[AnthonyMouse]

> A panopticon may produce “best behaviour”

This is not even a given. A panopticon tends to produce risk-aversion and metastasize Goodhart's Law. People do what they think they're expected to do and interpret vague rules in the most conservative way even if it's absurd/inefficient/immoral, or follow poorly drafted rules to the letter. There is a reason "work to rule" is a manner of labor strike.

> I have been trying to understand this fetish for controlling people through coercion that seems so prevalent in certain new modern business contexts, like amazon warehouse workers and delivery employees.

This tends to happen in rote unskilled jobs because they have to process however many packages per unit time and if workers spend 90% of each hour processing packages instead of 99.9% then they need 11 workers instead of 10. Even there it often doesn't work; results in high turnover or having to pay more to retain workers.

For the vast majority of jobs it doesn't even come close to working because the job isn't simplistic and uniform enough to have everything mapped out in advance. But some people have enough hubris to think they can run the bottom from the top.