Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to The quantified self at work
Similar to The quantified self at work (20)
More from NuBizHRMWE
More from NuBizHRMWE (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
The quantified self at work
- 1. THE QUANTIFIED SELF ATWORK Dr Phoebe Moore Law and Politics, School of Law #phoebemoore p.moore@mdx.ac.uk ESRC Seminar Series Regulation of work and employment: Towards a disciplinary, multilevel framework Thursday 17th September 2015
- 2. p. moore primary investigator (2015-7) agility, work and the quantified self. british academy/leverhulme small grant scheme p. moore, a. robinson (2015) the quantified self in precarity. new media and society pre-print available www.mdx.academia.edu/PHOEBEMOORE p. moore, l. piwek (2015) unintended consequences and the dark side of the quantified self commissioned paper by sustainable societies network and epsrc www.mdx.academia.edu/PHOEBEMOORE p. moore (2015) tracking bodies, the quantified self and the corporeal turn in kees van der pijl (ed) the international political economy of production (edward elgar) www.mdx.academia.edu/PHOEBEMOORE p. moore, c. till (fc2015) the quantified self at work. science, technology and human values special issue p.moore (2014) the politics of wearables. imperica digital arts and culture magazine interview feature article18/03/14 www.imperica.com/en/features/phoebe-moore-wearable-politics p.moore (2014) the quantified self at work. cybersalon the cyborg’s new clothes public lecture www.cybersalon.org/wearable/ p. moore (2011) subjectivity in the ecologies of p2p production. the journal of fibreculture fcj-119. http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-119-peer-to-peer-production-a-revolutionary-or-neoliberal- mode-of-subjectivation/ p. moore (2010) the international political economy of work and employability (palgrave macmillan) www.mdx.academia.edu/PHOEBEMOORE p. moore and p. a. taylor (2009) ‘exploitation of the self in community-based software production – workers’ freedoms or firm foundations?’ capital & class vol. 97, pp. 99–120. www.mdx.academia.edu/PHOEBEMOORE
- 3. BA/Leverhulme ■ This project will look at two companies introducingWSTT as a strategy to facilitate agile working places.We will ask what is the impact of introducing an intervening technology into workplaces?To what extent does it improve employees’ satisfaction of work, productivity, autonomy and work/life balance?Through rich qualitative research we will gain data to inform an innovative work design model for the new world of agile work. ■ The term agile was introduced in 1991 (Sanchez and Nagi 2001, 3563) focussing on principles for more frequent, simplified, self-organised team-based software development and delivery. ‘Agile’ has often used as a replacement term for ‘lean’ production but it differs in that it is seen as a necessary response to the complexity that comes about with constant change in unpredictable environments (Ibid.; Cooke 2010).
- 4. Theorising the quantified self at work CMS The continuing dominance of discourse has left CMS researchers subject to criticism that they have naively ignored materiality. Yet critics of CMS also understate the significance of subjectivities, recognisable through discourse and text. Dominant post-structuralist approaches’ dependence on discourse as means of analysis has left it subject to criticism that it naively ignored materiality and the relevance it has for co-constitution of the social. Critics of poststructuralism have also often understated the significance of subjectivity and subjectification (Foucault). Feminist new materialism, like agential realism, holds that ‘language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretive turn, the cultural turn… even materiality is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation’ (Barad, 2003: 801). The dominance of discourse and language and descriptions of social change that focus on culture is outdated. We need to look at nature, the corporeal, monist immanence rather than dualism (where mind dominates body, body only given animalistic ascriptions and mind, reason ) CR/LP Critical realists: Though committed to materiality, are not fully agnostic on the discursive and in 2012 article in Organisation Studies, Thompson and Harley draw from critical discourse analysis (Fairclough et al, 2011) and cultural political economy (Sum and Jessop, 2013) to advocate a place for the discussion fo the ‘role of discourse in organizational and system-level change… apply[ing] this framework to the supposed emergence of the knowledge- based economy (KBE) as a ‘hegemonic discourse’ (Thompson and Harley, 2012: 1365). Labour Process: Materialist--seeing WSTT from lens of labour process theory which is ontologically orthodox Marxist
- 5. ■ Thompson P and B Harley (2012) ‘Beneath the Radar? A critical realist analysis of ‘the knowledge economy’ and ‘shareholder value’ as competing discourses’, Organisation Studies 33(10): 1363 -- 1381. ■ Bates S R (2015) The Emergent Body, Critical Realism and the Corporeal in contemporary capitalist society. Global Society 29(1): 128 – 147. ■ Martin P (2015) Between sociology and the business school: Critical studies of work, employment and organisation in the UK. The Sociological Review 63: 162 - 180. ■ Morgeson F P, Humphrey S E (2006) ‘The Work Design Questionnaire (WDQ) Developing and Validating Comprehensive Measure for Assessing Job Design and the Nature of Work’ Journal of Applied Psychology 91(6): 1321 – 1339. ■ McKinlay A and Taylor P (2014) Foucault, Governmentality, and Organization: Inside the Factory of the Future, New York and London: Routledge ■ Fleming P (2014) Resisting Work: The Corporatising of Life and its Discontents. Philadelphia, PN: Temple University Press. ■ Edgar F, Geare A, Halhjem M, Reese K and Thorensen, C. (2015) ‘Well-being and performance: measurement issues for HRM research’, The International Journal of Human Resource Management 26(15): 1983 -- 1994. ■ Cohen J E (2012) Configuring the networked self: law, code, and the play of everyday practice (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press). ■ Barad K (2003) ‘Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (28): 801–31. ■ Cederstrom C and Spicer A (2015) The Wellness Syndrome. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity. ■ Orlikowski W J and Scott S V (2015) Exploring Material-Discursive Practices. Journal of Management Studies 52(5): 697 -- 705. ■ Brown A (2014) Critical realism in social research: approach with caution. Work Employment and Society 28(1): 112 – 123. ■ Fleetwood S (2014) Critical realism and systematic dialectics: a reply to Andrew Brown. Work Employment and Society 28(1): 124 – 138.
- 7. Quantified self at work BPAmerica ‘the program has improved morale, contributed to the corporate culture, improved the health of employees, and lowered insurance rates for both the company as well as individuals’ Sensory devices Movement, location, steps, voice quality, heartrate Discovering the autonomic self
- 8. 7-day weekend ■ LIVINGWELL ‘The state of Kentucky... operates a LivingWell wellness program used by more than 137,000 employees who agree to undergo a health assessment or biometric screening, with the data kept confidential with HumanaVitality, a third party. Participants in LivingWell earnVitality points, which can be redeemed for prizes such as movie tickets, digital cameras and hotel stays, with values of up to $300.’ http://www.computerworld.com/article/2937721/wearables/wearables- for-workplace-wellness-face-federal-scrutiny.html#tk.ctw-cio ■ IRON MOUNTAIN http://www.computerworld.com/article/2937333/wearables/wearables-and-company-wellness- programs-go-hand-in-hand.html ■ OUTSIDEVIEW http://theoutsideview.co.uk/ On this site you can find a video of the project this company did with employees, look for the video entitled FT Business:WearablesTechnology atWork: Will it Catch On? ■ BPAMERICA http://www.fastcompany.com/3036331/wearable-computing/what-industries-are-the-first-to-introduce- wearables-at-work ■ DELOITTEAND BPAMERICA http://www.humanyze.com/ Humanyze tracks movement and voice patterns across employees, BPAmerica noted that the prediector for productivity has to do with how much people speak, tone of voice, volume ■ (and many more)
- 11. Warehouse and factory work Arm-band replaces clipboard Body searches Work intensification, rationalisation
- 13. Survey N: 14 Sex: 7y, 7x Age:1y 21-25 2y 26-30 3x, 2y 36-40 2x 1y 41 – 45 1x 46 – 50 1y 1x 51 – 55 Smartphone use: 7x, 7y Android: 9, iPhone: 5 SN: 7x, 7y WSTT: 1y, 5x --Runkeeper: 2x, FitBit, 2x, 2y, Strava 2x Health: good 5x, 4y; fair 2x, 2y Rate productivity: good 7x, 5y fair 1y blank 1 Work most productively: office 3x, 4y; home 3x, 1y; road 1x Personal control/independence over work: strongly agree 6x, 4y; somewhat agree 1x, 2y
- 14. Consumers have lost all control over how personal information is collected and used by companies ■ Blank: 1 female Iy ■ Strongly agree: 5 males, 4 females Ix Ix Ix Ix Iy Iy Iy Ix Iy ■ Somewhat agree: 0 ■ Somewhat disagree: 2 females, 2 males Iy Ix Ix Iy ■ Strongly disagree: 0 Most businesses handle the personal information they collect about consumers in a proper and confidential way ■ Blank: 1 female Iy ■ Strongly agree: 1 female, 1 male Iy Ix ■ Somewhat agree: 1 female, 1 male Ix Iy ■ Somewhat disagree: 5 males, 4 females Ix Ix Ix Ix Iy Iy Iy Ix Iy ■ Strongly disagree: 0 Existing laws and organisational practices provide a reasonable level of protection for consumer privacy today ■ Blank: 1 female Iy ■ Strongly agree: 3 males Ix Ix Ix ■ Somewhat agree: 3 females Iy Iy Iy ■ Somewhat disagree: 3 females, 3 males Ix Ix Ix Iy Iy Iy ■ Strongly disagree: 1 male Ix
- 15. INTERVIEWS Metadata Phenomenon ■ When did you start using WSTT? [date] ■ Did you use any WSTT before the Quantified SelfWorkplace (QSW) experiment at Colliers? [binary:Y/N] [ifY: descriptive] ■ [IfY to 7]What kinds do you use? [descriptive] ■ What does it feel like to useWSTT? Causal Conditions ■ How did you find out about QSW? [choice: launch, word-of-mouth, e-mail, other] ■ What were your original thoughts about the project? [descriptive] ■ Was there a trigger that inspired you to get involved? [descriptive] ■ What does it mean for you to use these technologies? [descriptive] ■ What are your reasons for continuing to useWSTT? [choice: to feel in control, to become more productive or better at a task, to meet other people, other] ■ When do you mostly useWSTT? [weekday, time] ■ Why this time and why not at other times/contexts? [descriptive] ■ What goals did you set in usingWSTT? [descriptive]
- 16. Intervening Conditions ■ Have you ever experienced any difficulties in using WSTT? [binary: Y/N] ■ [If Y to 19] What were those difficulties? [descriptive] ■ Did you find that you stopped using WSTT at some point? [binary: Y/N] ■ [if Y to 20] Why did you stop? [descriptive] ■ [if Y to 20] For how long did you stop for? [numeric: number of days] Consequences ■ Do you feel that WSTT has helped you to meet your goals? [binary: Y/N] ■ [If Y to 23] Which goals, and to what extent? [descriptive] ■ [If N to 23] Why not? [descriptive] ■ Do you feel that using WSTT at work is helping you feel satisfied with your work? [binary: Y/N] ■ [If Y to 26] Why it helps you? [descriptive] ■ [If N to 26] Why it doesn’t help you? [descriptive] ■ Are there any changes to your feelings of autonomy? [binary: Y/N] ■ [If Y to 29] What changes? [descriptive] ■ Has the use of WSTT improved your sense of productivity? [binary: Y/N] ■ [if Y to 31] How it improved? [descriptive] ■ In what ways has the use of WSTT affected your motivation? [descriptive] ■ In what ways has the use of WSTT affected your mood or emotions? [descriptive] ■ In what ways has the use of WSTT affected your relationships (with other users or existing friends/non-users)? [descriptive] ■ In what ways has the use of WSTT affected your self-efficacy in relation to various tasks (e.g. if used for exercise, do you believe that you exercise better)? [descriptive]
- 17. Goals Growing awareness ;To stay healthy: Getting insight into my personal work-life balance; Getting insight in the Colliers drivers of wellbeing; Getting insight in the Colliers drivers of productivity;The right balance between productive and health;To improve my working and personal life and make it more effective; Create a balance between work and private Self-awareness 18 ‘I’m sure it makes you aware of things you do.’; ‘I see when I’m frustrated my heartbeat is higher.’; ‘You want to learn more about yourself.’ Critical or unsure 40 ’I don’t really see the purpose of it’; ‘Many of us are worried about privacy’; ‘I don’t find it really interesting to be honest’; ‘I don’t really see the purpose of it’ and ‘I am quite critical.’; ‘Why can’t we see our data?’ One respondent indicated that ‘a big question for me and for a few others as well, is uh, how reliable the FitBit is’.
- 18. Motivation: ‘It is a stimulation to make sure I make enough steps in a day.’; ‘It stimulates me to go exercise when I am tired after a long day at work.’; ‘It’s a trigger for me to wake up a little bit earlier and relax in the morning.’ Relationships: ‘Exchanging experiences make you aware about the way other work.And sometimes you can learn from each other’; ‘It helps in connecting’; ‘I’m noticing the last weeks that, uh, especially if we have appointments with our clients and two three of [company name], they see us wearing it and it’s always the subject (laughs) and it’s very nice.’ Behaviour change: ‘It is a stimulation to make sure I make enough steps in a day.’ ‘It stimulates me to go exercise when I am tired after a long day at work.’ ‘It’s a trigger for me to wake up a little bit earlier and relax in the morning.’ Self-awareness: ‘I’m sure it makes you aware of things you do.’ ‘I see when I’m frustrated my heartbeat is higher.’ ‘You want to learn more about yourself.’ 7 responses indicated that employees felt that relationships were changing as a result of the experiment, both with clients and other colleagues. For example, employees noticed that: ‘Exchanging experiences make you aware about the way other work. And sometimes you can learn from each other’
- 20. Until now and next steps ■ Encroachment, intimacy of monitoring and control at work ■ Paternalism? Accelerated performance management? ■ Technology in work design ■ Quantification does not reflect real life ■ Ostracized if opting-out ■ All of life, seven day weekend ■ Work-life integration/imbalance ■ Gamification, competitive behaviour ■ Displacement of accountability ■ Work intensification, rationalisation ■ Union responses ■ Legal issues: healthVs medical data, data protection, privacy ‘Computers don’t lie but liars can compute’
Editor's Notes
- Abstract: Contemporary workplace uses of self-tracking devices from warehouses to arthouses are subtly different from Taylorist monitoring methods in that the worker often holds knowledge accumulated, but in many cases she is not permitted to fully express nor use it. Whereas traditional Taylorism targets external performance within enclosed factories, QSW allows control of microsocial and inner processes in open-ended working environments. Drucker (1992) observed that ‘knowledge workers’’ work cannot, by definition, be measured by traditional Taylorist devices. The QSW is thus part of managerial efforts to control and extract value from creative as well as physical labour in more precise, quantified ways. WSTT may raise productivity and hopefully, workers’ wellbeing, but like Taylorism, it raises new demands on workers, potentially intensifies workloads, and leads to rationalization of staff, whilst displacing accountability. Bio: Trained as a social scientist Dr Moore is one of the sole scholars in the area of international political economy to write about the ever-changing worlds of work and labour and the impact of technology and changing regulation within the global neoliberal political economy. Phoebe is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Law and Politics at Middlesex Univeristy London and has published several pieces on corporeal capitalism and the quantified self; peer to peer production; labour struggle in East Asia; and global governance over ‘decent work’. She is the Primary Investigator for the British Academy/Leverhulme project entitled Agility, Work and the Quantified Self (2015 – 2017) and is writing her third monograph on the Quantified Self at Work (Routledge).
- Abstract: Contemporary workplace uses of self-tracking devices from warehouses to arthouses are subtly different from Taylorist monitoring methods in that the worker often holds knowledge accumulated, but in many cases she is not permitted to fully express nor use it. Whereas traditional Taylorism targets external performance within enclosed factories, QSW allows control of microsocial and inner processes in open-ended working environments. Drucker (1992) observed that ‘knowledge workers’’ work cannot, by definition, be measured by traditional Taylorist devices. The QSW is thus part of managerial efforts to control and extract value from creative as well as physical labour in more precise, quantified ways. WSTT may raise productivity and hopefully, workers’ wellbeing, but like Taylorism, it raises new demands on workers, potentially intensifies workloads, and leads to rationalization of staff, whilst displacing accountability. Bio: Trained as a social scientist Dr Moore is one of the sole scholars in the area of international political economy to write about the ever-changing worlds of work and labour and the impact of technology and changing regulation within the global neoliberal political economy. Phoebe is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Law and Politics at Middlesex Univeristy London and has published several pieces on corporeal capitalism and the quantified self; peer to peer production; labour struggle in East Asia; and global governance over ‘decent work’. She is the Primary Investigator for the British Academy/Leverhulme project entitled Agility, Work and the Quantified Self (2015 – 2017) and is writing her third monograph on the Quantified Self at Work (Routledge).
- Corporate interests in providing initiatives to help employees become/stay well, as well as gathering information about employees’ well-being as well as in are on the rise. Why? diminishing of traditional workplaces where management could once physically see and speak to employees, a phenomenon evident in most industries, so data accumulation could be a substitute for this lack of face to face contact. awareness of sedentarism in workplaces which themselves began to occupy temporal and spatial dimensions as people began to use computers and other machines more frequently for work, perhaps impacting people’s physical health and lowering productivity lowering productivity: in February 2015 the Office for National Statistics announced that output per hour in the UK was 17 percentage points below the average for the rest of the major G7 advanced economies in 2013 which is the widest productivity gap since 1992. The Netherlands has also experienced a slowing in productivity growth (OECD 2013). Days taken off work resulting from depression and anxiety. --The Labour Force Survey in 2008/9 reported that 415,000 individuals in the UK were suffering from stress, anxiety or depression that people believed had been caused and worsened by current or previous work, second only in prevalence to musculoskeletal disorders (HSE 2009, cited in Donaldson-Feilder and Podro, 2012: 6). --The number of days lost due to stress, depression and anxiety, and headaches and migraines rose 2012-2013, whilst all other reasons including heart and gastrointestinal problems dropped (ONS, 2014). So as part of an emerging ‘wellness syndrome’ (Cederstrom and Spicer, 2015), wellness is finally being seen in the public eye as not automatically unrelated to work or something that companies do not recognise as vital for the health of an organisation.
- Whatever the reasons for the rise in interest in wellness at work and ways to measure data about it, in principle, health and wellbeing initiatives sound wonderful, inarguably positive and an initiative for the greater good. The focus for this paper, specifically, is to look at the use of sensory technological devices in wellness initiatives specifically in workplaces to identify the ambivalence that emerges as we begin to look more closely at the possibilities that may follow in data driven management techniques that use sensory devices allowing for increasingly intimate information about workers’ activities. FitBit, Strava, Garmin and Jawbone have become very popular devices in the fitness and training world, used to record heart rates and steps taken. Now, workplace wearable self-tracking technological devices in wellness initiatives (abbreviated in this paper to WSTT) are seen as a cutting edge method to improve employees' health and happiness (Wilson, 2013b; Nield, 2014), ….and according to ABI Research, more than 13 million self-tracking devices will be incorporated into employee wellness programs 2014-19 (Nield, 2014). BP America was an early adopter in 2013 and offered step-tracking armbands as part of a voluntary company-wide initiative in health and well-being. BP’s health and welfare benefits consultant Chris Phalen indicated that more than 90 per cent of employees participated in the initiative and noted that ‘the program has improved morale, contributed to the corporate culture, improved the health of employees, and lowered insurance rates for both the company as well as individuals’ (Lindzon, 2014). The technologies used in workplaces measure and track arousal and performance both mental and physical via accelerometers, Bluetooth, triangulation algorithms and infrared sensors, allowing self-monitoring beyond the enclosure of a specific workplace and beyond traditional hours logged. WSTT allow management to investigating aspects of workers’ bodies. Because what may be classified as medical data is gathered, productivity is increasingly linked to physical health. Research in the health sector has shown that self-monitoring solutions can facilitate positive behaviour change such as weight loss (Womble et al., 2004); and management of chronic illnesses such as diabetes (Williams et al 1998), asthma (Shegog et al., 2001) or depression (Christensen et al., 2004). However, it is important to stress that there is currently no evidence in the scientific literature on the impact of WSTT use on employees in workplaces. There is a strong optimism, if not to say ‘hype’, around the QS movement, but it is limited by the subjective nature of self-reports gathered by QS enthusiasts using such solutions, and methodologically limited white-papers produced by commercial companies on this topic. The move toward WSTT demonstrates that we are moving toward a phase of corporeal capitalism (Moore, 2015; Smith and Lee, 2015), beyond the ‘knowledge economy’ where ideas became incredibly valuable commodities to be exchanged and where work could not, definitively, be measured by traditional Taylorist devices (Drucker, 1992). Whether this is an all encompassing shift to corporeality is something to be debated and in this article we look first at the issues arising and then at how previous social science and management debates are likely to respond to the new methods and techniques of analysis in workplaces.
- In the neoliberal workplace, we experience intensified precarity, austerity, intense competition for jobs, and anxieties about the replacement of labour-power with robots and other machines as well as, ourselves replaceable, other humans. Precarity is associated with reduced welfare and informal, flexible contracts (Berlant, 2011: 192), enabled by lean, just-in-time production, telepresence and outsourcing (Berardi, 2009: 75-7; Virno, 2004: 56-9; Negri, 1998: 210-11). It can be defined as a work regime of ‘non-self-determined insecurity’ (Raunig, 2004), which leads to dependence on capital for survival (Mitropoulos, 2005), disposability (Lorey, 2010), and a ‘hell of the absence of guarantees’ (Guattari and Negri, 1990: 76). It is an ‘epochal recomposition of capital and labor' (Brophy and de Peuter, 2007: 177; c.f. Van Veen, 2010) which uses disposability to re-subordinate workers (Bourdieu, 1998: 85; Lorey, 2010), and it is often contrasted in the literature with Fordism. The connection to quantification is that precarity generalizes affects of insecurity that increase the drive to regulate and predict both by workers and employers. It manifests psychologically as generalized hopelessness (Berardi, 2009: 30), a ‘chronic state of near collapse’ (Invisible Committee, 2009: 31), overstimulation and ‘attentive stress’ (Berardi, 2009: 42), ‘present shock’ and time-space collapse (Foti, cited Neilson and Rossiter, n.d.) ….all of which push workers towards adopting quantification and wearables as means to control the uncontrollable. The situation of the precarious worker is one whereby qualified, expressive, creative work is subsumed, where areas of activity formerly considered non-productive are increasingly incorporated in market economies, under the remit of the ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Boutang, 2011). With the elevation of workers across industries to ‘entrepreneurs’ this discourse arguably recognizes only one class: the managerial, entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. From an autonomist viewpoint, precarity is seen as a systemic capture of the hopeful movements of exodus of the 1960s/70s, when resistance often took the form of ‘refusal of work’, by the ‘slacker’ or ‘dropout’ (Shukaitis, 2006), with refusal to submit to Fordist work routines (Brophy and de Peuter, 2007: 180-1). Capitalism is said to have pursued this exodus into the field of life beyond work, and captured escaping flows by expanding labour into these spaces (Mitropoulos, 2005; Neilson and Rossiter, 2005); Federici, 2008; Frassanito Network, 2005), and appropriating radical ideas, introducing a wave of flexibilisation and selling it as liberation (Berardi, 2009) and blurring work-life boundaries in the process. In effect, capitalism followed the fleeing workers into the autonomous spaces of the qualitative, and restructured these spaces along quantitative lines, so as to bring the workers back into capitalism. Continuous appropriation manifests capitalism’s continued capability to re-invent itself when faced with resistance (Berardi, 2009: 77).
- Sensory tracking is happening in both knowledge and body work in the global north and south Warehouse work in the global north Amazon and Tesco warehouses monitor every minute zero-hour contracted workers spend on the performance console using arm-mounted terminals. The ‘wearable terminal’ is in effect a streamlined replacement for the clipboard, allowing workers to scan barcodes on packages from a small scanner worn on the finger. Information from barcodes, or location information is listed on the upper section of the terminal which is strapped to the forearm. Devices operates on a local WiFi network and can further adopt Bluetooth for synching with other devices. Adam Littler, undercover reporter, took a position through an employment agency as a ‘picker’ in the Amazon warehouse in Swansea. The wearable device he was given told him what to collect and gave him requisite number of seconds within which to find the product, tracking his picker rate with a warning that he could be disciplined and beeping if mistakes were made. For 11 hour shifts workers ‘are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we’re holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves… literally work to the bone and there doesn’t seem to be any reward or any let-up… the pressure’s unbelievable’ (Bennett, 2013). Another employee stated that the conditions were like a ‘slave camp’ (2013). Working conditions have become so intolerable that Amazon is offering unhappy employees up to 5,000 USD to leave jobs (Cockburn, 2014). In a similar experiment, Tesco tracked productivity as part of a 9 million dollar investment into similar wearables adopted in 300 locations across the UK. A 2.8-inch display gives analytical feedback, verifying the order or otherwise ‘nudging a worker whose order is short’ (2013). If workers meet targets, they are awarded a 100 per cent score, rising to 200 per cent if they work twice as fast. A worker reported ‘the guys who made the scores were sweating buckets and throwing stuff all over the place’ (Rawlinson, 2013). Warehouse workers are at risk of being penalized if they do not record toilet breaks on devices (2013). The investment was specifically oriented around efficiency and lean production, and led to reducing the need for full time employees by 18 per cent (Wilson, 2013). CW initiatives are now offered to employees in 79% companies in the USA and 46% in Europe. Initiatives take the form of such offerings as yoga classes provided at a discount rate, group cycling and walking challenges, beanbag and smoothie areas in quirky workplaces. 62% of all CW programmes have been implemented since 2009 (Buck, 2014) so the interest in the health of employees as we work is a relatively new phenomenon. Global South Taiwanese outsourcing firm Foxconn’s almost million-strong workforce, most of them employed under precarious conditions, produce many of today’s technological gadgets in a production regime which ‘sacrifices dignity for economic growth’ (Chan and Pun, 2010: 3). Stress and psychological breakdowns, as well as physical health problems, are routine effects of such production conditions (Chan and Pun, 2010; Chan et al., 2013). Workers report feeling that they are ‘losing their futures’ (2010: 4), and effects have included a well-documented wave of suicides which labour scholars categorise as a form of resistance. Among the characteristics of Foxconn’s regime are rigid internal surveillance systems such as ID checkpoints, frequent full body searches and the use of extreme forms of quality control (Chan et al., 2013: 109). WSTT: ranging from low-tech colour-coding of uniforms to the use of fingerprint scanners, electronic smart cards and alerting devices – are central to this regime (Chan and Pun, 2010: 10-11).
- WSTT place responsibility into the hands of productive bodies, simultaneously potentially removing autonomy through the generation of extensive, intimate data which is used in ways that users may not feel they have consented, already very much relevant in the case of for example FitBit wristbands and the Strava project. The use of the ‘big data’ now being generated by WSTT indicates a significant shift from deductive scientific logics to a raw, inductive experimentation ethos. One employee can create more than 30GB of data per-week based on three wearable devices, which is ……‘clearly a huge amount of information that needs to be captured, stored and analysed’ in order to ‘learn how human behaviours impact productivity, performance, well-being, and job satisfaction’ (Goldsmiths, 2014). With the range of technologies available including Fitbits, Sociometric badges, Motorola armbands and finger scanners, companies are experimenting with a nascent ‘agile’ work design model that involves sensory technology and accumulation of information about users’ habits.
- There were several responses indicating that some employees had negative reactions in the initial stages, or felt that the technology had not met their expectations (at all/yet). We coded 40 critical or unsure responses in all. Overtly negative responses include: ’I don’t really see the purpose of it’; ‘I don’t find it really interesting to be honest’; and ‘I don’t really see the purpose of it’ and ‘I am quite critical.’ One respondent indicated that ‘a big question for me and for a few others as well, is uh, how reliable the FitBit is’. One comment indicated that an employee originally thought that more participants were going to ‘complain about privacy’ and someone indicated that they were ‘afraid that some kind of competition will start’. Whereas other responses show that employees are simply interested in seeing something different from the project such as ‘this thing [FitBit] might be more intelligent than just recording my data’ or one employee who indicated that they ‘think the only interesting thing is that you can maybe you can set up goals for the group, like climb the mountain’. It was felt that the reason group goals had not happened is that ‘the internal communication of [company name] is not, uh, um, 100 per cent. So as long as that is not 100 per cent, it is quite difficult to uh… to set up something like this. So I think you need someone who is dedicated, responsible for that and who keeps the… everyone motivated.’ One employee stated that: ‘if more guidelines were given’ then it would be more straightforward ‘to manage your own work and be more productive’. Another comment shows that an employee thinks that ‘I think you need to wear it for a longer time to find out if the information is interesting’. There was a lot of interest in finding out more from the devices than employees feel they were able to depict in the intiiatl stages, and one employee stated that ‘there is a long way to go before we can use it to measure stress’.