<i>Undercover Boss</i>: Disciplining Workers for Fun and Profit

There is no mistaking the dominant narrative of Undercover Boss, the U.S. version of the hit show that made its debut right after the Super Bowl in February of 2010 (Lambert and Holzman 15). Undercover Boss U.S. makes its point of view clear in the voice of God introduction that intones: “The economy is going through tough times. Many hardworking Americans blame wealthy CEO's out of touch with what's going on in their own companies but some bosses are willing to take extreme action to make their businesses better.” This introduction goes on to explain that each week a CEO will go undercover in their own company to try to understand their business and workers better. Undercover Boss functions as a cultural response to economic uncertainty and represents a clear attempt to reassure the American people after the economic collapse of 2008. While superficially Undercover Boss is a feel good story about the benevolence of corporate CEOs, a closer reading reveals it creates a myth that resolves itself squarely on the side of capital while simultaneously functioning as a warning to workers that they must devote all their time and mental space to the service of their bosses and corporate codes or they could be found wanting and therefore disciplined. In this way, Undercover Boss functions to discipline workers much in the way that the panopticon functioned to ensure a disciplined inmate. While a full reception study is beyond the scope of this article, this textual analysis of Undercover Boss can been seen as a first step leading to further analysis of the show and how it is received by audiences. Premiering after the Super Bowl gave Undercover Boss the benefit of a built in audience with over 39 million people watching the debut episode. While Undercover Boss has never replicated the post-Super Bowl numbers, it has remained strong in the ratings for its timeslot, which has varied between Sunday and Friday nights. Two years after the debut episode, TV Guide noted that Undercover Boss garnered 13.06 million viewers beating every show both in its timeslot and the whole night (Rowe). Switching broadcast days is usually a bad sign for a TV show, however, Undercover Boss has thrived on both Sundays and Fridays and it has had a positive effect on other CBS shows by lifting up their ratings as well. In its sixth season, Undercover Boss “returned to Friday and immediately gave CBS its biggest 8 pm audience of the season and boosted Hawaii Five-O and Blue Bloods as the network won primetime in all measures” (Fienberg). Despite Friday night audiences skewing older in terms of viewers, Undercover Boss performs well for key demographics. A ratings snapshot from 2013, its fifth season, shows that Undercover Boss was first in all households, first with adults 25-54 and first with adults 18-49“ (CBS). The episode has been picked up by numerous online and print news outlets, such as the Las Vegas Review and the Toledo Blade. Broadcast news channels also covered the show. Toledo CBS affiliate WTOL 11 publicized out live viewing party in downtown Toledo, where the red carpet was rolled out for local residents eagerly awaiting Marco's Pizza and Bryon's appearance on Undercover Boss. The episode won its timeslot in the ratings on Jan. 29 with 8.1 million viewers and has the second-highest overall viewership for the day. The exposure was productive for Marco's pizza, as well. Our website and mobile traffic on Jan.29 was eight times greater than was typical. More than 400 franchise leads were generated in the week after the episode aired, and more than 7,000 customers joined our eClub through a promotion tied to the Undercover Boss show (Marco's Pizza). In addition, Undercover Boss is unique in that it is more easily rebroadcast than other reality shows as the producer of the show explains, “Unlike serialized shows like The Amazing Race and Survivor&having weekly, closed ended episodes gives Undercover Boss repeatability” (Grosz). This repeatability has allowed the producers to sell the show to Discovery that broadcasts repeat episodes on TLC and OWN (Ibid). This opens up the audience further and increases revenue. Undercover Boss has mass appeal across age groups and it appears a large part of this audience is comprised of the working class. In a ranking of viewers' income, the Undercover Boss audience was in the bottom ten shows for audience median income at $55,800. To put this in perspective the top show for audience median income was Modern Family at $81,100 (Maglio). Undercover Boss has been a success and is currently enjoying its seventh season. Every episode of Undercover Boss follows the same format. It first introduces the business and the CEO who is to go undercover. Each undercover boss disguises themselves and takes on different jobs throughout their Enterprise. If the company is a franchise, they will go to a variety of locations often in different states. If it is in one fixed location, the boss will do a variety of jobs within the company. They most often do three to four jobs in each show. The narrative function is to show the breadth of jobs and workers within their company. However, it also serves as an extensive advertisement for the companies. The narration always extols the size and breadth of each company. For example the introduction to the season one “7-Eleven” episode exclaims, “This convenience store empire spans five continents. They've turned the local corner store into a global corporate icon.” Each company is introduced with superlatives regardless of how well known they are. In season six, “Rocket Fizz” was claimed to be “the fastest growing soda pop and candy shop franchise in America.” The show does not mention how many soda pop candy shop franchises exist in the United States. The premise of the show, the boss going undercover in their own company, is predicated on a deception of the workers in the company. In Undercover Boss, the workers know they are being filmed for the show but they are lead to believe the undercover boss is a contestant on a different reality show. In this way, Undercover Boss is different from shows such as Big Brother or Survivor where the participants are fully aware of what type of show they are on and are there by choice. In those shows, as Misha Kavka phrases it in Reality TV, “private behavior is voluntarily brought from behind closed doors into the public sphere of the media gaze” (90). In Undercover Boss, the workers believe their new coworker is the one inviting the media's gaze so when they take their coworker into their confidence they have no idea it is actually their boss. This is where we see the idea of the panopticon comes into play. Foucault used Jeremy Bentham's concept of the panopticon to examine how society can create order and discipline through observation even when the subjects are not being observed. For the audience, it is enough to know that a boss, perhaps their boss, could be working alongside them at any time. This acts “so to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action” (Foucault 201). Undercover Boss extends the surveillance culture right into our living rooms in the guise of entertainment and normalizes the strict adherence to company policy at all times as a workplace norm. The employees who transgress company policies are disciplined on national television for all to see. This exercise in humiliation functions not simply as the discipline of one worker; the disciplined worker becomes a proxy for all workers. For example, in the GSI Commerce episode, Danielle, a customer service operator, essentially answering phone complaints all day long, lost her cool with a customer. Danielle rightly points out that sometimes you cannot actually make a customer happy. They show the CEO fuming and stating, “It took every bit of constraint I had to let that call even go on. There wasn't a lot that Danielle was doing right. She had an attitude with customers.” He takes a break after the call and notes, “She is actually getting lucky that this show is being filmed because if she wasn't she would actually be getting walked out of here today.” Contrary to the CEO's observation, Danielle was actually extremely unlucky; she was filmed behaving rudely to a customer while unknowingly sitting beside the CEO of her company. She would later be unlucky enough to be disciplined on national television. In the dénouement credits stated, “Danielle underwent customer service retraining. She is no longer with the company” (“GSI Commerce”). This serves as a warning to the viewers by illustrating that the boss has the ultimate power over their livelihood, the power to fire. What accentuates this power is that the workers in Undercover Boss are most often low wage workers whose job demands a lot of work (including emotional labor) for little pay (Wharton 149). 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