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Time of India
23-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Is algorithmic management creating a new hierarchy in the workplace?, ETHRWorld
Highlights AI surveillance is reshaping workplace power dynamics. Employees may engage in 'productivity theatre' to impress algorithms. High monitoring can stifle creativity and reduce meaningful output. Advt Advt What amount of wokeism is permissible in the workplace? Increased social awareness and activism, i.e., wokeism, among employees and its interaction with a company's culture has left organizations puzzled about how much of it to encourage so as to preserve operational stability. See More Details By & , ETHRWorld Contributor Join the community of 2M+ industry professionals Subscribe to our newsletter to get latest insights & analysis. Download ETHRWorld App Get Realtime updates Save your favourite articles Scan to download App A recent Bartleby column in the Economist satirizes AI surveillance in team meetings, analysing body language, eye-rolling, private messages, and even lip-reading when cameras are off, touching on the unsettling reach of workplace monitoring technology.A Wall Street Journal podcast reveals companies deploying software to identify promotion candidates and flight risks, analyse chat logs between conflicting employees, and increasingly adopt HR chatbots like executives are pushing departments to 'do more with less' via the adoption of AI to evaluate performance, predict attrition, allocate bonuses, resolve conflict, and even drive promotions and terminations. Algorithmic oversight now extends far beyond traditional task metrics into deeply personal developments may open a Pandora's box. As workplaces become algorithmically optimized, a subtle but profound shift in organizational power dynamics is bound to shape up. This transformation warrants deeper scrutiny not merely as a technological trend but as a fundamental restructuring of how power is experienced, expressed, and executed in the workplace. After all, power structures form the bedrock of organizational software to automate managerial functions is not new, its modern successors are Affect Management ( AAM ) combines good old workplace management with affective computing to create systems that monitor, analyse, and respond to workers' emotional states and reactions. AAM captures data on everything from tone of voice and facial expressions to brain activity and physiological responses to inform automated management decisions about productivity, performance evaluation, and resource are extensively taking to algorithmic management . OECD's Employer Survey 2025 says 90% of US firms use at least one AAM tool to instruct, monitor, or evaluate workers. European countries have an average adoption of 79%. According to a McKinsey study, the use of AI by organizations in one or more business functions has increased from 55% in 2023 to 78% in one hand, the ecosystem is ripening to adopt more AAMs, while on the other, their hair-splitting abilities are coming into full hierarchies have long depended on an unspoken grammar of submission—deferential gestures, seating arrangements, and even the cadence of laughter in meetings. These cues, as organizational psychologist Robert Sutton observed in The No Asshole Rule, are often subtle reinforcements of status and authority, echoing animalistic behaviours of dominance and these old cues are being replaced. The rise of 'dystopian' employee productivity monitoring software has created a new power dynamic where algorithms, not humans, determine real-time productivity dashboards and behaviour analytics determine employee value, work becomes a performance calibrated to machine Lindsey D Cameron of the Wharton School has found elements of 'deviance tactics' by ride-hailing workers to align their efforts with managerial interests. We may imagine analogous white-collar employee behaviours to game human-algorithm interactions when faced with red notices, or even otherwise, for falling below arbitrary productivity or 360-degree alignment are increasingly poised to navigate and, at times, manipulate AAMs. These systems often rely on data from emails, keystrokes, typing speed, backspace frequency, email volume, and other digital interactions to create 'productivity graphs' that compare workers against their peers on sometimes vague success-driven to research, more than one in ten workers will actively attempt to deceive AI-driven tracking systems. To maintain a favourable profile, employees may engage in 'productivity theatre,' such as scheduling emails to be sent during non-working hours or frequently updating collaborative documents, creating an illusion of constant activity. Others might use tools to simulate keyboard activity or remain logged into communication platforms to appear available to align with the algorithm's workers may use more sophisticated tricks like VPNs or multiple devices to avoid surveillance and separate monitored from unmonitored tasks. Reports suggest that companies that sell these monitoring tools and provide AI automation services are often the same, suggesting a troubling pathway from surveillance to replacement, almost encouraging one to trick learning how algorithms evaluate them, workers adapt their behaviour to meet metrics without real engagement. This dynamic creates a growing awareness among white-collar workers of the surveillance capabilities of AAMs and a proactive approach to exert autonomy and retain control over their work behaviour stands to aggravate as companies begin to use more powerful AAMs. AI is introducing a new layer of hierarchy in organizations and associated inconveniences. A new area of people management is emerging with Institute for the Future of Work (IFOW) says worker reactions to AAM are largely negative. Its Data on our Minds: Affective Computing at Work research found that fewer than 10% agree that these systems positively impact their wellbeing, safety, or health. The psychological toll is significant. Most employees report that AAM forces them to work faster, meet tighter deadlines, and change their working habits, with 29-34% experiencing increased 'techno' stress AI is already generating up to 30% of code at Microsoft, we may extrapolate and attribute one-third of an employee's yearly appraisal directly to AI, too. There is also the perception that the bosses will tighten based on these metrics: based on what the algorithm's 'expectations' from an employee are not simply tools that assist human managers—they're increasingly becoming managers themselves, fundamentally altering workplace dynamics and creating a paradoxical leadership algorithms efficiently distribute tasks, monitor performance, and enforce standards with relentless consistency, they simultaneously diminish the human elements of management that employees routinely rank as most valuable: empathy, contextual understanding, and, in particular, interpersonal algorithms risk being able to evaluate without being evaluated. About two-thirds of managers in recent OECD surveys are worried about the unclear accountability of AAMs for wrong decisions and being unable to follow the tools' decision-making logic. While this will resolve enroute to Artificial General Intelligence, the intervening time could be one of invisible hand of AAMs is simultaneously more present through continuous monitoring yet more absent in meaningful human interaction. The International Labour Organization has voiced managers' concerns about diminishing interpersonal skills as their roles become increasingly focused on interpreting and implementing algorithmic recommendations rather than exercising independent technological mediation creates a black box so that manager-employee relationships become increasingly opaque and transactional, feeding employee disengagement despite unprecedented levels of Ifeoma Ajunwa of Emory Law School notes in her research on Automated Governance that such black boxes could potentially reinforce entrenched power structures. For example, the 'old boys' club,' where male employees gain advantages through privileged networks—a dynamic particularly pronounced in India's hierarchical corporate environments, where caste, regional, and linguistic biases often operate beneath the the most surprising development in the algorithmic workplace is what Prof Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford University has identified as the 'modern productivity paradox '. Despite unprecedented capabilities for monitoring and optimizing every aspect of work, from keystrokes to brain waves, many organizations implementing comprehensive AAMs are experiencing stagnant or declining productivity when measured by meaningful output rather than activity metrics. This counterintuitive finding challenges the fundamental premise of algorithmic Reddit user addresses the heart of the problem: 'The better I got at looking busy, the less time I had to think.'When workers know they are constantly monitored down to their neurological activity, many respond by directing their ingenuity toward satisfying algorithmic metrics rather than solving substantive problems. It echoes economist Charles Goodhart's claim that a measure ceases to be effective when it becomes a studies reveal that the brain's default mode network, essential for creative thinking and novel connections, becomes suppressed under conditions of surveillance. Resources shift to the brain's executive control network, optimizing for predictable performance rather than creative thinking.A workplace surveilled by AI may appear highly active yet may underperform as regards adaptive innovation and problem-solving. These are precisely the human capabilities organizations need most in a rapidly changing AI-powered economy to realize, as Sundar Pichai recently said, an 'explosion in knowledge, learning, creativity, and productivity'.The path forward requires a thoughtful integration that preserves human agency and creativity while leveraging AI's analytical strengths. Research by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies suggests that organizations achieving this balance share a few key algorithmic transparency is critical. Employees should understand how algorithms work, not just that they are being used. This boosts trust, reduces anxiety, and limits gaming behaviour. Second, clear human override protocols are essential. Final decisions must remain with human managers who can factor in nuance and context. Third, organizations should invest in AI sandboxing to test AAMs before plugging them into the company's culture. Sandboxing is useful from a regulatory standpoint as must actively foster self-efficacy in AI learning. Research on South Korean professionals found that employees who feel confident in their ability to understand and work with AI experience significantly less stress during the goal should be augmentation over automation: AI should enhance human capabilities at all organizational hierarchies, not replace judgment. This allows managers to focus on coaching and interpersonal must also embed metrics of trust, such as transparency, explainability, fairness, reliability, and privacy, into AI design and implementation. These must be communicated effectively to users, including non-experts, to ensure perceived trustworthiness matches actual the scope of a company, regulations and standards overseen by governments are needed to calibrate trust and ensure ethical usage across diverse cultures. Dynamic, context-sensitive trust models, especially in AI–AI interaction, remain a critical research organizations must aspire to a work culture that values human ingenuity, encouraging reflective thinking and autonomy. Balancing efficiency with cognitive freedom is vital. Only by harmonizing human and machine intelligence can organizations unlock AI's transformative potential without compromising the human core of work.
Mada
19-05-2025
- General
- Mada
Not a hunger artist: Laila Soueif and the silence of the state
Each time I come across a new photograph of Laila Soueif — eight months into her hunger strike — I'm engulfed by a nameless feeling. It isn't fear, nor is it grief, exactly. It lies somewhere between stunned bewilderment and ethical shame. I watch her thinning body slowly and deliberately withdraw from the world. The more emaciated she becomes, the more undeniable her presence. To speak of her like this feels indecent; the image resists interpretation. My language falters, and I'm left confronting the fact that my solidarity is tenuous. This sense of powerlessness is not mine alone — it's shared, it belongs to us. Laila's hunger strike does not lend itself to metaphor. Her refusal of the status quo, her protest against the ongoing imprisonment of Alaa — carried out through her own body, in muscle, fat and bone is devastating. Unintentionally, I find myself returning to two literary figures that haunt the modern imaginary of refusal: Franz Kafka's A Hunger Artist and Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener. Both choose withdrawal (through starvation or silence) from absurd systems that regard them as obstruction or spectacle, or both. In Kafka's story, a man turns starvation into an art. He sits in a small, exposed iron cage, on display for an audience who observe him closely, as to verify his abstention. At first, his act drew the public's curiosity, gradually descending into boredom. His fast is capped at 40 days — a limit set by his impresario, who knows exactly when the crowd loses interest. Eventually, the hunger artist is left to die, curled and barely visible in a heap of straw, tucked in some forgotten corner of a dilapidated circus. With his final breath, he confesses: he never found anything he truly wanted to eat. He is replaced by a tiger —vivid, ferocious — the sight of him a show of vitality so excessive it borders on the obscene. Bartleby, a clerk in a Wall Street law office, begins by refusing assigned tasks one by one, repeating his now-famous refrain: I would prefer not to. He stops working, then stops responding, then stops leaving the office, and finally, stops eating. He is transferred to prison, where he dies quietly — without protest, without explanation, without plea. His phrase becomes a kind of shorthand for passive defiance: abstention as virtue, withdrawal as resistance. Both Bartleby and the hunger artist are often summoned as icons of retreat — figures quickly stripped of their gravity and rendered symbolic. Bartleby is reduced to his single phrase, a romantic emblem of private dissent. The hunger artist's body, transformed by starvation, mutates into a performance — something to be consumed, not grieved. When their stories are revived, their danger is defused and their meaning becomes hollow. And when we encounter a hunger strike as an image, it is metaphor that most threatens it. Defiance is dulled, recoded into a display. The violence of the act is repackaged, its cost diminished. Laila is not a symbol. Her body must not be collapsed into metaphor. Her resistance is not romantic in any sense. Laila's hunger strike is an incalculable risk — a wager she is staking on her body and her life. Her hunger is not performed; it is exacted, from within the flesh. There is no metaphor in what Laila is doing, and no ending open to interpretation. This is what it means for the body to speak when ambiguity is no longer a luxury. By refusing food, Laila reclaims her body — not as something to be confined or surveilled, but as a site of deliberate action, unsettling the very logic of sovereignty. In a context where bodies are routinely reduced — through arbitrary detention, solitary confinement, torture, medical neglect, extrajudicial killing and the bureaucratic violence of delay, denial of care and disappearance — they are rendered expendable: unprotected, unmourned, forgotten. Her act exposes a regime that does not distinguish between survival and extinction, where the question of life or death barely registers as consequence. Laila's strike is not a call for sympathy. It demands political and moral reckoning. It makes no plea to survive, but politicizes its own fragility. Her hunger is a form of indictment. In refusing nourishment, she invokes what Judith Butler names grievability — the right to be mourned, the demand that absence register as loss. But in the logic of the state, not every absence counts. Grievability is both a measure of recognition and a mechanism of erasure. Laila's emaciated body insists that Alaa's life be treated as one worth grieving — and that her own disappearance not fade into silence, but rupture it, as scandal, as accusation. Laila Soueif is not Bartleby, nor is she a caged hunger artist. Nothing about what she is doing is allegorical — it is maternal and political, directed squarely at the present. She knows this regime only responds to crises — and so she is decidedly turning herself into one. Through her body, she is simply stating: My son is imprisoned. I will starve myself so that he may be free. What makes Laila's act all the more unbearable is its unintended timing. Her hunger strike unfolds alongside the vast and systemic starvation of Gaza. Two hungers, distinct yet intertwined: one chosen, one imposed; one solitary, one borne by millions. They speak the same language — of bodies abandoned to perish, made visible only through their slow disappearance. Gaza is starved. Laila starves herself. While the images are not synonyms, they imply each other: bodies are perishing, and we are made to watch. Kafka once wrote that the world had lost interest in hunger artists. He may have been right. When the performance endures, engagement fades. Sympathy, if repeated, wears thin. Any act, sustained too long, loses its edge. But Laila does not seek sympathy. Nor does she await praise. Her silence does not comfort, it is indicting. The burden of the question is not hers, it's ours. In a world accustomed to pain, does this hunger still have the power to disturb? And if we can justify our silence — what does that make us? To say her act should not be glorified is not to diminish it, but to acknowledge its weight. Her hunger is a refusal of loss, a stand for what cannot be unseen. This loss is not hers alone. It wounds meaning, justice, memory. As in Gaza, where hunger becomes an instrument of erasure. Her body reveals what the state works to obscure: the collapse of the body, and of freedom, when reduced to bare life. If there is a lesson in Kafka or Melville, it is that misrecognition is fatal. The audience grows weary. Repetition numbs response. Death, when prolonged, becomes background noise. But Laila's hunger strike demands attention — not because it is heroic, or tragic, but because it is true, painful and directed at us. We, who still eat and sleep and wait. Her body carves itself into our awareness — not to move us emotionally alone, but to unsettle our silence, to confront our complicity in forgetting. Laila does not display her pain for pity. She asks for nothing. She forces us — those of us habituated to consuming images of suffering — to stop. To remain in the scene, not drift at its edge. To look, to feel, to register the weight — not as headline, but as summons. This is not only the story of a mother fighting for her son. It is a moral reality we cannot bypass without asking what part we play in silence, and in waiting. And if there is a question at the end, it is not about Laila. It is about us. Can we bear to know — and still remain silent? What will we do with that knowledge? What remains, then, is not a conclusion — but a responsibility.
Economist
09-05-2025
- Business
- Economist
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