Electronic Monitoring in the Workplace: If People Don't Care, Then What is the Relevance?

Abstract

This chapter will start with a discussion of three different pieces of research concerning surveillance. The first study looks at the perception of surveillance by some of those people who supervise and implement it; namely, information systems or information technology professionals. The next study investigates students’ perception of surveillance in their university, while the last one is an in-depth study of two organisations with regard to surveillance. The combining factor of these three studies is that the subjects do not necessarily see surveillance as problematic. Given this surprising finding, this chapter will recount the arguments for and against surveillance as found in the literature. This will lead to a discussion of the reasons why individuals often do not seem to mind surveillance, despite good evidence that it may be psychologically, morally, socially, and even economically harmful. The chapter will end with a discussion of what these findings can mean for people interested in surveillance.