ABSTRACT
Surveillance, in one form or another, has always been at the heart of capitalist enterprises, and organizations in general. Within the established business school, knowledge of general management theory and transaction cost economics (TCE), systematic information codification, monitoring and control are argued to be at the center of Western economic activity (and supremacy). In 1916, Henri Fayol’s organizational ethnography, described in every standard management text as one of the founding pieces of management theory, identified six management activities. These ranged from planning and forecasting, to organizing, commanding, and coordinating. The final of these activities was “controlling” – the definition of which refers to the monitoring of activities to ensure compliance with existing plans. Similarly, Beniger’s (1986) and Yates’s (1989) historical studies emphasize the pervasive policing and control elements of large-scale corporate systems which are supported by detailed communication systems (Clark 2000). TCE, in focusing upon the coordination of firms and market mechanisms in the policing of contracts, emphasizes the role of internal firm information in subverting the main market mechanism: price (Coase 1937; Williamson 1975). This is said to decrease risk and increase control over organizational environments by creating internal capital markets.
