1st Edition
The Surveillance-Industrial Complex A Political Economy of Surveillance
Today’s ‘surveillance society’ emerged from a complex of military and corporate priorities that were nourished through the active and ‘cold’ wars that marked the twentieth century. Two massive configurations of power – state and corporate – have become the dominant players. Mass targeted surveillance deep within corporate, governmental and social structures is now both normal and legitimate.
The Surveillance-Industrial Complex examines the intersections of capital and the neo-liberal state in promoting the emergence and growth of the surveillance society. The chapters in this volume, written by internationally-known surveillance scholars from a number of disciplines, trace the connections between the massive multinational conglomerates that manufacture, distribute and promote technologies of ‘surveillance’, and the institutions of social control and civil society. In three parts, this collection investigates:
- how the surveillance-industrial complex spans international boundaries through the workings of global capital and its interaction with agencies of the state
- surveillance as an organizational control process, perpetuating the interests and voices of certain actors and weakening or silencing others
- how local political economies shape the deployment and distribution of the massive interactions of global capital/military that comprise surveillance systems today.
This volume will be useful for students and scholars of sociology, management, business, criminology, geography and international studies.
Introduction: The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: Towards a Political Economy of Surveillance? Part I: International Networks and Global Circuits of Surveillance 1. The New Military Urbanism 2. Promoting Global Identification: Corporations, IGOs and ID Card Systems 3. Pandemic Governance: Using Event-Based Surveillance to Manage Emerging Infectious Diseases 4. The SAIC-SIEMENS ‘Super-Panopticon’ in the Athens 2004 Olympics as a Case of ‘McVeillance’: The Surveillance Industrial Complex’s Unscrupulous Global Business 5. Insecurity as an Engineering Problem: The Technosecurity Network Part II: Surveillance Capacity, Industrial Infrastructures and Resource Distribution 6. Critical Examination of the Role of Private Actors in the Fight Against Money Laundering – the Case of the UK Retail Banking Industry 7. Collaborative Surveillance: Configuring Contemporary Marketing Practice 8. The ‘Great Unwatched’ and the ‘Lightly Touched’: Surveillance and Stock Market Fraud Part III: Ground Level Circulations 9. The Imagined City: Power, Mystification and Synoptic Surveillance 10. From Accountability Policy to Surveillance Practices in Higher Education 11. Surveillance and Subjectivity: Everyday Experiences of Surveillance Practices 12. CCTV in Barcelona: The Political Economy of Surveillance in the (Wannabe) Global City
Biography
Kirstie Ball is Reader in Surveillance and Organization at the Open University Business School, UK.
Laureen Snider is Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University, Canada.
