Location: Mackintosh Corry Hall, Room D528
Time: 12:30 - 2:00 pm
Abstract
Employment and labour are definitely married to the economic realm, but under the auspices of neoliberal work regimes one's position in the market is permanently uncertain; individuals must take responsibility for their own precarity. To meet the demands of new economic shifts, many firms are looking for a more thorough measure of an individual's capacity to be a productive member of the team. Indeed, where particular techniques of workplace surveillance (e.g., keystroke monitoring, video surveillance, call monitoring, etc.) centers on the labour process, pre-employment screening increasingly focuses on the worker rather than the work itself.
Stevens focuses primarily on genetic and psychological evaluations and how the discourse of pre-employment testing is expressed in industry and academic journals, with the interests of productivity, efficiency, and profit being the principal motives.
The Surveillance Studies Centre
c/o David Murakami Wood
Department of Criminology
University of Ottawa
Canada