Watching You Watching Me: Boundary Control and Capturing Attention in the Context of Ubiquitous Technology Use

Abstract

As information communication technologies proliferate in the workplace, organizations face unique challenges managing how and when employees engage in work and nonwork activities. Using interview and archival data from the U.S. Navy, we explore one organization’s attempts to shape individual attention in an effort to exert boundary control. We describe the organizational productivity and security problems that result from individual attention being engaged in nonwork activities while at work, and find that the organization manages these problems by monitoring employees (tracking attention), contextualizing technology use to remind people of appropriate organizational use practices (cultivating attention), and diverting, limiting, and withholding technology access (restricting attention). We bring together research on attention and control to challenge current definitions of boundary control, and we detail the understudied situational controls used by the organization to shape work–nonwork interactions in the moment. We highlight how situational control efforts must work together in order to capture attention and shape behavior, and we develop a model to explicate this ongoing process of boundary control. Our findings offer insight into the evolving challenges that organizations face in executing boundary control, as well as of organizational control more broadly, in the modern workplace.