Digital Panopticism and organizational power

With the focus on organizations, this article describes power in relation to mediated surveillance using Luhmann’s systems theory, poststructuralist theory and theory of media sociography. It aims to sketch out the main issues in contemporary surveillance discourse and illustrate the current situation, as well as discuss surveillance from the perspective of poststructuralist theory in relation to Luhmann’s concepts of trust, risk and especially power. The underlying media sociographical question is which storing-, retrieving-, localisation- and temporal possibilities for communication and surveillance do digital media provide and how the realization of this potential feeds back into organizations’ power structures.