Managerial resistance to digital workplace surveillance in a local government authority

Abstract

Workplace surveillance is an increasingly pervasive feature of contemporary organisations, yet research overwhelmingly positions employees as its primary subjects and agents of resistance. Managers, by contrast, are implicitly framed as a homogeneous group who design, implement, and sustain surveillance. We argue that such framing ignores the complex positions managers simultaneously occupy as implementers, mediators, and potential subjects of surveillance, and further obscures situations in which they themselves are monitored, oppose surveillance, or actively engage in resisting it. Drawing on a grounded theory study of a UK local government authority, we examine how and why managers resist digitally augmented surveillance systems, revealing three interrelated resistance strategies: shielding employees from surveillance, obfuscating data to undermine system integrity, and deploying discursive practices to contest surveillance legitimacy. These strategies are simultaneously shaped by self-protective and value-driven motivations. By integrating sociotechnical systems theory with public service ethics, we develop a conceptual framework that repositions managers as agentive, morally reasoning actors navigating the contested terrain of digital control. The findings advance interdisciplinary understanding of resistance and ethics in digitally mediated public sector organisations, and respond to calls for research that recognises managerial diversity and conceptualises resistance as a situated sociotechnical process.

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