#  Jeremy Mopsick (Harvard) 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **April 8, 2026** 

 04:00PM - 05:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **WJH 1550**  

For the Zoom link email jviator@fas.harvard.edu

 

 

 



 

**"Fissuring and Control: Franchising and Surveillance in Fast Food"**

Workplace surveillance is widely recognized as central to firms’ ability to coordinate production, yet theories diverge on why monitoring intensifies—whether to safeguard transactions (transaction-cost accounts) or to extract effort in a contested employment relationship (labor process accounts). This paper brings these perspectives into conversation by examining how franchising—a canonical fissured organizational form—shapes the prevalence and form of surveillance in U.S. fast-food chains. We link novel worker-level reports of technological monitoring and discipline from The Shift Project (2019–2025) to state–firm–year measures of franchise share and to contract provisions scraped and coded from Franchise Disclosure Documents. Across 12,452 hourly workers at 68 firms, higher franchise share is strongly associated with more intensive technology-based monitoring of work quality, location, actions, interactions, conversations, and speed, as well as greater use of gamified performance systems (leaderboards). By contrast, franchising is weakly or negatively related to direct managerial observation and many discretionary rewards and penalties. Analyses of franchise agreement contract clauses indicate support for both mechanisms: monitoring is higher where agreements grant franchisors broad access to establishment data systems and where clauses compress franchisees’ non-labor margins of adjustment (e.g., hours and restricted-supplier requirements). Taken together, the findings suggest franchising shifts control toward standardized, technology-mediated surveillance that simultaneously resolves cross-firm governance problems and intensifies effort while reducing reliance on overt, personalized discipline.



 

 



 

 

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