Surveillance is a Joke: Ethnicized Masculinities in the High Tech Workplace

• In Event: 4323 - Culture and Identity

Abstract

Labor scholars studying high-tech workplaces tend to assume a homogeneous engineering culture dominated by white males, leaving ethnicity and gender invisible. To address this oversight, feminists examined female engineers’ less advantaged position in the high-tech sector, but failed to specifically articulate the dynamics of ethnicity and masculinity. This study shifts the attention to explore how ethnicity and masculinity produce diverse conditions that facilitate high-tech firms’ supervision and discipline. Based on 46 in-depth interviews and 11 months of ethnographic observation in a tech firm on the West Coast, I find that the high-tech firm generates pranks among its employees, in the process harnessing ethnicized masculine status positioning to enforce supervision and control. Three groups of engineers, white brogrammers, white geeks, and Asian engineers, drew on distinctive styles of “play” in these pranks, styles that come to be identified with the ethnicized masculinity of each group. These group modes of participating in the game, which came to be known as the “donut email,” reinforced ethnic hierarchies and ensured workplace discipline, even while the joking nature of the activity cast it as informal, voluntary and “fun.” The case study illustrates that pranks are integral to the high-tech workplace, as a means of generating both consent and mutual surveillance of workers. These findings contribute to scholarship on work and employment literature by unpacking how joking fits into labor process game scenarios, and identifying masculinity and ethnicity are two dimensions of work-floor games.

Author

• Tongyu Wu, University of Oregon