All Along the Watchtower
March 2, 2023An article co-written by Prof. Nanda Kumar (Paul H. Chook Department of Information Systems and Statistics) and published in Organization Science has won the 2022 Best Paper Award from the Association for Information Systems (AIS) Women’s Network College, a college of the AIS whose purpose is to support women scholars in information systems. The paper’s two lead authors were women at other universities.
Prof. Kumar and his co-authors accepted the award in December of 2022 at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) — the leading conference for researchers in the Information Systems area — in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Entitled “Watchers, Watched, and Watching in the Digital Age: Reconceptualization of Information Technology Monitoring as Complex Action Nets,” the article explores how surveillance happens in organizational settings in the new era of ubiquitous technology.
“Surveillance can happen in many directions with many stakeholders,” notes Prof. Kumar. “It’s not just what we traditionally think of — an organization watching its employees. It could be employees watching other employees, or citizens watching an organization for accountability.” To emphasize the multidirectional nature of this watching, he and his co-authors used the term “veillance” rather than “surveillance,” since “surveillance” implies top-down monitoring only.
The paper offers original viewpoints on veillance, moving away from traditional surveillance discussions to consider that in the digital age IT “artifacts” (for example, social media tools such as Twitter, or virtual conferencing tools like Zoom) are not just tools. Individuals use them to gather and spread information but the tools themselves monitor who is using them and why, and this data can be shared in multiple directions by multiple parties, who may or may not have malign motives. “How monitoring functions in today’s society operates under new rules,” Prof. Kumar says.
The relationship between watcher and watched need not be top-down — for example, when activists during the Arab Spring of a decade ago used social media to document and spread the word on government injustice — but even so, “power relationships still matter,” Kumar says. A powerful organization can still do much to monitor employees, and in a high-tech setting, employees may not realize how they’re being controlled.
“For example, with Zoom meetings, you might meet with other members of your team at 11 p.m. to accommodate different time zones,” Kumar offers. “Now that technology can follow you everywhere, that blurring of work and personal time becomes more of an expectation.”
Companies should also be careful that the data they collect on workers is truly meaningful, Kumar adds. “They may evaluate employees on keystrokes, but if their job involves thinking, is that really effective?” he asks. “As a professor and researcher, I need to pace the floor to get ideas, and some of my best ideas happen when I’m outdoors walking through a park. Monitoring a keyboard and mouse can’t capture that.”
The paper has been in the works for a decade, Kumar notes. He started the research as a more traditional study of top-down surveillance, but when he brought in the other scholars, the focus shifted to the multidirectional “veillance” approach that was published. The AIS Women’s Network College took notice of the work, he believes, not only because the two lead authors were women, but also because “the key ideas—being mindful of power relationships, making invisible monitoring more visible—are important for women, I think.”