Neither good, nor bad, but dangerous: Surveillance as an ethical paradox

Abstract

We argue for a discursive ethic of surveillance that accounts for the paradoxes that the phenomenon presents to today’s organisational members. We first we develop a genealogy of privacy and illustrate its relation to surveillance, focusing on the antinomian relationship between the “public” and “private.” Then we review the common ethical tensions that arise in today’s technologically intensive workplace. Lastly, we develop a critical approach to the ethical status of privacy and surveillance — a “micro-ethics” — that remains open to discursivelybased negotiation by those who find themselves at the very point of scrutiny.