Monday, September 22, 2008

Private life vs working life

For me it's important to separate my private life and my working life, when we talk about surveillance. I think that there are positive and negative things about surveillance in a working environment. The positive is that it gives your boss an opportunity of course in association with you to develop your working skills. Like when I worked in a store where we sold cellphones and stuff like that my boss could watch my interaction with costumers and then coach me afterward. The surveillance of the store also gave me some kind of security because I knew that if something happened we would have good pictures of the person. But like most things there is also a negative side to this. I don't have any personal experience with this but last year I wrote a paper about this phenomenon called LEAN. It's kind of a new form of Taylorism which was mentioned in the Robins and Webster text. Basically LEAN is about watching EVERY step of the work process and then eliminate all the waste. This concept was really popular in Denmark a couple of years ago and there was a lot of discussion about what this would do to the workers would everybody be stressed out or would it give them more time to do the things that they found interesting?
These two videos explain LEAN really simple: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWZnxTcNQzo and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL4bkoBAVZw&feature=related
In my personal life it's a bit different. I agree with the guy who posted something before me about that if you are not doing anything illegal why be afraid about people watching you but at the same time the You Tube video mentioned the possibility of the local policemen watching my private pictures and videos and that's kind of scary.

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