Discipline and Governmentality at Work ― Making the Subject and Subjectivity in Modern Tertiary Labour

Technology-mediated tertiary labor, involving work that is mediated, regulated, surveilled, and measured through computers, computer networks, telecommunications systems, and other new technologies and is primarily service work. According to Winiecki (instructional and performance technology, Boise State U.), it is growing in population and economic impact across socioeconomic classes in both highly industrialized and newly industrializing countries. In this study, he applies Foucauldian concepts of discipline and governmentality to the study of the subject and subjectivity in technology-mediated tertiary labor, addressing such subjects as the reconstituting of time, space, and activity at telephone call centers, governmental practices that discipline workers, resistance strategies of subjects within the previously describe constellation of disciplinary "biopower," and the transportation of disciplinary and governmental apparatuses from work to other zones of workers' individual social lives. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation c2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Don Winiecki is an Associate Professor in the Instructional & Performance Technology Department in the College of Engineering at Boise State University.