Daniel Neyland

Steve Woolgar

The book aims to explore how governance and accountability are mediated through material relations involving ordinary everyday objects and technologies. It draws on empirical materials in three main areas: waste management and recycling; the regulation and control of traffic; and security and passenger movement in airports.

Ontology and Accountability

Mundane Governance

Benjamin J. Goold

The field of surveillance studies is growing at a rapid rate, fuelled by a growing interest in the questions that lie at its heart and a deep unease about the future of individual privacy. What information is held about us, to what extent that information is secure, how new technologies ought to be regulated, and how developments in surveillance will affect our ordinary and everyday lives? Deliberately multi-disciplinary in character, this book examines these questions from the perspective of a broad range of fields, including sociology, management research, law, literary analysis and internet studies. As privacy comes under increasing threat and surveillance activities grow in quantity and diversity, so too the academic field needs to develop in new directions, form new perspectives, and gain new insights. In keeping with this aim, the chapters of this book consider how individuals, organisations, and states are engaged in the compilation, mobilization, scrutiny and use of ever increasing amounts of information. Divided into three sections focusing in turn on legal regulation, technologies of surveillance, and the future of privacy and surveillance, this collection provides a unique and eclectic insight into the question of how the spread of surveillance is changing our lives and the societies in which we live.

New Directions in Surveillance and Privacy

Divided into three sections focusing in turn on legal regulation, technologies of surveillance, and the future of privacy and surveillance, this collection provides a unique and eclectic insight into the question of how the spread of surveillance is changing our lives and the societies in which we live.

New Directions in Surveillance Privacy

Benjamin Jervis Goold

The field of surveillance studies is developing at a rapid rate, fuelled by a deep unease about the future of individual privacy and growing interest in a number of questions that lie at the heart of the discipline. What information is held about us? To what extent is that information secure? How should new technologies be regulated? How will developments in surveillance affect our ordinary and everyday lives? Deliberately multi-disciplinary in character, New Directions in Surveillance and Privacy examines these questions from a range of different perspectives, and includes contributions from leading academics in sociology, law, management studies, literary analysis and Internet studies. As privacy comes under increasing threat and surveillance extends into more and more areas of our daily lives, surveillance studies needs to develop in new directions, form new perspectives, and gain new insights. In keeping with this aim, the chapters of this book consider how individuals, organisations, and states gather, analyse, and share ever-increasing amounts of our personal and private information. Divided into three sections, this book contains chapters touching on issues of legal regulation, changes in the technology of surveillance, and on the future of privacy and surveillance. In so doing, this new collection provides a unique and eclectic insight into the question of how the spread of surveillance is changing our lives and the societies in which we live.

Sveta Milyaeva

Véra Ehrenstein

A provocative analysis of market-based interventions into public problems and the consequences. Market-based interventions have been used in attempts to solve numerous public problems, from education to healthcare and from climate change to privacy. Scholars have responded persuasively through critiques of neoliberalism. In Can Markets Solve Problems? Daniel Neyland, Véra Ehrenstein, and Sveta Milyaeva propose a different route forward. There is no single entity knowable as “the market,” the authors argue. Instead, they examine in detail the devices, relations, and practices that underpin these market-based interventions. Drawing on recent work in science and technology studies (STS), each chapter focuses on a different intervention and critically explores the market sensibility around which it is organized. Trade and exchange, competition, property and ownership, and investment and return all become the focus of a thorough exploration of what it means to intervene in public problems, how problems are composed, and how solutions are continually reworked. Can Markets Solve Problems? offers the first book-length STS enquiry into markets and public problems. Weaving together rich empirical descriptions and conceptual discussions, the book provides in-depth insights into the workings of these markets, their continuous evolution, and the consequences. The result is a new avenue of critical inquiry that moves between the details of specific policies and the always-emerging, collective features of this landscape of intervention.

An Empirical Inquiry into Neoliberalism in Action

Can Markets Solve Problems?

This open access book begins with an algorithm–a set of IF...THEN rules used in the development of a new, ethical, video surveillance architecture for transport hubs. Readers are invited to follow the algorithm over three years, charting its everyday life. Questions of ethics, transparency, accountability and market value must be grasped by the algorithm in a series of ever more demanding forms of experimentation. Here the algorithm must prove its ability to get a grip on everyday life if it is to become an ordinary feature of the settings where it is being put to work. Through investigating the everyday life of the algorithm, the book opens a conversation with existing social science research that tends to focus on the power and opacity of algorithms. In this book we have unique access to the algorithm’s design, development and testing, but can also bear witness to its fragility and dependency on others.

Daniel Neyland

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