Managers cannot resist using new social text to evaluate and punish subordinates

Evidence

Thanks to the new computer-mediated milieu, the scientists’ social and professional conversations now appeared as an electronic text: visible, knowable, shareable. It enriched their work in many ways, but it also created unexpected vulnerabilities as dispositions, values, attitudes, and social interactions were recast as objects of scrutiny. In a series of conflicts that unfolded over the years, I watched as the managers and executives at Drug Corp were simply unable to quell their inclination to use the new social text as a means to evaluate, critique, and punish. On more than one occasion I learned of managers who had printed out pages of DIALOG conversations in order to spread them out on the floor and analyze opinions on a particular subject, sometimes actually taking scissors to the pages and organizing the entries by theme or person. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 843

Categorization

• SEED: The scissors-and-paper scene of managers printing electronic chats to spread across a floor is a vivid, datable detail for an essay on how power adapts old rituals to new surveillance media.
• XREF: connects to: Surveillance of social text drives people toward perfunctory, impersonal communication — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 844; Fragmented production processes weaken individual accountability for harmful content — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 849

Broader Connections

• Surveillance of social text drives people toward perfunctory, impersonal communication #expands (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 844
• Fragmented production processes weaken individual accountability for harmful content #expands (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 849