Editors' Note: Taking a Look at Surveillance Studies

watching, monitoring, recording, and processing the behavior of people, objects, and events in order to govern activity—has been a mainstay in both classic and contemporary sociology. From classic work by Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel to more contemporary work by Erving Goffman, Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, Gary Marx, and James Rule, sociological studies of how individuals, groups, organizations, communities, societies, and nation-states engage in surveillance and the consequence of their engagement have been central to addressing larger questions about social order and social control. Cognate disciplines, especially history, political science, criminology, and communications, have shaped how sociologists understand surveillance; likewise, the sociology of surveillance has influenced how scholars working in other disciplines understand the social organization of “watching” and “monitoring” as well as being “watched” and “monitored” in a plethora of contexts throughout history and cross culturally. In the modern context, surveillance studies are closely related to the study (sociological and otherwise) of social arrangements, policies, and practices connected to governance and militarism, technologies of identification and information management, consumer control and protection, human health and welfare, and crime control. In each of these domains, as well as others, surveillance operates at both the micro and macro levels. At the micro level, it is a venue through which people are sorted, classified, and differentially treated, while at the macro level, social structures are formed, institutionalized, and occasionally challenged and changed. Clearly then, sociology’s horse is a major contender in the surveillance race. As Monahan (2006) makes clear in a recent book on surveillance in everyday life, “from bio technologies in airports and borders, to video surveillance in schools, to radio frequency tags in hospitals, to magnet strips on welfare food cards, surveillance technologies integrate into all aspects of modern life, but with varied effects for different populations” (p. x ). Thus, we decided to use Contemporary Sociology as a forum to direct attention to surveillance as a sociological matter with significant, timely, and pressing public policy implications. As Haggerty and Ericson (2006), luminaries in the study of surveillance studies, recently explained in The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility, “surveillance raises some of the most prominent social and political questions of our age” (p. 3). On the national front, for example, the Domestic Surveillance and the Patriot Act coupled with the Bush administration’s prideful reliance on warrantless wiretaps raises serious questions about the proper role of government in a free society. In the consumer protection (and demise) realm, unbeknownst to most Corvette drivers, a palm-size microcomputer embedded in the Corvette air-bag system—a black box technically called an “event data recorder” (EDR)—is capable of collecting and downloading data on the driver’s behavior, including speeding, weaving, breaking, and routing patterns. These data can—and indeed have been—used against the driver in criminal proceedings, which in turn inspired Barry Steinhardt from the ACLU to comment, “We have a surveillance monster growing in our midst” (Roosevelt 2006) and Newsweek to report, “Few Americans realize that their cars can tattle on them” (p. 58). In line with this Orwellian intrusion, the use of public video surveillance and other visual technology by public and private entities is heralded as a reasonable way to discourage crime and, when it does occur, to detect criminals. Increases in surveillance are promoted as a way to enhance physical health, promote national security, ensure fair play in a variety of institutional settings, and, quite literally, monitor pets, children, sex offenders, and workers alike and find them when they are missing. To quote Haggerty and Ericson (2006) again, “surveillance is a feature of modernity” (p. 4) that has “expanded and in the process become more multifaceted and chaotic” (p. 21). It is a “tool used for some of the most soEDITORS’ NOTE: TAKING A LOOK AT SURVEILLANCE STUDIES