Conclusion

Employees have many and complex feelings about being surveilled, and these need systematic study for at least two reasons. First, as pointed out above, such feelings are a kind of panoptic effect that might undercut, or in extreme cases even neutralize, the very plans and programs the surveillance was adopted to support. Second, if the self-propagating effect that Social Power theorists hypothesize in fact occurs with surveillance, increasing numbers of employers in both developing and developed countries will come to rely on electronic surveillance without even realizing why they are doing so, how employees actually feel about the experience, or what effect surveillance is ultimately having on their organizations.