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This paper aims to present results of a study that focused on the question of how computer and data experts think about Internet and social media surveillance after Edward Snowden’s revelations about the existence of mass-surveillance systems of the Internet such as Prism, XKeyscore and Tempora. Computer and data experts’ views are of particular relevance because they are confronted day by day with questions about the processing of personal data, privacy and data protection.

The authors conducted two focus groups with a total of ten experts based in London. As London is considered by some as the surveillance capital of the world, and has a thriving Internet industry, it provided a well-suited context.

The focus group discussions featured three topics that are of crucial importance for understanding Internet and social media surveillance: the political economy surveillance in general; surveillance in the context of the Snowden revelations; and the question what the best political reactions are to the existence of a surveillance-industrial complex that results in political and economic control of the Internet and social media. The focus groups provided indications that computer and data experts are pre-eminently informed on how Internet surveillance works, are capable of critically assessing its implications for society and have ideas about on what should be done politically.

Studies of privacy and surveillance after Edward Snowden’s revelations have taken on a new dimension: Large-scale covert surveillance is conducted in a collaborative endeavour of secret services, private communications corporations and security companies. It has become evident that a surveillance-industrial Internet surveillance complex exists, in which capitalist communications and security corporations and state institutions collaborate.

Social media platforms, along with networked devices and applications, enable their user base to produce, access and circulate large volumes of data. On the one hand, this development contains an empowering potential for users, who can make otherwise obscured aspects of social life visible, and coordinate social action in accordance. Yet the preceding activities in turn render these users visible to governments as well as the multinational companies that operate these services. Between these two visions lie more nuanced accounts of individuals coordinating via social data for reactionary purposes, as well as policing and intelligence agencies struggling with the affordances of big data.

This chapter considers how individual users as well as police agencies respectively actualise the supposedly revolutionary and repressive potentials associated with big data. It briefly considers the broader social context in which ‘big data’ is situated, which includes the hardware, software, individuals and cultural values that render big data meaningful and useful. Then, in contrast to polarising visions of the social impact of big data, it considers two sets of practices that speak to a more ambivalent potentiality. First, recent examples suggest a kind of crowd-sourced vigilantism, where individuals rely on ubiquitous data and devices in order to reproduce law and order politics. Second, police agencies in various branches of European governments report a sense of obligation to turn to social data as a source of intelligence and evidence, yet attempts to do so are complicated by both practical and procedural challenges. A combination of case studies and in-depth interviews offers a grounded understanding of big data in practice, in contrast to commonly held visions of these technologies.

First, big data is only ever meaningful in use. While they may be contained in databases in remote locations, big data do not exist in a social vacuum. Their impact cannot be fully understood in the context of newly assembled configurations or ‘game-changing’ discourses. Instead, they are only knowable in the context of existing practices. These practices can initially be the sole remit of public discourse shaped by journalists, tech-evangelists and even academics. Yet embodied individual and institutional practices also emerge, and this may contradict or at least complicate discursive assertions. Secondly, the range of devices and practices that make up big data are engaged in a bilateral relation with these practices. They may be a platform to further reproduce relations of information exchange and power relations. Yet they may also reconfigure these relations.

This research is limited to a sample of respondents based in the European Union, and based at a particular stage of big data and social media monitoring uptake. Subsequent research should look at how this uptake is occurring elsewhere, along with the medium to long-term implications of big data monitoring. Finally, subsequent research should consider how citizens and other social actors are coping with these emerging practices.

This chapter considers practices associated with big data monitoring and draws from cross-national empirical data. It stands in contrast to overly optimistic as well as well as totalising accounts of the social costs and consequences of big data. For these reasons, this chapter will be of value to scholars in internet studies, as well as privacy advocates and policymakers who are responsive to big data developments.

A hockey riot occurred on June 15, 2011 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Riots involve crowds. The presence of social media changes the spatial and temporal elements of the crowd, a process that contributes to online collective interpretations of social events, including riots. A key element of this process concerns the definition of the situation. Using Qualitative Media Analysis, we illustrate how the researcher of everyday life can retrieve and examine an accumulation of “definitions of situations” from social media, a process that provides insight into collective interpretations, including how online users made sense of the Vancouver riot. We begin with a short overview of the riot, briefly profile collective behavior in relation to the definition of the situation, and contextualize the importance of media in this process. We then examine what select posts made on social media can tell us about collective meaning making in relation to the Vancouver riot. We conclude by suggesting some directions for future research.

David L. Altheide, Ph.D., is Emeritus Regents’ Professor of the Faculty of Justice and Social Inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, where he taught for 36 years. His work has focused on the role of mass media and information technology in social control. His most recent books are Qualitative media analysis (2nd ed., Sage, 2012) and Terror post 9/11 and the media (Lang, 2009). Altheide received the Cooley Award three times, given to the outstanding book in symbolic interaction, from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction: In 2007 for Terrorism and the politics of fear (2006); in 2004 for Creating fear: News and the construction of crisis (2002); and in 1986 for Media power (1985). Altheide received the 2005 George Herbert Mead Award for lifetime contributions from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and the society’s Mentor Achievement Award in 2007.

The decision-making styles of human resource professionals (HRPs) in resolving complaints of sexual harassment are extremely important as they form the backbone of effectiveness in the resolution of a complaint. The purpose of this paper is to explore these decision-making styles and gauge their effectiveness in resolving such complaints.

Employing a qualitative research approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 35 HRPs of 30 companies in Sri Lanka.

We found eight decision-making styles used by HRPs in resolving complaints of sexual harassment: (1) analytical, (2) behavioural, (3) directive, (4) conceptual, (5) avoidant, (6) dependent, (7) intuitive and judgemental, and (8) manipulative and persuasive. HRPs were found to generally adopt combinations of these styles, with one or two styles being dominant while one or two were used as back-up styles. In resolving complaints of sexual harassment, certain combinations of these styles were found to be more effective than others because they led to procedural, distributive and interactional justice.

The implications of these findings for self-reflection and in training for the HRPs are also discussed.

The findings of this study assist us in understanding how and why HRPs make different decisions when resolving seemingly similar complaints and the effectiveness of such decisions.

This paper explores some of the gaps and contradictions that can often be found in public sector leader development approaches and then examines some of the theoretical assumptions related to these gaps and contradictions. The purpose of this examination is to further identify and define some corresponding gaps within public sector leadership development theory, as well as to encourage future theory development.

Using three common examples of contradictions often found within the leadership literature, gaps within public sector leadership development theory are identified and then linked to relevant components of leader development models found within other disciplines. As they were developed in other contexts, these components were then further reviewed to determine their potential applicability in speaking to the gaps often found in public sector leader development theory.

Proposals are made to address some of the common gaps and contradictions often identified in some public sector leader development approaches, along with the detailing of future research directions for the further development of theory.

This exploratory review highlights some of the central assumptions and gaps in the literature for the purpose of clarifying future directions of research into public sector leadership development theory.