Working in the Age of Ubiquitous Scrutiny: How External Monitoring Legitimates Organizational Monitoring

Extant research finds that workers often develop negative or ambivalent perceptions of organizational monitoring and thus engage in acts of resistance. However, this work largely assumes that organizational monitoring occurs in isolation, overlooking how the growing presence of external monitoring may fundamentally alter how workers experience organizational monitoring. To investigate this dynamic, we conducted a qualitative study of a U.S. police department where officers faced both organizational monitoring via body cameras and external monitoring via citizens’ cell phones. In the context of external monitoring, we find that officers experienced organizational monitoring as both unreasonable scrutiny and insulating protection that buffered against external scrutiny. To manage their resulting ambivalence toward organizational monitoring, officers disassociated their perceptions of the monitoring technology from policies, which enabled them to repurpose the technology. Officers’ uses of the monitoring technology triggered them to reevaluate the organizational monitoring system as legitimate within the context of external scrutiny. Based on our findings, we develop theory of how control is relationally constituted and legitimated, showing how control mechanisms such as organizational monitoring may shift from coercive to enabling in the context of ubiquitous external scrutiny. We also contribute to extant literature by identifying how workers may manage ambivalence toward organizational monitoring through functional disassociation, separating their perceptions of monitoring policies and technology. Further, we extend existing theory by unpacking how workers’ use of the monitoring technology, combined with external scrutiny as a comparative frame, may facilitate workers to reevaluate the organizational monitoring system as a legitimate source of oversight.