Negotiating the Margins

Employees are not passive objects dominated by surveillance technologies. Rather, they actively negotiate constraints, make choices, and deal with consequences of their decisions. Most of the interviewees enjoy their work at Funtime Toys. Within Funtime, a work idioculture has developed that functions to make work more enjoyable for employees and also enforce norms supporting productivity. While a variety of factors are involved in this development, one aspect is the ways that employees negotiate around store surveillance and actually use surveillance to reinforce the idiocultural norms of the productive worker. Perhaps the most significant impact surveillance has had on the workers idioculture is through its noninterference. Potential tensions that could undermine the productive aspects of the idioculture are alleviated by the shared belief of workers that surveillance. Most employees, especially those who have worked at the store the longest, feel a responsibility to other employees to be productive. Of the twenty employees, eleven feel they owe being productive primarily to other employees. Six more felt that they owe it to themselves , which would be consistent with a strong work ethic . Only three employees feel they owe it primarily to the store management or the corporation. The following quotes from Annette, Ashley, and Sharon describe these three orientations:

Annette: The job is going to have to be done whether it s them or somebody else who has to come in later, or somebody else who s on the clock. Somebody s going to have to get it done. So it s not fair if somebody s just goofing off.

Ashley: Well, I owe it to myself because I know what I can do and I always try to do more than what I did the day before, maybe. Those who aren t productive are silly, they really are, because they ll never get anywhere later on.

Sharon: The store is paying us to do our job. Our job is to be there and be sure we have the items and make sure we re friendly to customers. It s our job.

Most employees describe having a combination of these orientations. However, one is always portrayed as predominant, usually the belief that they owe it to their co-workers to be productive. As a result of their feelings of mutual responsibility, employees often use informal forms of social control such as teasing or policing to make sure other employees are doing their share of work. Not all of those who were interviewed engage in policing. Generally , those employees who regularly police the activities of co-workers are core employees with a substantial amount of tenure at the store. There are exceptions, such as one employee, Erik, who has been employed for only two years and polices other employees fairly regularly. Policing can be subtle, such as the playful ribbing about an honest mistake, or can be coercive and overt, such as instances where employees catch co-workers stealing. The connection among all these forms of policing is that it is a system of social control that is independent from the formal authority structures within the workplace. If employees were to feel that management does not trust them, their willingness to make sure other employees are working would be compromised. Management-employee relationships, which employees report ranging from friendly to apprehensively cooperative, would become increasingly antagonistic. For example, if a time came when Evan found out that management was recording employees on tape, he is adamant that he would confront the store director about it. In situations like this, it is likely that the consent of employees to the productivity demands made of them would be withheld and renegotiated.

While not a common occurrence, we even found evidence that employees sometimes monitor other employees using the video cameras . In one instance, without the instruction of management, two employees used the surveillance equipment to catch a co-worker inhaling or huffing drugs on the job. Here is David s account of what happened :

We fired a guy last night because he was huffing drugs. Spraying glue, I think, in a bag and huffing it. We [Erik and David] suspected he was doing it so we had to kind of watch him so we could see what he was doing. You and I were talking about the cameras we have. The one on the dock actually works! I don t think he knew because there were two bikes hanging right in front of it. In fact, when we went up there to monitor him, we re looking around and I said, Man, this sucks! All I see are bikes and little pieces between bikes. We finally got to where we figured out where the dock was. I told Erik, I m going to go move those bikes because they have them hanging right in front of it.

After moving the bikes out of the way, David and Erik finally caught the employee huffing, confronted him, and reported the incident to store management. This resulted in the employee being terminated . This event is a rather odd situation in that regular employees were utilizing a formal mechanism of control to monitor another employee, who in this case was hired for the Christmas rush. Also, it cannot be written off as an instance where employees were consciously enforcing store antidrug policies. Employees, including David, are generally aware when co-workers are intoxicated. Smoking marijuana or drinking beer before work or during breaks is uncommon, but accepted by employees. If someone comes to work intoxicated to the point that it is affecting their work and the work of other employees, more subtle policing techniques are used where stoned employees are teased and become the target of jokes.

In this example, Erik and David defined the situation as more severe than what was culturally acceptable regarding on-the-job drug use. Again, referring to our discussion with David:

Most of the people who you see huffing the fumes of things, they don t have much smarts. They re just total idiots. This guy was really intelligent , a good worker. We had to get rid of him because of a stupid thing like that. You can t very well keep him on because just how crazy a person can get when he s hocked up on something like that. You don t want to risk any of our lives or his life on our shift.

David did not report the drug use of this employee because it was against store policy, but rather because it represented a threat to the safety of the other workers. The use of marijuana and alcohol was not considered to be a violation that was serious enough to be reported to management, even though it violated the store s antidrug policy. This does not mean that all, or even most, of the employees approved of this behavior; they simply did not believe that most of these cases were severe enough for someone to lose their job.

The workers idioculture at Funtime is primarily defined by its norms of productivity. Most of the employees interviewed argue that being productive, and other employees being productive, is very important to them when they are on the clock. However, this is only one aspect of the workers idioculture, that which revolved around issues of work. The interactions that occur within the workplace are also meant to entertain employees. This play facet of work culture complements the values placed on work and helps to create an environment in which workers feel they can maintain high levels of productivity. At the same time, they want to enjoy the time they spend in the store. Though most employees generally discuss their lack of concern over how their work experiences are shaped by surveillance, much of their play activity either is facilitated by the surveillance system (or more aptly, how it is used) or takes into account the blind-spots that exist due to the limitations of the video cameras.

One form of play that is common among employees is sex-talk between employees. Randy, an 18-year-old still in high school, first talked about flirtation when he tried to describe the interactions among employees at Funtime:

Inside of work, there s a lot of flirting. I try to keep it so there s no hurt feelings or anything like that, so we can still work together . . . . It used to be that I would get bored and I d come up to see who s here and hang out. Being a teenager, I m trying to party and all this stuff before I have to go on to real life.

While older employees were less likely to engage in flirtation with co-workers, sex was still a relatively common topic. When I interviewed David, he spoke of girl-hunting in which male employees would let each other know when an attractive woman entered the store. Such behavior was not isolated to male employees; Annette admitted she would frequently follow attractive male customers around the store. Flirtation requires a certain amount of mobility, as employees must be able to move throughout the store to find other employees that they know will not be offended by it. This is particularly true of storeroom workers such as Randy, since at the time of our interviews there were no women working in the storeroom.

Other forms of play require employees to find those places in the store that cannot be seen using video surveillance. One less commonly reported form of entertainment at Funtime is what Fine (1996) refers to as horseplay. A basic example of horseplay is illustrated in this excerpt from our interview with David:

They ve got these footballs with the whistley thing in them. We d finish up early, or know that we were going to finish up early, and run around. Like six or seven of us with these footballs, running around and hitting somebody. That always made the night go by fast, and it was always something to look forward to, because if you re going to get done early, then you re going to have some fun.

In this particular example, employees were playing after the store had closed, so customers were not witnesses to this playing. At other times, while the store is still open , employees will take balls into the back part of the storeroom and play catch. Staying within the sports theme, employees also shot baskets when basketball goals were set up for display, providing yet another opportunity for employees to entertain themselves. These locations are all surveillance blind spots. While there is a video camera on the shipping dock, the back of the storeroom is around the corner from it. Also, the B aisles where the basketball goals are displayed are sheltered from both the video camera in the clothing section and the camera above the cash registers.

The loading dock has its own particular blind spots. The cameras are able to rotate nearly 360 degrees. However, they cannot pan down. Employees who want to talk rather than work can simply stand directly underneath the camera and never be seen. Another place where employees cannot be seen is in the back of the shipping trucks while unloading. Several employees brought up the example of horseplay that highlights this limitation, and also the dynamics of store folklore. On one occasion, Travis began doing a striptease while unloading one of the trucks . Annette describes the event as follows :

There were a few little things like Travis stripping in the back room on the truck. They were all back there and we were teasing Travis that he should be a dancer, because he had all the right moves and everything. So the truck was empty and they had the lights that point in the back of the truck. So he went on the truck, kind of like a stage, and they pointed the lights on him. People were doing the dada-dada-da, and Travis took his shirt off and was swinging it around, and kind of did a striptease then.

Later we learned that Randy had performed a similar striptease, giving birth to a new story to pass along to other employees. Employees report that such colorful instances of horseplay are rare, possibly because of the powerful values employees have toward being productive. By engaging in horseplay, workers are consciously reducing their productivity. While small amounts of play are culturally acceptable among employees, tenured workers disapprove if it is excessive. Because the organization of work makes employees mutually responsible for getting work done, the excessive play by some employees creates an increased workload for others. As a result, employees prefer limited forms of entertainment, such as talking and joking. It is unlikely that the rarity of horseplay is the result of surveillance practices, or at least the formal surveillance of managers and surveillance technology. Because of the numerous places not under video surveillance, it is relatively easy to find places to play. Also, since most employees believe that the video cameras are not being used most of the time, they are rarely concerned about engaging in more innocent forms of play (excluding the occasional striptease) in plain view of the cameras. Rather, employees beliefs that they are not being surveyed contributes to a work environment that has fostered a work idioculture in which employees police themselves and monitor their own productivity. Annette describes this more personal style of surveillance:

Surveillance was pretty much a person-to-person thing. You had the other employees, you had department heads, and you had managers which were covering most of the store at any point of time. I mean, you couldn t stay in any one area, even the storeroom. If you went in there, the storeroom had ears. You couldn t stay in one area long without somebody coming along and finding you, catching you, finding evidence of what you did, whether you were stealing something or talking about something. Sooner or later it would be found out. So surveillance was pretty much a people thing.