Research themes

My research examines how digital systems reshape work, management, and organisational life. It sits at the intersection of digital business, Information Systems, surveillance studies, and the critical study of digital technologies in organisational settings. Across my work, I am particularly interested in how surveillance, visibility, privacy, trust, resistance, and digital control are produced, negotiated, and contested within organisations.

My research is organised around four connected themes: conceptual development, sociotechnical surveillance formation, ethical tensions, and contested experiences (see figure above).

Conceptual development

This theme focuses on the development of concepts, frameworks, typologies, and multilevel models that clarify how surveillance, privacy, trust, resistance, and digital control operate in organisational life.

My contributions include the technology-culture interaction model of the panoptic gaze (Kayas et al., 2008), the concepts of government-rendered surveillance and the employee-management-public dialectic (Kayas et al., 2019), and the conceptualisation of students as surveillance instruments in higher education, including top-down and bottom-up vertical surveillance through students (Kayas et al., 2020). I have also developed work on resistance as the disruption of performance information flows (Kayas et al., 2020), an integrative conceptual framework of workplace surveillance (Kayas, 2023), socially negotiated privacy boundaries, intimate territory, and privacy-enabled academic identity (Kayas et al., 2024).

My work has developed a sociotechnical framework of workplace surveillance and identified the sociotechnical characteristics influencing the type of surveillance engendered in organisations (Kayas et al., 2025). It has also theorised fragile and contested trust in digital workplace surveillance, trust as a governance logic, and trust by design (Kayas, 2026). With Zamani, I have developed a managerial resistance framework, revealing self-protective and value-driven managerial motivations for resistance as well as resistance tactics such as shielding employees, data obfuscation, and discursive challenge (Kayas & Zamani, 2026).

Sociotechnical surveillance formation

This theme examines how surveillance is formed through the interaction of digital technologies, organisational culture, policy, performance regimes, management practices, and employee agency. Rather than treating surveillance as a direct outcome of technology, this work examines how surveillance emerges through the interaction of social and technical arrangements.

My work has shown how workplace surveillance is formed through the interaction of enterprise systems and organisational culture (Kayas et al., 2008), and through the relationship between central government policy, public sector performance management, and local authority enterprise systems (Kayas et al., 2019). It has also examined how concepts, antecedents, and outcomes of workplace surveillance operate across organisational, managerial, and employee levels (Kayas, 2023).

My later work develops this sociotechnical perspective by examining how organisational culture, leadership, management, employees, focus, boundary, datafication, automation, timeline, and frequency shape the characteristics of workplace surveillance (Kayas et al., 2025). With Zamani, I have also examined how managerial discretion, system affordances, public service ethics, hierarchy, dashboards, reporting tools, and performance cultures shape managerial resistance to digital workplace surveillance (Kayas & Zamani, 2026).

Ethical tensions

This theme examines the ethical tensions created by surveillance, including fairness, trust, proportionality, accountability, care, transparency, and public service values. My work is concerned with how surveillance systems are justified, governed, challenged, and experienced as ethically consequential organisational practices.

My research has thus examined ethical tensions between service quality and performance targets in public sector surveillance (Kayas et al., 2019), and has analysed control, privacy, trust, fairness, and employee outcomes in workplace surveillance (Kayas, 2023). It has also developed a sociotechnical account of responsible surveillance implementation, with particular attention to transparency, intrusiveness, consent, trust, and resistance (Kayas et al., 2025).

More recent work examines fairness, proportionality, selective application, opacity, and the contradiction between trust rhetoric and control practices in digital workplace surveillance (Kayas, 2026). With Zamani, I have also examined how care, dignity, public service ethics, employee protection, data accuracy, accountability, and professional judgement shape managerial responses to surveillance systems (Kayas & Zamani, 2026).

Contested experiences

This theme focuses on how employees and managers experience, negotiate, resist, trust, distrust, protect, and reinterpret surveillance within organisational settings. It examines surveillance not only as a system of observation and control, but also as something lived, negotiated, and contested by organisational actors.

My work has examined employee and managerial resistance to government-rendered surveillance in local government (Kayas et al., 2019), and academic resistance to student evaluations of teaching as a form of surveillance, including the disruption of performance information flows (Kayas et al., 2020). It has also explored how academics negotiate privacy boundaries, intimate territories, trust, and academic identity in digitally mediated work (Kayas et al., 2024).

More recently, my research has examined employees’ and managers’ fragile and contested experiences of trust in digital surveillance (Kayas, 2026). With Zamani, I have also examined managerial shielding, data obfuscation, discursive challenge, and resistance to decontextualised performance metrics in a public sector organisation (Kayas & Zamani, 2026).

Together, these themes show how my research develops critical and sociotechnical perspectives on digital surveillance, organisational visibility, ethical tensions, and contested experiences of digital systems at work.