Surveillance: Work, Myth, and Policy

Personal Information, Borders, and the New Surveillance Studies

“…The field can also be organized around institutional areas beyond public health such as work (Jermier 1998;Maxwell 2005;Weckert 2005), consumption (Gandy 1993;Lace 2005), criminal justice (Brodeur & Leman-Langlois 2006;Elden 2003;Goold 2004), libraries (Minow & Lipinski 2003), military (Donahue 2006;Haggerty & Gaszo 2005), education (Webb et al 2004), health (Nelkin & Tancredi 1994Ghosh 2005), spatial design (Curry 1997;Flusty 2001;Monmonier 2004) and domestic and international security (Della Porta 1998, Cunningham 2004, Varon 2004, Davenport et al 2005, Boykoff 2006, Bigo 2006Cate 2004;Lyon 2003a;Monahan 2006). There is also work on particular subgroups such as children (Penna 2005;Mirabal 2006), the elderly (Kinney et al 2003;Kinney & Kart 2006), and the ill (Timmermans & Gabe 2002;Stephens 2005).…”

Communication Research and the Study of Surveillance

“…3 The labor of surveillance is the heart of policing, and it represents an underexplored area of research. 4 In stark contrast to this dearth of scholarship, the problem of surveillance labor has received an enormous amount of attention from state agencies and other institutions involved in the construction of surveillance architectures, from Bentham to post-9/11 U.S. (Maxwell, 2005). As highlighted in recent films like The Lives of Others (2007) and Red Road (2007), surveillance involves considerable work, and special kinds of skills on the part of its workforce.…”

“…His study was narrowly concerned with information processing within police organizations and the impact of IT on police organizational communications. Although he does not explicitly address it as such, the study was more closely related to workplace surveillance research-and Richard Maxwell's (2005) work on the labor of surveillancethan to the literature on police surveillance of the social. The subfield of organizational communication has much to offer the study of workplace surveillance.…”