Automating to control: The unexpected consequences of modern automated work delivery in practice

Inti José Lammi

doi:10.1177/1350508420968179

Abstract

This paper explores how automation efforts with the intent to control work in modern work places can unfold. Building on a longitudinal study of a governmental agency’s efforts to implement automated work delivery technology to enforce work guidelines, I show how aspects of work might become more automated but the rationale of automation might fail to manifest as originally intended. Technology and the formal structure inscribed into it to control work might conflict with the demands of work practice. Moreover, the findings show how automated control can be resisted by workers through subversive organizing in teams to reacquire work discretion. Through an analysis of automated control in practice, this paper contributes to discussions of technologies of control and how pragmatic resistance can emerge to counteract such technology.

Highlights

A classical and ever-relevant topic of organizational studies is the use and effects of technology in the organizing of work
Ranging from past studies that explored machine automation and its effects on blue-collar work (Blauner, 1964; Faunce, 1958; Susman, 1970) to studies of computerized technologies of control in modern white-collar work (Knights and McCabe, 1998; Taylor and Bain, 1999; Zuboff, 1988), scholars have extensively studied the role of technologies in the transformation of work (Badham, 2006; Leonardi and Barley, 2010)
The findings of this paper can be summarized as pointing to the complexity of implementing automated control of work

Summary

Introduction

A classical and ever-relevant topic of organizational studies is the use and effects of technology in the organizing of work. These tools exist in two guises in relation to the control of work (Zuboff, 1988): as means to inform management about work and as means to automate aspects of work to reduce work discretion The former has been extensively explored in modern studies of workplace surveillance (Ball, 2010; Manley and Williams, 2019; Sewell et al, 2012). While scholars have begun to explore the potential of new automating technologies in work (Shestakofsky, 2017), and to discuss these conceptually as means to control work (Kellogg et al, 2020), there is curiously little contemporary attention on automating technologies of control Issues such as the workplace dynamics that can follow from such technologies, and how workers might consent or resist these, remain empirically understudied

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Conclusion