Workplace Surveillance, Security, and Labour Control In the Digital Age

The contemporary workplace has become an increasingly important site of surveillance, data extraction, security governance, and behavioural control. Across sectors, employers now deploy a growing array of technologies—including algorithmic management systems, productivity monitoring software, biometric identification, geolocation tracking, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics—to regulate work processes and shape employee conduct. These developments raise important questions about privacy, autonomy, creativity, resistance, and the changing nature of managerial authority.

This panel invites contributions that critically examine the relationship between workplace surveillance, labour discipline, security practices, and systems of control. Particular attention will be paid to how contemporary forms of monitoring and data collection reorganize power relations within workplaces, redefine the boundaries between work and personal life, and transform workers into measurable and governable subjects. The panel also welcomes theoretical interventions that explore these developments through perspectives such as labour process theory, surveillance studies, critical security studies, governmentality, political economy, and pacification theory.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

Algorithmic management and platform labour

Employee monitoring and productivity measurement

AI, automation, and workplace governance

Biometrics, wearables, and bodily surveillance

Datafication and behavioural prediction in employment

Workplace security and risk management

Remote work and digital supervision

Creativity, autonomy, and resistance under surveillance

The policing of workplace conduct and organizational culture

Labour discipline, pacification, and capitalist social order

Privacy, rights, and regulatory responses to workplace monitoring