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David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Oxford: Polity Press, 2007, 256 pp., $US 22.95 paper (978-0-74563-592-7), $US 64.95 hardcover (978-0-74563-591-0).
This book introduces the burgeoning cross-disciplinary field of surveillance studies. Derived from the French word, surveiller, meaning to "watch over," surveillance is defined as "the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection or direction" (p. 14). It includes everything from face-to-face encounters to mediated arrangements dependent on a wide and ever-growing range of information technologies. Surveillance is intrinsically ambiguous. It can entail watching to enhance the care and safety of the watched (e.g., the lifeguard at the beach) or it can involve an effort to control those whose conduct is under suspicion (e.g., police on a neighbourhood stakeout) and permit discriminatory practices.
To illustrate the remarkable range and prevalence of surveillance practices, Lyon describes several contemporary institutional sites, including the military, the nation-state, the workplace, and policing. Yet, the book also highlights consumption as an additional site of surveillance (pp. 40-44). This neglected realm involves use of radio-frequency identification and customer loyalty card programs and is arguably the most routine and fastest growing domain in which the details of people's practices are vigorously collected, analyzed, and then acted upon. Coupled with the workplace, the discussion of consumption makes clear that surveillance is a set of processes not limited to state minions watching the citizenry; it is equally at home in traditionally private spheres.
Befitting the expanding range and diversity of surveillance sites, Lyon abstains from grand theorizing, choosing instead a "tool-box" approach to explain surveillance. He sifts through a variety of theoretical traditions and specific contemporary works such as Gandy's early work on the "Panoptic Sort," distinguishing among those that "interpret the causes, the courses and the consequences of surveillance" (p. 47). In so doing he considers the roots of surveillance theories in the writings of Orwell and sociology's classical theorists, the latter illustrating that although cross-disciplinary...