A Unified Panopticon: Insights from a Study on Workplace Surveillance at Amazon and Uber

Abstract

This paper offers a proposal for a thesis examining the relationship between organizational structure and workplace surveillance. Primarily, surveillance practices falling under a top-down control category will be considered. To draw conclusions about the relationship, an explicit case study will be conducted to comparatively analyze workplace surveillance practices at Amazon and Uber. The goal is to evaluate whether the surveillance practices deployed by these companies are mostly similar, implying the underlying organizational structure is agnostic of surveillance and a deeper overlap is the root, or mostly different, implying the underlying organizational structure could be important for crafting approaches to resisting surveillance and overcoming negative conditions.