ABSTRACT
Until recently, explorations into the nature of surveillance have come to us by way of popular culture, the arts, philosophy, and law. While historically social scientists had little to say about surveillance, criminologists and industrial sociologists researched surveillance in the workplace and society at large. With regard to the workplace, it was Marx and his contemporaries Owen, Ure and Babbage in the nineteenth century (cf. Schaffer 1994), and Frederick Taylor in the early part of the twentieth century, who noticed a series of related trends. They saw in worker monitoring, fragmentation of tasks, the separation between mental and manual tasks, and regimentation of work – through the creation of the factory and eventually the assembly line – the means for increasing profit and reducing the unpredictability of labor, or, as expressed by Marx, for subordinating labor to capital (Marx 1976: 1019-38). This phenomenon, known as the deskilling and disciplining of labor, remains at the heart of the debate surrounding workplace surveillance and computer-based automation.
