Search results

Organizations and their actors are increasingly using video surveillance to monitor organizational members, employees, clients, and customers. The use of such technologies in workplaces creates a virtual panopticon and increases uncertainty for those under surveillance. Video surveillance in organizations poses several concerns for the privacy of individuals and creates a security-privacy dilemma for organizations to address. The purpose of this paper is to offer a decision-making model that ties in ethical considerations of access, equality, and transparency at four stages of video surveillance use in organizations: deployment of cameras and equipment, capturing footage, processing and storing data, and editing and sharing video footage. At each stage, organizational actors should clearly identify the purpose for video surveillance, adopt a minimum capability necessary to achieve their goals, and communicate decisions made and actions taken that involve video surveillance in order to reduce uncertainty and address privacy concerns of those being surveilled.

The paper proposes a normative model for ethical video surveillance organizational decision making based on a review of relevant literature and recent events.

The paper provides several implications for the future of dealing with security-privacy dilemmas in organizations and offers structured considerations for corporation leaders and decision makers.

The paper includes implications for organizations to approach video surveillance with ethical considerations for stakeholder privacy while balancing security demands.

This paper offers a framework for decision-makers that also offers opportunities for further research around the concept of ethics in organizational video surveillance.

Scholarship on the state control of social movements has predominately focused on overt repression, resulting in comparatively less attention to more covert forms of control. Researchers have suggested that government surveillance of social movement organizations (SMOs) has become increasingly widespread and routinized in the post-September 11, 2001 era, but this hypothesis has remained untested. Since contemporary surveillance is grounded in a logic of information gathering that has diffused across law enforcement agencies since the September 11 attacks, government actors now cast a wide net and monitor a large variety of groups. This study shows that a result, traditional factors predicting surveillance, such as contentious behavior, have less explanatory power. Using a database of 409 SMOs active in Philadelphia between January 1996 and October 2009, the research asked who and why particular groups are monitored by the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security (PA-OHS) between November 2009 and September 2010. Bayesian logistic regression analysis is used to examine the variables predicting surveillance. Findings show that 23% of the SMOs in the sample were targets of surveillance. Organizational ideology was the strongest predictor and there was little evidence that history of contentious protests or previous conflict with the police influenced coming under surveillance. However, groups with less visibility in traditional media sources were more likely to be monitored.

This chapter examines the shifting significance of data ownership and athlete rights as they pertain to the growth and expansion of the global sports gambling industry. It provides a nuanced overview of the ‘datafication’ of society, tracing how the omnipresent embrace of digital technologies has expediated new forms of organisational, political and corporate surveillance from which concerns over privacy, rights to ownership and the misuse of personal data arise. The chapter moves on to discuss how the extraction and trade of data has revolutionised how elite sport is performed, manufactured, broadcast and consumed, shedding critical light on the role of the gambling industry in the exchange of human data as a market commodity. These insights inform a series of socio-legal and ethical questions about the relationships between athlete data and the sports gambling industry for the purpose of signposting emerging issues and opportunities for critical sociological research and intervention.

Surveillance is seen as an important tool to prevent security breaches and may improve prosecutorial ability, but employees may engage in subtitle counterproductive behaviors in protest. This poses significant risks and costs to employers. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the results of a previous field study of the influences from justice perceptions as mitigation and prescribe some methods for addressing the issues that are raised.

Drawing from protection motivation theory, the psychological contract, and the systems of organizational justice, a threat control model about surveillance attitudes is field‐tested in a randomized design.

Trust and perceptions of justice mediated attitudes about surveillance practices; and threat severity and efficacy of surveillance in maintaining security moderated attitudes about corporate surveillance are founded.

The paper illustrates the theoretical linkages between surveillance practices and employee counterproductive behaviors. Grounded in these findings, an explanation for how security managers might balance the simultaneous demands for security while maintaining an effective workforce is presented.

The growth of information technology as a means of electronic surveillance has led to a great deal of research which managers need to evaluate and apply to the workplace. To aid this process, managers should understand the perspectives that guide research agendas. The assumptions of the investigators influence what questions are asked about electronic surveillance, how inquiry is conducted, and how results are interpreted. Summarizes research that employs different organizational perspectives in studying electronic surveillance, and attempts to aid managers in applying this research on the job.

The chapter uses a comparative case study design to address the mutations and trajectories of transparency in two organizations. We chose organizations that are similar in that they favor extensive forms of self-disclosure, but also different in terms of which sector they inhabit, audiences, and organization type: the Pirate Party of Germany and the lobby organization Epsilon. The findings, in close dialog with different threads in the transparency literature, unveil three crucial dimensions in which transparency regimes are likely to trigger unintended consequences: first, organizations have to cope with the tension between the disclosure of internal information on the one hand, and the need to appear consistent in public on the other. Second, transparency strategies can, however, turn into surveillance and trigger new forms of data ordering, sorting, and aggregating practices. Third, disclosure practices create and undermine complex hierarchies and power relations for organizational members. The comparison of the cases demonstrates that it is crucial to observe the practical implications and multiple trajectories of transparency practices.

This paper examines how contemporary workplace surveillance can simultaneously incentivize and commodify workforce behavior. Specifically, workplace surveillance is reconceptualized as rent-seeking, which offers a framework for analyzing novel employer-employee relationships stemming from alternate views of risk and reward.

The case of workplace microchipping is studied qualitatively as a backdrop for theorizing emergent labor relations in the context of surveillance capitalism and biopolitics.

Reconsidering surveillance within the context of personal risk and entrepreneurial lure offers much to 21st century discourse on labor and supervision. It is imperative that the public sector engages in appropriate regulatory protocols to manage emergent behavior in organizations.

This study departs from the popular conceptualization of human microchipping as an intersection of legal and ethical considerations of surveillance. Instead, the authors examine a different aspect of the microchipping phenomenon, taking into account employee creative reactions to employer surveillance in the context of risk and return.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-01-2022-0009

This paper aims to develop conceptual arguments questioning the efficacy of administration by the transaction cost economics (TCE) approach in an organization undergoing a major change.

The focus is on three distinct dimensions of organizational life where, as per prior research, TCE is likely to be inadequate: interdependence across transactions, high reliance on managerial foresight and inseparability of administrative decisions made at different points in time.

The climate of coercion and surveillance engendered by administration based on TCE approaches – that punishes deviation from goals, even when they are framed on inadequate knowledge – forestalls creative problem-solving that is necessary to address unforeseen developments that arise during change implementation. Fiat accomplishes within-group compliance in the change project sub-teams, but between-group interdependencies tend to be neglected, hampering organizational effectiveness. Moreover, attempts to create independent spheres of accountability for concurrent fiats regarding pre-existing and new commitments breed inefficiency and wastage.

The malevolent aspects of TCE-based administration contribute to organizational dysfunctions like escalation of commitment and developing of silos in organizations.

To succeed in effecting a major organizational change, meaningful relaxation of demands for delivering on prior goals is required, along with forbearance of errors made during trial-and-error learning.

TCE-based administration is deleterious to an organization attempting a major change. Supremacy accorded to resolution of conflicts in distinct hierarchical relationships by the mechanism of fiat fails to address the needs of an organizational reality where multiple groups are engaged in a set of interdependent activities and where multiple, interdependent organizational imperatives need to be concurrently served.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how surveillance facilitates new power relationships.

This longitudinal qualitative study is predicated on observations of the home care workers interacting with their managers and clients. The emerging picture was complemented with interviews of the participants. The home care workers were chosen as being crucial in the construction of new everyday relationships, and their interpretations were given most value in presenting how surveillance and monitoring relationships are constructed as embedded mundane practices and as emerging from practical needs.

The paper discusses an implementation and use case of surveillance capable technology in a social home care setting. The findings suggest discrepancy of how surveillance is being interpreted by different participants depending on their positioning in the context of use.

The study presents a case study where surveillance issues emerge not only at the workplace but also in the domestic sphere. The paper explores the workers' role in defining surveillance at the workplace, and questions the limits of legitimate surveillance in the social care context concerning vulnerable citizens as clients.

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the traditional placement of CCTV within the realm of crime prevention technologies and to propose a conceptualisation of surveillance cameras that takes into account how different elements interact to shape how these are understood, defined and used in the day-to-day practices of the police.

Methodologically, the research draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two medium-sized Italian cities where open-street CCTV systems have been recently implemented and is based on a combination of non-participant observations and interviews with police officers in both forces.

Overall, two main findings emerge from the fieldwork. First, cameras are rarely used and not for reasons pertaining to crime control; rather, they have become a tool for the efficient management of scarce policing resources, with particular emphasis on the co-ordination and real-time tracking of patrolling personnel. Second, this shift is understood in radically different ways by officers in the two cities, so that what is experienced as a benign form of peer-to-peer co-ordination in Central City becomes a form of undue surveillance on the part of higher ranks in Northern City.

The value of the present work is twofold. On one hand, it provides relevant information to police practitioners on how organisational and structural factors impact on the use of surveillance cameras in policing. On the other, embracing the idea that CCTV is constructed through the interaction of several distinct, yet related, processes can explain why the same technology is implemented, defined and used in different ways in comparable organisations.