Sandy J. J.. Gould
Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom
I argue that epistemologies of workplace surveillance are shifting in fundamental ways, and so critiques must shift accordingly. I begin the paper by relating Scientific Management to Human-Centred Computing's ways of knowing through a study of 'metaverse' virtual reality workplaces. From this, I develop two observations. The first is that today's workplace measurement science does not resemble the science that Taylor developed for Scientific Management. Contemporary workplace science is more passive, more intermediated and less controlled. The second observation is that new forms of workplace measurement challenge the norms of empirical science. Instead of having credentialed human witnesses observe phenomena and agree facts about them, we instead make outsourced, uncredentialed stochastic machine witnesses responsible for producing facts about work. With these observations in mind, I assert that critiques of workplace surveillance still framed by Taylorism will not be fit for interrogating workplace surveillance practices of the future.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642206
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2024.acm.org/)