The Social Structuring of Digital Monitoring: How Resource‐Rich Employees Are Shielded From More Invasive Levels of Digital Monitoring

ABSTRACT Digital monitoring represents a new dimension of external control. We focus on variation in the experiences and perceptions of digital monitoring among employees with differing access to resources due to their embeddedness in differentially resource‐rich organizations and jobs. Based on German linked employer–employee survey data, our results suggest that employees in resource‐rich organizations that are able and willing to pay relatively high wages to secure work performance are less likely to experience the use of automatically stored data on work steps for performance evaluation and to perceive digital monitoring as constant surveillance. The same is true of employees in resource‐rich jobs with high task complexity. These patterns did not emerge for the mere automatic storage of data about work steps, which suggests that—in contrast to more invasive levels of digital monitoring—employees' experiences of this basic level are less likely structured by their embeddedness in organizational inequality regimes.