Bossware| The Platformization of Worker Surveillance: Materialities and Imaginaries in Teramind and Time Doctor

Abstract

This article assesses surveillance imaginaries and materialities imposed through the Time Doctor and Teramind user activity monitoring platforms. To conceptualize bossware, I build on the concepts of platformization, surveillance, and automation, which act in the construction and operation of the features of such platforms and their imaginaries. I observe how communication practices—investigated based on Bucher’s “technography” method—are revealed both in the construction and the presentation of features, actively participating in the composition of a monitored and controlled environment aimed against workers. Technography makes it possible to remove surveillance platforms from the black box by observing what is possible from data inputs and outputs and the possible imaginaries from those who build them and those who operate them. In this way, from a perspective that seeks elements and actions of work control that are present in the first studies of scientific management in the early 19th century, I hereby present a more contemporary view of the possible practices from the platformization of surveillance in the workplace.