Datarepresentaatiot ja työpaikan valvonnan ja seurannan uusi aalto (DATADOUBLES)
Päärahoittaja
Rahoittajan antama koodi/diaarinumero: 356143
Päärahoittajan myöntämä tuki (€)
- 626 240,00
Rahoitusohjelma
Hankkeen aikataulu
Hankkeen aloituspäivämäärä: 01.09.2023
Hankkeen päättymispäivämäärä: 31.08.2027
Tiivistelmä
Organizations have more access to data about their employees than ever before, and this data is increasingly used to make predictions about employees’ motivations and behaviors. Flyverbom (2022) states that our lives are increasingly ‘overlit’ describing how available data and digital technologies make exposure of social life more invasive and generate new ways of seeing, knowing, and governing organizational affairs. The availability of data, technological advancements, and the recent exodus from corporate spaces due to the pandemic have both increased the opportunity and necessity for employee surveillance and monitoring. In contrast to ‘traditional’ forms of employee monitoring that rely more heavily on direct observations of employees, employee surveillance and monitoring increasingly rely on monitoring, storing, and analyzing digital trace data employees leave behind as by-products of their work (Ball, 2021; Leonardi and Treem, 2020; Treem et al., 2020). As employees work with digital technologies, they leave traces of data behind, and employers use these ‘data representations’ to evaluate and make predictions about employees' motivations and behaviors (Leonardi & Treem, 2020; Leonardi, 2020). Such data may include logs of phone or video calls, email actitivity, website visits, reports of keystrokes; screen recordings, video surveillance, logins that document work hours, or even biometric data collected through wearable devices (Ball, 2021). The problem that arises is this: Data doubles are crude proxies that may misrepresent workers and their actual work practices, leading to them being unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged by the use of such data for (behavioral) predictions (Leonardi, 2020; Shafheitle et al., 2021). This project will study surveillance and counter-surveillance practices, shed light on the actual production of digital doubles, and investigate the ramifications of these workplace practices for both individuals and organizations. Hence, at the heart of the proposed research lies the question of how data representations take shape in organizations through a process of surveillance and counter-surveillance tactics.
