Working under intensive surveillance: When does ‘measuring everything that moves’ become intolerable?
研究呼叫中心员工如何利用对立话语理解绩效测量作为工作监控的目的与后果，并发展出灵活的意义建构策略来应对矛盾。
We examine how call-center employees draw on opposed discourses to understand the purpose and consequences of performance measurement as workplace surveillance. Sometimes the workers saw performance measurement as a legitimate and impartial managerial tool serving the interests of everyone in the organization (e.g. by exposing free-riding, etc.). Other times, they saw performance measurement as intrusive and oppressive; imposed on them by managers who, as agents of employers, used it to serve a narrow set of interests (e.g. by intensifying work, etc.). Our analysis depicts how employees used an ironical process of predicate logic to develop flexible meaning-making strategies to cope with the apparent conflicts in meaning that arose from the two opposed discourses. We conclude by developing a three step method for the practical analysis of such ironical situations of competing discourses that facilitates our ability to reconsider and reconfigure meaning in more useful ways.