From Individual Privacy to Social Conundrum: An Ethical Exploration of the Technological Surveillance in the Organizational Workplace

The ongoing discussions today about electronic monitoring and workplace surveillance in various disciplines, ranging from the fundamental issues of sociology and philosophy to the specialized applied topics like information systems and ethics, show how much attention the issue has drawn. However, there are conflicting rights and interests: employers have legitimate interests in seeking efficiency, profit, and vicarious liability, while employees have rights to privacy, autonomy and justice. Many researchers have committed themselves to investigate and resolve these conflicts. Yet, although individuals are the key constitutive elements of any workforce, there are many more things to consider than just the concern for individual privacy. Hence, challenges of electronic monitoring are complex areas of discussion, which can be seen as a legal problem, a moral question, a social conundrum, and so forth. While acknowledging these possibilities of addressing this issue, this research will focus on certain fundamental individual challenges and social implications of people working in the information sectors. An in-depth analysis of David Lyon's demonstration of surveillance as a 'social sorting' will enable us to focus concretely the issue under discussion. It will be carried out not only from an individualist perspective, but also from a social as well as a context-oriented ethical perspective which has not yet been mapped in the research. It is, in fact, critical to move from the privacy problem to the social problem and try to achieve a nuanced balance in judging the use of ICT in the organizational workplace. This research, with an ethical and theological response, looks for a hermeneutical key or an ethical tool to reconcile the dichotomy between the social benefits and social disabilities arising from the use of surveillance in the workplace.status: publishe