A critical analysis of the implications of workplace surveillance
Workplace surveillance is a rapidly evolving area within surveillance studies, carrying serious implication for employment, labour relations, and our changing relationship to work itself. Once rooted in managerial theory, surveillance technology is now deeply embedded in both public and private spheres. While the intensity, and at times, the exploitative nature, of surveillance varies across sectors, one fact remains; regardless of your job, you are increasingly governed by surveillant systems. Surveillance, as Stark (2020, p.1077) asserts, is ‘a key tool for the exercise of power’, and wherever there is power, there is control, hierarchy and exploitation. As financialisation seeps into every aspect of society, we must understand workplace surveillance as part of a broader consumerist panopticon. This essay engages with that complexity, unpacking the textured layers that precede the most visible implications. Our work lives are transforming, and not always for the better. The first section investigates the underlying motivations behind workplace surveillance and its function in reinforcing control and exploitation. Here, a social determinist lens is applied to some of Marx’s key ideas, alongside an engagement with managerial theory to examine why capital seeks to dominate labour power. From there, we trace the evolution of surveillance through Taylorism and Kaizen philosophy; models that still shape contemporary managerial practice, before arriving at the notion of the financial panopticon and its grip on modern work. The second section focuses on the erosion of bodily autonomy and its disorientating effects on workers’ subjectivity. This includes both empirical and theoretical engagement with health surveillance, as well as spatial and temporal distortions produced by cybernetic integration and motion tracking systems. The third section explores how surveillance is gendered; drawing from feminist theory and empirical research to examine how women experience monitoring differently, particularly under the weight of the male gaze and a culture of sexualisation. Finally, the essay turns to the implication's surveillance has on resistance. Drawing on the historical trajectory of trade unions, this section argues that declining membership and institutional stagnation have left workers vulnerable. With unions struggling to keep pace with technological change, many workers are now turning to more covert, Metis-like strategies of resistance: quiet, cunning and increasingly necessary. Surveillance is expanding, and like CCTV, we must keep our eyes open.
To critically analyse the implications of workplace surveillance is to engage with the historical and theoretical foundations of workplace management itself. As Gent (2024, p.9) asserts, ‘where there are workers, there is also politics’. Surveillance cannot be separated from the structures that seek to govern and extract labour; it is fundamentally tied to the control of human activity and the regulation of labour power. Underpinning this argument is a Marxist framework that positions labour as central to human development; which offers a lens that of workplace surveillance is part of a broader logic of capitalist exploitation (Selwyn, 2013, p.1). At its core, workplace surveillance is not a neutral or purely technical practise, but rather a continuation of long-standing mechanisms designed to manage, discipline, and extract value from the workforce.
To start, the emergence of industrial capitalism marked a shift toward increasingly sophisticated techniques for regulating labour. Marx’s distinction between ‘extensive and intensive exploitation’ (Manokha, 2020, p.548) helps explain the imperative to monitor and control workers. Whether through longer hours (extensive) or greater output (intensive), the capitalist’s goal remains the maximisation of surplus value. This is rooted in Marx’s concept of labour power, which only becomes useful to capital ‘when the owner of the means of production finds the free worker available on the market as the seller of his own labour power’ (Marx, 1976, p.276). The central problem for capital, then, is that labour power is not a fixed commodity; it is governed by the worker’s will, effort and resistance. Surveillance emerges as a solution to this contradiction, a means of recapturing control over a form of labour that, by nature, eludes complete mastery. Braverman (1974) illiterates how capitalist management restructures the labour process to reclaim control, either by intensifying work conditions or extending the working day. Yet even beyond the walls of the workplace, Marx’s notion of the reserve army of labour illustrates how unemployment functions as a disciplinary mechanism; by saturating the labour market, it compels the employed to accept deteriorating conditions. As Yates (2022, p.2) notes, this surplus workforce acts as a brake on labour’s control bargaining power. Importantly, ‘Marx’s reserve army of the unemployed is a conscript, not a volunteer army’ (Blanchflower, 2020, p.19); a reminder that these conditions are systematically produced and not freely chosen. It is within these foundational ideas, that the stage is set for Foucault’s theory of disciplinary societies, where power operates through surveillance and enclosure. Institutions such as the school, the prison, and the factory produce docile bodies by conditioning behaviour within tightly regulated environments (Foucault, 1975). As Deleuze (1992, p.2) elaborates, in disciplinary societies ‘the individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws’. The workplace becomes a siren not just of labour, but of behavioural conditioning, where compliance is ensured through visibility and the looming threat of discipline. Contemporary digital surveillance technologies extend these logics, refining Foucault’s technologies of the self by increasing individualised pressure on workers to optimise performance. As Manokha (2020, p.547) argues, digital surveillance does not merely monitor; it internalises discipline, making workers responsible for their own productivity and efficiency. Thus, Marx’s analysis remains essential for understanding the implications of workplace surveillance. Surveillance functions as a managerial tool designed to overcome the limits of labour powers autonomy. As the next section will explore, contemporary workplace surveillance reflects not a break from these traditions, but their intensification under conditions of financialisation and global precarity.
The post-war period and decades after marked the rise of neoliberalism and post-capitalist governance, characterised by market deregulation, austerity, and the creation of leaner, more flexible businesses. These shifts ushered in new forms of workplace management, yet they drew heavily on earlier, socially outdated, techniques designed to govern labour. Notably, Taylorism, while peaking in the early 20th century, continued to influence managerial thought. Taylor believed that ‘managers’ relative lack of understanding gave workers too much power over performance’ (Gent, 2024, p.66). His solution was to fragment and deskill labour, rendering workers interchangeable components within a system of maximised efficiency; one that returned control to managers and made surveillance a condition of productivity. This logic was echoed in the Toyota Production System (TPS), which embraced the Kaizen philosophy of continuous improvement. While seemingly innocuous, such principles reinforce surveillance through constant monitoring and communication. As Rule (1973) cautions, any technology that improves communication inevitably enhances surveillance, and ‘whatever the purpose of surveillance is… some kind of power relations are involved’ (Lyon, 2007, p.184). The adaptability of the Kaizen model, combined with the deskilling of labour and the rise of precarious employment, reflects the fluidity of control under neoliberalism; an adaptability that aligns with the Deleuze and Guatarri’s concept of societies of control. Unlike Foucault’s disciplinary societies, which operated through fixed enclosures, societies of control are diffused, integrated into open systems and digital flows. ‘In the disciplinary societies, one was always starting again, while in the societies of control no one is ever finished with anything’ (Deleuze, 1992, p.5). This perpetual state of modulation mirrors contemporary demands placed on workers to be agile, self-regulating, and permanently available. Surveillance today is less about enclosure and more about entanglement; workers are embedded within an infrastructure of metrics, algorithms, and behavioural cues that condition their actions in real time. Taken together with broader critical theories: such as Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism (2019), Lazzarato’s mnemotechnics of debt (2012), and Althusser’s theory of ideological interpellation (2014), workplace surveillance appears not as an isolated practise, but a node within a vast network of control. It is, in effect, one fish in a very big pond. While the specific implications of workplace surveillance will be explored further, it is crucial to situate it within this wider financial panopticism, wherein individuals are subject to anticipatory conformity. Under the constant threat, or promise, of observation, workers come to align their behaviour not only with the interests of capital, but also with the broader objectives of the neoliberal state.
Moving forward, beneath the overarching structure of the financial panopticon lie specific implications of workplace surveillance, all of which remain grounded in control and exploitation. A particularly insidious expression of this is the control of human bodies and the erosion of bodily autonomy, wherein power is asserted over workers through the manipulation of their movements and rhythms. This is not a novel phenomenon but a longitudinal one, stretching from the industrial factories of the early 20th century to the algorithmically governed warehouses of today. While this practise is ultimately rooted in capitalism’s imperative to extract and regulate labour power, the deeper concern, and the focus of this point, is its transformative effect on subjectivity, the internalised self-conception and identity of the worker. Subjectivity, as Pepperell (2011, p.10) notes, involves the capacity to ‘enact both an objectivating and relativising relationship to self’. This becomes compromised when workers are prevented from manifesting the self due to constraints imposed upon them, especially when those constraints extend to the body’s basic movements. The Gilbreth’s’ early 20th century motion studies exemplify this mechanism of the body. By attaching small lamps to workers on production lines and photographing their movements, the Gilbreth’s sought to eliminate ‘wasteful’ motions, reframing the body ‘not as flesh and blood but as as luminous field of energy or line of force’ (Stephens, 2024, p.72). These fatigue studies not only enable greater managerial oversight and control but simultaneously undermined the workers autonomy. Despite their reductive premises, the success of these studies in optimising productivity helped entrench the view of the worker as a motor of capitalism; a view that would evolve with the rise of cybernetics. Following discoveries in thermodynamics, the body came to be understood as an engine, ‘regulated by internal, dynamic principles’ (Rabinbach, 1990, p.52). Frank Gilbreth (1921) himself asserted that it was more efficient ‘to have all one class of men’ (p.14) so as to ‘enable one to adapt his work, surroundings, equipment and tools to him’ (p.10); a vision of standardised humanity optimised for labour. These ideas persist in contemporary work environments. We see their legacy in health surveillance measures such as Pulmonary Functioning Testing (PFT) in hazardous industries and genetic screenings like those for the sickle cell trait (Schill, 2002, p.83; McKay, 1999, p.599). More recently, they have manifested in the digital cybernetic systems increasingly embedded in workplaces. As Gent (2014, p.92) argues, cybernetics enables us to consider how bodies and machines combine to produce systems of control, systems that collapse cognitive and biomechanical processes into feedback loops. This is not simply humans versus machines, but the reduction of human cognition into computational logic, wherein our information outputs are integrated into mechanic flows of surveillance. One example is the use of augmented-reality goggles in warehouses, which guide workers through tasks while simultaneously transmitting surveillance data to managers. Critically, ‘even when the wearer shuts their eyes, the goggles see all’ (Gent, 2024, p.44). At this point, digital surveillance becomes more than a tool of observation; it becomes a mechanism that fundamentally alters the subjectivity of the worker, disrupting their sense of autonomy and reshaping how they relate to themselves and their labour.
To extend this theoretical engagement, we must consider how workplace surveillance alters subjectivity through the manipulation of temporal perception, spatial orientation, and cognitive functions such as communication and memory. The disciplining of time has long been integral to labour control, initially visible in the medieval guild structures, but this significantly differs from the abstract and privatised temporalities embedded in today's neoliberal workspaces. As Manokha (2020, p.543) notes, early timekeeping systems had yet to ‘enter each workplace to measure in a specific manner the effort of each worker’, unlike the pervasive systems of temporal surveillance that now characterise many forms of employment. Digital control systems, such as warehouse goggles or real-time driving logs, distribute information instantaneously, resulting in what Levy (2015, p.168) describes as a ‘temporal shift’ whereby ‘information is distributed in real time’. This pushes workers into a state of permanent presentness, stripping them of the ability to reflect on the past or anticipate the future. Workers are cognitively tethered to the immediate task, collapsing temporality into an ever-narrowing present. This temporal compression is not confined to warehouses; the privatisation of time has also transformed white collar labour. As Mazmanian (2013, p.1337) observes, mobile technologies, initially seen as tools of personal autonomy, have created conditions of constant temporal flexibility, wherein tasks are carried out on an ‘implicit, voluntary and contractually unpaid basis’. (Hassard, 2022, p.1652) calls this an ‘innovative control practise’, highlighting how abstracted time enables the extensification of work. In this context, the blurring of personal and professional time dismisses the individual’s ability to regulate their subjectivity. Moreover, spatial disorientation, another outcome of cybernetic surveillance, further contributes to this disintegration of the self. Gent (2024), in Cyberboss, illustrates how warehouse goggles create spatial fragmentation by directing workers without prior information; ‘the worker does not know where they are going until they are told to go there’ (p.160). This removes the cognitive task of spatial mapping and disrupts the individual’s sense of autonomy over their environment. When memory becomes redundant and spatial navigation is externalised, key faculties of cognition, such as foresight and planning, are undermined. We can see here the murmurings of Haggarty’s (2000) surveillant assemblage in which, ‘the body itself, then, an assemblage compromised of myriad component parts and processes which are broken down for purposes of observation’ (p.613). Taken together, these developments speak directly to Chandra’s (2020) and Montealegre’s (2017) concept of Technological Spatial Intrusions (TSI), which describes how the integration of surveillance technologies into workplace environments alters the individual’s perceived locus of control and sense of causality. Through the suspension of coherent temporality, the disruption of spatial continuity, the erosion of memory, these technologies restructure subjectivity itself. Surveillance, then does not merely monitor; it reforms the internal architecture of how individuals experience time, space and selfhood. This is one of the most critical and often overlooked implications of contemporary systems of workplace surveillance.
A further implication of workplace surveillance lies in its gendered dynamics; a topic extensively explored within the literature due to its enduring and evolving relevance. Surveillance technologies do not operate in a vacuum; they are embedded within existing social structures, including the patriarchy. As such, women often experience surveillance differently from men, both in perception and impact. Stark (2020, pp.1074-1088), in a survey conducted at the PEW research centre, found that ‘women are much less likely than men to approve of the use of cameras in the workplace’, highlighting a fundamental gender disparity in how surveillance is received. The study also explores how gender biases are often encoded within surveillance software itself, particularly through biased training data that replicates and amplifies existing structural inequalities. As a result, surveillance becomes not only a neutral management tool but a gendered mechanism of asymmetrical power. Importantly, this asymmetry is not a contemporary phenomenon but one with historical lineage. Igo (2018, p.23) notes that historically, women were afforded ‘too much of the wrong type of privacy’, confined to domestic labourers under male authority, whereas entry into public workforce subjected them to intensified scrutiny and objectification. Today, this persists through what Stark (2020, p.1079) identifies as women being ‘more likely to be subjects of unwanted attention’, further entrenching surveillance within the concept of the male gaze. Zureik (2003, p.50) underscores that in workplace settings, surveillance intersects with ‘authority structures, body representation, and consequent sexual harassment and discrimination’, all of which disproportionally affect women. Given the over representation of men in managerial positions, surveillance often reproduces and legitimises patriarchal authority. As Foucault suggests, surveillance enacts power through observation, and when filtered through gendered norms, it supports masculine hegemony. Jordan’s (2008) study on the sexualisation of women in tourist surveillance, although not workplace-specific, affirms that surveillance reproduced patriarchal norms across different contexts. Lyon’s (2002, p.1) concept of surveillance as ‘the gaze without eyes’ further reinforces how technological tools can disembody but still enact power, allowing the male gaze to operate undetected through digital means. This is extended by Meulan (2016), who argues that the internalisation of the male gaze functions as a form of gendered ‘soul training’ (p.20), shaping how women present themselves under constant observation. However, this notion becomes reductive and totalising within its inherent whiteness. As Meulan also acknowledges, the gaze manifests differently for women of colour, whose experience is better understood through the ‘oppositional gaze’ (p.20); a critical refusal to comply with dominant narratives of visibility. In the workplace, gendered surveillance manifests not only in how women are watched but in how individuals engage with surveillance. Payne (2018, p.351) highlights that ‘men used surveillance to demonstrate their skill and expertise relative to other men’, aligning with competitive masculine norms. By contrast, some women exhibit what Connell (1987) terms ‘emphasised femininity’, reflecting heteronormative pressures and subordinate gender roles within hierarchical structures. These implications demand further scholarly attention, particularly as digital infrastructures of surveillance grow more complex and pervasive. Gender bias in surveillance is symptomatic of broader societal inequalities, and if sexism can be encoded into data languages, so too can racism, ableism, homophobia and other oppressive logics. Without critical intervention, surveillance will continue to function as a gendered, and intersectional, tool of control and subjugation.
Latterly, it would be remiss not to examine one of the most significant implications of workplace surveillance: its erosion of workers’ capacity to resist. This is perhaps the most critical consequence, as without viable resistance, other implications; such has intensified control, the erosion of bodily autonomy, and gendered divisions, are left unchallenged and liable to expand. A feedback loop emerges; whereby worsening conditions are met with diminishing avenues for organised opposition. As Gent (2024, p.19) documents, workers in heavily surveilled environments have been forced ‘to urinate in bottles rather than take sanctioned breaks’, an emblematic example of how digital monitoring intensifies precarity.
Historically, trade unions have played a central role in labour resistance. Emerging in the late 18th century through benefit societies and mutual aid schemes, they offered a collective shield against hardship. Members contributed regular dues in exchange for support during illness or unemployment (Adereth, 2024, p.438). However, from their inception, unions have operated in tension with the liberal state. The Combination Acts of 1800 rendered unions illegal, only to be repealed in 1824, after which they gradually gained legitimacy and political influence; particularly through their affiliation with the Labour Party (now historical). In the United States, the National Labour Relations Act of 1935 permitted unions to set work conditions, including limitations on surveillance (Stanton, 2006, p.68). Such protections feel increasingly distant today. Recent statistics reveal a stark decline in trade union membership. According to the UK Government (2024), 2022 and 2023 marked the lowest rates of union membership on record. Most notably, 83,000 fewer women were union members, bringing female membership to an all-time low. The decline has been most acute in the private sector and disproportionately affects lower-income workers; precisely those most in need of protection. Much of the literature attributes this decline, at least in part, to the rapid evolution of digital surveillance technologies, which unions have failed to adequately address. Gent (2024, p.21) notes that unions have historically prioritised pay, recognition, and employment security, often neglecting the increasing pervasiveness of monitoring tools. While some legal scholars have attempted to fill this gap, Stanton (2006, p.68) highlights the lack of a coherent legal framework governing workplace surveillance. The failure to adapt to new technology conditions has left unions appearing out of touch, and in some cases, complicit. The emergence of the gig economy under neoliberalism has only exacerbated this, with unions struggling to represent precarious and self-employed workers. Haake (2017, pp.63-65) calls for unions to ‘expand and adapt’, especially in representing self-employed individuals and those in non-traditional forms of work. Without such transformation, trade unions risk becoming obsolete. Worse still, their inaction leaves them vulnerable to state and corporate co-optation. Wang (2024, p.476) even suggests that unions might serve as mediators in the rollout of workplace technology, shaping ‘employee's positive perceptions’ of surveillance and encouraging them to ‘trust the process’. This dynamic is exemplified in the GMB union’s 2021 deal with Uber, which was hailed as groundbreaking by some, including the BBC. However, the App Drivers and Couriers Union (ADCU) argued that the deal contained multiple loopholes and warned against premature celebration. Such misalliances between unions and corporations foster distrust among workers and create a vacuum where traditional forms of resistance falter. As a result, new forms of resistance have begun to emerge, less visible, more improvised and often individualised. In the absence of formal structures, workers have turned to tactics rooted in Metis, a form of cunning and situational intelligence. They are increasingly relying on what Scott (1990, p.183) calls ‘infra-politics’; subtle, everyday acts of resistance that are deliberately difficult to detect. These may include minor acts of sabotage, feigned compliance, or using algorithms against themselves in unexpected ways. While not coordinated on a mass scale, these methods illustrate how resistance has adapted under conditions of digital surveillance. The pace of surveillance innovation has outstripped the ability of traditional labour institutions to respond. In doing so, it has left the most vulnerable workers exposed; unprotected in increasingly exploitative environments. The implication is clear, as surveillance technologies evolve, so too must the structures designed to protect those under its gaze. Otherwise, the conditions for resistance will continue to shrink, and with them, the possibilities for meaningful change. `
To conclude, workplace surveillance is no longer a marginal concern but a central force in shaping the conditions of contemporary labour. From the outset, this essay has argued that surveillance operates as a tool of control, designed not simply to monitor workers but to discipline them into compliance, extracting maximum productivity while hollowing out autonomy. Grounded in capitalist logics, surveillance infiltrates the workplace under the guise of efficiency, masking the deeper processes of exploitation. Whether through Taylorist models rebranded as innovation, or algorithmic management posing as objectivity, the surveillance apparatus is structurally tied to the expansion of capitalist power. Yet this is not merely a question of control, it is a question of embodiment. The erosion of bodily autonomy reveals how technologies can displace the worker from their own spatial and temporal rhythms, turning the body into data, movement into metrics. Surveillance disorients the subject, creating alienation not just from labour, but from the self. Gendered divisions compound this further, with surveillance weaponised differently against women, particularly through the male gaze coded into digital systems. Surveillance here is not neutral, it is political, racialised, and gendered. It reproduces hierarchies while cloaking itself in the language of digital neutrality. With all this in mind, resistance is faltering. As traditional union structures fail to adapt, workers are left to fend for themselves in a hyper-digitised labour market. The move toward Metis and infra-politics signals a shift; resistance has not disappeared, but it has gone underground, forced to adapt to a terrain designed to render it invisible. In this sense, the most pressing implication of workplace sureveillance is not just what it sees, but what it silences. As surveillance intensifies, so must our critical engagement. It is simply not enough to be the watched; we must learn to watch back.
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