The Future of Organizational Surveillance and the Very Future of Organizations

Abstract

Combining surveillance theory and social geography, we adopt a longue durée approach to re-examine organizational surveillance. Drawing on the work of Jacques-Alain Miller, we identify two forms of the generalized surveillant gaze–Subjective and Objective. We then combine these with the insights provided by Henri Lefebvre to identify four states of organizational surveillance–Police, Panoptic, Distributed, and Market–where these two forms of the gaze interact in distinct ways to create characteristic Surveillant Spaces of organization that are experienced by employees in different ways. Whilst police and panoptic surveillance are well understood through Michel Foucault’s influential work, we..