Technologies Of Social Control Research Articles

Disaster management in mining: an analysis of mediation as a technology of social control

Disaster management in mining: an analysis of mediation as a technology of social control

Digital technologies of social control: prospects and social consequences of their implementation

Introduction of digital technologies in all spheres of life is a factor that radically change the social interactions and mechanisms of social control. This rising trend, that turn the various digital technologies into main form of realization of “the social” is complex and contradictory. We are confronted more and more with multiplicity of social control with simultaneous unification of its procedures, determined by digital technologies. The functions of social control are transferred from human actors to machines and algorithms. The social control is automated. Under the cover of objectivity and neutrality such automatization contains political, economical and ideological imperatives. The machine has human core, yet difficult to discern. Implementation of algorithmic forms of governance, based on Big Data, significantly increases the scope of population monitoring and shifts the “power logic” to control and construction of opinions, creation of the demands, mobilizing action in accordance with the prescribed standards of conduct. COVID-19 Pandemic enhanced the activities of national States to take advantage of digital control over the population. In fact, during few months of quarantine measures in most countries unprecedented in its global reach and universal in their technical solutions instruments of control over the population have been deployed. In doing so the digital social control generates very specific forms of social asymmetry. There remains an open question: who has access to information, generated by the machines of control. For the development of modern smart cities and digitalization of social practices relevant and correct data are needed. Сompromise between citizens’ rights to privacy and rapid development of new smart technologies is inevitable. Personal data collected not only by the State but also by private corporations, especially by owners of digital platforms. Rights to obtain and use data need to be regulated and rules set for their commercial application. COVID-19 Pandemic, accelerating implementation of digital social control, reduced “public sensitivity” to violation of private borders for the sake of security. The need for a rapid response to COVID-19 changes the rules of the game as to how сitizens, organizations and authorities in different countries deal with personal data and actualizes the question, where the balance lies between confidentiality of personal data and public health and/or security.

‘I’m Not Afraid of the Dark’

‘I’m Not Afraid of the Dark’

The Estrangement of U.S. Colonialism from Counseling Discourses on Social Justice: Examining Intimacy and Care as Strategies to Sustain Democratic Citizenship

ABSTRACT In promoting social equality in the name of democratic citizenship, counseling discourses on social justice are largely disconnected from their U.S. colonial heritage. As history is typically erased from theoretical developments and research in counseling generally speaking, this essay mobilizes multiple disciplines in order to establish a conjuncture between the way counseling discourses on social justice address inequality and the way they inadvertently sustain the inequalities they seek to abolish. By grounding into U.S. colonialism as a form of imperial pragmatism in empire building, this essay explicates counseling as another technology of social control for which intimacy and care become categorically encased.

Coping and confinement on the border: the affective politics of music workshops in British immigration detention

ABSTRACT In the drive to securitise migration, immigration detention has expanded rapidly across western democratic states. This article investigates the function and meaning that music workshops have for foreign nationals held in UK detention centres. Drawing on scholarship on affect and emotion, I consider how the workshops produce separate affective forms of time and space that stand apart from, but also shape the dominant structures and social discourses of the detention centre. For many participants, caught in a state of perpetual dislocation and the hierarchies of detention centre orderings, the workshops are a space to escape or make sense of place, investing space with an affectivity that provides a meaningfully felt counterpoint to the austerity of the detention every day. Nevertheless, as much as music is a resisting practice and a means of reinventing detention, it also functions as a technology of social control, perpetuating hegemonic orderings. Thus, a closer look at the performance space draws attention to the ways in which music merges with other biopolitical technologies in structuring and defining life in detention.

New public management and the extension of police control: community safety and security networks in Canada

ABSTRACTThere are growing discussions regarding the need for collaborative responses for the provision of community safety, such that crime prevention efforts include the partnering of police with various community organisations and social services. In this article, we ethnographically examine one such development in Canada – community Situation Tables – to better understand the processes by which security networks are developed, implemented and governed. We argue that the managerial measures introduced to govern Situation Tables work as a technology of social control that redistributes responsibility for community safety and risk mitigation onto organisations and the clients they serve. Situation Tables, we argue, operate as if they are neutral entities. However, by looking at the mentalities, political and economic contexts of their development, implementation and governance identifies how they are influenced and shaped by traditional policing practices, which if not attended to carefully, can evade democratic accountability.

Reading the Spaces of Age in Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

This essay suggests that Alice Munro’s story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” participates in a gerontological debate concerning the nature and meaning of residential care for older people, complicating a dominant interpretation of the old age home as a technology of social control that marginalizes and depersonalizes its residents.

Securitisation and the mega‐event: an editorial introduction

I n August 2011 organisers of the London 2012 Olympics staged rehearsals for the Opening Ceremony due to commence exactly one year hence. Meanwhile, other parts of the city were experiencing rioting and looting on a scale not seen for 30 years. Whilst these two events were largely distinct, their simultaneous occurrence underscored an important point. For all the attention to the enclosure, artificial urbanism and contrived spaces that hosting sporting mega events create, they are accommodated in complex and often contested urban settings. Two years later, the links between the politics of the street and the sporting mega-event spectacle became cemented elsewhere. Echoing protests against Mexico City’s profligate Olympic spending at a time of austerity in 1968, June 2013 saw more than a million people take to the streets across 100 Brazilian cities. Although activist causes were manifold they unmistakably coalesced around the social and pecuniary impacts of Brazil’s staging of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. As mega-event spectacles, replete with promises of ‘regeneration’ and ‘legacy’, continue to encroach further into the urban realm, so different levels of action, activism, governance and policy necessarily become drawn together. For sporting mega-events, it is in the realm of security practice where the heat generated by internationally focused agendas abrading with local practices, processes and priorities is greatest. Here, the promise of stringent security guarantees is a precondition for hosts who operate under a constant risk of catastrophic reputational damage should they not be met. Of course, it is rare that, in such a broad sense, ‘security’ can ever be guaranteed and, for planners, its pursuit results in dwindling levels of acceptable risk. When applied to the complex, dynamic and unpredictable realm of the global city, the contemporary stage for sporting mega events, such promises are even harder to keep. The result is uneasy coalitions of international, national, regional and local security practice; a merger of civil, military and criminal justice techniques and technologies of social control; and a proliferation of security priorities. Yet whilst some of these measures may be exceptional for the cities that host them, they often represent very familiar elements of mega-event security programmes.

On the road: a social itineration of India

Taking early nineteenth-century European travel narratives as its point of entry, this article suggests ways in which the subject of roads in India can be more fully addressed. Rather than regarding them as purely a means of circulation (of goods, ideas and personnel), roads can be interpreted as a manifestation of linear modes of power and, for Europeans and Indians alike under colonial rule, as a salient site of social observation, engagement and friction. Roads constitute an underappreciated site of social interaction – voluntarily, perhaps, as among pilgrims and other travellers, but also, at the other extreme, through the contrived sociability of individuals’ intent on deception and theft. Roads were subject to coercive forms of social interaction as with convicts and famine relief workers obliged to labour on their construction and repair. Roads provided routes to new social locations, but also avenues for political display and ideological intervention and for the articulation of new technologies of social control and state action. Although this article's approach is primarily historical, it suggests ways in which the subject of roads might be of wider interdisciplinary interest and more contemporary significance.

Consumerism and Control: Archaeological Perspectives on the Harvard College Buttery

Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offers a unique setting through which to explore cultural changes within 17th- and 18th-century America, including shifting foodways and consumerisms. Harvard’s early leaders constructed their collegiate community by controlling many aspects of scholars’ lives, including their eating, drinking, and purchasing practices. Between 1650 and 1800, the college operated the “Buttery,” a commissary where students supplemented meager institutional meals by purchasing snacks and sundries. As a marketplace, the buttery organized material practices of buying and selling as people and things flowed through it. Archaeological and documentary evidence reveals how college officials attempted to regulate, but lagged behind, improvisational student consumerisms. The buttery market functioned both as a technology of social control and an opportunity for individual agency, providing broader lessons for consumer studies.

Civil society or ‘comprador class’, participation or parroting?

This article critically looks at the interfaces between the ideal notions of civil society and participation within the remit of Bangladesh’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) formulation process. On the one hand, the idea of civil society has been likened to a renaissance and is often considered to be the most likely route out of development ‘problems’, particularly in the poor countries. Dominant development discourses have scripted the liberal interpretation of civil society as the only game in town. However, on the other hand, as a consequence of growing criticism on the failure of top-down development approach in the late-1960s, and throughout most of the 1970s, there was a sudden upsurge of interest that ordinary citizens might have a part to play in the development process. A generalized consensus took shape that people’s participation in projects is an important component of development programmes and a means to their success and hence participation has turned out to be a ‘new paradigm’ of development. The PRSP framework, that precepts a romantic marriage between civil society and participation, was foisted by two major International Financial Institutions (IFIs) as a condition of further debt and other development assistance for all poor countries. Participation from ‘all relevant stakeholders’ including civil society was trumpeted as a significant policy shift from previous development prescriptions of these IFIs. This article presents observation from 36 semi-structured interviews with civil society representatives including key people who prepared and finalized the PRSP of Bangladesh and the review of six daily national papers (September 2004 to October 2005). This piece argues that, in theory, participation can be manifested as the ‘key’ for development, but in practice, participation can be an iron hand in a velvet glove. Participation can turn into parroting and often resemble similar views that are ‘expected’ and required to validate external framework. Moreover, through such process of mainstreaming participation, an interest group within the civil society can emerge who has the technical knack of producing development policy according to donor recipe with some flavour of participation. This work therefore asks whether civil society and participation should be used as technologies of social control or as anti-hegemonic and anti-clientelistic forces in order to empowering marginalized members of the society.

French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment by Paul Rabinow

Author(s): Fischler, Raphael | Abstract: French Modern is one of these books that one should read twice: first time, in order to enjoy author's storytelling; second time, to learn from his skillful analysis. The story, in this case, is that of gene­ sis of French urbanisme. It is story of technicians of general ideas: social reformers and statisticians, military men and politicians, architects and social scientists whose work lies in the middle ground between high culture or science and ordinary life (p. 9). Rabinow tells us about their efforts to fashion new fields of knowledge and technologies of social control, as well as new urban forms and social spaces. Through this story, Rabinow analyzes specific forms of rationality that these men embodied and articulated, forms of rationality that made possible a new mode of social regulation: modern city planning. While book is about French planning, it has lessons for American planning practi­ tioners, historians, and theorists, who may find that field of planning evolved in similar ways on both sides of Atlantic. Both French and American planning share an early emphasis on hygiene and both gradu­ ally came to rely on universal standards in order to analyze and regu­ late city and its population.

Discipline and Punish in the 21st Century : New Technologies of Social Control in France

L’article entreprend une actualisation des analyses de Michel Foucault sur la question du contrôle social et de la gouvernementalité pénale. Si la méthode et les concepts de Foucault sont toujours pertinents, ils permettent d’aborder des rationalités inédites en la matière. Elles se traduisent d’abord par une nouvelle économie des illégalismes, autour d’un imaginaire sociopolitique de la violence et des incivilités. Le quadrillage n’est plus disciplinaire mais réticulaire, reposant sur des réseaux combinés d’objets, d’information et de personnes et tendant vers une extériorisation de la norme. Enfin, la mobilisation du consentement du sujet mis en cause dans la décision et l’exécution de la peine achèvent d’exonérer l’institution de la légitimation de la norme et de son application, la renvoyant vers une figure du sujet social libre et sa volonté.

Introduction: What is Institutional Ethnography?

“Institutional ethnography” is the label that has come to be used for an approach to investigation of the social that focuses on “textually-mediated social organization” (Smith 1990b). Developed and named by Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith (1987) in the early 1980s, institutional ethnography has matured over the past several decades and spread not only internationally in sociology but through a number of other fields such as nursing, education, social work, planning, and so on. The practice of institutional ethnography has developed incrementally; Smith’s first writing provided a sketch for the approach, but she always insisted that it was a method that researchers would build collaboratively, working out how to proceed as we go along. Those using the approach have been sharing work through informal meetings and networking, elaborating and specifying the outlines of institutional ethnography, and developing the approach in working with students (DeVault and McCoy 2002; and, for a useful teaching text, Campbell and Gregor 2002). Recently, Smith herself has produced a pair of books that elaborate and illustrate her vision of this “alternative sociology” (Smith 2005, forthcoming). Institutional ethnographies are built from the examination of work processes and study of how they are coordinated, typically through texts and discourses of various sorts. Work activities are taken as the fundamental grounding of social life, and an institutional ethnography generally takes some particular experience (and associated work processes) as a “point of entry.” The work involved could be part of a paid job; it might fall into the broader field of unpaid or invisible work, as so much of women’s work does; or it might comprise the activities of some “client” group. In any case, there is recognition that institutional ideologies typically acknowledge some kinds of work and not others. Thus, the investigator attends to all of the work that’s done in the setting, and also notes which activities are recognized and accounted institutionally and which are not. Analysis proceeds by way of tracing the social relations people are drawn into through their work (with the term “social relations” taken in its Marxist sense to mean not relationships but connections among work processes). The point is to show how people in one place are aligning their activities with relevances produced elsewhere, in order to illuminate the forces that shape experience at the point of entry. Many institutional ethnographers have adopted a rhetoric of “mapping” to highlight the analytic goal of explication rather than theory building; the analysis is meant to be “usable” in the way that a map can be used to find one’s way. Institutional ethnography’s focus on texts comes from an empirical observation—that technologies of social control are increasingly and pervasively textual and discursive (Smith 1999). Texts such as medical charts, enrollment reports, strategic plans, and so on are mechanisms for coordinating activity across many different sites. Social science is sometimes a part of this coordinative apparatus, and perhaps as a result, we've tended to take this kind of textual coordination for granted, too often looking “through” texts without noticing their power or

A State Accountability System as a Technology of Social Control: The Case of Rhode Island, USA

The state of Rhode Island, USA has recently embarked on a new state accountability system for public elementary and secondary education. An overview of the system is provided coupled with an understanding of accountability systems as technologies of social control. The ramifications of such technologies are discussed along with the costs, benefits, uncertainties, and necessary tensions associated with such systems.

Technologies of social control: crowd management in liberal democracy

Crowd protest activity within liberal democratic countries of the West brings into view a series of tensions within the liberal democratic mode of rule. Crowds must be controlled, but at the same time the state should not limit the right of communities to protest. In this paper we argue that these tensions may be resolved by adopting a form of rule which seeks to manage crowds throguh authority internal to the crowd, by means of strategies aimed to intensify the self-regulatory processes of crowds. Liberal strategies and tactics of social control are identified in South African legislation during the period of transition from apartheid's repressive mode of rule to the democracy of the new Sount Africa. throughout the paper it is argued that liberal democrative forms of crowd management find their conditions of possibility in recent developments in crowd psychology, which treat crowds as relational, self-regulating and indentitied phenomena.

La société de sécurité maximale

Critical questions regarding the technology of social control are considered. Characteristics of the maximum security prison are used as a model to analyze developments in the broader society. We are moving toward, rather than away from becoming a maximum security society. Such a society is composed of six interrelated sub-societies: 1. an engineered society; 2. a dossier society; 3. an actuarial or predictive society; 4. a porous society; 5. a self- monitored society, and 6. a suspicious society. Examples are given and the positive an negative aspects discussed. The paper considers fifteen « techno- fallacies » with public policy impliations, which accompany the move toward a maximum security society.