Power, Control and Computer-based Performance Monitoring: Repertoires, Resistance and Subjectivities

Organization Studies, May, 2000 by Kirstie Ball, David C. Wilson

Abstract

This paper examines Computer-based Performance Monitoring (CBPM) in two UK financial services organizations. In doing so, it examines and critiques the existing manner in which this area has been theorized by both traditional and critical organization theorists. It then offers an alternative analysis of CBPM in terms of power, control and resistance, which involves the close interrogation of subject positioning within the speech of those who are subject to and manage this technology. By examining subject positions in interpretive repertoires, the paper demonstrates how power, control and resistance are constituted at an individual level and are specifically linked to the use (and abuse) of CBPM technology. It then further considers the nature and origins of the interpretive repertoires in relation to their organizational contexts, describing the differential circulation of disciplinary power in each. CBPM is thus understood as a politically neutral technology of power, which, when mobilized by management and discursively interwoven into practice becomes a potent force within local organizational sites. The central message of this paper is that it is possible to reveal the intertwining of individual and institutional discourses purely by examining technologies, practices and subjectivities in local organizational sites.

Descriptors: electronic monitoring; power; resistance; discourse analysis; subjectivity

Introduction

Computer-based performance monitoring (CBPM) is fast becoming a commonplace management practice in the service and manufacturing organizations, presenting opportunities for data collection and the analysis of a wide range of employee activities. It has been described by some as the 'technological whip of the electronic age' (Nine to Five 1990), but its proponents argue for its ability to improve efficiency, productivity, and, hence, profitability. Anecdotal accounts from predominantly North American popular management literature are punctuated with reports of negative experiences of CBPM. Severe employee stress, unreasonable management punitive action and slick managerial rhetoric are typical of such accounts. The rise of the 'call centre' has accelerated the diffusion of CBPM technology in the United Kingdom. The seas of VDU's populating organizational spaces which house insurance hotlines, direct banking, airline reservation centres render employees' activities visible and knowable to managers via CBPM. Thi s paper addresses the debate concerning the extent to which CBPM appears to be used as a means for improving efficiencies in the broadest sense: to increase control over employees. This paper examines two comparable cases drawn from the service sector in the United Kingdom.

Theorizing CBPM

The majority of research into CBPM technologies is predominantly North American in origin, drawing largely from the field of occupational psychology. Stress and feedback were the main focii of these endeavours, which typically produced lists of aggravating and mediating factors at the system design, task, management and ergonomic levels of analysis. The work of the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment (1987), Smith and Amick (1989), Higgins and Grant (1989) and Westin (1988, 1992) are noteworthy in this respect. These studies provide useful initial frameworks for the analysis. However, their generalizability proved limited and other scholars began to point to their limitations. In particular, the omission of organizational context was highlighted as critically important. For example, Attewell (1987) emphasized the influence of context which predicates CBPM usage employing different organizational theories from different organizational levels of analysis. He examined aspects of corporate culture, product lifecycle, contingency theory, neo-marxist theory and industrial sociology to indicate the key contextual influences on the use of CBPM. The main factors of this analysis are summarized in Table I. Whilst Attewell's model is a useful initial framework and addresses institutional and market factors which affect CBPM use, his conception of 'employee resistance' is based largely on neo-marxist theories and industrial sociology theories. These have been criticized for their marginalization of the subject, which precludes a full account of power, control and employee resistance (see Clegg 1994; Knights and Vurdubakis 1994; Knights and Willmott 1993). In the current paper, we address the question of CBPM usage within a more subjectivist framework of power, addressing processes of su bjectification which occur in the monitored workplaces of our sampled organizations. Our framework draws on the work of Foucault (1975, 1977), Potter and Wetherell (1987), Deetz (1992) Townley (1994) and Henriques et al. (1998) in combining institutional and discursive data to produce a view of power wherein CBPM is enmeshed in precanons equilibrium. Thus, we also critique Attewell's unidirectional conceptualization of the effect of context on CBPM. We view the discourses we examine as circulatory in nature, reproducing, re/defining and reshaping context over time. This paper, therefore, attempts to elaborate the notion of power, control and resistance through the study of the subject and its subjectification to CBPM technology. Placing the subject within the context of structures and technologies is a central tenet of the 'Panoptic' ideal type which is discussed briefly in the next section. In viewing the Panopticon as a structure in which observers can observe unseen by the observed, we argue, however, that it shares many of the drawbacks of previous structuralist approaches, since the voices of individuals subject to it are precluded from such an analysis.