Humans and Machines at Work: Monitoring, Surveillance and Automation in Contemporary Capitalism

Abstract

This edited collection provides a series of accounts of workers’ local experiences that reflect the ubiquity of work’s digitalisation. Precarious gig economy workers ride bikes and drive taxis in China and Britain, call centre workers in India experience invasive tracking, warehouse workers discover that hidden data has been used for layoffs, and academic researchers see their labour obscured by a ‘data foam’ that does not benefit them. These cases are couched in historical accounts of identity and selfhood experiments seen in the Hawthorne experiments and the lineage of automation. This book will appeal to scholars in the Sociology of Work and Digital Labour Studies and anyone interested in learning about monitoring and surveillance, automation, the gig economy and the quantified self in the workplace.