büyük and Uğur Keskin, “Panopticon’s Electronic Resurrection: Workplace Monitoring as an Ethical

Problem,” Turkish Journal of Business Ethics 5, no. 10 (2012): 75-88; Jitendra M. Mishra and Suzanne M.

Crampton. “Employee Monitoring: Privacy in the Workplace?” S.A.M. Advanced Management Journal 63,

no. 3 (1998): 4-11. 89 Graham T. Smith, Machine Tool Metrology: An Industrial Handbook (Switzerland: Springer, 2016), 527-

536; Herman Kruegle, CCTV Surveillance: Video Practices and Technology, 2nd ed. (Burlington, MA:

Elsevier, 2007), 130-132. 90 Simple digital cameras emit only electromagnetic radiation, which is weaker than ultra violet (UV) rays.

Many businesses and corporations use now infrared (IR) camera, because it not only functions as a crime

deter, but helps to monitor areas in law light or even in complete darkness. For, “a commercial security system

that uses an infrared (IR) camera harnesses the electro optic process that will digitize the electromagnetic

waves emitted in the area of focus and turn it into an image that will be used for surveillance and monitoring.”

USA Security Systems Blog, “How Electromagnetic Waves are Used in Security Cameras,” Surveillance

Cameras & Security News, March 25, 2014. http://blog.usasecuritysystems.com/electromagnetic-waves-

used-security-cameras/ [accessed June 20, 2017]. 91 The American Cancer Society Medical and Editorial Content Team. “Microwaves, Radio Waves, and Other

Types of Radiofrequency Radiation.” American Cancer Society, May 31, 2016.

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/radiation-exposure/radiofrequency-radiation.html [accessed

June 20, 2017]. 92 Exposure to intense electromagnetic radiation, including infrared radiation, can damage the lens and cornea

of the eye. Therefore, staring at the sun is said to be harmful and unintelligent. Media Centre, WHO, “Ionizing

radiation, Health Effects and Protective Measures,” Fact Sheet: World Health Organization, April 2016,

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs371/en/ [accessed June 20, 2017]. 93 Sudha Rana, Raj Kumar, Sarwat Sultana and Rakesh Kumar Sharma, “Radiation-Induced Biomarkers for

the Detection and Assessment of Absorbed Radiation Doses” Journal of Pharmacy and Bioallied Sciences 2,

no.3 (2010): 189-196. 94 Rana et al., “Radiation-Induced Biomarkers for the Detection and Assessment of Absorbed Radiation

Doses,” 189-196. 95 M. Frauk Oktay, et al. “Occupational Safety: Effects of Workplace Radiofrequencies on Hearing

Function.” Archives of Medical Research 35 (2004): 517-521.


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and extended use, can cause dizziness and insomnia and harms the reproductive system.96 These

problems seriously affect employees who are continuously exposed to such devices. In the following,

we make some detailed and conclusive remarks on the study described in this chapter.

5.5 ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE: A POOR SOLUTION TO WORKPLACE CONCERNS

As discussed in the second chapter, the implementation and use of electronic surveillance is on the

rise and has become routine in the Indian organizational workplace. The socio-cultural and economic

situations in India, including commerce and trade, have significantly supported this scenario. This

study also proves that the use of active monitoring systems in the workplace is increasing (88.6% of

respondents acknowledged the presence of electronic monitoring systems in their companies) and

that the performance and communications of employees are under strict scrutiny. Though few

employees responded positively to surveillance practices, typically as a means to ensure security,

many of them still express its negative impacts. Studies prove that any external monitoring practice

can have negative effects on employees.97 It can increase stress levels and decrease job satisfaction.

Increased productivity is not always a result, and even where it is, it is often accompanied by a

decrease in the quality of products and services. Besides, even where the short term results of

surveillance seem impressive, researchers doubt its long-term benefits.98

One of the major concerns expressed by an employee is that the following:

“… all individuals are different and there way of working is also different. Hence every action of

employee shouldn’t be traced & tracked. Most of the companies use monitoring at work just to

stop the unethical practices or harassment against the women employees for the security purpose.

In the recent past, it was in news companies track the Idle time of systems to capture employees

work, as an employee it just breaks the trust on employee on the employer/company. The employee

attrition will be more in those kinds of employees.”

Many employees spoke openly about their privacy concerns, stating for example that “our personal

privacy is sometimes compromised, when we are aware that, we are being monitored then we tend

to be more conscious, unsettled.” This leads to unnecessary fear, as one employee rightly noted: “…

much like public speaking, as soon as we step in front of the camera, our knees and hands start to

tremble, our voice get soft, it feels like someone looking straight into your eyes and judging you.” A

few female employees responded very harshly to it. For instance, one says, “it limits my freedom,

when there is no freedom there is no creativity. we are not robots to monitor all-time during the

work. It makes me exhausted at work and feel the same when I am back home.” Another exclaims,

96 Fei, Liang. “Dangerous Navigation.” Global Times: Discover China, Discover the World, September 5,

2013. http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/780549.shtml [accessed June 20, 2017]. 97 Don DiTecco, G. Cwitco, A. Arsenault and M. André, “Operator Stress and Monitoring Practices,” Applied

Ergonomics 23, no. 1 (1992): 29-34; John R. Aiello and Kathryn J. Kolb, “Electronic Monitoring and Social

Context: Impact on Productivity and Stress,” Journal of Applied Psychology 80, no. 3 (1995): 339-359;

Michael J. Smith, et al., “Employee Stress and Health Complaints in Jobs with and Without Electronic

Performance Monitoring.” Applied Ergonomics 23, no. 1 (1992): 17-27; Rebecca Grant and Christopher

Higgins, “Monitoring Service Workers via Computer: The Effect on Employees, Productivity, and Service,”

National Productivity Review 8, no. 2 (1989): 101-112; Roland E. Kidwell Jr., Nathan Bennett, “Employee

Reactions to Electronic Control Systems: The Role of Procedural Fairness,” Group & Organizational

Management 19, no. 2 (1994): 203-218; Terri L. Griffith, “Monitoring and Performance: A Comparison of

Computer and Supervisor Monitoring,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 23 no. 7 (1993): 549-572;

Delbert M. Nebeker and B. Charles Tatum, “The Effects of Computer Monitoring, Standards, and Rewards

on Work Performance, Job Satisfaction and Stress,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 23 no. 7 (1993):

508-536. 98 Stanton, “Reactions to Employee Performance Monitoring,” 108.


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“do they not trust us? Surveillance inhibits freedom at work. The more we are restricted the more

rage with others we become.” Yet another female employee asks, “am I a prisoner to be always

watched over? Workplace should not be equated with prisons. Why should a stranger observe

women’s privacy in the name of surveillance?” Several female employees also spoke about distrust,

power control and related stress, for example stating that:

(1) “I feel the element of distrust is the key here. It also leads to the creation of artificial

professional behaviour. It is the indication from the management that they do suspect

us.”

(2) “Now, it goes beyond performance evaluation and intrude our privacy and restrict

the freedom It is used because, with a fear tactic, the management wants to get full

control over us. For me it creates an atmosphere of mistrust at work.”

(3) “For the management, it may act as a moral check on the employees, but I am too

much stressed and feel very uncomfortable to work being under monitoring. Not

allowing us to have or enjoy a bit of own space is like a crime done to our human self

and shows the lack of respect to our needs and wants.”

Employees are concerned to protect totally private and personal things that cannot be made public.

So, any forced intrusion into one’s private sphere is seen to constitute a violation of their human

dignity. In view of all these responses, it seems clear that, at least from an employee’s perspective,

‘on/off the job’ surveillance cannot simply fix all the problems that arise in the workplace, as some

employers seem convinced it can. The concerns related to human dignity will be analyzed in detail

in the next chapter.

What then do employees themselves seek and stand for? When an employee states that “I am sure

that in order to be productive and responsible I do not need an external monitoring,” one can see the

need and ability of employees to be self-disciplined in the workplace. Responsible self-monitoring

is preferred by most of the employees who responded to the survey conducted for this study. Along

with these were a few respondents who were not bothered at all about surveillance, stating for

example that “… most of the times I don't care much about it, for me it makes no difference whether

if it is under electronic surveillance or not.” Certain others held that “a person's productivity and

talent can be molded and used effectively only under proper monitoring and surveillance.” However,

a majority of respondents prefer to work without being monitored or made to feel uncomfortable due

to surveillance practices in the workplace. This is expressed by one employee as follows: “it takes

away my work satisfaction” and “I am not a slave to work like this,” and “I feel I have the dedication

and commitment towards the work which I'm doing. My responsibility does not change according to

the level of external monitoring.” At least in their own estimation, these employees are ready to

assume responsibility for their work without the imposition of any external force or constraint.

A majority of employees who responded to this study (more than 75 percent, in Sample A) preferred

self-monitoring to any kind of external electronic or non-electronic surveillance as a means to

improve efficiency and effectiveness. Several responses focused on the importance of individual

motivation and responsibility: “I am sure that in order to be productive and responsible I do not need

an external monitoring” and “… my responsibility does not change according to the level of external

monitoring.” Other comments exhibit this same spirit of embracing self-monitoring and taking

responsibility for one’s own work: “I am not a slave to work like this” and “I change my behaviour

to please the authority.” Self-monitoring generally refers to the ability of individuals “to adjust his


222

or her behaviour to external, situational factors,”99 which leads, in the context of our research here,

to better performance and increased productivity.

Several studies indicate that a form of “self” monitoring is demanded and preferred by employees,

and that the feedback loop of self-monitoring improves performance in various situations.100 Self-

monitoring is found to be a better motivator than any other kinds of monitoring.101 Behavioural self-

monitoring (BSM) is being researched now in many disciplines.102 It is to be noted that, as Gudykunst

et al. argue, individualist and collectivist cultures influence self-monitoring differently. Furthermore,

people with an individualistic background tend to be low self-monitors, while those with a collectivist

background who value conformity to ingroups and are high self-monitors.103 India’s collectivist

cultures and traditions, discussed in the second chapter, show that India is low in individualism and

thus that her employees, when allowed to engage in more collectivist practices, are likely to be high

self-monitors. Self-monitoring as a feasible strategic approach to employee management will be

explored in more detail in the next chapter.

5.6 LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

This study has its limitations. The job nature and position of survey respondents may limit the

generalizability of its results. Errors that occur in the data due to incorrect or manipulated responses

may result from (1) a misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the terms used and the intended

meaning of the questions; (2) a fear of being mistreated or even punished by authority figures; and

(3) the distress caused by questions concerning sensitive issues. In the same way, individual

responses may not always accurately represent the self of the person responding, but rather reflect

bias. Some may argue that the sample set (200) is too small, or that the honesty of participants cannot

be guaranteed in such a small-scale interview. Indeed, the nature and relevance of the respondents’

experiences of workplace surveillance determines the truthfulness of their responses. Some

interviewees will respond in the way they expect the interviewer would like, which again jeopardizes

the validity of responses. Mixing up potential and actual tensions in the area discussed may also be

compromising. When respondents are forced to opt for alternatives given, spontaneity and creative

99 Stephen P. Robbins, Rolf Bergman, Ian Stagg and Mary Coulter, Management, 7th ed. (Melbourne: Pearson,

2015), 545. See references for this in: Stephen Robbins, Timothy A. Judge, Bruce Millett and Maree Boyle,

Organizational Behaviour, 7th ed. (Frenchs Forest NSW: Pearson, 2014), 90. The concept of self-monitoring

is introduced by Mark Snyder and perceived as a social construct of expressive behaviour. It is a personality

trait and individual ability to regulate or control one’s behaviour that helps him or her to accommodate social

situations and phenomena. Mark Snyder, “Self-Monitoring of Expressive Behavior,” Journal of Personality

and Social Psychology 30, no. 4 (1974): 526-537. Here, in this study, the concept of self-monitoring is

differentiated from the concept of impression management or the trend of being in desired public appearances. 100 John M. Ivancevich and J. Timothy McMahon, “The Effects of Goal Setting, External Feedback, and Self-

Generated Feedback on Outcome Variables: A Field Experiment,” Academy of Management Journal 25, no.

2 (1982): 359-372; Martin M. Greller, “Evaluation of Feedback Sources as a Function of Role and

Organizational Level,” Journal of Applied Psychology 65, no. 1 (1980): 24-27. 101 Jeffrey M. Stanton, “Reactions to Employee Performance Monitoring: Framework, Review, and Research

Directions,” Human Performance 13, no. 1 (2000): 93. 102 Ryan Olson and Jamey Winchester, “Behavioral Self-Monitoring of Safety and Productivity in the

Workplace: A Methodological Primer and Quantitative Literature Review,” Journal of Organizational

Behavior Management 28, no. 1 (2008): 9-75; Thomas S Critchfield and Ernest A. Vargas, “Self-recording,

Instructions, and Public Self-Graphing: Effects on Swimming in the Absence of Coach Verbal Interaction,”

Behavior Modification 15, no. 1 (1991): 95-112. 103 Gudykunst, William B. et al., “A Cross-cultural Comparison of Self-monitoring,” Communication Research

Reports 6, no. 1 (1989): 7-12.


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thinking is limited. With regard to adaptability, it is very difficult to accurately identify the feelings,

thoughts and reasons underlying any individual response.

As in every narrative-response study, it is difficult to analyse or compare responses to open-ended

questions. So, respondents’ points of view need to be brought into focus before making any

generalization about an individual’s attitude, job commitment or interpersonal behaviours. In

analysing the results of this study, it was difficult to calculate the depth of the qualitative information.

What is more, an interviewer/interviewee effect was likely to occur. As Martyn Denscombe opines,

for example, “[i]n particular, the sex, the age, and the ethnic origins of the interviewer have a bearing

on the amount of information people are willing to divulge and their honesty about what they

reveal.”104 Similar to this is the interviewee effect. The extensive coding methods required for a

narrative research study will necessarily limit its scope, as it was conducted with themes the

researcher already had in mind. As with every open-ended questionnaire, this study suffers from

missing and possibly inaccurate data. However, confidence in its conclusion is strengthened by the

fact that its findings complement and fit with the findings of other studies in the growing scholarly

literature on the negative impact of electronic surveillance in the workplace.

5.7 CONCLUSION

The study described in this chapter demonstrates the adverse effects of employee surveillance and

the complexity and limitations of any effort to understand the same. It qualitatively affirms, through

the analysis of employees’ real-time experience, the negative impacts of workplace surveillance that

have already been explored in previous chapters. This often surpasses the anticipated benefits of

surveillance. One concern of the study is to lay a groundwork for envisioning the elimination of

electronic monitoring in the organizational workplace, or at least an elimination of its more adverse

effects. Though researchers in this area have written mostly from psychological or legal perspectives,

our own study demonstrates the need to take a socio-ethical perspective. Employees occupy totally

different attitudinal and behavioural positions depending on whether of not they are under

surveillance. Therefore, this study has considered the effect of electronic monitoring on employee’s

morale, job attitude, workplace behaviour, trust and faith in employer and the commitment towards

the job and life. Employees resist or express discontent in various forms about such workplace

systems and strategies. They regard a few factors to be of overriding importance: privacy and data

security, freedom in their job, securing the trust of their employer and enjoying impartial treatment

in the workplace. External monitoring has not been shown to increase productivity or efficiency in

the workplace, and crucial variables such as trust, commitment, efficiency and performance are

unrelated to any type of monitoring.

Finally, we have seen that workplace monitoring does not help achieve long term goals and

objectives, and indeed demonstrated that the success of employees and organizations is unrelated to

any external monitoring employed in the workplace. Our study also affirms the need to explore the

negative effects of workplace surveillance on employees and in particular the ethical threats posed

to employee rights. Therefore, from an employee’s perspective, electronic monitoring is not a viable

solution for workplace problems. Morally, we would thus contend, it is wrong to use electronic

surveillance in the workplace, and particularly 24/7 ubiquitous monitoring. In this context, an

adequate description of good morale among employees, which is linked to trust and transparency in

the workplace, is a good starting point for generating alterations in employee attitudes, commitments

and behaviours. This could in turn establish a closer connection between employer and employees.

104 Martyn Denscombe, The Good Research Guide: For Small-scale Social Research, 3rd ed.

(Buckingham: Open University Press, 2007), 184.


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These conclusions, showing the negative effects of electronic surveillance in real-life work

situations, are consistent with other studies on this theme. Based on these conclusive remarks, the

next chapter discusses the significance of the phenomenon of the body and of body ontology as it

relates to the normative and moral concepts of bodily integrity, human dignity and human

transcendence. The employee responses presented in this chapter, we argue, express a body ontology

that is quite different from the one presumed by current surveillance practices in the organizational

workplace, and one that is far more ethically adequate as a means to preserve and protect employees’

human dignity.

CHAPTER SIX

AN ETHICAL RETHINKING OF WORKPLACE SURVEILLANCE AND MANAGERIAL

BEHAVIOUR

6.0 INTRODUCTION

When new information and communication technologies enter the workplace, it is necessary for both

the employer and employees to have clear ethical guidance. New developments increase the diversity

and ambiguity of situations, rendering them fluid. Many moral rules are at stake in workplace

conflicts such as safety, the duty to care, and issues related to privacy, physical and informational

freedom and discriminative behaviours. The previous chapter has sought to establish empirically the

link between workplace surveillance and employee responses, as well as to afford us some insight

into the job-related well-being or discontentments of employees. Using employee data about India,

the survey conducted as part of this research finds that workplace surveillance is associated with

lower employee satisfaction and a decrease in productivity in the long term. We found no current

pro-employee policies and practices that ameliorate this. Likewise, previous chapters, through the

review of available literature and field study reports, have shown that in most cases the

implementation and use of surveillance technologies seldom improve employee productivity or job

satisfaction. They rather worsen it, by causing behavioural and performance hardships in employees’

work and personal lives. Besides, our previous consideration of the ubiquitous means of surveillance

now in use in organizations align with the research of Richard S. Rosenberg, who finds that “more

surveillance, more loss of privacy, more restrictions, more control by management, and necessarily

less concern with ethical treatment.”1 The more we put privacy at risk, the more we can see the effects

of power control and even, going beyond this, discrimination and social sorting in the workplace.

In this chapter, we aim to develop a general moral framework to understand and ethically respond to

electronic monitoring. This ethical exploration begins by defining workplace ethics and workplace

surveillance ethics. It is followed by a preliminary analysis of what we hold to be a necessary

transition of workplace behaviours that goes beyond the domain of managerial rationality, narrowly

construed. It then follows by outlining an integration of corporate codes of ethics and various

theoretical approaches of moral assessment. The second section tries to balance these ethical

considerations with a tripartitereading of workplace surveillance. A converging employee

perspective, which regards ubiquitous surveillance in the workplace as unethical, further qualifies

this section. This employee standpoint is substantiated through the moral discussion of the

irreducibility of the human person, big data and the body-subject, and ethics of rights, power and

social justice. Finally, the third section presents a religious frame of reference to assess how religion

might be able to reinforce the ethical response to workplace management outlined previously.

6.1 A NEW BENEFICIARY VIEW OF WORKPLACE AND SURVEILLANCE ETHICS

Ethics in business is not only a concern in terms of profits or compliance in the domain of risk

management. It also requires that personal ethics be integrated into a corporate context, which is

itself of course enmeshed with social relations.2 Reaching beyond concerns about law and

compliance, ethics is about the moral character of persons and of culture, and can be defined, in a

1 Richard S. Rosenberg, “The Technological Assault on Ethics in the Modern Workplace,” in The Ethics of

Human Resources and Industrial Relations, eds. John W. Budd and James G. Scoville, 141-172 (Urbana-

Champaign, IL: Labour and Employment Relations Association, 2005), 150. 2 David W. Miller and Michael J. Thate, “Are Business Ethics Relevant?” in Economics as a Moral Science,

eds. Peter Rona and Laszlo Zsolnai, 163-173 (Switzerland: Springer, 2017), 163.

An Ethical Rethinking of Workplace Surveillance

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business context, as “the art and discipline of discerning the Right, the Good, and the Fitting Action

to take, and having the creativity and courage to do it.”3 Ethics helps indeed to shape the business

culture and character of employers and employees through the lenses of the ‘right,’ the ‘good’ and

the ‘fitting,’ and thus builds integrity and encourages responsible behaviour. It also enhances

employee morale, resulting in good corporate reputation. Mollie Painter-Morland opines that

“[w]hen ethics functions as an integral part of business practice, […] it informs individuals’

perceptions of events from the start and plays an important part in shaping their responses.”4 A

strategic integration of ethics into debates about workplace surveillance is a necessary precondition

to securing more adequate behaviour in this area. For as Painter-Morland observes, “[i]n fact, efforts

to formulate unambiguous normative guidelines for the conduct of business may paradoxically cause

us to neglect those very aspects of human life that both legality and morality attempt to protect.”5

This also necessitates the idea of ‘an ethical culture’6 to enable one to describe, assess and manage

the organizational culture.

A remark contained in the New York based Business Roundtable report of 1988, on Policy and

Privacy in Company Conduct, gives good reasons to think that the question of ethics in business is

the most challenging issue in any corporate scenario today.7 A different modus operandi is thus

required: a shift from common methods of organizational development that focus on control, to an

approach that starts from a person-oriented approach while also focusing on institutional aspects. As

Stefanie Mauksch opines, “organizations are made up of humans who perceive, interpret,

contextualize with thought and affect, choose, and then act.”8 Ethics is thus applied or is relevant to

the conduct of both individuals and entire organizations and refers to the values, norms, principles

and standards of both these variables and consequent behavioural alterations and new ways of

distinguishing right from wrong. Moreover, ethics is described as “an act of dynamic but justifiable

balancing of conflicting interests,”9 and thus in our present research the rights and interests of both

employers and employees need to be taken into account. Business ethicists also describe this as a

harmonization or reconciliation of conflicting interests.10 Hence, the following section will define

what workplace ethics and workplace surveillance ethics mean in the context of work, where the use

of surveillance technologies is so common.

3 Miller and Thate, “Are Business Ethics Relevant?” 168. 4 Mollie Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice: Ethics as the Everyday Business of Business

(Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2011), 2. 5 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 3. 6 Researchers view ethical culture as part of or the subject of organizational culture and as a help and support

to manage ethical risks by becoming part of ‘ethical risk assessment. Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as

Practice, 11. Refer also for instance, Geert Hofstede, BramNeuijen, dense daval Ohayv and Geert Sanders,

“Measuring Organization Cultures: A Qualitative and Quantitative Study across Twenty Cases,”

Administrative Science Quarterly 35 (1990): 286-316; Linda Klebe Trevino, Kenneth D. Butterfield and

Donald L. McCabe, “The Ethical Context in Organizations Influence on Employee attitudes and Behaviours,”

Business Ethics Quarterly 8, no. 3 (1998): 447-476. 7 W. Edward Stead, Dan L. Worrell and Jean Garner Stead, “An Integrative Model for Understanding and

Managing Ethical Behaviour in Business Organizations,” in Managing Business Ethics, eds. John Drummond

and Bill Bain, 58-73 (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996), 58. See for instance, Business Roundtable,

Corporate Ethics: A Prime Business Asset (New York: Business Roundtable, 1988). 8 Stefanie Mauksch, “Beyond Managerial Rationality: Exploring Social Enterprise in Germany,” Social

Enterprise Journal 8, no. 2 (2012): 156. 9 H.C. Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems (Delhi: PHI Learning, 2013), 8. 10 Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems, 8.


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6.1.1 Defining Workplace Ethics and Workplace Surveillance Ethics

Workplace ethics is generally described as the application of moral principles, standards of

behaviour, or sets of values regarding proper individual and group conduct in the workplace.11 This

is a necessary but not sufficient understanding of workplace ethics.12 As a crucial part of employment,

it is an ingredient for the success of any organization. It aims to establish an ethical culture in the

workplace. According to Mark S. Schwartz, workplace ethics prescribes moral standards to guide

both employer (corporate) and employee behaviour. It goes beyond the applicable laws to their

foundations and the spirit in which they were written.13 An unaffected and unmanipulated

commitment to ethics is said to confer three sorts of benefits, namely: within the company, within

the business community, and in relation to the wider outside community.14 Commitment within the

company can improve workers’ morale, help resolve internal disputes and promote a healthy and

secure workplace, while among business communities such commitment can also improve the

reputation of a company and thus be an aid in raising venture capital and in defending the company

against allegations of impropriety.

Margaret et al. argue that committed individuals, both employers and employees alike, with proper

execution of ethical policies and practices, can increase workplace ethics in a corporate

environment.15 Analysing Kenneth R. Andrews’ work “Ethics in Practice,” Gagne et al. explain that

the formation of ethical members is the first step to creating ethical organizations, followed by

attention to the environment, promotion of a culture of sharing, and development of a well-defined

strategy, values and standards of conduct.16 It also has some practical benefits that are persuasive

within organizations as well as within the market and the wider community.17 The increased use of

common standards in all these regards has both diminished disputes and absenteeism and enhanced

corporate reputation and ability to raise venture capital.18 Many agree that it has fostered and

generated sustained profits and improved the credibility of management and companies in the

workplace.

11 Dean A. Bredeson and Keith Goree. Ethics in the Workplace, 3rd ed. (Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage

Learing, 2012), 15-25. 12 According to Johan Verstraeten, any applied ethics must include a narrative ethics and context along with a

good moral intention, right moral choice, right clarification of complex reality, etc. Narrative ethics points

out that “moral principles and ways of reasoning that have become separated from their ultimate narrative

frameworks become so abstract that either they retain little or no meaning, or they can be used at will as

sophisticated or rhetorical instruments to legitimize all types of interests.” So, the normativity of moral

principles is explained in recourse to the particular moral traditions and its meta-ethical significance. For,

“what binds persons is not the abstract idea of humanity or reason, nor the arbitrariness of individual

preferences or economical and technical efficiency, but the practices, codes, metaphors, symbols and

narratives that shape the society.” Johan Verstraeten, “Narrativity and Hermeneutics in Applied Ethics: Some

Introductory Considerations,” Ethical Perspectives 1, no.1 (1994): 51. 13 Mark S. Schwartz, “Universal Moral Values for Corporate Codes of Ethics,” Journal of Business Ethics 59

(2005): 27-44. Considering the three sources of workplace ethical codes, namely, corporate codes of ethics;

global codes of ethics; and the business ethics literature, Schwartz listed six main moral values relevant to

the workplace. They are respect, caring, trustworthiness, responsibility, citizenship and fairness. these values

are used as a foundation for workplace ethical behaviours. 14 Ronald D. Francis and Mukti Mishra, Business Ethics: An Indian Perspective (New Delhi: Tata McGraw

Hill, 2011), 31. 15 Margaret L. Gagne, Joanne H. Gavin and Gregory J. Tully, “Assessing the Costs and Benefits of Ethics:

Exploring a Framework,” Business and Society Review 110, no. 2 (2005): 181-190. 16 Gagne, Gavin and Tully, “Assessing the Costs and Benefits of Ethics,” 182. Cf. Kenneth R. Andrews, “Ethics

in Practice,” Harvard Business Review 67 (1989): 99-104. 17 Francis and Mishra, Business Ethics: An Indian Perspective, 40. 18 Francis and Mishra, Business Ethics: An Indian Perspective, 40.


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In the same way, workplace ethics addresses the interaction between the individual and the

organization. For instance, according to MaryJo Burchard, “if the organization’s values and ethics

are not compatible with the individual’s ethics, the likelihood of the person remaining in that

organization significantly decreases.”19 So the individual’s perception of the ethical orientation of a

company is very important and is strengthened when individuals and organizations both understand

themselves in an ethical context. A positive ethical culture and climate – both individual and

organizational – and establishment of a code of conduct for all in the organization produces

favourable organizational or business outcomes. Such a code of conduct is a code of ethics for use

in the workplace, and is defined as “a set of guidelines which are designed to set out acceptable

behaviours for members of a particular group, association, or profession.”20 It is also conceptualized

as “distinct, formal documents specifying self-consciously ethical constraints on the conduct of

organizational life.”21 Such a code, therefore, consists both of internal guidelines for all members of

the organization as well as statements of values and commitments about the organization’s external

relations. Following this, members of an organization act in a responsible manner and commit

themselves in a more ethical spirit during their work, improving the status and condition of

individual, organization and society more broadly.

An organization is not all about machines and tasks performed, but also about individuals, as persons,

who are its primary participants and contributors. In our view, therefore, ethics, as an overarching

framework consisting of a set of values and principles that measures individual and communitarian

behaviours, is the real foundation on which all actions in the organizational workplaces are and ought

to be based. Ethics concerns how an organization thinks about its members, and vice versa. Since

work is the means to some end22, work ethics concerns the value of that work and requires a

commitment on the part of all members of the organization in order to sustain that value. Work ethics

also consideres the moral benefit of work that enhances an individual’s character and the reputation

of the organization. Similarly, according to Khatijah Othman, “a strong work ethic is created from a

set of values based on commitment and diligence of the individual worker concerned.”23 Work ethics,

therefore, within organizations, refers to a reflective constellation of attitudes and beliefs pertaining

to work behaviour from multiple points of view.24 It seeks to identify acceptable moral behaviours

in the workplace and achieve individual well-being and corporate growth and development. In turn,

it aims to contribute to global prosperity and ensure the sustenance of all human kind.

Workplace ethics is used by organizations to refer to the framework by which they govern and control

employee behaviour, normalize or regulate the moral decisions of management, and protect the

organization from legal liability. In short, workplace ethics simply seeks to create an environment

where it is easier to do the right thing and avoid doing wrong in the workplace. It is therefore an

effort to systematically apply ethical principles and moral reasoning to various contexts, with due

attention to individual moral character, corporate strategies and values, and management practices in

the workplace. Human values, such as respect, responsibility, trustworthiness, fairness and caring in

19 MaryJo Burchard, “Ethical Dissonance and Response to Destructive Leadership: A Proposed Model,”

Emerging Leadership Journeys 4, no. 1 (2011): 154. 20 WiseGEEK, “What is a Code of Ethics?” http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-code-of-ethics.htm [accessed

November 15, 2017]. 21 Gary R. Weaver, “Corporate Codes of Ethics: Purpose, Process and Content Issues,” Business and Society

32, no. 1 (1993): 45. 22 Paul Heelas, “Work Ethics, the Soft Capitalism and the ‘Turn to Life,’” in Cultural Economy: Cultural

Analysis and Commercial Life, eds. Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke, 78-97 (London: Sage Publication, 2002),

78. 23 Khatijah Othman, “Work Ethics and Quality Workplace: An Observation from the Conventional and Islamic

Application,” ‘Ullūm Islamiyyah Journal 17 (2016): 81 24 Othman, “Work Ethics and Quality Workplace,” 85.


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the workplace, along with proper conduct that accords with certain standards of behaviour, helps

ensure that the objectives of the organization are accomplished. These values, indeed, distinguish

what is right and wrong within the workplace, where individuals are linked together as a community

of persons for a common purpose. In this sense, workplace ethics guides how people – employers

and employees – conduct themselves in every thought and act of their lives. It is the sum of the

expected and accepted forms of conduct or behaviour in the workplace in line with the contextual

application of universal ethical principles concerning the rights of people (privacy, autonomy,

freedom), justice or fairness to others (equality, non-discrimination), and respect for the worth, value

and dignity of human life.

To articulate a well-defined workplace surveillance ethics and an ethical response to workplace

surveillance is a herculean task, especially because it is not enough to simply apply a few guidelines

to a given context to determine whether an action is ‘ethical’ or not.25 Differnt contexts differ greatly,

and any simplistic approach will leave out several nuances in relation to justice and social relations.

However, one can readily identify a few of the key concerns related to employee surveillance: Has

the increased use of electronic surveillance in the workplace made employees more ethical, or rather

more fearful? Do employees do the right thing because of an inner motivation – a sign of their

intrinsic character – or only from fear of punishment or longing for reward? Who do surveillance

systems benefit, employers or employees? Are surveillance technologies implemented to develop

employee character, or to prevent the activity of wrongdoers? Can overt surveillance in the workplace

ever hope to monitor what is going on inwardly, in the minds of employees?

As previously discussed, one ethical concern is that all employees seem to become victims of

surveillance practices, since no one can escape from its snooping eye and “no one is completely

ethically spotless.”26 Another concern is that workplace surveillance is “heavily laden with the values

concerning the organization’s unquestionable right to control worker performance, by whatever

means.”27 This shows that workplace surveillance ethics is very important today, as it exposes a

certain mania for control in our time extended well beyond the proper regulative and corrective aims

of employee management. In our own view, it is important to comply with workplace surveillance

ethics especially because the practice of complete surveillance often is not a fair and just way to

control behaviour in work situations. One can relate ethical analysis of workplace surveillance to

dynamics of power control in the workplace as well as the legitimate aim to ensure employees’

privacy in the workplace. Another ethical concern is how to determine a measuring criterion for

proportionate surveillance, such as the advocates of workplace surveillance call for.

The drive to use automated surveillance in the workplace that goes beyond legitimate supervisory

intentions presents an ethical challenge, creating distance between employers and employees and the

possibility of discriminative behaviour on the part of management. Thus, we need to address and

assess both the effectiveness and intrusiveness of workplace surveillance in order to determine the

ethical permissibility of a given action. For employees, rather than being concerned primarily with

efficiency and productivity, are concerned with several other effects of this surveillance: its physical

and psychological intrusions, discriminatory practices through vested favouritism and health hazards

that may hinder their well-being and neglect their dignity as human beings. As Ball summarizes and

as we have already explored, there are wide range of ethical dilemmas to consider: “the extent to

25 Kirstie S. Ball, “Situating Workplace Surveillance: Ethics and Computer Based Performance Monitoring,”

Ethics and Information Technology 3 (2001): 211. 26 Mark S. Putnam, “Workplace Surveillance: Making You More Ethical or Just Scared?” Global Ethics

University, 2003, http://www.globalethicsuniversity.com/articles/workplacesurveillance.htm [accessed

February 20, 2018]. 27 Ball, “Situating Workplace Surveillance,” 214.


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which workers are entitled to a degree of privacy under surveillance […], the extent to which workers

are expected to sacrifice aspects of their mental and physical health when they come to work […],

the extent to which workers have the reasonable expectation of a meaningful and satisfying job […],

and the extent to which workers have the reasonable expectation of a level of ‘normal’ human

interaction during the course of the working day, rather than being treated like a machine.”28 Any

assessment of workplace surveillance ethics must consider these objectives and the concerns of

employees. The primary concern of workplace surveillance ethics is, therefore, how to balance the

perceived needs and interests of both employers and employees. Legalization can never fully address

ethical issues arising from workplace surveillance, as the nuances and effects of this practice are

complex and multidimensional. Therefore, we need to go beyond the legalistic rationality so common

in approaches to employee management and consider instead what moral principles and values will

be able to respond to these perceived challenges.

6.1.2 Beyond the Limits of Managerial Rationality

Managerial rationality is viewed, on the one hand, as purposeful and goal-directed, and on the other

as an ideological construct that functions to legitimize managerial control.29 Portrayed as a concern

for efficiency and thus the maximisation of profit, this form of bounded rationality has always been

used to legitimize management control over workers and often show the inconsistency of individual

acts in a given situation.30 Governance through managerial rationality looks for the most suitable

means to ensure business survival and progress by way of a close observation of financial figures

and indicators, steps to reduce risks and costs, and the development strategic action plans, etc.31 It is

a strategic management practice that aims to ensure the sustainability of an organization. However,

when the term management is applied to human beings in the same way as to machines, the

dimension of care for human beings disappears and the control principle becomes dominant. In line

with a Foucauldian concept of power relations, which we have illustrated in previous chapters,

managerial rationality consists in watching over and punishing, forgetting the actual handling and

training of human persons. Moreover, an exclusivist tendency is observed in many power-centred

managerial paradigms and in organizational behaviours. It leads to a neglect of other forms of

rationality that are required in an organization and in the organizational workplace.32 For all these

reasons, it is important to develop an ethical defense of the genuine concerns of human life and

conduct in the workplace.

Johan Verstraeten refers to ‘responsible moral behaviour,’33 which goes beyond a merely rational

choice approach in business. The value of business, he argues, is often reduced to shareholder “value”

(profit), with ethical considerations subordinated to this. Attention to human rights and moral values

28 Ball, “Situating Workplace Surveillance,” 214. Cf., Janice C. Sipior, Burke T. Ward and Sebastian M.

Rainone, “Ethical Management of Employee Email Privacy,” Information Systems Management 15, no. 1

(1998): 41-47; J. Lund, “Electronic Performance Monitoring: A Review of the Research Issues,” Applied

Ergonomics 23, no. 1 (1992): 54-58; and G. Stoney Alder, “Ethical Issues in Electronic Performance

Monitoring: A Consideration of Deontological and Teleological Perspectives,” Journal of Business Ethics

17, no. 7 (199): 729-743. 29 Stewart R. Clegg and James R. Bailey, eds., International Encyclopaedia of Organization Studies, Vol. 1

(Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008), 870. 30 Clegg and Bailey, International Encyclopaedia of Organization Studies, 871. 31 Christiane Gebhardt, “The Impact of Managerial Rationality on the Organizational Paradigm. Role Models

in the Management of Innovation,” Technology Analysis & Strategic Management 17, no. 1 (2005): 27. 32 Mauksch, “Beyond Managerial Rationality,” 166. 33 Johan Verstraeten, “Responsible Leadership beyond Managerial Rationality: The Necessity of Reconnecting

Ethics and Spirituality,” in Leadership and Business Ethics, ed. Gabriel Flynn, Vol. 25, 131-147 (Dublin:

Springer, 2008), 132.


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depends on market pressures, and thus ethical behaviour is caught in the clutches of this very modern

form of bounded rationality, to which a manipulative exercise of power is often linked.34 Verstraeten

criticises business ethicists who argue that amassing specialized (rational) knowledge can solve all

the problems of business life; he calls this an illusion. When managers are imprisoned within the

narrow hermeneutical horizon of modernity with its characteristic forms of manipulative rationality,

real innovation in moral behaviour becomes impossible. For “[b]usiness is not only a field dominated

by instrumental rationality, but also a dynamic field of human interaction.”35 Thus, one has to

acknowledge that organizations are complex institutions where different engagements and

possibilities for change are implied, and that it is human interaction that makes innovative behaviours

possible, in a business context as well as in any other.

In a similar way, Amartya Sen writes that “there would be some necessity to go beyond the

requirements of rationality in terms of permissive self-scrutiny, and to consider the demands of

‘reasonable conduct’ towards others.”36 He calls for serious attention to different perspectives and

socio-ethical and contextual concerns when taking choices and decisions. and for integrated ethical

behaviour in business organizations. However, managing business organizations in an ethical manner

is still a formidable challenge, for as John Drummond and Bill Bain rightly remind us, such a

behavioural pattern is “influenced by a myriad of individual and situational factors.”37 Researchers

in this perspective opine that along with individual personality traits and backgrounds of

socialization, organizational factors also influence the ethical behaviour of employees.38 Employers

must pay attention not only to the content of managerial rational rules, regulations and codes of

conduct, but also to (1) the process of determining that content;39 (2) the real and implied meanings

attached to it; (3) the circumstantial ingredients and factors; (4) employees’ participative

environment;40 and (5) the ethical rationality that goes beyond managerial rationality. Individual

ethical behaviour thus becomes the starting point for organizational ethical behaviour. Employers

who act only according to managerial rationality, disregarding the influence of individual ethical

reasoning, will be unlikely to promote pro-employee behaviours.

Ethics has to be an open, integrating and integrated force in workplace management. Upon and over

against the argument of some management theorists such as P.F. Drucker, who claims that “a special

ethics for business often harbour antibusiness sentiments,”41 Mark Pastin contends that:

Ethical considerations systematically remind the decision-maker of his or her basic goals, those

of co-workers, and, crucially, the company’s goals. These considerations forced the decision-

maker to rethink – and possibly reject of revise – basic assumptions about other employees at the

company, the company itself and the relationships between the company, its environment and the

decision-maker.42

34 Johan Verstraeten, “How Faith Makes a Difference: Business as a Calling or the Christians in Business,”

Estudios Empresariales 113 (2003/3): 56-57. 35 Verstraeten, “How Faith Makes a Difference,” 57-58. 36 Amartya Sen, The idea of Justice (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 197. 37 John Drummond and Bill Bain, eds., Managing Business Ethics (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996),

56. 38 Stead et al., “An Integrative Model for Understanding and Managing Ethical Behaviour,” 59-61. 39 Stead et al., “An Integrative Model for Understanding and Managing Ethical Behaviour,” 67. 40 Stead et al., “An Integrative Model for Understanding and Managing Ethical Behaviour,” 67. 41 Mark Pastin, “Ethics as an Integrating Force in Management,” in Managing Business Ethics, eds. John

Drummond and Bill Bain, 76-88 (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996), 76. Cf. Peter F. Drucker, “What

is Business Ethics?” Across the Board (October 1981): 22-32. 42 Pastin, “Ethics as an Integrating Force in Management,” 77.


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The adoption and integration of ethical considerations in the business and in the workplace, therefore,

can guide decision makers following securing the right and the good for all in the organization. This

creates pro-business sentiments, in fact, and not the opposite, as we will argue in the following

sections. However, Gael M. McDonald and Raymond A. Zepp suggest, referring to W. Bryson, ethics

in business has multiple layers and not a single meaning; it is not simply synonymous with common

sense, personal and organizational ideologies, philosophies or an adherence to religious ethics.43 This

means that, going beyond the misconception workplace ethics is simply a concern of religion or

theology,44 workplace ethics actually aims to establish a set of values that directly or indirectly

influence the activities of organization and workplace in a way that is not exclusively dependent on

religious claims. An embedded religious frame of reference in the workplace is explored towards the

end of this chapter.

Reflecting on the ethics and value systems of business enterprises in the Indian specifically, M.C.

Mruthyunjayan argues for the integration of three facets of ethos, namely: (1) the apparent and visible

social ethos, (2) the less visible professional ethos, and (3) the invisible personal ethos.45 He also

argues that ethics has a role to play that goes beyond juridical and legal perspectives and aims to

create an environment with strong ethos-based business and behavioural patterns. According to him,

[O]ne has to keep in mind that all business activities and eventualities cannot be totally ruled by

law. There should be something beyond law to govern corporate activities. And it is the human

judgement that comes to play at some critical times where the law has no specific answer or clue.

All societies emphasize that the human judgement, an embodiment of high reasoning, has to be

strong with good foundation of culture built on ethical value systems that ultimately guides people

in taking suitable decisions and actions.46

Every judgement in a business setting, therefore, must manifest an ethos that transforms the

workplace into a conducive home for people to work in, and thus it must explore new life-chances.

Consequently, ethics in business and in managerial behaviour requires both “nobility of the objective

or sincerity of the purpose” and the “integrity of implementation and practices.”47 As such, it can be

regarded as the embodiment of conscious concern for the rights and interests of all people concerned.

Considering business ethics, Mruthyunjaya identifies three different schools of thought.48 The first

prefers an ethics that seeks to conform with legal norms. The second has a different perspective and

standardises ethics to ensure the safety of all concerned in the workplace, both internal and external.

The third school understands ethics to be closely related to the subject of human morality and fuses

moral issues with business ethics.49 This third approach is significant for our discussion here, as it

strongly argues that “while law can only ensure maintenance of certain minimum performance

standards, it cannot accommodate anything beyond that whereas human morale demands much more

43 Gael M. McDonald and Raymond A. Zepp, “Business Ethics: Practical Proposals,” in Managing Business

Ethics, eds. John Drummond and Bill Bain, 196-210 (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996), 196. Cf. W.

Bryson, “The Meaning of Ethics in Business,” Business Horizons 20 (1977): 31. 44 Roslyn Frenz, “Definition of Workplace Ethics,” Bizfluent, September 26, 2017. https://bizfluent.com/about-

6677585-definition-workplace-ethics.html [accessed November 5, 2017]. 45 Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems, 30. 46 Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems, 31. 47 Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems, 44. 48 Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems, 47. 49 Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems, 47-49. Mruthyunjaya explains that those holding legal

norms often argue that good ethics is the absence of a legal litigation and so a total compliance to legal norms

will ensure the moral/ethical performance in the organization and thus will have no ethical issues. In the same

way, safety is linked to ethics and then finally to human morale.


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from people than mere law abidance.”50 Mruthyunjaya further maintains that law provides a

foundation for accepted activities in the workplace, and must be followed not only in letter but in

spirit. He continues,

Even if an earnest attempt is made to make the law as exhaustive and comprehensive as practical,

there would always be something beyond the reach of the law. It is this area of beyond the reach

of the law where the extraordinary human qualities can play a significant role to save the humanity.

Unless the extra sensitive human mind innovates a superb personal ethical code of conduct driven

by the highest level of morale and steps in to lead the law beyond the apparent and/or visible

interceptions, scams and scandals cannot be totally erased from the surface of the business world

and the public life.51

Adherence to law is thus said to be the lowest common denominator of acceptable behaviour,

whereas ethics calls for a step beyond what is prescribed by law in situations of conflict. There will

be situations in the workplace where one needs to act in a way that reaches beyond the letter of rules

and regulations in order to understand the actual act, circumstances and intentions of the doer. For

instance, from CCTV footage and other data collected through monitoring, an employee may be fired

for taking frequent breaks during work. However, ethics demands that the authority probe further to

seek the actual reason why the employee is doing so, then act accordingly. Though adherence to law

is accepted as a basic prerequisite, then, one cannot hope to ensure total ethical security through law

alone. One needs rather to take the human ethos into consideration. In light of this recognition, we

may now look more closely at the corporate codes of ethics for workplace behaviours.

6.1.3 Corporate Codes of Ethics for Workplace Behaviour, and Beyond

The institutionalization of ethics in the codes of business organizations is perceived by researchers

to be a positive development, but there are significant differences between various codes and the

behavioural guidance they provide in the workplace.52 As Gary R. Weaver opines, “codes constitute

more than simple rational tools for achieving ethical organizational ends.”53 So, the distinction and

reservation of any particular behavioural standard amounts to a declaration that some requirements

are more important than others. Weaver continues in the same way, arguing that “[d]epending on the

circumstances of individual managers, organizations, industries, and societies, ethics codes – like

other organizational structures and activities – may have a variety of sources, roles and

consequences.”54 Codes of ethics have multiple roles to play in the workplace. Along with responding

to the demands and expectations of stakeholders in the organization and to other essential elements

of the broader business environment, such codes also respond to internal organizational dynamics

and promise to benefit all members of the organization.55 For employees, such codes establish

regulatory norms and practical guidelines for how to make an appropriate decision (that is good,

right, and fitting) when confronting legal and ethical dilemmas. According to Steven R. Barth, a code

of ethics, by indicating the vision, mission and guiding principles of the company, helps employees

act appropriately in individual cases and functions as an ethical compass in the workplace.56

Therefore, the purpose of codes of ethics in an organization or in the workplace is described as

50 Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems, 49. 51 Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems, 90. 52 Weaver, “Corporate Codes of Ethics: Purpose, Process and Content Issues,” 45. 53 Weaver, “Corporate Codes of Ethics: Purpose, Process and Content Issues,” 45. 54 Weaver, “Corporate Codes of Ethics: Purpose, Process and Content Issues,” 47. 55 Weaver, “Corporate Codes of Ethics: Purpose, Process and Content Issues,” 48. 56 Steven R. Barth, Corporate Ethics: The Business Code of Conduct for Ethical Employees (Boston, MA:

Aspatore, 2003), 8. Barth argues here that the cultural values created through these practices also create a

base for generating personal employee responsibility with ethical conduct.


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threefold: focusing at once on the company, on employees and on the environment.57 We will

consider each of these briefly.

Focusing first on the company, a code of ethics expresses the general values/philosophy of the

company, establishing and sustaining its particular culture by (1) identifying any unethical behaviour

directed against the firm or performed by it; (2) building trust and confidence within the firm; (3)

formulating a working strategy; (4) protecting the firm from legal action and liabilities: and (5)

evaluating its performance on a regular basis.58 It also leads to further environmental focus by

maintaining a good public image through mutual trust with other organizations and competitors and

satisfying external stakeholders.59 Moreover, as Barth observes, “implementing and enforcing an

effective corporate code of ethical business conduct will help improve […] employees’ self-esteem

and morale, making them happier and more productive.”60 It eventually enhances the reputation and

progress of organization. Codes of ethics are also viewed as “symbolic management tools, capable

of rationalizing or legitimizing organizational action regardless of the ultimate motive for or source

of those actions.”61 However, establishing a common norm or code for both employers and

employees to abide by is difficult, as it involves the conflicting interests of various stakeholders.

To resolve this issue, Schwartz identifies a set of universal moral values for use in formulating a

common corporate code of ethics.62 Schwartz justifies the use of universal moral values, quoting and

discussing Thomas L. Beauchamp and Norman E. Bowie, who illustrate that “there is a common

morality that all people share by virtue of communal life and this morality is ultimately the source of

all theories of morality […] it is applicable to all persons in all places, and all human conduct is

rightly judged by its standards.”63 The identification and adoption of universal values here is meant

to establish a moral authority. Nevertheless, referring to Sandra Waddock’s accounts on corporate

citizenship, Schwartz points out that “the existence of universal core moral values does not

necessarily imply that they will be followed or put into practice.”64 It must follow detailed and

definite training and guidance to be actualized or put into practice in specific situations through

workplace behaviours and decision-making processes. What is important for our present research is

its primary focus on deterring unethical practices and behaviours by employees. For the code of

ethics makes clear the seriousness of a company’s commitment to ethical business conduct and the

expected behaviour of employees of the company.65 Furthermore, a code indicates the obligations of

employees to the company and vice versa, and by providing moral guidance to both employers and

employees, it promises to improve workplace morale and regulate employee behaviour.66 It also aims

to guarantee the psycho-social well-being, health and safety of all members of the organization and

57 Weaver, “Corporate Codes of Ethics: Purpose, Process and Content Issues,” 49. 58 Weaver, “Corporate Codes of Ethics: Purpose, Process and Content Issues,” 49. 59 Weaver, “Corporate Codes of Ethics: Purpose, Process and Content Issues,” 49. 60 Barth, Corporate Ethics: The Business Code of Conduct for Ethical Employees, 8. According to Barth, a

proper adoption and timely adaptation of code of ethical conduct in business will enable the organization “to

create a cohesive culture of doing the right thing for the right reasons. […] As a result, your code of conduct

can lead to more and better business for your company – business with fewer risks or recrimination or

liability.” Barth, Corporate Ethics: The Business Code of Conduct for Ethical Employees, 8. 61 Weaver, “Corporate Codes of Ethics: Purpose, Process and Content Issues,” 47-49. 62 Schwartz, “Universal Moral Values for Corporate Codes of Ethics,” 27-44. 63 Schwartz, “Universal Moral Values for Corporate Codes of Ethics,” 39. Cf. Tom L. Beauchamp, and Norman

E. Bowie, Ethical Theory and Business, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2004), 33-

34. 64 Schwartz, “Universal Moral Values for Corporate Codes of Ethics,” 41. Cf. Sandra Waddock, “Creating

Corporate Accountability: Foundational Principles to Make Corporate Citizenship Real,” Journal of Business

Ethics 50, no. 4 (2004), 323. 65 Barth, Corporate Ethics: The Business Code of Conduct for Ethical Employees, 9. 66 Weaver, “Corporate Codes of Ethics: Purpose, Process and Content Issues,” 49.


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reduce occupational risks in several ways: by treating employees with respect, justice and dignity,

and by understanding their socio-cultural concerns without discrimination. A code of ethics

therefore, in short, aims to recognize and promote the individual and social rights and duties of

employees in the workplace.

There is a chance, however, that a code of ethics may itself become a form of control and supervision;

that a company may promote normative principles for the sake of profit alone rather than for the sake

of ethical behaviour in itself.67 For instance, informed consent and job relevance are two factors often

cited to justify employee surveillance in the workplace, as we have noted above. This may be part of

the contract signed by employees and become a part of the company’s codes of ethics. In what

manner is consent acquired, however, or how do employees agree to this? If it is done through a

forced contract, or marked by fear of punishment or fear of losing one’s job, is a matter of serious

concern that we will have to explore further. These limits of informed consent – to what extent it is

informed, and in what manner it is secured –also shows the need to go beyond mere normativity to

a further, ethical realm where conduct is truly unmanipulated. In the same way, is the relevance of

the practice of employee surveillance in a particular situation, time and place, and the gravity of its

implementation all raise further questions. A further challenge is that an organization or firm may

create codes of ethics using its own framework, and thus manipulate stakeholders who may be unable

to distinguish between the symbolic value of the code from its reality, or its apparent role from its

intended role.68

The increasing socio-economic diversity and multi-cultural background of the modern workforce

determines in many cases employees’ understanding of and receptivity to codes of ethics. Their

understand and receptivity will depend on a employee’s individual (personal) and cultural (traditions,

ethos and practices) views and own judgements of what is ethical or unethical in a given scenario.69

For instance, Weaver points out that “[j]ust as top management can see quality circles and

participative management as empowering workers while some workers see them as forms of co-

optation, so codes may function as ethically-oriented tools in the eyes of management but as

oppressive devices to other organization members.”70 Therefore, although codes of ethics can

function as an ethical or moral compass for an entire workforce, if it is not implemented and used

appropriately and justly, by sometimes going beyond the letter of the code to act in accordance with

its spirit, it may become an oppressive tool for employees. Before entering the discussion on an

adequate ethical approach and response to this phenomenon of workplace surveillance, we will

consider briefly is the need to integrate different ethical theories in the moral assessment of

workplace surveillance.

6.1.4 The Integration of Ethical Theories as Prerequisite for Moral Assessment

The integration of ethical theories is a prerequisite for any adequate assessment of decision making,

given that there can and will be more than one reason to act in a certain manner (ethically) in each

situation. As J. Thomas Whetstone illustrates, there are different reasons why a person will choose

one ethical theory over another and justify a course of action he or she has undertaken in a particular

way. For any given action, Whetstone argues, “[m]oral reasons can include both the duty to act and

the consequences expected from the act as well as the belief that so acting is characteristic of the

67 Weaver, “Corporate Codes of Ethics: Purpose, Process and Content Issues,” 50. 68 Weaver, “Corporate Codes of Ethics: Purpose, Process and Content Issues,” 50. 69 Barth, Corporate Ethics: The Business Code of Conduct for Ethical Employees, 7. 70 Weaver, “Corporate Codes of Ethics: Purpose, Process and Content Issues,” 51.


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kind of person one wants to be.”71 He urges ethicists therefore to combine various theories and

approaches to achieve a proper balance and produce a better assessment. The consideration of various

approaches helps us, in fact, to determine the standards of behaviour that can be considered ethical

in a given circumstance. However, to act ethically and to make ethical decisions, we need “a trained

sensitivity to ethical issues and a practiced method for exploring the ethical aspects of a decision and

weighing the considerations that should impact our choice of a course of action.”72 Hence, we need

an integrated framework to deal ethically with an issue that pertains to everyday life.

Privacy, as we can see in the pronouncement of the Victorian Law Reform Commission, is most

fundamentally related to the most intimate aspects of being human.73 Here, primary focus is given to

the right of the individual to choose for him or herself. The dignity of employees in the workplace,

based on their ability to choose freely what they will do with their lives, and their fundamental moral

right to have these choices respected, makes them different than the other “resources” an organization

may possess. Employees are not objects to be manipulated, and when something is done in ways they

do not freely chose, their human dignity is violated.74 Therefore, the Rights Approach that affords

employees the right to make their own choices, to be told the truth, and not to have their freedom

interfered with, shows employee surveillance to be unethical, since it strips the employee of many

rights. For example, as the rights approach implies, an employer who purposefully omits pertinent

information and does not duly inform the employee of the company’s policy on monitoring, acts

unethically. 75

Even in virtue ethics, which conceives of morality in relation to concepts of character including

honesty, fairness, compassion and generosity, privacy can be considered a right that employees

deserve and ought to have. For by implementing this ethical guidance, a company shows its belief

that “workers know how to act and display themselves with great character [and] therefore,

surveillance is unnecessary because employees’ behaviour and decisions will be consistent with the

actions of a ‘good’ person.”76 When employees are accorded the freedom to make their own

decisions, based on virtue ethics’ concept of character development, and assuming they make good

choices both for the individual and the company, this increased responsibility raises morale and

improves performance.77 For example, employees subject to electronic surveillance, and particularly

e-mail monitoring, have reported feelings decreased trust in their employer, increased stress, and

subsequently decreased productivity. However, relying on the good character of employees seems to

71 J. Thomas Whetstone, “How Virtue Fits within Business Ethics,” Journal of Business Ethics 33 (2001): 102.

Whetstone has illustrated an example in this regard that “one might refrain from cheating because this is the

right way to act, and because so acting will crate a better world, and because one is an honest person.”

Whetstone, “How Virtue Fits within Business Ethics,” 102. 72 Manuel Velasquez et al., “A Framework for Thinking Ethically,” Markkula Center for Applied Ethics,

https://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/framework.html [accessed March 12, 2014]. 73 Jan Holvast, “History of Privacy,” in The History of Information Security: A Comprehensive Handbook, eds.

Karl de Leeuw and Jan Bergstra, (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007), 739. See also “Workplace Privacy,” Victorian

Law Reform Commission, Issues Paper, 18.

http://www.lawreform.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/IssuesPaperfinal.pdf [accessed March 10, 2014]. 74 Manuel Velasquez et al., “Thinking Ethically: A Framework for Moral Decision Making,”

http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/thinking.html [accessed March 12, 2014]. 75 Michael Bassick, Tyler McNamara, and Deborah Sullivan. “Employee Surveillance: An Ethical

Consideration,” in The Ethical Imperative in the Context of Evolving Technologies, eds. Michel Bassick et

al. (Boulder, Colorado: University of Colorado, 2007), 81. 76 Bassick, “Employee Surveillance: An Ethical Consideration,” 82. 77 Barry A. Friedman and Lisa J. Reed, “Workplace Privacy: Employee Relations and Legal Implications of

Monitoring Employee E-mail Use,” Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal 19, no. 2 (2007): 80.


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improve productivity and instil confidence.78 In this regard Stanley Been, in his article ‘Privacy,

Freedom and Respect for Persons,’ writes:

[T]o conceive someone as a person is to see him as actually or potentially a chooser, as one

attempting to steer his own course through the world, adjusting his behaviour as his apperception

of the world changes, and correcting course as he perceives his errors. It is to understand that his

life is for him a kind of enterprise, like one’s own [. . .]. To respect someone as a person is to

concede that one ought to take account of the way in which his enterprise might be affected by

one’s own decisions. By the principle of respect for persons, then, I mean the principle that every

human being, insofar as he is qualified as a person, is entitled to this minimal degree of

consideration.79

To conceive and respect someone as a person preserves their individual human dignity and increases

mutual trust. Here, employers are called to “respect their employees’ personal dignity and integrity

by allowing them sufficient autonomy to function without constant and ubiquitous supervision and

inspection of their work and personal lives.”80 Moreover, the rights approach grants employees

certain inalienable rights, including rights to freedom and privacy that, regardless of the situation, an

employee as an individual still owns. When the employee is subject to extreme scrutiny through

electronic surveillance, he or she is treated in an unethical manner.81 The same concern arises, for

instance, in the case of Radio Frequency Identification, the effects of which have been discussed in

the first chapter. Although this system of marking is said to be very useful, in that is allows the

employer to know how long the employee spends time at the desk or in the break room, it is also

unethical, for it is an unwarranted means of observation that invades the physical and personal

privacy of employees.82 It is also clear that electronic surveillance by way of video, phone, and

internet monitoring in the workplace can distort and reduce personal autonomy by interfering with

the motivational attitudes, creativity, spontaneity and other executive capacities of employees.83

Finally, one’s growth in work and in life must be accompanied by growth in moral reasoning or

ethical thinking, which will increase one’s sense of responsibility to maintain these natural rights of

autonomy and privacy. Integrating several ethical approaches, such as the rights approach, virtue

ethics approach, etc., gives us an authentic understanding of how one can think or act in certain

circumstances.

6.2 CLASSICAL APPROACHES OF ETHICAL REASONING AND THEIR RELEVANCE FOR

WORKPLACE SURVEILLANCE

Though this study generally examines electronic surveillance in the workplace as an issue dominated

by ethical questions and concerns, Kirstie S. Ball rightly observes that “any investigation of ethical

monitoring practice is inadequate if it simply applies best practice guidelines to any one context to

78 Bassick, “Employee Surveillance: An Ethical Consideration,” 84. 79 Stanley I. Benn, "Privacy, Freedom and Respect for Persons," in Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An

Anthology, eds. James Roland Pennock and John William Chapman (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1984), 8-9. 80 Frank J. Cavico, “Invasion of Privacy in the Private Employment Sector: Tortious and Ethical Aspects,”

Houston Law Review 30 (1993): 1345. 81 Bassick, “Employee Surveillance: An Ethical Consideration,” 85. 82 Alan R. Peslak, “An Ethical Exploration of Privacy and Radio Frequency Identification,” Journal of Business

Ethics 59 (2005): 327-345. 83 Emma Rooksby and Natasha Cica, “Personal Autonomy and Electronic Surveillance in the workplace,” in


Group Publishing, 2005), 252.


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indicate, whether practice is, on balance, ‘ethical’ or not.”84 Therefore, such an investigation must

aim to integrate ethical principles and practices, consisting of moral behaviour and character

formation. Such an investigation must also examine how different means of technological

surveillance in the workplace, if not rightly understood, can be detrimental to organizational

motivation and social commitment. It is important to understand employee monitoring in relation in

an ethical manner in order to understand clearly the dilemmas it poses, particularly with respect to

the issue of privacy. Any ethical analysis must exhibit respect and regard for the basic rights of the

individuals concerned and must also consider culturally inherited differences held as moral

standards.85 However, ethics is not simply a matter of following accepted cultural norms and laws;

rather, it proposes more universal standards of behaviour that humans ought to adhere to.86

Teleological and deontological approaches have already been discussed in this regard in the first

chapter. The four main ethical approaches, namely “the virtue ethics approach, the utilitarian

approach, the fairness approach, and the common good approach,”87 cannot individually provide an

adequate and thorough solution to a problem situation in the workplace, where people are gathered

together as one collectivity even though they have different ethnic, cultural, religious, political and

economic backgrounds.

Consequentialism, another ethical theory, argues for the avoidance of adverse consequence or harm

to anyone, holding that an action is ethical “only if the outcome remains totally good and good in all

respects.”88 In this view, the ends can indeed justify the means. With respect to workplace

surveillance, from a consequentialism standpoint, any means to monitor employees can be

implemented provided that it achieves the objectives of the organisation and fulfils its intended goals.

This position has been much criticised. However, in recent years there has been an increase in the

popularity of utilitarianism. According to Mollie Painter-Morland, utilitarianism embraces whatever

works best, and management determines its course of action based on a cost-benefit analysis, seeking

an optimal outcome.89 The number of beneficial effects of an action are given more importance here

(the greatest good for greatest number)90 and many management decisions are made on this basis.

84 Kirstie S. Ball, “Situating Workplace Surveillance: Ethics and Computer Based Performance Monitoring,”

Ethics and Information Technology 3 (2001): 211. 85 Bahaudin G. Mujtaba, “Ethical Implications of Employee Monitoring: What Leaders Should Consider,”

Journal of Applied Management and Entrepreneurship.

See, http://www.huizenga.nova.edu/Jame/articles/employee-monitoring.cfm [accessed March 10, 2014]. 86 According to Velasquez ethics is not a feeling and not confined to any religion, nor is it the same as religion.

Being ethical is not same as following the law. It refers primarily to “the well-founded standards of right and

wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society,

fairness, or specific virtues, [and] includes that enjoin virtues of honesty, compassion, and loyalty.” Manuel

Velasquez et al., “What is Privacy?” Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

https://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/whatisethics.html [accessed March 12, 2014]. 87 George Reynolds, in his book ‘Ethics in Information Technology’ explains these approaches in a nutshell as

follows: “The virtue ethics approach is the ethical choice that best reflects moral virtues in yourself and your

community. The utilitarian approach is the ethical choice that produces the greatest excess of benefits over

harm. The fairness approach is the ethical choice that treats everyone the same and does not show favouritism

or discrimination. The common good approach is the ethical choice that advances the common good.” George

Reynolds, Ethics in Information Technology (Boston, MA: Thompson, 2003), 20. 88 Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems, 207. 89 Mollie Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice: Ethics as the Everyday Business of Business

(Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2011), 53. John Stuart Mill, however, has further described a kind

of utilitarianist ideology that goes beyond pleasure-pain calculus. By bringing a gradation in the kinds of

pleasures that one experiences and looks for, he argues, some are qualitatively better than others and the

benefit to the individual in turn serves also to maximise the well-being of the broader community. He terms

it as social well-fare utilitarianism. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Montana: Kessinger, 2004); Painter-

Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 53. 90 Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems, 208-209.


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However, this theory has been extensively criticised due to the risk it seems to pose of objectifying

people, given its instrumental moral orientation.91 In the same way, business practitioners may

rationally justify the harmful consequences of a particular action by pointing to other benefits that

outweigh them. Such an approach may encourage the rationalization of unethical behaviour, or a

belief that the end can justify the means.92 Establishing a noble path to achieve good ends should also

be of concern to business ethicists.

Unlike determining the morality of an action by reference to its anticipated consequences, non-

consequentialists look for well-reasoned moral principles and argue that “moral imperatives should

be formulated in an objective, rational and impartial manner.93 Moral theories of deontology, closely

associated with the work of Immanuel Kant and the rights-based approach of John Rawls, are

exemplary of this appraoch. Kant’s deontology looks for a priori reasoning in moral assessment,

utilizing the human capacity for reason, and specifically practical reason. Referring to this Kantian

notion of pure practical reason, business ethicists often, as Painter-Morland noted, employ this kind

of a priori reasoning to formulate moral maxims to guide their actions and decisions.94 Moral duties,

for Kant, are categorical imperatives and have universal applicability and indisputable normative

force.95 Though context remain important for Kant, here he is concerned with the universal

application of these imperatives. This will be further explained in the next sub-section.

At this juncture, it is important to draw attention to Painter-Morland’s claim that although moral

reasoning or the ability to reason is essential to moral agency, as many business ethicists allow,96 it

is unlikely that business ethicists or managers will make decisions that are wholly without reference

to self-interest in this capitalist-economy world.97 It is noted that the objective reasoning and rights

of employers in the organization (security, safety, liability alleviation, etc.) may contradict the rights

of the employees (privacy, autonomy, fair treatment, etc.). This approach has also been criticised, on

the one hand, for being internally inconsistent, since one cannot ignore the potential consequences

of an action, and on the other hand for relying on a merely instrumental principle to secure a desirable

end.98 Thus there are some limitations to this approach in the context of workplace surveillance, for

example the collection of more employee data than what is required for a purpose (function creep),

third party access to the information, and the future manipulative use of the data with vested interests.

John Rawls’ idea of justice as fairness likewise addresses social inequalities in the context of business

morality, by which he describes the principles of liberty and equality in the conception of justice.99

The example of social sorting, in which employees are categorized according to their worth or risk

on the basis of monitored data, could be understood along these lines. Rawls wanted to correct for

the bias created by social position and power interests and prevent this from influencing moral

judgements. Thus, he begins his theory from behind a hypothetical ‘veil of ignorance’ designed to

91 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 53. 92 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 53. 93 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 55. 94 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 56. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of

Morals, ed. & trans. Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 95 According to Kant, “[t]he categorical imperative would be that one which represented an action as

objectively necessary for itself, without any reference to another end.” Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics

of Morals, 31. 96 For instance, Norman Bowie, Kantian Business Ethics (Malden: Blackwell, 1999), 45. 97 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 59. Self-interest is not intrinsically bad either. 98 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 59-60. 99 John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985): 223-

251. Cf. John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge: Harvard University,

2001).


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ensure that all parties select principles of justice proper for a fair society.100 He argued for equal

rights for all members of a society, where the least advantaged are benefited and not forgotten.

According to Painter-Morland, in a business context, ethicists such as Edwin Hartman have used

Rawls’s theory to establish principles of organizational justice since it enables people to forumulate

a fair institutional dispensation in freedom and equality, and thus accepts the plurality of moral

theories applicable in a business context.101 However, these principles for fair business have been

criticised as vague and too general, with too little attention to context. For instance, there are

stakeholders with different interests, and the balancing of these interest is not done according to a

principle of equality, but according to the purpose of particular interactions in the organization.102

Virtue ethics is also often held to complement deontological or consequentialist formulations of

moral reasoning.103 Virtue is said to be a qualitative characteristic within a person – a character

disposition. According to Dennis Wittmer and Kevin O'Brien, “virtue is a quality or excellence that

makes a thing good according to its nature, and moral virtues (versus intellectual virtues) are those

qualities that make a person morally or ethically excellent.”104 Whetstone defines a virtuous act as a

“rational act based on a wise, purposeful assessment of the factual situation, chosen for a pure motive

and consistent with a steady disposition of the actor’s character.”105 Virtues are, therefore, not only

a primary disposition to act, but also a habit of acting on the basis of that predisposition. This is an

internal practice and gives rise to internal goods.106 In the context of workplace surveillance, virtue

ethics is significant as a means of character formation, moral education and proper training of

employees, are notably affect their behaviours and responses both in general and in particular

situations. If theft and fraudulent activities continue in the workplace after implementing electronic

systems to monitor employees and control and regulate them, the virtue approach seeks to transform

the qualitative characters of the perpetrators.

However, each of these above-mentioned approaches is limited in one way or another, as George

Reynolds explains:

[S]ince the definition of virtue cannot be worked out objectively it doesn’t provide much of a

guide for action and it depends on the circumstances – you work it out as you go and also each

one’s culture and cultural norms may also dictate what is right or wrong in a situation. Since

measuring or comparing the values of certain benefits and costs is difficult in some situations the

utilitarian approach alone is also complicated and insufficient. The influence of the personal bias

makes the fairness approach incompetent to solve the issue. When people have clearly different

100 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 63. 101 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 65. Cf. Edwin Hartman, Organizational Ethics and the Good

Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 102 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 66. Iris Marion Young also, through her feminist political

thought, criticises in the same way arguing the particularity of situations. Cf. Iris Marion Young, Justice and

the Politics of Difference (Woodstock: Princeton University Press, (1990) 2011). 103 Whetstone, “How Virtue Fits within Business Ethics,” 102. 104 Dennis Wittmer and Kevin O'Brien, “The Virtue of “Virtue Ethics” in Business and Business Education,”

Journal of Business Ethics Education 11 (2014): 3. 105 Whetstone, “How Virtue Fits within Business Ethics,” 104. Referring to the Aristotelian explanation of the

ethic of virtue, Whetstone sees virtue ethics as personal – more fundamental to persons, as focusing on the

motivations of the actor, as context oriented, and complementing to other discipline of human behaviour.

Whetstone, “How Virtue Fits within Business Ethics,” 105-106. 106 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame

Press, 2007), 149.


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ideas about what constitutes common good the consensus cannot be easily made and in addition

to that maintaining the common good often requires some groups to bear great costs than others.107

Despite the limitations of these approaches, they remain important factors in assessing various issues

of privacy and social sorting in the workplace. Hence, these approaches help to define what standards

of behaviour can be adopted. To consider these issues in the workplace, therefore, we need to take

an integral approach and seek to harmonize the ethical norms and principles noted above in order to

find a better solution.

6.2.1 A Tripartite (Eclectic) Reading of Workplace Surveillance

In our effort to explain and respond ethically to workplace surveillance using a tripartite approach,

which we will call an “eclectic” approach, we will draw on a recent study on electronic surveillance

by Jonathan P. West and James S. Bowman. For West and Bowman, surveillance “is common, takes

many forms, and embodies not only abstract rights in conflict but also sparks debate in practice […]

used for a variety of reasons, and is likely to be most efficacious when employer and employee rights

are carefully weighed.”108 Therefore, following West and Bowman, a tripartite eclectic approach will

be valuable because it combines different models and promises to illuminate the behavioural

perspectives and decision making process in a given situation. This analysis is tripartite in that it

includes three dominant schools of thought, and it is eclectic in that it tries to derive a well-grounded

position with regard to workplace surveillance from a broad and diverse range of sources. This

response is based on a combination of (1) the expected result of an action (consequentialism or

teleology); (2) the application of pertinent rules (duty ethics or deontology); and (3) personal

character (virtue ethics).109 By analyzing these considerations and integrating them in an ethical

triangle of perspectives, as West and Bowman envision, a balanced defensible evaluation of

workplace surveillance is expected.

Firstly, we employ the result-based perspective or cost-benefit [utilitarian] approach, as it seeks the

greater utility/good for the maximum possible number of employees. As we have discussed and

explored in previous chapters, the background literature and arguments in support of surveillance

include productivity, security, risk management, protection against fraudulent acts, liability

alleviation, the assurance of quality, data protection, and so forth.110 For instance, monitoring is

expected to increase individual work capacity, enhance performance and improve the assessment of

employee behaviour by increasing organizational control and managerial resources.111 Besides, in

the view of a few researchers like Marylène Gagné and Devasheesh Bhave, surveillance improves

the performance of employees when it supports personal autonomy, by which it seems to serve the

interests of both organization and workforce alike.112 However, as West and Bowman rightly

107 Reynolds, Ethics in Information Technology, 21-22. 108 Jonathan P. West and James S. Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,”

Administration & Society 48, no. 5 (2016): 631. 109 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 631-641. 110 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 634; Al-Rjoub et al.,

“Electronic Monitoring: The Employees Point of View,” 190; Sewell and Barker, “Coercion versus Care,”

939; Mujtaba, “Ethical Implications of Employee Monitoring,” 34; Kirsten E. Martin and R. Edward

Freeman, “Some Problems with Employee Monitoring,” Journal of Business Ethics 43, no. 4 (2003): 353-

361; and Allen et al., “Workplace Surveillance and Managing Privacy Boundaries,” 186. 111 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 634. 112 Marylène Gagné and Devasheesh Bhave, “Autonomy in the Workplace: An Essential Ingredient to

Employee Engagement and Well-Being in Every Culture,” in Human Autonomy in Cross-Cultural Context,

ed. Valery I. Chirkov, Richard M. Ryan, Kennon M. Sheldon (New York: Springer, 2011), 163-187. West

and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 634; and Roland E. Kidwell, “Loafing


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observe, many of its advocates argue that surveillance is beneficial or at least necessary, but with

various conditional clauses. We read, for example, in West and Bowman, “[a]s long as surveillance

is for a legitimate business purpose and personnel have consented to monitoring, it can safeguard

both organizational security and employees. […] Organizations are entitled to conduct surveillance

for business reasons so long as it is not unduly intrusive.”113 It is accepted, therefore, if at all, with

certain conditions that again put in question its legitimacy. The inadequacy and limitedness of such

arguments in terms of job relevance and informed consent is analysed below, in light of the example

of the privacy argument.

Surveillance negatively affects “the employment relationship giving more power to employers as

organizations regard control of the workplace as a management prerogative.”114 It also shows that

when those holding the power act with utilitarian instrumental principles, employees are objectified

and treated as means to some end, made to act as arbiters of authorities’ profit and pleasure.115 In the

same manner, as our previous discussion demonstrates, surveillance goes beyond what is reasonable

and exhibits “function creep,” where increasingly “all-seeing” technologies control and spy on

employees and are used as a kind of “electronic whip” by which managers increase the pace of

work.116 Besides, over against productivity enhancement claims, this research shows that the anxiety,

depression, stress, and physical and nervous disorders that result from surveillance adversely impact

employee health and lead to decreased productivity. Moreover, behavioural tendencies like fear,

distrust, suspicion, resentment, hostility, violence and anti-social activities are alarmingly increased,

morale and motivation are decreased, and job dissatisfaction leads to higher rates of turnover, burnout

and absenteeism.117 West and Bowman rightly point out in this regard that “[w]hen monitoring

backfires, it can result in resistance, non-compliance, and retaliation.”118 All these in fact seem to

deteriorate and worsen the productivity of employees in the long run.

Through these ever-present monitoring practices, employees lose their autonomy, creativity and

freedom, for a fear of punishment causes them to think and act according to the requisites of an actual

or virtual observer. Likewise, along with West and Bowman, this research also shows the advantages

of safeguarding employee rights and interests by using the same measures mentioned above. The

invasion of privacy, for instance, emerges as the most significant individual and social issue when

surveillance is concerned.119 A whole chapter has been dedicated to exploring the violation of

in the 21st Century: Enhanced Opportunities – and remedies – for Withholding Job Effort in the New

Workplace,” Business Horizons 53 (2010): 543-552. 113 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 635. Cf. Martin K. Riedy and

Joseph H. Wen, “Electronic surveillance of Internet Access in the American Workplace,” Information and

Communication Technology Law 19, no. 1 (2010): 87-99; Nancy Flynn, The e-Policy Handbook: Rules and

Best Practices to Safely Manage Your Company's E-Mail, Blogs, Social Networking, and Other Electronic

Communication Tools, 2nd ed. (New York: American Management Association, 2009); Kendra Rosenberg,

“Location Surveillance by GPS: Balancing Employer’s Business Interest with Employee Privacy,”

Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts 6, no. 2 (2008): 145-154. 114 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 636. 115 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 54. 116 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 636. Cf. Ball, Workplace

Surveillance: An Overview, 93. 117 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 636; Kizza and Ssanyu,

“Workplace Surveillance,” 12-14. See also Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns,” 102; Stanton,

“Traditional and Electronic Monitoring from an Organizational Justice Perspective,” 130-134; Simpson and

Byrski, “The 21st Century Workplace,” 22; and Ciocchetti, “The Eavesdropping Employer,” 285-369, 357. 118 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 636. 119 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 637; Spinello, John Gallaugher

and Sandra Waddock, “Managing Workplace Privacy Responsibly,” 74-97; Solove, Understanding Privacy,

1-5.


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employee privacy in the workplace, and proves that unrestricted privacy in any forms deprives

employees of their basic human rights. Therefore, from a results-oriented perspective, constant

surveillance in the workplace is a threat (physical, moral, psychological, and behavioural) to the

individual ethical rights of employees (rights to freedom, autonomy and privacy) and from an

employee perspective is an unethical managerial practice.

Secondly, we may consider the rule-based perspective, as ethical rules help professionals follow and

abide by the ethical principles and precepts found in constitutional, federal, and other organizational

or corporate regulations, rules and reservations. This perspective holds that, notwithstanding the

projected or predicted consequences/result, certain actions are in every case right or wrong. It argues

that “[w]hat is right is what conforms to moral rules; one must see one’s duty and do it.” In deciding

what rule to apply, the person considers, “what is good for one is good for all”120 in specific situations.

Workplace surveillance is analyzed here based on principles of social justice and fairness and in view

of rule-based duty and legal-ethical responsibilities. Supporters of workplace surveillance from this

perspective look for the fair treatment of employees in accordance with an established management

practice. They may argue that if “properly designed and implemented, surveillance promises fairness

and objective administration of the employer-employee contract, ensuring procedural and

distributive justice.”121 Surveillance is thus regarded as a means both for the promotion of mutual

respect and fairness and for more objective, fact-based feedback and performance appraisal. The

view is not without its problems, however, and these are discussed in the following.

An understanding and application of legal frameworks for surveillance is an area that exceeds our

scope here and requires another platform of research. For “the expansion and proliferation of

technology has dawned a new era, blurring the preconceived boundaries, and surfacing new issues

in which [...] the moral, legal, and social principles that once helped guide ethical decision making

are no longer sufficient, resulting in a variety of practices which accelerate the emergence of ethical

dilemmas.”122 What an employer and employee consider ethical may differ and ultimately come

down to the question of one’s point of view.123 The critical reading of surveillance in the context of

social sorting and power distance makes clear that, as Lyon observes, “despite their consequentiality

for life chances and choices, they are seldom subject to ethical inquiry.”124 We are led, therefore, to

develop an ethical response to this. Employees want to be ethically treated and fairly judged in the

workplace. To determine what is ‘ethical’ should be a concern of all stakeholders, and, as Rosenberg

argues, should be “a product of an employer-employee team, responsible for the initial design and

regular updates as well as for evaluating effectiveness and fairness.”125 In the same way, the current

domination of employers, who enjoy a near-Orwellian capacity to spy on employee behaviours and

snoop into their private and work lives, is not tenable.126

120 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 631. 121 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 638. 122 Michael Bassick, Tayler McNamara and Deborah Sullivan, “Employee Surveillance: An Ethical

Consideration,” in The Ethical Imperative in the Context of Evolving Technologies, ed. Michael Bassick, et

al. (Bouler, CO: Ethica Publishing, 2007), 67. 123 Johnathan Yerby, “Legal and Ethical Issues of Employee Monitoring.” Online Journal of Applied

Knowledge Management 1, no. 2 (2013): 51. 124 Lyon, “Facing the future: Seeking ethics for everyday surveillance,” 174. 125 Rosenberg, “The Technological Assault on Ethics in the Modern Workplace,” 150. 126 Rosenberg, “The Technological Assault on Ethics in the Modern Workplace,” 151. Rosenberg illustrates

here that “the use of an employer’s computer should not be equated with the loss of its operator’s rights” and

argues that “a society which values individual freedom cannot function this way.”


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Privacy is regarded as an employee right in the workplace due to a presumed moral entitlement to be

protected from certain harms and physical, informational, and decisional infringements.127 The rights

and interests of different parties, the employer and the employee, must be balanced so that individual

privacy is protected and balanced with the legitimate needs of the employer, particularly in a situation

that is increasingly dependent on technology.128 Even when one agrees that some kind of regulation

is necessary in the workplace, the extent to which personal privacy may be compromised in pursuit

of a larger end is a matter of much discussion and debate. Job relevance and prior consent are the

ethically relevant factors that most often seem to secure some qualified approval of the use of

surveillance in the workplace. The ethical challenges raided by these factors will be explained later

in this section.

An employee’s privacy is violated whenever personal information is collected, stored, or used by an

employer in any way or for any purpose irrelevant to or in violation of the contractual relationship

between employer and employee.129 George Brenkert and Joseph Desjardins offer arguments to

restrict the types of information employers may gather about employees to information that is ‘job

relevant’. The employer can legitimately acquire information about the prospective employee’s job

qualifications, work experience, educational background, and other information relevant to the hiring

decision.130 Considering this aspect, Brenkert also argues that the “job relevance” requirement limits

the information sought to that which is directly connected to the job description.131 Agreeing with

this argument, Lippke admits that some aspects of a person’s social and moral character, such as

honesty and a willingness to cooperate with others, are job relevant, yet at the same time he rules out

information about an employee’s political or religious beliefs and practices, his or her sexual

preferences, marital status, financial data, etc.132 At this juncture, two things are important, according

to Joseph DesJardins and Ronald Duska: that jobs under surveillance must be jobs that clearly can

cause harm, and that the performance being monitored should be only one that is really and

potentially harmful.133

The notion of ‘informed consent’134 is also relevant to the ethical assessment of workplace privacy.

The relationship between an employee and an employer is generally held to be a consenting

127 Joseph DesJardins and Ronald Duska, “Drug Testing in Employment,” in Ethics in the Workplace, ed.

Robert A. Larmer (Minneapolis: West Publishing Company, 1996), 119. 128 Tom McEwen, Managing Values and Beliefs in Organisations (Essex: Prentice Hall, 2001), 155. Some

parts of this section are taken from my previous research entitled “Privacy in Workplace: An Ethical

Analysis,” submitted to the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at KU Leuven in June 2013. 129 Joseph R. DesJardins, “An Employee’s Right to Privacy,” in Contemporary Issues in Business Ethics, eds.

Joseph R. Desjardins and J.J. McCall, (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1985), 225. 130 Joseph R. DesJardins, “Privacy in Employment,” in Moral Rights in the Workplace, ed. Gertrude Ezorsky

(New York: State University of New York Press, 1987), 131. 131 George G. Brenkert, “Privacy, Polygraphs, and Work,” in Contemporary Issues in Business Ethics, eds.

Joseph R. Desjardins and J.J. McCall (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1985), 231. 132 Richard L. Lippke, “Work, Privacy, and Autonomy,” in Ethics in the Workplace, ed. Robert A. Larmer

(Minneapolis: West Publishing Company, 1996), 112. 133 DesJardins, “Drug Testing in Employment,” 123. 134 Informed consent is generally a process of getting permission before conducting an investigation of any

kind on a person, such as health care analysis and researches. In a workplace, an employer is entitled to have

certain specific information about the employee, and employees are permitted to get specific information

about the conditions of their employment, and also about monitoring in the workplace. The general

acceptance of these practices shows the general acceptance of the idea of informed consent in workplace

relations. The consent of employees should be required before new surveillance techniques are introduced in

the workplace. See Steve Clarke, “Informed Consent and Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace,” in


Group, 2005), 230-231.


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relationship.135 The collection and use of personal information about an employee or screening and

monitoring to acquire further details are matters to which an employee must consent in the

workplace. Hence, bypassing consent is prohibited in matters related to personal data and

surveillance in the workplace. According to Steve Clarke, as long as employees are aware of the

nature and extent of electronic monitoring in the workplace, and as long as they consent to these

arrangements, then electronic monitoring is ethically acceptable.136 However, this consent must be

freely given with full knowledge and understanding, because “one is not genuinely consenting unless

he or she can also decide not to consent,” and it is not generally regarded as ethically acceptable to

suppose that “a master-slave relationship [...] was based on consent.”137 Hence, the rightful and

genuine interests of the employee are invariably conditioned by the legitimate interests of the

employer, and vice versa. Therefore, surveillance and other electronic and data monitoring in

workplace, where employee consent is possible, is unacceptable without such consent.

However, researchers like Kirstie S. Ball and Stephen T. Margulis observe in this regard that the

“consent to monitoring is rarely, if ever, freely given in the workplace.”138 This has to be further

researched to determine what internal and external complications it might entail, especially in the

context of employees’ freedoms. The frameworks of ‘job relevance’ and ‘informed consent’ cannot

alone legitimize employee privacy issues, since employees’ expectations are increasingly

compromised by new technologies and the interests of employers. Therefore, to provide enduring

and substantive protection of employee privacy interests, we need to integrate the various ethical

models discussed above in a way that can rectify the shortcomings of each approach taken on its

own. Similarly, the arguments in opposition to electronic surveillance in the workplace are supported

by the finding of this present research in previous chapters, namely that the objectives of surveillance

and its expected benefits are not adequately achieved in the workplace, and thus many limitations

are placed on it. These limitations alter employee behaviours, often with adverse effects.

This research shows that continuous surveillance in the workplace creates and perpetrate

inequality.139 The observation of West and Bowman, that “[s]urveillance hold the very real potential

to violate human rights by harming the quality of worklife, demeaning the individual, treating

employees like property, and reducing them to interchangeable parts in the organizations”140 is

categorically affirmed in this research as well. For this research has also found that ubiquitous

surveillance in the workplace is consistently linked to justice (social) violations, enabling

discriminatory and control practices. Before considering its discriminating tendencies, we shold also

note that modern surveillance raises the issue of disappearing bodies. Employees are no longer seen

as embodied human beings, but “coded” data subjects, amounting to an ontological reductionism

135 Clarke, “Informed Consent and Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace,” 230. 136 Clarke, “Informed Consent and Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace,” 232. There are few other authors

who deal with the prior consent in the workplace. Cf. Carly L. Huth, “The Insider Threat and Employee

Privacy: An Overview of Recent Case Law,” Computer Law & Security Review 29 (2013): 370. 137 Clarke, “Informed Consent and Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace,” 232. 138 Kirstie S. Ball and Stephen T. Margulis, “Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in Call Centres: A

framework of Investigation,” New Technology, Work, and Employment 26, no. 2 (2011): 115. Cf. David

Zweig and Jane Webster, “Where is the Line between Benign and Invasive? An Examination of Psychological

Barriers to the Acceptance of Awareness Monitoring Systems,” Journal of Organizational Behaviour 23, no.

5 (2002): 605-633. 139 Lyon, Haggerty and Ball, “Introducing Surveillance Studies,” 3. 140 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 639. According to them,

continuous surveillance in the workplace “violates both the “golden rule” (“do unto others as you would have

them do unto you”) and the categorical imperative (“what is good for one is good for all”).”


246

through representation.141 The issue here is twofold: firstly, a different kind of embodiment takes

place in that one’s physicality is symbolized and represented through abstract data and codes, and

secondly, that when the actual or real is represented by something else and lacks immediate presence,

this can be misread or manipulated. In turn, it also becomes an instance of the personification of

information. For the electronic mediation of employees raises the issue of “facelessness”: being

constantly watched from a distance by invisible other causes the identity of employees to be lost in

a field of electronic mediation.

The challenges of employee profiling (reputational vulnerability) and phishing (stealing identities)

can wreak havoc in employees’ lives and diminish their life chances.142 Furthermore, employees are

sorted and discriminatively grouped and categorized according to their supposed risk, danger, and

worth. We can again invoke the “panoptic sort” of Oscar Gandy here. Surveillance functions as

purely a discriminative technology that classifies employees according to who is eligible for special

treatment and who is an object of suspicion.143 The “marginalized” or “dangerous” becomes the prey

of an even more intense unidirectional gaze and object of increased scrutiny for the powerful.144 An

unwanted “male gaze” is also experienced in the workplace, as we have explored in the fourth

chapter, leading to gender-based discrimination in the workplace. In the same way, when women are

the subject of a snooping gaze that turns their body into sexualized object, surveillance fails to

consistently foster a sense of security in the workplace.145 Women employees thus become, as already

noted, the target or victim of Peeping Tom voyeuristic surveillance. These same negative effects are

seen when surveillance is used as a form of ‘disciplinary power,’146 and the less powerful are

dominated by the more powerful and experience total subjugation. The predominance of the

hierarchy established in the workplace through surveillance practices change the rule-based conduct,

favoring the hierarchy and ensuring that constant observation in the workplace becomes a mechanism

of control. The ‘disciplinary or control model’ of Foucault and the notion of a ‘society of control’ by

Deleuze147 indicate this same power control and power distance in the workplace.

The underlying ethical concern here is the tendency to treat the body (employee) as an object to be

watched (problem of voyeurism), assessed and manipulated,148 such that the subjective dimension of

labour is commodified. Employee sorting and power control often have manipulative behavioural

effects on employees. The reduced feeling of employee self-image and impoverished sense of self-

worth can cause employees to act differently in the workplace. Through the creation of a categorical

profile identity at the cost of one’s real self-identity, as we have discussed, employees become

“virtual robots,” behaving only at the will of employers. This starts from the declension of extra-role

behaviours in the workplace. Thus, continuous surveillance in fact curtails the constructive “above-

141 Lyon, “Introduction: Surveillance as Sorting,” 120; Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes

and Mobile Bodies,” 23; and Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 115-116. 142 Jenkins, “Identity, Surveillance and Modernity,” 163-164; Sewell, “Organization, Employees and

Surveillance,” 303-312. 143 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 20-22. 144 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies,” 13-30; Ball, “Categorizing

the Workers: Electronic Surveillance and Social Ordering in the Call Center,” 201-225. Cf. Oscar Gandy, The

Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). One may

ask here, if people are really ‘dangerous,’ should there be no surveillance on them? if not, how to tackle the

danger they pose? The category here mentions is the discriminated group through mere suspicion of doing

wrong. Or in other words, all people are victims of this omnipresent surveillance putting them all in one

category of suspicion. 145 Koskela, “You Shouldn’t Wear that Body: The Problematic of Surveillance and Gender,” 52-54. 146 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 200-203. 147 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 170-203; Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of

Control.” 3-7. 148 Staples, The Culture of Surveillance: Discipline and Social Control in the United States, ix.


247

and-beyond” behaviours of employees.149 A digital colonizing experience, or digital domination,

grounds employees’ continuous disengagement from work and can lead to job abandonment.150 The

default role obligation demanded through external power control leads employees to engage in

reciprocal forms of deviance, such as production deviance and opportunistic actions,151 and finally

increases absenteeism, presenteeism and employee turnover.

There is also significant evidence, as described towards the end of the fourth chapter, that ubiquitous

surveillance and the subsequent stress-related issues lead to occupational violence (e.g., stealing and

damaging work-related properties) as well as antisocial behaviours152 towards friends, family and

other social groups. Thus, to summarize, the rule-oriented analysis and the social effects (justice)

perspective show that surveillance, though implemented in accordance with pertinent laws and

precepts, can harm individual employees, organizations and the wider society. Therefore, consistent

and ubiquitous workplace surveillance is generally regarded as unethical from a rule-based ethical

perspective.

Thirdly, the virtue-based perspective, or virtue ethics, disregarding the result or rules, looks for what

kind of person one is153 and thus whether decisions or actions in the workplace improves one’s

character and that of the organization or the larger community. Virtue ethics seeks to assess the whole

person rather than just certain traits or the details of a particular action.154 It gives predominant

consideration and respect to the moral agency of a person, and thus perceives “integrity” as a pre-

eminent virtue that synthesizes other key virtues, such as honesty, moderation, justice, and

prudence.155 With a high regard for personal integrity, some researchers like Rick Iedema and Carl

Rhodes have begun to form arguments in support of surveillance, holding that monitoring makes

employees better disciplined and more work-oriented.156 According to Iedema and Rhodes, “[t]his

ethics resides in an ‘undecided space’ – one where individual conduct and subjectivity are not

decided by surveillance-based discipline but performed by active subjects in interaction with each

other in relation to that discipline.”157 The term ‘undecided’ is used to consider the capacity of the

individual, with his or her own power or knowledge, to be reflexive and active in deciding what is

good for them, for organizations and for the wider society.158 However, as West and Bowman argue,

149 Petitta and Vecchione, “Job Burnout, Absenteeism, and Extra Role Behaviours,” 98. 150 D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, 9-14; Johns, “Presenteeism in the Workplace: A Review and Research

Agenda,” 521-527; and Demirbag et al., “Employee Service Abandonment in Offshore Operations,” 178. 151 Zweig, “Beyond Privacy and Fairness Concerns,” 112; Robinson and Bennett, “A Typology of Deviant

Workplace Behaviours,” 555-572; and Bhave, “The Invisible Eye? Electronic Performance Monitoring and

Employee Job Performance,” 611-613. 152 Singh, Organizational Behaviour: Text and Cases, 182; Paludi, Nydegger and C. A. Paludi, Understanding

Workplace Violence, 14-15; D’Cruz, Workplace Bullying in India, 10-13; and Sinha, Culture and

Organizational Behaviour, 28-52. 153 The theory of virtue ethics reflects and deliberates that “an act to be good on the basis of the character trait

or virtue that the act evidences.” Dean Gueras and Charles Varofalo, Practical Ethics in Public

Administration, 3rd ed. (Vienna, VA: Management Concepts, 2010), 59. 154 Gueras and Varofalo, Practical Ethics in Public Administration, 59. 155 West and James S. Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 640. 156 Rick Iedema and Carl Rhodes, “The Undecided Space of Ethics in Organizational Surveillance,”

Organization Studies 31, no. 2 (2010): 199-217; West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An

Ethical Analysis,” 640. 157 Iedema and Rhodes, “The Undecided Space of Ethics in Organizational Surveillance,” 199. Iedema and

Rhodes quotes Mark Bevir’s idea in this regard that “[b]ecause different people adopt different beliefs and

perform different actions against the background of the same social structure, there must be an undecided

space in front of these structures where individual subjects decide what beliefs to hold and what actions to

perform for reasons of their own.” Iedema and Rhodes, “The Undecided Space of Ethics in Organizational

Surveillance,” 201. Cf. Mark Bevir, “Foucault, Power and Institutions,” Political Studies XLVII (1999): 358. 158 Iedema and Rhodes, “The Undecided Space of Ethics in Organizational Surveillance,” 201.


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“deploying a surveillance system covertly indicates that the employer believes that employees lack

integrity to perform their duties; such an approach does not contribute to human flourishing in the

workplace.”159 This type of engagement, we argue in this research contrary to Iedema and Rhodes,

has the problem that the conscious practice of the ethical conduct by employees is constrained by the

power distance and power control exercised through managerial surveillance.

In the same way, West and Bowman, referring to Elin Palm, observe that employees, when subjected

to ubiquitous surveillance (continuous observation and persistent control), fail to act in accordance

with their own true selves, and often sacrifice their personal integrity.160 This even causes them to

engage in a situation with “adaptive behaviours” through a “manufactured” self, and this anticipatory

conformity to other’s will leads to self-subordination.161 This tendency, according to Palm, “reduces

the ability of self-control at work,” such that “employees are no longer said to govern themselves.”162

In this context we can also appeal to the Foucauldian understanding of the self,163 as constructed

within the bounds of power relations. However, Sewell and Barker observe that if the self is a

complex construction, “then we need an approach to the ethics of surveillance that incorporates an

appreciation of the role it plays in that construction.”164 So, we find that a manipulated self is acting

in the workplace under the influence of external control and power differences.

The empirical (qualitative) study we conducted in the Indian organizational workplace, described in

the previous chapter of this research, shows that a lack of privacy and freedom and prevalence of

power distance and control constrain the employee’s self-disclosure as a human self. This means that

electronic monitoring systems challenge and threaten the “human” aspect of employees as well as

their work-quality and work-ethics. This study also reminds us of the ontological insecurity165 one

may feel in the workplace, which tends to be overlooked by surveillance advocates. A workable

surrender to authority is fostered here, resulting in powerlessness and a sense of vulnerability.

Through this compulsive irrational submission to authority, as Erich Fromm described, one loses

one’s “self” and becomes an automaton.166 Finally, as West and Bowman would agree, through

surveillance systems and processes in the workplace, “[e]mployee behaviour becomes rationalized

and individuals are objectified, manipulated and devalued, denying them not only voice but also the

159 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 640. 160 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 640; Elin Palm, “Securing

Privacy at Work: The Importance of Contextualized Consent,” Ethics of Information Technology 11, no. 4

(2009): 233-241. 161 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 640; William S. Brown,

“Ontological Security, Existential Anxiety, and Workplace Privacy,” Journal of Business Ethics 23, no. 1

(2000): 61-65; and Palm, “Securing Privacy at Work: The Importance of Contextualized Consent,” 235. 162 Palm, “Securing Privacy at Work: The Importance of Contextualized Consent,” 235. 163 Sewell and Barker, “Neither Good, nor Bad, but Dangerous,” 191. Cf., Michel Foucault, “Space,

Knowledge, and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,

1984a); Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Process,” The Foucault

Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin Books (original: Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984b),

1991(350-355. 164 Sewell and Barker, “Neither Good, nor Bad, but Dangerous,” 191. To take an ethical position, this

constructed self, according to Foucault, should follow four considerations: (1) ethical substance – related to

human aspects of moral conduct, (2) subjectification – human inclination to follow the moral obligation, (3)

practical ascetisim – ways of human action to become ethical subjects, and (4) moral telos – the type of being

an individual aspiring to be. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Process,” 352-

355; Sewell and Barker, “Neither Good, nor Bad, but Dangerous,” 190. 165 William S. Brown has already reflected in this same direction. Cf. Brown, “Ontological Security, Existential

Anxiety, and Workplace Privacy,” 61-65. 166 Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 269.


249

necessity to regard them as moral agents.”167 This ends the creation of an inauthentic self and leads

to employee alienation and attrition.

Finally, the individual assessment of rule-based, results-based and virtue-based approaches and their

convergence show that being a virtuous person respecting rules and examining results can undermine

the need for surveillance. The continuous negative effects of workplace surveillance often outweigh

the intended benefits and affirm, from an employee perspective, that it is unethical for management

to continuously monitor them. In relation to workplace surveillance, though there are situations

where neither the organization nor the employees can possess absolute rights, it becomes

counterproductive: “[t]he right to manage can be a seductive rationale for finding the greatest good,

exceeding what is reasonable and necessary at the expense of important rights.”168 It becomes

unethical, since “monitoring goes beyond what is sensible, demands precise information about

employer behaviour, fails to promote the social good, and when it compromises work practices.”169

Similarly, a conflict occurs when the benefit and goodwill of the employer alone is given priority,

forgetting the rights and interests of employees. The problem here is not merely a need to balance

surveillance, privacy and impartiality, but rather “[t]o the extent that we risk the loss of privacy we

risk, in a very real sense, the loss of our very status as subjective, autonomous persons.”170 Therefore,

revealing the current status of the employee perception, workplace surveillance is shown to bring

with it many uncertainties, and thus should be used only with serious reservations.

6.2.2 Ethics of Rights, Power and Social Justice

The rights approach shows that employees have a right to be treated with respect and dignity. This

upholds employees’ rights to choose freely and to have these choices respected. As illustrated in this

research, David Meeler states that “[e]ach person has a fundamental right to be respected and treated

as a free and equal rational person capable of making his or her own decisions. This implies other

rights (e.g., privacy, free consent, freedom of conscience, etc.) that must be protected if a person is

to have the freedom to direct his or her own life.”171 Practices in the workplace can run against this

dignified understanding of the individual when an employee is forced to work without a ‘personal

space’ – a violation of his or her individual and social rights. The rights approach to the ethics of

workplace surveillance proposed by Patricia Werhane, which we have already discussed, is grounded

on the moral rights of employees and a premise that “human beings have moral claims to a set of

basic rights vis-à-vis their being human.”172 What Werhane speaks as the rights talk - human rights

or moral rights - is derived from the assumption that human beings have intrinsic value and thus that

every person is entitled to these rights regardless of socio-cultural, economic or political differences.

167 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 641. 168 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 643. 169 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 645. 170 Michael P. Lynch, “Privacy and the Threat to the Self,” The New York Times, June 22, 2013.

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/22/privacy-and-the-threat-to-the-self/ [accessed on

November 15, 2017]. Cf. West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 646. 171 David Meeler, “Five Basic Approaches to Ethical Decision-Making,” Handout for Central Approaches to

Ethics, http://faculty.winthrop.edu/meelerd/docs/rolos/5_Ethical_Approaches.pdf [accessed November 25,

2017]. See also, for instance, Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J., and Michael J. Meyer,

“Thinking Ethically,” Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, August 1, 2015,

https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/thinking-ethically/ [accessed

November 25, 2017]. 172 Tara J. Radin and Patricia H. Werhane, “Employment-at-Will, Employee Rights, and Future directions for

Employment,” Business Ethics quarterly 13, no. 2 (2003): 114.


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Werhane argues convincingly that freedom and liberty are basic moral rights of all persons, and that

these rights, along with reason as an underlying principle, enable an individual to exercise freedom

of choice and thus to develop full human capabilities.173 In her opinion, freedom fosters and protects

the individual desire “to be his own master,” “to be self-directed” and “to act and decide rather than

be acted upon and decided for by others.”174 We have already noted that this freedom is drastically

constrained in the workplace when employees act, not of their own accord, but in line with the desires

of the actual or virtual observer. One result of ubiquitous surveillance in the workplace is forced

involuntary behaviour. Werhane argues in this regard that “if employers and managers have certain

rights, say, to respect, free speech, and choice, employees should also have equal claims to those

rights.”175 It also demotes the human ethic system of work to “a mechanistic form of control which

devalues individual work habits and creative skills, treats people like property, and reduces workers

to interchangeable parts of the organization rather than individual members.”176 The lack of

constitutionally guaranteed individual rights and the contractual agreements in organizations, often

favouring the organization itself, leads to employee suffering in the workplace.

In the same way, Tara J. Radin and Patricia H. Werhane quote Christopher McMahon, a defender of

employee rights, who writes that “although, as property owners or agents for companies, employers

and managers have rights to hire and fire “at will,” this does not provide them with moral justification

for ignoring other employee rights claims, including, for example, rights to participate in corporate

decision-making.”177 Overall dissatisfaction about the lack of privacy rights in the workplace is

widely explored in literature on organizational surveillance. For as Botan and Vorvoreanu observe,

surveillance infringes on employees’ right to private identity and their autonomy.178 This in fact refers

to the panoptic effect, discussed above, which compromises the intended benefits of surveillance.

Persistent and continuous electronic surveillance in the organizational workplace reminds us today

that the Foucauldian electronic panopticon effects are once again present, as employees are forced to

internalise the discipline and control demanded by their employer.179 In this context of the permanent

snooping on employees, Sewell and Wilkinson exclaim that “the solitary confinement of Taylorism

has been superseded by the electronic tagging of the Information Panopticon.”180 This imposition of

permanent control poses further psycho-physical threats. We have also seen that the pressure of being

constantly under someone’s monitoring gaze in the workplace leads ultimately to stress, health

hazards, and distrust, and eventually to a break in the employer-employee relationship.

Power becomes a factor in the picture of unethical workplace surveillance due to the “coercive”

nature of such practices, as we have discussed in the first chapter, by which surveillance becomes a

means of control and manipulation. Graham Sewell et al. share the same concern, writing that the

173 Patricia H. Werhane, Tara J. Radin and Norman E. Bowie, Employment and Employee Rights (Malden,

MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 9. 174 Werhane, Radin and Bowie, Employment and Employee Rights, 12. 175 Radin and Werhane, “Employment-at-Will, Employee Rights, and Future directions for Employment,” 114.

Originally in: Patricia Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice- Hall,

1985). 176 Alder, “Ethical Issues in Electronic Performance Monitoring,” 736. 177 Radin and Werhane, “Employment-at-Will, Employee Rights, and Future directions for Employment,” 114.

Cf. Christopher McMahon, Authority and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 178 Botan and Vorvoreanu, “What do Employees Think about Electronic Surveillance at work?” 130. 179 Bain and Taylor, “Entrapped by the ‘Electronic Panopticon’? Worker Resistance in the Call Centre,” 4. 180 Graham Sewell and Barry Wilkinson, “Empowerment or Emasculation? Shopfloor Surveillance in a Total

Quality Organization,” in Reassessing Human Resource Management, eds. Paul Blyton Peter Runbull

(London: Sage, 1992a), 109. Cf. Graham Sewell and Barry Wilkinson, “Human Resource Management in

“Surveillance” Companies,” in Human Resource Management and Technical Change, ed. Jon Clark, 137-

154 (London: Sage, 1993); Graham Sewell and Barry Wilkinson, “Someone to watch over me: Surveillance,

Discipline and the Just-in-Time Labour Process,” Sociology 26 (1992b): 271-289.


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workplace surveillance has the effect of “intensifying work, reducing autonomy, increasing stress,

and undermining solidarity by pitting worker against worker.”181 According to them, the argument

of surveillance as a “discourse of care” is valid and legitimate if and only if it happens in a “case of

the few watching the many in the interest of the many.”182 Yet that is not the situation here, because

we face a “case of the few watching many in the interests of the few,” as expressing the “discourse

of coercion.”183 The rights and interests of the many – employees – are often neglected. Sewell et al.

also perceive the main purpose of surveillance as being “not to protect against antisocial behaviour

(although this may be a side effect), but to ensure that employees work as hard as they possibly can

all the time.”184 Our empirical study supports this claim. This research also aligns with the study of

Ball on the effect of demotivation in the workplace. People behave differently when they know they

are under surveillance in an effort to exploit the system to get on the good side of management.185 In

the context of surveillance and power-plays in organizations, the research of Joris Lammers et al.

also makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the hypocrisy that comes along with

the increase of power.186 Based on anecdotal evidence, they suggest that “the power [of managers]

undermines people’s sense of morality, corrupting their thoughts and behaviour.”187 This shows that,

when authorities feels more powerful and dominant, there is a motivation to assess and judge

employees more harshly and even to behave immorally, which may in turn cause them to engage in

more invasive monitoring practices.

In this regard, the moral value of personal autonomy and subsequent extension of employee rights to

include psychological autonomy, is also infringed by electronic surveillance. For instance, Emma

Rooksby and Natasha Cica rightly claim that “electronic surveillance is morally wrong where it is

used by employers or managers to facilitate coercive or manipulative changes to workers’ values

insofar as this involves an attempt to undermine or distort their personal autonomy.”188 Thus, the

infringement of an individual employee’s rights of personal autonomy, privacy, etc. threated personal

autonomy and employees’ personal and social values. Rooksby and Cisa argue that electronic

surveillance and its wide-ranging implementation in a workplace distort employees’ attitudes – both

motivational and informational - as well as their executive qualities, as they merely enact the will of

their employer.189 Correspondingly, the manipulation of motivational, informational, and executive

qualities are just three forms of covert non-constraining control of others, whereby “continuous

surveillance of all aspects of workers’ behaviours creates an environment in which they may find it

difficult to resist compliance with guidelines for workplace behaviour set down by employers and

managers, even where those guidelines are not coercively enforced.”190 Motivational manipulation

is involved when an employee is forced to change his or her values unreflectingly to suit the corporate

values and culture, while unreflective adoption of workplace-preferred values leads to the

181 Graham Sewell, James R. Barker and Daniel Nyberg, “Working Under Intensive Surveillance: When Does

‘Measuring Everything that Moves’ Become Intolerable?” Human Relations 65, no. 2 (2012): 191. 182 Sewell et al., “Working Under Intensive Surveillance,” 191. 183 Sewell et al., “Working Under Intensive Surveillance,” 191. 184 Sewell et al., “Working Under Intensive Surveillance,” 191. 185 Ball and Margulis. “Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in Call Centres,” 113-126. Allen et al. also

speak about this type of odd behaviours in response to being monitored by referring to it as the “chilling

effect” in the workplace behaviours. Allen et al., “Workplace Surveillance and Managing Privacy

Boundaries,” 172-200. 186 Joris Lammers, Diederik A. Stapel and Adam D. Galinsky, “Power Increases Hypocrisy: Moralizing in

Reasoning, Immorality in Behaviour,” Psychological Science 21, no. 5 (2010): 737-744. 187 Lammers et al., “Power Increases Hypocrisy: Moralizing in Reasoning, Immorality in Behaviour,” 737. 188 Emma Rooksby and Natasha Cica, “Personal Autonomy and Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace,” in

Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: Controversies and Solutions, ed. John Weckert, 242-259 (Hershey:

Idea Group Publishing, 2005), 243. 189 Rooksby and Cica, “Personal Autonomy and Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace,” 249. 190 Rooksby and Cica, “Personal Autonomy and Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace,” 250.


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manipulation of executive qualities and distortion of information, and the fact that certain

information is regarded as suspicious can lead to informational manipulation.191

Likewise, even referring to the legitimate interests of the organization to implement surveillance

technologies, the use of such technologies cannot be justified prima facie, given that personal, often

vested and manipulative, interests drive this use without a clear and direct demonstration of

organizational advantage. The notion of a worker’s right to autonomy is significant here, as it ensures

employees’ control over their own work situation by providing substantial freedom in carrying out

their work in the way they think best.192 Also at issue here is “personal autonomy” and “worker

autonomy.” Worker autonomy is valuable as it enables employees to act upon their own values in

workplace situations, while personal autonomy covers a broader ground, taking care of the ways in

which employees adopt and act upon these values,193 even beyond the terrain of the workplace. The

moral significance of personal autonomy in connection with employee self-responsible regulative

behaviours will be discussed in the later part of this chapter.

Werhane also speaks about equal consideration or a right to be treated as equal to another holder of

a moral right.194 This takes the rights of social justice into consideration along with individual rights.

It shows the necessity of a social justice approach, as surveillance in the workplace affects

employees’ social behaviour as well, as we have seen. It is argued, in this regard, that “employees

quite often make sense of (i.e. create significant meaning around) their work by drawing on ideas

that stem from their immediate task environment and from broader institutional environments

relating to social systems within and around the organisation itself.”195 The system of economic

efficiency may be an example of this kind, both as the social system and as the surveillance indicator.

This brings us to a related question: is surveillance so efficient as it claims to be, or does it seek

another kind of efficiency, really an economic efficiency? Is it more a problem about power (a social

problem) or an economic problem? For if it is only economic, then it is easy to manage that: merely

conduct some studies to see what level of control people will tolerate, then deduce well. If people do

still adopt these all-embracing control systems, even knowing it is not effective, we can conclude

that they do it because of power, to borrow the Foucauldian thinking. People, when vested with

power and in power positions, become like the Grand Inquisitor of Dostoyevsky,196 fixated on having

their eye on others.

Surveillance in the workplace, therefore, is only one part of a global cultural trend evident in the

modern society, state, and economy: people who are different are not tolerated. Everybody must act

in certain way, and by controlling you can exclude the more “crazy” people. Foucault also writes

about this in his History of Madness, focusing on a pattern of keeping disturbing elements out of the

system. This is connected to the model of “mainstreaming” in management, where one is forced to

think like the one who is above them in the hierarchy of system, or where someone is dominating

191 Rooksby and Cica, “Personal Autonomy and Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace,” 250-251. 192 Rooksby and Cica, “Personal Autonomy and Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace,” 252-253. Cf. Philip

Brey, “Worker Autonomy and the Drama of Digital Networks in Organizations,” Journal of Business Ethics

22, no. 1 (1999): 16; Robert C. Solomon, Above the Bottom Line: An Introduction to Business Ethics, 2nd ed.

(Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1994), 392. 193 Rooksby and Cica, “Personal Autonomy and Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace,” 253. 194 Werhane, Radin and Bowie, Employment and Employee Rights, 9-10. 195 Kirstie S. Ball and Stephen T. Margulis, “Electronic Monitoring and Surveillance in Call Centres: A

Framework for Investigation,” New Technology, Work and Employment 26, no. 2 (2011): 114. 196 The Grand Inquisitor (1880) is a poem in the novel The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is

important because of its ideas about human nature and freedom. Cf., Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, “The Grand

Inquisitor,” in The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett,

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/grand.htm [accessed February 15, 2017].


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another. Diane van den Broek here identifies the management-imposed normative and cultural

controls and mechanisms that impact employees and negatively influence their behaviours.197

Surveillance and its subsequent individual and social intrusions create to and exacerbate personal

and social injustices. Justice violations in the workplace happen, within the context of surveillance,

when certain individuals or group of people are subject to unequal treatment or discrimination. We

have already discussed how surveillance leads to the sorting of employees according to their gender,

ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and even class/caste structures in certain contexts like India.

We may conclude that the new discriminative patterns and inequalities and unequal behavioural

tendencies in the workplace greatly increase power control and power distance, as well as social

sorting and discrimination. Individual and collective resistance to workplace surveillance on the part

of employees, by way of manipulated appraisal behaviours, presenteeism, absenteeism, and altered

organizational functioning, all indicate that employees resent this managerial activity. From an

individual rights perspective, the intrinsic value of the human body and human nature itself is

threatened as employees’ bodies increasingly are made the subject of unwanted and ubiquitous

scrutiny with various adverse effects, such as intrusions of bodily and cognitive or informational

privacy, a lack of personal space and objects, and constraints on self-directed individual and social

conduct. The limitation of privacy does not ensure good performance, but rather leads to inadequate

fulfilment of each one’s roles responsibilities.198 Employee surveillance is not necessary to ensure

the increased productivity and the subsequent improved quality and quantity of work output.

Searching for evidence that an employee is engaged in fraud or theft is not the same as a routine

searches, continuous e-mail and telephone monitoring, or extensive CCTV surveillance of all

employees, which treat them all as though they are under suspicion.199 Accordingly, from a social

justice perspective and thus considering equality,200 serious limitations are imposed on employees.

A ‘Big Brother’ management style that seeks to exercise total control over employees renders them

powerless.

All of these claims validate the argument presented above, that from an employee perspective

ubiquitous surveillance is unethical in the organizational workplace. In this context, Phil Taylor and

Peter Bain rightly observe, referring to Paul Thompson and Chris Warhurst (1998), that a

contemporary management styles reliant on surveillance and employee monitoring “has produced its

own dystopian off-spring, whose accounts emphasise ‘captured subjectivity and labour trapped in

totalising institutions combined with new, oppressive forms of regulation and surveillance […].”201

We must determine, then, what relative value should be assigned to the conflicting rights and interests

of employers and employees, and what managerial rationality or values can be applied to it in the

employee surveillance context. In what follows, we explore this through a detailed analysis of body

197 Diane van den Broek, “We have the Values: Customers, Control and Corporate Ideology in Call Centre

Operations,” New Technology, Work and Employment 19, no. 1 (2004): 2-13. Donald J. Winiecki, adapting

Foucauldian genealogical perspective in analysing technology-mediated labour in call centres, also makes the

same observation in his study. Cf. Donald J. Winiecki, “Shadowboxing with Data: Production of the Subject

in Contemporary Call Centre Organizations,” New Technology, Work and Employment 19, no. 2 (2004): 78-

95. 198 Philip Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” in The Ethics of Workplace Privacy, eds. Sven Ove

Hansson and Elin Palm (Brussels: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2005), 114. 199 Brey, “The Importance of Workplace Privacy,” 115. 200 Within the limitedness and scope of this research, I have mentioned only about the formal equality notion,

equality before law. 201 Phil Taylor and Peter Bain, “An Assembly Line in the Head: Work and Employee Relations in the Call

Centre,” Industrial Relations Journal 30, no. 2 (2003): 103. Cf. Paul Thompson and Chris Warhurst, eds.,

Workplaces of the Future (London: Macmillan, 1998), 6.


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ontology and how a practice of ubiquitous surveillance can harm the relationship between employees

and employers.

6.2.3 The Irreducibility of the Person and the Ethics of Big Data and the Body-Subject

Lukas D. Introna, using a Levinasian notion of ethics, argues that workplace surveillance is unethical

and unfair.202 Introna refers here to “the multiplicity of formal and informal practices of monitoring

and recording aspects of an individual or groups’ behaviour ‘at work’ for the purposes of judging

these as appropriate or inappropriate; as productive or unproductive; as desirable or undesirable; and

so forth.”203 He speaks first from the perspective of the Levinasian concept of the “irreducibility of

the other,” and holds that “[s]urveillance in its operation renders the Other faceless and

speechless.”204 For ethics happens when the other is encountered as Other and the ‘face’ solicits one

through its expression, bringing about an encounter with the other in everyday life.205 Surveillance

reduces the face in the workplace, according to Introna, by the operation of power ‘at distance’ that

functions as the logic behind surveillance, which [power] is expressed physically and institutionally

in the workplace.206 The same is argued sociologically by David Lyon, as we have already discussed

in previous chapters, surveillance is now about ‘remote-world’ and ‘remote-relations,’ where co-

present embodied persons no longer see the faces of those with whom they engage. For Lyon, the

“enlightenment attitudes, embedded in modernity [here that of the relation between abstracted data

and embodied social persons], have fostered facelessness, and electronic mediation has exacerbated

this situation today.”207 Reflection on this missing face lead both Introna and Lyon to regard

surveillance as unethical and unfair.

Secondly, surveillance in its operation, Introna opines, is not just a general practice, but comes with

a purpose-making judgement over the monitored – one that “starts with a category and ends with a

judgement relative to that category”208 (productive, suspicious, etc.). The subsequent encounter,

Introna continues, re-produces and legitimises this judgement and the “otherness of the other, the

exceptional, is neatly bracketed and ‘covered over’ […].” The problem here is that “the ethical

paradox of rendering the Other present through the monitoring data is that the possibility for speaking

– encountering the Other – is exactly circumvented by the argument that it is ‘fair and just’ that all

are rendered equal by the objectivity of the data and treated only in terms of that. In this way the

voice of the Other becomes silenced in the supposedly ‘just’ economy of the category and the rule.”209

Acting and behaving merely according to the facts presented, therefore, again leads to unjust and

unfair decision-making in the workplace. For, referring to the Levinasian notion of the Other, Introna

sharply exemplifies that “the ethical demand that we encounter the other as a face, to let the other

explain him or herself, to let him or her speak, to allow them to question the validity of our judgement,

202 Lukas D. Introna, “Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair,” Surveillance and Society 1, no. 2

(2003): 210-216. 203 Introna, “Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair,” 210. 204 Introna, “Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair,” 212. To denote the Other, Introna also uses

the capital ‘O’ as it is in Levinas, who uses autrui (other with capital ‘O’) as opposed to autre (other) to signal

the former (Other) as proper noun. The other for Levinas is an absolute and irreducible singular that goes

“beyond all categories of good and evil, as well as beyond the force of reason, even reasonable reason. Introna,

“Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair,” 210. Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans.,

M.B. Smith (London: The Athlone Press, 1993), 35. 205 Introna, “Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair,” 211-212. 206 Introna, “Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair,” 212. 207 Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting,” 27. 208 Introna, “Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair,” 212. 209 Introna, “Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair,” 213.


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again, and again […]”210 External monitoring though electronic machines and systems clearly lacks

this kind of ethical responsibility.

Thirdly, Introna speaks about the radical asymmetry of every ethical relation, which leads to the

question of justice – the equality of all before the law.211 For, in justice, laws and regulations are

developed to ensure equality of all people without distinction between “those close and those far

off,”212 and especially those who are silenced due to socio-economic and cultural factors. In the

workplace, as previously explored, employees are placed in a vulnerable situation by electronic

surveillance that presumes a judgement of worth and suspicion. This judgement, Introna observes, is

suggested by the data disregarding individual circumstances and devoid of any legitimacy,213 and

thus ethics and justice, in Levinas’s sense, are rendered unfeasible and even impossible. This means

that on the one hand one is urged to take an extra mile, suspending judgements through monitored

data alone, in order to fully understand the circumstances, while on the other hand it warns that

workplace surveillance is not a ‘solvable’ ethical problem,214 as there is no ideal balance between the

conflicting interests. However, Introna opines, “the working out of ethics and justice in everyday

workplace surveillance practices starts by accepting that they are unethical and unfair, from the start,

as such.”215 This situation opens a new ethical space and platform for encountering the problem,

leading to further questions and reflections.

What is original and essentially human is that which makes a human being completely unique in the

world and cannot be reduced to mere accidental phenomena and data. With this in mind, one can say

that employees have an irreducible character by virtue of being human, and that this irreducible and

unrepeatable character is supplemented with the notion of the other. When applied to surveillance

ethics, when there are principles in management ethics to which human action should adhere in cases

when an action has another person at its object, one should not treat him or her as a means to an end

or as a tool, but rather as having his or her own purpose.216 The completeness of the human being is

disregarded when this concern is not adequately taken into account, by which the human person is

degraded and humiliated from his or her wholeness. This irreducibility of the human being becomes

the moral basis, on the one hand, for our individual and shared humanity, and on the other hand, for

universal human rights. It is manifested in the workplace when due respect for self and other is

demonstrated through maintenance of organizational conventions by all members concerned. The

contrary, however, is reflected in the workplace when employees are reduced to mere data codes and

body-subjects. Therefore, it is necessary that we analyse here the ethics of big data and the body-

subject.

We may define “data” as any facts and statistics collected for later reference. Data is “a

reinterpretable representation of information in a formalized manner suitable for communication,

interpretation, or processing [which] can be processed by human or by automatic means.”217

210 Introna, “Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair,” 213. 211 Introna, “Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair,” 213. It is due to the Levinasian understanding

of justice that “there is no distinction between those close and those far off.” 212 Introna, “Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair,” 213-214. Originally in: Emmanuel Levinas,

Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991

[1974]), 159. 213 Introna, “Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair,” 214. 214 Introna, “Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair,” 214. 215 Introna, “Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair,” 215. 216 Wojciech W. Gasparski, “Beyond the Prose of Business,” in Spirituality and Ethics in Management, ed.

Zsolnai, László, 123-140 (New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2005), 129. 217 Richard Kemp, “Big Data and Data Protection,” Kemp IT Law (2014): 2. Cf.

http://www.kempitlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Big-Data-and-Data-Protection-White-Paper-v1_0-


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According to Richard Kemp, “[t]he term ‘Big Data’ refers to large amounts of different types of data

produced with high velocity from a high number of various types of sources.”218 It is the exponential

availability, use and rapid growth of information that marks data in our post-modern data-driven

world. One of the challenges Big Data faces is the focus given to the volume and consequent inability

to control the flow and the qualification aspects. This leads to the need for a new approach to data

management that considers all dimensions of information. Nawsher Khan et al. identify three main

characteristics of Big Data: “(a) the data are numerous, (b) the data cannot be categorized into regular

relational databases, and (c) data are generated, captured, and processed very quickly.”219 Elena

Geanina Ularu et al. illustrate, in this regard, that “[l]ives today are impacted by the ability of the

companies to dispose, interrogate and manage data. The development of technology infrastructure is

adapted to help generate data, so that all the offered services can be improved as they are used.”220

So, Big Data today is said to have a promising range of applications for business organizations.

However, the improper use of the data and its possible manipulation is a major challenge that Big

Data brings into our discussion. As it consists of a large amount of complex data, security and privacy

become an important challenge for Big Data.221 The analysis of Big Data is important in this research,

as in the organizational workplace with its digital and computing scenarios, information is today

generated, collected, stored, retrieved, and used at a rate that rapidly exceeds all expectations.222 The

biggest ethical challenges this creates concerns the user’s and holder’s privacy and its sorting

character. We have already discussed in the third and fourth chapters respectively. This arises due to

the possible manipulation of so-called personal information (secretive facts and sensitive data) that

are not supposed to be revealed. For instance, the use of Big Data according to Ghani et al., enables

those who handle the data “to identify patterns and trends which may predicts people’s dispositions,

for example, related to health, political viewpoints or sexual orientation.”223 In the context of

workplace, this may cause employees to be unfairly and discriminately treated. So, when this data is

related to an identifiable living individual, its collection and usage are to follow data protection acts.

We have already explored several data protection acts in the first chapter, as well as data security

and the issue of privacy in the third chapter of this research.

November-2014.pdf [accessed November 22, 2017]. According to Elena Geanina Ularu et al. “[t]he explosion

of data cannot be any more measured in gigabytes, isnce data is bigger there are used etabytes, exabytes,

zettabytes and yottabytes.” Elena Geanina Ularu et al., “Perspective on Big Data and Big Data Analytics,”

Database Systems Journal 3, no. 4 (2012): 5-6. 218 For Kemp, big datasets are “large, diverse, complex, longitudinal, and/or distributed datasets generated from

instruments, sensors, Internet transactions, email, video, click streams, and/or all other digital sources

available today and in the future.” Kemp, “Big Data and Data Protection,” 2. More details on big data are

available in: Norihan Abdul Ghani, Suraya Hamid, and Nur Izura Udzir, “Big Data and Data Protection:

Issues with Purpose Limitation Principle,” International Journal of Advances in Soft Computing & Its

Applications 8, no. 3 (2016): 116-121; Doug Laney, “3D Data Management: Controlling Data Volume,

Velocity, and Variety,” Application Delivery Strategies: Meta Delta (6 February 2001): 1-3; Nawsher Khan

et al., “Big Data: Survey, Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges,” The Scientific World Journal (2014):

1-18; and Elena Geanina Ularu et al., “Perspective on Big Data and Big Data Analytics,” Database Systems

Journal 3, no. 4 (2012): 3-14. 219 Khan et al., “Big Data: Survey, Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges,” 1. 220 Ularu et al., “Perspective on Big Data and Big Data Analytics,” 5. 221 Ularu et al., “Perspective on Big Data and Big Data Analytics,” 5. 222 Ghani et al., “Big Data and Data Protection: Issues with Purpose Limitation Principle.” 117. The Big Data,

as many researchers illustrate, “comes into play when vast amounts of raw data generated by a plethora of

different sensors and devices is further stored and processed.” Nikolaus Forgó, Stefanie Hänold and Benjamin

Schütze, “The Principle of Purpose Limitation and Big Data,” in New Technology, Big Data and the Law,

eds. Marcelo Corrales, Mark Fenwick, and Nikolaus Forgó, 17-42, (Singapore: Springer, 2017), 19. 223 Ghani et al., “Big Data and Data Protection: Issues with Purpose Limitation Principle.” 118.


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One of the principles involved in the data protection act is the purpose specification and limitation,

which follows the “notice and consent” model.224 According to this model, the collection of data is

only for a specified cause and the collected data should not be further used or processed for any

unstated purposes. The purpose limitation, in principle, “provides that personal data must be

collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a way

incompatible with those purposes.”225 However, Big Data challenges this, as the volume increases,

by enabling “a data analysis using many different algorithms which reveals unexpected correlations

that can be used for new purposes.”226 Forgó et al. doubt in this regard the ability to sufficiently

clarify the intended purpose in data collection itself, and point to the legal and ethical issues of “how

far data can be ‘owned’ (in terms of an absolute property right), and if so who the owner is.

Furthermore, large amounts of data in the hands of one entity raise competition and antitrust law

concerns.”227 For the purpose of this research, we will leave aside the legal aspects and challenges of

Big Data and focus only on the ethical challenges. Thus, this section explores and demonstrates the

challenges of data-subjects.

Inferences about employee behaviour are drawn from automated and often passive data streams like

various automatic sensors (e.g., cell phones, cars, etc.), and one can readily see a creeping extension

of controlling surveillance into the public and private lives of employees. Kirstie Ball et al., analysing

through the lens of proximity and criticising these digitally mediated relationships, illustrate the

implications of Big Data practices on surveilled subjects.228 Going beyond the Foucauldian treatment

of the direct gaze, Ball et al. focus, not on relationalities, but on the intersecting proximities between

subjects themselves and big data surveillance practices. According to them with the collection and

process of Big Data, “the surveillance subject is now much more closely but sometimes unknowingly

enmeshed in surveillance assemblages and subject to multiple lines of sight by virtue of latter’s

ubiquity.”229 This poses two challenges in the workplace: on the one hand, apart from a direct gaze,

here the subject is caught (politically or economically) in relationship with those who collect and use

the data; on the other hand, these are mediated through electronic devices.230 The ethical implications

of these two arguments are self-explanatory as the research in the previous chapters has shown.

One of the challenges that electronic surveillance and the collected data bring forth in line with

proximity, with its shared presence and embodied sense of nearness, is the chiasm between the self

and the data streams, which emerges often without the conscious knowledge of the subject.231 This

digitally mediated proximity, according to Ball et al., without consciousness on the part of the subject

and without conscious inter-relationality of the surveillant other and the surveilled subject, intensifies

the reductionism of the subject.232 In the same context, referring to Merleau-Ponty, they argue that

“one’s physical body, ‘le corps propre,’ is not merely an object but also an enduring condition of

224 Ghani et al., “Big Data and Data Protection: Issues with Purpose Limitation Principle.” 119. 225 Forgó, Hänold and Schütze, “The Principle of Purpose Limitation and Big Data,” 17. 226 Ghani et al., “Big Data and Data Protection: Issues with Purpose Limitation Principle.” 119. According to

Ghani et al., “Big data involves reuse of data which it leads to repurpose data. […] In addition to repurpose,

big data analytics also has the potential to create a new personal data.” Ghani et al., “Big Data and Data

Protection: Issues with Purpose Limitation Principle.” 119-120. 227 Forgó, Hänold and Schütze, “The Principle of Purpose Limitation and Big Data,” 19. 228 Kirstie Ball, MariaLaura Di Domenico and Daniel Nunan, “Big Data Surveillance and the Body-subject,”

Body & Society 22, no. 2 (2016): 58-81. In this work, Big Data Surveillance and the Body-subject, Ball et al.

interpret the Big Data surveillance through the subject’s proximity with data flows, analysing the idea of

Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Coecklberg. 229 Ball, Di Domenico and Nunan, “Big Data Surveillance and the Body-subject,” 65. 230 Ball, Di Domenico and Nunan, “Big Data Surveillance and the Body-subject,” 65. 231 Ball, Di Domenico and Nunan, “Big Data Surveillance and the Body-subject,” 67. 232 Ball, Di Domenico and Nunan, “Big Data Surveillance and the Body-subject,” 69, 72-73.


258

experience and perception.”233 Through data, therefore, the subject is exposed to surveillance in an

embodied and contested way, which again reduces him or her as a person. Body analysis is

significant, therefore, not so much because it is the source of surveillance, but because when the

digital abstractions produced by collected data represent the surveilled people, it has intense effects

for the embodied self. Similarly, they continue, “the more of the lived body that is remediated into

information flows the more value is created for those who want that information. […] [However]

this may not coincide with an individual’s lived, embodied identity and their sense of morality.” 234

Therefore, Big Data not only collects and stores data in high volumes, but also forces the surveilled

subject to live in an altered way, integrating new practices in the embodied lives.

The ethical paradox of the disappearing body, according to Lyon, has been explained already in

previous chapters. For Lyon, bodies disappear due to the creation of “data-subjects,” rendering

individuals increasingly mobile and invisible.235 When data represents bodies, bodily activities and

embodied behaviours, subjects disappears through abstractions. The visible features of the body are

represented through digital, often textual and informational codes, and the subject is reduced to a

virtual, symbolic form. According to Lynsey Dubbeld, “[t]he particulars of the embodied human

actor are therefore left behind: the electronic representations are uncoupled from the physical person,

and acquire an independent existence detached from the individual.”236 So, through surveillance the

physical body is translated into digital data with a virtual representation. All of these negative

assessments further demonstrate the ethical undesirability of persistent workplace surveillance. The

lived body is also a social object, and human embodiment is highly significant to the constitution and

the sustenance of the social world. However, the body is beyond the category of social object or even

the subject whose identity is created by the social world in and of itself and thus is a ‘body-subject,’237

not merely the ‘data-subject’ created through representation.

At this point of the research, from a converging employee perspective compiling various employee

reactions towards monitoring practices and technologies, and from the analysis of the individual and

social right perspectives explored in previous chapters, we can say with confidence that ubiquitous

surveillance in the organizational workplace, especially in IT, ITeS, and BPO sectors, is widely held

to be unethical and unfair. The converging understanding of the ethical principles in the previous

section points to the same. This view must, therefore, be reviewed for further ethical implications.

Of primary concern is the assault on privacy and promotion of social sorting and discrimination

through power distance. Management exhibits an incessant drive to control the workplace. Richard

S. Rosenberg reminds us once again that:

From the early practice of monitoring keystrokes to the current tracking of websites visited, the

office had become as controlled and controlling as the factory floor from the days of the first

233 The French origin le corps proper of Merleau-Ponty is translated as the proper body. They refer also to the

body as ‘la chair du monde,’ an ontology of ‘the flesh of the world’ of Merleau-Ponty. Ball, Di Domenico

and Nunan, “Big Data Surveillance and the Body-subject,” 73-74. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible

and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,

1968); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James E. Edie, trans.

Carleton Dallery (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 159–190. 234 Ball, Di Domenico and Nunan, “Big Data Surveillance and the Body-subject,” 74. 235 Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, 16. It is said as paradoxical as body appears as the

focus of observation and disappears during this process. Lynsey Dubbeld, “Observing Bodies, Camera

Surveillance and the Significance of the Body,” Ethics and Information Technology 5 (2003): 152. 236 Dubbeld, “Observing Bodies, Camera Surveillance and the Significance of the Body,” 152. Representation

is always related to technological element in the surveillance practice. It shows that the data through

surveillance technologies re-present the data subject. 237 Kirstie Ball, “Organization, Surveillance and the Body: Towards a Politics of Resistance,” Organization

12, no. 1 (2005): 96.


259

assembly line. It may have been naïve to assume that the computer and its associated technologies

would liberate workers to contribute more fully of their talents and expertise. In some areas of

work such liberation is in fact taking place, but for many workers the workplace offers little in the

way of exercising individual creativity but much in the way of creating ethical concerns and

challenges.238

On-the-job monitoring is even more extended now to off-the-job surveillance, and there is no safe

place for the workers, as we have already seen. The use of GPS and RFID increases this challenge

and thus monitoring goes beyond the traditional workplace. Rosenberg quotes Jill Andreskey Fraser,

who rightly points out that “[t]echnological developments […] have permitted corporations to extend

their control over employees to an oppressive degree: all in the interest of keeping men and women

at maximum productive efficiency, whether they find themselves in their cars or commuter trains,

hotel rooms, or even the master bedroom.”239 Employees cannot escape from the snooping gaze of

their employers even off-the-job. Due to this on-the-job and off-the-job surveillance, the rights of

employees – at once individual (privacy, autonomy, dignity), organizational (safe workplace, free

from physical or mental harassment, due process) and social (impartial and equal treatments, freedom

of association) – have been thoroughly compromised.

A phenomenographic understanding of employee surveillance, illustrated in the previous chapter, is

valuable to consider at this moment, as it deals with qualitatively different experiences of employees

in this matter, explained in terms of categories of descriptions.240 It gives an interpretative

description, taking an introspective approach,241 of the qualitatively different ways in which

employees perceive and experience the phenomenon of electronic surveillance. The exploratory

study conducted as part of this research shows the adverse effects of surveillance on employee

attitudes, job commitment and satisfaction and moral behaviour. Researchers have already expressed

that monitoring is not “being used in a way that helps train new employees or helps people improve

the quality of service, but rather as an electronic whip, as a means of harassment or as a way of

intimidating workers.”242 It also shows that variables like employee efficiency, commitment, trust

and performance rarely improve due to external monitoring or control systems in the workplace.

Moreover, our study found that the “human” aspects of employees, along with the quality of their

human existence,243 are overlooked and thus persistently forgotten or disregarded by the ontological

insecurity produced by the surveillance systems.

At this stage of the research, having shown that ubiquitous surveillance in the workplace is often

unethical or a practice requiring rethinking from an employees’ perspective or a person-oriented

approach, we need to further explore this phenomenon by taking into account all of the factors and

interests of the employee-employer relationship and managerial patterns or models. We need, that is,

a new management framework and paradigm in order to make an adequate response, and we will

aim to provide this in the next chapter. However, before entering into the discussion of current

management models and the search for an alternative, it is important to see what religion can offer

238 Richard S. Rosenberg, “The Technological Assault on Ethics in the Modern Workplace,” in The Ethics of

Human Resources and Industrial Relations, eds. John W. Budd and James G. Scoville (Champaign, IL:

Labour and Employment Relations Association, 2005), 142. 239 Rosenberg, “The Technological Assault on Ethics in the Modern Workplace,” 142-143. Cf. Jill Andreskey

Fraser, White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America (New

York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001), 76. 240 Marton, “Phenomenography,” 180; Khan, “Phenomenography,” 34. 241 Richardson, “The Concepts and Methods of Phenomenographic Research,” 57. 242 G. Stoney Alder, “Ethical Issues in Electronic Performance Monitoring: A Consideration of Deontological

and Teleological Perspectives,” Journal of Business Ethics 17, no. 7 (1998): 735. 243 Brown, “Ontological Security, Existential Anxiety, and Workplace Privacy,” 65.


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to the ethics of workplace and employee management. For religion is said to be a social institution

that has a vital influence on attitudes, values and behaviours that each person possesses and performs

in a given situation. Researchers also point to the vital role that religion plays in human interactions

in various ways.244 In the following, let us consider how religion impacts an individual’s behaviour

and performance in organizations and what managerial framework can be extracted from it.

6.3 AN AMALGAMATION OF AN EMBEDDED RELIGIOUS-ETHICAL FRAMEWORK

The question now is whether religion and/or spirituality can play an interactive and integrative role

in the creation of an adequate ethical framework that reaches beyond narrowly legal or regulatory

approaches. To those who question the need to turn to religion and religious perspectives to seek

ultimate morals and values and promote religion as one of the fundamental sources of ethical

behaviour of individuals, Victor van Bijlert provides two sociological observations: “(a) the great

world religions of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism have large followings, and are more

universal in aim and intent than political or social ideologies; (b) unlike ideologies, world religions

address (or claim to address) issues of ultimate human concern such as life, death, good, evil, and

the hereafter.”245 Besides, Bijlert states that since religions have been providing and still provide

values and moral principles to millions around the world regardless of any demographic or other

such differences and discriminations, religions have a major impact on value discourses of any kind

and religious texts can be sources for ethics in business and politics.246 Within the organization, along

with organizational values, ethical behaviour in the workplace is perceived as an extension of

individual morals and norms, which are also affected by their own religious and spiritual beliefs and

practices.247 So, we can see an interdependent relationship between religious beliefs and practices

and ethical behaviours in organizations.

In a survey conducted worldwide by the World Economic Forum, among 130,000 respondents, only

21% acknowledged religion or faith as the primary source of their personal values.248 Despite this

limited number, “religious thought, whether conscious or not, is a latent variable that often shapes

and informs both personal and social ethics.”249 It thus needs to be taken into account. A half a century

ago, reflecting on religion and business, James W. Culliton stated that “religion has something to

offer business” and argued that both can benefit from knowing each other better.250 This meaningful

244 Ahmad Rafiki and Kalsom Abdul Wahab, “Islamic Values and Principles in the Organization: A Review of

Literature,” Asian Social Science 10, no. 9 (2014): 1. 245 Victor van Bijlert, “Hinduism, Values and Management,” Research & Reports, IIAS News Letter 33 (March

2004): 23. 246 Bijlert, “Hinduism, Values and Management,” 23. 247 Sana Moid, “A Theoretical Construct of the Impact of Religious Beliefs on Accounting Practices in the

Indian and Global Context,” NMIMS Management Review 31 (2016): 92. Sarah Drakopoulou-Dodd and Paul

Timothy Seaman, “Religion and Enterprise: An Introductory Exploration,” Entrepreneurship Theory and

Practice 23, no. 1 (1998): 71-86. 248 Timothy Ewest, “Christian Identity as Primary Foundation to Workplace Ethics,” Religions: A Scholarly

Journal 12 (2015): 23. World Economic Forum, “Why Care about Faith?” Global Agenda Council on the

Role of Faith, 2014.

http://www3.weforum.org/docs/GAC/2014/WEF_GAC_RoleFaith_WhyCareAboutFaith_Report_2014.pdf

[accessed October 30, 2017]. 249 Miller and Thate, “Are Business Ethics Relevant?” 167. 250 James W. Culliton, “Business and Religion,” Harvard Business Review 27, no. 3 (1949): 265. For further

reference: Scott J. Vitell, “The Role of Religiosity in Business and Consumer Ethics: A Review of the

Literature,” Journal of Business Ethics 90 (2009): 155. Researchers argue that in many occasions, religion is

perceived as a determinant of the moral values as the moral teachings of every religion approve only ethical

actions and do not tolerate unethical behaviour. Tisha L.N. Emerson and Joseph A. Mckinney, “Importance

of Religious Beliefs to Ethical Attitudes in Business,” Journal of Religion and Business Ethics 1, no. 2 (2010):

2. There are number of researches expressing a positive correlation of religion with ethical standards. For


261

and significant influence of religion on business decisions and ethical judgements suggests that “the

strength of religious beliefs might result in differences in one’s decision making processes when

facing business decisions involving ethical issues.”251 In the same way, it is widely acknowledged

that “religiosity contributes to entrepreneurial success by moderating the relationship between the

pursuit of material wealth and resulting personal satisfaction and the personal satisfaction in business

is influenced by the belief on the religious values that they follow.”252 Moreover, religious

individuals, whose morality is influenced by their religion, generally seem to possess a deep longing

to take up larger social responsibilities in the workplace and in business.253 All these studies show

that human religiosity, in whatever dimensions of religious affiliation, activity and belief, can

constitute a spirituality among individual employees and enables them to see the world and self in

that framework.254 As such, it influences attitudes and behaviours in organisations.

The research of Gary R. Weaver and Bradley R. Agle indicate that religious role expectations, which

people internalize as religious self-identity moderated by religious motivational orientations,

influence an individual’s ethical behaviour.255 Weaver and Agle address the relationship between

religion and different behavioural and affective phenomena, discussing the variations in personality

traits, coping abilities and strategies, health stability on an individual level and social and political

behaviours on a social level. A positive relationship between religiosity and ethical business or

organizational behaviour is empirically observed.256 Yet some researchers criticize the focus on a

narrow link between moral reasoning and religious reasoning. According to these experts, both are

“unrelated as they represent two distinct ways of thinking,” in which the latter “is based upon rational

arguments and influenced by cognitive development” and the former “is based upon the revelations

of religious authorities.”257 However, most researchers acknowledge a close link between these two

constructs, arguing that “one’s moral reasoning depends, in part, upon the seriousness and character

of one’s religious commitment.”258 In the same way, a study conducted by Siu, et al., examining the

instance, the positive relationship between religious beliefs and ethical attitudes is found by Terpstra et al.,

Smith and Oakley, Conroy and Emerson, and so on. Cf. David E. Terpstra, Elizabeth J. Rozell and Robert K.

Robinson, “The Influence of Personality and Demographic Variables on Ethical Decisions Related to Insider

Trading,” The Journal of Psychology 127, no. 4 (1993): 375-89; Patricia L. Smith and Ellwood F. Oakley,

“The Value of Ethics Education in Business School Curriculum,” College Student Journal 30 (1996): 274-

83; and Stephen J. Conroy and Tisha L. N. Emerson, “Business Ethics and Religion: Religiosity as a Predictor

of Ethical Awareness among Students,” Journal of Business Ethics 50, no. 4 (2004): 383-396. 251 Vitell, “The Role of Religiosity in Business and Consumer Ethics,” 155. Hunt, Shelby D. and Scott J. Vitell,

“The General Theory of Marketing Ethics: A Retrospective and Revision,” in Ethics in Marketing, eds. N.

Craig Smith and J. A. Quelch (Homewood, IL: Irwin Inc., 1993), 775–784. 252 Binod Krishna Shrestha, “Religious Ethics and Socially Responsible Behaviours of Small Firms in Nepal,”

Journal of Religion and Business Ethics 3, no. 2 (2017): 1. Cf. Bellu Renato and Fiume Peter, “Religiosity

and Entrepreneurial Behaviour: An Exploratory Study,” International Journal of Entrepreneurship and

Innovation 5, no. 3 (2004): 191-201. 253 Shrestha, “Religious Ethics and Socially Responsible Behaviours of Small Firms in Nepal,” 1. Cf. Brammer

Stephen, Williams Geoffrey and Zinkin John, “Religion and Attitudes to Corporate Social Responsibility in

a Large Cross-Country Sample,” Journal of Business Ethics 7, no. 1 (2007): 229-243. 254 Vitell, “The Role of Religiosity in Business and Consumer Ethics,” 156. Cf. Dana Bjarnason, “Concept

Analysis of Religiosity,” Home Health Care Management and Practice 19, no. 5 (2007): 350-355. 255 Gary R. Weaver and Bradley R. Agle, “Religiosity and Ethical Behaviour in Organizations: A Symbolic

Interactionist Perspective,” Academy of Management Review 27, no. 1 (2002): 77-97. 256 Weaver and Agle, “Religiosity and Ethical Behaviour in Organizations,” 80-82. 257 Vitell, “The Role of Religiosity in Business and Consumer Ethics,” 156. Cf. Kohlberg, Lawrence. The

Meaning and Measurement of Moral Development (Massachusetts: Clark University Press, 1981). 258 Vitell, “The Role of Religiosity in Business and Consumer Ethics,” 156. Cf. Rebecca J. Glover,

“Relationships in Moral Reasoning and Religion among Members of Conservative, Moderate, and Liberal

Religious Groups,” The Journal of Social Psychology 137, no. 2 (1997): 247-254; Conroy and Emerson,

“Business Ethics and Religion: Religiosity as a Predictor of Ethical Awareness among Students,” 383-396;


262

relationship between religiousness and ethical orientations of business people, also observes that

“individuals who are more religious were also more oriented toward ethics and ethical issues.”259

This means that an individual’s personal religion and religious reasoning, or in other words their

religiosity, influences both one’s personal characteristics and one’s ethical decisionmaking process.

In a study on the Importance of Religious Beliefs to Ethical Attitudes in Business, Tisha L. N.

Emerson and Joseph A. Mckinney argue that religion is a determinant of ethical attitudes in

questionable situations.260 They begin with all world religions’ moral teachings and disapproval of

unethical actions and argue that religion can influence the recognition of ethical issues (moral

sensitivity), ethical decisions (moral judgment), intention to act (moral intention), and actual

behaviour (moral behaviour).261 Domènec Melé refers to the ethical ideas traced from various

religion’s tradition, such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.262 According to

him, the teachings of all these religions highlight religious and ethical norms as the guiding principles

of business activities, as they see work in a human-divine partnership model, where human dignity

and concern for persons such as justice are crucial.263 Various religious traditions, spirituality,

teachings and practices function as a dynamic tool to develop personal and social ethics as needed to

respond to complex situations in the workplace.

Though there is a conceptual distinction between religion and spirituality,264 they do have many

functional and substantive commonalities, and “the experience of spirituality for many, indeed most,

people remains embedded within a religious context.”265 In what follows, we explain religion and

and Justin G. Longenecker, Joseph A. McKinney and Carlos W. Moore, “Religious Intensity, Evangelical

Christianity, and Business Ethics: An Empirical Study,” Journal of Business Ethics 55, no. 4 (2004): 373-86. 259 Vitell, “The Role of Religiosity in Business and Consumer Ethics,” 160. Cf. Noel Y. M. Siu, John R.

Dickinson and Betsy Y. Y. Lee, “Ethical Evaluations of Business Activities and Personal Religiousness,”

Teaching Business Ethics 4, no. 3 (2000): 233-256. 260 Tisha L. N. Emerson and Joseph A. Mckinney, “Importance of Religious Beliefs to Ethical Attitudes in

Business,” Journal of Religion and Business Ethics 1, no. 2 (2010): 1-15. 261 Emerson and Mckinney, “Importance of Religious Beliefs to Ethical Attitudes in Business,” 10. 262 Domènec Melé, “Religious Foundations of Business Ethics,” in The Accountable Corporation, Vol. 2, eds.

Mark J. Epstein and Kirk O. Hanson (London: Praeger, 2006), 11-43. 263 Melé, “Religious Foundations of Business Ethics,” 11-43. 264 Few researchers make conceptual distinction between religion and spirituality: “religion is more community

focused while spirituality tends to be more individualistic; religion is more observable, measurable, and

objective while spirituality is less visible and quantifiable and more subjective; religion is more formal,

orthodox, and organized while spirituality is less formal, less orthodox, and less systematic; religion tends to

be behaviour-oriented with an emphasis on outward practices while spirituality tends to be more emotionally

oriented and inwardly directed; religion is more authoritarian, especially in terms of behaviours while

spirituality is less authoritarian and has little external accountability; and religion is more oriented toward

doctrine, especially that which distinguishes good from evil while spirituality stresses harmony and unity and

is less concerned with doctrine.” Peter C. Hill and Gary S. Smith, “Coming to Terms with Spirituality and

Religion in the Workplace,” in Handbook of Workplace Spirituality and Organizational Performance,” eds.

Robert A. Giacalone and Carole L. Jurkiewicz, 231-243 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), 233. 265 Hill and Smith, “Coming to Terms with Spirituality and Religion in the Workplace,” 234. They bring

research evidences to argue for the overlapping identities of religion and spirituality among people by way of

introducing a sacred core, a sacred dimension of life giving a sense of meaning of life beyond the self and

mundane concerns. Religious adherences, beliefs systems and practices along with subsequent spirituality

enable a person within the organization to act with higher sense of responsibility, commitment and increase

the greater personal and organizational growth. According to Richard D. White, Jr., “a spiritually healthy

workplace positively influences employee and organizational performance. Spiritual health leads people to

experience consciousness at a deeper level, improves their intuitive skills, encourages teamwork, develops

more purposeful and compelling organizational vision, and boosts innovation.” Richard D. White, Jr.,

“Drawing the Line: Religion and Spirituality in the Workplace,” in Handbook of Workplace Spirituality and

Organizational Performance,” eds. Robert A. Giacalone and Carole L. Jurkiewicz, 244-256 (Armonk: M.E.

Sharpe, 2003), 244.


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spirituality as central features of many people’s lives that regulate how they think and act, including

in situations like that of workplace surveillance. Since we have analysed workplace scenarios of the

Indian context in the second chapter to situate this research, the Hindu view of moral standards that

influence managerial acts in the workplace is explored here in detail, followed by a brief description

of other religious tenets. Then, a detailed analysis of Catholic Social Teaching is given, as this will

be the basis for the personalist management framework that this research proposes in the final chapter

as an alternative to current models of workplace management. All these religious references support

a person-centered ethical approach to employee management.

6.3.1 The Hindu View of Moral Standards in Management Ethics

Moral standards are generally influenced by several factors, including “moral principles we accept

as part of our upbringing, values passes on to us through heritage and legacy, the religious values

that we have imbibed from childhood, the values that were showcased during the period of our

education, the behaviour pattern of those who are around us, the explicit and implicit standards of

our culture, our life experiences and more importantly, our critical reflections on these

experiences.”266 Since religion provides its followers with a “set of moral instructions, beliefs, values,

traditions and commitments,” people perceive and believe that morality also emanates from

religion.267 There is no single source of moral standards in Hinduism, for it encompasses values from

various religious beliefs and practices, as illustrated in works such as the Ramayana, Mahabharata,

Bhagavad Gita, etc. and also accrued from other religious traditions including Buddhism, Sikhism,

Jainism, and Zoroastrianism.268 A strong interrelationship between religious thought and economic

activity is foreshadowed in all Indian business scenarios. According to researchers, “the rich culture

of India, immersed in spirituality and religion, is focused on intuitive ethical decision making and

the rule of man, which sets it apart from the western analytical approach to ethical decision making

based on norms and the rule of law.”269 Hinduism, being a prominent religion in India, provides

ethical roots for economic, business and managerial ethics.

Although religions like Hinduism and Buddhism have individual enlightenment as their predominant

consideration,270 their ethical guidelines and spiritual practices for the enlightened life of all humanity

offer significant guidance for economic and managerial activities, as these are an inevitable part of

human life and well-being. An ethical principle of the Karma theory of Hinduism, that “one is

responsible for one’s actions and the individual alone must bear the consequences of those actions in

the future,”271 causes individuals to discipline and regulate their activities. Researchers have noted

that the “religious enforcement mechanisms” practiced in India emphasize the vitality of applying

266 Fernando, Business Ethics: An Indian Perspective, 31. 267 Fernando, Business Ethics: An Indian Perspective, 31. 268 Colin Fisher and Alan Lovell, Business Ethics and Values: Individual, Corporate and International

Perspectives (England: Pearson Education, 2009), 442. Fernando, Business Ethics: An Indian Perspective,

31. 269 Ron Berger and Ram Herstein, “The Evolution of Business Ethics in India,” International Journal of Social

Economics 41, no. 11 (2014): 1075. Cf. Alexandre Ardichvili, Douglas Jondle, Brenda Kowske, Edgard

Cornachione, Jessica Li, and Thomas Thakadipuram, “Ethical Cultures in Large Business Organizations in

Brazil, Russia, India, and China,” Journal of Business Ethics 105, no. 4 (2012): 415-428. 270 Juliana Essen, “Sufficiency Economy and Santi Asoke: Buddhist Economic Ethics for a Just and Sustainable

World,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 17 (2010): 70-99. Berger and Herstein, “The Evolution of Business Ethics

in India,” 1076. 271 Berger and Herstein, “The Evolution of Business Ethics in India,” 1077. Cf. Praveen K. Kopalle, Donald

R. Lehmann and John U. Farley, “Consumer Expectations and Culture: The Effect of Belief in Karma in

India,” Journal of Consumer Research 37, no. 2 (2010): 251-263


264

ethical strands in all areas of life, including business and management.272 The ethical principles of

Hinduism, some of which we explain in the following, enable organizations to conduct business by

adhering to a high personal value system that forms a strong ethical infrastructure for business. All

Hindu religious thinking and philosophy leads to the creation of general principles of ethical conduct

and ethical management, both seeking individual well-being and organizational development.

Though management generally seems to be a universal process, in practice different perceptions have

to be considered as employees invariably have different cultural and religious backgrounds. They are

largely “influenced by attitudes, traits and perceptions which are developed over a period of time as

a result of their cultural affiliations, associations with peers, family and their past experiences.”273

This makes it necessary to look for the particulars of contextual management pertinent to each region

or country, developed through its religious traditions and practices.

In the Indian management context, we find today residual traces of ancient wisdom274 as the present

practices of trade and business face various and multifaceted complexities of global realities, as

discussed above. Today, many are searching for a different, distinctively Indian organizational

management model today because of the problems created by trying to transfer another country’s

model of management, from the West, into India. A dynamic engagement through interdependence

and integration is needed and valued in this situation as a means to grasp the overall performance of

the workplace and management context. For often, cultural differences are more important and

determinative than the commonalities among different countries.275 For example, “too much of

individualism, the principle of maximization of profits at all costs, little concern for values and a

narrow view of life could be some of the major flaws”276 of Western management model, when it is

transferred directly to the more of collectivistic and relationship-based Indian cultural scenario. For,

the Indian management system is based on India’s socio-cultural and economic environment, as well

as the internal environments of any organization functioning in India.

Researchers, in this regard, assert that management is predominantly culture specific and derives also

from religious and faith practices.277 Nigam and Su rightly illustrate this:

In the case of India, the management system is based upon centuries of rules and regulations from

various dominating empires; different religions; a very influential caste system that knowingly or

unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, influences the organizational system of Indian

enterprises; the British Raj who rules India for about 200 years; and more recently, the

globalization of world economies and its influence on the Indian management system.278

272 Berger and Herstein, “The Evolution of Business Ethics in India,” 1079. Cf. P. Kanagasabapathi, “Ethics

and Values in Indian Economy and Business,” International Journal of Social Economics 34, no. 9 (2007):

577-585. 273 Carl Osunde, Joshi Ashima, Vyas Anup, and Gargh Shankar, “Management Problems and Practices: India

and Nigeria,” Advances in Management 8, no. 1 (2015): 9. 274 The above-mentioned traces of ancient wisdom are mainly the compiled treaties by Chanakya, an Indian

scholar-practitioner, for human resource practices presented in ‘Arthashastra,’ the first Indian management

writings codified over three millenniums before Christ. It presents “notions of the financial administration of

the state, guiding principles for trade and commerce, as well as the management of people.” Chatterjee,

“Human Resource Management in India,” 92. Along with this, Aryan thoughts and writings called Vedanta

also influence the management values in India, which “nurtured an inner private sphere of individualism”

including the values of responsibility to others – family, group and society. Chatterjee, “Human Resource

Management in India,” 92-93. 275 Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 240. 276 Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 239. 277 Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 237. 278 Nigam and Su, “Management in Emerging versus Developed Countries,” 124.


265

To explain this further, any country or region will have a specific set of approaches to life, different

economic systems, different predominant cultural frameworks, different spiritual and religious

orientations, and differences of temperament, etc., all of which influence business management and

decisionmaking practices.279 For instance, the practice of the caste system, by which people are

categorized into different groups – higher or lower – according to the caste into which they are born,

brings with it a hierarchical mindset and thus a management model of ‘power delegation.’ This

results in a pattern of centralized authority and top-down decision making.280 For in line with our

precious discussion, this caste system and the continued effects of an old feudalistic tendency, created

and prompted by the British Raj promoting inequality in rural and urban population, maintain a

hierarchy, status consciousness, power distance and low individualism in the workplace.281 This

practice and the cultural tendencies in the organization, according to Debi S. Saini and Pawan S.

Budhwar, strengthen a hierarchical superior-subordinate relationship and thus increase social control

over inferiors.282

In different texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, the Arthashastra and the Thirukkural, Indians receive

knowledge and concepts related to management.283 These and other ancient Indian literatures, such

as various Upanishads, Vedas, and Smrutis, along with the Quran and the Bible, serve as a source of

principles and guidelines for the development of good human relations, norms of good governance,

and good communication skills.284 The Indian management style is also marked by different power

aspects such as loyalty, affection, respect and bonding based on the above discussed socio-cultural,

religious and political traditions and customs. This is because of the Indian inheritance of the holistic

vision that it pursues in its engagements with others. To further explicate, apart from the managerial

presupposition of the West that the individual is the central unit of reference, Indian culture perceives

the individual as merely a component part of larger social institutions such as the family, and thus

group efforts are given more importance than individual efforts.285 Kanagasabapathi in this regard

writes that:

Our culture provides us with ‘the cosmic vision’ which, translated in terms of business, amounts

to accepting and owning our social responsibility towards all the stakeholders like share-holders,

employees and their union, consumers, society, government, financial institutions, supplier, etc.,

and beyond, competitors, environment-physical, social, religious, cultural, educational and even

the inanimate kingdom.286

279 Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 238. 280 Nigam and Su, “Management in Emerging versus Developed Countries,” 126. 281 Debi S. Saini and Pawan S. Budhwar, “HRM in India,” in Managing Human Resources in Asia-Pacific, ed.

Pawan S. Budhwar (London: Routledge, 2004), 120. 282 Saini and Budhwar, “HRM in India,” 120. 283 Anindo Bhattacharjee, “Modern Management through Ancient Indian Wisdom: Towards a More

Sustainable Paradigm,” School of Management Science-Purusartha 4, no. 1 (2011): 15; Manish Prasad Rajak,

“Ancient Indian Wisdom in Modern Management: A Review of its Scope and Prospects,” aWEshkar 18, no.

2 (2014): 18-29. 284 Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 242. See also, Yog Raj Singh

and Ankur Bhatnagar, “Management and Business Ethics through Indian Scriptures and Traditions,” 2012,

http://www.managementparadise.com/article/3654/management-and-business-ethics-through-indian-

scriptures-and-traditions [accessed March 10, 2016]. 285 Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 242 -243. 286 Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 243.


266

The whole world is thus seen as a family – Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam287 – and when people interact

with individuals, groups or organizations, this view predominates and this holistic or cosmic vision

gives a new face to the Indian management philosophy. In this concept of universal family-hood,

“individual and collective interests complement each other, and the focus is on caring and sharing

and respect for fellow beings.”288 This spiritual and cultural practice is also a defining feature of

interpersonal relationships in the organizational workplace. For the sustainability and growth of

Indian organizations are deeply rooted in a culture of upward respect, called Sradha (loyalty), of

downward fondness, called Sneha (affection), and of mutual attachment, called Bandhan (bonding)

that arises through the interaction of loyalty and affection in the organization.289 These concepts mark

the distinctiveness of Indian management models.

The ethical values of ancient India, including Dharma (justice righteousness, duty, moral order,

virtues), Artha (wealth, prosperity, success), Kama (worldly desire, pleasure), and Moksha

(liberation or salvation) constitute the ideals of life, provide a solid ethos for work culture, and offer

a broad framework for a new model of organizational management.290 For, this fourfold aim of

human existence is pertinent to whole practical and day-to-day arenas of human life, and everyone

is expected to achieve it disregarding the expectation to get something in return. In this 21st century,

these objectives or ideals – Dharma as conscientious living, Artha as seeking security, Kama as the

art of enjoying pleasures, and Moksha as freedom from all limitations – are becoming more vital, as

they can contribute much to an understanding of organizational behaviour as well.291 Dharma and

Artha allow the generation of wealth or profit so long as it is not done by unjust means. In the same

way, Kama, the attainment of desired pleasure, invariable looks for cardinal rules and values through

the self-disciplined and self-managed efficacy of worldly goods and services. Besides, the concept

of Moksha in this regard can inform the ideology and philosophy of life in any organization or a

corporate body.292 In the same way, a management model based on these ideals, according to Manish

P. Rajak, “stresses on harmonizing the individual goals with the goals of others for bringing harmony

in system; such a system would be highly decentralized and depended on every person following

287 The concept Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam is a Sanskrit phrase meaning “the whole world is one single family.”

Here ‘vasudha’ means Earth; ‘eva’ means emphasize and ‘kutumbakam’ means family. This Sanskrit verse

is from Maha Upanishad (Chapter 6, Verse 72), where we read:

Ayam Bandhurayam Neti Ganana Laghu Chetsam

Udaara Charitaanaam Tu Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam

Only small men discriminate saying: One is a relative; the other is a stranger.

For those who live magnanimously, the entire world constitutes but a family.

It is also a cultural and spiritual concept as vasudhaiva is a state of awareness or consciousness for which love,

harmony, co-operation and mutual support form key features. See, Shashank Shah and V.E. Ramamoorthy,

Soulful Corporations: A Value-Based Perspective on Corporate Social Responsibility (New Delhi: Springer,

2014), 249. 288 Shah and Ramamoorthy, Soulful Corporations, 249-250. 289 Chatterjee, “Human Resource Management in India,” 93-94. 290 These values of Dharma, Artha, Kama, and Moksha are four purusharthas or permissible goals of human

life that constitute a way for happy life on earth. Purusha is an individual or person and Artha means

meaning/objective or pursuit and thus objectives of human life is called purusharthas. This purusharthas is

the basis for human life and central to Indian classical ethics. Every human being has to achieve it with

detachment and renunciation. Alka Mohan Kadam, “Purushartha in 21st Century,” Online International

Interdisciplinary Research Journal 5, no. 4 (2015): 441. Cf., Berger and Herstein, “The Evolution of Business

Ethics in India,” 1078. 291 Kadam, “Purushartha in 21st Century,” 445-447. 292 Anil Rao Paila and P.S. Rao, “Ethics in Business and Indian Value Systems: Need for Integration in the age

of Science and Technology,” in Business Ethics and Human Values, ed. V.M. Chavan (New Delhi: Excel

Books, 2009), 24.


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Dharma for the attainment of the Purusarthas.”293 The Purusharthas also therefore are held to offer

solid ideals of human ethics as important guidelines for managing organizations in modern times.

In these modern times, over against the hierarchical management approach, which often seems

antagonistic, a more personal management style is now used in many organizational workplaces in

India, one which sees all members as associates and thus is friendlier in dealing with each one.294

This type of person-oriented approach is valued in the workplace in the context of implementing

electronic surveillance as a strategy to manage employees. The owner-labour relationship is fostered

in the context of a higher personal orientation and a fraternal approach that draws employees more

closely togrther, regardless of their professional or socio-economic status.295 In the Indian non-

corporate sector, a ‘holistic’ management style is followed according to which the entrepreneur

shows concern for all parties involved in the firm or transaction by means of direct contact with all

stakeholders. An entrepreneur, in this regard, takes all risks involved and functions as “a financial

expert, a human relations man, a marketing wizard and a production specialist, all at one time”296 to

successfully manage complex situations coming across. Similarly, leaders in the corporate sector in

India by and large try to adapt to modern management styles without losing their traditional value

systems. Moreover, in the corporate sector, both a higher need for updating operations and services

through adoption of the latest technologies and a growing tendency to emulate the West are quite

advanced and developed.

However, a creative and progressive management model that incorporates the nuances of application

and implementation of information and associated technologies will construct and provide for the

effective management of the new workforce by focusing on the well-being of employees through a

person-centered approach. For the contemporary workplace, with its wealth of information and

connectivity, is exemplified perhaps most clearly by the field of IT, with its hyper-specialized fields,

job arenas that are horizontally-networked (less hierarchical) and highly-interconnected, and “less

command-and-control oriented behaviours, with the big data as key basis of competition, growth and

innovation.”297 These emerging new work environments, by adopting advanced technologies that

increase productivity and the quality of life, mark the distinction between traditional and new

management patterns.298 Arun Kumar and Priyadarshini Singh have compiled several principles of

workforce management based on the work of K. Aswathappa, which extends from principles of

individual self-development to the principle of contribution to national prosperity.299 Availing

oneself to realize and actualize own potentials through the responsible utilization of full and equal

opportunities given to him or her, an employee promotes the dignity of labour while also providing

for national prosperity by contributing to it with a team spirit. Principles of labour management

cooperation, the free flow of communication, fair remuneration incentives and the dignity of labour

also all contribute to cordial industrial relations and effective labour management.300 It is interesting

at this juncture to note that Indian work culture and management models are more about performing

293 Rajak, “Ancient Indian Wisdom in Modern Management,”22. It is originally from, Krishan Saigal, Vedic

Management: The Dharmic and Yogic Way (Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 2000), 63-100. 294 Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 251. 295 Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 251. 296 Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 254. 297 Kumar and Singh, “Principles and Practices of Workplace Management in Information Age,” 24. 298 Kumar and Singh, “Principles and Practices of Workplace Management in Information Age,” 29. 299 Kumar and Singh, “Principles and Practices of Workplace Management in Information Age,” 29-31. See

also K. Aswathappa, Human Resource Management: Text and Cases, 7th ed. (New Delhi: McGraw Hill

Education [India] Pvt. Ltd., 2013), 26. 300 Kumar and Singh, “Principles and Practices of Workplace Management in Information Age,” 29-31.


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with a comprehensive or holistic worldview and are invariably humane in practice, functioning in a

way that is consistent with Indian religious, socio-cultural and economic orientations.

In a similar manner, India itself, being by its very nature of multiple and outwardly accepting, tolerant

and adaptive to diversities, is largely open to imbibing various approaches and management styles.

According to Jean-Pierre Lehmann, “[t]he planet needs a sense of moral order, spirituality and an

ethical compass. The Indian religious and philosophical traditions can provide a great deal of all

three.”301 Therefore, any critical and ethical analyses of work behaviour and progressive workplace

or labour management in Indian organizations has to be in tune with its above discussed cultural

practices and socio-economic and religious traditions and practices. Therefore, Hinduism contributes

to ethical behaviour in the workplace by applying principles of right social behaviour “based on four

ideals or goals of life: prosperity, satisfaction of desires, moral duty and spiritual perfection by

liberating from a finite existence.”302 These four ideals, according to Shrestha, highlight the human

virtues of “honesty, righteousness, nonviolence, modesty and purity of heart.”303 This framework

enables and engenders the vitality of analysing deep-rooted behavioural patterns of the modern

workplace in Indian organizations and globally, with all its specifics. For the new organizational

environment does not exhibit a conventional fixed set of behavioural platforms, but rather a complex,

dynamic web where people need to interact with each other for effective work performance.

6.3.2 Ethical Tenets of Other Major Religions

Analysis of other major religions must firstly focus on Buddhism, from which, although it has a

predominant concern for individual enlightenment, as in the case with Hinduism, one can derive

ethical guidelines for peoples’ economic and social activities that promote a more socially just way

of being in the world.304 Though the Buddhist model looks to individual (self) rational choices for

the improvement of material wellbeing, it goes beyond the ‘means-end’ rationality or the ‘economic

man’ model of the enlightenment era and acknowledges that the self is connected with other entities,

not isolated.305 Buddhism also states, in this regard, that any action done by individuals has

consequences, resulting in a kammic boomerang.306 Kamma is the Pali term for Karma, and means

that all actions driven by intention carry future consequences. Without stopping at the satisfaction of

a demand, as in the rational process of neoclassical economic man, Buddhist reflection “would first

factor into his or her choices the possible effects on all spheres of human existence: individual,

society and nature.”307 The Buddhist model aims to achieve individual well-being, which looks

beyond material well-being to the attainment of the ultimate spiritual goal of nibbãna (in Sanskrit

nirvāṇa), which indicates a soteriological release from rebirth in saṃsāra – the beginningless cycle

301 Jean-Pierre Lehmann, “The Dangers of Monotheism in the Age of Globalization,” The Globalist, March 30,

2006. http://www.theglobalist.com/dangers-monotheism-age-globalization/ [accessed March 10, 2016]. See

also Kanagasabapathi, Indian Models of Economy, Business and Management, 280. 302 Shrestha, “Religious Ethics and Socially Responsible Behaviours of Small Firms in Nepal,” 4. 303 Shrestha, “Religious Ethics and Socially Responsible Behaviours of Small Firms in Nepal,” 4. 304 Juliana Essen, “Sufficiency Economy and Santi Asoke: Buddhist Economic Ethics for a Just and Sustainable

World,” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 17 (2010): 71. 305 Essen, “Sufficiency Economy and Santi Asoke,” 73. 306 Essen, “Sufficiency Economy and Santi Asoke,” 73. The concept Kamma (Karma in Sanskrit) speaks about

the moral low of actions in Buddhism. Though generally the moral law of action is termed as Kamma-Vipaka,

in which Kamma is the action and Vipaka the result, the term Kamma is also used to cover both actions and

results. Sri Dhammananda Maha Thera explains the term Kamma as “an impersonal, natural law that operates

in accordance with our actions,” a law in itself having no lawgiver and “operates in its own field without the

intervention of an external, independent, ruling agent.” Dhammananda Maha Thera, “What is Kamma?”

Buddha Sasana, https://www.budsas.org/ebud/whatbudbeliev/87.htm [accessed February 28, 2018]. Kamma

simply means “do good and good will come to you.” 307 Essen, “Sufficiency Economy and Santi Asoke,” 73.


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of birth and death.308 This model enables individuals to get rid of their negative desires, which

according to Buddhism is the source of suffering. For Buddhism distinguishes two kinds of desires,

viewing one negatively - tanha - and the other positively - chanda. The former “is ignorant craving

for pleasurable feelings associated with both the tangible and intangible such as status or fame,”

whereas the latter “is positive desire for wellbeing and benefit.”309 The positive desire “is based on

pañña or intelligent reflection and leads to right effort and action [and] that economic activity can

and should be prompted by this form of desire - and possibly by the more specific desire to turn

money into merit.”310 It urges individuals to perform productive or livelihood activities to satisfy

their positive desires.

Right livelihood, one step on the Eightfold Path of Buddhism, is guided by this positive desire and

“allows individual to keep the five basic householder precepts (to abstain from killing or harming

life, lying, stealing, engaging in sexual misconduct, and consuming sense-altering substances).”311

Vamsapala calls right livelihood “Balance Life,” one that avoids dishonest livelihood.312 According

to Juliana Essen, this right livelihood in Buddhism requires diligence and implies self-reliance.313 It

enables individuals to “work together more harmoniously by controlling thoughts, feelings, speech

and action according to the Eightfold Path [by which] as individuals’ mental states improve, so too

does the quality of their work and social interactions.”314 This leads to a functional ethic of the

workplace from a Buddhist perspective. P. A. Payoutta speaks about three interconnected aspects of

human existence to which Buddhist’s economic principles are related: “human beings, society and

the natural environment,” and states that by promoting harmony and being mutually supportive,

“[e]conomic activity must take place in such a way that it doesn't harm oneself (by causing a decline

in the quality of life) and does not harm others (by causing problems in society or imbalance in the

environment).”315 In other words, within the ethical perspective of the Buddhist model, what is good

and right for oneself is also good and right for others.

Along with ethical qualities “based on loving, kindness, compassion and altruistic joy through the

welfare of others,” the Buddhist model of ethical behaviour in the workplace “focuses on moral

imperatives such as earning rightfully, use of resources correctly and market appropriately [and]

views the function of work as a chance to utilize and develop one’s and others’ faculties and to bring

needed goods and services into existence.”316 For business and the workplace, it contributes and a

308 Nibbãna is a Pali word for Sanskrit nirvāṇa and is formed of Ni and Vana. Ni is a negative particle

and vana means lusting or craving.” It is “a departure from the craving which is called vana, lusting.” The

word Nibbãna literally means non-attachment. It may also be defined as “the extinction of lust, hatred and

ignorance.” However, it is neither a mere nothingness nor a state of annihilation, but what it is no words can

adequately express. Nibbãna is a Dhamma which is “unborn, unoriginated, uncreated and unformed.”

Therefore, Nibbãna is “eternal (dhuva), desirable (subha), and happy (sukha).” Narada Tera, “Buddhism in

a Nutshell,” Buddha Dharma Education Association, 2012, http://www.buddhanet.net/nutshell10.htm

[accessed February 28, 2018]. 309 Essen, “Sufficiency Economy and Santi Asoke,” 74. 310 Essen, “Sufficiency Economy and Santi Asoke,” 74. 311 Essen, “Sufficiency Economy and Santi Asoke,” 74. Cf. E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics

as if People Mattered (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). 312 Vamsapala, “Buddhist Economic Ethics,” http://vamsapala.blogspot.be/2013/07/buddhist-economic-

ethics.html [accessed February 28, 2018]. 313 Self-reliance in the workplace and in business looks for more caring of the human nature than any growth-

oriented perspective. 314 Essen, “Sufficiency Economy and Santi Asoke,” 75. 315 P.A. Payutto, Buddhist Economics: A Middle Way for the Market Place, trans. Dhammavijaya and Bruce

Evans, comp. Bruce Evans and Jourdan Arenson, 1994,

http://pioneer.netserv.chula.ac.th/~sprapant/Buddhism/buddhist_econ.html [accessed February 28, 2018]. 316 Shrestha, “Religious Ethics and Socially Responsible Behaviours of Small Firms in Nepal.” 6. One of the

significant characteristics of Buddhism is that it “accepts the importance of all levels of happiness in life,


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“compassion-based collectivism,” promoting unselfish individual behaviour for the benefit of the

whole community317 and securing wealth rightfully, “without exploitation but through effort and

intelligent action.”318 The Buddhist model thus looks for activities for both the individual and

organizations that achieve tranquillity and maximise organizational and thus social well-being.

Buddhist economic thought and practice increasingly reunite with a human ethic that is more true to

human nature319 and speaks about an alternative economic and management model based on

religious, spiritual, environmental, and humanistic values. The Buddhist model also proposes the

principle that one should “do no harm to others” and thus encompasses all humankind. This

humanistic view will be developed in the next chapter to bring about an ethical alternative to

employee management models.

Secondly, we may consider Sikhism. As an egalitarian religion, Sikhism preaches love, truthful

living, equality, liberty, etc. and works for the peace and prosperity of the whole world. Sikhism

holds that many ethical practices are done thanks to the God-fearing attitude each person

possesses.320 Mruthyunjaya illustrates that this God concept in Sikhism is further emphasised

“through holding of one’s duties towards man with total sincerity, integrity and in the highest esteem

as the noblest route towards God and through implanting a deep seated feeling that God has given

this human life only to serve other fellow human beings with love, affection, compassion and

humility filled with a sense of selflessness.”321 Its message for human or spiritual development

teaches about the self-discipline and control each person needs to possess, “as only a person who can

control his mind and reactions can control/manage an organization and people in it and attain

managerial excellence.”322 In the same way, one of the premises of Sikhism is that the dignity of

individuals must be defended and sustained “through total freedom from discrimination and abuse”

and “total righteousness through actions and practices” must be practiced.323 It looks for

“contentment, humility and humbleness in life” and thus seeks “complete freedom from excessive

desire and greed which is responsible for all forms of unethical activities.”324 Sikhism thus believes

that God, the supreme power, is pleased when one is active and shows predominant consideration

and willingness to community service,325 as they believe that God is present in all individuals.

Therefore, Sikhism believes that “[a]ll behaviour, including that in business is guided by three

principles – cultivating virtues, honest labour and service to humanity.”326 It therefore seeks the well-

being of all people and expresses a people-centred evaluative model and management ethics.

In Islam, work is regarded as a virtue that balances the needs of both the individual and society and

promotes the independent and social nature of human beings by being a source of self-respect and

including bodily or material happiness. To obtain happiness in this level, however, morality must be employed

as the guideline in order to prevent exploitation both to one’s own self and others.” Numkanison Subhavadee,

“Business and Buddhist Ethics,” The Chulalongkorn Journal of Buddhist Studies 1, no. 1 (2002): 40. 317 Shrestha, “Religious Ethics and Socially Responsible Behaviours of Small Firms in Nepal.” 6. 318 Shrestha, “Religious Ethics and Socially Responsible Behaviours of Small Firms in Nepal.” 8. Cf.

Subhavadee, “Business and Buddhist Ethics,” 39-58. 319 Essen, “Sufficiency Economy and Santi Asoke,” 71, 94. 320 Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems, 377. 321 Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems, 377. 322 A.S. Chawla, Dharminder Singh and Jasleen Kaur, “Management Perspectives of Sikh Religion,”

http://www.globalsikhstudies.net/pdf/2013riv/chawla1.pdf [accessed February 28, 2018]. 323 Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems, 377. 324 Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems, 378. 325 Mruthyunjaya, Business Ethics and Value Systems, 378. 326 Charan Singh, “Ethics and Business: Evidence from Sikh Religion,” Working Paper No. 439, Indian

Institute of Management Bangalore, 2013, 4.


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social welfare.327 Islam teaches about “justice and honesty in trade, courtesy and fairness in

employment relationships, and also encourage humans to learn new skills and to strive to do good

work that benefits both the individual and the community.”328 Therefore, work, in Islam, is not an

end in itself, but a means fostering personal growth and social relations. The intention of the act is

emphasized, not the result.329 The economic activities of an individual are viewed as an obligation.

One is forbade everything that compromises one’s righteousness, and urged to practice honesty and

trustworthiness.330 Moreover, justice, trust and benevolence are three ethical criteria that Islam

promotes that are especially related to workplace behaviours: justice leads to a balanced behaviour,

meaning that one avoids extremes and acts in a proportionate manner; trust enables the individual to

bear responsibility for his or her actions, leading to benevolence, and excellence.331 Thus, Islam

speaks about two conditions that ensure quality in the workplace. Firstly, employers’ obligation to

to provide employees with all the necessary facilities for a good work climate, taking into account

all humanistic factors. Secondly the obligation of employees to employers to pursue the goals of the

organization by working in an honest and timely way and by being trustworthy, committed and

productive to give the best to the organization.332 Hence, Islam gives importance to the duty that each

person should responsibly fulfil in a given situation.

Islam thus provides a wide-ranging ‘code of life,’ with attention to its physical, social, intellectual

and spiritual aspects.333 The topic of the Holy Quran, as Razimi et al. states, is the “Human Being,”

and it covers all aspects of human day-to-day life, including the welfare of employees, organizations

and entire societies.334 Although Islam identifies with Christianity and Judaism in various conceptual

respects, it provides also certain unique perspectives, such as by “considering work as worship and

perfection of work as a religious duty, making welfare of society contingent on business and

327 Othman, “Work Ethics and Quality Workplace,” 82. Cf. Abbas J. Ali and Abdullah Owaihan, “Islamic

Work Ethic: A Critical Review,” Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal 15, no. 1 (2008): 5-

19. 328 Othman, “Work Ethics and Quality Workplace,” 83. Cf. Mohamed Branine and David Pollard, “Human

Resource Management with Islamic Management Principles: A Dialectic for a Reverse Diffusion in

Management,” Personnel Review 39, no. 6(2010): 712-727. 329 Othman, “Work Ethics and Quality Workplace,” 83. 330 Abbas J. Ali. “Scaling an Islamic Work Ethic.” The Journal of Social Psychology 128, no. 5 (1988): 575-

583. 331 Othman, “Work Ethics and Quality Workplace,” 87. Johan Graafland et al. state that “the core values in

business life are freedom and justice,” in which “freedom is connected to justice,” which “includes the

fulfilment of promises, pacts and contracts.” Johan Graafland, Corie Mazereeuw and Aziza Yahia, “Islam

and Socially Responsible Business Conduct: An Empirical Study of Dutch Entrepreneurs,” Business Ethics:

A European Review 15, no. 4 (2006): 391. 332 Othman, “Work Ethics and Quality Workplace,” 93. The impacts of religion on employees in individual

level include “creativity, honesty and trust, personal fulfilment, commitment, motivation and job satisfaction,

and organizational commitment,” while “emotional development and spiritual competence, encouraged

holistic ways of working, developed community at work, empowered workforce and human society, risk

aversion and ethics, stress management and career development” characterise the organizational level. Rafiki

and Wahab. “Islamic Values and Principles in the Organization,” 1. Cf. Scott J. Vitell, “The Role of

Religiosity in Business and Consumer Ethics: A Review of the Literature,” Journal of Business Ethics 90,

no. 2 (2009): 155-167; Val M. Kinjerski and Berna J. Skrypnek, “Creating Organisational Conditions that

Foster Employee Spirit at Work,” Leadership and Organisation Development Journal 27, no. 4 (2006): 280-

295. 333 Muhammad Habib Rana and Muhammad Shaukat Malik, “Human Resource Management from an Islamic

Perspective: A Contemporary Literature Review,” International Journal of Islamic and Middle Eastern

Finance and Management 9, no. 1 (2016): 109-124. 334 Mohd Shahril Bin Ahmad Razimi, Murshidi Mohd Noor and Norzaidi Mohd Daud, “The Concept of

Dimension in Human Resource Management from Islamic Management Perspective,” Middle-East Journal

of Scientific Research 20, no. 9 (2014): 1175-1182.


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balancing work and life.”335 Though the concept human dignity is not well defined in Islam, modern

interpreters have established a foundation for it. For instance, the Universal Islamic Declaration of

Human Rights, in its foreword, states that “Islam gave to mankind an ideal code of human rights

fourteen centuries ago. These rights aim at conferring honour and dignity on mankind and eliminating

exploitation, oppression and injustice.”336 Thus, the dignity of the human being is the cornerstone for

all laws in Islam. For it teaches that “all men are equal in terms of basic human dignity”337 and tries

to enhance such dignity and thus human integrity. This can be explained as an Islamic Humanism,

one that “will see human dignity and human rights as situated within, not apart from, [a] larger

created whole, itself evolving through time, with each creature having […] intrinsic value.”338 The

essence of humanism in Islam, according to Farhan Shah, emphasizes “(1) the innate dignity of

humanity, (2), the universality of human rights, and (3) the inter-relationality of all creation.”339 It

asserts that humans are created worthy of dignity and honour and maintains that every individual is

the subject of his or her own life and is an end in itself; a someone, not a something.

Jewish tradition, in the same way, calls for people to practice compassion and urges them to “prevent

the suppression of human potential.”340 Judaism provides ethical guidelines to manage people with

integrity, justice and fairness, as well as with honesty and loving kindness. Against the instinct to

maximise profit, it helps enable people to act justly and deals with employer-employee relationships,

“treating workers, forming partnerships, making agreements, […] ensuring integrity in

interactions.”341 Acknowledging the “rights and obligations inherent in being human,”342 any kind of

oppression is considered unethical and fair labour standards are sought to ensure others’ welfare.

Judaism holds that “since our lives and futures are interdependent, sharing with those less fortunate

is essential to the common good and protects the dignity of each person.”343 It supports the rights of

individual employees’ “to organize and bargain collectively” and insists that one must often go

beyond the letter of the law to its spirit. It calls for all people to value solidarity.344 Jewish morality

also advocates altruistic behaviours or great value to an organization. In all these religious traditions

and teachings, we find a robust and active effort to ensure repsct for the dignity of human person and

a vital humanistic morality that promotes both self-respect and genuine concern for others.

335 Rana and Malik, “Human Resource Management from an Islamic Perspective,” 112. 336 Islamic Council, “Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights,” September 19, 1981.

http://www.alhewar.com/ISLAMDECL.html [accessed April 20, 2018]; Salem Azzam Secretary General,

“Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights,” Human Rights 2, no. 3 (2007):102-112. 337 Organization of Islamic Conference, “Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam,” August 5, 1990.

http://www.bahaistudies.net/neurelitism/library/Cairo_Declaration_on_Human_Rights_in_Islam.pdf

[accessed April 20, 2018]. Cf. Domènec Melé, “Three Keys Concepts of Catholic Humanism for Economic

Activity: Human Dignity, Human Rights and Integral Human Development,” in Humanism in Economics and

Business: Perspectives of the Catholic Social Tradition, eds. Domènec Melé and Martin Schlag (Dordrecht:

Springer, 2015), 113-136. 338 Farhan Shah, “Islam, Humanism and Ecology,” Vart Land, October 14, 2016.

http://www.verdidebatt.no/innlegg/11663959-islam-humanism-and-ecology [accessed April 20, 2018]. 339 Shah, “Islam, Humanism and Ecology.” 340 Susan S. Case and J. Goosby Smith, “Contemporary Application of Traditional Wisdom: Using the Torah,

Bible, and Qur’an in Ethics Education,” in Handbook of Research on Teaching Ethics in Business and

Management Education, eds. Charles Wankel and Agata Stachowicz-Stanusch, 39-64 (Hershey, PA:

Information Science Reference, 2012), 42. 341 Case and Smith, “Contemporary Application of Traditional Wisdom,” 42. 342 Case and Smith, “Contemporary Application of Traditional Wisdom,” 42. 343 Case and Smith, “Contemporary Application of Traditional Wisdom,” 42. Cf. Elliot N. Dorff and Louis E.

Newman, Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices: Body (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2008), 32-39. 344 Case and Smith, “Contemporary Application of Traditional Wisdom,” 45.


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6.3.3 Catholic Social Thought and the Call for a New Managerial Ethics

Christian ethics and spirituality have a long tradition of being applied to economics and business

contexts. Its distinctive combination of faith and reason offers “principles, criteria, and guidelines

for action and a set of virtues with relevance for economic activity.”345 Its unique horizon of

interpretation and inspired “interplay between the rational and the narrative aspect of Christian

practice and thinking,”346 make possible another interpretation of business practices. As Verstraeten

elucidates,

Because Christians cultivate a hermeneutic relationship to an interpreting community and an ethos

that is different than that of modernity and its forms of instrumental and managerial rationality,

they able to discover ethical and meta-ethical perspectives that can break through the dominance

of this type of rationality and social organization which is coupled with it, as well as it enables

them to break through the narrow angle of problem solving.347

In this regard, from the perspective of narrative ethics (e.g., a biblical narrative perspective),

Verstraeten calls upon business people to interpret their practices in a new light, encouraging them

to act in a morally responsible way.348 Decisions and acts must be considered from all perspectives

in a person’s life as a whole, because “[m]orality is not only a question of particular decisions and

separate acts, but also and in the first place a continuing actualization of a fundamental ethical life

intention which finds its significance in a […] religious fundamental option.”349 So, any professional

decision that contradicts a person’s fundamental ethical life choice creates a problematic tension. A

human person is constituted as a moral subject, and his or her professional moral decisions are

influenced by this such that one cannot separate personal responsibility and from the moral

responsibilities associated with their role. The movement from limited types of individual ‘role

responsibility’ to a more ‘universal responsibility,’ according to this narrative model, is relevant to

professional ethics. For instance, the functional difference between role obligation and global

responsibility makes clear the ‘neighbourhood-effects’ and effects a shift from a technocratic

mentality to a deeper kind of human concern. This is reflected in the long-term effects of professional

decisions as well.350 We explain this further in the following analysis of Catholic Social Thought

(CST),351 which presents itself as an example par excellence in this regard, and as helpful in

345 Domènec Melé and Joan Fontrodona, “Christian Ethics and Spirituality in Leading Business Organizations:

Editorial Introduction,” Journal of Business Ethics 145, no. 4 (2017): 671. 346 Verstraeten, “How Faith Makes a Difference,” 58. For the explanation, within the scope of this research,

we limit the analysis only with the exploration of Christian theological reflections. 347 Verstraeten, “How Faith Makes a Difference,” 58. Though he acknowledges the domination of capitalistic

ethos in business having religious roots (for instance, the perceived link between Christian ethics and the

emergence of the capitalist work ethic [Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism - Max Weber]), Verstraeten

illustrates that it is not the calling of Christians to justify the market. 348 Verstraeten, “How Faith Makes a Difference,” 62-66. 349 Verstraeten, “How Faith Makes a Difference,” 63. 350 Verstraeten, “How Faith Makes a Difference,” 64. 351 CST is widely known today, with its continuing conversation with the human sciences, as an excellent

contributor of the ethical analysis of human concerns and life matters going beyond any particular faith

convictions and theology. Cf., Johan Verstraeten, “Catholic Social Thought and Amartya Sen on Justice,” in

Economics as Moral Science, eds. Peter Rona and Laszlo Zsolnai, Virtues and Economics, Vol. 1, 215-223

(Switzerland: Springer, 2017), 215. Through CST’s global perspectives in analysing things, it tries to create

responsible global citizens and a more just world to live in. So, its purpose, according to Pope Benedict XVI,

“is simply to help purify reason and to contribute, here and now, to the acknowledgment and attainment of

what is just.” Cf., Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 28. Confer, for instance,

http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-

caritas-est.html [accessed November 1, 2017]. Catholic Social Teachings are important for this research as it

particularly deals with the rights of workers and the dignity of work. Matters of human dignity and common

good in society are aimed at its discussion in various socio-economic issues of our time.


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understanding the role religion can play in ethical analysis, as it also fosters ethical reasoning about

socio-political and economic issues.

Catholic Social Thought (CST) has consistently criticised modern social and political ideologies that

fail to respect for human dignity and promote the common good. CST is said to emerge from the

Church’s own encounter of Gospel teachings with current social problems, stimulating a “greater

insight into the authentic requirements of justice as well as greater readiness to act accordingly.”352

According to Alejo José G. Sison et al., CST “represents a body of moral reflection forged through

centuries on social issues; it seeks rational and faith-harmonious solutions in accordance with the

characteristics of human nature within changing historical contexts.”353 CST tries to reconstruct the

social order by responding to social challenges such as inhumane conditions in various social

institutions. In the modern period, Church’s social teaching dates from the 1891 encyclical of Pope

Leo XIII on the condition of labour (Rerum Novarum), responding to the plight of working-class

people in industrial societies. Pope Leo focuses on the just and equitable interrelationship of workers

and their specific rights and duties in various social situations.

Along with its significant concepts – including respect for human dignity, human rights, stewardship,

the Golden Rule (treating others as you would have them treat you), and the idea of service in leading

others – one finds in CST a vision of “integral human development and emphasis on the common

good as a criterion of the moral legitimacy of the social order.”354 Referring to several encyclicals

and other documents of the Catholic Church, Domènec Melé and Joan Fontrodona describe several

concepts relevant to business and employee management, such as the “personalist view of work” and

labour rights, “business as a community,” “the common good as criterion for legitimization of

business,” the centrality of “integral human development” beyond economic development, and

“business as a noble vocation.”355 These concepts will be further explored in the final chapter.

Verstraeten, combining Catholic Social Thought with the idea of justice proposed by Amartya Sen,

contends that the starting point for ethical exploration in relation to business practices must be

indignation about injustice and a consequent recognition of one’s moral duty to seek a just

alternative.356 He later asserts, however, that “moral indignation is a necessary but not sufficient

352 Benedict XVI, “Deus Caritas Est,” Encyclical on Christian Love, December 25, 2005,

http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-

caritas-est.html [accessed February 20, 2018]; Alejo José G. Sison, Ignacio Ferrero and Gregorio Guitián,

“Human Dignity and the Dignity of Work: Insights from Catholic Social Teaching,” Business Ethics

Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2016): 503. 353 Sison, Ferrero and Guitián, “Human Dignity and the Dignity of Work,” 505. 354 Melé and Fontrodona, “Christian Ethics and Spirituality in Leading Business Organizations,” 674. Cf. John

XXIII, “Mater et Magistra,” Encyclical on Christianity and Social Progress, May 15, 1961.

http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_15051961_mater.html

[accessed February 15, 2018]; Benedict XVI, “Caritas in Veritate,” Encyclical on Integral Human

Development in Charity and Truth, June 29, 2009. http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-

xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html [accessed February 15,

2018]. 355 Melé and Fontrodona, “Christian Ethics and Spirituality in Leading Business Organizations,” 674. Along

with previously referred encyclicals, see further: Leo XIII, “Rerum Novarum,” Encyclical on the Labour and

Social Order, May 15, 1891, http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-

xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html [accessed February 15, 2018]. John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus,”

Encyclical on Socio-Economic Order, May 1, 1991, http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-

ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html [accessed February15, 2018];

Paul VI, Populorum Progressio,” Encyclical on Development of People, March 26, 1967,

http://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_26031967_populorum.html

[accessed February 15, 2018]. 356 Verstraeten, “Catholic Social Thought and Amartya Sen on Justice,” 217.


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condition and that it need to be followed by moral reasoning.”357 This reasoning, however, does not

exclude the wisdom of religion, as human persons are capable of being reasonable358 even by inviting

and reflecting on ideas from different sources. Therefore, professional ethics requires attention to

three components of ethics: the personal, social and religious/faith-based. For ethics, being based on

accepted standards of behaviour, is developed through one’s individual philosophy, through the

influence of one’s community, and often in dialogue with religious writings, interpretations and

practices.

This ethical approach to workplace behaviour, directed through human rights and social justice,

further makes it possible to hold organizations to account for human rights violations and social

justice violations, even when they have acted in accordance with the law. Rethinking how to manage

workplace behaviours, beyond the constraints of “standard” agency theory, Martijn Cremers argues

that CST offers an alternative due to its focus on human dignity, solidarity, and subsidiarity.359

Cremers calls these the three pillars of CST, and especially emphasizes the first pillar, human dignity

– “the value and grandeur of the human person” (CA 41) – that each member of an organization

recognizes in him or herself and in others.360 Cremers regards organizations as communities of human

persons seeking to contribute to and foster human flourishing by treating each one not instrumentally

but as end in him or herself. This in fact leads members of organizations to enter into a relationship

of solidarity and communion with one another. Hence, referring to the Compendium of the Social

Doctrine of the Church (CSDC), Melé observes that the principle of human dignity is “based on the

recognition of and respect for the intrinsic worth of every human being, the awareness of the primacy

of each human being over society, and the corresponding duty of respect for every person, which

includes not manipulating him or her for ends which are foreign to his or her own development.”361

This unique consideration of human beings and their values remains the foundation of all the

principles of Catholic social teaching.

This second pillar – solidarity – “emphasizes the social nature of the human person, linking our right

to have our dignity respected by others to our duty to respect the dignity of others, which requires us

to consider our social responsibility.”362 This principle acknowledges “the existence of

interdependences and social interactions, with the corresponding sense of unity, recognition of the

intrinsic worth of each party, and a sense of brotherhood – all of which require awareness of and

willingness for the common good.”363 It demands a recognition of one’s obligation to contribute to

357 Verstraeten, “Catholic Social Thought and Amartya Sen on Justice,” 217. 358 Sen, The idea of Justice, 43; Verstraeten, “Catholic Social Thought and Amartya Sen on Justice,” 218. 359 Martijn Cremers, “What Corporate Governance Can Learn from Catholic Social Teaching,” Journal of

Business Ethics 145, no. 4 (2017): 711-724. Though agency theory is the standard paradigm in some of the

academic corporate governance research, Cremers views it as reductionist and is problematic due to both

economic limitations (asymmetric information, contract completeness, and the need for coordination through

explicit power or hierarchies) and human limitations (bounded rationality, opportunism, and behaviourism). 360 John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus,” no. 41. Cremers, “What Corporate Governance Can Learn from Catholic

Social Teaching,” 712. 361 Domènec Melé, “Virtues, Values, and Principles in Catholic Social Teaching,” in Handbook of Virtue Ethics

in Business and Management, eds. Alejo José G. Sison, Gregory R. Beabout and Ignacio Ferrero, 153-164

(Dordecht: Springer, 2017), 158. Cf. Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social

Doctrine of the Church (London: Continuum International, (originally, 2004) 2012), no. 132-133. 362 Cremers, “What Corporate Governance Can Learn from Catholic Social Teaching,” 712. Referring to Sison

and Fontrodona and the Christian anthropological perspectives, Cremers specifies that “one’s ‘self-interest’

is linked with and depends on others’ ‘self-interest,’ or within organizations with the organization’s shared

interest.” Cremers, “What Corporate Governance Can Learn from Catholic Social Teaching,” 712. Cf. Alejo

José G. Sison and Joan Fontrodona, “The Common Good of the Firm in the Aristotelian-Thomistic Tradition,”

Business Ethics Quarterly 22, no. 2 (2012): 211-246. 363 Melé, “Virtues, Values, and Principles in Catholic Social Teaching,” 159.


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the common good of society, and is closely connected with the previously discussed principle of

human dignity. This obligation qualifies the “duty to contribute to sustainability” of all members,

which is “inherent in all human relationships” (CSDC 193).364 The third pillar of CST – subsidiarity

– provides employees the “opportunity and freedom to participate, serve others, and receive help to

develop toward their full potential.”365 In organizations, it supports the personal development of

employees through participation and shared values in solidarity. This further leads to the principle of

participation, which enables one to be part of ruling process in which each has a right and a duty to

a certain role according to the position one possesses.

According to Cremers, these pillars affect the three functions of employee management – the

compass function, the commitment function, and the criteria function.366 The compass function

provides for human flourishing in the organization through a set of proper values one can use to

guide oneself; the commitment function coordinates the cooperation of all members in solidarity; the

criteria function looks for what constitutes excellence in organizational performance.367 Within the

compass function, Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Centesimus Annus, referring to Rerum Novarum,

presents a holistic view of human life and asks organizations not to contribute to a merely

materialistic view of human life but rather to foster integral human development.368 The commitment

function of employee management leads “corporate resources (including corporate positions of

power and privileges) toward solidarity, allowing everyone in the corporation to cooperate in

mutually beneficial relationships toward a shared goal.”369 In the same way, analysing the criteria

function, Cremers identifies the virtue of justice as a constitutive factor for excellence in human

flourishing, as there is a significant danger of asymmetric information (abuse of superior

information), unequal power and differences in control and organizational management.370

Moreover, distributive justice in solidarity is a prime requisite,371 according to Cremers, for internal

corporate governance or employee management in the organization. The dignity of human persons

and the supremacy of the common good do much to ensure the appeal of CST and ensure its

application in particular contexts and circumstances. CST therefore criticizes unsustainable

managerial models based on a narrowly modern economic and technocratic paradigm.

Another feature of CST is its understanding of and contribution to the notion of the subjectivity of

the work (Laborem Exercens, no.6). The objective dimension of work is the “sum of activities

resources, instruments and technologies used by men and women to produce things,” while its

subjective dimension is “the activity of the human person as a dynamic being capable of performing

a variety of actions that are part of the work process and that correspond to his personal vocation”

(CSDC 270).372 This means that, as Sison et al. illustrate, the objective dimension embodies the

“contingent aspect” of work, with its technological, cultural, social and political conditions, whereas

the subjective dimension represents the “stable aspect” and is based exclusively on the dignity of

364 Melé, “Virtues, Values, and Principles in Catholic Social Teaching,” 159. 365 Cremers, “What Corporate Governance Can Learn from Catholic Social Teaching,” 712. Cf. Gregorio

Guitián, “Service as a Bridge between Ethical Principles and Business Practice: A Catholic Social Teaching

Perspective,” Journal of Business Ethics 128, no. 1 (2015): 59-72. 366 Cremers, “What Corporate Governance Can Learn from Catholic Social Teaching,” 719. 367 Cremers, “What Corporate Governance Can Learn from Catholic Social Teaching,” 719-723. 368 Cremers, “What Corporate Governance Can Learn from Catholic Social Teaching,” 720. Cf. John Paul II,

“Centesimus Annus,” nos. 35 & 36. 369 Cremers, “What Corporate Governance Can Learn from Catholic Social Teaching,” 721. Cf. Michael E.

Porter and Mark R. Kramer, “Creating Shared Value: How to Reinvent Capitalism - and Unleash a Wave of

Innovation and Growth,” Harvard Business Review 89, nos. 1-2 (2011): 1-17. 370 Cremers, “What Corporate Governance Can Learn from Catholic Social Teaching,” 722. 371 Cremers, “What Corporate Governance Can Learn from Catholic Social Teaching,” 722. 372 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 270,


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human beings.373 In the same way, work is the essential expression of the person and denotes that

“any form of materialism or economic tenet that tries to reduce the worker to being a mere instrument

of production, a simple labour force with an exclusively material value, would end up hopelessly

distorting the essence of work and stripping it of its most noble and basic human finality” (CSDC

271).374 Hence, according to CSDC, human work “proceeds from the person” and is “ordered to and

has its final goal in the human person.”375 So, the purpose or end of work is man himself and its

subjective dimension is of superior importance, in line with the notion of human dignity. The idea of

work as an act of the person again makes clear the primacy of the notion of the ‘personalist principle’

in workers’ management. This will be further explored in the final chapter.

In this regard, in Economic Justice for All, a Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S.

Economy, the Catholic Bishops of United States link the concepts of social justice, the common good

and participation to the discussion on work and workers.376 Discussion on these concepts contribute

to the merit of the pillars of CST discussed above. It acknowledges basic justice in three dimensions:

commutative, distributive and social (no.68). Commutative justice respects the equal human dignity

of all individuals and “calls for fundamental fairness in all agreements and exchanges between

individuals” (no.69). Distributive justice, in the same way, looks for the equal allocation of income,

wealth, and power (no.70). According to this document, “social justice implies that persons have an

obligation to be active and productive participants in the life of society and that society has a duty to

enable them to participate in this way” (no.71). It demands that every individual contribute to the

common good. For productivity in an organization is not only based on outcomes in terms of goods

and services, but is also “measured in light of their impact on the fulfilment of basic needs,

employment levels, patterns of discrimination, environmental quality, and sense of community”

(no.71). It has to be done in a way that ensures respect for the freedom and dignity of every individual.

Work should enable the working person to become “more a human being,” more capable of acting

intelligently, freely, and in ways that lead to self-realization (no.72).

This document states that human dignity is realized in solidarity with others and affirms the link

between the respect for human rights and a sense of responsibility, both at the level of the individual

and that of the community. These conditions lead to the concept of the common good and fulfilment

of material needs in freedom. This in turn aims to protect relationships and enable the participation

of all in the life of society. For the common good, according to this document, “demands justice for

all, the protection of the human rights of all” (no.85). Basic justice with its multidimensional

variables, demands that all members of society be afforded at least a minimum level of participation

in the economy. Unfair exclusion, that prevents any individual from participating in or contributing

to the economy, is wrong (no.15). For what lies at the heart of true justice is a drive for solidarity and

participation. A “minimum level of participation in the life of the human community for all persons”

(no.77) is required, as it re-establishes the individual, organizational (professional) and social well-

being of all concerned. Hence, “Catholic social teaching does not maintain that a flat, arithmetical

equality of income and wealth is a demand of justice, but it does challenge economic arrangements

that leave large numbers of people impoverished. Further, it sees extreme inequality as a threat to the

solidarity of the human community, for great disparities lead to deep social divisions and conflict”

373 Sison, Ferrero and Guitián. “Human Dignity and the Dignity of Work,” 515. 374 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 271. 375 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, no. 272. 376 United States Catholic Bishops, “Economic Justice for All: Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and

the U.S. Economy,” 1986. http://www.usccb.org/upload/economic_justice_for_all.pdf [accessed April 25,

2018].


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(no.74). This is an expression of the communitarian vocation of every human being. This social

justice discourse will be further explored in the next chapter.

To sum up this section, we may quote Peter Ferdinand Drucker, who argues that “society needs a

return to spiritual values – not to offset the material but to make it fully productive. However remote

is its realization for the great mass of mankind, there is today the promise of material abundance or

at least of material sufficiency. [We need a] return to spiritual values […] the deepest experience that

the Thou and the I are one, which all higher religions share.”377 Reconnecting to religion can help to

promote values of compassion and empathy in corporate and organizational relationships and

religion can be a constituent component of human anthropology that looks for a distinctive personal

experience for all members in an organization based on endemic human qualities and values. It

recognizes the “whole” person in the workplace. The organizational model of the whole person in

the workplace empowers employees to put their maximum into the organization. In terms of their

spiritual dimension, it allows them to work with a higher loyalty and responsibility, more creativity

and less absenteeism and turnover.378 Employees do not wish to segregate their life from their work

or vice versa and demand a holistic life, in which they can immerse their whole life, including their

faith. In the same way, the recognition and integration of faith with work enables it to encompass

ethics, diversity, human rights, and the various interests of both employers and employee alike, all

of which, taken together, benefit both individual (personal) and organizational (corporate) integrity,

development and well-being.

6.3.4 Christian Personalism and Meaningful Employment Practices

Johan De Tavernier, referring to Emmanuel Mounier’s account of personalism and in line with Kant,

state the need to defend the primacy of the person and articulate that no other person or any collective

whole can legitimately utilize the person as mere means to an end.379 For, De Tavernier continues,

as a free being that adopts, assimilates, lives and affirms values, every person constitutes his or her

uniqueness and worth.380 Personalism enters here and assures the maximum true culture that one is

capable to possess and exhibit. De Tavernier further brings out Mounier’s blame on the ‘primacy of

economics’ subordinating the freedom of human beings and preferring profit to person.381 However,

De Tavernier states that personalist economics subordinates economics to persons valuing labour,

not capital, as central to the market economy. According to him “the primacy of labour over capital

rests on the fact that human work is the one and only agent that is productive in economic activity.

[…] While work should not be made the exclusive definition of human beings, it must be recognized

as an essential human activity that partly completes the person.”382 De Tavernier refers also to

Jacques Maritain and argues for a “distinct and developing understanding of the human being and

377 Peter F. Drucker, Landmark of Tomorrow: A Report on the New “Post Modern” World (New Brunswick:

Transaction Publishers, 2011), 264-265. Peter Ferdinand Drucker, Peter Drucker on the Profession of

Management (Harvard: Harvard Business School, 2003); and David E. McClean, Wall Street, Reforming the

Unreformable: An Ethical Perspective (Oxon: Routledge, 2016), 32. 378 David Miller and Timothy Ewest, “Rethinking the Impact of Religion on Business Values: Understanding

its Reemergence and Measuring its Manifestations,” in Dimensions of Teaching Business Ethics in Asia, eds.

Stephan Rothlin and Parissa Haghirian (Berlin: Springer, 2013), 29-38. 379 Johan De Tavernier, “The Historical Roots of Personalism: From Renouvier’s Le Personnalisme, Mounier’s

Manifeste au service du personnalisme and Maritan’s Humanisme integral to Janssens’ Personne et Societe,”

Ethical Perspectives 16, no. 3 (2009): 369. See also: Emmanuel Mounier, A Personalist Manifesto, trans. by

the Monks of Saint John’s Abbey at Collegeville, Minn (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1938),

69. 380 De Tavernier, “The Historical Roots of Personalism,” 369. See also: Joseph Amato, Mounier and Maritain:

A French Catholic Understanding of the Modern World (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1975), 130. 381 De Tavernier, “The Historical Roots of Personalism,” 370. 382 De Tavernier, “The Historical Roots of Personalism,” 371.


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the world.”383 According to him, Maritain refutes ‘person-centred humanism (Anthropocentric

humanism - man is his own centre) and opposes collectivism and individualism on the one hand and

values the principle of common good and the spiritual value of the individual person on the other,

and thus envisions a humanistic economics and society.384

In an organizational context, this notion of humanistic economics aspires to serve the employees and

seeks to end the abuses of the capitalist system. These personalistic understanding, in turn, supports

and becomes a reference point for the later Catholic Social Teaching.385 Louis Janssens, the founder

of the Louvain tradition of personalism, perceives human person as the foundation of ethics and the

criterion of ethical discernment.386 He thus argues for an indispensable ‘human condition’

surrounding the workplace to develop integral human riches in the society. This idea requires and

guarantees a person-centred economics over against the profit-centred or work-centred economics.

From a personalistic perspective, this section will describe the notion of meaningful work, the

humanity of workers and the employment relationship, which we have already mentioned in previous

sections.

Along with financial security, human interactions and social relationships, employees need

meaningful employment in order to develop themselves as persons.387 For as John Paul II states at

the very beginning of Laborem Exercens (LE), “only man is capable of work, and only man works,

at the same time by work occupying his existence on earth. Thus, work bears a particular mark of

man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark

decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature.”388 This shows that work

must be taken seriously and responsibly, and employees must be treated well because of their very

human nature. Work is decisive, according to John Paul II, because it makes life more human (LE

3). He urges that more attention be paid to the one who works (the person) than to his work (his

action), because, for him, the work is in the first place “for the worker” and not the worker “for work”

(LE 6). He continues that, though work itself can have greater or lesser objective value, all work

should be judged by the measure of dignity given to the person who carries it out (LE 6).389 This is

what is required in every employee relationship. As Tablan states, referring to Stephen Overell, that

“what people want from work is to feel useful, fulfilled at least to some degree, to participate in a

collective effort and that work should be performed in an environment that respects fairness and

dignity.”390 In work, it is the human person who must be valued in his or her entirety, and hence here

we have a departure to a personalist understanding of employment practices.

Further, LE 16 recalls that work is a duty because it maintains and develops our humanity. This must

be out of regard for others, especially our families, our society, and all humanity.391 In addition to

this, we also inherit the work of the generations who came before us and share in the building of the

383 De Tavernier, “The Historical Roots of Personalism,” 376. See also: Jacques Maritain, True Humanism

(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 19-22. 384 De Tavernier, “The Historical Roots of Personalism,” 376. 385 De Tavernier, “The Historical Roots of Personalism,” 377. 386 De Tavernier, “The Historical Roots of Personalism,” 377-384; Alex Liegeois, “Louvain Personalism as

Foundation of Ethics: A Revision in the Care Context,” Louvain Studies 40 (2017): 410. Cf. Louis Janssens,

“Artificial Insemination: Ethical Considerations,” Louvain Studies 8 (1980): 4. 387 Tablan, “Catholic Social Teachings: Toward a Meaningful Work,” 291. 388 John Paul II, “Laborem Exercens,” AAS 73 (1981), http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-

ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens.html [accessed October 15, 2018]. 389 John Paul II, “Laborem Exercens,” AAS 73 (1981), nos. 3 & 6. 390 Tablan, “Catholic Social Teachings: Toward a Meaningful Work,” 291. Cf. Stephen Overell, The Meaning

of Work (Bristol: Futurelab, 2009). 391 John Paul II, “Laborem Exercens,” AAS 73 (1981), no. 16.


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future for all who will come after us. This is part of employee rights that comes from work or the

duty to work (LE 16). However, these rights of employees cannot be doomed to be merely the result

of economic systems of profit maximization; rather, the whole economy must be shaped in relation

to the respect for workers’ rights within each country and throughout the world (LE 17).392 In this

line, Tablan affirms the idea of Al Gini, that “access to work that is meaningful and developmental

must be part of the basic package of ethical human rights.”393 Through the apostolic exhortation on

the Eucharist – Sacramentum Caritatis (SC) – Pope Benedict XVI again states that work is

inseparably related to the fulfilment of the human being (respect for human dignity) and the

development of society (the common good).394 According to him, “it is indispensable that people not

allow themselves to be enslaved by work or to idolize it, claiming to find in it the ultimate and

definitive meaning of life” (SC 74).395 In this regard, an illustration concerning work offered by

Tablan can be noted: that “[w]ork is not just the use of mind or muscle in order to achieve a particular

task or obtain our material needs; it shapes human personality and is the most significant factor that

affects the development of our self-identity.”396 Individuals must therefore express their identities in

work and flourish in all their diversity.

Work, according to Tablan, is an objectification of human nature and perfects our human powers and

faculties using reason. Thus, it is “not only an instrumental in humanizing nature, but also in

humanizing man too.”397 Thus, for Tablan, meaningful work is freely chosen and assists employees

in realizing their personal happiness and moral development. At the same time, he argues,

management has to organize workplace in such a way that employees, by the best use of their rational

faculties, may exercise their freedom and independence.398 Pope Benedict XVI has already expressed

this concern in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate – “In Charity and Truth” – where we read:

It [decent work] means work that expresses the essential dignity of every man and woman in the

context of their particular society: work that is freely chosen, effectively associating workers, both

men and women, with the development of their community; work that enables the worker to be

respected and free from any form of discrimination; work that makes it possible for families to

meet their needs and provide schooling for their children, without the children themselves being

forced into labour; work that permits the workers to organize themselves freely, and to make their

voices heard; work that leaves enough room for rediscovering one’s roots at a personal, familial

and spiritual level; work that guarantees those who have retired a decent standard of living (CiV

63).399

The prime duty of the employment relationship, therefore, includes, along with economical practices,

in giving employees opportunities to utilize and develop their faculties and assuring them of a decent

existence. Here work is seen in relation to human fulfilment, such that meaningful work is correlated

to a meaningful life. This authentic growth and fulfilment of the human person (human flourishing)

392 John Paul II, “Laborem Exercens,” AAS 73 (1981), no. 17. 393 Tablan, “Catholic Social Teachings: Toward a Meaningful Work,” 291. Cf. Al Gini, “Meaningful Work and

the Rights of the Worker: A Commentary on Rerum Novarum and Laborem Exercens.” Thought: Fordham

University Quarterly 67, no. 3 (1992): 226-239. 394 Pope Benedict XVI, “Sacramentum Caritatis,” 2007, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-

xvi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_ben-xvi_exh_20070222_sacramentum-caritatis.html [accessed

October 22, 2018]. 395 Benedict XVI, “Sacramentum Caritatis,” (2007), no. 74. 396 Tablan, “Catholic Social Teachings: Toward a Meaningful Work,” 292. 397 Tablan, “Catholic Social Teachings: Toward a Meaningful Work,” 292. 398 Tablan, “Catholic Social Teachings: Toward a Meaningful Work,” 293. 399 Pope Benedict XVI, “Caritas in Veritate,” 2009, no. 63, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-

xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html [accessed October 25,

2018].


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and of society (societal development) is the concern of CST. The notion of the subjective dimension

of work has already been explained in previous sections.

In his 2013 apastolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium – “The Joy of the Gospel” – Pope Francis writes

that, along with ensuring nourishment and a “dignified sustenance” for all people, it is required to

attend to their “general temporal welfare and prosperity.”400 He continues “[t]his means education,

access to health care, and above all employment, for it is through free, creative, participatory and

mutually supportive labour that human beings express and enhance the dignity of their lives. A just

wage enables them to have adequate access to all the other goods which are destined for our common

use” (EG 192).401 In this line, discussing alienation in the workplace, Tablan illustrates two key issues

– a lack of autonomy and alienating wage systems – through which employees come to be unsatisfied

with their work.402 When employees have no control over work processes or the outcome of work,

they feel alienated. While there is no easy solution to these challenges,403 the Catholic vision offers

concrete proposals “that will ensure a just and equitable distribution of profits and active participation

of workers, such as the practice of subsidiarity, uniform and collective bargaining, join ownership of

the means of work, participatory management, share-holding by labour, or other mixed model.”404

Here the participatory model transforms organizations into a community of persons working together

justly for a common goal. The subsidiarity principles, as already discussed, enables all employees,

including lower-level workers, to be treated as co-entrepreneurs.

Alienation also happens in the workplace when employees are treated and valued only in an objective

sense – as mere as instruments of production – leading to a situation where technology dominates

the person and the personalist value of employees is forgotten.405 A lack of concern about employees’

growth through his or her labour is an indication of this instrumentalization of labour within work

process, and John Paul II maintains that this should be prevented.406 Similarly, John Paul II continues

to remind us that the moral excellence of employers and employees is at stake when it is possible for

"“the financial account to be in order, and yet for the people – who make up the firm’s most valuable

asset – to be humiliated and their dignity offended.”407 This also happens when any employment

relationship forgets that man is capable of himself and meaningful work is related to the search for

meaning in life. In this milieu, though CST recognizes the proper role of profit as the first indicator

of business success, it continues to emphasize that “the legitimate pursuit of profit should be in

harmony with the irrenounceable protection of the dignity of the people who work at different levels

in the same company.”408 This enables employees to develop themselves in the process of

employment and thus seeks an authentic integral development of humanity. Let us analyse now what

400 Pope Francis, “Evangelii Gaudium,” 2013, no. 192,

http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-

ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html [accessed October 25, 2018]. 401 Francis, “Evangelii Gaudium,” 2013, no. 192. 402 Tablan, “Catholic Social Teachings: Toward a Meaningful Work,” 298-299. 403 Joanne B. Ciulla, “Worthy Work and Bowie’s Kantian Theory of Meaningful Work,” In Kantian Business

Ethics: Critical Perspectives, eds. Dennis G. Arnold and Jered D. Harris, 115-131 (Northampton: Edward

Edgar, 2012), 115. 404 Tablan, “Catholic Social Teachings: Toward a Meaningful Work,” 299. Cf. John Paul II, “Laborem

Exercens,” AAS 73 (1981), no. 14. 405 John Paul II, “Laborem Exercens,” AAS 73 (1981), no. 8; Tablan, “Catholic Social Teachings: Toward a

Meaningful Work,” 300. 406 John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus,” AAS 83 (1991), no. 41. 407 John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus,” AAS 83 (1991), no. 35. Cf. CSDC, no. 340. 408 CSDC, no. 340. An indiscriminate pursuit of profit maximization of organization is also said to be a form

of alienation in relation to employment practices.


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the personalistic understanding of CST has to say specifically about employment practices, such as

in job design and implementation.

According to CST, a person-centred approach in business practices is evident when businesspeople

are encouraged to invest in ways that will enable employees to develop their potential as human

beings by making good use of their potentials and abilities.409 The CSDC stresses in this regard that

“allowing workers to develop themselves fosters increased productivity and efficiency in the very

work undertaken.”410 Thus, all economic activities of business and its legitimate pursuit of profit

should also protect the dignity of employees, who are a vital part of the organization itself. Similarly,

as already stated by Pope John XXIII, an active participation of employees in decision-making and

thus to profit and ownership will enable proper relations between managers and employees and

ensure active and loyal cooperation in the common enterprise with good will and appreciation.411 All

these concerns are in line with business or job design. In the same way, in practices of staffing and

recruitment, one must bear in mind that all human beings are of equal fundamental worth, and thus

that unfair discrimination and deception in the organization must be avoided.412 Such practise must

also follow the truthfulness and justice principles and should assess moral dispositions along with

technical skills and efficiency.

The CSDC (no. 186) recalls the need for superior institutions or communities, assuming an attitude

of support and development with respect to lower-order communities.413 This is linked to the training

and development that an organization offers or ought to offer for employees to help ensure their

integral development. Likewise, CST shows a concern for just remuneration of work as a basic step

to regulate and secure a just relationship between the employee and the employer414. In this way,

CST415 encourages employers or management to take into account commutative, distributive, legal

and social justice in their employment practices. It is reasonable also that employers should provide

a decent salary and working conditions to ensure a well-sustained life according to human dignity

for all their employees.416 In this regard, Pope Francis urges humankind in his encyclical Laudato Si’

– “Praise Be” – saying:

We were created with a vocation to work. The goal should not be that technological progress

increasingly replace human work, for this would be detrimental to humanity. Work is a necessity,

part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development and personal

fulfilment. Helping the poor financially must always be a provisional solution in the face of

pressing needs. The broader objective should always be to allow them a dignified life through

work.417

In the same manner, a 2018 document of the Catholic Church, “Oeconomicae et Pecuniariae

Quaestiones” – Considerations for an ethical discernment regarding some aspects of the present

409 John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus,” AAS 83 (1991), no. 36. 410 CSDC, no. 340. 411 John XXIII, “Mater et Magistra,” AAS 53, 1961, no. 92. 412 CSDC, no. 271. Unfair discrimination includes physical/health, familiar-composition, gender, nationality,

cultural, racial, religious, among others. Cf. CSDC, nos. 148, 237, 295, 298, 366, 433, and 536. 413 CSDC, no. 186. 414 John Paul II, “Laborem Exercens,” AAS 73 (1981), no. 19. 415 CSDC, no. 201. 416 Leo XIII, “Rerum Novarum,” 1891, no. 45; John Paul II, “Laborem Exercens,” AAS 73 (1981), no. 14; and

John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus,” AAS 83 (1991), no. 8. 417 Francis, “Laudato Si’,” 2015, no. 128.

http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-

laudato-si.html [accessed October 25, 2018].


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economic-financial system – released by the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith and the Dicastery

for Promoting Integral Human Development, clearly state that:

[w]ithout an appropriate vision of the human person, it is not possible to create an ethics, nor a

practice, worthy of the dignity of the human person and the good that is truly common. In fact,

however neutral and detached from every basic concept one may claim to be, every human action,

even in the economic sphere, implies some conception of the human person and of the world,

which reveals its value through both the effects and the developments it produces.418

The document continues to remind that “all the endowments and means that the markets employ in

order to strengthen their distributive capacity are morally permissible, provided they do not turn

against the dignity of the person and are not indifferent to the common good.”419 The convictions of

CST regarding the centrality of the human person and the transcendent dignity of all human beings

embark upon the challenging matter of employee management in organization, to be conducted with

humanity and attention to the integral human development of all.

Though CST does not provide any technical solutions for material or earthly realities, its viability

and applicability for employee management in a more human fashion cannot be neutralized or

negated. CST contributes “to the acknowledgement and attainment of what is just,”420 and its guiding

principle is a correct view of human person conferring on him an incomparable dignity.421 This also

implies that “the person is above everything he produces or possesses”422 and that labour (human

capital or social capital) has intrinsic priority over capital (material means of production, financial

resources).423 CST offers employment practices a holistic understanding of the human person in its

embodied, relational, and rational nature. Since labour is the “principal resource” of an

organization,424 the personalist understanding, and value given to work obliges management to

address different issues, such as wage discrimination, unfair treatment, unequal distribution of

profits, employment alienation, etc., and provide workers with the necessary conditions for

meaningful work.

6.4 CONCLUSION

We began in this chapter by arguing for an ethical workplace culture, one that distinguishes right

from wrong and thus legally and morally protects human life in an organization through an

integration of ethics into the normative guidelines used to conduct its business. The notion of

responsible moral behaviours often goes beyond rational choice and thus managerial rationality, and

demands reasonable moral conduct towards the other and within the organization. It also necessitates

418 Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, “‘Oeconomicae et Pecuniariae Quaestiones’ –

Considerations for an Ethical Discernment Regarding Some Aspects of the Present Economic-Financial

System,” Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, May 2018, no. 9,

https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2018/05/17/180517a.html [accessed

November 25, 2018]. 419 Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, “Oeconomicae et Pecuniariae Quaestiones,” no. 13. 420 Benedict XVI, “Deus Caritas Est,” 2005, no. 28, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-

xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est.html [accessed October 25, 2018]. 421 John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus,” AAS 83 (1991), no. 11. Cf. Karen Shields Wright, “The Principles of

Catholic Social Teaching: A Guide for Decision Making from Daily Clinical Encounters to National Policy-

Making,” The Linacre Quarterly 84, no. 1 (2017): 12. 422 Alejo José G. Sison, Ignacio Ferrero and Gregorio Guitián, “Human Dignity and The Dignity of Work:

Insights from Catholic Social Teaching,” Business Ethics Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2016): 520. 423 Sison, Ferrero and Guitián, “Human Dignity and The Dignity of Work,” 520. 424 CSDC, no. 278; John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus,” AAS 83, 1991, no. 32; Sison, Ferrero and Guitián,

“Human Dignity and The Dignity of Work,” 520.


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the integration of a social, professional and personal ethos in workplace behaviours, and shows how

all judgements are manifestations of that ethos. The role of religion and spirituality in offering an

adequate ethical framework in the workplace was then explored within the contexts of religious

fundamental options and neighbourhood-effects, which effect a shift from a technocratic mentality

to a deep human concern. More than a matter of following accepted cultural and social norms and

laws, integrated ethical behaviour, that an employee ought to live with, is required. The code of ethics

of an organization clarifies the seriousness and significance of the commitment undertaken by the

organization itself to conduct it business ethically. It expresses the obligation of employers to

employees and vice versa and thus recognizes and promotes the individual and social rights of both

parties.

The tripartite ethical discussion in this chapter has presented several arguments related to workplace

surveillance and shows that, as G. Stoney Alder has expressed, “managerial practices which violate

basic rights or cause harm to any of the organization’s stakeholders may be unethical regardless of

the good that practice otherwise creates,”425 and thus call for an ethical response. Both the individual

assessment of rule-based, result-based and virtue-based analyses and the convergence of these prove

that being a virtuous person, respecting rules, examining results can show that external surveillance

is unethical. From a converging employee perspective combining various employee reactions to

monitoring practices and technologies, and from the analysis of individual and social right

perspectives as well as from the converging understanding of the ethical principles, we have found

that the use of ubiquitous surveillance in the organizational workplace is both unethical and unfair.

For the human aspect of employees is often forgotten in the workplace by a purposeful negligence

of the irreducibility of the person and by perceiving big data as a body-subject through the ethics of

rights, power and social justice.

At this juncture, we are not aligned with Graham Sewell and James R. Barker, who in their work,

Neither Good nor Bad, but Dangerous: Surveillance as an Ethical Paradox, argue for a “discursive

ethic of surveillance that accounts for the paradoxes that the phenomenon presents to today’s

organizational members.”426 For, this research of the individual and social effects of surveillance and

monitoring, which is most often detrimental to employees, has shown that these significant negative

effects on employees primarily concern their morale, reducing the efficiency, productivity and

growth of organizations, if such practices are perceived to be unfair or unreasonable. Therefore, apart

from perceiving surveillance as an ethical paradox, this research harmonizes with the view of Lukas

Introna,427 who observes that, though not a resolvable ethical problem, continuous and consistent

electronic surveillance in the organizational workplace is unethical and unfair from an employee

perspective. Accepting this fact is the starting point for the further ethical treatment of workplace

surveillance. This leads to ethically and managerially reconsider surveillance practices due to their

effects firstly on employees, and then on organizations, and finally on society as a whole. It is

particularly significant, as many workplaces today are increasing the deployment of technology

enabling surveillance.

425 Alder, “Ethical Issues in Electronic Performance Monitoring,” 732-733. 426 Graham Sewell and James R. Barker, “Neither Good nor Bad, but Dangerous: Surveillance as an Ethical

Paradox,” Ethics and Information Technology 3 (2001): 183. According to Sewell and Barker, “[s]urveillance

presents us with constant ethical paradoxes. Surveillance is useful but harmful; welcome but offensive; a

necessary evil but an evil necessity. We support surveillance, so long as someone else is in its watchful eye.

We find surveillance as something we have to do - even if it is only to protect ourselves or our organizations

- but we do not particularly care for it.” Sewell and Barker, “Neither Good nor Bad, but Dangerous,” 183. 427 Introna, “Workplace Surveillance ‘is’ Unethical and Unfair.” 210-2016.


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It is observed in the strict sense from an employee perspective that external surveillance is not

potentially pertinent to increase productivity or workplace efficiency, whereas employee autonomy

and freedom combined with self-control and responsibility benefits any working environment. This

leads to a need to give the employee a significant place, valuing his or her dignity as a human person.

Thus, a new strategic management framework of workplace surveillance, namely “Labourer Valued

Management” (LVM), will be introduced in the next chapter as a means to reconstruct ethical

behavior in the workplace. LVM integrates an interactive partnership model (employer-employee

partnership) with a passionate strategy and a life-centered ethic, shifting the discussion from ‘auto

mode’ or ‘techno mode’ to ‘human mode’ in the debate over workplace surveillance.

CHAPTER SEVEN

LABOURER VALUED MANAGEMENT AND SELF-MONITORING: A PERSON-

CENTERED MANAGERIAL PARADIGM FOR THE WORKPLACE

7.0 INTRODUCTION

The recurring and evocative question haunting many minds in the context of workplace surveillance

is this: why are misconduct and fraudulent activities on the rise in the workplace? Our detailed

analysis in previous chapters, both descriptive and critical, as well as the comparative and associated

reading of the results of the survey conducted for this research, reveal that monitoring systems and

practices effect no substantial change in the misconduct of employees. Identifying employees guilty

of misconduct through implementing ubiquitous surveillance practices and systems and firing them

based on the collected data is not, therefore, a tenable solution to the problem. A circumstantial

prerequisite is an alternative way of thinking about workplace behaviours and employee management

that is likely to lead to a change in the way members of the organization think and act. Therefore, to

stimulate further research, we need a new theoretical perspective and a new management model, with

the capacity to alter both managerial and employee behaviours in the workplace. This alternative

approach must ensure that employees’ voices are heard. In the same way, we have explored

normative theories of ethics in management that focused almost entirely on the acceptability or

permissibility of acts. They judge acts mainly based on their material results (consequentialist ethics)

or based on rules, duties, and obligations (deontological ethics). On this spectrum, we have integrated

the perspective of virtue ethics to enable a distinct perception of moral judgements in which

individuals become the focus rather than acts. Hence, we seek to develop a person-centered account

of moral judgement, which will offer a ‘humanistic’ alternative to the predominant ‘economistic’1

conceptions of employees and workplace behaviours.

The person-centered approach prioritizes the humanness or human character of employees without

neglecting the role played by “principles and norms for good behaviour and for achieving

harmonious and just human relations.”2 It includes “basic and commonly accepted human principles,

such as the Golden Rule (putting oneself in the place of the other) and human values […], human

dignity and human rights.”3 Hence, this final chapter proposes an integrative ethical and personalist

model as a new management paradigm for organizations. After surveying both traditional and

contemporary management models, this chapter provides an overview of a Person-Centered

Approach to employee management. In this, it follows an analysis of Labourer Valued Management

1 Humanistic conceptions are related to that which shows strong concerns for human values, dignity and welfare

where every individual is treated with respect, affirming human freedom and progress. These are ethical

stances emphasizing the individual and collective value and agency of human beings preferring a critical and

analytic thinking. Economic conceptions relate dominance of economic factors, causes and effects over all

other factors in society. Societal factors like culture and nationality are reduced to simplistic economic terms

aiming to mere material standards of living. In a business context, the humanistic perspective serves

individual well-being and the common good, while the economic paradigm focuses on profit maximization.

The humanistic approach includes profits and the development of the organization. However, profit alone

motivation of economistic approach has to be altered to a humanistic understanding of management in which

benefits are valued in terms of well-being of all persons concerned. So, here we look for a fundamental

conceptual shift in workplace management. Hence, we juxtapose the emerging humanistic paradigm with the

traditional economistic paradigm of workplace management. Cf., Michael Pirson, Anuj Gangahar and Fiona

Wilson, “Humanistic and Economistic Approaches to Banking: Better Banking Lessons from the Financial

Crisis,” Business Ethics: A European Review 25, no. 4 (2016): 400-415. 2 Domènec Melé, Business Ethics in Action: Seeking Human Excellence in Organizations (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2009), xvi. 3 Melé, Business Ethics in Action, xvii.

A Person-Centered Managerial Paradigm for the Workplace

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(LVM) as an integrative ethical alternative in the context of workplace and surveillance ethics.

Finally, it identifies self-monitoring as a human development approach to workplace behaviour able

to complement person-centered, labourer-valued management. An integrated review of a personalist

management paradigm of Domènec Melé will help us embark on the ethical discussion of a

humanistic or person-centered approach to workplace surveillance studies. We begin this discussion

by considering and assessing both historical and contemporary theories of workplace management.

7.1 HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY MANAGEMENT THEORIES AND MODELS

Given the growing ubiquity of monitoring, with its socio-economic, physical, psychological, and

ethical effects on employees and long-term adverse alterations in employee behaviour, we require a

paradigm that protects the right of both individuals and management and avoids any kind of

discrimination and unequal power distances. Therefore, in the following, after introducing the

traditional and contemporary management models, we propose a more viable and significant model

for the workplace. The terms labour or workforce management refer to the practice whereby

“management controls the result by organizing and harmonizing the workforce, keeping the other

aspects of business in parallel, and the objective of the business in centre [...] maintaining a

productive workforce to optimize the productivity.”4 It aims to allocate ‘just the right’ labour talents

and numbers of workers in an organization, to meet all requirements and schedules, to minimize

costs and to maximize productivity-performances and services. It also refers to the effort to

effectively handle the complications and challenges of the workplace and any disputes with the

workforce, keeping in mind the various objectives of the particular organization. Any management

model will revolve around the relationship between situations, actions and outcomes and looks for a

division of labour, effective cooperation, and an increase in the productive powers and skills of

labour. It enables the sustenance of the organization and thus the well-being of all concerned. We

may now illustrate, in a nutshell, a few evolving theories of and approaches to employee

management.

7.1.1 Evolving Theories of and Approaches to Management

Management is defined in general as “the art, or science, of achieving goals through people [...] to

ensure greater productivity or [...] continuous improvement [...] that derives its importance from the

need for strategic planning, co-ordination, directing and controlling of large and complex decision-

making process.”5 According to Andrew J. DuBrin, management is “the process of using

organizational resources to achieve organizational objectives through planning, organizing and

staffing, leading and controlling.”6 Yasin Olum illustrates the threefold objectives of management:

(1) ensuring that organizational goals and targets are met, at the lowest cost and with minimum waste;

(2) looking after the health and welfare and safety of staff; and (3) protecting the machinery and

resources of organization, including human resources.7 Therefore, in the most positive sense of the

word, management is a dynamic and life-giving element that aims to ensure the generation,

sustenance and growth of a business and the well-being of all concerned. Yet the definition of

4 Arun Kumar and Priyadarshani Singh, “Principles and Practices of Workplace Management in Information

Age,” International Journal of Advanced Research in Management and Social Science 3, no. 4 (2014): 23. 5 Yasin Olum, “Modern Management Theories and Practices,” Paper presented at the 15th East African Central

Banking Course, held on 12th July 2004, at Kenya School of Monetary Studies, 2004, 2. According to Olum,

management, in its expanded form, includes “planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling” and

possesses the competence and effectiveness in the areas of “problem solving, administration, human resource

management, and organizational leadership.” Olum, “Modern Management Theories and Practices,” 2. 6 Andrew J DuBrin, Essentials of Management, 9th ed. (Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning, 2012),

2. 7 Olum, “Modern Management Theories and Practices,” 3.


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management does not always endorse this positive meaning. Contemporary models of management

consist of several theories from different schools of thought. Benjamin James Inyang states that

“management theory provides the basis for management practice, and the practice in turn helps to

reinforce the development of management theory. Management practice therefore involves the

translation of existing management knowledge and theories into action that will result in the

achievement of the dual goals of organizational efficiency and effectiveness.”8 Management theories

are broadly classified into different categories that have undergone a rapid revolution in the twentieth

century and are invariably adapted and integrated in different situations in organizational work

scenarios and management processes.

Though the history of management goes back several thousand years, we may here consider its

development starting from the 19th century, around the time that management came to be regarded

as a formal discipline.9 Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) developed the Scientific Management

Theory –later called Taylorism – that analyses workflows and tries to improve labour productivity

and economic efficiency through the development of a true science, scientific selection, education,

the development of workers, and close cooperation between workers and management.10 Taylor’s

idea that there is ‘one best way’ in management theory reflects his scientific effort to replace ‘rule-

of-thumb’ work methods with an empirically grounded theory.11 Accordingly, the methods of

observation, data gathering, and careful measurement he called for enable each organization to

determine the ‘one best way’ to perform each job. This caused what came to be called a production

“miracle,” as it made it possible to produce finished products much more quickly. However, Taylor’s

theory and its practice was also widely being criticized, being accused of dehumanizing workers.12

Working harder and faster than normal and the undue pressures the places on employees both

exhausts them physically and, in a different sense, exhausts the work to be done, triggering layoffs.

In the same way, the emphasis on productivity and profit led to the unjust exploitation of employees.

Taylor’s approach has also been criticised for placing impersonal efficiency above human needs.

The so-called Classical Organizational Theory arose in reaction to the Scientific Management

Theory of Taylor and others. Founding contributions to this theory include the Administrative

Management Model of Henri Fayol (1841-1925), known as fayolism, and the Bureaucratic Theory

of Max Weber (1864-1920). Henri Fayol prefers management principles to personal traits and defines

management as a continuous process of evaluation.13 In his view, any organization should be

designed with a formalized administrative structure, which often is hierarchical in nature and should

8 Benjamin James Inyang, “The Challenges of Evolving and Developing Management Indigenous Theories

and Practices in Africa,” International Journal of Business and Management 3, no. 12 (2008): 124. 9 Richard M. Hodgetts and Steven Altman, “History of Management Thought,” in Management Handbook:

Operating Guidelines, Techniques and Practices, ed. Paul Mali (New York: John Wiley, 1981), 4-5. 10 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers

Publishers), 130. See also reprinted version, Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific

Management (London: Forgotten Books, 2015). Taylorism is largely criticised for dehumanizing the workers

by the process of making him/her like auto-man or machine. Carl Mitcham, ed., “Management,” Encyclopedia

of Science, Technology and Ethics, vol. 3 (Detroit; Thomson & Gale, 2005), 1152-1153. 11 Mitcham, “Management,” 1153. 12 The scientific management theory and its approach seems to work well for organizations disregarding the

human aspects of employees and work with assembly lines and other mechanistic, routinized pattern of

activities. 13 Henry Fayol wrote a monograph in French in 1916 titled “General and Industrial Administration”

(Administration Industrielle et Générale), which was translated later by Constance Storrs. See for instance,

Henri Fayol, General and Industrial Management, trans. Constance Storrs (Eastford, CT: Martino Publishing,

reprint 2013).


290

possess a clear division of labour strategies to achieve organizational goals.14 He illustrates a set of

management roles that includes the process of planning, organizing, command, coordination, and

control, and continues by outlining fourteen principles of management that enable both managers

and workers to conduct their affairs more effectively.15 Similarly, Max Weber regards bureaucracy

as an ideal form of organizational structure. In his view, good administration is the exercise of control

through knowledge and shows that rational authority (which is impersonal) is more efficient that

personal authority in organizational management.16 Therefore, along with the hierarchy of authority

and skilled and qualified labour hiring, standardized procedures and well-defined job roles with

meticulous record-keeping are the key features of effective management.17 Weber states that dividing

organizations into hierarchies will establish strong lines of authority and control. This process has

also been criticized, however, for being too focused on administrative requirements, leading to

unpleasant experiences and in the end even inefficient operations. The impersonal machine-like

treatment of employees and harsh dependence on rules and policies make employees feel

dehumanized and distrusted. Consequently, employees avoid taking risks and refrain from pro-

organizational behaviours, leading to indifference and diminished workplace performance.

Discussions about management in the twentieth century raised concerns about the interactions and

motivations of individuals in organizations and gave rise to the Behavioural Theory. This theory

gives due importance to human relations in management. The importance of human interactions in

workplace management was proposed by social scientist Elton Mayo18 (1880-1949), the hierarchical

need-based analysis of management by behavioural psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970),

and the two theory (Theory X and Theory Y) perspective of human behaviour by Douglas McGregor

(1906-1970). All these views acknowledge and illustrate the need to manage human behaviour and

relations in the organization.19 In fact, these theorists introduce the idea of an organizational

humanism. Nell Tabor Hartley, referring to McGregor, explains Theory X as representing the

common assumptions of management that “people work only under conditions of external coercion

14 Michael J. Fells, “Fayol Stands the Test of Time,” Journal of Management History 6, no. 8 (2000): 345-347.

See also Ziarab Mahamood, Muhammad Basharat and Zahid Bashir, “Review of Classical Management

Theories,” International Journal of Social Sciences and Education 2, no. 1 (2012): 512-522. 15 Mitcham, “Management,” 1151; Fells, “Fayol Stands the Test of Time,” 355-357. These principles include

division of work, delegation of authority, discipline, chain of commands, congenial workplace, interrelation

between individual interests and common organizational goals, compensation package, centralization, scalar

chains (hierarchical chain of command), order, equity, job guarantee, initiatives, and team spirit. Fells, “Fayol

Stands the Test of Time,” 355-357. 16 Mücahit Celik and Edip Dogan, “A Theoretical Approach to the Science of Management,” International

Journal of Humanities and Social Science 1, no. 3 (2011): 67; Ziarab Mahamood, Muhammad Basharat and

Zahid Bashir, “Review of Classical Management Theories,” International Journal of Social Sciences and

Education 2, no. 1 (2012): 512-522. See also for further details, Max Weber, The Theory of Social and

Economic Organization, trans. A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (London: Collier Macmillan Publishers,

[originally in 1921] 1947); Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A.M.

Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: The Free Press, 2012), 324-406. 17 Lea Terry, “The Management Theory of Max Weber: Use the Bureaucratic Management Theory to Increase

Efficiency,” 2011, http://www.business.com/management/management-theory-of-max-weber/ [accessed

March 10, 2016]. 18 Elton Mayo is known as the father of the human relations movement. He believed in the interrelationships

among members of an organization and the role of the management to keep that relationship alive to achieve

organization’s goals and objectives. 19 Mitcham, “Management,” 1152. Ryszard Barnat, “Strategic Management: Formulation and

Implementation,” http://www.introduction-to-management.24xls.com/en127 [accessed March 12, 2016].

Reacting to the rather dehumanizing effects of Taylorism, individuals and their unique capabilities have

received major attention in the organization leading to the creation of the idea of human resource

management. Theory X, assuming most employees as basically immature, incapable of taking responsibility,

gives a negative view of employee behaviour and management, while Theory Y acknowledges that employees

seek or self-fulfilment and self-development at work.


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and control” and Theory Y as representing the more positive view that “workers instinctively want

to contribute” (a behaviourist view) to the goals of the organization.20 The five-tiered hierarchy of

needs introduced by Maslow states that a variety of needs motivate individuals. The needs identified

in his schema are arranged in a graded order from lower-level physiological needs to higher-level

needs for self-actualization.21 Physiological needs have to be met first in order to reasonably satisfy

higher-level needs. These theories emphasize basic and functional human needs, individual or group

behaviour, and intra/inter-human relations, and calls for a participatory approach to management.22

It maintains that employees will be ultimately unresponsive to a controlling style of management.

These theories give importance to the social needs of employees, including the need for interpersonal

relationships. However, a question always remains: are employees coming to work to seek affection,

or affiliation? Management, on this theory, must seek to recognize individual needs and social

satisfactions as well as organizational objectives, strive to understand the human aspects of workers,

and treat them accordingly.

7.1.2 Recent Developments in Management Approaches

Recently, a plethora of new management theories and models have emerged, including the systems

approach, contingency theory, team building theory, lean management, etc.23 The systems approach,

being a synthesis and integration of different theories, functions in organizational management by

emphasizing the need for systems to adapt to contextual and circumstantial changes and to

interrelated subsystems.24 This means that, in workplace management, a systems approach “provides

a framework for visualizing internal and external environmental factors as an integrated whole.”25 It

is in this sense an interdisciplinary study of organizational systems, in which a man-made or natural

cohesive interrelation of mutually dependent parts of organizations is expected and experienced.

Another paradigm in recent management trends is the contingency approach, also called situational

theory, that in particular situations, devoid of certain principles, relies on the evaluation of an

experienced manager.26 According to Fred Luthans, “[t]he contingency approach recognizes the

complexity involved in managing modern organizations but uses patterns of relationships and/or

configurations of subsystems in order to facilitate improved practice.”27 Contingency theory aims to

consider all aspects of the current situation and to act in light of those when a decision needs to be

taken. Thus, it argues that “the most effective management concept or technique depends on the set

20 Nell Tabor Hartley, “Management History: An Umbrella Model,” Journal of Management History 12, no. 3

(2006): 281. 21 Wolfgang Pindur, Sandra E. Rogers and Pan Suk Kim, “The History of Management: A Global Perspective,”

Journal of Management History 1, no. 1 (1995): 65. 22 The development and application of behavioural sciences indeed enabled a deep understanding of the needs

and wants of workers and the means by which these could be better aligned with that of organization. 23 Olum, “Modern Management Theories and Practices,”11-21. 24 Olum, “Modern Management Theories and Practices,” 17. According to Cristina Mele et al. “systems theory

is an interdisciplinary theory about every system in nature, in society and in many scientific domains as well

as a framework with which we can investigate phenomena from a holistic approach.” Christina Mele,

Jacqueline Pels and Francesco Polese, “A Brief Review of Systems Theories and Their Managerial

Applications,” Service Science 2, no. 1/2 (2010): 126. In the same way, an “organization is considered as a

system having integrated parts that must be coordinated for efficiency and effectiveness.” Cornell C. Chikere

and Jude Nwoka, “The Systems Theory of Management in Modern Day Organizations: A Study of Aldgate

Congress Resort Limited Port Harcourt,” International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications 5, no.

9 (2015): 1. 25 Richard A. Johnson, Fremont E. Kast and James E. Rosenzweig, “Systems Theory and Management,”

Management Science 10, no.2 (1964): 367. 26 Olum, “Modern Management Theories and Practices,” 18. 27 Fred Luthans, “The Contingency Theory of Management: A Path Out of the Jungle,” Business Horizons 16,

no 3 (1973): 70.


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of circumstances at a particular point in time.”28 The key feature of this approach is the situation at

hand. This theory focuses primarily on the situation here and now. So, according to the contingency

approach, any management process can be said to be situational in nature, as all depend on the

complexity of situations. In this way, this theory takes into consideration the multivariate nature of

organizational workplaces.

In this line, the team building approach relies on teamwork and emphasizes the levelling of

hierarchies or pyramidal management models.29 Team building is defined as “the process of taking

a collection of individuals with different needs, backgrounds, and expertise and transforming them

into an integrated, effective work unit.”30 According to a recent study by Matteo Gaeta and Rocco

Palumbo, team building “consists of an in-depth analysis of the way organizational tasks and

responsibilities are assigned, involving the thorough examination of team processes.”31 This

integration balances individual and organizational needs32 and is said to help merge individual

contributions with the objectives of the organization and support each other’s goals. Lean

management is a recent method of organizational management that identifies and clarifies what

values play a role in workplace processes. It is a management method that adapts to the different

situations of organizational and market conditions through functional alternations.33 It seeks

continuous improvements and excellence in the organization by altering the behaviour of its members

to improve efficiency and quality. It also “concentrates on professional training and shaping the

staff’s attitudes as well as maintaining positive public relation.”34 Lean management applies

scientific methods of experimentation and observation to processes and systems in order to achieve

needed improvements in organizations. It respects people who are “on-the-spot,” including both

customers and employees, and promotes a culture of teamwork and shared responsibility in the

workplace.35 Thus, it demonstrates great concern for managing human resources by providing good

atmosphere (one that is employee supportive), proper communication, and appropriate motivation in

the workplace. These are just a few of the management theories and models that have been developed

in recent years, in view of the many contextual differences and complexities that mark modern

management situations.

28 Fred Luthans and Todd I. Stewart, “A General Contingency Theory of Management,” The Academy of

Management Review 2, no. 2 (1977): 182. 29 Olum, “Modern Management Theories and Practices,” 19. 30 Hans J. Thamhain and David L. Wilemon, “Building High Performing Engineering Project Teams,” IEEE

Transactions on Engineering Management 34, no. 3 (1987): 130. Cf., Matteo Gaeta and Rocco Palumbo,

“Comparing two Approaches to Team Building: A Performance Measurement Evaluation,” Team

Performance Management: An International Journal 23, no. 7/8 (2017): 334. Team building, according to

Thmhain and Wilemon, often “determines the performance and success of multidisciplinary efforts” in the

organization. Thamhain and Wilemon, “Building High Performing Engineering Project Teams,” 130. 31 Gaeta and Palumbo, “Comparing two Approaches to Team Building,” 334. 32 Gaeta and Palumbo, “Comparing two Approaches to Team Building,” 334. 33 Łukasz Dekier, “The Origins and Evolution of Lean Management System,” Journal of International Studies

5, no 1 (2012): 49. The roots of Lean comes from the Japanese company of Toyota and thus lean management

is a successor of both Toyota Production System and Lean Manufacturing. 34 Dekier, “The Origins and Evolution of Lean Management System,” 49. 35 Marcela Urteaga, “Lean Management: A Socio-Technical Systems Approach to Change,” STS Roundtable,

Sociotechnical Systems Roundtable Inc., March 16, 2014. http://stsroundtable.com/2014/03/16/lean-

management-a-socio-technical-systems-approach-to-change/ [accessed March 5, 2018].


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7.1.3 The Sociotechnical and Personalist Expanse of Management

Two ideal-typical reactions have driven the search for a new management model, namely the social

and the technological.36 The social reaction, as Lyon observes, consists of two distinct views in the

context of workplace surveillance: the liberal and the Luddite.37. The liberal view argues that since

the adaptation to the information society and consequent increased use of technology in the

workplace are the outcome of an informed democratic process, the development of information

technology and its wide uses are organizationally and socially appropriate and beneficial. Likewise,

the importance this view gives to individual choice and democratic decision-making “is a vital

antidote both to any technological determinism which forecasts that future society will be determined

by new technologies and to any economic determinism that sticks to class relation in any analysis

concerning techno-social phenomena.”38 However, within the context of an organizational

workplace, liberal views seem to favor the neutral capacity of technology and thus have been subject

to criticism. They have been criticized for having a ‘naturalization effect’ – “the display of a natural

attitude that takes surveillant ways of life for granted” – in new digitalized circumstances of the

workplace, where employees are “being colonized by empowering digital ideology.”39 Lyon also, in

this regard, warns about the anti-social potential of IT applications40 that adversely affect

employment relationships. The Luddite perspective, by contrast, goes against the ‘technological

neutrality’ of liberals, holding that any new technologies express new “values and priorities.”

According to the Luddite view, neutrality favoritism takes the side of the “hidden interests of the

dominant group” and overlooks the technological determinism functioning behind it.41 It also

highlights the possibility of manipulation by the ruling class in the context of organizational

surveillance.

Technological reactions focus on the need for Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) in the

workplace.42 PETs refer to “coherent systems of information and communication technologies that

strengthen the protection of individuals’ private life in an information system by preventing

unnecessary or unlawful processing of personal data or by offering tools and controls to enhance the

individual’s control over his/her personal data.”43 Explaining this a bit further, Günter Schumacher

quotes G.W. Van Blarkom et al. that PETs provide “a system of ICT measures protecting

informational privacy by eliminating or minimising personal data thereby preventing unnecessary or

unwanted processing of personal data, without the loss of the functionality of the information

system.”44 Thus, the notion of PETs is basically a technical concept used organizationally to refer to

36 Mun-Cho Kim, “Surveillance Technology, Privacy and Social Control: With Reference to the Case of the

Electronic National Identification Card in South Korea,” International Society 19, no. 2 (2004): 210. 37 David Lyon, “The Roots of the Information Society Idea,” in Information Technology and Society: A Reader,

eds. Nick Heap, Ray Thomas, Geoff Einon, Robin Mason, Hugh Mackay,52–73 (London: Sage, 1995), 69-

70. 38 Kim, “Surveillance Technology, Privacy and Social Control,” 211. 39 Kim, “Surveillance Technology, Privacy and Social Control,” 211. 40 Lyon, “The Roots of the Information Society Idea,” 69. 41 Kim, “Surveillance Technology, Privacy and Social Control,” 210; Lyon, “The Roots of the Information

Society Idea,” 70. 42 Seda Gürses and Jose M. del Alamo, “Privacy Engineering: Shaping an Emerging Field of Research and

Practice,” IEEE Security & Privacy 14, no. 2 (2016): 42. 43 Faye Fangfei Wang, “Consumer Privacy Protection in the European Union: Legislative Reform driven by

Current Technological Challenges,” in Privacy Protection Measures and Technologies in Business

Organizations: Aspects and Standards, ed. George O.M. Yee, 331-349 (Hershey, PA: Information Science

Reference, 2012), 349. 44 Günter Schumacher, “Behavioural Biometrics: Emerging Trends and Ethical Risks,” in Second Generation

Biometrics: The Ethical, Legal and Social Context, eds. Emilio Mordni and Dimitros Tzovaras, 215-228


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the aim to protect personal identity and data related to a human being.45 Within the context of

surveillance in the workplace, the adoption of PETs is said to improve user confidence by reducing

the unnecessary collection, use, disclosure, or retention of personal data and by empowering

employees to manage their personal data and thus ensure security, confidence and trust.

Colin J. Bennett and Charles E. Raab, in their work The Governance of Privacy: Policy Instruments

in Global Perspective, distinguish two categories of PETs: substitute and complementary. The

former reduces the presence of information in the system, for instance by using encrypted e-mails,

and the latter tries to minimize potential harm of data already in the system, for instance by appeal

to legal principles.46 In this regard, a report submitted to the European Commission in 2010 by

London Economics points out that “to qualify as PETs, technologies have to reduce the risk of

contravening privacy principles and legislation, minimise the amount of personal data being held,

and/or give individuals control over information about them that is being held.”47 The subjective

expectation of privacy is thus ensured for all data subjects as well as data collectors and users.

Similarly, another expected outcome of PETs is increased organizational transparency and a resultant

increase in interpersonal trust. However, though PETs may improve data analysis and processing

practices and thus increase data protection, Schumacher rightly observes that its main “focus is on

static data like name, address, payment credential etc. and does not include any information on [the]

dynamic behaviour”48 of employees and others in the workplace. Another weak point of PETs is that

in order to work well, technological elements of both the user and the service provider have to be

introduced prior to its function.49 This shows that, although PETs are generally perceived as

integrated privacy systems, the conditions needed to guarantee their functioning without revealing

the identity of users are hard to achieve.

The above discussed theories and approaches reveal that no single managerial strategy can be

effectively applied to all situations at all times in organizations. It has to be noted that a few

researchers, like West and Bowman, emphasize that the phenomenon of electronic monitoring is

socially constructed, as technology will both constructively and destructively pursue the ends of its

application.50 Despite there being constant factors across contexts, specific features of the culture in

question will always do much to shape the problems face, and thus addressing these problems will

always depend on the particulars of the given context. Any management model needs to consider

these contextual factors. According to Vorvoreanu and Carl H. Botan, “[t]he experiences of being

surveilled acquires meaning as it is lived and interpreted by people in their organizational context.

Depending on the nature of this social construction, electronic surveillance can be perceived as a

more or less negative experience and can have varying effects.”51 John D. Bustard, in his analysis of

(Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), 224. Cf., G.W. Van Blarkom et al., Handbook of Privacy and Privacy-

Enhancing Technologies (The Hague: College Beschermign Persoonsgegevens, TNO-FEL, 2003). 45 Herman T. Tavani and James H. Moor, “Privacy Protection, Control of Information, and Privacy-Enhancing

Technologies,” Computers and Society 31, no. 1 (2001): 9. 46 Colin J. Bennett and Charles E. Raab, The Governance of Privacy: Policy Instruments in Global Perspective

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 177-202. 47 London Economics, “Study on the Economic Benefits of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs),” Report

to the European Commission, DG Justice, Freedom and Society, 2010, 7. Cf.

http://ec.europa.eu/justice/policies/privacy/docs/studies/final_report_pets_16_07_10_en.pdf [accessed by

December 10, 2017]. 48 Schumacher, “Behavioural Biometrics: Emerging Trends and Ethical Risks,” 224. 49 Schumacher, “Behavioural Biometrics: Emerging Trends and Ethical Risks,” 224. 50 West and James S. Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 629. Cf. E. Schmidt

and J. Cohen, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business (New York:

Knopf, 2013). 51 Michaela Vorvoreanu and Carl H. Botan, “Examining Electronic Surveillance in the Workplace: A Review

of Theoretical Perspectives and Research Findings,” Paper Presented to the Conference of the International


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the ethical issues surrounding workplace monitoring, emphasizes debates about privacy. Firstly, he

justifies “obvious” monitoring and argues that secret monitoring is indubitably morally wrong;

secondly, he justifies monitoring of commercial aspects that leave out the personal lives of

employees.52 However, our research shows that this discussion cannot be a starting point for

maintaining an equilibrium of employee concerns in surveillance contexts, as the discussion goes

beyond the realm of mere privacy, reaching to the broader categories of power distance and social

sorting and thus raising concerns about social justice. In the same way, the recommended strategies

of workplace monitoring, such as: “significant business justifications, obtaining employee consent,

posting notices, training monitors to focus on job-related behaviours, and surveying workforce

morale,”53 are seldom able to provide an adequate response to this invasive practice.

It is difficult to choose a single theory or approach from among this jungle of options or to synthesise

them into an alternative method. Both employers and employees have different views and motives,

which vary between organizations. These motives change as they are exposed to various experiences

in the workplace. This situation makes it necessary for managers to look for different strategies at

different times and in different situations with different persons. Apart from the rational economic

view and mechanized concentration on employees, our discussion must include the complex

employee perspective in order to make clear employees, as human beings with self-worth and self-

actualization and having different perspectives, aspirations, potentials and needs, cannot be managed

like the other resources an organization may have.54 It is therefore crucial that employees be

approached from a human perspective rather than an economic or technocratic perspective. A

humanistic perspective with a person-centered approach will provide a significant contribution to the

effort to navigate the complexities of individual and organizational management.

From employees’ perspectives and experiences, as our empirical study and some of our other

previous considerations have shown, external surveillance practices are not effective ways to increase

productivity or workplace efficiency. Allowing for employee autonomy and freedom, by contrast,

combined with self-control and responsibility, has clear benefits in any working environment.55 So,

what is needed is a management approach that exhibits genuine human concern. This also leads to

person-centered thinking, grounded within the value framework of the rights and interests of both

the individual (dignity, autonomy, freedom, independence, choice) and of society (coproduction,

cooperation, respect for the other, common good).56 Person-centered thinking focuses on individuals

or persons as the unit of analysis for moral judgments, rather than on acts. Rosenblat et al. observe

Communication Association, Acapulco, Mexico, 2000, 24-25. Cf. Eileen M. Otis and Zheng Zhao,

“Producing Invisibility,” in Invisible Labour: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World, eds. Marion Crain,

Winifred R. Poster and Miriam A. Cherry, 148-169 (California: University of California, 2016), 151. 52 John D. Bustard, “Ethical Issues Surrounding the Asymmetric Nature of Workplace Monitoring,” in Human

Aspects of Information Security, Privacy and Trust, eds. Theo Tryfonas and Ioannis Askoxylakis, 226-235

(Berlin: Springer, 2013), 233. 53 West and Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 645. 54 Abdelkarim Kitana, “Overview of the Managerial Thoughts and Theories from the History: Classical

Management Theory to Modern Management Theory,” Indian Journal of Management Science 6, no.1

(2016): 20. 55 Steve Lohr, “Workplace Surveillance and the ‘Transparency Paradox,’” The New York Times, June 21, 2014.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/workplace-surveillance-andthe-transparency-paradox/ [accessed

December 05, 2017]; Steve Lohr, “Unblinking Eyes Track Employees: Workplace Surveillance Sees Good

and Bad,” The New York Times, June 22, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/technology/workplace-

surveillance-sees-goodand-bad.html [accessed December 05, 2017]; and Arne L. Kalleberg, Good Jobs, Bad

Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s-2000s (New

York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011). 56 Helen Sanderson and Jaimee Lewis, A Practical Guide to Delivering Personalisation; Person-Centred

Practice in Health and Social Care (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2012), 24.


296

in this regard that “[s]ometimes the absence of surveillance can be just as rewarding as a system that

uses employee monitoring to identify and reward workers based on how that system scores their

performance.”57 The need to give employees a significant place, valuing their dignity as human

persons, is widely recognized. This marks the significance of a humanistic perspective in workplace

surveillance ethics. Complementing various other approaches to humanistic management, such as

those centered on human motivations and organizational culture, Melé presents a new, emerging

approach that regards an organization as a real community of persons.58 This consideration will be

explored and described extensively in the final section.

Person-centered management, as part of a humanistic approach and as noted by Melé, can be defined

either as a concept of management that “emphasizes the human condition and is oriented to the

development of human virtue, in all its forms, to its fullest extent,”59 or as “fundamentally a concept

of management that upholds the unconditional human dignity of every woman and man within an

economic context.”60 Whatever perspective one takes, the human person in his or her entirety has

been given importance here. This approach in fact “emphasizes the significance, uniqueness and

inviolability of the person, as well as the person’s essentially relational or communitarian

dimension.”61 It takes shape as a reaction against several socio-political and technological tendencies

to treat the human being simply as an object, a means, and not an end. As a perspective, the person-

centered approach reacts against the reductionistic tendencies of materialistic ideologies and affirms

the centrality of the person, valuing his or her subjectivity, autonomy, dignity and participation and

solidarity in a community.62 We choose to focus on the person-centered approach here because it

better understands employees where they are, including in terms of their needs and wants, rights and

duties, job satisfaction and commitment, relationships with others, individual well-being and

organizational development. This type of person-centered strategy and management processes thus

has implications for both individual and organizational well-being and can help us to understand the

situation of employees who are sidelined from mainstream consideration.

7.1.4 Purposeful Organization and Sustainable Human Resource Management

An organization undergoes a transformative change when it moves from seeing itself as a machine

to seeing itself as a living system – “organization-as-living-system.”63 This transformation can be a

starting point for adopting a person-centred approach in an organization.64 The purposeful

57 Alex Rosenblat, Tamra Kneese and Danah Boyd, “Workplace Surveillance,” Open Society Foundations’

Future of Work Commissioned Research Papers (New York, Data & Society Research Institute, 2014), 12. 58 Domènec Melé, “The Challenge of Humanistic Management,” Journal of Business Ethics 44, no. 1 (2003):

77-88. 59 Melé, “The Challenge of Humanistic Management,” 79. Cf. Alma Acevedo, “Personalist Business Ethics

and Humanistic Management: Insights from Jacques Maritain,” Journal of Business Ethics 105, no. 2 (2012):

199. 60 Heiko Spitzeck, “An Integrated Model of Humanistic Management,” Journal of Business Ethics 99, no. 1

(2011): 51. Cf. Acevedo, “Personalist Business Ethics and Humanistic Management,” 199. 61 Acevedo, “Personalist Business Ethics and Humanistic Management,” 202. Cf., J. Thomas Whetstone,

“Personalism and Moral Leadership: The Servant Leader with a transforming Vision,” Business Ethics: A

European Review 11, no. 4 (2002): 385-392. 62 Whetstone, “Personalism and Moral Leadership,” 385-386. 63 Giles Hutchins, “5 Ways to Transform Your Organization into a Purposeful Living System,” Leadership,

August 26, 2016, https://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/leadership/giles_hutchins/5_

ways_transform_your_organization_purposeful_living_system [accessed October 20, 2018]. 64 It represents a change from “mechanistic linearity of command-and-control cultures and ‘human resorce’

management [... to] a more human approach to our way of working.” Hutchins, “5 Ways to Transform Your

Organization into a Purposeful Living System,” Leadership, August 26, 2016,


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organization model of Clive Wilson gives evidence of this. Wilson associates the design of a

purposeful organization with eight concepts: purpose, vision, engagement, structure, character,

results, success and talent.65 Through this model, he demonstrates the purpose of an organization’s

existence, which he maintains is context-driven, strategically anchored and stakeholder-driven.66 The

notion of purpose is increasingly used today, he writes, “to capture the amalgam of strategy, culture

change, and value creation required for 21st-century firms to thrive under today’s challenging

business conditions and institutional context.”67 This explains how management can deploy purpose

as a strategic anchor, and that this purpose includes a consideration of the needs of all stakeholders

within an organization.68 This moves an organization beyond the boundaries of the transactional

performance of a business or market system to a purpose-centred enterprise that releases the talent,

creativity and engagement of all involved. A purposeful organization promotes a moral self

(identity), a vision for its functioning, and an ethical approach to management, marked by a

commitment to all its stakeholders.69 For instance, Wilson here affirms that for any organization to

be successful, it must be purpose-driven – must give inspiring reasons for its existence, compelling

from the perspectives of all its stakeholders.

The notion of a purposeful organization is differently designated by Andrew White et al. as a

“purpose-led organization,” though it means the same.70 A purposeful organization also looks for the

structure of the organization, in which it is built and in which it moves.71 Along with this structure,

the character of the organization (its culture) and the character of the individuals within it

(employees) have important roles to play.72 The character of employees must be aligned with the

vision and purpose of the organization and has vital power in ensuring the achievement of the goals

of the organization. Since purposeful organization integrates its action with all stakeholders, it

provides opportunities for synergism or cooperation with each other as people become aware of one

another’s present and future capabilities.73 This model of a purposeful or purpose-led organization is

important in our discussion of a person-centered approach because it focuses on the purpose of the

organization and of the employees who work for the organization. Similarly, the notion of shared

purpose effects employees’ satisfaction, engagement and sustained performance and thus benefits

society as well.74 This helps us to see the organization through the lens of employees, in such a way

as to promote its better functioning. For the recognition of purpose at the individual level will

integrate into the organization’s purpose and aspires to effect a purposeful or purpose-led

transformation in organizational functions. The logic of purposeful organizations puts in question

the need for surveillance and strict monitoring, according to the underlying principle that employees

who are purpose-led and engaged better serve the organization through their responsible and

dedicated pro-organizational attitudes and behaviours. In all these ways, the institutional view of

https://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/leadership/giles_hutchins/5_ways_transform_your_or

ganization_purposeful_living_system [accessed October 20, 2018]. 65 Clive Wilson, Designing the Purposeful Organization: How to Inspire Business Performance Beyond

Boundaries (London: Kogan page Limited, 2015), 8-220. 66 Wilson, Designing the Purposeful Organization, 15-17. 67 Andrew White, Basak Yakis-Douglas, Heli Helanummi-Cole and Marc Ventresca, “Purpose-Led

Organization: “Saint Antony” Reflects on the Idea of Organizational Purpose, in Principle and Practice,”

Journal of Management Inquiry 26, no. 1 (2017): 101. 68 Wilson, Designing the Purposeful Organization, 16. 69 Wilson, Designing the Purposeful Organization, 2. 70 White et al., “Purpose-Led Organization: “Saint Antony” Reflects on the Idea of Organizational Purpose, in

Principle and Practice,” 101-107. 71 Wilson, Designing the Purposeful Organization, 89-112. 72 Wilson, Designing the Purposeful Organization, 117-144. 73 Mark Frohman and Perry Pascarella, “Managing Change: Creating the Purposeful Organization,” Industry

Week 229, no. 5 (1986): 46-47. 74 Wilson, Designing the Purposeful Organization, 11.


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person-centred approach accords with Wilson’s and White’s models of the purposeful or purpose-

led organization. And since organizations are comprised of individuals, their motivations and needs

must be respected when we talk about organizational purpose and culture.

This notion of a purposeful organization also includes “sustainable human resource management”

(Sustainable HRM), an inclusive approach to action recognising decisions in organizations affect the

lives of all persons concerned. Based on the ethical stance of human resource management, a growing

interest has been placed on various stakeholders in corporate-level issues, where the ethical treatment

of employees has taken the prime position along with the other two categories of financial

transparency and environmental protection.75 Sustainable HRM can be broadly defined as “the

adaption of HRM strategies and practices that enables the achievement of financial, social and

ecological goals, with an impact inside and outside of the organization and over a long-term time

horizon while controlling for unintended side effects and negative feedback.”76 A key part of this

definition is human sustainability in all its aspects. Sustainable HRM, as Ehnert et al. state, commits

to refraining from pursuing short-term cost-driven HRM practices that harm employees and their

families or communities.77 It also promotes proactive steps to develop mutually beneficial and

regenerative relationships between employees and different resource providers, and thus nurtures

employees as a longer-term investment to achieve greater functioning both for employees and the

organization.78 Sustainable HRM is thus a collaborative HR development “facilitating employee

participation, open communication, work roles, and performance evaluation focused on building

employee strengths and facilitating performance.”79 It also promotes trust between employees and

managers in a given situation.

Similarly, sustainable HRM seeks to achieve positive human or social outcomes by the

implementation of sustainable work systems, and thus facilitates employees’ work-life balance

without compromising performance.80 Likewise, researchers opine that “the aspect of humanity

should be brought back into the discussion about the future of HRM [... and] this will build a healthy

and effective organization.”81 Modern HRM views employees as a significant asset to the

organization and accords importance to employees’ needs, preferences and perspectives.82 This is an

important tenet of the person-centered perspective of the humanistic approach as well. Jeanette N.

Cleveland et al. argue that “we can improve organizational performance by investing in long-term,

developmental relationships with employees, as opposed to restricting the relationships to contractual

agreements where employees’ employment is counted in weeks or months and relationships are

75 Maria Järlström, Essi Saru and Sinikka Vanhala, “Sustainable Human Resource Management with Salience

of Stakeholders: A Top Management Perspective,” Journal of Business Ethics 152, no. 3 (2018): 703. 76 Ina Ehnert, Sepideh Parsa, Ian Roper, Marcus Wagner, and Michael Muller-Camen, “Reporting on

Sustainability and HRM: A Comparative Study of Sustainability Reporting Practices by the World’s Largest

Companies,” The International Journal of Human Resource Management 27, no. 1 (2016): 90. See also, Asta

Savaneviciene and Zivile Stankeviciute, “Smart Power as A Pathway for Employing Sustainable Human

Resource Management,” Inzinerine Ekonomika-Engineering Economics 28, no. 2 (2017): 198; Järlström,

Saru and Vanhala, “Sustainable Human Resource Management with Salience of Stakeholders,” 704. 77 Ehnert et al., “Reporting on Sustainability and HRM,” 90. 78 Ehnert et al., “Reporting on Sustainability and HRM,” 90. 79 Järlström, Saru and Vanhala, “Sustainable Human Resource Management with Salience of Stakeholders,”

705. 80 Järlström, Saru and Vanhala, “Sustainable Human Resource Management with Salience of Stakeholders,”

705. 81 Jeanette N. Cleveland, Zinta S. Byrne and T.M Cavanagh, “The Future of HR is RH: Respect for Humanity

at Work,” Human Resource Management Review 25, no. 2 (2015): 146-161; Järlström, Saru and Vanhala,

“Sustainable Human Resource Management with Salience of Stakeholders,” 706. 82 Cleveland, Byrne and Cavanagh, “The Future of HR is RH,” 146.


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“constrained by the explicit and economic language of the contract.”83 This shows how the very

nature of employee-organization relationship marks the difference in bringing human resource-based

view of organizational development. Cleveland et al., in this regard, show that organizations that are

committed to their employees secure the total commitment of employees as well – those who “invest

the most,” “get the most.”84 This view also runs against instrumental views that perceive employees

through the prism of usefulness. Thus, the individual is the core of the sustainable human resource

system.

In their research, Järlström, Saru and Vanhala identify four dimensions of sustainable HRM, namely:

“Justice and equality, transparent HR practices, profitability, and employee well-being.”85 The first

of these, justice and equality, concerns the ethical responsibilities of law-abiding and seeks

exemplary behaviour on the part of authorities, including the proper management of employment

relationships.86 This dimension also stresses diversity among employees and their equal treatment,

and thus gives a new meaning to sustainability consisting equality and appreciation among

employees. It is similar to the fair treatment we have already discussed. The second dimension

requires and demands transparent HR practices in “recruitment, resource allocation, competence

development, rewarding, [employee] participation, and flexibility practices.”87 Third, the

profitability dimension, looks for organizational effectiveness through the integration of HRM and

strategy, proactiveness in action, long-term thinking, etc., along with financial outcomes.88 What is

most important in our discussion is the final dimension: employee well-being. It promotes a

leadership style that cares for and supports employees, showing due respect. This dimension shows

that employees are not mere resources to be exploited, but assets to be developed.89 Employee well-

being here implies well-being, health-related thinking, physical and mental demands, safeguarding

work relationships with others and work-life balance. The sustainable HRM in the individual realm

of employees here promotes practices that foster the mental and physical health or well-being of

employees.90 All these show a shift toward an employee-centred perspective of people management.

Thus, both purposeful organization and sustainable HRM offer an institutional context of a person-

centred approach of employee management.

83 Cleveland, Byrne and Cavanagh, “The Future of HR is RH,” 150. 84 Cleveland, Byrne and Cavanagh, “The Future of HR is RH,” 150. One of the propositions of Cleveland et

al. make this point clear, that: “Organizations where HRM places a priority on the care of employees (by

using alternative approaches to workforce reduction or cutbacks during tough economic times), and attending

to the environmental sustainability of organizations (including green buildings that support the health of

employees) will retain more highly committed, engaged, and productive employees because their overall

health and well-being are secured — not just within themselves, but within their community and family

realm.” Cleveland, Byrne and Cavanagh, “The Future of HR is RH,” 150. 85 Järlström, Saru and Vanhala, “Sustainable Human Resource Management with Salience of Stakeholders,”


709. Cf. Michelle Greenwood, “Ethical Analyses of HRM: A Review and Research Agenda,” Journal of

Business Ethics 114, no. 2 (2013): 355-366. For Greenwood, the HRM is an “inherently ethical activity in

that its fundamental core is concerned with the treatment of humans.” Greenwood, “Ethical Analyses of

HRM: A Review and Research Agenda,” 355. 87 Järlström, Saru and Vanhala, “Sustainable Human Resource Management with Salience of Stakeholders,”

710. Cf. Ehnert et al., “Reporting on Sustainability and HRM,” 88-108. 88 Järlström, Saru and Vanhala, “Sustainable Human Resource Management with Salience of Stakeholders,”


712. Cf. Mick Marchington, “Human Resource Management (HRM): Too Busy Looking Up to See Where It

is Going Longer Term?” Human Resource Management Review 25, no. 2 (2015): 176-187. 90 Järlström, Saru and Vanhala, “Sustainable Human Resource Management with Salience of Stakeholders,”

713.


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7.2 LABOURER VALUED MANAGEMENT (LVM): AN INTEGRATIVE ETHICAL ALTERNATIVE

In organizations, a person-centered approach to management can help employees to define their role

and work toward a common goal without forsaking their individuality. It challenges behaviours that

perpetuate power distance, control and discrimination. It has already been discussed that surveillance

makes employees feel as though they are in an automated machine, like the panopticon or assembly

line. According to Rosenblat et al., “if de-skilling workers in the Taylorist management model leads

to resistance by workers who do not enjoy participating in automated efficiency systems, humanizing

their workplaces with space for privacy and discretion can encourage good workers to give their

labour and knowledge more willingly.”91 At this juncture, we will introduce a new strategic

management framework of workplace surveillance, namely “Labourer Valued Management”

(LVM), in an effort to reestablish ethical behavior in the workplace. LVM is a management strategy

that gives predominant consideration and value to employees’ dignity, rights, autonomy, and

freedom, consisting of equality, justice and fairness in treatment, and providing ample opportunities

to grow and develop. LVM integrates an interactive partnership model (employer-employee

partnership) with a life-centered ethic, shifting the debate over workplace surveillance from ‘auto

mode’ or ‘techno mode’ to ‘human mode.’ LVM can also be called the “Labourer-Value-Approach,”

since priority or importance is given to what is called value-oriented management, creating labourer-

value or employee-value in the organization. Thus, the aim of this approach is to increase the

employee value in each situation, including situations of workplace surveillance. Similarly, it is

important for any organization to pursue employee-friendly behavioural policies to avoid losses of

confidence and trust among employees.

7.2.1 LVM: Echoing Employees’ Dignity, Rights and Justice

The first principle of LVM is to value the dignity of employees in its entirety. For due to ubiquitous

surveillance practices in the workplace, which invade and intrude upon employees’ privacy,

autonomy and freedom, it is human dignity itself that is ultimately dishonored and degraded. Human

dignity is important also because the value given to work is determined by the very fact that a human

person does it, in order that a human purpose should be fulfilled. The term ‘dignity’ is defined as “a

personal sense of worth, value, respect, or esteem that is derived from one’s humanity and individual

social position; as well as being treated respectfully by others.”92 Recognising the fact that “all human

beings possess dignity in virtue of being human,” Timo Jütten argues that “living a dignified life

requires two forms of social recognition: respect and social esteem.”93 The notion of respect,

according to Jütten, “recognises the personhood of the individual subject and is equally owed to

every subject,” while the notion of “esteem recognises a particular quality of an individual subject

and is owed to all and only those subjects who possess the esteemed quality.”94 So social esteem is

in fact included as a part of the individual esteem, with regard to the dignity of human person.

Researchers show, in this regard, that by emphasizing human dignity, employees’ individual and

social rights are protected, while “making employees work under constant surveillance contravenes

human dignity and is not necessarily productive.”95 This means that a subjects’ human dignity, along

with other legitimate rights and interests, is the central theme of all general data protection

91 Rosenblat, Kneese and Boyd, “Workplace Surveillance,” 12. 92 Kristen Lucas, “Workplace Dignity: Communicating Inherent, Earned, and Remediated Dignity,” Journal

of Management Studies 52, no. 5 (2015): 622. 93 Timo Jütten, “Dignity, Esteem, and Social Contribution: A Recognition-Theoretical View,” The Journal of

Political Philosophy 25, no. 3 (2017): 259. 94 Jütten, “Dignity, Esteem, and Social Contribution,” 259. 95 Yohei Suda, “Monitoring E-mail of Employees in the Private Sector: A Comparison Between Western

Europe and the United States,” Washington University Global Studies Law Review 4, no. 2 (2005): 247.


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regulations and acts.96 Thus the dignity of human beings supports employees’ sense of self-worth

and helps them appreciate that their own existence and presence in the workplace has meaning and

value.

The notion of human dignity is the basis and foundation of all human rights and even the cornerstone

for constitutional acts and declarations on human rights in various contexts.97 For instance, the

preamble of UDHR states that the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and

inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace

in the world.”98 UDHR also affirms the equal dignity and rights of all human beings in its article 1,

and appeals to the concept of dignity in reference to social rights in articles 22 and 23.99 Willy Moka-

Mubelo quotes the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International

Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, affirming that the “recognition of the inherent

dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation

of freedom, justice and peace in the world, recognizing that these rights derive from the inherent

dignity of the human person.”100 Constitutional and federal laws and acts are in force in several

countries and in the constitutions of regional organizations that appeal to the idea of human dignity

to speak about fundamental human rights.101 In this way, the authentic value and preservation of

employee dignity and employee rights are salient features of LVM in the workplace, in particular in

the context of workplace surveillance.

Kirsten Lucas illustrates some of the theoretical foundations of workplace dignity, starting from its

distinct meanings as either inherent or earned. The former speaks of “an unconditional God-given

dignity” that one has as a “consequence of being human,” while the latter speaks of its “conditional

aspects,” gained through qualities and efforts or from instrumental contributions in workplace

contexts.102 The latter here seems to suggest that dignity is hierarchical in nature. However, Andrew

Brennan and Y. S. Lo argue that “the modern notion of dignity drops the hierarchical elements

implicit in the meaning of dignitas, and uses the term so that all human beings must have equal

dignity, regardless of their virtues, merits, actual social and political status, or any other contingent

features.”103 Brennan and Lo continue, observing that this notion of dignity also involves universal

96 Yuan Stevens and Joanna Bronowicka, “Workplace Surveillance: Is Our Privacy Protected at Work?” Centre

for Internet and Human Rights, December 2016. https://cihr.eu/workplace-surveillance-is-our-privacy-

protected-at-work/ [accessed December 15, 2017]. 97 Willy Moka-Mubelo, “Human Rights and Human Dignity,” in Reconciling Law and Morality in Human

Rights Discourse: Beyond the Habermasian Account of Human Rights, ed. Willy Moka-Mubelo (Cham:

Springer, 2017), 89-125. 98 United Nations General Assembly. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (Originally proclaimed on

December 10, 1948). Cf., United Nations, “Preamble,” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 2015,

1. http://www.un.org/en/udhrbook/pdf/udhr_booklet_en_web.pdf [accessed December 15, 2017]. Cf., Moka-

Mubelo, “Human Rights and Human Dignity,” 90. Hereafter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will

be referred as UDHR only with article umbers. 99 UDHR, 1, 22 and 23. Cf., Moka-Mubelo, “Human Rights and Human Dignity,” 90. 100 Moka-Mubelo, “Human Rights and Human Dignity,” 91. Cf. United Nations Human Rights Office of the

High Commissioner for Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,

http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr. aspx [accessed December 15, 017]. 101 Moka-Mubelo, “Human Rights and Human Dignity,” 91. 102 Lucas, “Workplace Dignity: Communicating Inherent, Earned, and Remediated Dignity,” 622-623. Cf.

Claus Dierksmeier, “Reorienting Management Education: From Homo Oeconomicus to Human Dignity,” in

Business Schools Under Fire: Humanistic Management Education as the Way Forward, eds. Wolfgang

Amann Michael Pirson, Claus Dierkmeier, Ernst von Kimakowitz, and Heiko Spitzeck (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2011), 19-40; Andrew Brennan and Y. S. Lo, “Two Conceptions of Dignity: Honour and Self-

Determination,” in Perspectives on Human Dignity: A Conversation, eds. Jeff Malapss and Norelle Lickiss

(Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 43-58. 103 Brennan and Lo, “Two Conceptions of Dignity: Honour and Self-Determination,” 47.


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human rights, and the intrinsic value or sanctity of human life: “These rights, and the associated

dignity, are no longer fragile, but are guaranteed to all who are born human.”104 Here dignity appears

as something democratic and egalitarian. Lucas states, concerning dignity, that it is “subjectively

experienced and judged” by individuals, and augmented by the application of “commonly-held

standards” of interaction to value the dignity of others along, with one’s own dignity.105 So, the

dignity that LVM looking for in the workplace is a dignity that is equal and guaranteed to all

employees and which is inherent in each human being.

The third argument Lucas makes concerns the normative expectations tied to dignity. He finds the

roots of this in Christian theology, Kantian philosophy and business ethics, all of which emphasise

moral imperatives. This leads to the fourth point concerning the nature of employment relationship

that is “frequently at odds with achieving dignity.”106 The difference between a Christian theology

of dignity and the view of Kantian philosophy is that the former alludes to God’s grace, while the

latter grounds dignity in humanity’s rational agency, autonomy and freedom.107 In this present

research, we understand human dignity to refer to both of these notions. The secular justification of

human dignity comes from the Kantian understanding of the “Categorical Imperative, according to

which everyone must be treated with respect.” According to Moka-Mubelo, this “is the best-known

non-religiously-based conception of dignity.”108 Moka-Mubelo quotes Kant and states that the

“subjective foundation of human morality consists of the dispositions of self-respect and respect for

others.”109 Human dignity is an expression of this morality. This approach matches quite well with

the understanding of human dignity and work in the Catholic tradition, which gives priority to the

subjective character of work over its objective character. We will explore this in what follows

through an analysis of Catholic Social Teaching and specifically of Laborem Exercens110 (On Human

104 Brennan and Lo, “Two Conceptions of Dignity: Honour and Self-Determination,” 47. Italics in the quote is

maintained as in the original source. 105 Lucas, “Workplace Dignity: Communicating Inherent, Earned, and Remediated Dignity,” 623. Cf. Man Yee

Karen Lee, “Universal human dignity: some reflections in the Asian context,” Asian Journal of Comparative

Law 3, no. 1 (2008): 283–313. 106 Lucas, “Workplace Dignity: Communicating Inherent, Earned, and Remediated Dignity,” 623. Cf.

Ferdinand Tablan, “Catholic Social Teachings: Toward a Meaningful Work,” Journal of Business Ethics 128

no. 2 (2015): 291-303; Andrew Brennan and Y. S. Lo, “Two Conceptions of Dignity: Honour and Self-

Determination,” in Perspectives on Human Dignity: A Conversation, eds. Jeff Malapss and Norelle Lickiss

(Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 43-58. 107 Brennan and Lo, “Two Conceptions of Dignity: Honour and Self-Determination,” 47. The religious

response is that “all human beings have an equal unconditional value which is: (a) Non-instrumental (i.e.

independent of their usefulness); (b) Intrinsic (i.e. dependent on their intrinsic qualities); and (c) Necessary”

(God’s unconditional love for all human beings). Replacing God with ‘ideal agents’ otherwise called fully

rational agents, Kant argues for human dignity as rational agents valuing it and thus “all human beings have

equal intrinsic and necessary value.” Brennan and Lo, “Two Conceptions of Dignity: Honour and Self-

Determination,” 8-49. 108 Moka-Mubelo, “Human Rights and Human Dignity,” 95. Cf. Emmanuel Kant, Groundwork for the

Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). As I

understand this Kantian categorical imperative is more or less in relation with the duty and it has various

ramifications. 109 Moka-Mubelo, “Human Rights and Human Dignity,” 96. Cf., Roger J. Sullivan, Immanuel Kant’s Moral

Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (originally in 1989) 1995), 193. 110 Laborem Exercens (LE) perceives the work as a fundamental dimension of human existence. It brings a

distinction between the objective and subjective dimensions of work and emphasises the deep connection

between work and personal dignity. The objective dimension of work considers the external result of the work

by way of product or service, by any worker, while the subjective dimension reflects the inner results of work

considering human dignity and fully becoming flourishing of one’s humanness. It looks for worker becoming

more of a human being and thus enforces the priority of labour over capital. Cf., John Paul II, “Laborem

Exercens,” AAS 73 (1981), http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-

ii_enc_14091981_laborem-exercens.html [accessed December 15, 2017].


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Work), the 1981 encyclical by Pope John Paul II, as this document situates work clearly within the

context of a personalist anthropology,111 giving importance to the dignity of the human person and

the subjective dimension of work. We also consider the relevance of the Catholic work ethic, with

its concern for human dignity and the subjective dimension of work in the context of organizational

surveillance.

However, before considering the dignity of workers from a Christian perspective, it will be helpful

to briefly consider the idea of the expectation of the meaningful work. For as we have seen from an

employee perspective, workplace surveillance can be a hurdle for meaningful work, job-satisfaction

and socialization. Ferdinand Tablan quoes James O’Toole and Edward Lawler, stateing that

employees today need a “meaningful employment and the opportunity to grow and develop as a

person.”112 This means that what employees expect from work is a feeling of being useful by

participation in a collective effort to work “in an environment that respects fairness and dignity.”113

This assessment of work with employees’ dignity is also considered a part of ethical human rights.114

Tablan, similarly, referring to Norman E. Bowie, writes that “providing meaningful work is one

possible and rather effective way for a firm to honour the requirement that it respects the humanity

of its employees […].”115 The notion of meaningful work has several constituent parts: for example,

the conventional subjective view of individual interests and the derivation of personal satisfaction

from the activity itself, as well as the objective-normative approach that refers to a telos or purpose

and what the work creates for individual and community; also, the notion of sensus or sense-making,

the intention and values of individuals who do the work; and finally the understanding of a fit between

a person and his or her job, with “a harmonious alignment between work and the individual’s goals,

values, temperament, and lifestyle.”116 From this it is clear that meaningful work actualizes human

potentials of autonomy, creativity and sociality.

Human dignity, or the intrinsic worth of every human being, is associated with varying criteria that,

on the one hand, it can be understood as being grounded in the faith-claim of that every human person

has been created in the imago Dei, the image of God, as emphasized especially in Catholic teachings.

On the other hand, in common language, it is associated with the human capacity to reason and

exercise autonomy, enabling freedom of choice and thus self-determination.117 In the 1961 encyclical

on Christianity and Social Progress, Mater et Magistra, Pope John XXIII, affirming that individual

human beings are “the foundation, the cause and the end of every social institution,” identifies human

dignity, “the sacred dignity of the individual,” as a basic principle of Catholic Social Teaching.118

Even the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (The Condition of Labour) by Pope Leo XIII observes the

111 Anton Stres, “Laborem Exercens and Human Work,” in Work as Key to the Social Question: The Great

Social and Economic Transformations and the Subjective Dimension of Work, Pontifical Council for Justice

and Peace, 23-29 (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2002), 23. 112 Tablan, “Catholic Social Teachings: Toward a Meaningful Work.” 291. Originally in: James O’Toole and

Edward E. Lawler III, The new American workplace (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 8. 113 Tablan, “Catholic Social Teachings: Toward a Meaningful Work.” 291. 114 Tablan, “Catholic Social Teachings: Toward a Meaningful Work.” 291. Cf. Al Gini, “Meaningful Work and

the Rights of the Worker: A Commentary on Rerum Novarum and Laborem Exercens,” Thought: Fordham

University Quarterly 67, no. 3 (1992): 226-239. 115 Tablan, “Catholic Social Teachings: Toward a Meaningful Work.” 291. Originally in: Norman E. Bowie,

Business Ethics: A Kantian Perspective (Malden: Blackwell, 1999), 70. 116 Tablan, “Catholic social teachings: toward a meaningful work.” 291-292. 117 Alejo José G. Sison, Ignacio Ferrero and Gregorio Guitián, “Human Dignity and the Dignity of Work:

Insights from Catholic Social Teaching,” Business Ethics Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2016): 503-528. Cf. Meir Dan-

Cohen, “Introduction: Dignity and Its (Dis)content,” in Dignity, Rank, and Rights, ed. Jeremy Waldron, 3-

10 (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2012), 5-8. 118 John XXIII, “Mater et Magistra,” AAS 53, 1961, no. 219. http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-

xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_15051961_mater.html [accessed December 20, 2017].


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dehumanizing conditions of workers in the context of the industrial revolution and provides some

notes on the rights and duties of workers, calling for the proper treatment of workers and respect for

their dignity in the work context.119 Likewise, Laborem Exercens (LE) speaks convincingly about

the nature and condition of labour, and states that human beings are the proper subject of work, which

expresses and increases human dignity.120 The significance of the discussion on LE in this research

is due to its focus on the positive and negative aspects of technology used in the workplace.

LE affirms the constructive use of technologies in facilitating work, while also noting their

disparaging ability to supplant or control humans. It states, for instance,

It [(technology and machineries)] facilitates his work, perfects, accelerates and augments it. It

leads to an increase in the quantity of things produced by work, and in many cases, improves their

quality. However, it is also a fact that, in some instances, technology can cease to be man's ally

and become almost his enemy, as when the mechanization of work “supplants” him, taking away

all personal satisfaction and the incentive to creativity and responsibility, when it deprives many

workers of their previous employment, or when, through exalting the machine, it reduces man to

the status of its slave.121

In any case, LE argues for due respect for the human dignity in the workplace, as any discussion on

the workplace should also concern its subjects – human beings. The subjective dimension of work,

expressed in LE, is a substantial contribution of CST to public discussions of the workplace. It says

that, for instance, “[a]s a person, man is the subject of work and these actions, independent of their

objective content, must serve to realize his humanity, to fulfil his calling to be a person.”122 It also

continues to attribute an ethical meaning to work, stating that “[w]ork is a good thing for man – a

good thing for his humanity – because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to

his own needs, but he also achieves fulfilment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes

‘more a human being.’”123 LMV in the workplace argues in support of this experience of being human

in a situation of managerial control by calling for due respect and worth for all members of an

organization. It emphasizes the role of personal values along with other material or economic values

in the workplace. For, as LE rightly situates,

[t]he person who works desires not only due remuneration for his work; he also wishes that,

within the production process, provision be made for him to be able to know that in his work, even

on something that is owned in common, he is working “for himself.” This awareness is

extinguished within him in a system of excessive bureaucratic centralization, which makes the

worker feel that he is just a cog in a huge machine moved from above, that he is for more reasons

than one a mere production instrument rather than a true subject of work with an initiative of his

own.124

This reveals that, again, as Tablan puts it, “[t]he person as a subject cannot be an object. Being an

end in itself, the person cannot be subordinated to other lesser ends or values.”125 However, we have

seen that in the workplace, due to excessive surveillance practices, employees become too often

merely the object of others’ observation and are treated as a mere means to achieve certain goals and

119 Leo XIII, “Rerum Novarum.” 1891. http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-

xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html [accessed December 20, 2017]. 120 John Paul II, “Laborem Exercens,” AAS 73 (1981), no. 5. 121 John Paul II, “Laborem Exercens,” AAS 73 (1981), no. 5. 122 John Paul II, “Laborem Exercens,” AAS 73 (1981), no. 6. 123 John Paul II, “Laborem Exercens,” AAS 73 (1981), no. 9. 124 John Paul II, “Laborem Exercens,” AAS 73 (1981), no. 15. 125 Tablan, “Catholic social teachings: toward a meaningful work.” 295.


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objectives. The 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus (One Hundred Years) by Pope John Paul II,

released on the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, also warns about new threats to human dignity

arising from technology, social structures and corporate greed, exacerbating issues of economic and

social justice and leading to the subordination of workers.126 Centesimus Annus (CA) declares that

“[a] person who is deprived of something he can call ‘his own,’ and of the possibility of earning a

living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control

it. This makes it much more difficult for him to recognize his dignity as a person and hinders progress

towards the building up of an authentic human community.”127 Thus CA calls for a fully “humane”

and authentic work culture that respects personal dignity. LVM, in this regard, promotes policies and

regulations in the workplace that respect human dignity, the subjective dimension of work and the

objective rights of employees to shape labour relationships, organizational behaviours, shared social

harmony and the world economy.

To return briefly to the discussion of the imago Dei, we find that David Hollenbach, referring to

various Catholic Social Teachings, offers a triple interpretation of the imago Dei in his work Human

Dignity in Catholic Thought: namely, the substantialist, relational and functional.128 The

substantialist understanding find the inherent image in the very substance of the human person and

thus regards human dignity as “an attribute of the human person affecting the substantial unit of body

and soul.”129 The relational aspects looks to the rational nature of individuals and their openness to

“relationship with others through knowledge,” representing a “double dimension of individuality and

relationality or sociality.”130 This goes beyond the individualistic ethic to acknowledge the social

aspect of human nature and existence. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church

expresses this social aspect in line with the principle of the common good, stating that this is the

principle “to which every aspect of social life must be related if it is to attain its fullest meaning,

stems from the dignity, unity and equality of all people.”131 The functional view, admitting that

“dignity resides in this functional unit of body and soul,” asks individuals to “take responsibility over

the material world, expressing dignity through their actions.”132 This irreducible principle of the

dignity of the human being and its developmental dynamics is the value to be accorded to it in the

workplace by using LVM to ensure the equal treatment of employees in each situation, in view of

his worth and value.

It also must be noted that the previously discussed rights-oriented approach and social justice

approach are predominant in this model of LVM, due to it emphasis on human dignity and

itspreservation. CSDC rightly points out in this regard that “[t]he rights of workers, like all other

rights, are based on the nature of the human person and on his transcendent dignity.”133 CSDC also

lists some of these rights, non-exclusively, as follows: “a working environment […] which are not

126 John Paul II. “Centesimus Annus.” AAS, 83 (1991). http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-

ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html [accessed December 20, 2017]. 127 John Paul II. “Centesimus Annus.” AAS, 83 (1991), no. 13. 128 David Hollenbach, “Human Dignity in Catholic Thought,” in Cambridge Handbook on Human Dignity:

Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds. Marcus Düwell, Jens Braarvig, Roger Brownsword and Dietmar Mieth

(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 2014), 250–259. 129 Sison, Ferrero and Guitián, “Human Dignity and the Dignity of Work,” 507. Cf. Hollenbach, “Human

Dignity in Catholic Thought,” 253-255. 130 Sison, Ferrero and Guitián, “Human Dignity and the Dignity of Work,” 507. Cf. Hollenbach, “Human

Dignity in Catholic Thought,” 253-255. 131 Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (London: Burns

and Oates, 2012; reprint, 3), no. 164. (Here after, we will use the abbreviation CSDC of the Compendium of

the Social Doctrine of the Church (CSDC) with paragraph number for its citations). 132 Sison, Ferrero and Guitián, “Human Dignity and the Dignity of Work,” 508. Cf. Hollenbach, “Human

Dignity in Catholic Thought,” 253-255. 133 CSDC, 301. Italics in the quote is maintained as in the original source.


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harmful to the worker’s physical health or to their moral integrity; the right that one’s personality in

the workplace should be safeguarded without suffering any affront to one’s conscience or personal

dignity; […] the right to social security […].”134 LVM likewise is concerned with the whole range of

needs of employees: economic, organizational, socio-cultural, personal and existential, including

spiritual values. For along with protecting employees’ rights and interests, it fosters respect by

honoring employees’ dignity and autonomy and thus reduces the intrusion of privacy and looks for

fair and impartial treatment in workplace behaviours, rejecting the possibility of discrimination or

social sorting. Finally, CST is concerned to promote the genuine progress of the human being and

society by according an authentic respect to all dimensions of individuals as persons, expressed

“whole and entire, body and soul, heart and conscience, mind and will.”135 It is through this process

that LVM effects a shift in the consideration of workplace ideologies and behaviours, taking us from

a techno-mode to a human-mode.

7.2.2 Corporate Citizenship and Transactional, Participatory, and Recognition Ethics

In line with above-mentioned approaches to human dignity and the subjective dimension of work,

the notion of corporate citizenship is very significant. This notion is immersed in the LVM and

enables it to develop an individualized analysis of employee management. Many researchers have

addressed this model and concur that good corporate citizens live up to clear, constructive visions

and possess core values in their organizations.136 Corporate citizenship, understood as analogous with

a social role (rights and duties) in a community, is depicted as “a social role, characterized by the

social contract of business, a participatory ethics of business, the precautionary principle and the

promotion of just international institutions.”137 Here, the whole corporation is metaphorically ‘seen

as’ a citizen,138 having wide-ranging consequences for its behaviour. The active citizenships of the

corporate citizen also means that its members have various functioning roles perform in the

organization. These active citizenship roles, according to Ronald Jeurissen, are “[t]he social contract;

collective responsibility; active responsibility; and the juridical state.”139 In an organizational

context, this is a social (labour) contract of business with institutional responsibilities and

precautionary principles.140 However, as Jeurissen observes, the social contract and just laws must

combine ethics, responsibility and self-interest with a strong moral commitment to the common good

in the organizational workplace.

The corporate citizenship model, just as it deals with the relationship of corporations to external

stakeholders (consumers, government, the environment), also addresses internal corporate

134 CSDC, 301. 135 Vatican Council II. “Gaudium et Spes.” AAS 58 (1966), no. 3.

http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-

ii_const_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html [accessed December 20, 2017]. 136 Sandra Waddock, “The Development of Corporate Responsibility/Corporate Citizenship,” Organization

Management Journal 5, no. 1 (2008): 29-39; Donna J. Wood and Jeanne Logsdon, “Business Citizenship:

From Individuals to Organizations.” Ethics and Entrepreneurship 3 (2002): 59-94; and Radin and Werhane.

“Employment-at-Will, Employee Rights, and Future directions for Employment.” 119. 137 Ronald Jeurissen, “Institutional Conditions of Corporate Citizenship,” Journal of Business Ethics 53 (2004):

87. 138 Jeurissen, “Institutional Conditions of Corporate Citizenship,” 87. The essential elements of corporate

citizenship are “family-friendly workplaces, employee health and retirement benefits, employee safety and

security and ‘employee participation in workplace productivity’ and community welfare.” Subhabrata Bobby

Banerjee, Corporate Social Responsibility: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar,

2007), 41. 139 Jeurissen, “Institutional Conditions of Corporate Citizenship,” 88. 140 Jeurissen, “Institutional Conditions of Corporate Citizenship,” 89-90.


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relationships between managers and employees.141 To treat employees as citizens is to treat them as

adults, recognizing and granting their dignity as human beings and accordingly respecting their legal

and moral rights and duties.142 This shows that, just like any other form of political or legal

citizenship, rights and duties attend this corporate citizenship. Radin and Werhane illustrate, in this

regard, that in an organization, “the citizen metaphor links people to one another in such a way that

they inevitably take responsibility for working together for the benefit of the firm. At the same time,

the metaphor of citizenship requires that each citizen has equal rights and requires that all citizens be

treated with respect and dignity. According to such a model, employees thus serve as participants in,

and members of, a firm community.”143 The notion of corporate citizenship, therefore, takes

productivity and performance seriously, as loyalty and good performance are expected from citizens

of any community, leading to job satisfaction and an improvement of employee life-chances. This

notion of corporate citizenship is not friendly to any form of external monitoring or surveillance, but

regards with high esteem workplace behaviour that exhibits commitment, mutual trust and

responsibility towards the common goal.

The LVM also highlights a combination of three forms of ethics: the transactional, participatory, and

recognitional ethics of business. It opposes authoritarian or compulsory surveillance as well as the

hierarchical observation of employees by managers. This approach acknowledges that employees or

corporations alone are not responsible for their social and ethical behaviour, but all its members need

to take part in its mutual reinforcement. Henk van Luijk first proposed this form of participatory

ethics, along with a description of the two other domains of ethics noted above: the transactional and

recognitional.144 The moral approach to participatory ethics involves an ethic of the collective good

with a common interest of voluntary solidarity. The members of an organization, as corporate

citizens, “have a moral responsibility to define their due in the promotion of a sustainable society.145

In explaining this participatory ethics, Van Luijk begins by noting the three categories of human

action, calling them self-directed, other-including and other-directed actions.146 According to him,

A self-directed action is an action that intends the actor and the recipient of the benefits of the

action to coincide. The outcome of the action returns in total to the actor […]. An other-including

action is an action in which the actor intends to share with other the position of being the recipient

of the action’s benefits […], whereby the amount and the quality of the results need not be same

for all recipients […]. An other-directed action is finally, is an action with which actor intends

results that exclusively benefit another or others than him or herself.147

These three dimensions of actions determine the kind of person one wants to be. However, a moral

evaluation is not fully possible without considering the interests and rights of each individual and

corporation.148 Here, putting aside the manipulated self-directed actions, where one’s intention

excludes the other, other-included actions seek common interests and equal claims. Van Luik argues

here that “[o]ther-including actions based upon either simultaneous or connected interests and equal

claims are acceptable from a moral point of view when people agree to be moral according to the

141 Radin and Werhane. “Employment-at-Will, Employee Rights, and Future directions for Employment.” 120. 142 Radin and Werhane. “Employment-at-Will, Employee Rights, and Future directions for Employment.” 120.

Cf. Joanne B. Ciulla, The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work (New York: Random

House Times Books, 2000), 233. 143 Radin and Werhane. “Employment-at-Will, Employee Rights, and Future directions for Employment.” 120. 144 Henk van Luijk, “Rights and Interests in a Participatory Market Society,” Business Ethics Quarterly 4, no.

1 (1994): 79-96. 145 Jeurissen, “Institutional Conditions of Corporate Citizenship,”95. 146 van Luijk, “Rights and Interests in a Participatory Market Society,” 82. 147 van Luijk, “Rights and Interests in a Participatory Market Society,” 82. 148 van Luijk, “Rights and Interests in a Participatory Market Society,” 83.


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principles of a market morality, the principles of equality, honesty and reciprocity.”149 This is

critically referred to as ‘morals by agreement’ by researchers.150 However, according to Van Luijk,

when rational self-interest, respect for the rights and interests of others and a morality of reciprocal

exchange coincide, there emerges a ‘transactional ethics’151 well suited to the workplace. Going

beyond this, other-directed actions are finally altruistic actions, even apart from moral duty. For a

specific moral action, when there is no force to cooperate and when one commits oneself voluntarily,

there arises, what van Luijk calls, a non-enforceable obligation, leading to altruism.152 Here, various

contributors in the workplace recognize their shared rights and interests, which are either lost or

forgotten by incessant surveillance in the workplace, and act rather in pursuit of a common good.

Here participants are also involved in decisions and contribute to their realization, and thus this is

called a ‘participatory ethics.’153

Today, however, the workplace is alarmingly affected by conflicting interests, both of employees

and employers, and stuck with the inequalities of power, rendering its members unable to consider

common interests.154 In the workplace, in a context of continuous surveillance, we find a pure case

of conflicting rights and interests with a strong moral claim. This awareness of the moral issues at

stake leads Van Luijk to introduce the notion of ‘recognition ethics,’155 that recognizes these strong

rights and conflicting interests. It complements both transactional and participatory ethics. There are

researchers who argue that employee involvement in the design and implementation of any system

in the workplace always has a positive impact.156 The exclusion of employees from the design and

implementation of surveillance techniques in particular leads to an increase in hostility of employees

towards monitoring.157 Similarly, G. Stoney Alder, referring to John R. Aiello and Kathryn J. Kolb,

states that when employees “feel that their input has been incorporated in the system adopted, they

may feel greater ownership of their work and experience greater motivation and less stress.”158

Reflecting in line with Van Luijk, in transactional ethics, employees, as abstract equals, claim a

149 van Luijk, “Rights and Interests in a Participatory Market Society,” 85. 150 van Luijk, “Rights and Interests in a Participatory Market Society,” 85. This type of market principles –

morals by agreement – is presented by David Gauthier in his book Morals by Agreement. Cf. David Gauthier,

Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). 151 van Luijk, “Rights and Interests in a Participatory Market Society,” 85. 152 van Luijk, “Rights and Interests in a Participatory Market Society,” 85-86. This altruistic behaviour goes

beyond the reciprocal treatment. That means when some one calls it as a reciprocal altruism, it may have

latent selfish motives, which cannot be fully called as other oriented. 153 van Luijk, “Rights and Interests in a Participatory Market Society,” 86. According to van Luijk, this

participatory ethics has two principles – decency and emancipation that the formal implies one should have

solid moral reasons before quitting the opportunity to contribute for the welfare of others, while the latter

concentrate on specific groups who were deprived off the means of development. 154 van Luijk, “Rights and Interests in a Participatory Market Society,” 86. Cf. Foucault, Discipline and Punish:

The Birth of the Prison, 201; Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-

1977, 30; Magee and Galinsky, “Social Hierarchy: The Self-Reinforcing Nature of Power and Status,” 351-

398; Clegg, Courpasson and Phillips, Power and Organization, 3; Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring

Everyday Life, 115; and Fleming and Spicer, “Power in Management and Organization Science,” 238. 155 van Luijk, “Rights and Interests in a Participatory Market Society,” 87. 156 G. Stoney Alder, “Employee Reactions to Electronic Performance Monitoring: A Consequence of

Organizational Culture,” Journal of High Technology Management Research 12 (2001): 332; Maureen L.

Ambrose and G. Stoney Alder, “Designing, Implementing, and Utilizing Computerized Performance

Monitoring: Enhancing Organizational Justice,” Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management

18 (2000): 187-219. 157 Alder, “Employee Reactions to Electronic Performance Monitoring,” 332. Cf., Peter A. Susser, “Electronic

Monitoring in the Private Sector: How Closely Should Employers Supervise Their Workers?” Employee

Relations 13 (1988): 575-598. 158 Alder, “Employee Reactions to Electronic Performance Monitoring,” 332-333. Cf., John R. Aiello, and

Kathryn J. Kolb, “Electronic Performance Monitoring and Social Context: Impact on Productivity and

Stress,” Journal of Applied Psychology 80 (1995): 339-353.


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similar space of freedom and cooperation to act for their mutual benefit and thus hasten the progress

of the organization.

Although the participation of all agents, here both employer and employee, cannot be assumed,

participatory ethics does assume a voluntary solidarity in pursuit of a common goal, for example to

increase productivity and efficiency in the workplace.159 This is because of the necessary space given,

as mentioned, to the non-enforceable obligation of each participant. Similarly, recognitional ethics

in the workplace is characterized by an asymmetry of positions and claims, which may change with

circumstances. Here, employees will be forced to recognize claims made by those in authority and

thus take actions out of a sense of duty to those authorities. However, it is acknowledged that,

“[p]articipatory ethics, the ethics of non-enforceable obligations, accompanies the emergence of new

moral opportunities and social initiatives considered utopian before. Recognitional ethics makes us

accept the rights and claims that individuals and groups have acquired in the past. Transactional

ethics makes us cooperate for mutual benefit in the present”160 So, although not individually, in a

complementary sense these three ethical branches make sense as a means of valuing the employee

vis-à-vis the employer in situations where conflicts of rights and interests arise in the organizational

workplace.

7.2.3 Organizational Identification and Organizational Justice

LVM leads to a process of organizational identification on the part of employees. When employees

feel that they are valued and respected, there arises a course of organizational identification that

assures the firm acceptance of decisions made by the organization. G. Stoney Alder and Phillip K.

Tompkins refer to Herbert A. Simon, who argues that “organizational identification and loyalty lead

members to evaluate courses of action in terms of the consequences of their actions for the

organization when making decisions.”161 In this case, employees adhere to the decisions of the

organization even at the expense of a degree of their autonomy and personal space. Alder and Phillip

K. Tompkins rightly maintain that such organizational identification “leads members to adopt an

organization personality […] whereby, within an area of acceptance or zone of indifference […], the

employee plays the role of organization and accepts the organization’s premises as relevant to

decisions.”162 Employees allow and accept organizational decisions since they feel that “the

organization becomes as much a part of the member as the member is a part of the organization.”163

This in fact eliminates the possibility of conflicting individual or organizational interests. Alder and

Tompkins also warn that this employee identification is not a static phenomenon;164 rather it can take

various forms and either strengthen or diminish in degree due to various managerial practices.

In the same way, organizational justice inevitably plays a creative role in LVM. There are researchers

who argue that organizational fairness or perceived justice in the workplace “results in higher loyalty,

commitment, satisfaction, and performance.”165 We have already discussed in the first chapter the

159 van Luijk, “Rights and Interests in a Participatory Market Society,” 88. 160 van Luijk, “Rights and Interests in a Participatory Market Society,” 93. 161 G. Stoney Alder and Phillip K. Tompkins, “Electronic Performance Monitoring: An Organizational Justice

and Concretive Control Perspective,” Management Communication Quarterly 10, no. 3 (1997): 268. Cf.,

Herbert A. Simon, Administrative Behaviour: A Study of Decision-Making Process in Administrative

Organization (New York: Free Press, 1976), 205. 162 Alder and Tompkins, “Electronic Performance Monitoring,” 269. 163 Alder and Tompkins, “Electronic Performance Monitoring,” 269. 164 Alder and Tompkins, “Electronic Performance Monitoring,” 270. 165 Alder and Tompkins, “Electronic Performance Monitoring,” 270-271. Cf., Jerald Greenberg,

“Organizational Justice: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” Journal of Management 16, no. 2 (1990): 399-

432.


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inventive part played by distributive and procedural justice in the organizational workplace in

relation to the surveillance framework. Many researchers, such as John Rawls who identifies justice

as “the first virtue of social institutions,”166 recognize the “importance of the ideal of justice as a

basic requirement for the effective functioning of organizations and the personal satisfaction of the

individuals they employ.”167 This means that the idea and practice of interpersonal relations and

social justice and fairness in the workplace leads employees both to understand who behaviours are

favorable and promising and to engage in these behaviours. Likewise, it is argued that procedural

justice judgments and evaluations consistently affect employee attitudes towards their work and their

organization by way of a transformed loyalty and commitment and increased work-group

cohesiveness.168 Researchers also propose that employee management should keep in mind the idea

of workplace justice in the design of employee programs and agendas, for instance in job analyses

and assessments or performance reviews and appraisals.169 This causes employees, in turn, to develop

self-identity and self-worth by valuing their relationships with other individuals and groups and with

the organization itself.170 These practices will eventually dispel the need for an external surveillance

system. Thus, the idea of organizational justice can be understood in parallel with the above-

mentioned organizational identification in the scope of labour valued management.

Within the framework of organizational justice, LVM likewise argues that the meaningfulness of

employees’ lives must be preserved in the organizational work context. Gorge Bragues, in his work,

Seek the Good Life, not Money, emphasizes business morality and tries to link it to a universal

concept of the good life, based on a reading of Aristotle.171 Though he notes that, from an Aristotelian

point of view, personal happiness consists in practicing of virtues, such as the intellectual virtues of

prudence manifested “in the leadership of organizations” and wisdom revealed “in the philosophical

search for truth,” Bragues argues that “the greatest ethical imperative for business is to give

individuals opportunities to thoughtfully participate in the management of company affairs and to

contemplate the ultimate meaning of things.”172 Bragues identifies seven moral virtues, out of a total

of 13 he discusses, that have a special role to play in business and which concur with reason:

“courage, self-control, generosity, magnificence, magnanimity, sociability, and justice.”173 Within

the scope and limits of this present research, we will adopt Bragues’ understanding of justice because

of the predominant role it has played in discussions about the meaningfulness of the lives of

employees and because of the relevance of its subject matter, which is freedom, privacy, property,

integrity, discrimination, power and status. For the practice Bragues identifies as leading to human

excellence in the workplace does involve justice. According to Bragues, any workplace morality and

meaningful life for employees will include:

166 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [original edition], 1971), 3. 167 Greenberg, “Organizational Justice: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” 99. 168 Alder and Tompkins, “Electronic Performance Monitoring,” 271. Originally in, Edgar Allan Lind and Tom

R. Tyler, The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice (New York: Springer Science and Business Media,

1988), 179. 169 Alder and Tompkins, “Electronic Performance Monitoring,” 271. Cf., Gerald E. Fryxell and Michael E.

Gordon, “Workplace Justice and Job Satisfaction as Predictors of Satisfaction with Union and Management,”

Academy of Management Journal 32, no. 4 (1989): 863. 170 Alder and Tompkins, “Electronic Performance Monitoring,” 271. 171 George Bragues, “Seek the Good Life, Not Money: The Aristotelian Approach to Business Ethics,” Journal

of Business Ethics 67, no. 4 (2006): 341-357. 172 Bragues, “Seek the Good Life, Not Money: The Aristotelian Approach to Business Ethics,” 341. Priorities

of practicing the virtues are means to actualize the human potentials, that “[p]eople are thus called to display

courage, self-restraint, generosity, magnificence, magnanimity, sociability, justice, prudence, and wisdom in

their business activities,” to support a virtuous life. Bragues, “Seek the Good Life, Not Money: The

Aristotelian Approach to Business Ethics,” 342. 173 Bragues, “Seek the Good Life, Not Money: The Aristotelian Approach to Business Ethics,” 346.


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(1) the creation of more participatory workplaces so that employees can contribute their particular

expertise and play a greater role in company decisions; (2) less hierarchical structures and more

shared responsibilities in order to reduce the necessity of unreflective order taking and mind-

numbing specialization; (3) more respect shown for employee’s rationality by ensuring that

management liberally discloses information pertaining to the firm’s condition and prospects and

provides reasons for company policies; […].174

These frameworks of participatory workplace behaviours, shared responsibilities and due respect of

individual rationality, autonomy and dignity are key elements in LVM’s effort to create a better and

more productive workplace.

7.2.4 LVM and Rehumanizing Workplace

Finally, LVM stands for rehumanizing the workplace, where the human person is more valued than

anything else. The value of the human person can never be adequately practiced in the workplace

when employees are made the regular victims of unwarranted surveillance and mechanisms of

control through the vast implementation of advanced monitoring technologies. To rehumanize the

workplace means that one seeks to create a workplace where every individual is regarded as worthy

of respect intrinsically, without any discrimination or subordination. Stanley Been, in his article

‘Privacy, Freedom and Respect for Persons,’ writes:

[T]o conceive someone as a person is to see him as actually or potentially a chooser, as one

attempting to steer his own course through the world, adjusting his behaviour as his apperception

of the world changes, and correcting course as he perceives his errors. It is to understand that his

life is for him a kind of enterprise, like one’s own […]. To respect someone as a person is to

concede that one ought to take account of the way in which his enterprise might be affected by

one’s own decisions. By the principle of respect for persons, then, I mean the principle that every

human being, insofar as he is qualified as a person, is entitled to this minimal degree of

consideration.175

Since work is central to our life and a prerequisite for physical, psychological, emotional and social

survival, any dehumanizing experience in the context of work will produce in turn a discontent in

every realm of human life. Hence, it is necessary to seek a movement from dehumanizing situations

to more humane situations, in order to ensure that the dignity of each employee as a person is

esteemed and prized. Brene Brown sums up the essence of this idea of re-humanizing, saying that:

In an organizational culture where respect and the dignity of individuals are held as the highest

values, shame and blame don't work as management styles. There is no leading by fear. Empathy

is a valued asset, accountability is an expectation rather than an exception, and the primal human

need for belonging is not used as leverage and social control. We can't control the behaviour of

individuals; however, we can cultivate organizational cultures where behaviours are not tolerated,

and people are held accountable for protecting what matters most: human beings.176

174 Bragues, “Seek the Good Life, Not Money: The Aristotelian Approach to Business Ethics,” 354. 175 Stanley I. Benn, "Privacy, Freedom and Respect for Persons," in Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An

Anthology, ed. Ferdinand David Schoeman, 223-244 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 229. 176 Brene Brown, “Three Ways to Kill Your Company’s Idea-Stifling Shame Culture,” FastCompany,

September 2012. http://www.fastcompany.com/3001239/3-ways-kill-your-companys-idea-stifling-shame-

culture [Accessed December 18, 2017].


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When a de-motivating situation, like that of continuous surveillance, ceases to exist, there emerges

a re-humanized177 and life-affirming workplace. Werhane speaks about each individual employee as

the ‘rightful owner’ of his or her personal and intimate information, and privacy protects the freedom

of each person to retain this ownership.178 This idea of rightful ‘ownership’ respects the personhood

of the employee, and if this personhood is individual, everyone has the right to protect him or herself

from invasions of any kind. For according to Werhane, disrespecting employee rights is equivalent

to disrespecting employees as persons,179 and thus she recommends a new approach to employment

issues.

Along with respect for the personal worth of every employee, a rehumanized workplace will

definitely make a difference in the employer-employee relationship. The reciprocal nature of the

employee-employer relationships in the workplace, according to Werhane, entails some important

employee rights, in particular rights to fair treatment and respect. If an employee is expected to “act

solely for the benefit of the principal [...] and not to act or speak disloyally,” the employer has a duty

to treat the employee with similar respect. Employer loyalty includes respect for employee privacy,

worker safety, employee information, and due process in the workplace.180 Respect for the employee

also entails minimizing workplace safety dangers and providing information about unavoidable

hazards. Expectations of loyalty and obedience are unjustified if one does not protect workers’

physical well-being.181 Thus, the respect and value given to individual employees will ensure that

they are treated as ends in themselves, not as the means to any end.

Johan Verstraeten enters this discussion by reasserting the value of the person in the workplace and

expressing that a person is more than just a “human resource.” He does this by drawing attention to

the elements of empowerment, integrity and participation.182 As a first step, he observes that any

business is “more than just a society of capital goods,” and conceives it as “a society and community

of persons in which people participate in different ways and with specific responsibilities, whether

they supply the necessary capital for the company’s activities or take part in such activities through

their labour.”183 Referring to the golden rule that “one should treat others as one would like to be

treated oneself,” as well as to the categorical imperative formulation that “one ought never to treat a

person as a mere means, but rather as an end in himself,” Verstraeten here underlines the need to

respect human dignity in workplace scenarios, which ensures the preservation of the fundamental

177 In the book ‘Business Ethics’ Andrew Crane and Dirk Matten also speak about re-humanized workplace,

but in a different way. They speak it in the context of mechanization of work which led to the situation of

unemployment. Also, the impact of technology, rationalized work processes and the division of labour have

made the work monotonous one bringing little meaning and satisfaction. Every job without job satisfaction

is a meaningless discourse where the relationship between technology and the quality of working life is less

maintained. Connecting these situations, they proposed the idea of re-humanized workplace. It is to re-

humanize the workplace by empowering the employee which include ‘job enlargement’ (giving employees a

wider range of tasks to do) and ‘job enrichment’ (giving employees a larger scope for deciding how to

organize their work). It is also to create a condition where workers can be engaged in more creative and

meaningful work utilizing ‘human-centred’ technology. Cf., Andrew Crane and Dirk Matten, Business Ethics:

Managing Corporate Citizenship and Sustainability in the Age of Globalization, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2007), 302. 178 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 118. 179 Werhane, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, 103. 180 Patricia H. Werhane, Tara J, Radin and Norman E. Bowie, Employment and Employee Rights (Oxford:

Blackwell, 2004), 112. 181 Werhane, Radin and Bowie, Employment and Employee Rights, 113. 182 Johan Verstraeten, “From Business Ethics to the Vocation of Business Leaders to Humanize the World of

Business,” A European Review 7, no. 2 (1998): 111. 183 Verstraeten, “From Business Ethics to the Vocation of Business Leaders,” 112.


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rights of employees.184 This also directs our discussion of LVM into different images of work

relationships, where the preferred option of LVM is very significant.

Brown, in this regard, speaks of four images: master-and-servant, market, team, and the entrepreneur.

The master-and-servant image is a legal precedent of labour management, where citizens become

mere servants, dominating the notion of obedience and exercisingtotal control or authority over

another person.185 According to Brown, “[b]eing a servant to a master was not just a contract; it was

an identity” in the early decades of twentieth century.186 It also carried the previously discussed

notion of “employment at will,” by appeal to which employers justified their refusal of due process

to their employees.187 The labour relationship in the market image relies exclusively on wages and

benefits, and thus the notion of “exchange” – an “exchange of one’s skills, talents and time for

wages” in a working situation.188 Though this promotes “equal exchange” and “acknowledges the

importance of fair dealing,” it turns workers into “commodities that can be traded.”189 Likewise,

though the market image also introduces the law of reciprocity based on fair exchanges and

cooperation and reveals the social bonds that develop relationships, “it does not signify the implicit

cooperation on which it [market image] depends.”190 Thus the need for cooperation is seen in the

image of team relationships, which express a relationship of cooperation by employee participation

in order to develop a common vision and common problem solving strategies.191 The need for

cooperation and reciprocity is much appreciated in this image.

The teamwork image focuses, along with personal development, on the goal achievement of an

organization through mutual participation, and thus the organization becomes a “learning team” as

its members engage in dialogue with each other to build up the organization.192 The teamwork image,

given its inherent dimension of mutual participation and interpersonal exchange, argues for a

cooperative and reciprocal workplace. The fourth image, that of the entrepreneur, appeals to the role

of an initiator, with new ideas for developing the organization and the economy at large.193 Since it

highlights the role played by individual creativity, cooperation, reciprocity and the aspect of working

together is less emphasized in this model. Though each of these images provides a foundation,

implicitly or explicitly, for creating and maintaining workplace relationships, LVM affirms the team

184 Verstraeten, “From Business Ethics to the Vocation of Business Leaders,” 114. 185 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 77. As Brown rightly states

when workers received by law their rights to organize and to engage in collective bargaining, they are being

treated again as citizens. 186 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 77. 187 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 78. In many places, along

with the law of employment at will, there is law against racial or other discrimination. But there are other

images like market image placed alongside the master-servant image. 188 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 79. 189 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 83. 190 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 79-80. According to Brown,

the different self-interests played in this relationship will become conflicting interests in the workplace that

leads again to ego-centric actions and behaviours in a relationship. 191 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 80. 192 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 80-81. It fosters an

interpersonal encounter among co-workers to a joint effort to make the future of the organization. Th image

of reciprocal relationship functions here. 193 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 81. Brown referring to

Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert Dreyfus, brings here three distinct characteristics of

entrepreneurs: (1) self-appointed entrepreneurs driven by greed and ego; (2) persons involved in democratic

action; and (3) cultural figures, who create solidarity around a common concern. Cf. Charles Spinosa,

Fernando Flores and Hubert Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the

Cultivation of Solidarity (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1997); Brown, Corporate Integrity:

Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 81.


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image, since it makes possible a more cooperative conversation and more participative mode of

interactive relationships in the workplace, even leading to dialogue-focused mutual learning and thus

the development of the organization. According to Brown, “[p]erformance reviews based on this

[teamwork] image would encourage the supervisor and subordinate to work together to develop

mutual expectations for future performance.”194 Employees here seek ways to further improve their

mutual interaction and cooperation with authorities in order to sustain team performance and ensure

the constant development of the organization.

7.3 SELF-MONITORING [SELF-REGULATION] AS A HUMAN DEVELOPMENT ALTERNATIVE

In line with the major surveillance literature and other qualitative and quantitative studies on the

same theme, this research holds that electronic surveillance in the organizational workplace

detrimentally affects employees’ life chances – including work-life/culture, productivity, job

satisfaction, creativity and motivation by its individual (invasion of privacy, health hazards like

stress) and social impacts (social sorting, power distance and control). These detriments outweigh its

benefits. Electronic surveillance is, therefore, an inadequate way to manage employees. An

alternative to electronic surveillance is needed in the workplace. Ball reminds us of this need,

pointing out that:

(1) If no alternative can be found, managerial attention to task design, supervisory processes,

employees’ expectations about monitoring, and an appraisal of the company’s operating

environment can mediate its downsides; (2) the normality of workplace surveillance, and the

prevalence of arguments about how to ‘do it better’, make it difficult to radicalize; and (3) the

introduction of broader debates around information use, rights, power and social structure

highlights how surveillance in the workplace may serve to perpetuate existing inequalities and

create new ones.195

What then is required in the workplace? Employee management processes and styles need to be

redesigned, Ball rightly observes, to limit or balance their emphasis on external monitoring.196 West

and Bowman rightly observe that “[i]n the pursuit of work-life balance, respect for the moral agency

of a person can serve to mitigate the asymmetry in employer-employee relations.”197 Central to this

understanding of human moral agency is the view that each person has the capacity to exercise

personal autonomy, or a capacity for self-government.198 Rooksby and Cica, referring to Joel

Feinberg, state that individuals experience a sense of violation, invasion, or belittlement when they

are not allowed to govern themselves.199 Electronic surveillance and the consequent domination of

others over individual employees has just this effect, and creates doubts in employees’ about their

own capacity to govern themselves. This personal moral autonomy is also the basis on which any

citizen can claim his or her individual, socio-economic and cultural rights, which in turn transform

the “social and institutional means necessary for individuals to exercise their autonomy, and include

the freedom of conscience, expression, and association”200 in the workplace. Personal autonomy is

thus accorded significant scope in this research.

194 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 83. 195 Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” 87. 196 Ball, “Workplace Surveillance: An Overview,” 94. 197 West and James S. Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,” 640. 198 Rooksby and Cica, “Personal Autonomy and Electronic Surveillance in the workplace,” 244. 199 Rooksby and Cica, “Personal Autonomy and Electronic Surveillance in the workplace,” 244. Cf. Joel

Feinberg, “Autonomy,” in The Inner Citadel: Essays on Individual Autonomy, ed. John Christman (Vermont:

Echo Point Books (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) 2014, 27-53. 200 Rooksby and Cica, “Personal Autonomy and Electronic Surveillance in the workplace,” 244.


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Rooksby and Cica identify two sorts of conditions that an agent must meet to count as an autonomous

agent: he or she must “satisfy certain competency conditions,” and must “satisfy certain authenticity

conditions.”201 They also note that, referring to an incomplete list of competency conditions

developed by Diana Meyers, securing these conditions requires introspective, imaginative,

communicative, analytical, reasoning, volitional and interpersonal skills. As for the authenticity

conditions, agents must act based on “certain values that are, in some sense, his or her own, rather

than resulting from the manipulation of others, form addiction, or from lack of self-control.”202 When

an employee arrives at his or her values in an appropriate way – free from external force and undue

manipulation, he or she can act in an authentic way to the benefit of the organization. In the same

way, any external intervention, such as external monitoring, reduces or distorts employee’s personal

autonomy and fails to satisfy the authenticity condition or to affirm or even recognize and

individual’s capacity for autonomy. Similarly, the moral value of personal autonomy and the

consequent rights of employees to assess and pursue them in a workplace context should be without

manipulative inference from the employer or indeed any external authority. In this regard, we would

again propose the desirability of self-monitoring over against highly manipulative electronic

(external) monitoring. Self-monitoring, in the scope of this research, could take the form of a

conscious personal management system that helps employees control what they think, say and do

and thus transforms all behaviours for overall benefit of all in the organization, employees and

employers alike.

Through analysis of the results of the empirical study conducted as part of this research, based on the

employees in IT, ITeS and BPOs in India, the fifth chapter of this research found that a majority of

respondents prefers self-monitoring (75.4%). Besides, it is notable that among the rest of

respondents, along with those who argued for ‘no electronic monitoring,’ a few of those who claimed

the need of electronic monitoring also prefer self-monitoring as the next best option. As previously

discussed, self-monitoring, in the context of the organizational workplace, means the capacity of

individual employees to adjust his or her behaviours according to various external or situational

factors, each in tune with his or her own personal and moral values and attitudes. Self-monitoring

invariably leads to better performance ratings and increased productivity. The concept of self-

monitoring is introduced by Mark Snyder203 and treated as a social construct of expressive behaviour.

It relies on employees’ personality traits and individual ability to regulate or control their own

behaviour. Here, in this study, the concept of self-monitoring is differentiated from the concept of

impression management. According to Stanton, self-monitoring, being a stronger and better

motivator than external surveillance, is ten times more effective in increasing efficiency and

productivity.204 Research on employees’ preference for self-monitoring and how it improves

employee performance have already been discussed in the fifth chapter.

The concept of Behavioural Self-Monitoring (BSM) is being researched by several psychologists

and physicians, as we have noted, who ask their patients to observe, evaluate and record their own

201 Rooksby and Cica, “Personal Autonomy and Electronic Surveillance in the workplace,” 245. 202 Rooksby and Cica, “Personal Autonomy and Electronic Surveillance in the workplace,” 245. Cf. Diana T.

Meyers, “Intersectional Identity and the Authentic self: Opposites attract!” in Relational Autonomy: Feminist

Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self, eds. Catriona A. Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar (New

York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 151-180. 203 Mark Snyder, “Self-Monitoring of Expressive Behaviour,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

30, no. 4 (1974): 526-537. 204 Jeffrey M. Stanton, “Reactions to Employee Performance Monitoring: Framework, Review, and Research

Directions,” Human Performance 13, no. 1 (2000): 93.


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behavioural tendencies for the purpose of treatment.205 In the workplace, such a practice enhances

self-regulatory processes and thus improves productivity, safety and health. Self-monitoring, when

targeted toward one’s job responsibilities, increases productivity and enhances workplaces

relationships. It also has motivational effects, as it identifies stressors, hazards or harmful behaviours

in the workplace. Self-monitoring of one’s own productivity or safety behaviors, according to Ryan

Olson and Jamey Wichester, “may reveal motivating discrepancies […] between current and goal

levels of behavior, or when goals are met, the data may function as conditioned reinforcers.”206

Researchers such as Jeffrey M. Stanton have also the significant gains in performance secured by

self-monitoring.207 However, the workplace applications of BSM have not received enough attention

in scholarship. There is also a danger that as electronic surveillance becomes even more ubiquitous,

the above mentioned BSM procedures may also be manipulated as a “management method for

‘checking up on’ or ‘spying on’ workers.”208 Therefore, self-monitoring as a feasible strategic

approach to employee management is recommended as a subject for further research.

Though self-monitoring in the workplace is regarded as dependent upon employees’ personality traits

and capacity to control their own expressive behaviours – by monitoring and controlling their self-

presentation - it also includes a concern for one’s social ties and status in the organization. As Joel

H. Neuman and Robert A. Baron state, employees who monitor or control themselves score high in

social sensitivity and in producing self- and other-favourable behaviours due to their awareness of

others reactions to a situation as well as their ability to adjust their actions to changing conditions.209

In the organizational workplace, employees with high self-monitoring “would be more conciliatory

in conflict situations and less provocative in their behaviour towards others.”210 It has also been found

that self-monitoring “predict[s] one’s position within a workplace social network, and […] self-

monitors appear to actively participate in the construction of their social worlds at work.”211 Self-

monitoring could be expressed in this way, as “an individual level variable that has been shown to

have a pervasive influence on behavioural choices in both social interactions and interpersonal

relationships.”212 This means that employees with self-monitoring and self-regulative traits are said

to express valuable characteristics in relationships with other workers and with management and thus

increase the workflow.

Therefore, in line with Snyder, who defines self-monitoring as “differences in the extent to which

people monitor (observe, regulate, and control) the public appearances of self they display in social

situations and interpersonal relationships,”213 this research defines self-monitoring in the workplace

205 Ryan Olson and Jamey Winchester, “Behavioral Self-Monitoring of Safety and Productivity in the

Workplace: A Methodological Primer and Quantitative Literature Review,” Journal of Organizational

Behavior Management 28, no. 1 (2008): 9-75. 206 Olson and Winchester, “Behavioral Self-Monitoring of Safety and Productivity in the Workplace,” 14. 207 Stanton, “Reactions to Employee Performance Monitoring,” 85-113. 208 Olson and Winchester, “Behavioral Self-Monitoring of Safety and Productivity in the Workplace,” 16. 209 Joel H. Neuman and Robert A. Baron, “Workplace Violence and Workplace Aggression: Evidence

Concerning Specific Forms, Potential Causes, and Preferred Targets,” Journal of Management 24, no. 3

(1998): 405. 210 Neuman and Baron, “Workplace Violence and Workplace Aggression,” 405. 211 Sonya Fontenot Premeaux and Arthur G. Bedeian, “Breaking the Silence: The Moderating Effects of Self-

Monitoring in Predicting Speaking Up in the Workplace,” Journal of Management Studies 40, no. 6 (2003):

1539. Cf. Ajay Mehra, Martin Kilduff and Daniel J. Brass, “The Social Networks of High and Low Self-

Monitors: Implications for Workplace Performance,” Administrative Science Quarterly 46, no. 1 (2001): 121-

146. 212 Premeaux and Bedeian, “Breaking the Silence: The Moderating Effects of Self-Monitoring in Predicting

Speaking Up in the Workplace,” 1540. 213 Mark Snyder, Public Appearances, Private Realities: The Psychology of Self-Monitoring (New York: W H

Freeman/Times Books/ Hemy Holt & Co, 1987), 4. As Snyder observes there is high self-monitors as well as


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as a capacity for behavioural appropriateness through self-observation, self-control and self-

presentation. It is a general personality characteristic of work-related attitudes and behaviours. The

creation and maintenance of workplace relationships are significant and include the self-monitoring

traits of employees. David V. Day and Deidra J. Schleicher, in this regard, state that:

[O]rganizational work is characterized by exercises of power and authority, enacted and perceived

leadership, job performance and performance assessment, attitude formation and expression, and,

most important, relationships. […] All of these phenomena—and especially work relationships—

influence and are influenced by the expressive control of individuals engaged in social interaction.

[…] Self-monitoring personality is an important construct in understanding how such

relationships are formed and maintained.214

By means of these effective work relationships, the goals and objectives of an organization are

accomplished. An empirical study by Day and Schleicher explores the relationships between self-

monitoring and other work-related constructs such as “job attitudes (including organizational

commitment, job satisfaction, job involvement, and role stressors), individual ability, job

performance and advancement, and leadership.”215 In the same way, they state, referring to Day et

al., that “high self-monitors (in comparison to low self-monitors) tend to be more involved in their

jobs, have higher levels of cognitive ability, perform at a higher level, are rated as better managers,

and are more likely to emerge as leaders.”216 Likewise, through self-monitoring, employees

contribute to the vision and mission of the organization.

Here in the final stage of our research, this section on self-monitoring also concerns individual moral

behaviour, in that it calls for a rethinking of how individuals make sense of things in a given context.

Moral behaviour is said to be the response of an individual to a situation, with respect to how he or

she makes sense of it by reference to the moral directives he or she is expected to possess and

produce. For many business ethicists assume that “an individual can gain a completely objective,

rational understanding of what is morally required of him/her in particular situations.”217 Referring

to Norman Bowie’s description of being rational as essential to moral agency, Painter-Morland

points out that he also emphasizes deliberate rational analysis because reason characterises humanity,

and thus views it as an approach to ethical decision-making.218 Those who hold this view also expect

that responsible moral agents will avoid the undue influence of subjectivity and personal perceptions

to secure a desired outcome, as these may carry emotional content or bias. Such agents transcend the

contextual pressures of the situations in which they find themselves.219 However, for some others,

“moral values are a direct product of the human relations that we are immersed in.”220 Appreciating

the “non-instrumental meaning and significance of individual lives,” and recognizing the “concrete

particularity of an individual’s existence,” Painter-Morland argues that a true and authentic moral

response can emerge only from a “rootedness of human beings in everyday practice,” and the

“possibility of morality lies […] in his/her readiness to recognize and respond to such realities as

low self-monitors distinguished by various dimensions like motivation, ability, attention to different signs

and situational cues, appropriate use of ability and even consistent behavioural patterns. 214 David V. Day and Deidra J. Schleicher, “Self-Monitoring at Work: A Motive-Based Perspective,” Journal

of Personality 74, no. 3 (2006): 689. 215 Day and Schleicher, “Self-Monitoring at Work: A Motive-Based Perspective,” 690. 216 Day and Schleicher, “Self-Monitoring at Work: A Motive-Based Perspective,” 695. Cf. David V. Day,

Derida J. Schleicher, Amy L. Unckless, and Nathan J. Hiller, “Self-Monitoring Personality at Work: A Meta-

Analytic Investigation of Construct Validity,” Journal of Applied Psychology 87, no. 2 (2002): 390–401. 217 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 97. 218 Norman Bowie, Business Ethics: A Kantian Perspective (Malden: Blackwell, 1999), 45; Painter-Morland,

Business Ethics as Practice, 97. 219 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 97. 220 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 98.


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they become manifest in the course of everyday life.”221 All these facts and specifics influence the

ability of an individual to act as moral agent.

Painter-Morland’s question of “whether a system of authority and oversight based on generalized

normative imperatives really is the best way to ensure that employees come into their own as moral

agents”222 is very pertinent to our discussion here. The individual’s autonomous thinking about moral

norms, and understanding of the anthropological dimension (of dignity, autonomy and sociability) is

a highly valued component of these responsibly self-regulated practices. The structures and concepts

that have been developed to understand reality may actually inhibit the ability of individuals to act

as moral agents.223 Likewise, adopting an organization’s standard solutions to fix a unique moral

problem will likely not yield an authentic solution in a specific context and time. In what follows,

we consider why the notion of self-regulation is an inevitable part of responsible workplace

behaviour.

The “self-regulatory approach”224 accords great value to human rights and justice in given situations

like the organizational workplace. Generally, on an individual level, self-regulation is viewed as the

regulation by a person of his or her own behaviour without any external control or monitoring. It is

defined as “the process by which people change thoughts, feelings, or actions in order to satisfy

personal and society goals and standards.”225 It could be placing self-control over internal attitudes

and external behaviours to bring about an individually or socially desirable behaviour. In other

words, it is an alteration of the inner state and responses of an individual.226 It is held to be a self-

management mechanism in an organizational context. In a workplace context, the four components

of self-regulation or self-management identified by Roy Baumeister are important, as they begin with

the standards of desirable behaviour expected in the workplace, followed by the motivation to meet

the given standards. It then looks for monitoring of thoughts and other situations that may violate

these standards, and concludes by considering the willpower or internal strength needed to control

the inner and outer urges of human behaviour.227 So, in a nutshell: the components of self-regulation

are standards, motivation, monitoring and willpower.228 These can be applied in different situations,

221 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 99. 222 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 101. 223 Painter-Morland, Business Ethics as Practice, 101. 224 Mark C. Bolino, Jaron Harvey and Daniel G. Bachrach, “A Self-Regulation Approach to Understanding

Citizenship Behaviour in Organizations,” Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Process 119

(2012): 126-139; Tom R. Tyler, “Self-Regulatory Approaches to White-Collar Crime: The Importance of

Legitimacy and Procedural Justice,” in The Criminology of White-Collar Crime, eds. Sally S. Simpson and

David Weisburd (New York, NY: Springer, 2009), 195-216; Tom R. Tyler, “Legitimacy and Criminal

Justice: The Benefits of Self-Regulation,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 7 (2009): 307-359. 225 Todd F. Heatherton, “Neuroscience of Self and Self-Regulation,” Annual Review of Psychology 62, no. 1

(2011): 364. Todd F. Heatherton, in this article, illustrates few psychological components characterizing self-

regulation that it, firstly, requires individual awareness of one’s own behaviour, which has to be measured

against societal norms and that follows an understanding of how others react to his or her behaviour. It will

then try to detect threats and intimidations in complex social situations leading, finally, to look for further

mechanism to resolve inconsistencies and incongruences arising in the relation of self-knowledge to social

expectations of norms. In this way it tries to resolve existing and possible conflicts with a motivated

behaviour. Cf., Heatherton, “Neuroscience of Self and Self-Regulation,” 363-380. 226 Roy F. Baumeister, Brandon J. Schmeichel and Kathleen D. Vohs, “Self-Regulation and the Executive

Function: The Self as Controlling Agent,” in Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles, eds. A. W.

Kruglanski and E. T. Higgins (New York: Guilford Press, 2007), 516-539. 227 Baumeister, Schmeichel and Vohs, “Self-Regulation and the Executive Function,” 516-539; Mark Muraven

and Roy F. Maumeister, “Self-Regulation and Depletion of Limited Resources: Does Self-Control Resemble

a Muscle?” Psychological Bulletin 126, no. 2 (2000): 247-259. 228 Roy F. Baumeister, Kathaleen D. Vohs and Dianne M. Tice, “The Strength Model of Self-Control,” Current

Directions in Psychological Science 16, no. 6 (2007): 351-355.


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including in relation to workplace behaviours and life chances. Albert Bandura, in a similar manner

in a study of self-regulation, proposes that the characteristics of self-observation, self-evaluation and

self-efficacy all interact within the process of attaining a goal – which is a motivation – that has been

previously set.229 All these concern the perception of self-control in human behaviour.

Tom R. Tyler also proposes a self-regulation approach able to trigger employees’ ethical

judgements.230 Regarding employee regulation, Tyler compares the command-and-control approach

with the self-regulatory approach. In his view, the former fosters a rule-following method and

emphasizes the instrumental concerns of employees – namely, utility maximization. This reflects a

strategy of external regulation. The latter, by contrast, signifies the internal motivations of

agents/employees, which is linked to identification and internalization.231 The concept of command-

and-control emphasizes the active role of the external authority and the use of extrinsic force to

demand adherence to rules. Tyler argues that in the modern workplace there are several features

resulting from the command and control model. For instance, he states that “the extensive use of

surveillance techniques – such as the use of cameras, the monitoring of telephone calls and computer

usage, etc. – is an artefact of the implementation of command-and-control techniques.”232 So, there

are both financial and social costs associated with this approach.

In motivating employee rule following, the self-regulatory model emphasizes the role played by an

individual’s ethical values, which are related to or interact with the organization. It holds that

concerns about the legitimacy of organizational authorities and rules, and the congruence of the same

with the individual’s moral values, leads one to feel a personal responsibility to adhere to corporate

rules and policies.233 For, as Tyler rightly observes, employees are “motivated to align their behaviour

with the rules of organizations or groups they belong to when they view those groups as being

legitimate and consistent with their own sense of right and wrong.”234 So, when the ethical values of

individual employees are activated, adherence to laws and policies is also tremendously increased.

This speaks about an intrinsic motivation through an employee’s ethical values to follow the rules

and regulations of organizations. It goes beyond the extrinsic incentives or sanctions specified by the

organization and emphasizes the ethical values of individual employees. This means that the ethical

concerns of an employee motivate his or her self-regulatory behaviour. Even when we consider the

viability and utility of self-regulatory strategies, we find that they are of greater benefit to the

organization that any command-and-control strategy. For according to Tyler, the self-regulatory

strategy “prevents organizations from expending resources on creating and maintaining credible

systems of surveillance to enforce rules, strategies actually encourage people to hide their behaviour

and thus make it necessary to have especially comprehensive and costly surveillance systems.”235

229 Albert Bandura, “Social Cognitive Theory of Self-Regulation,” Organizational Behaviour and Human

Decision Process 50 (1991): 248-287. 230 Tyler, “Self-Regulatory Approaches to White-Collar Crime,” 195-216. Tyler applies the notion of self-

regulation to the different domains of human life, such as law, criminal justice, etc., and focuses on the

individual values consisting a “voluntary compliance with law and/or willing cooperation with legal

authorities.” Tom R. Tyler, “Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: The Benefits of Self-Regulation,” Ohio State

Journal of Criminal Law 7 (2009): 307. 231 Tyler, “Self-Regulatory Approaches to White-Collar Crime,” 197. 232 Tyler, “Self-Regulatory Approaches to White-Collar Crime,” 200. 233 Tyler, “Self-Regulatory Approaches to White-Collar Crime,” 197. Cf. Taylor, “Legitimacy and Criminal

Justice: The Benefits of Self-Regulation,” 312. 234 Tyler, “Self-Regulatory Approaches to White-Collar Crime,” 197. When Tyler addresses self-regulatory

approach, he explores how values shape law-related behaviours and how then to engage the legitimacy of that

law. In an organizational level, employees are more likely to obey a law when he or she perceive it legitimate

and consistent with their values. How a legal authority exercises its power is also significant in this self-

regulatory model. Taylor, “Legitimacy and Criminal Justice: The Benefits of Self-Regulation,” 315. 235 Tyler, “Self-Regulatory Approaches to White-Collar Crime,” 204.


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When individual employees, through the use of self-regulatory strategies, take responsibility for

themselves, follow the rules, and commit themselves to the organizational goals, organizations grow

and develop.

The self-regulatory model functions by increasing the level of ethical values and responsibility that

an employee shows. At the same time, as Tyler states, it is important to observe how employees hold

these ethical values that fosters their adherence to the rules. Tyler here introduces the idea that

procedural justice, upheld by fair organizations, can activate the ethical values of employees. This is

done on the assumption of the group engagement model, that “procedural justice judgements are

central to shaping employee cooperative behaviour.”236 The above-mentioned ethical values are

responsibly created and shaped by the perception that employees are fairly treated by management

and by the organization. Tyler suggests in this regard that “an organizational environment

characterized by fair procedures will activate strong employee organizational identification, thus

leading them to engage in desirable workplace behaviours and to hold positive attitudes toward their

work organizations.”237 Organizational culture, with its policies and practices, influences the ethical

values of employees and consequently their ethical attitudes and behaviours. Thus, Tyler argues that

the aspects of equity and distributive justice in the organization shouls focus on distributive fairness,

which will both intrinsically and instrumentally motivate employees.238 Procedural justice

evaluations and judgements go beyond instrumental concerns and look for procedures that respect

employees’ relational connections and social identities.

Fair procedures in an organization help both employers and employes to understand the moral values

possessed both by the organization and by its individual members. According to Tyler, this notion of

fair procedures “activates employee’s own internal motivations, and they more voluntarily follow

company rules and policies, i.e., they become self-regulatory.”239 Employees who feel and

experience a fair work environment will willingly assume responsibility to follow the policies and

rules without any external compulsion or control.240 Fair treatment by management fosters desirable

employee behaviours that benefit the organization. Tyler observes that unfair behaviour by

employers motivates employees to engage in fraudulent activities, such as theft or sabotage.241 This

introduces the idea of employee management through fairness, including an ethical motivation to

follow group policies and rules. This is linked in turn to ethical and fair behaviours in the

organizational workplace. This understanding of rule following and morally enabled ethical

behaviour goes well with the concept of human motivation, which we have explored in considering

236 Tyler, “Self-Regulatory Approaches to White-Collar Crime,” 198. This view is supported by researchers

from both legal and managerial settings. Cf. Tom R. Tyler, Why People Obey the Law: Procedural Justice,

Legitimacy, and Compliance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Tom R. Tyler and Steven L.

Blader, “Can Business Effectively Regulate Employee Conduct? The Antecedents of Rule Following in Work

settings,” Academy of Management Journal 48, no. 6 (2005): 1143-1158; and Tom R. Tyler and Steven L.

Blader, “The Group Engagement Model: Procedural Justice, Social Identity, and Cooperative Behaviour,”

Personality and Social Psychology Review 7, no. 4 (2003): 349-361. 237 Tyler, “Self-Regulatory Approaches to White-Collar Crime,” 206. Taylor, “Legitimacy and Criminal

Justice: The Benefits of Self-Regulation,” 319-320. 238 Tyler, “Self-Regulatory Approaches to White-Collar Crime,” 206. Cf. Edgar Allan Lind and Tom R. Tyler,

The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice (New York: Plenum, 1988). 239 Tyler, “Self-Regulatory Approaches to White-Collar Crime,” 207. Cf., Tom R. Tyler, Lawrence Sherman,

Heather Strang, Geoffrey C. Barnes, and Daniel Woods, “Reintegrative Shaming, Procedural Justice, and

Recidivism: The Engagement of Offenders' Psychological Mechanisms in the Canberra RISE Drinking-and-

Driving Experiment,” Law and Society Review 41, 3 (2007): 553-586. 240 Tyler, “Self-Regulatory Approaches to White-Collar Crime,” 207-208. 241 Tyler, “Self-Regulatory Approaches to White-Collar Crime,” 208. Cf. Tom R Tyler. and Steven L. Blader,

Cooperation in Groups: Procedural Justice, Social Identity, and Behavioural Engagement (Philadelphia, PA:

Psychology Press, 2000).


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the employee valued or labour valued management model discussed in the previous section. We can

now see how human motivations and ethical motivations can complement one another, constructively

altering employee behaviour. Further aspects of this self-regulatory approach are explored below.

7.3.1 Authentic Self-Direction, Creating Capabilities and Self-Monitoring

Firstly, the notion of “authentic self-direction” substantiates the argument of responsible self-

regulation with well-researched academic and reflective thoughts. Ideas about self-direction and

self-regulation enable employees to act ethically within the workplace without compulsion from

external control systems like electronic monitoring and surveillance systems. To substantiate this

idea, we will here consider Amartya Sen’s contribution to notions of human rights and shared

humanity by analysing his idea of authentic self-direction. The capability approach, developed by

Amartya Sen, perceives human life as a set of “doings and beings,” otherwise called “functionings,”

and “relates the evaluation of the quality of life to the assessment of the capability to function.”242

Sen defines this concept of functionings as “parts of the state of a person – in particular the various

things that he or she manages to do or be in leading a life.”243 These are the things, according to Sen,

that a person values “doing or being,” or things “he or she has reason to value.”244 It enables

individuals to decide which functionings are valuable to him or her in a given situation. This

capability, in an organizational context, prioritizes the individual employee’s functionings that are

self-valuable as well as valuable for the organization. The capability approach focuses on actual

human life, proposing “a serious departure from concentrating on the means of living to the actual

opportunities of living.”245 This view clearly runs contrary to a means-oriented evaluative approaches

in moral decisionmaking.

According to Sen, individuals enhance their well-being by expanding their capabilities through the

exercise of their freedom of choice.246 For the idea of freedom, in this regard, “respects our being

free to determine what we want, what we value and ultimately what we decide to choose.”247 He

distinguishes between the “well-being” aspect and the “agency aspect” of persons. Apart from John

Rawls’s analysis of “Kantian constructivism,” according to which “persons [are] characterized as

rational agents of construction,” Sen argues that “the conception of ‘persons’ in moral analysis cannot

be so reduced as to attach no intrinsic importance to this agency role, seeing them ultimately only in

terms of their well-being.”248 For Sen, the person’s own life, with the concepts of autonomy and

personal liberty, are important to his or her agency role, because “[f]or an integrated person it is

likely – possibly even inevitable – that the person’s well-being will be influenced by his or her

242 Amartya Sen. “Development as Capability Expansion,” in Readings in Human Development: Concepts,

Measures and Policies for a Development Paradigm, eds. Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and A.K. Shiva Kumar (New

Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 43. 243 Amartya Sen, “Capability and Well-being,” in The Quality of Life, eds. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya

Sen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 31; Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1999), 75. 244 Sen, The Idea of Justice, 231. The criticism levelled against the capability approach that it being

‘methodological individualism,’ that “all social phenomena must be accounted for in terms of what

individuals think, choose and do,” Sen states that “[t]here have certainly schools of thought based on

individual thought, choice and action, detached from the society in which they exist. But the capability

approach not only does not assume such detachment, its concern with people’s ability to live that kind of lives

they have reason to value brings in social influences both in terms of what they value […] and what influences

operate on their values […].” Sen, The Idea of Justice, 244. 245 Sen, The Idea of Justice, 233. 246 Amartya Sen, “Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984,” The Journal of Philosophy

82, no. 4 (1985): 169. Cf., Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 225-290. 247 Sen, The Idea of Justice, 232. 248 Sen, “Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984,” 186.


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agency.”249 However, Sen also points to the possibility that a single person will have several agency

roles, such as those connected to fulfilling obligations, and that this may adversely affect individual

well-being.250 Well-being is nothing external for Sen, but rather is achieved internally in oneself with

a distinctly personal quality. Sen’s focus is indeed on the individual’s capability to function rather

than on actual functionings. Sen argues that “the well-being aspect of a person leads to a particular

concept of freedom, which has been called well-being freedom.”251 Thus, the well-being aspect of a

person is linked to his or her capability to function, rather than any specific functioning vector, and

includes the freedom that a person possesses to do or to be.

Along with the understanding of freedom based on the well-being aspect of a person, Sen’s

interpretation of freedom, based on the agency aspect of a person, is significant for our purpose here.

According to Sen, “[a] person’s ‘agency freedom’ refers to what the person is free to do and achieve

in pursuit of whatever goals or values he or she regards as important […] taking note of his or her

aims, objectives, allegiances, obligations, and – in a broad sense – the person’s conception of the

good.”252 Both the agency freedom “to achieve whatever the person, as a responsible agent, decides

he or she should achieve,” and the well-being freedom that tries to “achieve something in particular,

viz., well-being,”253 is important and has special role to play in one’s moral decisionmaking. For the

“use of one’s agency is […] a matter for oneself to judge.”254 Sen also speaks about two elements of

freedom – power and control – required to achieve a chosen result, depending on whether one’s

choice will be respected in order that a corresponding result may happen. This power he calls effective

power, and it does not concern the procedures of control, while freedom itself exercises control over

procedures and the process of choice.255 The individual is obliged not to interfere with other people’s

freedom, because, on the one hand, the “concentration on control tends to produce an unacceptably

narrow conceptualization of liberty and freedom,” and on the other, individual freedom is “assessed

whether the person is himself exercising control over the process of choice.”256 However, certain

mechanisms of self-decision making and procedures of self-choice demand a capacity to exercise

self-directed control over situations.

In order to have a sustainable moral system in one’s behaviours, one must recognize certain rights-

related constraints in line with human freedom. For human rights are also linked to capabilities, and

both rights and capabilities depend on the process of public reasoning toward a moral judgement.257

This freedom also involves authentic self-direction, which is perceived as an ability to shape the

destiny of an individual both as a person and as a part of various communities. Shalom Schwartz

identifies self-direction as a universal human value, as it, for him, represents independent thought

and action – choosing, creating, and exploring.258 Though the value dimension of self-direction

possesses both intrinsic and instrumental value, Schwartz links self-direction to the autonomy of the

individual and thus as a value motivating human action through the scales of freedom (action and

thought), creativity (uniqueness, imagination), independence (self-reliance, self-sufficiency),

249 Sen, “Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984,” 187. 250 Sen, “Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984,” 187. Sen also analyse the individual

well-being with utility, which has different interpretations like happiness, desire, and choice. 251 Sen, “Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984,” 203. 252 Sen, “Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984,” 203. 253 Sen, “Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984,” 203-204. 254 Sen, “Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984,” 204. 255 Sen, “Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984,” 208. 256 Sen, “Well-being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984,” 209. 257 Amartya Sen, “Human Rights and Capabilities,” Journal of Human Development 6, no. 2 (2005): 151-166. 258 Shalom H. Schwartz, “Universals in the Content and Structure of Values: Theoretical Advances and

Empirical Tests in 20 Countries,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 25 (1992): 1-65.


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choosing one’s own goals (having and selecting one’s own purposes), and curiosity (exploring).259

Such self-directed behaviour fosters the individual’s beliefs in his or her own capability to exercise

control over the functioning of their selves in various situations. Self-directed behaviours or self-

regulations enable the dimension of self-determination in individuals, consisting of the characteristic

of autonomy along with its subsequent competence. Relatedness thus becomes an essential means of

increasing individual well-being.

This account of the aspect of autonomy in self-directed behaviour aligns with Valery Chirkov et al.,

who state that “a person is autonomous when his or her behaviour is experienced as willingly enacted

and when he or she fully endorses the actions in which he or she is engaged, and/or the values

expressed by them. People are therefore most autonomous when they act in accord with their

authentic interests or integrated values and desires.”260 In this way, the concept of freedom is

integrated in this aspect of self-direction. An employee who can or is able to self-regulate his or her

workplace behaviour and attitudes is more likely to cope with working situations, while workers with

low self-regulation and high external control are likely to suffer stress, privacy invasion, job related

discrimination and job dissatisfaction from poor handling of competing priorities and values and/or

their consequently poor working behaviour. We thus propose the notion of self-regulation as an

inherent component of employees’ transition to the workplace.

Secondly, “creating capabilities” is important in the human development approach to value self-

monitoring as a qualitative criterion for determining whether people are living their lives in a

manner worthy of human dignity. Previous discussions of the dignity of human beings in the context

of workplace surveillance take sides with the argument that “[h]uman dignity is harmed when

individuals and groups are marginalized, ignored, or devalued.”261 The dignity of all employees is

enhanced within the workplace when a human development approach is introduced that recognizes

the proper place of employees within an organization. Martha C. Nussbaum, emphasizing the ideas

of plurality and non-reducibility proposed by Amartya Sen, also introduces a few elements related to

people’s quality of life, which are plural and qualitatively distinct. Her idea of capabilities is

employed in comparative quality-of-life assessments and in theorizing basic social justice.262 This

approach of creating capabilities, firstly, takes into consideration, “each person as an end, asking not

just about the total or average well-being but about the opportunities available to each person.”263

Secondly, it is “focused on choice or freedom, holding that the crucial good societies should be

promoting for their people is a set of opportunities, or substantial freedoms, which people then may

or may not exercise in action: the choice is theirs.”264 The individual’s power of self-definition is

respected here and leads one, finally, to be “concerned with entrenched social injustice and

inequality, especially capability failures that are the result of discrimination or marginalization.”265

This approach becomes significant within the scope of this research, as it uncompromisingly argues

for the preservation and fostering of human freedom and the capability of responsible self-regulation

and determination.

259 Shalom H. Schwartz, “Are There Universal Aspects in the Structure and Contents of Human Values?”

Social Issues 50, no. 4 (1994): 19-45. 260 Valery Chirkov et al., “A Self-Determination Theory Perspective on Internalization of Cultural Orientations

and Well-Being,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84, no.1 (2003): 98. 261 Moka-Mubelo, “Human Rights and Human Dignity.” 115. 262 Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge: The Belknap

Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 18. 263 Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 18. 264 Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 18. 265 Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 19.


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Nussbaum’s theory of justice makes central the notion of human dignity,266 and she places it at the

basis of what she calls the human development approach. Going beyond an emphasis on the

rationality of human nature, Nussbaum is concerned about the emotions and basic physical needs of

human beings. Having been influenced by modern functionalism,267 Nussbaum explains the human

body and reason in functional terms and thus reflects on human capabilities. These capacities become

functional entities, dependent on the world.268 She differentiates between a few kinds of capabilities:

basic capabilities (untrained practices), internal capabilities (trained capacities) and combined

capabilities (trained capacities with suitable circumstances to its exercise).269 While acknowledging

that not all capacities can serve as a basis formoral claims, following a Rawlsian understanding,

Nussbaum argues for “a holistic account of justification, in which intuitions and political principles,

and alternative accounts of both, are held up and scrutinized against our considered judgments until

we reach, if we ever do, a reflective equilibrium.”270 An individual is encouraged to lead a life worthy

of human dignity when he or she is allowed to develop him or herself through the primary human

capacities of imagination, reason, intuition and freedom of choice.

Nussbaum also looks for “an account of the basis of human dignity that is respectful of the many

different varieties of humanity and that doesn’t rank and order human beings.”271 In this way, she

displaces the predominance of rationality in the discussion of human dignity and introduces a new

framework focused on the development of human capacities. This shows that alongside the

importance of rationality in the constitution of human dignity, the animality of the human being also

plays a role.272 The equal dignity of all members of a species is acknowledged here. Nussbaum thus

opens the door for a more inclusive account of justice. What is important in Nussbaum’s work for

our research is, firstly, the idea of the person, who according to her, “is imagined as having a deep

interest in choice, including the choices of a way of life and of political principles that given it,

[which] stresses the animal and the material underpinning of human freedom.”273 Secondly, its

importance comes from the guiding notion of the capability approach, which is not dignity itself but

rather “that of a life with, or worthy of, human dignity, where that life is constituted, at least in part,

266 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Human Dignity and Political Entitlements,” in Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays

Commissioned by the President’s Council on Bioethics (Washington D.C.: The President’s Council on

Bioethics, 2008), 351-380. 267 Functionalism is a doctrine or practice that emphasizes practical utility or functional relations of designs,

structures, institutions and society. As a theory it stresses the interdependence of the integrating parts and its

functions in a context. All aspects in a society serve a function for the survival of that society. Functionalism

is explained as a belief that sees a social pattern, not in terms of its historical origin, but in terms of its

consequences for, and functions in a given society, in which all parts of society function in various ways. In

philosophy and psychology, it serves mental states which can be sufficiently defined by their cause, effects

on both mental states and behaviour. So, functionalism can be viewed as a “doctrine that what makes

something a thought, desire, pain (or any other type of mental state) depends not on its internal constitution,

but solely on its function, or the role it plays, in the cognitive system of which it is a part.” Janet Levin,

“Functionalism,” The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2017),

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/functionalism/ [accessed March 5, 2018]. 268 Nussbaum, “Human Dignity and Political Entitlements,” 357. The capabilities approach as a political theory

for human development demands that the state should “provide certain capabilities, as a matter of minimal

justice, to all its members. Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species

Membership (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2006), 71. 269 Nussbaum, “Human Dignity and Political Entitlements,” 357. Cf., Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 18-

30. 270 Nussbaum, “Human Dignity and Political Entitlements,” 358. 271 Nussbaum, “Human Dignity and Political Entitlements,” 362. By this argument, she includes all people,

those with mental disabilities, for example, within the realm of respectful human diversity. 272 Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 171-179. 273 Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 88.


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by having the capabilities on the list.”274 We analyse this briefly in the following. The functioning

aspects of dignity is valued here along with capabilities. The capability of autonomy, for Nussbaum,

is related to dignity, and in turn a person’s dignity must be respected for he or she to be autonomous.

The central human capabilities asserted by Nussbaum, which we may take as significant aspects of

a responsible self-regulating behaviour in the workplace, include: (1) life, (2) bodily health, (3)

bodily integrity, (4) the senses, imagination, and thought, (5) being able to have emotional

attachments to entities outside of ourselves, (6) practical reason to form a conception of the good,

(7) affiliation and non-discrimination, (8) living in relation to other animals and nature, (9) play, and

(10) having control (to the extent possible) over one‘s environment.275 The first three of these, life,

bodily health and integrity, concerns people’s abilities to live, to move freely, and to have good

health, without being confined to a state of life not-worth-living or being subjected to assaults and

invasions. The second group, consisting of the senses, imagination and thought, emotions and

practical reason concerns using the senses “to imagine, think and reason and to do things in a truly

human way,”276 enabling one to be attached to people outside of oneself, with the help of the

individual’s practical reason. The last group of capabilities, affiliation, other species, play and control

over one’s environment fosters other-oriented self-expression of care for others; “having social basis

of self-respect and non-humiliation, being able [to treat] and to be treated as a dignified human

being.”277 Applying these capabilities to the workplace context in relation to self-monitoring,

employees will experience enhanced sense of dignity leading to a respect for the dignity of others

and responsible behavioural choices worthy of a human being.

The capabilities of responsible autonomous choice and the practical reason of employees will

enhance the workplace well-being. The espoused principle of capabilities – each person as an end –

stipulates its application in the workplace context: one is not to use employees as a means to enhance

the capabilities of others – most likely others in authority, in managerial roles, at the top of the

organization – or to diminish the dignity of any part of the whole. Rather, one is to promote the full

capabilities of each and every member of the organization, recognizing the dignity of each. The

capabilities approach thus enables employees “to live full and creative lives, developing their

potential and fashioning a meaningful existence commensurate with their equal human dignity,”278

in a workplace context. Likewise, the capabilities, according to Nussbaum, account for minimal

social justice in connection with other pertinent laws and regulations. Nussbaum’s criticism of the

rationalistic reductionism of the concept of dignity, grounding human dignity in the concepts of free

will, individual autonomy, and the ability to be part of a social contract, leads us still closer to a

personalist approach to workplace behaviour.

7.3.2 The Symmetry of Trust and the Transparency for Self-Monitoring

Thirdly, this research proposes that a legitimate symmetry be maintained between trust and

transparency to enable the employee as a moral agent to effectively practice self-monitoring in the

workplace. To explain this, we may consider again the issue of surveillance in the organizational

274 Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 162. 275 Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 76-78; Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 33-34. See the reference also in:

Paola Bernardini, “Human Dignity and Human Capabilities in Martha C. Nussbaum,” Iustum Aequum

Salutare 4 (2010): 47-48. Cf., Barry R. Cournoyer, The Social Work Skills Workbook (Boston, MA: Cengage

Learning, 2017), 365; Andrew Sayer, Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 235. 276 Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 76. We have grouped this list of ten capabilities according to the nature and

usefulness of its further analysis in line with self-regulated behaviours in the workplace. 277 Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice, 77. 278 Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 185.


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workplace. Surveillance, in our previous discussion, has been shown to be a response to a risky

society marked by with suspicion, fear, and distrust, yet ‘spying’ on employees has been shown to

be counterproductive to the establishment of trust and integrity in the workplace. Eric Stoddart admits

in his research that “surveillance fuels a risk society by fabricating people around institutionally

established norms.”279 Surveillance, according to Stoddart, can be understood in relation to the risks

to which it is supposedly the solution. Rather than actual performance, theoretical models are today

often used to set up and legitimize various strategies and even to convince the public that certain

methods of surveillance and intervention are necessary.280 The association of surveillance with fear

is clearly evident in the workplace, where electronic monitoring is continuous and often transgressive

of individual rights. As Frank Furedi has claimed people are panicking under suspicion and fear of

potential harm.281 Individuals have become so accustomed to being fearful that they ever ready to

lend their ears to news of new dangers. Stoddart also believes it is this fabric of fear that individuals

wear, and the drive to be safe and secure, that disposes them to use surveillance strategies.282 This

fear and anxiety for one’s security and the security of one’s loved ones is also plainly associated with

the general climate of distrust so evident today.

In this context, the sheer diversity of technologies quickly outstrips available ethical frameworks,

giving rise to a need for a new attempt to assess the consequences of new surveillance methods. The

ethical criteria of informed consent, job relevance, single usage, and limited and restricted data

transformation are all still valuable. At the same time, “these are of little help with respect to

assessing the appropriateness of original goals, nor do they adequately cover the broader context in

which data are collected.”283 While acknowledging the inability of any universal principle to serve

as the basis for an ethical evaluation of surveillance, Gary T. Marx draws the attention of surveillers

to social norms and proposes a sensitising formula that respects the dignity of the human person.284

However, since the context and strategies of surveillance are manifold, as Stoddart observes, ideas

of dignity, autonomy, and the like remain abstract in this sensitising model.285 In this same line of

thought, we would argue here that information is always relational, and thus that knowledge about

persons is knowledge amongst persons. Such knowledge can engender or endanger mutuality and

solidarity among workers, depending on the level of mutual trust and transparency each one holds.

For surveillance as a kind of ‘virtual gaze’286 endangers this solidarity, which is an indispensable

factor for human flourishing. As Lyon puts it, “deeper than law and technology is the level of mutual

279 Eric Stoddart, Theological Perspectives on a Surveillance Society: Watching and Being Watched (Farnham,

England: Ashgate, 2011), 103. 280 Stoddart, Theological Perspectives on a Surveillance Society, 108. 281 Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation (London: Continuum,

2002), 185. 282 Stoddart, Theological Perspectives on a Surveillance Society, 103-104. 283 Gary T. Marx, “Ethics for the New Surveillance,” The Information society 14, no. 3 (1998): 172. 284 In his effort to provide an ethics for the new surveillance, Marx concretely evaluates the means, data

collection, context and use as ethical guides for the assessment of surveillance. As he shows, “the more the

principles implied in these questions are honoured the more ethical the situation is likely to be, or conversely

the fewer of the principles respected, the less ethical the surveillance.” This additive approach is intended as

a sensitizing strategy by Marx who suggests subsequently that equal moral weight cannot necessarily be given

to each factor. Marx proposes 29 sensitising questions which includes the issues of harm, awareness, consent,

public good, and the advantage to the subject. When this additive strategy is adopted, those who supervise

the surveillance might be sensitised to the ethical aspects of their goals and strategies. Marx, “Ethics for the

New Surveillance,” 171-185. 285 Stoddart, Theological Perspectives on a Surveillance Society, 30. 286 Lyon, “Facing the Future: Seeking Ethics for Everyday Surveillance,” 174.


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recognition, of willingness to discuss, of social trust.”287 We elaborate further on these behavioural

models of trust and transparency as expected modes of workplace conduct in what follows.

‘Trust’ is a broad term covering a variety of contexts and relationships. It can be regarded as an

“anticipated cooperation,” characterizing “the expectation […] of ethically justifiable behaviour –

that is, morally correct decisions and actions based upon ethical principles of analysis.”288 Within the

scope and purpose of this research, we will use the concept of trust to indicate the relationship

between two groups of people, employers and employees. We have spoken already of course of the

issue of distrust, which is created by because the use of electronic surveillance practices in the

workplace. According to Helen Nissenbaum, trust is established once one acknowledges and accepts

the presence of perceived personal qualities in the other, along with shared values and commitments.

Common and mutual goals, along with the reciprocity that holds people together in a relationship,

all sustain this expected trust.289 The fulfilment of one’s role in a particular context, such as the

workplace, is also very important in its formation. As Nissenbaum writes, “trust, we learn, is an

attitude. It is almost always a relational attitude involving at least a trustor and a trustee. In this

relation of trust, those who trust accept their vulnerability to those in whom they place trust. [...]

Trust, then, is a form of confidence in another, confidence that the other, despite a capacity to do

harm, will do the right thing in relation to the trustor.”290 When people act with this same confidence

and trust, an intrinsic motivation is generated and each one is led to devote him or herself to the

benefit of oneself, of the other, and of the organization. This intrinsic motivation fosters the self-

regulation and pro-organizational behaviours discussed above.

Francis Fukuyama, in a similar way, describes trust as the “expectation that arises within a

community of regular, honest, and cooperative behaviour, based on commonly shared norms, on the

part of other members of that community.”291 Likewise, trust lowers transaction costs, facilitates

interorganizational relationships, and enhances manager-subordinate relationships.292 In the same

way, trust is “a collective judgement of one group that another group will be honest, meet

commitments, and will not take advantage of others.”293 It is also “one party’s willingness to be

vulnerable to another party based on the confidence that the latter party is (a) benevolent, (b) reliable,

(c) competent, (d) honest, and (e) open.”294 Nevertheless, trust has declined drastically in our day and

any progressive and productive relationship has been eroded and withered in the workplace due to

the pervasiveness of both ‘on-the-job’ and ‘of-the-job’ surveillance. However, when organizational

behaviour is endorsed from the perspective of both employer and employee, within the context of

mutual trust, the need for other-monitoring in the workplace is shown to be irrelevant and extraneous.

287 David Lyon, Surveillance after September 11 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 154. 288 Roderick M. Kramer, “Trust and Distrust in Organizations: Emerging Perspectives, enduring Questions,”

Annual Review of Psychology 50 (1999): 571. 289 Helen Nissenbaum, “Will Security Enhance Trust Online, or Supplant It?” in Trust and Distrust in

Organizations: Dilemmas and Approaches, eds., Roderick M. Kramer and Karen S. Cook, vol., 7 (New York:

Russell Sage Foundation, 2004), 159-160. 290 Nissenbaum, “Will Security Enhance Trust Online, or Supplant It?” 172. 291 Francis Fukuyama, Trust (New York: Free Press, 1995), 26. 292 Patricia M. Doney, Joseph P. Cannon and Michael R. Mullen, “Understanding the Influence of National

Culture on the Development of Trust,” The Academy of Management Review 23, no. 3 (1998): 601-620. 293 Brad L. Rawlins, “Measuring the Relationship between Organizational Transparency and Employee Trust,”

Public Relations Journal 2, no. 2 (2008): 5. 294 Megan Tschannen-Moran and Wayne K. Hoy, “A Multidisciplinary Analysis of the Nature, Meaning, and

Measurement of Trust,” Review of Educational Research 70, no. 4 (2000): 556.


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In the same manner, the articulation of transparency, as a business priority, is of utmost importance

for a successful and trusting organization.295 For transparency is an essential tool for preserving the

autonomy of both employers and employees and empowering them relative to one another in their

day-to-day job affairs. Though transparency often seems to be an overlooked value in business, it

greatly improves productivity, employee morale, and an organization’s culture.296 Transparency, as

it is generally conceived, “is an individual being honest with himself about the actions he is taking,

[…] is also the organization being upfront and visible about the actions it takes, and whether those

actions are consistent with its values.”297 Brad L. Rawlins urges today’s management to hold true to

some basic tenets in employee management, insisting on authenticity in communication and

relationships and being transparent and open in organizational strategies and behaviours.298 In the

organizational workplace, the proper degree of disclosure of information is dynamically fashioned

through the clear and accurate construction, interpretation, and exchange of information.

Transparency holds any organization accountable for their policies and practices, enhancing the

reasoning capabilities of its members.

The concept of openness is often emphasized in connection with transparency, and this means more

than just the open flow of information. It describes, more specifically, the need to face more and

more active demands for the concealment and disclosure of information.299 Rawlins defines

transparency as “the deliberate attempt to make available all legally releasable information […] in a

manner that is accurate, timely, balanced, and unequivocal, for the purpose of […] holding

organizations accountable for their actions, policies, and practices.”300 Moreover, transparency starts

now to subsume responsibility and accountability in public and private discourse about good

behaviour and governance in any organization. For it acts as a deterrent against corrupt and fraudulent

behaviour by promoting workforce vigilance. Transparency is thus viewed as a relational variable

promoting accountability, cooperation, and commitment and rebuilds trust for a better collaborative

relationship in a working condition.301 For it has always been linked with trust, integrity,

accountability, openness, secrecy, participation, and respect for others.302 Transparency, on the one

hand, is crucial for building trust and maintaining healthy organizational relationships; on the other

hand, transparency requires trust, since being transparent requires a willingness to be vulnerable

given the uncertainty about how the shared information will be used. Building mutual trust between

employers and employees is a high priority challenge for both public and private organizations today.

295 Huth, “The Insider Threat and Employee Privacy,” 368-381. Berggren, E., & Bernshteyn, R.

“Organizational Transparency Drives Company Performance.” Journal of Management Development 26, no.

5 (2007): 411-417. 296 Chuck Cohn, “4 Ways Transparency Can Boost Your Business,” American Express: Open Forum, July 1,

2013. https://www.americanexpress. com/us/small-business/openforum/articles/4-ways-transparency-can-

boost-your-business/ [accessed January 5, 2017]. 297 David Gebler, “Transparency is a Key to Performance,” Blog: Business Ethics, Culture and Performance,

March 14, 2011. http://managementhelp.org/blogs/business-ethics/2011/03/14/transparency-is-a-key-to-

performance/ [accessed January 5, 2017]. 298 Rawlins, “Measuring the Relationship between Organizational Transparency and Employee Trust,” 1-2. 299 Heungsik Park and John Blenkinsopp, “The Roles of Transparency and Trust in the Relationship between

Corruption and Citizen Satisfaction,” International Review of Administrative Science 77, no. 2 (2011): 254-

274. 300 Brad L. Rawlins, “Give the Emperor a Mirror: Toward Developing a Stakeholder Measurement of

Organizational Transparency,” Journal of Public Research 21, no. 1 (2009): 75. 301 Julia Jahansoozi, “Organization-Stakeholder Relationships: Exploring Trust and Transparency,” Journal of

Management Development 25, no. 10 (2006): 942-955. 302 Rawlins, “Give the Emperor a Mirror,” 75-76.


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Transparency reduces organizational malfeasance by means of its ‘open-window’ effect,303 which by

building credibility contributes positively to trust. Hence, trust along with transparency is a vital

indicator or denominator of a satisfactory and complementary relationship between employer and

employee. It is an essential component of cooperation and effective communication and the

foundation for productive relationships. In the same line, Linda Chilers Hon and James E. Grunig

have identified three qualities that have been mutually identified in this transparent and trusting

relationship: integrity, or the belief that a party is fair and just; dependability, or the belief that a party

will do what it says it will do; and competence, or the belief that a party has the ability to do what it

says it will do.304 This will engender organizational behaviour that is more satisfactory for both

parties concerned, and equally so. As organizations become more transparent, they also come to be

more trusted, and this mutual trust among a workforce contributes significantly to productivity and

other forms of desirable organizational behaviour. Relationships, built among co-workers and

between them and their managers through trust and transparency, generate a couple of positive

workplace outcome and strong moral behavioural patterns. In the same way, social relationships at

work are always associated with job involvements and organizational commitments,305 and these are

attained through attitudes of trust and transparency. We therefore here advocate the culture of trust

and transparency as an essential ‘on-the-job’ and ‘off-the-job’ behaviour, and argue against any effort

to legitimate the use of electronic surveillance in a workplace context.

7.3.3 The Notion of Just-Care and Self-Monitoring

Fourthly, the notion of Just-Care is significant in the discussion of self-directed value implementation

and workplace behaviour. Just-Care refers to a combination of care and justice as expressed in self-

directed and self-motivated behaviours in the workplace. We have already discussed the limitations

of the ethics of care, taken on its own, in the first chapter. It is widely recognized, as we have

elsewhere discussed, that “to engage and manage business people and their challenges fairly and

successfully, any business model has to be true-to-life facilitating and bridging business goals with

individual and social fabric of moral life.”306 Justice is held to be the first virtue of social institutions

is generally understood to consist in what people are due as well as the upholding of fairness and

equality. In a societal context, “social justice is a basic structure of cooperation and reciprocity and

essentially depends upon the equal treatment of individual’s fundamental rights and duties, economic

opportunities and social conditions.”307 Thus, social justice applies to both institutions and

individuals alike. On the one hand, it is “a principle that orders institutional activities as suitable for

production and protection of the common good”; on the other, it “is not a principle applying to

institutions alone, but rather a habit of justice applying to and an attribute of individuals.”308 In the

same way, through an analysis of workplace surveillance that takes into account John Rawls’s

principles of liberty and equality, we see that the number of opportunities for meaningful work

declined drastically due to employees being under constant surveillance.

303 David Herald, “Varieties of Transparency,” in Transparency: The Key to Better Governance, eds.

Christopher Hood and David Heald (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 25-43. 304 Linda Chilers Hon and James E. Grunig, Guidelines for Measuring Relationships in Public Relations

(Gainesville, FL: Institute for Public Relations, 1999), 1-39. 305 Ivy K. Nielson, Steve M. Jex andGary A. Adams, “Development and Validation of Scores on a Two-

Dimensional Workplace Friendship Scale,” Educational and Psychological Measurement 60, no. 4 (2000):

628–643. 306 Jijo James Indiparambil, “Deconstruction of Power: An Ethical Response to Organizational Surveillance,”

Conference Proceedings, The European Conference on Ethics, Religion & Philosophy 2015, 75-87 (Brighton:

The International Academic Forum, 2015), 82. 307 Indiparambil, “Deconstruction of Power: An Ethical Response to Organizational Surveillance,” 82. 308 Indiparambil, “Deconstruction of Power: An Ethical Response to Organizational Surveillance,” 82.


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The idea of social justice primarily implies the elimination of all forms of discrimination and social

sorting in a manner that respects the fundamental freedom, dignity, and civil and moral rights of all

individuals. In the case of the organizational behavioural context, this means that “individuals are

allowed to freely pursue their aspirations within the legal and moral limits and capacity of concerned

organization.”309 This in turn increases self-regulated behaviours in the workplace. Borrowing from

Paul Ricoeur, we see that social justice is marked by a logic of equivalence,310 which governs

everyday morality in an organization in a specific way, accepting the priority of others and regarding

this from an individual’s self-motivated scheme. It follows the golden rule of morality, treating others

as one wants to be treated by others. As a result, “justice-based evaluation offers an ethical framework

for succeeding and even balancing the moral values of treating people with fairness and dignity

combining material values of productivity and profits of the organization.”311 It also structures and

encourages organizations to promote and enhance the full potential of each of its members by

working for a diffusion of power in a way that is acceptable in any given situation. However, as we

have previously assumed within the scope of this research, the justice approach on its own gives rise

to another limitation, namely that the presumption of general agreement regarding what is just or fair

can antagonize the individual rights and interests of both employers and employees in an

organizational context. Here, the concept of an ethcis of care that goes beyond the ‘justice view’ of

morality and is able to complement the discussion of organizational moral behaviour.

Daniel Engster writes that “caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we

do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That

world includes our bodies, ourselves, and jour environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a

complex, life-sustaining web.”312 According to Engster, care generally denotes “everything we do

directly to help others to meet their basic needs, develop or sustain their basic capabilities, and

alleviate or avoid pain or suffering, in an attentive, responsive and respectful manner.”313 This shows

that the moral and social significance of the fundamental elements of human relationships is

recognised in this care ethics, as it serves to reproduce human life in a constructive way in society.

Care, with its moral considerations of sensitivity, trust and mutual concern, represents human activity

with the added value of social relations and thus presumes a face-to-face enounter, on an

interpersonal level, in the context of which one can respond to the needs of the other.314 Care, in its

ethical reflection, also emphasizes the importance of response, shifting its face from ‘what is just’ to

‘how to respond’ in a responsible and caring way. Thus also it involves attentiveness, responsibility

and a commitment to take into account different perspectives.315 Care thus appears as a moral

foundation for organizational behaviour, directed from and toward the promotion of employees’

self-worth and commitment.

Analysing the modes of thought of Carol Gilligan, who identified a different voice in moral

reasoning, Eric Stoddart identifies moral problems as problems of care and responsibility in

309 Indiparambil, “Deconstruction of Power: An Ethical Response to Organizational Surveillance,” 82. 310 Paul Ricoeur, “Ethical and Theological Considerations on the Golden Rule,” in Figuring the Sacred, ed.

Mark I. Wallace and trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press [French original 1987], 1995), 293-

302. 311 Indiparambil, “Deconstruction of Power: An Ethical Response to Organizational Surveillance,” 82. 312 Daniel Engster, “Rethinking Care Theory: The Practice of Caring and the Obligation to Care,” Hypatia 20,

no. 3 (2005): 50-51. 313 Engster, “Rethinking Care Theory: The Practice of Caring and the Obligation to Care,” 55. 314 Ellen Van Stichel, “Love and Justice’s Dialectical Relationship: Ricoeur’s Contribution on the Relationship

between Care and Justice within Care Ethics,” Medicine Health Care and Philosophy 17, no. 4 (2014): 501. 315 Selma Sevenhuijsen, Citizenship and the Ethics of Care: Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality and

Politics (New York: Routledge, 1998), 16.


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relationships, which are different from those of rights and rules.316 This view looks for new responses

marked by mutual obligation and responsibility on the part of organizational members, and this logic

of interdependence, as we can call it, support an affirmative response to workplace surveillance,

which builds trust, mutual concern and interconnectedness among members of an organization and

in part emerges from the self-regulative model. Neverthless, a too-exclusive reliance on care ethics

seems to be insufficient, as it lacks empirical accuracy and validity in moral reasoning and fails to

offer concrete guidance for ethical action. The liberal concepts of autonomy, equality, and justice

can be incorporated into care ethics, however, and thus make it theoretically indistinct. Therefore,

while both the ethics of care and justice can be applied to all areas of discussions about the workplace

surveillance and the development of individual moral reasoning and self-regulation, one bears greater

authority in some situations than the other. Favouring clarity and certainty and emphasizing the

absolute standards of judgement, the ethic of justice upholds fairness, reciprocity, and rights claims,

whereas the ethic of care emphasises creation and the strengthening of relationships, taking into

account the complexities of relationships among people.317 This situation calls for a combined

analysis of care and justice and their roles in moral reasoning and behaviours.

In this context, the concept of ‘just-care,’ which admits space for both justice and care, enables their

critical and contextual analysis and places them in a harmonious relationship that is far more than

merely dialectical. It places a high ‘rhetorical value’ on human life and on our debate on surveillance

in the workplace.318 Members in an organization with a framework of ‘just-care’, are no longer

independent individuals but are interrelated, and this ethical preference for harmonizing human

relationships is more in favour of crafting social integration than of ensuring the fair imposition of

managerial rules and organizational statutes.319 This combination in business also makes, on the one

hand, the nurturing of our immediate communities and protection of those closest to us the highest

moral obligation, and on the other hand, prompting us to review decisions not in terms of hard rules

but in terms of how they will affect the people with whom we share our lives.320 In this regard, care

leads justice to become ‘more human,’ and care appears as an indispensable precondition for justice.

Justice, in this same vein, helps to prevent a reduction of care to sentimentality321 and enables it to

be practically embodied in diverse situations. A focus on justice helps to make clear that the notion

of care does not only concern the private sphere, as critics have often alleged. Stichel, referring to

Ricoeur, argues that the perceived disproportionality between care and justice is only on an abstract

or ideal level, while on a concrete and practical level they intersect.322 Thus she emphasises the role

that justice can play in effecting the embodiment of care.

316 Eric Stoddart, Theological Perspectives on a Surveillance Society: Watching and being Watched. Farnham

(England: Ashgate, 2011), 43. Cf. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s

Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 317 Sheldene Simola, “Ethics of Justice and Care in Corporate Crisis Management,” Journal of Business Ethics

46, no. 4 (2003): 351-361. 318 The concept ‘rhetorical value’ is used here about persuading and influencing people for an alternative

response without expecting any concrete solution or answer. Indiparambil, “Deconstruction of Power: An

Ethical Response to Organizational Surveillance,” 83. 319 From a critical-ethical point of view, we can look at the organization/firm itself as a participatory enterprise

or as a social entity with a participatory vision – sharing with the wider society and with its own employees

leading to social enhancement. 320 James Brusseau, Business Ethics Workshop (Irvington, NY: Flat World Knowledge, 2011), 170. 321 Stichel, “Love and Justice’s Dialectical Relationship,” 505. 322 Stichel. “Love and Justice’s Dialectical Relationship,” 505. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, “Love and Justice,” in Radical

Pluralism and Truth: David Tracy and the Hermeneutics of Religion, eds. Werner G. Jeanrond, and Jennifer

L. Rike, trans. David Pellauer, 187–202 (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1991), 196.


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Justice thus presupposes an attitude of caring, and by bringing together justice and care we can help

to ensure mutual understanding and cooperatively formulated solutions in a given situation.323

According to Stichel, both personal relationships and professional caring practices must be just, such

that equality, its core, is embraced, and its discourses of rights, fairness, and universal principles are

integrated in a situation of moral discernment.324 Here, a discursive ethic of care and a rights-based

ethic of justice coexist and offer a more promising approach to this debate. For in a workplace, ‘just-

care,’ which integrates care ethics and social justice with their respective logics of interdependence

and equivalence, elucidates a positive response to surveillance and engenders a new logic of

superabundance that goes beyond the particulars of any imposed or volunteered norms and

regulations. We use the term ‘superabundance,’ here, in a manner more in line with ‘generosity’, not

purely in the same sense as Ricoeur. He uses this term as what he calls the economy of the gift,325

where we see the domination of the love commandment (logic of superabundance) over the ‘golden

rule’ (logic of equivalence).326 Thus, in organizational surveillance, a contextually determined and

acceptable range of agreement is made compatible with conflicting rights and interests through a

combination of care ethics and social justice, which we bring together here in the category of Just-

Care. Thus, we learn how ethical deliberations can fit seamlessly with managerial statutes in an

organization.

7.3.4 Personal, Corporate and Social Integrity and Self-Monitoring

Finally, this self-regulated moral approach, applied in place of external foms of technological

monitoring, accords importance to Personal, Corporate and Social Integrity and leads to an

integrated and productive workplace that gives sufficient value to all persons concerned. The notion

of integrity is generally described as the quality of being honest, and having a strong adherence to

moral principles. It has taken on several meanings. Researchers view integrity as “a substitute for the

good or the right” and “acting ethically or morally,” but representing a whole integrating all parts

including consistency, relational awareness, inclusion, and the worthwhile purpose of an action.327 It

could show itself as a kind of moral uprightness, whereby one holds consistent moral and ethical

beliefs. Integrity is defined as a measure of coherence and consistency,328 and refers thus to “the

alignment between what one does and what one says” – belonging, doing and saying to the same

whole.329 This consistency discussion also leads to a relational awareness of integrity, as our

relational self exists and serves the expressions of the individual self.330 To understand the wholeness

of the word integrity, researchers like Suresh Srivastva, Frank J. Barrett and Robert Solomon have

integrated the notion of wholeness with notions of relationship and interaction.331 Marvin T. Brown,

323 Robert C. Solomon, “The Moral Psychology of Business: Care and Compassion in the Corporation,”

Business Ethics Quarterly 8, no. 3, (1998): 515-533. 324 Stichel, “Love and Justice’s Dialectical Relationship,” 500. 325 Ricoeur, “Ethical and Theological Considerations on the Golden Rule,” 293-302. 326 Ricoeur coherently articulate ‘the economy of the gift’ more in terms of ‘mutuality’ and ‘generosity’ (logic

of superabundance), basing on the commandment to love one’s enemies, than in terms of ‘reciprocity’ based

on the golden rule of treating each other as one wants to be treated (logic of equivalence). Yet, this logic of

equivalence, as Ricoeur elucidates “governs everyday morality” and the “superabundance becomes the truth

hidden in equivalence” (Ricoeur 1995). 327 Martin T. Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5. 328 Amena Shahid and Shahid M. Azhar, “Integrity and Trust: The Defining Principles of Great Workplace,”

Journal of Management Research 5, no. 4 (2013): 64. 329 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 5. 330 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 6. 331 Suresh Srivastva and Frank J. Barrett, “Foundations for Executive Integrity: Dialogue, Diversity,

Development,” in Executive Integrity: The search for High Human Values in Organizational Life, eds. Suresh

Srivastva and Associates (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1980), 291; Robert C. Solomon, A Better Way to


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in this regard, argues that real individual integrity is the result of the conscious relationships which

he or she cultivates. For, according to Brown, “[i]ntegrity applies to both aspects of the self. As a

relational self, integrity requires a relational awareness, a consciousness of the relations in which one

participates. In terms of human action, integrity requires consistency in action; a consistency between

what one says and what one does. Hence, both aspects of integrity are necessary because the self is

both relational and an agent.”332 These relational aspects of integrity introduce the notion of inclusion

into our discussion.

Certain social scientists are trying to relegate integrity to the normative domain, “[a]kin to concepts

such as morality, ethics, and legality, integrity has been assumed to involve a non-scientific value

judgment that cannot be proved right or wrong by facts, evidence, or logic [and] stem from the value

system of the person making the judgement.”333 However, the word ‘integrity,’ on a personal level,

always goes beyond the limited view of ethics to involve the character of persons. It includes various

characteristics that are “consistently considerate, compassionate, transparent, honest, and ethical,”

and with trust defend what is “right […], fair, just, and acceptable.”334 In the same manner, integrity

is not only a personal matter, but rather involves others in many respects. For the notion of integrity,

“at the individual level presumably provides for the kind of soundness and honesty that results in

authenticity of behaviour, being true to one’s own beliefs and standards (personal codes) as well as

to the numerous corporate mission statements and codes of conduct that now mention not just one

but a whole range of stakeholders.”335 Thus the notion of inclusion in integrity entails an ethics of

openness to differences, which also refers “to listening to different voices, even disagreeable

ones.”336 This inclusion also refers to the integration of various ethical ideologies, principles and

theories, as we have already discussed in the previous chapter.

Within an organization or on a corporate level, integrity is not only a means to attain or integrate

ethical principles into its practices and behaviours. Rather, in itself integrity is an ethical principle

providing guidelines for choosing right actions.337 Corporate integrity, similarly, refers to the

“culture, policies and leadership philosophy” that strengthens corporate loyalty, teamwork,

consensus and ethical behaviour.338 On the corporate level, it is individuals of integrity who “cultivate

a consensus around mutual values” and foster a culture of integrity that creates in turn a highly valued

work environment.339 Here, individuals or employees of integrity achieve harmony on the basis of

mutual values and live it out. This harmony in turn builds and develops a culture of integrity, which

“impacts the strong working relationships within the company and creates a highly valued work

atmosphere [where] employees are motivated and innovative, take pride in their work, and enjoy

their affiliations.”340 Among the several interrelated and interdependent dimensions of corporate

integrity, namely the cultural, interpersonal, organizational, civic, and natural, it is the cultural

Think About Business: How Personal Integrity Leads to Corporate Success (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1999), 40. Cf. Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 6. 332 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 7. 333 Mark A. Zupan, “The Virtues of Free Markets,” Cato Journal 31, no. 2 (2011): 172-173. 334 Jan Warren Duggar, “The role of Integrity in Individual and Effective Corporate Leadership,” Journal of

Academic and Business Ethics 3 (2009): 1-7. 335 Shahid and Azhar, “Integrity and Trust: The Defining Principles of Great Workplace,” 68. Cf. Ans Kolk,

Rob van Tulder, and Carlijn Welters, “International Codes of Conduct and Corporate Social Responsibility:

Can Transnational Corporations Regulate Themselves?” Transnational Corporations 8, no. 1 (1999): 143-

179. 336 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 8. 337 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 9. 338 Duggar, “The role of Integrity in Individual and Effective Corporate Leadership,” 2-3. 339 Shahid and Azhar, “Integrity and Trust: The Defining Principles of Great Workplace,” 64-65. 340 Shahid and Azhar, “Integrity and Trust: The Defining Principles of Great Workplace,” 73.


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dimension, according to Brown, which functions as fundamental and holds all other dimensions

together by discovering ways to “relate to persons, experiences, and things.”341 This understanding

fosters further exploration of personal and corporate integrity in the workplace that values a self-

regulated moral approach in the employee management.

Personal integrity, as we have seen, can be explained as an ethical or moral motivation that enables

employees to relate with others in the organization – both significant and non-significant others –

along with relating to the values and interests of others and even with other corporate theories. The

price assigned to the personal integrity of employees, integrating their values and ends for the

workplace and organization, will enable them to actively engage in all work scenarios. Personal

integrity leads to value and gives meaning to different systems of the organization. Thus, Verstraeten,

a business ethicist, rightly refers to the “motivational view of good life,” holding that the ethics of

the organization should not be “a one-way process moving from the company to its employees.”342

Verstraeten illustrates, in this regard that “[i]n order to function well, both company and personnel

need other sources of inspiration. A company should not be a closed circle nor a tree with only a

single root. It also draws inspiration from the rich ideas which its personnel bring to it.”343 In this

way, it gives importance to the person who acts, and in turn this person must assume moral

responsibility for his or her acts. This leads us to consider the necessary competence and practical

wisdom that an agent, here a moral agent, must possess.344 These intellectual qualities of phronesis

or prudentia, according to Verstraeten, introduce the theme of virtue to the discussion of self-

regulated organizational behaviours.

Virtue, as we have seen, is an acquired human quality that employees are supposed to inherit to

enable them to discern what is good in a particular context. It can be explained as a non-instrumental

aspect of ethics, related to judgement and justice, and leading to the creation of a moral character.345

The expression of moral character is assumed in the self-regulatory approach to workplace practices.

To create integral-ethical workplaces and work conditions, employees are figured as ethical subjects.

The education of moral personalities or, in other words, a moral education, is a necessary

precondition for this.346 Along with character development, emotional well-being is a necessity in

the self-regulatory framework. However, it is observed that “[r]arely do the character flaws of a lone

actor fully explain corporate misconduct. More typically, unethical business practice involves the

tacit, if not explicit, cooperation of others and reflects the values, attitudes, beliefs, language, and

behavioural patterns that define an organization’s operating culture. Ethics, then, is as much an

organizational as a personal issue.”347 It is also observed that there are occasions when both personal

and corporate integrity are challenged in an organization. The integrity and values of individuals and

that of organizations may not be the same in all circumstances. We need, therefore, to identity the

core values of an organization through an analysis of respect for the privacy, autonomy and dignity

of employees and the integrity and responsibility of both employers and employees.

341 Brown, Corporate Integrity: Rethinking Organizational Ethics and Leadership, 9. 342 Johan Verstraeten, “From Business Ethics to the Vocation of Business Leaders to Humanize the World of

Business,” A European Review 7, no. 2 (1998): 116. 343 Verstraeten, “From Business Ethics to the Vocation of Business Leaders,” 117. 344 Verstraeten, “From Business Ethics to the Vocation of Business Leaders,” 118. 345 Verstraeten, “From Business Ethics to the Vocation of Business Leaders,” 119. 346 Verstraeten, “From Business Ethics to the Vocation of Business Leaders,” 120. “Moral education requires

the recognition and appreciation of the propaedeutic and educational role played by the narrative communities

outside the business, communities in which people are initiated into the world of texts which create meaning.”

Verstraeten, “From Business Ethics to the Vocation of Business Leaders,” 120. 347 Lynn S. Paine, “Managing for Organizational Integrity,” Harvard Business Review (1994),

https://hbr.org/1994/03/managing-for-organizational-integrity [accessed December 20, 2017].


335

A combined-integrity-based approach to workplace management from a self-regulatory perspective

emphasizes the integration of individual and managerial responsibility for ethical behaviour. For as

Lynn S. Paine states, “integrity strategies […] strive to define companies’ guiding values, aspirations,

and patterns of thought and conduct […] such strategies can help prevent damaging ethical lapses

while tapping into powerful human impulses for moral thought and action. Then an ethical

framework becomes no longer a burdensome constraint within which companies must operate, but

the governing ethos of an organization.”348 So, integrity, individual or organizational, is formed

through the practice of self-governance, wrapped up with certain guiding values and principles that

give life to an organization and its members. Paine, in this regard, continues that “[f]rom the

perspective of integrity, the task of ethics management is to define and give life to an organization’s

guiding values, to create an environment that supports ethically sound behaviour, and to instil a sense

of shared accountability among employees.”349 The self-regulatory approach, combined with

integrity, enables employees and to view ethical responsibility as a constructive, not constraining,

aspect of worklife in any organization.

Finally, integrity, in the context of ethics in the workplace, is referred to as “honesty and truthfulness

or accuracy of one’s actions,” “the opposite of hypocrisy,” and thus also to refer to the consistency

of one’s character.350 To sum up, the understanding of integrity within the scope of this research

points us to multiple dimensions: “(1) balance between institutional loyalty and moral autonomy, (2)

moral courage in a social context to stand up for and respect others as well as oneself, (3) honesty,

(4) altruism, acting courageously for the benefit of others even when attacked and criticised, (5)

understanding global norms of justice and fairness, and (6) openness to community evaluation.”351

These aspects of integrity practiced in the workplace make it more productive and thus life

enhancing, enabling all members to contribute to the well-being of each other.

We may conclude this discussion by quoting Rosenberg’s remark that “[t]aking an ethical point of

view in managing the workplace is not a formula for losing control. Treating employees with respect

and creating an environment that encourages commitment, resourcefulness, and responsibility can

be equated with capital investment to improve productivity. Establishing ethical ground rules and

enforcing them fairly demonstrate a commitment of management to respect its workers and their

efforts.”352 On the part of employees, the feeling of being valued and respected enables them to

develop a deeper sense of personal commitment to the organization and its mission and to behave in

accord with the legitimate judgements of various situations taking appropriate decisions. This in turn

will lead to right action in the workplace. Having said this, we may now review the main features of

what is called Christian personalist management. This is exemplified by Domènec Melé, a Catholic

theologian and business ethicist, who sought to situate Labourer Valued Management and Self-

monitoring in the wider context of personalism and the person-centered approach of employee

management in the workplace.

348 Paine, “Managing for Organizational Integrity,” https://hbr.org/1994/03/managing-for-organizational-

integrity [accessed December 20, 2017]. 349 Paine, “Managing for Organizational Integrity,” https://hbr.org/1994/03/managing-for-organizational-

integrity [accessed December 20, 2017]. 350 Carley H. Dodd and Matthew J. Dodd, “What is Integrity?” in Business and Corporate Integrity: Sustaining

Organizational Compliance, Ethics, and Trust, ed. Robert C. Chandler, 3-13 (California: ABC-CLIO, LLC,

2014), 5. 351 Dodd and Dodd, “What is Integrity?” 6. 352 Rosenberg, “The Technological Assault on Ethics in the Modern Workplace,” 148.


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7.4 DOMÈNEC MELÉ AND A HARMONIZING PERSONALIST MANAGEMENT REVIEW

Domènec Melé, illustrating the wide use of analytical tools in the field of management, points to a

reductionism dominant in the consideration of the human role in business and in the workplace.353

This problem of reductionism is widely experienced in the workplace, as we have explored in this

research, due to ubiquitous surveillance practices. Understanding the narrow view of human beings

as homo oeconomicus – economic man – with only an instrumental rationality, Melé argues for a

new manifesto for management that considers the intrinsic value of openness to human development

and human flourishing and calls for a rethinking of economics, business and management from a

humanistic or personalistic perspective.354 Humanistic management “emphasises the human

condition and is oriented to the development of human virtue in all its forms, to its fullest extent.”355

Referring to Gaudium et spes, Melé summarises the base for humanistic management that “Man is

the source, the centre and the purpose of all economic and social life.”356 Business and organizational

managements are to practice humanism by respecting the humanity of each member of their

organizations, treating them as an end, favouring human potentials in creativity, rationality, and

character, fostering the exercise of freedom with a sense of responsibility and contribute to human

well-being.357 The Person is the centre of this approach.

Humanistic management affirms the centrality of persons in organizations and the development of

their faculties, affairs, and well-being.358 This approach to management stresses the importance of

human behaviour, needs and motivations. It also presupposes the decentralization of power and

provision of workers with opportunities for decision-making. It also assumes that dealing with

employees in a more humane way will increase performance and productivity in the workplace. This

humanistic perspective thus seeks to effect a shift “from organisations in which each person is just a

cog in the business machine to organisations in which people are put first, with a greater degree of

involvement, commitment, and participation.”359 It also recognizes the personal competences of each

member of the organization. To this end, Melé brings joins the personalist principle and the common

good principle, focusing on interpersonal relationships and that of individuals or group [of

employees] and organization or wider society. This will make even moral reasoning and decision-

making suitable to the situation, taking into account its specificity and complexity. This personalist

353 Domènec Melé, “Editorial Introduction: Towards a More Humanistic Management,” Journal of Business

Ethics 88, no. 3 (2009): 413. 354 Melé, “Editorial Introduction: Towards a More Humanistic Management,” 414. Along with considering

efficiency in management, it is vital to consider people in their fullness. 355 Domènec Melé, “Antecedents and Current Situation of Humanistic Management,” African Journal of

Business Ethics 7, no. 2 (2013): 52. To explain humanism, Melé quotes French Philosopher Jacques Maritain,

who states “humanism tends essentially to render man more truly human and to manifest his original greatness

by having him participate in all that can enrich him in nature and history … [I]t at once demands that man

develop the virtualities contained within him, his creatives forces and the life of reason, and work to make

the forces of the physical world instruments of his freedom.” Melé, “Antecedents and Current Situation of

Humanistic Management,” 53. Cf. Jacques Maritain, “Integral Humanism, Freedom in the Modern World,

and a Letter on Independence,” in The Collected Works of Jacques Maritain (Original: Integral Humanism:

Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom, 1938), ed. Otto Bird, trans. Otto Bird, Joseph Evans,

and Richard O’Sullivan (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 153. 356 Melé, “Antecedents and Current Situation of Humanistic Management,” 53. Cf. Vatican Council II.

“Gaudium et Spes.” AAS 58 (1966), no. 63. It also urges that “[i]n the economic and social realms, too, the

dignity and complete vocation of the human person and the welfare of society as a whole are to be respected

and promoted.” 357 Melé, “Antecedents and Current Situation of Humanistic Management,” 53. 358 Melé, “Antecedents and Current Situation of Humanistic Management,” 54. Cf. Domènec Melé, “The

Challenge of Humanistic Management,” Journal of Business Ethics 44, no. 1 (2003): 77-88. 359 Melé, “Antecedents and Current Situation of Humanistic Management,” 59.


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review indeed sums up all previous ethical discussions and offers new responses to the new ways of

employee management.

7.4.1 Integrating Personalist and Common Good Principles

Personalism, often qualified as humanism, “holds the centrality of the human person in social,

political, economic, and environmental contexts […] emphasizing the uniqueness of person and his

or her dignity.”360 By giving importance to personal autonomy and freedom, personalism seeks to

enables individuals to become the true subjects and causes of their actions and affirms the centrality

of human persons. According to Melé, personalism “emphasizes human consciousness, intentionality

toward ends, self-identity through time, value retentiveness, openness to community building, and,

above all, the dignity of every human being.”361 This means that, in its strict sense, personalism

“focuses on the reality of the person […] and on his unique dignity, insisting on the radical distinction

between persons and all other beings (non-persons) [and] draws its foundations from human reason

and experience.”362 Though historically it emerged as an accompaniment of biblical theism and draws

insights from revelation, it is applied now to different branches of [speculative] thought such as

philosophy, theology, economics, psychology, sociology, and so forth. Melé distinguishes

personalism from both individualism and collectivism. For him, a person exists not in isolation or

united through mere social contracts, but has an interdependent existence by both possessing intrinsic

relationships and maintaining individual autonomy and freedom. Each person is thus a unique

being.363 This interiority, autonomy, freedom and interchangeability in relationships makes clear the

uniqueness of personalism.

In line with the analysis of employees as virtuous persons, Melé introduces a realistic personalism,

consisting of personalist rational principles and common good principles, which are integrated into

the ethical behaviour and culture of organizations.364 These personalist principles serve employees

to act ethically in various situations in the workplace. Reflecting on the personalist principle, Melé

cites the Golden Rule – the ethics of reciprocity – as its remote antecedent and formulates it in a

novel way: as a call to “put yourself in the place of another.” He argues that “one has a right to just

treatment, and a responsibility to ensure justice to and for others.”365 This is considered the basic

global ethical norm for universal principle of justice with both positive (do your best for others) and

negative (do no harm to others) formulations. However, according to Melé, the consideration of

human dignity – the intrinsic worth of humans – gives a new dimension to the Golden Rule. It is

defined as “the sacredness or value of each person as an end, not simply as a means to the fulfilment

of others’ purposes.”366 This dignity as an inherent part of the human condition has already been

discussed in previous sections. Along with respecting each person’s rights – concerns about what

justice requires - human dignity as the absolute worth of the human person stresses “benevolence

360 Domènec Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics: The Personalist and the

Common Good Principles,” Journal of Business Ethics 88, no. 1 (2009): 229. 361 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 229. 362 Thomas D. Williams, “What is Thomistic Personalism?” Alpha Omega 7, no. 2 (2004): 164. 363 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 229. 364 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 227-244. 365 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 230. The Golden Rule is expressed as

“do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This command of Golden Rule assures the moral

rightness of human action. Gerhard Zecha, “The Golden Rule in Applied Ethics: How to Make Right

Decisions in Theory and Practice,” Anuarul Institutului de Istorie "George Baritiu" din Cluj-Napoca - Seria

HUMANISTICA 9 (2011): 90. 366 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 231.


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and care, that is concern and solicitude for their needs.”367 Thus, Melé formulates the personalist

principle as: “No human being should ever be treated as mere means to an end. On the contrary,

persons should be treated with respect and also with benevolence and care.”368 Personalist principles

therefore include the rights and duties of justice as well as the obligations of benevolence and care.

The personalist principle is also viewed as a basis for human rights, such as natural rights or human

rights, due to the fact of being human, in addition to rights acquired through contracts. For instance,

in this regard, Melé refers to Robert Spaemann, who writes that “the recognition of human beings as

persons includes recognizing whatever the person possesses as a part of his human condition: life,

body, reputation, property or freedom of movement […] and any other feature related to human

goods.”369 The personalist principle provides a sound basis for claims concerning intrinsic human

rights, which are inviolable and inalienable. What do rights, justice, benevolence and care mean in

an organizational business or workplace context, according to the personalist principle? In Melé’s

view, it means “acting with a sense of service and collaboration and giving the due care toward

collaborators and other stakeholders,”370 which includes practical wisdom and the freedom to

develop virtues for every member of the organization. This will enable the actions of the individual

employee to be in conformity with the proper expectation of the organization and will lead to an

increase in productivity and services. Melé also remarks upon the social dimension of the person in

the organization in his exploration of the common good principle. The capability of each member of

the organization to associate with one another through mutual interests and understanding is the key

factor here. Though this collaboration can be viewed in relation to public recognition, seeking self-

interest and reputation, Melé demands that it be recognized as an end in itself,371 for personalism

regards this collaboration and sociability to be inherent in persons having equal dignity and rights.

In his profound analysis, Melé relates the sociability of the human person to the notion of the common

good by noting the human inclination to obtain what one thinks to be good.372 Since an organization

is established with a view to some good, all its members, along with their pursuing their own good,

share this common or collective good. The social dimension of individuals relates to the notion of

the common good and the view that members “belong to a community are united by common goals

and share goods by the fact of belonging to the community.”373 The factors that shape an organization

as a community of persons are the following: individual contribution through cooperation, mutual

respect and openminded commitment to the organization, as well as the attitudinal and behavioural

alterations in favour of the personal and organizational good. Through social cooperation every

individual member of the organization fulfils his or her “existential end” and thus “enjoys the

possibility of realizing his true self by participating in the effects of the cooperation of all.”374 Thus,

the concept of the common good in organizations enables its members to formulate conditions for

367 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 232. The personalist principle or the

personalist norm of Wojtyla, which includes the respect, care and benevolence, is already discussed in the

previous section. 368 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 232. Personalist principles in general

prohibits making any attempt on or against human life and physical integrity, “slavery, exploitation and

manipulations” and any “mistreatment of persons or groups.” 369 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 233. Cf. Robert Spaemann, Happiness

and Benevolence, trans. Jereiah Alberg (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2000), 185. 370 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 233. 371 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 234. 372 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 234. Melé distinguishes here the

‘apparent good’ from authentic human good. For instance, obtaining money through a fraudulent activity is

an example of apparent good as it attracts in some way but not real good as it corrupts human being. 373 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 235. 374 Johannes Messner, Social Ethics: Natural Law in the Modern World, trans. J.J. Doherty (USA: Herder, St.

Louis, 1965), 118, 124. Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 235.


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increasing opportunities for all to flourish. The notion of the common good, as Melé envisages it,

goes beyond the limitedness of concepts like ‘common well-being’ and ‘public interest’ (only

material conditions) as well as the notion of ‘general interests’ (majority opinion), and seeks human

flourishing in its entirety.

In this way, within the context of the organization or workplace, Melé observes that “providing goods

at a fair profit is a goal common to every business. A culture of commitment and cooperation, and a

good work climate is part of the common good of the firm.”375 So, the concept of the common good

consists of several aspects, including socio-cultural values shared in the organization, rights and

freedom, safety and justice, etc., as well as organizational conditions including both economic

dimensions (just laws, fair treatment, trials and procedures) and environmental ones (sustaining

fitting habitat). The description of the common good and other decisions and concerns of employees

must, therefore, be “always with the due respect for human dignity and innate rights, and following

the legitimate proceeds established within such community.”376 Likewise, the relationship of

employees with the organization must involve consciousness and freedom as well as ethical

collaboration and contribute to the common good. This collaboration does not entail a full

subordination of the individuality of employees to all the common interests of organizations at the

cost of one’s dignity and autonomy. For Melé, referring to Wojtyła, states that “Thomistic

personalism maintains that the person should be subordinated to society in all that is indispensable

for the realization of the common good, but the true common good never threatens the good of the

person, even though it may demand considerable sacrifice of a person.”377 This means that the notion

of the common good under no circumstances devalues the personhood. On the contrary, it contributes

to employee flourishing in the organization. This reflection on personalist principles leads us to the

perception of business organizations as communityies of persons.

7.4.2 The Organization as a Community of Persons

In accord with phenomenological-personalist thought, Melé regards a firm as a community of

persons, and emphasizes “the uniqueness, conscience, free will, dignity, and openness to human

flourishing.”378 Personalism considers matters affecting human life as a whole. This means that, over

against the “economism-based business ethos” that perceives the business organization as a set of

contracts, Melé here argues for a humanistic business ethos that regards every business enterprise in

its human wholeness.379 He begins his discussion by first illustrating the current managerial views of

organizations and shows their limitations before proposing an alternative view. One view he

considers, for instance, reduces the organization to a nexus of contracts, “aggregate of individuals

united exclusively for reasons of power and interests, through a set of contracts.”380 Agency theory

375 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 235. 376 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 236. 377 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 236. Cf. Wojtyla, Person and

Community: Selected Essays, 174. Melé here “differs from collectivistic ideology, which holds that human

persons should be subordinated to society in all things, and from the individualistic approaches which place

the interests of the individual over the common good.” Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based

Business Ethics,” 236. 378 Domènec Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” Journal

of Business Ethics 106, no. 1 (2012): 89-101. 379 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 90. 380 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 90. Melé, in this

regard, quotes Hessen who argues organization consists only of individuals with certain types of contractual

relationships with one another. Robert Hessen, In Defence of the Corporation (Stanford, CA: Hoover

Institution, 1979), xiii. He refers also the influential economist Ronald Coase who sees business firms and

organizations as instruments of economic efficiency. Melé also speaks about the psychological and social


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or agency cost theory, which we have previously discussed in the first chapter, could be an easy

extension of this type of thinking, as it deals with explicit or implicit contracts between two groups

of people.

Another perspective proposes that corporations are simply a coordination of connected networks of

concurrent interests of the various stakeholders.381 This view goes beyond mere contractual ideas.

According to Melé, this understanding of organizations “as a constellation of interests adds a human

aspect to the ‘skeleton’ of contracts, but it is still insufficient for a whole view of the firm.”382 Thus

he brings the commitments and moral (altruistic) behaviours within the discussion and holds that

corporations are communities with intrinsic values. Melé also introduces other concepts than

contracts and interests in his discussion of organizational behaviours, many of which we have already

discussed. For instance:

The concept of “organizational commitment,” which regards the attachment of employees to the

organization and involves economic, sentimental and also normative motives for such attachment;

“organizational identification,” or degree to which an employee experiences a “sense of oneness”

or psychological bonding between themselves and his or her work organization; and

“organizational citizenship behaviour” which has been defined as “individual behaviour that is

discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and that in

aggregate promotes the effective functioning of the organization.383

This type of behaviour often goes above and beyond the domains of duty, interests, and contracts.

Besides, following social capital theory, Melé acknowledges the presence of social capital, which,

as a source of social relations within organizations characterized by trust, cooperation,

interdependence, interaction, etc.,384 suggests that organizations should be viewed as human

communities rather than any more abstract entity. What is valued in a community is human

relationships, and these relationships among employees are related to organizational efficiency and

increased productivity, benefitting all members concerned. Similarly, Melé quotes Robert C.

Solomon, who writes that “what makes a corporation efficient or inefficient is not a series of well-

oriented mechanical operations but the working interrelations, the coordination and rivalries, team

spirit and morale of many people who work there and are in turn shaped and defined by the

corporation.”385 So, corporations become communities through members’ relationships and through

their moral behaviours. Thus, he continues, referring to Koehn, that “people become what they are

within a community and their moral character is relevant for making contributions to the society or

communal enterprises.”386 Furthermore, referring to Catholic Social Teaching and in particular to

Mater et Magistra, Gaudium et Spes and Centesimus Annus, Melé stresses the notion of a business

as a community of persons, associated with various ethical requirements. Verstraeten, as a Catholic

contracts in this way in connection to organizational mutual behaviours and rights and duties. Melé, “The

Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 90. 381 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 91. R. Edward

Freeman, “Business Ethics at the Millennium,” Business Ethics Quarterly 10, no. 1 (2000), 169-180; R.

Edward Freeman and Jeanne Liedtka, “Corporate Social Responsibility: A Critical Approach,” Business

Horizons 34, no. 4 (1991), 92-99. 382 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 91. 383 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 91. 384 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 91. 385 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 93. Cf. Robert C.

Solomon, Ethics and Excellence: Cooperation and Integrity in Business (New York: Oxford University Press,

1992), 150. 386 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 93. Cf. Daryl

Koehn, “A Role for Virtue Ethics in the Analysis of Business Practice,” Business Ethics Quarterly 5, no. 3

(1995): 537.


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theologian and business ethicist, also views a business as a community of persons.387 Organizations

are therefore valued as communities of interrelated persons with, to a certain extent, a shared moral

sense.

In an organization, a virtuous relationship, which is motivated by a willingness to stand for a good

cause, is preferred over the other many kinds of relationships we have discussed above, such as

utilitarian relationships with utilitarian interests, or emotional relationships based on enjoyment.388

Virtuous or interrelated, collaborative and constructive relationships among employees are a real

contribution to human life chances. An organization, with the deep relationship of a stable group of

employees or association, is considered a substantive community, in contrast to ephemeral

communities that have only occasional meetings.389 For, as Melé defines it, a community, in a strict

sense, “entails a permanent community of life between persons that affects them in the depth of their

being and confers on them a lasting stamp.”390 Intersubjective relationship is the decisive factor in

this community of persons, in which a feeling of “we” in the organization drives its member common

pursuit of a goal, without losing the full subjective personalities of each.391 This validates the concept

of an organization as a community of persons behaving together. However, it is more than a mere

collectivist view of individuals that overlooks the fullness of individual members of an organization.

It is a personalist understanding, or a humanistic perspective, and can contribute much to our research

here.

The concept “person” for Melé has “a connotation of individuality, uniqueness, and possession of

intimacy” having “self-conscience, self-determination, and consequently, a subject of moral acts, and

endowed with intrinsic dignity.”392 In this regard, Melé, from his humanistic perspective, bases

himself on the writings of Pope John Paul II and argues for the inner orientation of individual actions

towards oneself, along with or more than the expected external good. Employees’ actions in an

organization include “a moral judgment by which a person determines him or herself as a human

being,” as it comprehends the “self-determination and self-realization of the acting person.”393 Being

aware of the actions that contribute to human flourishing as well as those that erode the humanity of

acting persons, Melé gives importance to human inner experiences and thus to employees’ human or

personal characteristics. Any action by an employee with freedom and a capacity for self-realization

contributes to this personalistic value of persons. Hence, an inherent position of this ‘personalistic

value’ before the ‘ethical value’ of the action is illustrated by Melé, relating the former with the

person as the rational free subject, and the later with ethical norms. Identifying this “personalistic

value inherent in every human action” also leads to the identification of the “intrinsic social or

communitarian dimension” of the action, when performed together with others. This simply requires

387 Verstraeten, “From Business Ethics to the Vocation of Business Leaders,” 112. 388 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 95. 389 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 95. 390 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 95. Cf., Edith

Stein, La estructura de la persona humana (first published in German as ‘Der aufbau der

menschlichenperson’, 1994) (Madrid: BAC, 1998), 249. 391 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 96. Cf., Karol

Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), Person and community: Selected Essays, translated by O. Theresa Sandok (New

York: Peter Lang, 1993). 392 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 96. Cf., Robert

Spaemann, Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something,’ trans. Oliver O’Donovan (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2006). 393 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 96.


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that one respect the personalistic value of actions in oneself and in others.394 This respect mutually

rendered to the humanity of each other leads also to self-actualization.

Thus, Melé introduces a “personalist principle,” referring to the “personalistic norm”395 of Karol

Wojtyła, and argues that this personalist vision “goes beyond the sociological determinism, which

attempts to explain the person’s action through a set of social relations in which person is only a cog

within a mechanism.”396 It also goes against any position that fails to acknowledge the inter-

subjective dimension present in every action. In this way, an anthropological point of view is declared

and professed when an organization is viewed as a community of persons with the ethos of a

humanistic perspective. Hence, Melé defines an organization or business enterprise as “a community

of persons based on cooperative activity to provide goods and services in an efficient, competitive

and profitable way.”397 Illustrating this, he also points to the ethical implications of this identification

of organizations as communities of persons, presuming a higher purpose. As a first principle, such a

corporation or organization will regard itself as a citizen of a larger community. Referring to Robert

C. Solomon, Melé states that corporations, like individuals, are part of the community and have

intrinsic responsibilities as social entities.398 A community, for Solomon, is “an open-ended and

immensely complex set of relationships between its members, who may, within that context, be

called ‘individuals.’”399 The organization or corporation is viewed here as a tangible community; a

community of persons.

According to Solomon, “communities and the spirit of community are fundamentally concerned with

complementarity and differences, out of which emerge relationships of reciprocity and cooperation

[consisting] a shared sense of belonging, a shared sense of mission [… and] mutual interest.”400 An

organization, in this way, is a community consisting primarily of its members – employers,

employees, stakeholders and consumers. When an organization is viewed as a community of persons,

as Melé observes, all members are regarded as a core part of this group, all bearing responsibility for

each other and treating one another with “respect and a sense of cooperative reciprocity.”401 So, along

with valuing and respecting human dignity and the associated rights of employees, an attitude of

benevolence and care is also demanded from organizational behaviours, an attitude that takes into

account the personal conditions and needs of each employee.402 Similarly, the sense of benevolence

394 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 96. 395 Reformulating the Kantian description on human dignity Karol Wojtyla writes that “whenever a person is

the object of your activity, remember that you must not treat that person as only the means to an end, as an

instrument, but must allow for the fact that he or she, too, has, or at least should have, distinct personal ends.”

Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility (San Francisco: Harper-Collins (first published in Polish, Miłos ´c ´

i Odpowiedzialnosc. Studium etyczne. Lublin: KUL, 1960), 1981), 28. Melé quotes the same in his

explanation of personalist reading of employees’ behaviours in the organization. Melé, “The Firm as a

“Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 97. 396 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 97. Cf. Domènec

Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics: The Personalist and the Common Good

Principles,” Journal of Business Ethics 88, no. 1 (2009): 227-244. 397 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 97. 398 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 97-98. Cf. Robert

C. Solomon, “The Corporation as Community: A Reply to Ed Hartmann,” Business Ethics Quarterly 4, no.

3 (1994): 271-285. 399 Solomon, “The Corporation as Community,” 277. He explains it further stating “[t]he particular individuals

may come and go. Indeed, in that sense the corporation is rarely the same from one day to the next. But the

relationships, always forming, being reinforcing and reforming.” Solomon, “The Corporation as

Community,” 277. 400 Solomon, “The Corporation as Community,” 277. 401 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 98. 402 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 277-284. Cf. Melé, “The Firm as a

“Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 98.


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and care in the organization, which we have already discussed, does not disregard the attention given

to efficiency, competitiveness and profit,403 and this in turn fosters trust and cooperation among the

members of an organization. Organizations as communities of persons not only constitute and

contribute to the “respect for the freedom of corporate employees […] but also expresses their

condition as a person, one who can never be treated as a passive or unconscious element within the

organization.”404 This cooperation of all members in the organization for a common goal or common

good is the ethical behaviour required of all in the workplace. Relationships based on ethics go

beyond contractual duties and foster employees’ flourishing in organizations, which consisting of

persons – which are communities of persons – who are conscious and free beings.

One of the leading challenges that arises in the effort to create social relationships among employees

within an organization is the usual managerial attitudes and practices, which are “based on protecting

the organization from its own employees, using hierarchical authority to prevent opportunistic

behaviour, or rewarding and punishing employees to guarantee that everyone does what they are

expected to do.”405 Our research has shown that these characteristics predominate when electronic

and other forms of external monitoring and ubiquitous surveillance are enforced in the organization,

in view of security and productivity. There arise feelings of distrust among employees who are

always subjugated to power. We have seen also how this electronic surveillance creates opportunistic

behaviours. Melé thus states that in order to develop an organization as a community of persons, all

working together for the betterment of both employee and employer alike and thus fulfil the goals of

the organization, managerial behaviours must construct an ethical paradigm that “falls outside any

job description or any mandatory rule or procedure.”406 Hence, a humanistic-based management

model, such as the Labourer valued management approach proposed in this research, is much

required today and recommended for organizations.

7.4.3 Humanizing/Rehumanizing the Culture in Organizations

We have already discussed above the emergence and development of an ‘organizational culture’ and

how it is formed and sustained in organizations. This differently formed organizational culture is said

to be “a determinant of performance through employee behaviour and decision patterns,”407 as it

consists of an ethos within the organization on which its specific culture is based. An organizational

culture influences how things are done in organizations by incorporating certain shared and stable

beliefs and values.408 Melé explores and argues for a humanizing culture in organizations, which in

his view gives a human character to all performances and behaviours. On the one hand, it must be

“an organizational culture appropriate to human beings” corresponding to human conditions, and on

the other hand, it must “be appropriate for fostering human fulfilment in those involved in it.”409

Here, all members of the organization, as Melé envisages, though already human, become more

human by achieving what is termed human flourishing or human fulfilment. This is what is meant

by re-humanizing the workplace. Melé in this regard indicates a few features of a rehumanized

403 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 98. 404 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 98. Cf. George G.

Brenkert, “Freedom, Participation and Corporations: The Issue of Corporate (Economic) Democracy,”

Business Ethics Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1992): 251–269. 405 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 99. Cf. Paul S.

Adler and Seok-Woo Kwon, “Social Capital: Prospects for a New Concept,” Academy of Management Review

27, no. 1 (2002): 17-40. 406 Melé, “The Firm as a “Community of Persons”: A Pillar of Humanistic Business Ethos,” 99. 407 Domènec Melé, “Organizational Humanizing Cultures: Do They Generate Social Capital?” Journal of

Business Ethics 45, no. 1-2 (2003): 3. 408 Melé, “Organizational Humanizing Cultures,” 4. 409 Melé, “Organizational Humanizing Cultures,” 4.


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organizational culture that are shared by all members of organizations who play a role in creating

and sustaining an organizational culture.

One principal feature of the humanizing or rehumanizing culture is the “recognition of the person in

his or her dignity, rights, uniqueness, sociability and capacity for personal growth.”410 This, in the

organization, acknowledges the intrinsic dignity of each member through one’s innate faculties of

reason, consciousness, freedom, intimacy and the ability to transcend oneself. What makes this

unique is that it recognizes, on the one hand, the unrepeatable differences of each member of the

organization with each one’s uniqueness, and on the other, the sociability of human beings that gives

employees the capacity to participate in social life.411 These all become part and parcel of re-

humanizing culture in the workplace. This humanized culture will recognize the capacity of each

member as human being for personal growth including all the aspects of human life – the physical,

the moral and the virtuous. This is the capacity for personal growth. We have already discussed the

role of virtuous acts, which are acquired through good decisions. These acts make an employee the

kind of person he or she wants to be and, in this way, increase employees’ capacity for respect,

service and cooperation.

All these dimensions formulate subsequently a set of innate rights of employees as human beings

and leads to the second feature of rehumanizing the workers, workplace behaviours and cultures:

namely, giving respect to persons and to their human rights.412 According to Melé, “[r]especting

persons and their human rights also means integrity, with a steadfast attitude of trustfulness, keeping

promises and fulfilling contacts, fairness and organizational justice.”413 An attitude of “care and

service for persons around one” is the third feature of an organizational humanizing culture. This

attitude of care, which goes beyond the regularities of rights and duties and focuses on improving

employees’ life chances and personal growth, has been discussed in a previous section. Melé

illustrates here that respect and rights are ethically in tune with prohibitive norms, while care and

service are related more to affirmative norms and needs, including ethical rationality and the practical

wisdom needed to enact it.414 The limitations of the ethics of care have been explored above, and

both care and justice are valued in the context of organizational surveillance and workplace

behaviours. However, care is important, as its dimension of benevolence is an essential factor for

human fulfilment, even in organizational contexts.

This understanding of care and justice further leads to the forth feature of humanizing the workplace:

managing towards the common good rather than particular interests.415 Melé disregards here the

limited view of business as a mere mechanism for profit or an organism adapting to different

environments, and argues that “if persons have human dignity and intrinsic rights, they cannot be

treated as mere instruments for profits nor as simple resources for performance, adapting themselves

to market and other environment conditions.”416 For a rehumanizing organizational culture, the vision

of the organization must go beyond the limited view of business enterprises and organizations. So

organizations, formed by different members sharing common goals, have an interconnectedness

among their members and is most accurately characterized as community of persons united in pursuit

410 Melé, “Organizational Humanizing Cultures,” 5. 411 Melé, “Organizational Humanizing Cultures,” 5. 412 Melé, “Organizational Humanizing Cultures,” 5. Melé observes and recognizes also the human conditions

having innate rights of his/her-own through life, body, freedom, etc., and acknowledges all members of the

organization as human beings are equal in dignity and rights. 413 Melé, “Organizational Humanizing Cultures,” 6. 414 Melé, “Organizational Humanizing Cultures,” 6. 415 Melé, “Organizational Humanizing Cultures,” 5. 416 Melé, “Organizational Humanizing Cultures,” 7.


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of a common good – having self-interest identical to the larger group interests. Therefore, a

humanizing culture will not subordinate the common good and tries to satisfy both self-interest and

common organizational goals and interests. All these features hold fast and deeply fasten to the

already discussed characteristics of LVM and the self-regulating or self-monitoring approach

discussed in previous sections.

Melé observes, in this regard, that the organizational humanizing culture creates “social capital” in

the organization.417 Social capital is defined as “the resource available to actors as a function of their

location in the structure of their social relations.”418 In the organizations, social capital is invested

through the relational activities of generating connections, enabling and sustaining trust and fostering

and empowering cooperation. Melé, referring to Carrie R. Leana and Harry J. van Buren III, writes

that trust and associability generate social capital in an organization, and that both of these function

within the “willingness and ability of participants in an organization to subordinate individual goals

and associate actions to collective goals and actions.”419 He thus regards trust and associability as the

major components of social capital. In the same way, in reference to social capital in organizations,

Melé quotes Don Cohen and Laurence Prusak, who write that “social capital consists of the stock of

active connections among people: the trust, mutual understanding, and shared values and behaviours

that bind the members of human networks and communities and make cooperative action

possible.”420 Hence, social capital consists in the ability and willingness of employees to work

together in organizations, even at the cost of personal interests, for common goals and purposes.

Trust and associability are the two key factors to enable cooperation, cooperation builds social

capital, and this in turn fosters organizational humanizing cultures – and vice versa. This generates

the organizational identification we have discussed in previous sections.

Melé is also concerned about the dehumanizing culture produced through disloyalty, “unfair

treatment, lack of respect for people and unconcern for the community needs.”421 This culture

weakens trust and employees willingness to cooperate, and thus also associability. Lack of respect

for the dignity and humanity of each individual leads to antisocial behaviour in organizations,

endangers social capital, and further destroys the productivity, profitability, expansion and endurance

of an organization. Thus, Melé opposed performance-dominated cultures, which disdain concern for

people, and argues instead for a ‘citizenship behaviour’ that goes “beyond the role requirements, that

are not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, and that facilitates

organizational functioning.”422 We have already discussed this advantage and the requirements of

citizenship behaviour in the organization formed through care, trust, commitment and organizational

identification. The dimensions of trust, loyalty, commitment and identification, along with

recognition and respect for individuals’ dignity and rights, seem to play the major roles in

417 Social capital could be an asset in the organization derived through the relationships among individual

employees, employers and other groups within it and includes outside networks or societies, which can enable

profits just as physical (equipment) or human (knowledge) capital. Melé, “Organizational Humanizing

Cultures,” 7. Many studies have explored how social capital facilitates resource exchanges and product

innovations, team effectiveness, workers satisfaction, etc. Cf. Adler and Kwon, “Social Capital: Prospects for

a New Concept,” 17. 418 Adler and Kwon, “Social Capital: Prospects for a New Concept,” 18. 419 Carrie R. Leana and Harry J. van Buren III, “Organizational Social Capital and Employment Practices,”

Academy of Management Review 24, no. 3 (1999): 541. Cf. Melé, “Organizational Humanizing Cultures,” 8. 420 Melé, “Organizational Humanizing Cultures,” 8. Cf. Don Cohen and Laurence Prusak, In Good Company:

How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001), 4. 421 Melé, “Organizational Humanizing Cultures,” 10. 422 Melé, “Organizational Humanizing Cultures,” 10. Cf. Mark C. Bolino, William H. Turnley and James M.

Bloodgood, “Citizen Behaviour and the Creation of Social Capital in Organizations,” Academy of



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organizational humanizing culture and the creation of social capital. This makes clear that a

humanizing or rehumanizing culture in an organization leads to the creation of social capital, and

vice versa.

7.4.4 Human Quality Treatment (HQT) in the Workplace: A Personalist Review

Human quality is given predominant consideration in dealing with people in organizations from a

personalist perspective. In fact, the measured quality of any business processes, service or end

products is linked, directly or indirectly, to the capacities of employees and how they are managed

or treated in organizations. Melé observes that although managing human quality is not common in

managerial literature and discourses, several concepts apparently discussed in management are

linked to it, such as respect for human dignity and individual rights, “inhuman” treatment and

practices in the workplace and in business, fair treatment, and freedom or bondage in labour

relationships, etc.423 Referring to several management literatures, Melé illustrates several antecedents

dealing with human quality. For instance, he first refers to the Human Relations Movement, which

argues that “human beings are more than interchangeable parts within an organization.”424 It is

observed that employee efficiency and productivity is improved when organizational or workplace

management considers employee feelings and attitudes, going beyond mere technology, its methods

and processes.425 This runs against the conventional mechanistic outlook of the organization,

proposing a deeper understanding of the human being.

A second antecedent related to human quality in the workplace is the Quality of Working Life (QWL)

that seeks, along with job satisfaction, the well-being of employees.426 It promotes peer relationships,

job-satisfaction, reduction of stress, etc. QWL is defined as “the quality of the relationship between

employees and the total working environment, with human dimensions added to the usual technical

and economic considerations.”427 It also witnesses that the satisfaction of employees is linked to and

improves the quality of products and services and thus increases the profitability of the organization.

A third antecedent could be a summarized form of organizational justice (treating employees in

terms of justice and fairness) and the quality of management of work (an appropriate treatment of

employees considering the organizational ethical culture).428 According to Melé, appropriate

treatment of employees includes “[an] ‘intrinsic motivation’ (motivation for the work itself)

‘organizational commitment’ (attitudes of people toward the organization’s values and goals), and

‘corporate citizenship behaviour’ (individual behaviour not directly or explicitly recognized by the

423 Domènec Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” Journal of Business Ethics 120,

no. 4 (2014): 457. 424 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 458. Cf. Elton Mayo, The Human Problems

of an Industrial Civilization (Salem, NH: Macmillan, 1933). George Elton Mayo started the Human Relations

movement to explore the link between employee well-being and workplace productivity. His experiments

show the increase of productivity when employers are interested in employees’ psycho-social and natural

needs and satisfaction. It could be a counterpoint to the mechanistic view of managing employees stated by

Taylorist scientific management. 425 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 458. 426 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 458. Cf. Richard E. Walton, “Improving

the Quality of Work Life,” Harvard Business Review 52, no. 3 (1974), 12-155. The QWL seeks the overall

or focus on employees as persons with values and dignity and their worklife, not mere the act or the work

done by the employer. Employees’ holistic well-being must also be the concern of employers, not just what

is related to work and the situational outcome. 427 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 458. Cf. Louis E. Davis, “Design of New

Organizations,” in The Quality of Working Life and the 1980s, eds. Harvey Kolodny and Hans van Beinum

(New York: Praeger, 1983), 65-86. 428 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 458.


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formal reward system, which contribute to a better performance).”429 Along with these dimensions,

Melé considers spirituality in the workplace also as relevant in the discussion of human quality in

the organization.

All these factors concerning the individual and social ethical climate of organizations, have been

discussed in previous sections. Melé, likewise, states that ethical theories such as contractarianism,

deontology, virtue ethics and ethics of care and responsibility are implicitly related to the notion of

human quality.430 For considering the ethical challenges in labour relations and employee

management today, notions such as “the rights of employees versus property rights, employee

privacy and monitoring, whistle-blowing, pay equity, discrimination, employee safety, unions, and

minimum labour standards,”431 etc. give respect to human rights, that entails in turn respect for

persons and their dignity. Besides, according to Melé, human virtues support employees in their

effort to act humanly, which also lead to the ethics of care and responsibility, which concentrate on

concern for the other. However, the Person-Centred approach focuses closely on human treatment.

It is because of its central theme that “persons should be treated not only with respect, but also with

benevolence and care.”432 It looks for a humanistic management to enable an integral human

development.

The notion of quality is conceptualized as excellence according to certain standards. Melé is aware

that the richness of human nature makes it difficult to propose a standard for human quality.

However, investigating what is appropriate for human conditions, he tries “to identify some basic

ontological characteristics of the human being and their implications for an appropriate treatment of

humans.”433 For instance, rationality, the intellectual capacity to understand the self, the other, and

the external world, is the first ontological character Melé notes in discussing the human condition.

Reason helps us to realize inner privacy, intimacy, and self-determination. He speaks about the

emotions and sentiments that stimulate desires in humans and motivates them to act. However, in his

opinion, “rational deliberation combines with self-determination and permits one to decide whether

or not to respond to a stimulus, or to choose between several alternative courses of action.”434 This

means that a spontaneous motivation combined with rational choice enables one to choose the act

most conducive to human growth. Relationality, the capacity to share and “establish relationships

with other personal beings and to enrich his or her character and personhood through such relations,”

as well as sociability, “a tendency to live together,” are other significant ontological characteristics

of human beings appropriate for human conditions.435 However, this does not forsake the uniqueness

of human being, which is not only genetical “but also in the awareness of the self in his or her interior

world and intimacy.”436 All these characteristics mark the human conditions for appropriate

treatment.

These specific human characteristics demonstrate the intrinsic worth of human beings and their right

to be treated with respect and with recognition of their personhood. Human quality is endowed with

429 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 459. 430 For instance, the Integrative Social Contract Theory derives morality form “a combination of “hypernorms”

(fundamental principles discernible in a convergence of religious, political, and philosophical thought) and

“authentic norms” (generated within a community’s free moral space).” According to Melé, human quality is

highly valued here. Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 459. 431 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 459. 432 Melé, “Integrating Personalism into Virtue-Based Business Ethics,” 232. Melé, “Human Quality Treatment:

Five Organizational Levels,” 460. 433 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 461. 434 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 461. 435 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 461. 436 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 461.


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human conditions of innate dignity and rights and treating them as rational free beings with

relationability and sociability.437 These aspects of persons must be the subjects of appropriate study.

Therefore, it requires “a sensitivity and care for people’s legitimate interests and real needs” and

termed as “authentic care” with a “discernment through practical wisdom […] along with legitimate

interests.”438 Human Quality Treatment, thus deals with “persons in a way appropriate to the human

condition, which entails acting with respect for their human dignity and rights, caring for their

problems and legitimate interests, and fostering their personal development.”439 To manage people

in organizations, Melé distinguishes five levels of Human Quality Treatment (HQT), including

maltreatment, indifference, justice, care, and development.440 Let us briefly explain each of these in

line with employee management and organizational behaviours in the organizations.

Maltreatment, the lowest level of HQT, represents the “blatant injustice through abuse of power or

mistreatment”441 and includes exploitation and treatment of people in harmful or offensive ways in

the context of the organizational workplace. It is the abuse – exploitation – of any person in the

organization. There could be maltreatment by both commission and omission. Second is the level of

indifference, displaying a “disrespectful treatment through lack of recognition of their personhood

and concern.”442 It could be an invisible maltreatment – a subtle form of injustice – within the

organization that happens even when one feels abiding by the law. For instance, not giving due

respect to the human dignity that each employee possesses. Justice is the third level characterized by

respect for persons and their rights.443 Here the intrinsic dignity of each person is recognized, but

with strict rule of justice, giving merely what is due. Along with veracity, fairness in words and

actions is valued and expected in all dealings with employees. According to Melé, equity is very

significant in this level of human quality and goes against favouritism or nepotism.444 The fourth

level, care goes beyond justice and expresses “concern for people’s legitimate interests and support

to resolve their problems.”445 This level of human quality encourages people to understand the

vulnerability of each member and act with empathy, compassion and emotional intelligence.446 The

notion of care entails ethical requirements, so as not to provoke some injustice due to the hold of

illegitimate sentiments. Melé, thus, speaks here about authentic care, which is a “pre-occupation for

437 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 462. When a personhood of an individual

is not recognized, it goes against his or her worthiness. Domènec Melé, Management Ethics: Placing Ethics

at the Core of Good Management (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 28-29. 438 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 462. 439 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 462. 440 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 462-466. 441 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 463. It includes improper usage of people,

mismanagement of authority and confidence leading to authoritarianism and the consequent aggression in

words and deeds, psychological and sexual harassment, instilling fear and anxiety, unfair discrimination,

violation of basic human rights such as privacy, autonomy, and freedom. 442 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 463. Employees are seen as mere resources,

only means, not an end. Not having sensitivity towards people, treating employees with suspicion, acting

without due respect, disregarding employee’s capabilities, etc are few examples of indifference in the

workplace. 443 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 464. Over against the abuse of power as in

the maltreatment, “justice demands a proper exercise of power in dealings with people.” 444 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 464. 445 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 464. 446 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 464. Emotional intelligence is defined as

“the ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand

emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and

intellectual growth.” John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey, “What is Emotional Intelligence?” in Emotional

Development and Emotional Intelligence: Educational Implications, eds. Peter Salovey and David J. Sluyter

(New York: Basic Books, 1997), 5.


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others, but with discernment.”447 The concern of justice is emphasized here again. We have already

discussed the need to combine justice and care in dealing with employees.

The fifth level of human quality is development, “favouring people’s human flourishing, mutual

esteem, and friendship-based reciprocity.”448 Along with justice and care, this level of human quality

shows “a real esteem for others in their wholeness, and acting with a sense of service and cooperation,

providing an appropriate participation, and fostering in collaborators the acquisition of professional

competences, including those which are moral in nature.”449 This level tries to create and engage in

a virtuous circle of human flourishing through cooperation and willingness to serve the development

of other persons in the organization. Promoting what is best for each one in the organization, a

reciprocal influence and mutual esteem and respect are developed. Melé brings here a “friendship-

based reciprocity,” generated through the flourishing of each member in the organization by the

mutual concern and esteem each has for the others.450 The maximisation of capabilities and mutual

encouragements leads employees to recognize themselves as active subjects or participants in their

organization, as well as co-responsible in achieving its goals. Thus, human quality treatment nurtures

mutual dealings with respect and authentic care, fosters development, and expresses engagement or

treatment appropriate to the human condition in organizations. It also helps in reflection on how to

manage employees and rehumanize the workplace.

7.5 CONCLUSION

In many organizational contexts, electronic surveillance in the workplace is today part of a

management strategy established by authorities to achieve its objectives. The biggest constraint of

this articulation is that this management model empowers a few but disempowers the many who are

closely related to the organization. Employees demonstrate altered behaviours due to ubiquitous

monitoring and bear the subsequent socio-economic, psychological, and ethical effects. The

individual application of different management models does not produce the expected result in a

given situation, and thus a new system of behaviour in the workplace is needed. Moreover, given the

growing ubiquity of monitoring, its socio-economic, physical, psychological, and ethical effects on

employees, and the long-term adverse alterations in employee behaviour, what is required is a model

that respects both individual and management rights and avoids any kind of discrimination and

unequal power distances. This chapter, after critically analyzing the major management theories and

approaches, has sought to articulate the growing necessity of a new employee management paradigm

that best fits modern organizations. An adequate integration of faith reflections and spirituality and

that of Catholic Social Teaching in particular, to a person-centered humanistic understanding has

been expounded here in brief. The proposed approach of labourer valued management (LVM) and

its responsible task of self-monitoring or self-regulative practice promises to foster a new

understanding of workplace management.

LVM values the dignity of the human person in its entirety and thus the subjective dimension of

work. The factor of corporate citizenship is very significant and is immersed in the LVM to enable

it to develop an individualized analysis of employees and management and highlights a combination

of the transactional, participatory, and recognition ethics of business. Through a continued process

of organizational justice and organizational identification, LVM stands for rehumanizing the

workplace, such that every individual is regarded worthy of self-esteem without any discrimination

447 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 465. 448 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 465. 449 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 465. Cf. Melé, Management Ethics:

Placing Ethics at the Core of Good Management, 132-133. 450 Melé, “Human Quality Treatment: Five Organizational Levels,” 465.


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or subordination. This approach acknowledges that corporations not alone are responsible for their

social and ethical behaviour, but all their members have a capacity and responsibility of mutual

reinforcement. In the same way, employees desire more freedom and autonomy and less external

monitoring and control and oppose ubiquitous surveillance in the workplace as it functions

detrimentally with employees’ efficiency and productivity and moral behaviour. Self-monitoring is

an effective alternative to electronic monitoring and is likely to satisfy both employers’ interests –

vision or objectives – and employees’ rights and interests, such as privacy and fair and impartial

treatment. It qualifies and empowers social interaction within the organization through personal

charisma and social sensitivity and adaptability. Thus, employees demonstrate a responsible and self-

regulated commitment and dedication to the improvement of the organization by a self-motivated

compliance with all its rational, judicial and impartial legal mandates and develop a normative and

ethical corporate conduct and behavioural patterns to ensure fairness and justice in the workplace.

The integration of personal and social normative concerns along with the domains of legal and moral

values into organizational behaviours and decision-making and to the pursuit of social responsibility

all create, in turn, a ‘corporate conscience’ that promises to benefit all participants or stakeholders

concerned.

Management practices face unprecedented challenges today and the same is true of workplace

surveillance as a management strategy. Lack of transparency, increasing suspicion and the

continuous decline in trust among organizational and corporate members all threaten the normal

functioning of any business. Management strategies informed solely by economics make employees

into materialistic utility maximisers, and the human concerns of respect, dignity, human rights, self-

actualization, community, shared values, mutual relationship, etc. are put at risk. This situation leads

to create an integrated management form of values, principles and virtues. Thus, we have a person-

centered approach in management that seeks to integrate goods (values), ethical norms and

principles, and virtues (human nature and character). This approach “focuses on human persons – in

their individual and social dimensions – stressing human dignity, human rights, benevolence and

caring for people, along with the common good of human communities.”451 Although for moral

judgements of any action it considers circumstances and consequences, its ultimate goal is human

well-being and flourishing. It brings forth a sense of belongingness by regarding the workplace or

organization as a community of persons joined together for individual and organizational

development. Hence, reflecting on the notion of workplace surveillance as a management strategy

used to control employees, and considering its impacts on employees’ life chances, we have here

proposed a new humanistic management alternative – a person-centered approach – that takes into

account the “whole life” of employees.

451 Domènec Melé, Business Ethics in Action: Seeking Human Excellence in Organizations (London: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2009), 74.

GENERAL CONCLUSION

Work is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as

cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through

Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest.1

We started this study of workplace surveillance from the observation that human life, with its values

and characteristic behaviours, has undergone a shift due to the unprecedented spread of information

technology and advent of computers and related devices. Technology continues to advance today,

with an all-pervading capacity. This advancement provides boundless opportunities for a better

world. These mechanisms have had both benefits and detriments in various realms of society, as we

have seen. Especially the massive use of electronic surveillance apparatuses in the workplace today

jeopardizes the protection of individual rights and the safeguarding of personal information, space

and time. Despite the conviction of business ethicists that the workplace is meant to be a major locus

of human interaction and growth, the advancement and widespread use of information and

communication technologies, have in more than one way had a negative effect. For instance, while

technology aims to make communication more efficient and effective, it also negatively affects the

relationship between employers and employees and creates tension and distrust in an organizational

context. Within the research context of this study, we have seen how these technologies have made

extensive employee monitoring and surveillance possible – inexpensive, pervasive and invasive –

with psychological, socio-cultural and economic effects.

This shows that workplace surveillance and employee monitoring is a common reality with nuanced

implications and is a field of multiple conflicting rights and practices. While technological

surveillance in the workplace can bring benefits to an organisation, such as promoting security,

exposing dishonest workers, enabling efficient communication, expanding networking opportunities,

and being as a cost-efficient means of storing data, its impact on employees seems less positive. It

affects workers negatively and hinders their productivity and satisfaction at work. For instance, this

research, in line with several other researchers, demonstrates that within the context of workplace,

both ICT-enabled surveillance practices and the big data revolution they have brought about today

have concerning implications for individual privacy, the protection of human dignity, power control

and distance, human autonomy and freedom, and social justice.2 Researchers such as Michel Anteby

and Curtis K. Chan state that “employers may be unaware that the effects of surveillance may go

well beyond the initial, and often relatively innocuous, reason they chose to monitor employees.”3

Given practices of monitoring in the workplace, the question of how an individual or organization

can establish acceptable limits on such intrusiveness has become a big issue and is increasingly

debated. Its acceptance or rejection depends largely upon how one answers questions in a range of

categories, such as who is performing the surveillance (agent), why it is being done, and how it is

being done. As few researchers4 have studied the ethical implications of electronic surveillance in

1 Timo Jütten, “Dignity, Esteem, and Social Contribution: A Recognition-Theoretical Views,” The Journal of

Political Philosophy 25, no. 3 (2017): 266. Cf. Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All

Day and How They Feel About What They Do (New York: Free Press, 1974), 1. 2 Torin Monahan, “Built to Lie: Investigating Technologies of Deception, Surveillance, and Control,” 229. Cf.

Vincent Mosco, To the cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World (New York, NY: Paradigm, 2014); David Lyon,

Surveillance after Snowden (Malden, MA: Polity, 2015); David Lyon, “Surveillance, Snowden, and Big Data:

Capacities, Consequences, Critique,” Big Data & Society 1, no. 2 (2014): 1-13. 3 Michel Anteby and Curtis K. Chan, “Why Monitoring Your Employees’ Behaviour Can Backfire,” Harvard

Business Review, April 25, 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/04/why-monitoring-your-employees-behavior-can-

backfire [accessed October 20, 2018]. 4 Jonathan P. West and James S. Bowman, “Electronic Surveillance at Work: An Ethical Analysis,”

Administration & Society 48, no. 5 (2016): 628.

General Conclusion

352

the workplace, this research has asked not only whether companies use modern technologies to

monitor and control employees, but how this surveillance is currently implemented and what

detrimental effects it has on employees.

GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

The tendency of researchers to overlook the ‘ethical’ in studies of workplace behaviour necessitated

this research and eventually benefited it in two ways: on the one hand, it has identified the best

managerial and behavioural patterns in the workplace, and on the other it has helped to fill a lacuna

in the scholarship. Clearly, surveillance is more than just an effort to improve efficiency. Its current

practice invites one to confront and challenge the basic reasoning behind its very existence. It was

critically important, therefore, to balance the legitimate desire to safeguard organizational interests

and equally legitimate human concerns to protect employee privacy, dignity and social status. Thus,

our research revolved around the primary question of how the use of electronic surveillance in the

organizational workplace imperils the individual rights of employees, does more harm than good,

and has significant socio-economic effects and implications for how we assess the current employee

management paradigm. To answer this question, this study has taken into account both the individual

rights perspective and the social justice perspective and proposed a new more favourable

management paradigm for understanding the workplace.

To this end, this study has combined descriptive and theoretical analysis and in this way identified,

on a conceptual basis, some of the underlying surveillance frameworks. It has also examined a

number of current technological devices and methods used in the workplace. Surveillance is

positively regarded as a management technique useful to ensure quality service and increase

productivity, as well as being a guarantee against theft, legal trouble and overexpenditures due to

fraud, dishonesty, or misconduct. It is also thought to offer an objective and fact-based basis for

feedback and performance appraisal. However, our critical analysis of this practice in this study has

brought to light certain forgotten issues and shown that the individual, social and ethical concerns

raised by employees about these practices outweigh their benefits.

THE FACTS: NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES FOR PEOPLE IN THE WORKPLACE AND THEIR

RESPONSE TO THESE

A thorough inspection of electronic workplace surveillance in the Indian socio-cultural and economic

context has shown that such practices are undertaken for reasons of power control and power

distance, not only for general causative factors of quality management and performance attributes as

is often said. Here it is also discovered that the lack of constitutional and legislative security over

surveillance and individual rights greatly exacerbates workplace bullying as well as employee

mechanization and dehumanization. Two key competing consequences of workplace surveillance –

privacy and social distance – are investigated further and shown to expose the deeply rooted socio-

ethical paradox of surveillance technologies. These enumerations have opened a new avenue of

investigation, consisting of human rights and social justice. It has showed that new technological

developments in the workplace have led to a diminution of privacy, bringing a kind of Big Brother

into the office in an all-too obvious way. This study has also demonstrated that employee privacy

rights, the protection of which is a prerequisite for safeguarding and preserving the individuality and

dignity of employees, are often violated, creating problem of social justice. Thus, our discussion

moved from a focus on individual rights (privacy – be oneself) to social problems (social sorting –

creation of inequality and power control – subjecting people) and was shown to have clear ethical

implications.

General Conclusion

353

Our empirical study has demonstrated that the negative impacts of workplace surveillance surpass

its expected benefits. It has ascertained that employees have totally different attitudinal and

behavioural positions according to whether or not they are under surveillance. The inadequacy of

workplace monitoring in achieving long term goals and objectives has also been empirically

explored. We have seen that this qualitative affirmation that the negative impacts of workplace

surveillance surpass its expected benefits calls for an adequate ethical response and new management

strategy. To understand the moral rules at stake and respond ethically to workplace surveillance, this

research has proposed a new management strategy that goes beyond merely managerial rationality.

It has argued for an ethical culture that protects, legally and morally, human life in any work context

and integrates social, professional and personal ethos into workplace behaviour. All judgements and

organizational behaviour in general have been shown to be manifestations of this tripartite ethos.

The religious vision of individuals has also been seen to transform a technocratic mentality in the

workplace into a new attitude of profound human concern. Thus, our proposed strategy seeks to re-

establish the forgotten human aspect of employees by reclaiming the neglected fact of the

irreducibility of persons, and it has done so through the ethical analysis of rights, dignity, power and

social justice. In our time, it is more important than ever to give a significant place to employees,

valuing and treasuring each one’s dignity, autonomy and uniqueness as a human person.

Keeping in mind this propensity for valuing the ‘human’ aspect of employees and need to uphold

employee respect and esteem, we have proposed a new strategic management framework within the

context of workplace surveillance. This study has prioritized an integrative ethical and personalist

model known as Labourer Valued Management (LVM) and tried to reconstruct ethical behaviour in

the workplace by integrating a passionate human strategy with a life-centered ethics that values the

subjectivity of work and the dignity of the human person in its entirety. This constitutes a responsible

practice of self-monitoring or self-directed regulative practices as a human development approach

that complements person-centered or labourer valued management.

OTHER INSIGHTS FROM THIS RESEARCH

The advancement and convergence of computer-internet technologies within the workplace has given

rise to new methods for surveillling people as citizens, workers and consumers. This has had dramatic

effects on our society per se. It has promoted a ‘culture technique’ of human life. Along with the

consequent acceleration of material improvements and new opportunities for work performance and

security, it has led to employee degradation and had other unintended social and ethical implications,

leading to a paradox of technological development. As an observation from a distance, it directs one

in the end to the individual himself. It influences a person’s life with surreptitious investigations into

routine activities and workplace behaviours. It is called a ‘double-edged sword,’ carrying baggage

as well as benefits. Several factors – continuous and easy monitoring of employees, technological

over-dependency, power control and inequality in contractual relationships – have shifted the focus

in the workplace today from ‘monitoring work’ to the ‘surveillance of workers,’ demanding a

transformed management strategy. This practice of direct or ‘panoptical’ control over workers rather

than over the work itself has a kind of drilling effect – an effect of psychological torture – on

employees. It has been called the ‘electronic panopticon,’ where a disembodied eye overcomes the

constraints of architecture, space and time.

The rigid system of surveillance in the workplace is ruthless. It binds employees to their machines

and ranks them almost as ‘cyborgs’ – welded to their workstations and having little or no autonomy.

Employees in turn fall victim to the institutionalized acceptance of management prerogatives and

managerially imposed and intensified control systems. This has resulted in a new degree of regulation

General Conclusion

354

of employees’ identities and subjectivities, as we have seen, leading to increased mechanization and

dehumanization. Perhaps the most novel contribution of this research is its identification of a ‘social

sorting’ mechanism as a consequence of workplace surveillance. The concept of social sorting makes

clear the tendency of contemporary surveillance to sort people into various categories for assessment

and judgement. This process of sorting employees is now virtual. It is done by assigning categorical

descriptions of ‘worth’ or ‘risk’ to employees in ways that have real effects on their life-chances.

The phenomenon of sorting also affects employees by giving them an experience of arbitrariness,

being treated in certain ways just because they belong to certain groups, as well as by challenging

their human relationships through a new prominence of disembodied information. Employee

classification happens according to their relative worth, and thus individuals or groups that are most

likely to be valuable – the creamed-off-categories – receive superior services. Though categorization

seems to be an endemic part of social life today and even a condition of certain forms of social

progress, it can also lead to adverse social stratification – a ‘digital redlining’ or weblining – and

have unfair and unjust social effects. So-called ‘marginal’ or ‘dangerous’ people or groups, often

profiled in terms of probabilities and future possibilities, always remain under the gaze and scrutiny

of the invisible and the powerful. This endorsed stigmatization of employees has intensified

exclusionary strategies in the workplace, where one can say that all are thought to be potentially

‘guilty’ unless systems say otherwise.

The ability to monitor employees at a distance has raised the issue of disappearing bodies and has

led to a disembodiment of human relations. Physical bodies are transformed, in our experience, into

digital codes, and there emerge new bodies made of mere information – a kind of personification of

information. When abstracted from a territorial setting and represented only through data flows, an

observed body becomes a fragmented, decorporalized body; a ‘data double’ of pure virtuality.

Human beings thus degenerate from being ‘bodies’ to being merely ‘matter’ to be examined and put

on display. Contemporary surveillance, as we have seen, is based more on abstractions than on

embodied persons; it makes no reference to living people, but only to the data representing them.

This phenomenon, as this study has shown, reconfigures how social relationships are fostered,

leading to a disembodiment of social relationships.

The logic behind workplace surveillance is the operation of power ‘at distance,’ expressed physically

and institutionally. In the same way, surveillance is now about a ‘remote-world’ and ‘remote

relations’ where there is no room for personal engagements or even the co-presence of embodied

persons. The electronic mediation of abstract data representing social persons fosters a ‘facelessness’

of individual employees recognizing the ethical concern of the ‘irreducibility of the person’ within

the framework of the ethics of big data and the embodied subject. Similarly, in present digital

surveillance the experience of ‘being watched’ is highly gendered and charged with a certain

voyeuristic motive, only increasing the ‘being-looked-at-ness’ of women. The pernicious tendency

of the surveilling gaze to turn the body into a sexualized object reproduces the sexualization of

women who are made the victims of this digital ‘Peeping Tom.’

Another theme identified in this study is the manipulation of data to secure a desired outcome and

normalize ‘a way of being.’ This is done by direct controlling systems that reconstruct and reshape

the ideological values and preferences of their targets. The enforcement of the blind obedience of

employees to the authority has disempowered employees and led to a ‘commodification’ of labour.

It has triggered ‘reciprocal deviances’ such as production deviance (counterproductive behaviours),

employee-shirking behaviours, opportunistic acts, impression management tactics, an intentional

reduction of effort, etc., and it has curtailed ‘above-and-beyond’ (extra-role) behaviours. This ‘digital

captivity’ or ‘digital domination’ has been identified in the Indian context as part of a hidden

General Conclusion

355

apartheid – the maltreatment of employees in a polished, respectable form. This mechanism leads to

job-dissatisfaction and thus to employee turnover, job-attrition, absenteeism, presenteeism, job-

abandonment and less favourable organizational citizenship behaviours overall. It can also lead to

occupational violence and anti-social behaviours. Other workplace variables such as trust,

commitment, efficiency and performance, we have seen, do not depend on external electronic

monitoring. Ubiquitous surveillance, according to the direct employee experience, does not help to

achieve long term objectives. It is not recognized as a significant factor in productivity and thus is of

little help in resolving workplace problems.

ETHICAL EVALUATION

Our analysis has led to an ethical reconsideration of electronic surveillance in the workplace. To

develop a well-defined workplace surveillance ethics and ethical response to workplace surveillance

is, however, a herculean task. For if one applies a few guidelines in one context to ensure that an

action is ‘ethical,’ these guidelines may not be applicable to a different context and thus become

inadequate. They may also leave out nuances of the problem related to justice and social relations. It

is conceded, therefore, that we need a movement from managerial rationality to a paradigm that

makes central a real concern for employees as human persons, not as machines, things to be used, or

data to be analysed. Managerial rationality, a purposeful, goal-directed ideological construct for the

sustainability of the organization, tend to consider employees as machine implementing a power-

centered management paradigm. Variables like ‘reasonable moral behaviour’ and ‘reasonable

conduct towards other’ demand a shift beyond managerial rationality to a dynamic field of human

interaction and hence an ethical rationality.

Religion also plays an important role in shaping ethical rationality. For organizational values and the

resultant ethical behaviour is often an extension of individual morals and norms developed through

religious systems and spiritual practices. Religion also helps to transform a technocratic mentality

into a deep human concern in the workplace. Moreover, the role of religion on value discourse of

any kind in organizations functions as a latent variable that shapes and informs individual and social

ethics.

From a results-oriented perspective, constant surveillance in the workplace becomes a threat

(physical, moral, psychological, and behavioural impacts) and assaults individual rights (lack of

freedom and autonomy, privacy invasion, disregarding employees as autonomous moral agents).

Thus, from an employee perspective, workplace surveillance is an unethical managerial practice that

must be altered and transformed. Similarly, it is observed from a rule-based perspective that

continuous or pervasive surveillance in the workplace creates and perpetrates inequality, treats the

body (employee) as an object to be watched (the problem of voyeurism), and thus leads to a violation

of the socio-ethical rights of employees.

The major problem identified here is the subjective dimension of labour turning into the merely

commodified version noted above. Likewise, a virtue-oriented perspective reminds us that

employees, when subjected to ubiquitous surveillance, often fail to act in accordance with their own

true selves and even sacrifice their personal integrity. This failure in the workplace may even lead

one to engage in a situation with “adaptive behaviours” through a provisionally “manufactured” self.

This anticipatory conformity to another’s will leads to final self-subordination. Therefore, analysing

these perspectives, we have seen that electronic monitoring systems challenge and threaten the

‘human’ aspect of employees and thus compromise their work-quality and work-ethics.

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356

This research has also exposed the ontological insecurity that one feels in the workplace, beyond the

safety and security claims of surveillance advocates. The tripartite ethical discussion of rules, results

and virtue-based analysis holds that ubiquitous surveillance practices in the workplace, implemented

as part of managerial practices and strategies, violate basic individual rights and the requirements of

social justice and thus are unethical and unfair. Employee perspectives on workplace surveillance

and reactions to it as well as our consideration of its individually and socially detrimental effects

have demonstrated the same. Likewise, this research has established that employers who act only

according to managerial rationality, forgetting the above mentioned ‘human’ aspect of employees

and disregarding the influence of individual ethical reasoning, will limit pro-employee behaviours.

Therefore, it is observed in the strict sense of employee perspective that external electronic

surveillance is not likely to increase productivity or efficiency in the workplace; rather, respect for

employee autonomy and freedom combined with self-control and responsibility are more likely to

achieve this result. This made clear the need to respect the dignity of each employee as human person.

Individual ethical behaviour is here seen to be the starting point for organizational ethical behaviour.

THE ALTERNATIVE: TWO MODELS

These findings have led us to propose a different modus operandi in the workplace and in employee

management, implying alterations in the commonly practiced control-based organizational

development approaches, starting from a person-oriented approach and focusing on institutional

aspects. Hence, the newly introduced strategic management model of workplace surveillance,

namely “Labourer Valued Management” (LVM), reconstructs ethical behavior in the workplace

within the framework of a person-centered approach. This person-centered approach prioritizes the

humanness of employees without disregarding the role of principles and norms of good behaviour.

It emphasizes the uniqueness and inviolability of employees as persons essentially within their

relational or communitarian dimensions. Thus, it reacts to the sorting or discriminating mechanism

of surveillance and reductionistic tendencies of materialistic ideologies of the modern era placing at

its center the value of the person’s subjectivity, autonomy, dignity, participation and solidarity.

A transformative perception of the organization as a living-system (not as machine) becomes a

starting point to adopt a person-centred approach. This progressive and transformative discernment

brings into the organization a purposeful organization model (purpose-led organization) and the

consequent sustainable human resource management approach (Sustainable HRM). The ‘purpose’

becomes a strategic anchor within the organization considering all stakeholders. It promotes a moral

self (identity) to function and manage embodying the culture of the organization and the character of

its employees (configuring individual character with organization’s purpose). In this line, employee

management is triggered to concentrate on human sustainability (considering employees as

significant assets) to intensify a regenerative relationship between employees and organizations and

thus to achieve positive human or social outcomes. Employee well-being (against the instrumental

view on employees) is a significant dimension of sustainable HRM leading to a work-life balance.

Labourer valued management, as the child of a person-centered approach, integrates a passionate

managerial strategy with a life-centered ethic and shifts the discussion from ‘techno-mode’ to

‘human-mode,’ focused on employees’ dignity, rights and justice. This approach increases the

employee value in each context of conflict and encourages organizations to pursue employee-friendly

behavioural policies from the employers’ side to avoid losses of confidence and trust on the

employees’ side. Model 1 shows the formulation and the major contributors of LVM.

General Conclusion

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Model 1 - Formulation and Contributors of LVM

The main criterion of LVM is to value the dignity of employees in its entirety. For the notion of

human dignity is the basis and foundation of all human rights and the cornerstone for constitutional

acts and declarations on human rights in various contexts. We have already explored the role played

by world religions in ensuring the dignity of each human being. The secular justification of human

dignity from the Kantian ‘categorical imperative’ matches with the Catholic social tradition. The

intrinsic worth of every human being is associated both with the faith-claim of the imago Dei and

with the human capacity to reason – autonomy leading to free choice and self-determination. Both

the ‘inherent’ and ‘earned’ aspects of dignity are affirmed, therefore: the former speaks of “an

unconditional God-given dignity” or intrinsic as a “consequence of being human,” and the latter

speaks of its “conditional aspects,” gained through qualities and efforts or from instrumental

contributions in workplace contexts. The notion of the subjective dimension of work is a primary

contribution of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) to the public debates about the workplace. For CST

holds that, independent of any objective content, man as a ‘person’ is the subject of work and all

man’s actions must realize his or her humanity. LVM in the workplace argues for this experience of

being human in a situation of managerial control by appeal to the due respect and worth given to

each other. It is concerned with the role played by personal, material or economic values in the

workplace.

LVM in this regard calls for policies and regulations in the workplace to respect human dignity: both

the subjective dimension of work and the objective rights of employees to shape labour relationships

and organizational behaviours. Other concepts, such ‘corporate citizenship’ (the rights and duties of

a person as a member of a community) play a role in transactional, participatory and recognition

ethics. Notions of ‘organizational identification’ and ‘organizational justice’ call for a re-

humanization of the workplace. It is widely experienced that organizational fairness or perceived

justice in the workplace results in greater loyalty, commitment, satisfaction, and performance on the

Labourer Valued Management

Organizational Identification & Rehumanizing

Workplace

Corporate Citizenship;

Transational, Participatory &

Recognition Ethics

Dignity, Rights and Justice & Subjective Demension of Work

General Conclusion

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part of employees. LVM’s commitment to treating every employee as a person worthy of self-esteem,

and opposing every form of unjust discrimination and subordination, can re-humanize the workplace.

The integration of personal and social normative concerns in pursuit of individual, professional and

social responsibility creates a ‘corporate conscience’ within organizations, benefiting all members

and participants. This gives birth to a sense of belongingness and treats the workplace as a

‘community of persons’ joined together for individual and organizational development.

Echoing major surveillance studies and literature, this study demonstrates that electronic surveillance

is an insolvent technique (solution) to employee management, and that a person-centered or

employee-valued management strategy is more able to transform employee behaviour. ‘Self-

monitoring’ results in better efficiency and more workplace improvements. Our empirical study also

shows that employees prefer self-monitoring to electronic (external) monitoring. Self-monitoring,

indeed, as a personality trait and an individual ability to regulate or control one’s behaviour, has been

shown to be ten times more effective in increasing efficiency and productivity. By enhancing self-

regulatory process, it transforms individual behaviours for the overall benefit of organizations and

thus moves from controlling self-presentation to a concern for social ties and status in organizations.

It is a behavioural appropriateness in the workplace through self-observation, self-control and self-

presentation. Self-monitoring is also an effective alternative to electronic monitoring and is likely to

satisfy both employers’ interests – vision or objectives – and employees’ rights and interests, such

as privacy and fair and impartial treatment. For it qualifies and empowers social interaction within

the organization through personal charisma and social sensitivity and adaptability. Employees here

show a responsible and self-regulated commitment to the improvement of the organization, driven

by a self-motivated compliance with its rational, ethical and impartial legal mandates.

Self-monitoring includes authentic self-direction and building capabilities that prioritize employees’

functioning. It regards both as valuable for the self and the organization alike. Self-direction is linked

both to individual autonomy and to a value, thus motivating human action through both freedom and

creativity. Freedom of choice is one of the denominators to expand individual capabilities and thus

wellbeing, which is achieved first internally on oneself with a distinct personal quality. This situation,

then, enables an individual to be a responsible social agent and plays a special role in moral decision

making in situations of conflict. Proper self-direction thus leads to the proper treatment of

capabilities, and vice versa. Authentic self-direction reshapes one’s individual destiny both as a

person and as a part of various communities.

This self-management mechanism alters one’s inner state and responses to a socially desirable

behaviour while maintaining symmetry of trust and transparency, combining care and justice, and

joining personal, corporate and social integrity. It acts against the invasion of privacy and social

sorting mechanisms. It provides psychological serenity and job satisfaction, and thus personal,

professional and organizational improvements. This approach is significant within the scope of this

research, as it uncompromisingly argues for the ‘human’ aspect of employees, fostering and

preserving individual freedom and the capabilities of responsible self-regulation and determination,

leading to individual, organizational and social development and flourishing. A pictorial

representation of this framework is given in Model 2.

General Conclusion

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Model 2 - Components of Self-Monitoring [Self-Regulative] Model

We have argued in this research for a new manifesto of management, one that respects the intrinsic

value of human development and flourishing and that rethinks economics, business and management

from a humanistic or personalistic perspective. By trying to introduce a realistic personalism of both

personalist rational principles and common good principles into the ethical culture of organization,

this movement upholds its responsibility to safeguard individual rights and seek just treatment for

all. Hence, what is essential for good corporate behaviour is the individual contribution through

cooperation, mutual respect and openminded commitment, along with attitudinal and behavioural

alterations in tune with personal and organizational good. With the understanding of organization as

a community of persons, business and organizational managements are being suggested to practice

humanism by respecting the humanity of each member, treating them as an end, favouring human

potentials in creativity, rationality, and character, fostering the exercise of freedom and responsibility

and contributing to human well-being.

This understanding is in line with the Indian notion of universal family-hood (Vasudhaiva

Kutumbakam – the entire world as a single family) or the ‘cosmic’ or ‘holistic’ vision of Indian

philosophy as applied often today in the context of debates about management. One major

contribution of this research is that, over against an economy-based business ethos that gives priority

to organizational contracts, we argue for a humanistic business ethos that sees business enterprise in

its human wholeness. Thus, organizations become a community of interrelated persons with a shared

moral sense.

FINAL APPRAISAL

Such a humanistic approach can support the effective functioning and development of any

organization. As we have seen, several key ethical concepts for organizational behaviour and

management strategy, namely individual human rights, human dignity, social justice and integral

human development, can be derived from a Catholic humanistic outlook and fit very much in the

Self-

Monitoring

Authentic Self-

Direction

Trust & Transparency

Just-Care

Persoanl, Corporate &

Social Integrity

Creating Capabilities

General Conclusion

360

context of electronic surveillance studies.5 This approach entails a comprehensive view of employees

as human being. In the same way, the ontological characteristics of human beings – rationality,

relationality, sociability – have also been identified as the subjects of appropriate treatment of

employees in a given situation. John Paul II illustrates in this regard that “the person is not at all a

‘thing’ or an ‘object’ to be used, but primarily a responsible ‘subject’, one endowed with conscience

and freedom, called to live responsibly in society and history […].”6 This research urges

organizational members and all stakeholders to “rediscover and make others rediscover the inviolable

dignity of every human person”7 within the workplace. For, as Gaudium et Spes,8 the Pastoral

Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, reminds us: “man is the source, the centre and the

purpose of all economic and social life” (no. 63).

This research would desirably urge business management schools and institutions to adequately

provide a formational dimension (basic element of a working curriculum) that educates the young

managers and employees to comprehend the world of business, economics and human management

in the light of a vision of the totality of the human person and integral human development, avoiding

any kind of reductionist view of a person. Taking this research as a valid source and a strong basis,

it is desirable for Catholic Church to produce a document that provides for business people a holistic

understanding of a person over against the reductionist market view, particularly in line with the use

of electronic surveillance systems and mechanisms in the workplace and its impacts on employees

and to offer further integral, adequate and comprehensible ethical response.

This study is meant to serve as a starting point for further work in the field of workplace surveillance

and labour studies in general. Of course, many nuances remain to be explored. For example, a

detailed assessment of various trends in the field of human resource management could usefully

complement this study, as well as a review of corporate social responsibilities. Similarly, the paucity

of literature from a theological perspective on the theme of electronic workplace surveillance has

made it difficult to conduct detailed research on theological appraisals. However, this research has

been given due importance thanks to the elucidation of Catholic Humanism (CH), which has played

a major role in our accounts here of current business or economic activities, organizational

behaviours, managerial rationality and management strategies. This is thanks to the common

emphasis on human dignity, individual rights, social justice and integral human, organizational and

societal development. Another area of CH that could support further research and contribute to

human development within the workplace or organizational context is the centrality of a few specific

virtues, such as charity, humility, kindness, a willingness to forgive, etc., together with the cardinal

virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and courage. For the human being is at the centre of every

work, and this research has been undertaken to help ensure that the life of every employee is lived in

its fullness.

5 The concept of human development is expressed here in an integrative sense as Melé would Envisage it. It

has two interrelated aspects – “personal human development embracing the whole person” and “the human

development of every human being worldwide.” Domènec Melé, “Three Key Concepts of Catholic

Humanism for Economic Activity: Human Dignity, Human Rights and Integral Human Development,” in

Humanism in Economics and Business: Perspectives of the Catholic Social Tradition, eds. Domènec Melé

and Martin Schlag, 113-136 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 113-114. 6 John Paul II, “Christifideles Laici,” Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Vocation and the Mission of

the Lay Faithful in the Church and in the World, 1988, no. 5. http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-

ii/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_30121988_christifideles-laici.html [accessed April 25,

2018]. 7 John Paul II, “Christifideles Laici,” no. 37. 8 Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes, AAS 58 (1966), no. 63.

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