Employee drug testing is an invasive and controversial new
social control policy that burst into the American work place during the war on drugs of the 1980s. Workers, judges, and politicians divided over whether it was an unnecessary and unconstitutional program of surveillance or an effective and appropriate new weapon in the anti-drug arsenal. When the dust had settled, the new technique was widely used and had been strongly approved by the United States Supreme Court. This raises the fundamental question: Why was the
momentum behind testing so strong and the opposition to testing so ineffective?Drawing on theories of ideological hegemony and legal
mobilization, John Gilliom begins the…
