Technologies of control and the invisible transformation of the labour market from welfare state principles to welfare capitalism

Abstract

This chapter is based on an evaluation of the Norwegian oil company Northoil’s performance management system, People@Northoil (P@N), by which workers evaluate their co-workers, producing numerical assessments of every employee’s performance, behaviour, and adherence to company values. We argue that a specific techno-logic is written into P@N as a digital infrastructure, transforming the labour market from welfare state principles to welfare capitalist reward and punishment. Through its techno-logic of governance at a time of financial abundance, P@N is a herald of welfare capitalism. It is only one of many such systems, which both build and build on the selfsame techno-logics present everywhere in New Public Management and neo-liberalisation. Together this leads to anti-democratisation by expelling human judgement and discretion. As such, P@N is one of many structures of capitalist working life, which both harbours its own individualisation and technological control, and simultaneously furthers them as global techno-logics. P@N is one of the many technological reward mechanisms, whereby welfare capitalism is increasingly replacing the welfare state as the provider of security. We see an individual sense of security tied to capital, gradually replacing the need for a communal, that is, a social sense of security.