Parenti, Christian, "Big Brother's Corporate Cousin"

Parenti, Christian. "Big Brother's Corporate Cousin." The Nation 273.5 (6/13 Aug. 2001): 26-30.

An overview of "life on the new shop floor," and beyond, "where surveillance and constant psychological pressure to work harder are increasingly common." Shows how American workplaces are "becoming ever more transparent to employers" via high-tech "and oppressive for employees" given the way advanced technology is used. Real-world examples as of 2001 include "Customer Relationship Management" which monitoring down to keystrokes, listening in on calls, archiving and searching e-mail and voice-mail. Such power allows managers "to create an intricate and invasive corporate culture based on measuring, ranking[,] and intimidating line staff" (26), resulting in "the office as Panopticon" (27)—see in this Category M. Foucault's Discipline and Punish. For a major example, companies are combating personal Internet use (for gambling, pornography, etc.) and more serious computer-aided offenses (industrial espionage, fraud, insider trading) with software packages developed for the military. Low-tech jobs such as restaurant server are "Taylorized" (see this Category, F. W. Taylor) through replacing order pads with handheld computers that radio back orders, cutting down on wasted motion by the servers—and severely cutting down on socializing (28). For a variation on the collars worn by "Risks" in F. Pohl and J. Williamson's Reefs of Space (listed under Fiction), hospital workers wear transponder badges giving their locations, and trucks and drivers can be tracked anywhere, the drivers through their "Delivery Information Acquisition Devices": computerized clipboards (30).