NETWORKING - TRANSPARENCY VERSUS PRIVACY

Privacy issues have to be considered within the framework of both management methods and forms of cooperation between workers. New trends in work organization seem to aggravate rather than resolve the problems. Against this background we have to analyse networking which implies a change of kind making it even more difficult to secure workers' privacy. At theoretical level it is suggested that the fundamental ambivalence of networking should lead us to consider the determining impacts of social relations in production and of the economic and institutional context when designing, or analysing the impact of, computer systems