Introduction

Baba, Marietta L.

doi:10.1525/napa.1986.2.1.1

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Through the influence of the Chicago School, observational studies proliferated and the Bank Wiring Room study soon became just one of a constellation of classic observational ethnographic studies in management focused on an individual observer's direct observation of human behavior in the workplace (Gill & Johnson, 2010: 151-152), some of which are captured in Table 1 (for more detailed summeries, see Baba, 1986Baba, , 1998Baba, , 2006Baba, , 2012Bate, 1997;Burawoy, 1979a;Cefkin, 2009;Chapple, 1953;Erickson, 2011;Gardner, 1977;Gillespie, 1993;Holzberg & Giovannini, 1981;Mauskapf & Hirsch, 2015;McCall, 2006;Morey & Luthans, 1987;Schwartzman, 1993;Vidich & Lyman, 2000;Watson, 2011;and Wright, 1994). Table 1 is also evidence that the practice of observational studies had passed from the practitioners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to professional academics.…”

Section: The Legacy Of the Hawthorne Studies And The Chicago School: mentioning

confidence: 99%

Making Transparency Transparent: The Evolution of Observation in Management Theory

Bernstein¹

2017

ANNALS

176

144

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Observation is key to management scholarship and practice. Yet a holistic view of its role in management has been elusive, in part due to shifting terminology. The current popularity of the term "transparency" provides the occasion for a thorough review, which finds (a) a shift in the object of observation from organizational outcomes to the detailed individual activities within them; (b) a shift from people observing the technology to technology observing people; and (c) a split in the field, with managers viewing observation almost entirely from the observer's perspective, leaving the perspective of the observed to the realm of scholarly methodology courses and philosophical debates on privacy. I suggest how the literature on transparency and related literatures might be improved with research designed in light of these trends.KEYWORDS: transparency, privacy, performance, organizations, management theory ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I thank Julie Battilana, Ethan Burris, Tim Earle, Amy Edmondson, John Elder, Elizabeth Hansen, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Joshua Margolis, Tsedal Neeley, Nitin Nohria, Shefali Patil, Kathy Qu, Ryan Raffaelli, Lakshmi Ramarajan, and Bradley Staats for feedback on prior versions of this work; Jim Detert, Sim Sitkin, and two anonymous reviewers for insightful and developmental feedback; and the Harvard Business School for financial support.Please cite as: Bernstein, E. S. Making transparency transparent: The evolution of observation in management theory. Academy of Management Annals, 11(1): 217-266. 2We are increasingly observed and observing at work. Fifty years ago, a typical manager might have tracked production, revenue, and expenses against budget and periodically observed workers during in-person audits (e.g., Dalton, 1959). Today, advances in technology, from smart cameras to wearable tracking devices, make possible a kind of real-time "SuperVision" (Gilliom & Monahan, 2012) far beyond any level of observability envisioned 50 years ago or when Frederick Taylor (1911) originally promoted managerial oversight through scientific management.Public attention is captured by extreme examples of observation at work, like handheld computers (Amazon) or wearable bands (Tesco) tracking and optimizing employees' every move (Head, 2014;Kantor & Streitfeld, 2015;Rawlinson, 2013), embedded sensors in large fleets of company-owned trucks (e.g., UPS) recording hundreds of measurements to capture every action of the truck and its driver to unearth and enforce time-saving tactics (Goldstein, 2014;Levy, 2015), cameras at Las Vegas casino Harrah's tracking the smiles of card dealers and wait staff as a proxy for customer service quality (Peck, 2013), point-of-sale systems scraping every transaction for signs of employee fraud (Pierce, Snow, & McAfee, 2015), and RFID (radiofrequency identification)-enabled workspaces automatically capturing factory worker progress (Ranganathan, 2015), how long employees spend at their desks (Zillman, 2016), and even who does and does not use hand-soap and hand-sanitizer dispensers ...

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Section: The Legacy Of the Hawthorne Studies And The Chicago School: mentioning

confidence: 99%

Making Transparency Transparent: The Evolution of Observation in Management Theory

Bernstein¹

2017

ANNALS

176

144

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Fighters, Hunters and Blue-Blood: A Postmodern Reading of African Folk Tales and the Soft Will to Africanize

Stoica

2022

Re-Centering Cultural Performance and Orange Economy in Post-Colonial Africa

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Markets and Violence: Qualitative Research and the Neoliberal Future

Nespor

2017

Qualitative Inquiry

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Neoliberal epistemologies are grounded in a temporal paradox. To prosper, you have to know how actions taken now will pay off in the future. But you can’t know that—the future is uncertain and unknowable. In this context, qualitative inquiry becomes less a matter of explanation or interpretation than of feeding information into efforts to collapse the temporal horizon and format the future in a form that you can dominate. This article examines manifestations of this approach in the qualitative research practices of two key institutional sectors of neoliberalism: the corporate and military.

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Introduction

Cited by 5 publications

References 36 publications

Making Transparency Transparent: The Evolution of Observation in Management Theory

Making Transparency Transparent: The Evolution of Observation in Management Theory

Fighters, Hunters and Blue-Blood: A Postmodern Reading of African Folk Tales and the Soft Will to Africanize

Markets and Violence: Qualitative Research and the Neoliberal Future

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