Video Surveillance and Social Control in a Comparative Perspective

Fredrika Björklund, Ola Svenonius, Fredrika Björklund, Ola Svenonius

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136182013
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This edited collection reports the results of a comparative study of video surveillance/CCTV in Germany, Poland, and Sweden. It investigates how video surveillance as technologically mediated social control is affected by national characteristics, with a specific concern for recent political history. The book is motivated by asking what makes video surveillance "tick" in three very different cultural settings, two of which (Poland and Sweden) are virtually unexplored in the literature on surveillance. The selection of countries is motivated by an interest in societies with recent experiences of authoritarianism, and how they respond to the global trend towards intensified technical means of control. With thorough empirical studies, the book constitutes an important contribution to security studies, surveillance studies, and post-communist area studies.

1 Video Surveillance in Theory and as Institutional Practice

Fredrika Björklund and Ola Svenonius

Introduction

One defining characteristic of the last twenty years is without a doubt the emergence of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as a central aspect in all areas of social life. Since the 1960s, and most notably after 1990 and the fall of the Iron Curtain, technological development has increased exponentially. Whereas the increasing dependence on, and belief in, technology’s potential for making our lives easier is generally a positive feature of late capitalism, there is also reason to be very wary of how ICTs are deployed. This regards specifically the ever-increasing availability of relatively inexpensive ICTs developed for purposes of surveillance and social control. In this volume, the type of equipment that we are especially interested in is cameras, and the surrounding, attaching, and enhancing technologies that improve their functionality. But surveillance is much more than the electrified computer circuit linked to a lens and a digital receiver. What is interesting about surveillance practices are their motivations, practice, and institutional ‘embeddedness’.

Surveillance in general, and video surveillance in particular, can be understood in terms of the indirect social control it facilitates, its central position in late modernity, and its function as a replacement for the direct social control that existed prior to the development of inexpensive ICTs. The discourse on surveillance in the social and human sciences owes much to the work of Foucault and Deleuze who, from an early stage, influenced critical scholars to take a very sceptical view of social control, as a perpetual machinery with no end to its appetite for increased discipline/control (Fiske 1998; Gandy 1993; Lyon 2006; Mathiesen 1989; Norris 2003). The possibility that surveillance technologies could be used for ill by authoritarian regimes was always there, but even in a democracy, freedom could be a technology of power as explored in Foucault’s and Deleuze’s work. During the 1970s and’80s, many Western European countries created strict institutional restrictions to prevent any trend towards the type of authoritarianism that existed in communist Eastern Europe, and which had been vividly described by George Orwell in 1984. However, in the decades after 1989–90, as the old geopolitical distinction between East and West lost much of its meaning, and surveillance technology became more available, governments started to relax the strict regulations that were once in place. At the same time, new ideas concerning security have gained ground across Europe, which promote video surveillance as an effective means of crime prevention and to increase perceptions of security (Svenonius 2011). As the memory of Communism fades, new technological forms of social control have become dominant where before there was fear of authoritarianism. This book seeks to understand how that change came to be and how surveillance practices are institutionalised today.

This book reports the results of a research project on video surveillance, the West-East Video Surveillance Project,¹ carried out at Södertörn University in Stockholm between 2008 and 2010. Whereas policy diffusion throughout Europe has occurred to a large extent in the area of data protection, throughout the European Union (EU) large differences can still be observed in the area of video surveillance (Bennett and Raab 2006; Löfgren and Webster 2009; Norris 2012; Webster 2004). Video surveillance is therefore a worthwhile study subject because it is (still) mainly a national policy issue. The political nature of the surveillance problematic is closely related to the sensitive issues of political rights and legitimacy. It would probably be a difficult task for the EU to unite member states like Germany and Poland around a common solution regarding cameras, because, as we shall see herein, these countries have radically different approaches to video surveillance; even despite the fact that police forces in both Poland and Germany all advocate the effectiveness of video surveillance in combatting crime (see Eric Töpfer’s and Paweł Waszkiewisc’s contributions in this volume).

However, against this positive discourse stands empirical research, primarily the evaluations made during the first decade of the new millennium. Welsh and Farrington (2007), for example, show that video surveillance may reduce crime only to a small extent, and only when other preventive measures are also taken. Their work is hitherto the most extensive meta-evaluation of video surveillance, and the authors reach the conclusion that the marginal effectiveness is even more true for surveillance systems outside the United Kingdom, possibly due to the lack of other security measures used in parallel to video surveillance (Welsh and Farrington 2007: 57). This national specificity is one of the reasons that makes the institutionalisation of video surveillance such a strange phenomenon. The very different approaches to video surveillance that exist in the EU therefore constitute a valid field of study, and a rich environment for national comparison. The book is guided by certain questions: How is video surveillance institutionalised in different national contexts? What are the differences in legal structures, political ambitions, and deployment practices? Besides the tentative results from the Urbaneye Project (Hempel and Töpfer 2004), and the edited volume on video surveillance by Doyle, Lippert, and Lyon (2012), international comparative studies designed to answer this question have been rare.

This book concerns the institutionalisation of video surveillance, but it also addresses some other challenges facing the current surveillance literature, such as the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon perspective, and the lack of comparative studies, particularly between Eastern and Western Europe. In general, studies on video surveillance seem to remain predominantly national and rarely venture across borders. But since the UK and United States have become the forerunners in video surveillance applications and research, we have learnt too little about countries beyond the Anglo-Saxon cultural sphere. Despite the increasing range of empirical knowledge in the surveillance literature, non-Anglo-Saxon contexts are under-represented in the surveillance literature, and this becomes even more evident in the case of Eastern Europe, where empirical studies are still almost non-existent. One possible problem with the Anglo-Saxon dominance in the field is that culturally specific understandings of central concepts and societal problematics always risk being taken prima facie and becoming internalised as ‘normal’. These conditions may have different meanings and are sometimes controversial where different notions of authority and statehood dominate.

In actuality, the problem is more fundamental than the issue of Anglo-Saxon dominance. Empirically more important is, as noted above, the general lack of comparative work on video surveillance. One reason for this is that video surveillance, although a central pillar of urban surveillance (Coaffee et al. 2009; Graham 2001) seems to have gone out of fashion. Today, researchers either focus on other types of technology or have shifted from a technologically determined focus to more general thematics such as governmentality, securitisation, or surveillance and ‘mega-events’. It has also been said that the lack of a coherent research programme on surveillance has hindered the emergence of a proper knowledge base that can spark the advancement of comparative research. Marx’s now famous description of the emerging genre of surveillance studies as “players without a field” (2007) is not without merit.

This situation motivated the research carried out at Södertörn University between 2008 and 2010. The aim of the West-East Video Surveillance Project was to deliver a substantial contribution to the empirical knowledge on surveillance in different countries, one that would allow us to grasp the contextual factors but at the same time broaden the approach using theories from the disciplines of sociology, law, and political science. In this book, we first and foremost let the empirical world guide the theory. The present volume is a collection of research reports that focus on video surveillance, its institutions, and social control in three countries: Germany, Poland, and Sweden. It gathers seven individual contributions that collectively provide comparative, descriptive, explanatory, and interpretive accounts of regulation, discourse, institutionalisation, implementation, and implications of video surveillance in all three countries, at both local and national levels.

In this introduction, we present the context of this book. First, we set out to discuss the issue of surveillance—that is, we situate the book in the relevant theoretical context. In short, we focus on surveillance as the institutionalisation of technologically mediated social control. This calls for a clarification of what we mean by social control and institution. Second, we discuss the implications of the comparative perspective as well as some methodological issues. Finally, we briefly introduce the contributions to the volume.

Surveillance as a Theoretical Concept

To social scientists, surveillance is interesting as a practice rather than as a technology. While many researchers in criminology and social science generally use surveillance as a prima facie concept—something empirically observable to all upon observation, much like a chair—the field known as surveillance studies approaches the concept analytically. It seeks to disentangle the characteristics of surveillance, to understand the ambiguities of different conceptualisations, and to bring out the implicit assumptions that are commonly not addressed outside this relatively young field. The field of surveillance studies was formed around the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ surveillance, and around the emerging theories of ‘disciplinary societies’ (Foucault 1977), ‘total surveillance societies’ (Rule 1973), and ‘maximum security societies’ (Marx 1988).² There was, from the beginning, a tendency towards a technological focus—as in research related to closed-circuit television (CCTV)—and social constructionism in the wake of Foucault’s influence from the 1970s onwards. The data protection literature, which had constituted a separate field of research and activism, merged to a certain degree with sociological theory towards the end of the 1980s, and became known as surveillance studies.

One of the problems with surveillance research since its inception has been its propensity towards over-theorising the object of analysis. The field of surveillance studies has seen extensive writing on discipline, liberty, and cultures of control, but often lacks a strong empirical base or, as Zureik puts it, “heavy on theorising and light on empirical research” (2007: 114). In our view, useful theories on surveillance are empirically manageable, give an enlightening account of the phenomenon, or are practice-oriented, focusing on surveillance as the purpose of data collection. Marx’s distinction between old and new surveillance (2002), Haggerty and Ericson’s application of Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory (2000), and Norris and Armstrong’s empirically based formulation of the political problem with surveillance (1999) are all examples of influential works that do not over-theorise the topic and in different ways allow us to understand the phenomenon of surveillance in a better way.

Conceptually, we can see two main trends in the surveillance studies of how to understand surveillance as such—that is, as opposed to surveillant practices. On the on hand, there are sociological theories with a Foucauldian and sometimes Marxist heritage which highlight social control and disciplinary power, and collective autonomy; one such example is, “Surveillance involves the collection and analysis of information about populations in order to govern their activities” (Haggerty and Ericson 2006: 3). Other ways of understanding the concept exist, such as Fiske’s, which conceives of surveillance as a “technology of whiteness that racially zones city space by drawing lines that Blacks cannot cross and whites cannot see” (1998: 69); and Lyon’s term ‘social sorting’ (2003, 2007a) is a way to pinpoint surveillance as a mechanism aimed at seamlessly separating and categorising groups. The commonality between Haggerty and Ericson’s, Fiske’s, and Lyon’s concepts of surveillance is clear, and partially lies in their intellectual debt to Foucault, who discussed surveillance as a technique of domination that acts both on a granular level within each subject and as a form of power (Foucault 1977, 2007). The intentionality, the analytical focus on populations, and the power/knowledge nexus are all quite specific aspects of these authors’ ways of understanding the topic.

A different way of conceptualising surveillance in more traditionally liberal terms would be to view it as an unlawful breach of the social contract when the monitored subject does not consent to being monitored. Surveillance from this data protection perspective can be defined as ‘the purposive collection of personal data’. This way of understanding surveillance is perhaps more suited to legal analyses, such as Patricia Jonason’s chapter in this volume, because it highlights the issue of privacy in relation to surveillance, which is the normative backbone in the analyses. The idea of privacy used to be quite central to surveillance studies, but it has more or less been declared a ‘lost fight’. Today, many scholars rather speak of ‘liberties’ in general than of ‘privacy’ (Bigo et al. 2010; Coaffee 2009). One reason for the decline in the analytical value of privacy might be because it has been quite thoroughly regulated, at least in Europe, and therefore depoliticised to an extent. As Eric Töpfer argues in this volume, we should not let the idea of privacy go but instead follow Regan (1995), who speaks of privacy as a collective value. The distinction between surveillance as social control and surveillance as personal data collection is arguably a worthwhile one, and a defining characteristic of surveillance studies.

In this book, surveillance exists somewhere between the positions discussed above. It is a technique of data gathering that performs the function of social control, irrespective of whether we are speaking about consumers, citizens, passengers, guests, or patients;³ but it is also a way of collecting personal data. Common to all contributions is the centrality of institutions (governmental bodies, law enforcement, and certain cultural practices). We focus on institutional practice, which arguably should be at the core of every theory on surveillance, whether Foucauldian, post-Marxist, or liberal. Institutions are the sites where cultural and historical narratives are reproduced, where norms are created and enforced, and where collectives exert control over individuals. This is a central understanding of surveillance that is remarkably absent in the surveillance studies literature and is something we try to remedy with this volume. Our argument is that in social science, surveillance is most interesting as an institutional practice—that is, as a collective endeavour, whether it be on Web 2.0, in urban security governance, in public discourse, in international police cooperation, or in regulation activities. Outside of the institutional focus, the distinction of old and new surveillance, the surveillance assemblage, and the political consequences of extensive CCTV are stripped of the power dimension and therefore risk losing much of their interesting complexity.

Institutional perspectives on surveillance can, however, take very different forms, which the contributions in this volume display with great clarity. Elfar Loftsson and Wojciech Szrubka stay close to the political science discourse on ‘the new institutionalism’ and seek to apply and develop this theoretical perspective. Ola Svenonius writes about surveillance practices as outcomes of institutional settings, while Fredrika Björklund focuses on discourses and their institutional effects. Patricia Jonason, Eric Töpfer, and Paweł Waszkiewicz, finally, focus on institutional practice in terms of regulation and law enforcement. Thus, even though all are concerned with issues of institutional power, each of the chapters focuses on different aspects of surveillance practices and highlights different institutional practices in each context. We share the aim of shedding light on the structural conditions for power and revealing aspects of this area that are not obvious to everyone. The social control approach to video surveillance opens up a critical agenda but is reflected in this book more as an approach to setting the questions to be asked than as a programme for policy improvements. At the end of this introduction, the chapters will be presented in more detail.

The present volum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Video Surveillance in Theory and as Institutional Practice
• Part I: Comparative Studies
• Part II: Case Studies
• Contributors
• Index