Organizer
Kenneth Lipartito
Panelists
Kenneth Lipartito(he/him)
The Chandlerian Panopticon: Surveilling Workers and Managers in American Railroads, 1850-1890
lipark@fiu.edu
Bianca Centrone (she/her)
Watching Workers Lives: Company Housing at Baťa and Olivetti, 1920-1960
centrone@princeton.edu
Karen Mahar (she/her)
One of Us: Using “Executive Personality” to Surveil Managers in the United States, 1900-1950
KMAHAR@siena.edu
Josh Lauer (he/him)
Disciplining Telephone Users: Telephone Talk and the Instrumentalization of Personal Communication in the United States, 1880-1920
josh.lauer@unh.edu
Chair/Comment
M. R. Sauter (they/them) mrsauter@umd.edu
Surveillance plays a large part in how companies manage, control, and discipline their workforces. Today such surveillance is often associated with digital monitoring and algorithmic decision making In the past, surveillance was often carried out by more direct observational methods, perhaps most infamously with company spies such as Pinkerton agents, who gave particular focus to potential unionization movements. But as we show in these papers, when looked at through the lens of business and managerial history these simple stories hide a variety of less obvious methods of worker surveillance and more complex relationships between management and labor.
Existing stories often focus on the “dyad” of managers on the one side, workers on the other. As Kenneth Lipartito shows in his paper on 19th century railroads, surveillance operates in both directions, from management to work back to management. This “panoptic” structure enhanced labor surveillance at a time when digital devices of information gathering used on the shop floor today did not yet exist. Such bidirectional surveillance also opened opportunities for workers themselves to push back or reclaim space and autonomy against intrusive surveillance practices. Likewise, as Karen Mahar notes in her paper on “executive traits” surveillance was often deployed to locate and indeed “construct” the ideal manager, a practice that inevitably coded in racial and gender assumptions that restricted who was allowed to ascend to these positions.
Both of these papers focus on informational surveillance, the indirect methods by which people are located, measured, and assessed beyond simple observing. But space is also an important part of the surveillance apparatus as Bianca Centrone shows in her study of company towns at Olivetti and Bata. Company towns are often thought of as a controlled environment where management could exert dominance over more or less captive workers. But in the cases Centrone explores the space was used less for top-down dominance and more for “reformist” impulses through company welfare schemes to prepare and adjust workers to the new realities of an industrial culture. Much of the emphasis went on workers beyond the workplace lives, something that has become common in management monitoring of employees’ social media today but has been an impulse in managerial practice far longer. Indeed, the same concerns about traits, behavior and character off as well as on the job went into the management of railroad workers as well as the seeking out of ideal executive traits. Here as with Mahar, surveillance is not just a device of control but is also a means of constructing laboring subjects.
While workers are often the main objects of surveillance, as Josh Lauer shows customers also get caught up in the surveillant infrastructure in a mode of “refractory surveillance.” By carefully monitoring and the users of telephones, Lauer argues, telephone companies trained them to speak and operate telephones efficiently. How customers used telephones, and how they interacted with telephone operators were important to service and productivity. As with social media today, consumers were also laborers providing inputs into the system.
Together these papers open up new avenues for business history to explore with regard to surveillance as a business practice. With their deep knowledge of management structures, technical systems, size, scale and scope, and the multiple social and cultural practices of corporations, business historians are equipped to go beyond existing models focused more narrowly on direct observation, the management-worker dyad, or on managers and workers isolation from consumers and customers.