Embedded Digital Tools, Controls and Privacy at Work

Within companies, the safety of facilities and people often results from a search for transparency of activities to reduce uncertainties and errors. In this perspective, digital tools (portable terminals, smartphones with dedicated applications) embedded in workers capture data on real activities to optimize their programming, times and traffic routes. Inscribed on the body, equipped with sensors or geolocation devices, these tools also enter into the private life and intimacy of workers and raise the question of whether they can protect themselves from them. To answer this, communication will clarify the notions of intimacy and private life at work. They involve workers arranging collective symbolic spaces to deploy socialization rituals, "interstitial" spaces (Fustier, 2012) to exchange professional knowledge and intimate spaces to reflect on the evolution of their activities thanks to local and informational confidentiality (Palm, 2009 a, b). But spatial reforms through shared and open offices and embedded digital tools offer managers the possibility of accessing areas from which they were excluded. Workers then develop resistance and negotiation skills to thwart certain technologies and impose limits on managers.

Two empirical industrial cases will show that private life at work is composed of rituals, “behind the scenes” activities (Goffman, 1973) and exchanges in organizational interstices to circulate expert knowledge and consolidate mutual assistance necessary for professional efficiency.

Open workspaces and embedded technologies lead workers to take refuge in more remote “interstitial and intimate spaces” or to negotiate the use of digital technologies. They favor those that amplify dialogue between colleagues on the site to the detriment of external experts and thwart those that would track their movements. They also require managers, dependent on the contributions of their subordinates, to limit the calculations of times and movements.