Digitalisation, Algorithmic Governance and the Limits of Workplace Democracy

This chapter considers digitalisation and algorithmic governance through the lens of UK call centres. Call centres show how algorithmic governance, performance management and employee surveillance create new ways of seeing and knowing workers. Ranking, classifying and re-presenting output can be at odds with how workers see their role and measure ‘good’ practice but as power rests with the system of algorithmic governance, through its presentation of ‘objective’ data, and management who increasingly rely on data, the worker is disadvantaged. Through a social harm framework understood as barriers to flourishing, the chapter argues that bureaucratic rationality based on algorithmically informed work processes and representations of worker performance are damaging to workers. However, without meaningful engagement in negotiation on these issues, trade unions are unlikely to ensure any balance between the demands of capital and labour. In countries where co-determination is already weak, algorithmic governance is a further blow to workplace democracy.