Moulaï K., " Video Surveillance in Working Contexts and Business Legitimacy: A Foucauldian Approach " In: Rendtorff J. (eds) Handbook of Business Legitimacy. Springer, Chamber.
Résumé
This book chapter explores the dynamics of video surveillance on the bodies of workers from the spectrum of a subjectification process. Offering a theoretical progression in line with managerial considerations, this study plunges the reader into a consideration of the captured body through a reading of Foucault to open a reflection on business legitimacy. Because of the visual nature of the technique of discipline at stake here, e.g., video surveillance, we mobilized Merleau-Ponty’s approach to perception to serve our investigation. Far from questioning the disciplinary potential of video surveillance, this study first argues that, by nature, only an incomplete reality of the surveilled body can be captured by the camera. The study then reconstructs the logic of an electronic eye as a mediator of power participating to a limited extent in the object-subject dynamic. Our investigation demonstrates how video surveillance can be approached as a provocation, since it gives the worker the impetus to access a knowledge of parcels central to the individual’s attention to himself, the other, and the world. It finally discusses the role of a moral legitimacy to preserve the consciousness at stake in the subjectification process that we analyze.