Beating the Box: Resistance to Electronic Surveillance in the U.S. Trucking Industry

How and why do people resist (perceived or actual) invasions of their privacy? Empirically, we know relatively little about resistance practices, and we lack developed theoretical frameworks to help us understand how and why it occurs. But resistance is fast becoming an important focus for scholarly attention, as surveillance becomes more pervasive, wholesale opt-out becomes less feasible, and circumvention strategies are criminalized. This talk takes a grounded approach to developing new theoretical and empirical knowledge about resistance to surveillance, based on an in-depth ethnographic study of digital monitoring in the United States trucking industry. I discover a wide range of resistance practices truckers use to foil regulatory and organizational surveillance of their work behaviors – ranging from material interventions to creative data manipulations, organizational strategies to collaborative evasion tactics that enlist seemingly disinterested third parties.