The discipline of teams: the control of team-based industrial work through electronic and peer surveillance - Special Issue: Critical Perspectives on Organizational Control

Administrative Science Quarterly,  June, 1998  by Graham Sewell

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PERSPECTIVES ON THE LABOR PROCESS

Surveillance and Teamwork: An Unexpected Combination

Surveillance in the workplace, previously a relatively neglected issue in organizational theory, is becoming the focus of much attention. New information technologies have increased the scope and reach of workplace surveillance, and never before have employees been subjected to such intense scrutiny and monitoring. Using the word surveillance to describe a feature of the contemporary workplace courts controversy, as it tends to convey negative images of suspicion, distrust, and disobedience. This is ironic, as we now celebrate positive images at work like empowerment, trust, and increased discretion. Teamwork, another feature of many contemporary workplaces and an intense focus of attention from practitioners and theorists alike, is strongly associated with these positive images. This article undertakes a critical analysis that advances our understanding of the perhaps unexpected relationship between surveillance and teamwork.

Numerous theorists (e.g., Poster, 1990; Lyon, 1994; Bogard, 1996) have provided disturbing visions of the way in which surveillance is displacing bureaucracy as the principal mode of rationalization and control in contemporary life, particularly in the workplace. This pessimism stands in sharp contrast, then, with the messages of empowerment, devolved responsibility, and the widespread reversal of repressive workplace control structures that are now commonly found in popular management books. A recurrent theme in these books is their emphasis on replacing the individual with teams as the basic unit of work organization (Barley, 1990). For its advocates, this change represents a reversal of the rationalization of Taylorism and holds a promise of mutual gain. Teams provide a means of working "smarter, not harder," and work itself becomes more effective and more fulfilling.

Given that the two positions outlined above appear antithetical, the contention that increased workplace surveillance and teamwork could be in any way related may come as a surprise. In this article, however, I will argue this very point through an examination of contemporary labor process theory. In particular, the article shows that labor process theory can retain its relevance and critical thrust despite the current popularity of teamwork as an ostensible means of moderating some of the more unattractive aspects of capitalist organization. By demonstrating that the apparently consensual workplace relations associated with teamwork are, in certain circumstances, founded on new technologies and organizational practices that ensure discipline in obtrusive and unobtrusive ways, the article sets the scene for the construction of a new model of labor process control. Reviews of empirical studies, combined with theory, provide the basis for the proposed model.

The substantive focus of this article is the role of surveillance in the control of the industrial labor process, where group objectives are pursued. This is why the model developed below may not necessarily resonate with other work situations that are closely monitored electronically but do not occur in socialized, interdependent, and synchronized organizational settings - for example, the activities of supermarket checkout operators, telesales staff, or long-distance truckers. This article does show, however, that in certain industrial settings where teamwork has been implemented, we must moderate the rhetoric of greater worker autonomy and empowerment with theoretically informed empirical studies of the labor process that reveal the possibility of heightened managerial control.

The Importance of Control in Labor Process Theory

The origins of contemporary labor process theory lie within neo-Marxist critiques of the capitalist mode of production, and its substantive focus draws on preoccupations that have changed little since the publication of Marx's Capital (Goldman, 1983). Marx (1976) considered the control of work to be central to industrialization, as it formed the principal mechanism by which labor was subordinated to the interests of capital. Subsequent management practice has invariably sought to reinforce this subordination by efficiently directing purposeful human action, i.e., by tightening the control of the industrial labor process (Jermier, 1983; Thompson, 1983). Braverman (1974) identified scientific management, or Taylorism, as the most significant innovation in pursuit of this end.

Control as a practice is a necessary component of the social relations of capitalist production due to the indeterminate relationship between individuals' notional capacity to undertake work (i.e., their labor power) and the amount of effort they expend in working (i.e., their actual labor). In effect, workers do not surrender their full capacity to work but retain it, only selling their labor power for an agreed amount of time (Braverman, 1974). Under these conditions, managers attempt to ensure that expended effort approaches the full potential of labor power, first by determining the tasks individuals must undertake and then by directing their efforts throughout the working day to make sure that these tasks are completed. According to Taylor (1972), the legitimate authority for managers to assert this level of control stemmed from their application of scientific and, hence, impartial principles of efficiency. Braverman disabused us of this notion of impartially, identifying Taylorism as an ideological project of domination with the ultimate objective of ensuring the real subordination of labor. Although labor was formally subordinated through capitalists' ownership of the means of production, labor could still exercise a degree of genuine autonomy by retaining responsibility for the conception and execution of work tasks. Braverman suggested that, despite his rhetoric of scientific efficiency, Taylor's primary objective was to bring about the real subordination of labor by dissolving this unity of mental and manual work. Managers would take over the responsibility for the conception of work, while non-managers were simply left to execute standardized tasks, thereby driving out any vestige of autonomy. As such, scientific management's concern was not primarily to identify the best way to do work in general (i.e., to maximize efficiency) but "to answer the specific problem of how best to control alienated labour - that is to say, labour that is bought and sold" (Braverman, 1974: 90). This reinforced the Marxist tradition of representing the politics of the labor process as a struggle over who determines the nature and form of work, a polarized contest between worker autonomy and the assertion of managerial prerogative, taking place at what Edwards (1979) has described as the "frontier of control." Under contemporary approaches to teamwork, which advocate a limited recombination of mental and manual work, the traditional frontier of control associated with labor process theory is becoming harder to delineate, especially when nominal autonomy and enhanced managerial control are mutually supportive.