On the poverty of a priorism: technology, surveillance in the workplace and employee responses

Many debates about surveillance at work are framed by a set of a priori assumptions about the nature of the employment relationship that inhibits efforts to understand the complexity of employee responses to the spread of new technology at work. In particular, the debate about the prevalence of resistance is hamstrung from the outset by the assumption that all apparently non-compliant acts, whether intentional or not, are to be counted as acts of resistance. Against this background this paper seeks to redress the balance by reviewing results from an ethnographic study of surveillance-capable technologies in a number of British workplaces. It argues for greater attention to be paid to the empirical character of the social relations at work in and through which technologies are deployed and in the context of which employee responses are played out

Drivers and outcomes of work alienation: reviving a concept

This article sheds new light on an understudied construct in mainstream management theory, namely, work alienation. This is an important area of study because previous research indicates that work alienation is associated with important individual and organizational outcomes. We tested four antecedents of work alienation: decision-making autonomy, task variety, task identity, and social support. Moreover, we examined two outcomes of alienation: deviance and performance, the former measured 1 year after the independent variables were measured, and the latter as rated by supervisors. We present evidence from a sample of 283 employees employed at a construction and consultancy organization in the United Kingdom. The results supported the majority of our hypotheses, indicating that alienation is a worthy concept of exploration in the management sciences

Knowledge-sharing, control, compliance and symbolic violence

Recent developments in control hold that professionals are best managed through normative and concertive as opposed to bureaucratic and coercive mechanisms. This post-structuralist approach appeals to the notion of congruent values and norms and acknowledges the role of ind ividuals' subjectivity in sustaining professional autonomy. Yet, there remains a risk of over-simplifying the manifestations of such control initiatives. By means of an in-depth case study, this article considers the challenge of implementing a knowledge-sharing portal for a community of R&D scientists through management control initiatives that relied on the rhetoric of a blend of 'facilitation' and presumed 'peer pressure'. Arguing that traditional approaches such as normative/concertive control and soft bureaucracy only partially explain this phenomenon, we draw from Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of 'symbolic violence' to interpret a managerial initiative to appropriate knowledge and affirm the structure of social relations through the complicity of R&D scientists . We also examine how the scientists channelled resistance by reconstituting compliance in line with their sense of identity as creators of knowledge

Complexity Theory and Al-Qaeda: Examining Complex Leadership

Recent events in the world are forcing us to restructure our understanding of leadership and organization. The al- Qaeda organization and its pervasive presence in the world demonstrated first-hand the power of a flexible, moderately coupled network of individuals brought together by a common need and aligned behind an informal and emergent leader. Its structure, which resulted from bottom-up coordination of individuals who voluntarily came together based on common need rather than from top-down hierarchical control, clearly demonstrates the power of a networked system based on relationships and shared vision and mission. To understand this and other types of network organizations, traditional models of leadership and organizational theory may no longer be sufficient, and may perhaps even limit our ability to realize the capabilities and resilience of such organizational forms. To address such limitations, leadership theorists are exhibiting interest in new perspectives on organizing such as complexity theory (Boal et al., in press; Hunt & Ropo, in press; Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001; McKelvey, in press; Streatfield, 2001). Complexity theory proposes that organizations are complex systems composed of a diversity of agents who interact with and mutually affect one another, leading to spontaneous “bottom-up” emergence of novel behavior (Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001; Regine & Lewin, 2000). Because of this, leadership in complex systems requires a shift in thinking from traditional “command-and-control” models that focus on control and stifle emergence (McKelvey, in press) to “complex leadership” models (Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001) that enable interconnectivity and foster dynamic systems behavior and innovation. In this way, complexity theory helps explain organizational behavior relative to the “dynamic swirl” of social and organizational events that influence complex systems and their agents. The purpose of this article is to derive propositions regarding complexity and complex leadership (Marion & Uhl-Bien, 2001) and to illustrate them using the case of al-Qaeda. We will argue that the conditions that led to the emergence of al-Qaeda were conducive to complex leadership, and that complex leadership helps explain the success of this terrorist movement. Although detailed data of the sort needed for rigorous qualitative analysis are obviously unavailable, we believe that the al- Qaeda example is such a powerful illustration of complexity concepts that it merits a nontraditional format for presentation

Enhancing Perceived Safety in Human–Robot Collaborative Construction Using Immersive Virtual Environments

Advances in robotics now permit humans to work collaboratively with robots. However, humans often feel unsafe working alongside robots. Our knowledge of how to help humans overcome this issue is limited by two challenges. One, it is difficult, expensive and time-consuming to prototype robots and set up various work situations needed to conduct studies in this area. Two, we lack strong theoretical models to predict and explain perceived safety and its influence on human–robot work collaboration (HRWC). To address these issues, we introduce the Robot Acceptance Safety Model (RASM) and employ immersive virtual environments (IVEs) to examine perceived safety of working on tasks alongside a robot. Results from a between-subjects experiment done in an IVE show that separation of work areas between robots and humans increases perceived safety by promoting team identification and trust in the robot. In addition, the more participants felt it was safe to work with the robot, the more willing they were to work alongside the robot in the future.University of Michigan Mcubed Grant: Virtual Prototyping of Human-Robot Collaboration in Unstructured Construction EnvironmentsPeer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145620/1/You et al. forthcoming in AutCon.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145620/4/You et al. 2018.pdfDescription of You et al. 2018.pdf : Published Versio