A Japanese “cure” to a British “disease”? Cultural dimensions to the development of workplace surveillance technologies

Abstract

Seeks to explore the analytical rectitude of comparative culturalist approaches to the explanation of differences in the implementation of technologies in different settings. Takes theory and empirical observation from a well‐established case study of the use of information technology in the workplace as a form of worker surveillance (Kay Electronics) and examines a hitherto neglected feature of the company’s reconfiguration of the industrial labour process. Focuses on the realization that the quality monitoring system implemented to support manufacturing in the UK plant was not, as it was initially thought, a direct emulation of a system used in its Japanese sister plant, but was described by the company as a unique approach developed in response to the challenges of a UK manufacturing context.