Exploring Electronic Monitoring of Employees and Resistance: A Foucauldian Perspective

The call of paper of the track “Social Issues in Organizations” invites researchers to explore different aspects of social issues that are impacted by information technology affecting organizations. In this paper, we investigate how social issues - such as electronic monitoring of employees and resistance - are affected by the emergence of mobile technologies. It seems more and more important to explore this issue, at a time when mobility and flexible working practices are becoming increasingly widespread. In this paper we argue that a Foucauldian approach can enrich our understanding of social issues linked with mobile IS deployment, such as electronic monitoring of employees and resistance. To defend our idea, we present the results of four case studies (based on 85 semi-structured interviews and 10 days of observation).