Stochastic machine witnesses at work: Today’s critiques of Taylorism are inadequate for workplace surveillance epistemologies of the future

Gould, Alexander 2024. Stochastic machine witnesses at work: Today’s critiques of Taylorism are inadequate for workplace surveillance epistemologies of the future. Presented at: CHI: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 11-16 May 2024. CHI '24: Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 10.1145/3613904.3642206

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Abstract

I argue that epistemologies of workplace surveillance are shifting in fundamental ways, and so critiques must shift accordingly. I begin the paper by relating Scientific Management to Human-Centred Computing’s ways of knowing through a study of ‘metaverse’ vir- tual reality workplaces. From this, I develop two observations. The first is that today’s workplace measurement science does not resem- ble the science that Taylor developed for Scientific Management. Contemporary workplace science is more passive, more intermediated and less controlled. The second observation is that new forms of workplace measurement challenge the norms of empirical science. Instead of having credentialed human witnesses observe phenomena and agree facts about them, we instead make outsourced, uncredentialed stochastic machine witnesses responsible for producing facts about work. With these observations in mind, I assert that critiques of workplace surveillance still framed by Taylorism will not be fit for interrogating workplace surveillance practices of the future.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Computer Science & Informatics
Publisher:	ACM
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	21 February 2024
Date of Acceptance:	19 January 2024
Last Modified:	11 May 2024 01:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/166451

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