Testes de drogas no ambiente de trabalho : vigilância e controle social na sociedade contemporânea

Abstract

Workplace drug testing is a common practice in large companies in Brazil. In this work this practice is approached sociologically and questions related to the tests are debated from an ethnographic research held within a specific company that maintains a regular drug testing program on its employees. To contextualize the theme in the debate about forms of social control in contemporary society, Foucault's genealogy of power is used, constructing an analytical framework that allow to describe the workplace drug testing as a surveillance practice representative of the biopolitical governmental power arrangement, a mechanism whose power effects are less focused on disciplining individuals than on fabricate specific types of freedom and on the management of the conduct of free subjects through actuarial techniques and social classification. By adopting an interpretive approach to understand how employees themselves give meaning to the workplace drug testing, empirical research provides an analysis of the values and social meanings articulated by such practices. At the end it is possible to delineate some new tendencies in contemporary social control, which presents itself in much more diffuse and decentralized ways, as well as to understand some discourses and symbolic meanings that legitimize and sustain it. In addition, the paper also aims to contribute to the methodological issue by presenting some discussions on perspectives and approaches to empirical research on surveillance. By understanding how individuals perceive and deal with these new forms of social control, this work seeks to collaborate with efforts to better understand contemporary society and some of its more challenging social processes - such as changes in conceptions of freedom, individual responsibility, and security.