Making Sense Behind the Lens: Closed Circuit Television and the Dutch Customs Office

Using Goold’s categorization the heuristics of the customs office’s CCTV-operators at Schiphol Airport (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) are mapped. Then, Weick’s sensemaking concept is applied to explain the difference in heuristics – and also in effectiveness - between the two customs office regions studied. It turns out that the inability of one of the regions to apply all of Weick’s properties provides the answer.

[1]  M. Mccahill.  The surveillance web : the rise of visual surveillance in an English city , 2002 .

[2]  Kees Boersma,et al.  Zooming in on 'heterotopia': CCTV-operator practices at Schiphol Airport , 2012, Inf. Polity.

[3]  E. Wenger,et al.  Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier , 2000 .

[4]  M. Nathan.  How past becomes prologue: a sensemaking interpretation of the hindsight-foresight relationship given the circumstances of crisis , 2004 .

[5]  Peter Adey,et al.  Secured and Sorted Mobilities: Examples from the Airport. , 2002 .

[6]  Mark B. Salter,et al.  Governmentalities of an Airport: Heterotopia and Confession , 2007 .

[7]  Frank Helten,et al.  Reactive Attention: Video Surveillance in Berlin Shopping Malls , 2002 .

[8]  Nick Tilley,et al.  Understanding Car Parks, Crime and CCTV: Evaluation Lessons from Safer Cities , 1993 .

[9]  Benjamin J. Goold,et al.  CCTV and Policing: Public Area Surveillance and Police Practices in Britain, Clarendon Series in Criminology , 2004 .

[10]  K. Pease,et al.  Burnley CCTV Evaluation , 1999 .

[11]  D. Lyon.  Surveillance Studies: An Overview , 2007 .

[12]  G. Armstrong,et al.  The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV , 1999 .

[13]  K. Weick.  ENACTED SENSEMAKING IN CRISIS SITUATIONS[1] , 1988 .

[14]  Gary Armstrong,et al.  CCTV AND THE SOCIAL STRUCTURING OF SURVEILLANCE , 2006 .

[15]  A. Giddens,et al.  The Nation State and Violence. Volume Two of a Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism , 1986 .

[16]  David Murakami Wood,et al.  The Growth of CCTV: a global perspective on the international diffusion of video surveillance in publicly accessible space , 2002 .