International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on Bossware: Critically Investigating Employee Monitoring and People Management
Bossware. Employee Monitoring. People Management. Whatever the term, this software tracks the activity of workers in extensive and often invasive ways. Piggybacking on the pandemic, bossware has rapidly spread as managers strive to oversee and control remote workers. Bossware introduces new digital regimes into the workplace, establishes softer forms of surveillance, and reshapes the everyday experience of workers. Some services flag “risky” employees; others offer productivity scores to management to “optimize” labor. These techniques intensify pressure, undermine trust, and damage worker well-being.
But if the stakes of bossware are clear, its novelty has made it hard to grasp. A more critical and comprehensive understanding is needed. How do we situate bossware, how does it operate, how do workers respond, and how does all of this reconfigure contemporary labor? Such questions are not merely about filling a disciplinary gap but are foundational for worker understanding and resistance.
In this Special Section on Bossware: Critically Investigating Employee Monitoring and People Management, guest-edited by Luke Munn, authors provide a rich portrait of bossware, showing the powerful affordances and promises that lead employees to adopting it (Barili), how it reshapes our experience of work in subtle but significant ways (Cinque), and how workers adapt to these pervasive regimes, accepting some measures while pushing back against others (Ye and Zhao). Mark Andrejevic concludes the Section with a highly incisive framing of bossware as a “devolution of recognition” situated in a broader recession of sociality.
As work becomes platformized and digitized, bossware becomes a significant yet often invisible infrastructure and a new site of struggle for contemporary labor. Grasping this phenomenon is key for media studies, labor studies, management studies, and organizations and activists seeking to support workers’ lives and livelihoods.
To this end, we invite you to read these articles published in the International Journal of Communication on July 12, 2024.
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More Than Monitoring: Grappling With Bossware—Introduction
Luke Munn
The Platformization of Worker Surveillance: Materialities and Imaginaries in Teramind and Time Doctor
Fabricio Barili
Knowledge Workers of the Digital World, Unite! Knowledge Workers’ Workplace Surveillance and Hidden Transcripts in China
WeiMing Ye, Luming Zhao
Automated Monitoring in the Workplace: The Devolution of Recognition—Afterword
Mark Andrejevic
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Silvio Waisbord, Editor
Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Chi Zhang, Managing Editor, Special Sections
Mark Mangoba-Agustin, Webmaster
Luke Munn, Guest Editor
Please note that according to the latest Google Scholar statistics, IJoC ranks 7th among all Humanities journals and 8th among all Communications journals in the world — demonstrating the viability of open access scholarly publication at the highest level.
USC Annenberg Press 