Search results
1 – 10 of 16The purpose of this paper is to challenge the traditional placement of CCTV within the realm of crime prevention technologies and to propose a conceptualisation of surveillance…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to challenge the traditional placement of CCTV within the realm of crime prevention technologies and to propose a conceptualisation of surveillance cameras that takes into account how different elements interact to shape how these are understood, defined and used in the day-to-day practices of the police.
Design/methodology/approach
Methodologically, the research draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two medium-sized Italian cities where open-street CCTV systems have been recently implemented and is based on a combination of non-participant observations and interviews with police officers in both forces.
Findings
Overall, two main findings emerge from the fieldwork. First, cameras are rarely used and not for reasons pertaining to crime control; rather, they have become a tool for the efficient management of scarce policing resources, with particular emphasis on the co-ordination and real-time tracking of patrolling personnel. Second, this shift is understood in radically different ways by officers in the two cities, so that what is experienced as a benign form of peer-to-peer co-ordination in Central City becomes a form of undue surveillance on the part of higher ranks in Northern City.
Originality/value
The value of the present work is twofold. On one hand, it provides relevant information to police practitioners on how organisational and structural factors impact on the use of surveillance cameras in policing. On the other, embracing the idea that CCTV is constructed through the interaction of several distinct, yet related, processes can explain why the same technology is implemented, defined and used in different ways in comparable organisations.
Details
Keywords
Richard Noel Canevez, Jenifer Sunrise Winter and Joseph G. Bock
This paper aims to explore the technologization of peace work through “remote support monitors” that use social and digital media technologies like social media to alert local…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the technologization of peace work through “remote support monitors” that use social and digital media technologies like social media to alert local violence prevention actors to potentially violent situations during demonstrations.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a distributed cognition lens, the authors explore the information processing of monitors within peace organizations. The authors adopt a qualitative thematic analysis methodology composed of interviews with monitors and documents from their shared communication and discussion channels. The authors’ analysis seeks to highlight how information is transformed between social and technical actors through the process of monitoring.
Findings
The authors’ analysis identifies that the technologization of monitoring for violence prevention to assist nonviolent activists produces two principal and related forms of transformation: appropriation and hidden attributes. Monitors “appropriate” information from sources to fit new ends and modes of representation throughout the process of detection, verification and dissemination. The verification and dissemination processes likewise render latent supporting informational elements, hiding the aggregative nature of information flow in monitoring. The authors connect the ideas of appropriation and hidden attributes to broader discourses in surveillance and trust that challenge monitoring and its place in peace work going forward.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to focus on the communicative and information processes of remote support monitors. The authors demonstrate that adoption of social and digital media information of incipient violence and response processes for its mitigation suggests both a social and technical precarity for the role of monitoring.
Details
Keywords
The paper assumes a conflict between the discourses (domains of language) of finance, criminality and regulation. It suggests that in the recent past transgression of codes has…
Abstract
The paper assumes a conflict between the discourses (domains of language) of finance, criminality and regulation. It suggests that in the recent past transgression of codes has become the norm in financial services practices. Utilising the idea that profit orientated organisations and operatives are crimogenic and that the border between organised economic activity and organised criminality is negotiable, it further suggests that the strategic deployment of nomination in relation to economic activities involving financial services serves to neutralise responses which would ordinarily classify these activities as deviant and subject to orthodox criminalisation. Without recourse to unified definitions and standards of criminality, the effectiveness of rational regulatoiy responses is flawed from the beginning. The paper raises broader questions regarding governmentality, legitimation and anomie. The deregulation, technologisation and internationalisation of the London financial markets has served to remove a central source of regulator authority (the State and its institutional agencies). Regulation through compliance suggests that the responsibility for legitimation and the production of values and ethics resides with the practitioners themselves who operate in a state of anomie (normlessness) in response to risk (financial risk and norm‐breaking risk). The absence of a grounded discourse of criminality operative within the con sciousness of practitioners and regulators enables ethical and moral relativity to flourish. The paper ends with a call for a restatement of criminological ‘labelling’ theory and for this to become an element in the informing theoretical criteria in future studies of fraudulent activity.
Justin T. Piccorelli and Maria Veronica Elias
The purpose of this paper is to argue that philosophic and administrative thought have enframed (Heidegger, 1977) us to unconsciously accept technology in public administration…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to argue that philosophic and administrative thought have enframed (Heidegger, 1977) us to unconsciously accept technology in public administration and the bureaucracy.
Design/methodology/approach
It builds on literature in phenomenology.
Findings
It discusses the implications of this phenomenon for organizational decision-making, management, and governance more broadly.
Practical implications
It questions whether we should utilize video technology in policing, and examine technology as good or bad before implementing it.
Originality/value
Most of the critiques of technology were in the early 1990s. This paper attempts to explain why we implicitly accept technology, links the philosophy of Immanuel Kant to Herbert Simon, and articulates how technology shapes our thinking.
Details
Keywords
The paper provides a speculative reflection on the power of modern science, technology and innovation systems (STI) for revealing some distinctive style of modernity in Africa…
Abstract
The paper provides a speculative reflection on the power of modern science, technology and innovation systems (STI) for revealing some distinctive style of modernity in Africa. The modernization of these systems, as the backbones of any mode of modernity, also requires the modernization of our mental or intellectual costumes. This process is essentially the passage from closed, selfconfirming, faith‐based, customary, totalizing or terrorizing knowledge systems to essentially falsifiable, evidence‐based, scientifically‐established and technicallyproven innovative knowledge systems. In these systems scientific knowledge can be construed as a theory of the real and as a technology of truth and understood as the epistemological foundation of any form of Afro‐modernity. It is also the passage from the ‘Book of Scripture’ to the ‘Book of Nature’ or from the submission to the white man’s colonizing gods to the more authentic and genuine African identities, beliefs and values, such as those embodied in the concept of ubuntu. The paper discusses a possible way forward in terms of capacity development in STI in Africa with an emphasis on some observed weaknesses regarding fundamental long term neglected issues. It provides some ideas for filling gaps in the context of the call by a number of African thinkers, including the Executive Secretary of UNECA, for initiating a ‘scientific revolution’ on the African continent.
Details
Keywords
Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the complex interplay between the media, school shootings and society from the perspective of mediatization of the victim. In…
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the complex interplay between the media, school shootings and society from the perspective of mediatization of the victim. In mediatization of the victim, the media, in a crisis, plays a key role in connecting people, disseminating information, compiling a security-related picture and providing for potential new emergencies.
Design/approach – The chapter draws on Winfried Schulz's (2004) typology for the analysis of mediatization of the victim in the multidimensional manner. It examines how mediatization works in practice by applying Schulz's typology in the analysis of the two school shootings in Finland in Jokela in 2007 and in Kauhajoki in 2008. The empirical material consists of interviews with police, state and municipal officials and people from non-governmental organizations. Media materials (electronic and print) were collected from the major Finnish media houses and several state and community official web sites.
Findings – The chapter argues that the media shapes the construction of the victim in the process of mediatization and makes the role of victim and witness both central and ambiguous. The chapter concludes by drawing upon the work of French sociologist Luc Boltanski (1999) on morality, media and politics as it identifies the ways in which mediatization engages the affective potential of the spectator and evokes a specific disposition to act upon the suffering, thus, creating a moralizing effect on the spectator.
Originality/value – The chapter produces new theoretical and empirical knowledge on the complex interplay between the media, school shootings and society by discussing it from the perspective of the victim. Consequently, it contributes in deepening our understanding of the process of mediatization and the place of the victim in it in the case of violent crisis such as school shootings.
Details
Keywords
Fiona Measham, Karenza Moore, Russell Newcombe and Zoë Zoë (née Smith)
Significant changes in British recreational drug use were seen throughout 2009, with the emergence and rapid growth in the availability and use of substituted cathinones or…
Abstract
Significant changes in British recreational drug use were seen throughout 2009, with the emergence and rapid growth in the availability and use of substituted cathinones or ‘M‐Cats’ (most notably mephedrone and methylone), a group of psychoactive drugs not currently controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 (HM Government, 1971), with similar effects to ecstasy, cocaine and amphetamines. The reasons for the appearance and appeal of this group of so‐called ‘legal highs’ are explored here in relation to availability, purity, legality and convenience. The authors argue that a reduction in the availability (and thus purity) of illegal drugs such as ecstasy and cocaine and resultant disillusionment among users was a key motivation for displacement to substituted cathinones, conveniently and legally purchased online. Finally, we explore policy considerations around the likely criminalisation of substituted cathinones and the challenge of providing rapid yet considered harm reduction responses to emergent drug trends in the face of a minimal scientific evidence base and eager press demonisation.
Details
Keywords
Martin John Broad, Marian Matthews and Kerry Shephard
The Internet is becoming more widely used by academic institutions to support the learning and teaching activities of students and academic staff. Whilst this is a very efficient…
Abstract
The Internet is becoming more widely used by academic institutions to support the learning and teaching activities of students and academic staff. Whilst this is a very efficient mechanism, it is, arguably, important that there are adequate controls in place to ensure that the information is not libellous, defamatory, inaccurate, illegal or inappropriate. The interactivity of the Internet, the immediacy of access to its contents and the public accessibility to much of its information, however, do provide a different operating environment and therefore different audit and control issues arise. This paper discusses the roles and concerns of a range of stakeholders and suggests that the control mechanisms might be failing, or might not be adequately policed in practice. A number of examples are provided where the manner in which controls are put in place do not operate effectively, or where there may be control loops that are open‐ended. For each of the stakeholder groups that are identified, an account is given of the use to which the Internet is put and where regulation currently exists or may be desirable.
Anne Touboulic and Lucy McCarthy
The purpose of this paper is to explore the current focus of supply chain management (SCM) research; it considers field level and societal constraints and consequently the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the current focus of supply chain management (SCM) research; it considers field level and societal constraints and consequently the potential for change. It details the underlying assumptions in the field, considering the dominant paradigms and stakeholders, and how this has shaped the research we have engaged in as a community of scholars.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a reflective inquiry that seeks to deconstruct the dominant discourses and paradigms in SCM. It offers alternative avenues of inquiry to “traditional” research, considering how different questions, perspectives and approaches might yield different learning for the field. offering alternative avenues to traditional research.
Findings
This is a call for collective action, for solidarity, for a re-imagining of what research in SCM could look like. Research activism is challenging and potentially risky but necessary for the research community to engage in, particularly in light of the global societal grand challenges. Change can take place in the SCM field through collective action and solidarity. Three levels of activism are explored here – acting to solve the grand challenges, acting to change the field and acting as individuals.
Originality/value
This is a “speak-out” piece, which embraces and encourages reflexivity, new methods of doing and writing research as well as different perspectives, and especially a consideration for context and multiple players in the supply chain. The authors contend that it is urgent to re-appropriate our own agency as SCM researchers.
Details