Introduction

The increased use of computer and surveillance technologies in the workplace has exposed workers throughout the entire occupational structure to heightened levels of monitoring and scrutiny. Telephone operators routinely have conversations recorded. Restaurant workers wear beepers that literally prod them through their shift. Bookstore clerks don wireless headsets so they can stock shelves and answer phones and queries at the same time. Delivery people, auto-rental check-in clerks, parking-meter readers, and a host of others carry data-entry computers. In fact, according to an annual survey by the American Management Association (AMA, 2001) more than three- quarters of major U.S. firms (77.7%) record and review employee communications and activities on the job, including their phone calls, e-mail, Internet connections, and computer files. This percentage has doubled since 1997. Not only are some of these technologies used to help workers be more efficient, but also to monitor their movements and/or keep track of their productivity. Such uses have implications for the privacy rights of workers as well as the dehumanization and deskilling of work, even in those occupations regarded as unskilled.

As we have argued elsewhere (Staples, 2000), contemporary forms of surveillance and social control tend to be systematic, methodical, and automatic in operation. It is likely to be impersonal in that the observer is rarely seen, is anonymous, and is likely to be a computer system, a video cam, a drug-testing kit, or an electronic scanner of some kind. Once more, the data that these devices collect may become part of a permanent record in the form of videotape, a computer database, or some other digital format. These new meticulous rituals of power often appear as the technological progeny of the Panopticon (Bentham, 1995; Foucault, 1977; Staples, 2000) 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.

A number of social theorists have argued that surveillance is replacing bureaucratization as the driving force in the rationalization of everyday life and work (Bogard, 1996; Lyon, 1994; Poster, 1990; Sewell, 1998). When applied in the workplace, electronic systems of surveillance and monitoring may attempt to control and manipulate workers behaviors and job performances through their own self-monitoring and discipline. In addition, workers may be subordinated by means of systems that rationalize their skill and knowledge about the labor process and transfer it to management in order to ensure both their acquiescence and replaceability (Braverman, 1974; Staples & Staples, 2001). Both of these strategies are centered on efficiency and control and both rely on the close observation and inspection of the labor process.

Yet, like many attempts to understand the routinizing effects of technologies in the workplace, managerial prerogative is often depicted as omnipotent, and power is exercised in a one-directional, hierarchical manner. Moreover, studies that stress the importance of ideational (or debureaucratized ) control and normative expectations have opened the door for addressing the informal processes through which consent is manufactured (Grenier, 1988; Ouichi, 1981; Rosen & Baroudi, 1992). Nevertheless, these studies typically define these cultural processes as the product of organizational and managerial manipulation, and fail to effectively conceptualize workers as active participants in the workplace. By contrast, we see the use of surveillance as another contested terrain (Edwards, 1979) of the workplace, a site of negotiation where the boundaries and meaning of surveillance are shaped through both the contestation and consent of employees. While attempts to control workers behaviors through surveillance may be initiated by management, employees are still able to navigate around the edges of these tactics in ways that are both meaningful to them and shape the actual implementation of policies and procedures.

We share the perspective advanced by Stanton and Stam (2003) that rejects the notion that the relations between employees and their managers are irrelevant in the implementation of surveillance technologies. As a way of understanding the dynamics between structural aspects of the workplace, such as surveillance and the micro-level interactions of workers and managers, we adopt Fine s negotiated-order perspective, as well as his concept of idioculture (Fine, 1996). As originally presented by Strauss (1978), this perspective has four presuppositions . The first is that organization is not possible without negotiation. Second, specific negotiations are dependent on the structural conditions of the organization. Third, negotiations are temporally constrained and must be perpetually reconstituted. And fourth, structural changes in organization require revisions in the negotiated order. From this standpoint, then, workers must be viewed as active participants within the organizational environment of their workplace and can act strategically despite real constraints and differences in power.

For Fine, processes of negotiation are closely associated with what he refers to as small group idioculture or a system of knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, and customs shared by an interacting group to which members can refer and which serves as the basis for further interaction (Fine, 1996,p. 116). Idiocultures may include local rules and traditions, various tricks of the trade and short cuts, a shared sense of work aesthetics, types of play, and ritualized forms of talk such as storytelling and sex-talk. While employees enter the workplace with a variety of individual beliefs, personal histories, and opinions , they all must confront and negotiate similar structural constraints imposed upon them through the social and technical organization of the labor process, in addition to larger, macro-political, and cultural constraints. As a result, workers typically develop, in addition to their own individual perspectives, a local set of common beliefs and practices that can potentially aggregate into an identifiable workplace idioculture. While workplace idiocultures are, by definition, idiosyncratic and particularistic, they tend to share a set of common characteristics (Fine, 1996). For example, while telling stories may be a general feature of most work settings, the stories themselves, their content, and their character, tend to be unique to each workplace. Likewise, while employees in various workplaces may share a common value such as the importance of productivity, it is unlikely , given the emergent nature of idiocultures, that different groups of workers will share entirely identical value systems. As a result, empirical generalizations regarding particular workplace idiocultures are limited. Nevertheless, the concepts of idioculture and negotiation can be used to highlight a number of important issues within every workplace, including the processes through which surveillance is instituted.

In this chapter, we examine the ways that employees at a large, corporate retail store we refer to as Funtime Toys (a pseudonym) consent to and challenge the in-store surveillance system and how these negotiations are shaped by and incorporated into the workers idioculture.

Our analysis highlights several important themes, including how workers perceive the use of surveillance and how they respond to new surveillance technologies. We focus on how these aspects of worker idioculture are, in part, a product of what employees believe to be morally acceptable uses of technology and their experiences with the older system they had come to know. In addition, we examine the ways that employees negotiate around the edges of store surveillance and, in some cases, actually use surveillance to reinforce the idiocultural norms of the productive worker. At the end of the chapter, we will discuss the limitations that these idiocultural processes have in empowering employees in the workplace.