Surveillance has become a hot topic for debate. To name some contemporary examples of the increased reach of surveillance, whether we a driving down the freeway, walking through our city centres or using credits cards to shop, aspects of our lives are under scrutiny from many sources. At an immediate level this may or may not be a concern to us -- we have always been surveyed, enumerated and classified to some extent. Indeed, some degree of surveillance seems to be an inescapable part of modern life. However, in civil society we also expect a degree of protection from the worst excesses of monitoring and surveillance. In countries like Australia where privacy should be a valuable right to be jealously protected from erosion we attempt to keep up with advances in the technology of surveillance through regulatory mechanisms. These are often reactive and it is difficult to ensure the truly democratic regulation of the scope and extent of surveillance. Nonetheless, in a parliamentary democracy part of a government's accord with its citizens should be that it will endeavour to protect them from unwarranted intrusions into their lives by its own agents, other institutions or non-governmental interests. This may be a idealised representation of what is, in practical terms, a highly complex issue but at least the expectation of protection is there. But does this expectation exist when it comes to other relationships between commercial organisations and their employees? My particular area of concern is the relationship between employers and employees in the industrial work place. Although some corporations are more enlightened than others on this issue, within the context of waged labour there is little expectation on the part of employees that their working lives might not be subjected to the most detailed levels of scrutiny by their employers. It is as if, in signing a contract of employment, we sign away our right to privacy in the work place. Worse, increasingly employers are considering this prerogative to extend beyond the work place -- witness the 'morality' testing (e.g. drugs testing, polygraph testing, etc.) of job applicants now common to the recruitment and selection procedures of many US corporations.

As one might expect, the surveillance of employees within the work place is nothing new. Many historians have noted the formal similarities between the early factories of the industrial revolution and the prisons of the same period. Indeed, once individuals undertook work, not for themselves but for capitalists, then their activities needed to be directed and controlled in time and space -- i.e. managed. This remains a concern of managers to this day, as I will argue later. Meanwhile, it is interesting to note that such 'enlightened' figures of the Industrial Revolution as the Utopian Socialist and mill-owner Robert Owen or the Yorkshire woollen weaver Titus Salt were aware of the 'benefits' of keeping their workers under close scrutiny. Both were involved in building new towns to house mill workers and their families. To be sure, Owen's settlement of New Lanarck in Scotland (c.1800-1810) and Salt's town of Saltaire, near Bradford (c.1850-1853) provided living conditions for factory workers which were far better than those generally prevailing at the time. However, the design of these towns also reflected their instigators' wishes to influence the activities of their employees outside the work place by observing and managing their non-work lives. Owen, also introduced innovations within the factory, creating a system of quality and individual productivity checks, the results of which were displayed in the factory above the heads of individuals for all to see.

During the early part of the twentieth century when innovations in the social and technical organisation of manufacturing gave rise to mass production, managers' responses to the problem of direction and control in the work place centred on the increased rationalisation and fragmentation of activities. Here, work would be broken down into a set of repetitive and analysable tasks, strictly governed by managerially imposed cycle times. Such a process was amenable to the most detailed and minute managerial scrutiny and surveillance; monitoring was an ever present aspect of working life. However, for a number of years now management 'best practice' has argued against the worst alienating and inefficient aspects of such a rationalised labour process. Who could have escaped exhortations to worker empowerment, increased responsibility and discretion, task recombination, 'team' work and flatter organisations? At one level this agenda could be read as a manifesto for the increased democratisation of the work place but increased discretion is a double-edged sword -- if we allow employees more 'space' to exercise their discretion then how can we be sure that it is used to the benefit of the company?

My interest in surveillance in the work place developed when I was involved in a UK-based research project which examined the introduction of 'Japanese-style' management and manufacturing innovations. On the basis of a detailed study of one plant, what myself and my colleague, Barry Wilkinson, found was that, despite a rhetoric of empowerment and devolved responsibility, the experiential reality for workers subject to these types of innovation in the work place was intensified effort, increased stress and centralised managerial control. What had happened in this plant was that management had devised a way of solving the dilemma of increased discretion. Through the use of a electronically based work monitoring system deployed in combination with peer group scrutiny of fellow team members, management was able to identify negative divergences from production targets and improvements over and above minimum. This allowed them to identify and sanction individuals who performed poorly and appropriate the process improvements made by individuals whose performance set them apart from their peers. This increased level of performance would become the new standard for the team and all members would have to strive to achieve it.

It is interesting to note that the electronic surveillance we encountered in our study of this plant was not particularly 'high-tech'. Indeed, it had been technically feasible for a number of years. However, the significant innovation was that it enabled a new form of social organisation to develop which reversed the orthodox tendency to rationalise and fragment industrial work. Furthermore, the move towards team-based organisation augmented the vertical surveillance undertaken by managers with a horizontal form of peer surveillance which sometimes extended beyond the work place and into team members' personal lives. This intense level of scrutiny seemed surprisingly at odds with the managerial rhetoric of trust and empowerment found at the plant. Our surprise was heightened when we found that this level of surveillance had been developed as a solution to uniquely 'British' problem -- it was not evident in the company's sister plant in its home country. In effect, the management of the UK had decided that it could not trust its work force to pass on the benefits of increased discretion and had to keep them under surveillance to ensure it happened. So much for 'empowerment'.