Use of technology to increase social control

William Czander

wczander@aol.com or
wczander@manhattan.edu

Abstract

While organizations maintain that the creation of a decentralized, team oriented, empowered culture is preferable they have increasingly utilized technology increase social control. While on the surface employees employee responses from a Gouldnerian perspective appear to be predictable, psychodynamically they create a symbolic duality. Technology is viewed by employees unconsciously as both a symbolic extension of management and a symbolic freedom from management constraints. Closeness of supervision/control is not face to face, it is distant, this provides a sense of freedom. However, technological supervision/control is never too distant. It is distant enough, therefore providing a sense of security and comfort. This paper explores the psychodynamics of increased security and the impact it has on employees and the field of psychoanalytically oriented organizational psychology.

The Pervasiveness of Control

In Manhattan, a block to block survey found 2,380 surveillance cameras trained on public spaces (Lambert, 1998). While some see the unfettered spread of surveillance as a threat to private freedom, others see it as a source of comfort, or psychodynamically as within the holding arms of mother. In the psychological sense, electronic surveillance and the constant attachment to electronic medium serves to protect. Living in the electronic community has all but destroyed deGrazia’s (1962) concept of the pursuit of leisure. Members of this community may complain about being seduced, cajoled and bludgeoned into a state of over commitment in cyberspace, and of being overwhelmed with its demands, but one is drawn to it, and one increases his/her involvement because of what it symbolically represents, the ideal container. An ideal container, where one can be unconditionally gratified and at the same time be in control.

The Comfort of Electronic Control

Jane wakes up in her suburban apartment on a Monday morning at 6:30 AM. As she turns on her coffee maker and prepares for a shower she switches on her computer, presses a few digits and receives a printout. The printout gives Jane her daily schedule. Today she has to visit nine Physician offices. She receives a printout informing her of the appointment times, travel directions, and the purchases each physician has made over the past two years, and what pharmaceuticals she is to push. At 8:30 AM she is dressed, and with coffee, bun and laptop in hand she hurries to her company car. The company car allows her to plug in her laptop during her drive, and she is connected via satellite to the main company computer, she has a cellular phone to use, she can confirm her appointments as she speeds on the thruway to her first destination. She worries little about getting lost, the company car is connected with a lojack device that is beamed up to a satellite. Typing a code into her laptop will immediately give her a visual of where she is, and the best route to take to her next appointment. The device also lets the company know her whereabouts throughout the day.

She arrives at her appointment at 10:00 AM, after a few minutes of pleasantries, she gets down to business and discusses her products, she gives the physician some research literature, and immediately types the orders into her laptop. After a half hour visit she quickly leaves, dropping off several samples, and some discount tickets to some local shows. While she drives to her next destination she plugs her laptop into the satellite via cell phone and the company immediately begins to process her orders. At 6 PM she completes her route and begins the long journey home. Arriving home at 7:30 PM she eats alone, while answering company correspondence. At 9 PM she sits comfortably in front of her computer and begins to surf the net, chatting with friends and making new ones.

Jane has been with X Pharmaceuticals for almost three years. She has been to the home office twice, once after a 3 month training period, traveling with the man she eventually was to replace, and then, a second time, she returned to the home office for a meeting, she remembers nothing about this meeting. She has not spoken to her immediate supervisor face-to-face, or on the telephone for 6 months. She knows she works with other salespeople who travel in different regions, but she has never met any of them, she has a listing of their names and E-mails, but she has never felt the need to correspond. Her pay, with commissions, is calculated every Friday. She receives a weekly printout of her visits, sales, miles traveled on her company car, time on and who she called on her cell phone, and a detailed accounting of her commissions. She is also informed where she stands in the company sales award contest and is reminded of the lucrative prizes. Her pay is calculated, and a check is sent to her banking account. Her vacation is planned for her 6 months in advance, she is given one week free at the companies’ seaside condominium. She is told via printout, when to bring her auto in for servicing, and where to bring it. When she is out of work, be it illness or vacation, all it means is that her sales visits are not completed, and she has fallen behind. When she returns she must catch up, or her sales will fall and commissions reduced.

A clinical analysis of Jane would focus on her motivations for occupational choice or the characteristics of the role she has chosen to occupy, as well as her propensity to work in isolation, and the conscious and unconscious gratification she obtains. Such an analysis may draw upon work that explored the psychopathology of the psychically empty salesman, the Willie Lomans’ of the world. This type of an analysis would contain a psychoanalysis of alienation, loneliness, the empty self and the relationship of these characteristics to the job, and how early relationships contribute to occupations choice, and gratification on the job. However, this type of analysis would bear little fruit in explaining the nature of this phenomenon and why employees like Jane gravitate towards this type of job. This type of clinical analysis would tend to apply an ahistorical view of the post-World War 11 conception of self as "empty." An empty self that needs to be placated and made cohesive by being filled-up, with food, relationships, and consumptive goods.

The literature on the post-World War 11 self in the United States, assumes a configuration of the self that while bounded and masterful, it remains empty. If we believe that the self system is defined, interpreted, and shaped by the terrain it occupies, then the post World War 11 self is shaped by experiences that include a significant absence of community, tradition, and shared meaning. This self experiences an array of social absences and their consequences "interiorly" as a lack of personal conviction and worth, and it embodies these social absences as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger (Cushman, 1990). Other theorists, like Reisman, Glazer & Denny (1950), and Fromm (1955), would likely see Jane as the prototypical "other-directed" personality, the person who needs others to direct them, the malleable self, a self that utilizes her fined tune social-sale personality to seek brief superficial relationships with predictable outcomes.

. These culturally bounded explanations that focus on the alienated employee, or even the "organizational man" do not apply to Jane.They are based on the Taylorist views founded in the industrial revolution that demanded that people gather to work under one roof, and work in authority based hierarchical systems that demand obedience and conformity.

Jane is not anymore "other-directed" than she is "inner-directed." She is at home with her electronic appendage, the computer, she knows its utility and exploits its usefulness. There is a spirit in Jane’s approach towards her work. Her relative isolation is not defective. She has learned not to be threatened by loneliness, she does not see herself as being controlled or without human contact. As a matter of fact she sees herself as having a flourishing social life, filled with constant activity. She has embraced what she sees as the positive values of her membership in the electronic community. She lingers in the habitat of this community, establishes relationships, has chance meetings, contacts old friends, has a wide variety of encounters. She has found ways to compensate from the absence of physical space, or face-to-face interaction, and the routine of going from home to work. She has established a new rhythm for her days living and working in the electronic community.

Why is a woman chosen to be the focus rather than a man? It is evident that the electronic community has different implications for women than men. For example, consider that the role of women has been defined in the past 200 years to be to model of virtue in need of protection. Over time protection of woman has taken the form of enforcing constraints and by having male figures defined their roles as their protectors. In the electronic community their is no need for the male protector. The woman is liberated. She is liberated from the oppressive nature of the male protector. The electronic protector does a better, and perhaps a more non-intrusive job. The electronic protector is an equitable protector and does not decide who needs more or less protection. She has at her disposal electronic devices capable of combating any threat. This electronic protector will even open the doors for her, as well as men.

Is Jane unique? She is not, this type of employment is not unique, it is quite common and the hordes of young employees who flock to these jobs find them exceedingly gratifying. In addition, there is an avalanche of evidence supporting the virtues of telecommunication-based collaborative work environments (http://www.ccgatech.edu/~quiang.a.zha/cscw98/tsldoo5.htm). Corporations at an increased rate are using technology to structure all types of jobs in the manner similar to Jane’s employment. In the last 10 years corporate American, along with downsizing, corporations have drastically reduced the size of their headquarters. The office, both front and back, is described by futurists as rapidly approaching obsolescence. In Westchester County, an affluent suburb of New York City, 75% of corporate headquarters have significantly reduce the size of their back offices, and 50% have moved heir front offices into smaller, more electronically efficient buildings. In New York State every college and university either has some type of virtual university, or a planning committee exploring the possibility. We are witnessing a proliferation of office-less jobs, and employees are spending more time working at home, on the road, or at temporary desks, referred to as "hoteling" where employees rent or arraign for a temporary desk. This trend will increase as more and more of the employed population will find themselves attached to some amorphous corporation minus the amenities that have traditionally been associated with "being at work."

As a result of the extraordinary changes occurring in the corporate world, the troubled field of organizational psychology that has spent fifty years trying to break away from its lingering homage to Taylor and scientific management, may find itself at sea with no mooring. Those who would study the organization or the office as a static entity containing a range of psychodynamics forming a culture, will quickly discover that continuous change, temporariness, and the virtual office requires perhaps a new way of thinking. The psychoanalyst can no longer observe or analyze the organization as a community of people, with a culture containing politics, biases and prejudices, where people become involved with others in tasks that promote and array of issues associated with intimacy and competition. An employee’s physical and psychological presence, is at the very least dramatically altered, or perhaps nonexistent.

We are witnessing the dismantling of one type of organizational community and the creation of another.

How Can the Organizational Psychoanalyst Understand the New Organization?

What becomes relevant for the psychoanalyst is the dimensions of experience an employee brings to their work role, how they experience themselves and their situation, the formal and informal groups they operate within. What organizational psychoanalyst typically require in their analysis is a tightly bounded group or collectivity with some degree of stability. Organizations without physical structures, and electronic supervision provide to the investigator a psychological relationship limited or no physical boundaries. Think about conducting an organizational analysis based on reading E-mail correspondence. In addition, any organizational analysis would have to include an important object, the medium by which people communicate, call it the computer. Finally, it may be that the organizational analyst will be forced to become more clinically oriented in his/her analysis, focusing more on the individual employee as opposed to the group. Consider Jane, why has the author chosen to focus on a specific employee and not the organizations she works in. There are three reasons. First, Jane represents the new employee working for an organization that does not exist. It will require that the psychoanalyst think differently and perhaps more expansive when we discuss, "the organization." One may have to conduct an analysis of the meaning of the organization through the individual employee. Second, to increase our understanding of the organization requires a better understanding the employee. For example, why does Jane engage in this type of labor, what about her loneliness, the lack of companionship, etc., these are things organizational psychologists traditionally value. As I suggest above, perhaps our social and psychological theories about the self as one relates to work is culturally constrained. Perhaps an analysis of the "Jane’s’" of the workforce will finally give an a more fuller understanding of how the workplace and the type of jobs one occupies influence the self and how the self is modified over time by the work. However, it may be that the organizational in the formal sense no longer exists and that the employees will structure, on their own, a group life. It may well be that rather than reduce face-to-face interaction, electronic communication will actually increase it. It may be that the more people telecommunicate the more they will travel to meet each other face-to-face. (Mokhtarian and Solomon,1994). The following question emerges- will microelectronic communication isolate or re-unit us? It may be that it will do both. Finally, how can we understand Jane’s work in terms of freedom from the traditional notions of supervision, and authority? How can we understand Jane, and scores of others who seek out these jobs? What is the relationship between role and personality that finds this type of work gratifying, and what is it about the isolation, the distance from authority, and the security that comes with electronic forms of control. It may be that for Jane, the electronic control system provides the same sense of security as the camera in her elevator or the peep hole in her apartment door. In Fromm’s (1944), prototype of the character who seeks to escape from the freedoms to the paternal watch of the "eye", she seeks and finds her freedom, like the trucker, on the road. Her face-to-face social contacts are brief, never intense, and filled with casual chitchat, similar to what one finds on the road. To Jane the work is adventuresome, she feels she is on her own, but like raproachmon, she is never to far from the glance and watchful eye of electronic mother. It may be that Jane does belong to a community, not in a physical sense. Janes’ community is not at all like that of the trucker, casual "touch and go." Her electronic community is deeply intense and psychologically enriching. It may be that the duality of electronic control experienced as an extension of management, and symbolic freedom experienced by Jane, are the holding arms of mother.

Bibliography

Cushman, P. (1990). Why the self is empty? American Psychologist, 45, 5, 599-611

de Grazia, S. (1962). Of time, work and leisure. New York: Vintage Books.

Fromm, E. (1970) Thoughts on bureaucracy. Management Science, 16(12), B699-B705.

From, E. (1941). Escape from freedom. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Lambert, B. (1998). Secret surveillance cameras growing in city, report says. New York Times, 12/13. P.61

Reisman, D., Glazer, D., & Denny, R. (1950). The lonely crowd. New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press.

Mokhtarian, P. & Salomon (1994). Modeling the choice of telecommuting: Setting the context. Environment and planning A. 26, 749-766