Opening the Black Box

Gavin J.D. Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Australian National University. He is the author of many reviews, book chapters, journal articles and media reports on the social impacts and implications of surveillance diffusion. His current research explicates the dynamic interplay between systems and subjects of surveillance, particularly the interpretive meanings people attribute to their visibility and the labour they invest in managing their ascribed `data-body'.

• Part I: Problematizing and Contextualizing Watching Practices 1. Towards Supervisory Circulations: Circuitry coordinates 2. Engaging Circuitries: Researching supervisory circulations Part II: Engaging the Means of Watching 3. Instigating Circuitries: Inception and reception 4. Construing Circuitries: Supervisory projection 5. Bearing Circuitries: Supervisory subjection 6. Sustaining Circuitries: Supervisory aberration

"As the role of watching and collection of personal data is increasingly devolved to wide-range of actors, it is important to understand how this monitoring may be shaped by existing social positions. Why, for example, do some surveillance agents become ‘crime fighters’ or ‘sympathisers’ or ‘whistleblowers’? Opening the Black Box has raised these questions and in doing so the author has made a significant and enduring contribution to the field. The book will become essential reading for those interested in surveillance studies, criminology, urban studies, and organization studies."— Michael McCahill, University of Hull, Surveillance and Society"By challenging the way we understand CCTV, Gavin Smith is in effect opening up a field as important today as that opened up by the early critical analyses of police work in the late 1960s... It is the focus on the work of watching, in the end, that sets this book apart from a mass of more or less predictable analyses and commentaries on CCTV."— Pat O’Malley, University of Sydney, Australia, Theoretical Criminology