The information revolution has ushered in a data-driven reorganization of the workplace, where big data, and AI are used to surveil workers for productivity and to shift risk. The book’s theory of worker quantification is that work technologies concurrently and cumulatively quantify not just worker productivity, but also all aspects of worker behavior. Whereas the concept of scientific management was focused on quantifying the work, chipping work into concrete and minute tasks that could be both quantified and standardized for great efficiency gains, the workforce science of today, as an iteration of scientific management, goes far beyond that. Now, it is not merely the job task that is being quantified, it is also the worker’s health through workplace wellness programs, the worker’s mental state through personality job tests, and the worker’s social behavior through workplace surveillance and the monitoring of social media. To be sure, worker quantification is enabled, facilitated, and driven by technological advances, but the impulse towards worker quantification also derives from the ideologies that came before those technological advances. Changes in the law are necessary to mitigate the ill-effects on workers.
Teaching resources:
- Link to Syllabus for The Quantified Worker Book
- Youtube playlist of relevant clips