Willing robots

I posted recently about the growing possibilities for replacing human workers with robots, but alongside that it’s possible to discern a growing ‘robotization’ of human workers. That thought was prompted by a recent article by the excellent journalist John Harris about employee monitoring. Harris discusses the soon to be released film The Circle based upon a 2013 novel of the same name by Dave Eggers. I have not read it, but apparently it depicts the dystopian world of a high-tech corporation where:

“… privacy and autonomy count for almost nothing. Under a veneer of feelgoodism, employees are complicit in their own constant monitoring and a system of endless appraisal by their peers, who feed into a system called Participation Rank – or PartiRank, for short.”

Harris goes on to discuss real life counterparts of this, including the ‘Humanyze’ system of ‘people analytics’ which tracks and records employee movements and interactions, biometric data and so on. Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear of this, as back in February 2014 I wrote about the Hitachi Business Microscope which has very similar functions.

The theme of workplace surveillance has been very widely explored within organization studies for at least 25 years, especially under the influence of Foucauldian analysis, and I discuss it at some length in my book (pp. 72-77). Yet we should not dismiss it as ‘old hat’, not least because of the ever-advancing technological capacities to extend surveillance.

Alongside the technology, there seems to be a growing acceptance and normalization of its use, so that (as Foucault recognized of surveillance and disciplinary power in general) those subject to it welcome it rather than experience it as intrusive. As the Circle Corporation sloganizes: “Secrets are lies; sharing is caring; privacy is theft”.

The obligatory reference to George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four hardly seems necessary, but the ‘feelgoodism’ of contemporary surveillance is rather different to the austere, monochrome ambience of Orwell’s Oceania. It resonates more with Jacques Donzelot’s (1991) thought-provoking essay ‘Pleasure in Work’. Donzelot’s argument is that work was being re-imagined as a “means towards self-realization” (p. 251) as a reaction against the effects of the drive for productivity in the workplace.

Yet the contemporary harnessing of ‘feelgoodism’ is different in that it seeks to re-inscribe productivity into pleasure. That is to say, pleasure is not the antidote to techniques of enhancing productivity but is itself a technique to do so, what organizational theorist André Spicer calls ‘the cult of compulsory happiness’.

Harris concludes by saying that “what all this means is pretty obvious. On the way to being replaced by a robot, you will have to become one”, and I have some agreement with that. However, in co-opting pleasure for and securing subservience to productivity, the kind of robots we are suppose to become are oxymorons like the ‘willing slaves’ described by both Madeleine Bunting (2011) and Andrew Scott (1994). In being willing robots we are simultaneously robots and that one thing that robots cannot be – willing, in all senses of the word: cheerfully prepared and possessed of choice and purpose.

The centrality of productivity to contemporary economic discourse is pointed up by the consultation document on its industrial strategy released by the UK government today. The longstanding weakness of UK productivity by international standards is the central theme of this strategy and throughout the document it is linked to the need to work ‘not harder but smarter’ (p.13) and to new technologies, including robotics (p.63). Like everything else in British politics at the moment it is refracted through Brexit, so that the opening preface from the Prime Minister declares that the vote to leave the EU was also a vote to “change the way our country works forever” (p.3).

It strikes me as unlikely that those who voted for Brexit realised that they had also voted to be replaced by robots or themselves to become willing robots – after all, neither this nor, for that matter, industrial strategy were on the ballot paper - but if this turns out to be the case it underscores that the exercise of human will is less predictable than the operation of robots, so that the choices we make may lead to consequences we never envisaged.

References

Bunting, M. (2011) Willing Slaves: How the overwork culture is ruining our lives. London: Harper Collins.

Donzelot, J. (1991) ‘Pleasure in Work’ in Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller P. (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in governmentality, pp 251-280. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Scott, A. (1994) Willing Slaves? British workers under human resource management. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Under the microscope

Issues of privacy are a hot topic at the moment, mainly in terms of the way that governments and corporations may access and our data. The debate there is about the privacy of citizens and consumers - but what about employees? In the book (p.73) I talk about surveillance in the workplace and remark that after initial enthusiasm for the use of Foucault's discussion of the Panoptic prison in organization studies, more recently authors have been rather sniffy and dismissive of it. In particular, it is seen as too totalizing, too inattentive to resistance.


What, then, to make of Hitachi's new Business Microscope device? This allows employees' movements to be tracked - something that has long existed in 'smart buildings' - but also monitors who they speak to, for how long and how 'energetically', how close they stand to each other, how much they contribute in meetings and many other things as well. The rationale, of course, is greater productivity and efficiency plus the obligatory humanistic nod to checking on employees' health and well-being.


The notion of privacy has less traction here than in the debates about consumers and citizens, for in what sense does privacy, or the right to privacy, exist at work? When at work, what part of us is not the legitimate purview of management? It was long ago ceded that organizations could legitimately manage our motivations and emotions, so why should anything be off limits? If you are at work, doesn't your employer have the right to know what you are doing and feeling?


Indeed, there is a fashionable school of thought that says that privacy was a passing historical moment, sandwiched between traditional pre-industrialism and technological high capitalism; an interlude of sentimental humanism. I understand and feel attracted to that argument in that I also think that what constitutes personhood (and, thence, privacy) is historically variable (and, again, argue that in the book, pp. 46-51). But it is a bit too glib, as well. Privacy may be a specific historical construct but it continues to have much purchase. Indeed, the current controversies about privacy would hardly be 'controversial' were this not so.


From this perspective, privacy can serve as the basis of resistance - that is, we resist by trying to hold private to ourselves certain thoughts and feelings in the face of surveillance. George Orwell's 1984 is an obligatory reference here: even the omniscient Big Brother engendered resistance from Winston Smith as he sought to guard his thoughts and his love affair from the telescreens. I'm not sure that this is a comforting, though, given Winston's fate and, more prosaically, the way that in organizations such resistances typically act as the spur for further and more intense surveillance.


But what if the most effective resistance lay not in trying to close ourselves to surveillance but in being more fully open than our surveyors can bear? What if we insisted on our right not to privacy but to 'tell all' - to speak of the truths, mundane and dramatic, of our lives?  To say to those who demand that we bring our 'whole selves' to work: 'very well, then, here it is, warts and all'? So, for example, in meetings we would blurt out what, presumably, most of us often feel: that we are bored, preoccupied by domestic worries, or afflicted by sciatica or whatever it might be. To disclose not less but more than the 'Business Microscope' can discern? If surveillance is not to be thought of as a one way street, how might it work to overwhelm those who want to know everything by letting them know, precisely, that? To make it inefficient to be known?