The Banality of Surveillance

Abstract

Surveillance is a ubiquitous and routine organizational practice. It has a long history as a tool of governance and a tacit right of the state. In the digital age, actors within both public and private institutions increasingly collect data on people and behaviors to classify, sort, and intervene upon people’s lives in ways that are consequential for individual trajectories and patterns of social stratification. Although theoretical scholarship on surveillance is rich, the corpus of empirical work on the subject is more limited, in part due to methodological and data challenges. Fortunately, scholars across a wide range of disciplines are turning their attention to surveillance and finding creative and ambitious strategies for overcoming these data limitations. Future research—particularly that which leverages new sources of data and comparative or experimental designs—may yield new insights about whether and under what conditions technologically mediated surveillance disrupts or ossifies existing inequalities.