Gary T. Marx

Massachusetts Institute of Technology | MIT

L'A. porte son attention sur la profession de sociologue. Il s'efforce de mettre en lumiere les facteurs qui influent sur le deroulement des carrieres des enseignants et des chercheurs dans cette discipline. Il isole 37 imperatifs moraux qui, s'ils sont scrupuleusement respectes, permettent de mener a bien ce type de carriere

This interview is ostensibly about the background and assumptions underlying Gary T. Marx's encyclopedic Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology. The "I break in order to reveal" title of the article refers to a central tenet of his distinctive style of critical thinking that seeks to unveil the often hidden (or...

Erving Goffman was born 100 years ago in 1922. Drawing on his work, the Goffman archives (Shalin, 2007), the secondary literature and my personal experiences with him and some of his university of Chicago cohort, I offer thoughts on some implications of his work and life, and the inseparable issues of understanding society. This goes far beyond his...

The Oxford Handbook of Ethnographies of Crime and Criminal Justice provides critical and current reviews of key research topics, issues, and debates that crime ethnographers have been grappling with for over a century. Despite its long and distinguished history in the social sciences, ethnographies in criminology are still relatively rare. Over the...

Secrecy and censorship involve norms about the control of information. Censorship of communication in the modern sense is associated with large, complex urban societies with a degree of centralized control and technical means of effectively reaching a mass audience. It involves a determination of what can, and can not, (or in the case of non-govern...

I first consider three questions asked by session organizer Glenn Goodwin about changes in society and sociology —"where were you, who were you and what did you think and do in the 1960s?" Between 1960 and 1970 I moved from being a graduate student and teacher in Berkeley involved in the civil rights movement to being a teacher in Cambridge involve...

Deleted material from G.T. Marx, Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology. Culture and Contexts (intro from printed book, and Chapter A on music in popular culture from book's Univ of Chicago webpage: https://press.uchicago.edu/ sites/marx/index.html

This chapter on visual images and humor in popular culture with respect to surveillance is was deleted from the print version of Windows Into the Soul for space reasons. It is on the Univ. of Chicago's webpage for the book at uchicago.edu/sites/marx/index.html) .

With Erving Goffman never far from the pages, after reviewing numerous examples of fraudulent presentation of self and biography and noting their likely increase with new information technologies, this orienting, issue-raising article examines factors encouraging this, some relevant concepts for organizing variation and some policy choices. Typolog...

Students of communication and of science need to be attentive to how social and psychological factors can condition what we take to be reality and truth. Advocacy, self- promotion and self-exegesis can hide under the mask of academic neutrality and dispassion. Yet there is always a person behind the formality of the scholarly book and the choices,...

Expanded version of article in R. Darling and P. Stein, Sociological Lives. The article deals with the personal meanings of being among the scribbling classes for more than 60 years. To my surprise, in spite of the excitement and righteousness in dealing with social issues that matter, the most satisfying part of my work life has been teaching and...

“The Ayes Have It—Should They? Reflections on Police Body-Worn Cameras” Gary T. Marx, Professor Emeritus MIT is the author of Protest and Prejudice, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America and Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology. Police worn cameras raise vital conceptual, ethical, policy, and empirical...

Introduction for Kam C. Wong, Public Order Policing in Hong Kong –The Mongkok Riot, Palgrave, 2018. Every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing A.N. Whitehead Men of well-padded intellect with a genius for platitudes have been warning against violence, they have been deploring it in the cities...They are the men who see the absence of viol...

The Kerner Commission identified factors contributing to police ineffectiveness during the 1960s civil disorders. Since release of the Kerner report, the frequency and intensity of civil disorders has declined and the policing of disorders has changed. Using the report recommendations as a framework, we analyze changes in police disorder management...

This is a longer version of a paper written for The Harvest of American Racism (University of Michigan Press, 2018) R. Shellow, D. Boesel, D. Sears and G.T. Marx. “In the summer of 1967, in response to violent demonstrations that rocked 164 U.S. cities, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, a.k.a. the Kerner Commission, was formed. T...

This is a longer version of a paper written for The Harvest of American Racism (University of Michigan Press, 2018) R. Shellow, D. Boesel, D. Sears and G.T. Marx. “In the summer of 1967, in response to violent demonstrations that rocked 164 U.S. cities, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, a.k.a. the Kerner Commission, was formed. T...

En el tercer capítulo de su tercera parte, Orwell escribe en 1984: We control matter because we control mind. Reality is inside the skull (Orwell, 1992: 268). Si el escepticismo es la llave de la sociología, ese desatar los andamiajes de la realidad y dejar al desnudo la construcción deliberada de las estructuras relacionales (Bourdieu, 1991), Gary...

In my book Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology (Marx 2016) I analyze many of the social, political, ethical and cultural issues raised by the new surveillance. The book uses a variety of traditional methods such as observation, interviews, document analysis and quantitative measures to document surveillance...

This chapter deals with types of surveillance data. Such data are honeycombed with attributes and tacit expectations that can be systematically compared. What are the major kinds of data that surveillance may gather? How do the characteristics of these data affect explanation, evaluation, manners, policy and law? When we speak of surveillance, just...

The chapter begins with a brief history of surveillance starting in the 15th century and the emergence of a “policed society” based on systematically gathering and analyzing personal information. In such a society agents of the state, commerce and industry come to exercise control over ever-wider social and geographical areas. Bentham with his Pano...

Underlying this inquiry and interlaced with the empirical questions are moral concerns. Is a given practice good or bad, desirable or undesirable? These questions are at the core of surveillance as a contemporary issue. However, posing questions in such a general way is not helpful. The only honest answers are, “yes and no,” “sometimes,” and “it de...

This chapter reports on PISHI (Parents Insist on Surveillance Help Inc.) the statement of a fictional social movement organization promoting surveillance of children. We see surveillance as care and concern (or at least that is how it is sold). Family surveillance is not spying on children, rather it is prevention and protection. With respect to pe...

This chapter defines the basic terms for surveillance analysis. After offering a broad definition it separates strategic from non-strategic forms and distinguishes traditional surveillance from the new surveillance. Distinctions are drawn between the public and the private as expectations about how information is to be treated as against observable...

This satirical chapter pursues aspects of the private within the public in looking at the behavior of imaginary character Tom I. Voire through a clinical psychological report. His story illustrates ambiguities and value conflicts in cross-gender surveillance and differences in male and female responses. He acts as a free range voyeur roaming across...

Human ingenuity often trumps the machine. In conflict settings the flexible and creative human spirit has some advantages over “dumb” machines with a limited number of programmed responses (at least the first time around). This chapter considers the dynamic adversarial social dance of neutralization and counter-neutralization involving strategic mo...

This chapter seeks to identify the broad justifications and often veiled assumptions underlying surveillance policies and practices. Among the nations of the world, the United States most clearly reflects the optimistic, techno-surveillance worldview found within a broader technocratic and commercial celebratory ethos. The satires all reflect this...

Relative to the profound changes in means, surveillance goals as broadly defined have not fundamentally changed. However the specific contents/meanings of goals (e.g., the kind of rule enforced or eligibility verified or control imposed) has changed, and the priority among goals has changed as well (e.g., the increased prominence of prevention and...

The speech argues for maximum use of the new technologies of security and surveillance and for prevention, categorical suspicion, non-consensual data collection, the soft and hard engineering of behavior, and the increased blurring of borders between public and private security and more generally government and civil society. Rocky Bottoms delivers...

This fictional satire reports on the highly successful and paternalistic “Omniscient Organization” --a high tech firm that uses the most up to date surveillance tools to fully monitor workers and their transparent environments. The firm relies on the engineering of social control and indefinite discipline. It shows the case of maximum surveillance...

This article suggests some basic terms for surveillance analysis. The analysis requires a map and a common language to explain and evaluate its fundamental properties, contexts, and behaviors. Surveillance is neither good nor bad but context and comportment make it so. Topics considered in this article include: a broad definition of surveillance, i...

A transcript of the presentation of the Surveillance Studies Network Outstanding Achievement Award to Gary T. Marx at the Surveillance & Society Biennial Conference, Barcelona, April 2014.

This chapter considers privacy and surveillance filtered through the specifi cation of some individual and social dimensions of information control. The two can be related in a variety of empirical and ethical configurations. In both academic and popular discussion privacy is too often justified as a value because of what it is presumed to do for i...

One aspect of modernization is the use of science-based technology in rule enforcement. In the 'engineered society,' an ethos of rationalization is seen in the application of means to ends. The events of 11 September 2001, and the war on terror have brought increased attention to the question, but the increased use of technical means for control re...

Starting from police requests for help from citizens in the Boston Marathon bombing, this article examines some of the new opportunities and risks that computers and related communication tools bring to social control efforts. Issues of justice, liberty, privacy, community, and effectiveness are involved. Yet whatever is new here for national secur...

When authorities or elites are challenged by a social movement, they may ignore it or respond with a variety of tools from cooptation to redirection to repression with many points in between. One extreme form of the latter is provocation. The idea of the agent provocateur entered popular consciousness in the nineteenth century as Europe experienced...

A half century has gone by since the publication of Neil Smelser’s classic book on the Theory of Collective Behavior. The re-issue of the book triggered these observations in which I reflect on the fate of old books; trace a bit of the book’s genealogy; note changes in the field; and argue that Smelser’s book is really four books in one with varyin...

This is an extended review of Locke's Eavesdropping: An Intimate History.

O συλλογικός αυτός τόμος περιέχει τις βασικές εισηγήσεις του Συνεδρίου Surveillance and Democracy, και της ημερίδας Παρακολουθήσεις και Δημοκρατία στην Ελλάδα, που διοργάνωσε ο Μηνάς Σαματάς στο Τμήμα Κοινωνιολογίας του πανεπιστημίου Κρήτης στο Ρέθυμνο 2-4 Ιουνίου 2008.

This article examines the claims made by surveillance entrepreneurs selling surveillance to parents and government agencies responsible for children. Technologies examined include pre-natal testing, baby monitors and nanny cams, RFID-enabled clothing, GPS tracking devices, cell phones, home drug and semen tests, and surveillance toys. We argue that...

Social movements seeking to change the subordinate status of ethnic minorities have drawn activists from both the minority and dominant groups. Conflict has at times developed between movement members of these two groups. In a comparative analysis of three movements—the civil rights movement, the anti-slavery cause in the U.S., and the movement to...

Through a discussion of neutralization and counter-neutralization dynamics, the author highlights some of the theoretical and methodological issues involved in looking at individual resistance to surveillance.

Using Simmel’s article “The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies” as a point of departure (Simmel 1906: 441–498), this chapter examines selected aspects of the social scientific field of secrecy. As Simmel conceptualized it, the secret is a central means for information control in contemporary society. A brief survey of Simmel’s writing on...

This article reviews and critiques recent scholarship on surveillance and communication technology that involves the crossing of personal information borders. A Sociology of Information framework focusing on the normative elements is proposed as a way to integrate this variegated field. Empirical analysis is particularly needed to test the claims o...

This article notes ways that power is central to questions of personal information access and use. New surveillance technologies are likely to sustain and even strengthen traditional forms of social stratification. Yet power is rarely a zero-sum game. A number of factors that limit unleashing the full potential of privacy-invading technology, even...

Introduction The Interview of the Future: New Wine New Bottles? Questions More Questions References

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I am here to fight for truth, justice and the American way. —Superman 1978 This article uses a true fiction speech by Mr. Richard Rocky Bottoms to illustrate a number of background beliefs underlying contemporary perspectives on social control, borders and surveillance, and on technology more broadly. Rocky Bottoms exists only in the imagination, b...

The new social surveillance can be defined as scrutiny through the use of technical means to extract or create personal or group data, whether from individuals or contexts. Examples include: video cameras; computer matching, profiling and data mining; work, computer and electronic location monitoring; biometrics; DNA analysis; drug tests; brain sca...

In this article, we construct a framework for distinguishing various types of computer-mediated communities. Once that is done, we move on to the analysis of “community networks.” Community networks are systems that electronically connect individuals who also share common geographic space. Considering data gathered from 1994 to 1995, we suggest som...

Increased reliance on science and technology is central to contemporary developments in policing. The engineering of social control is not new. What is new is the scale, greater precision, continual invention and experimentation, and global connections. Technical means of social control saturate modern society, colonizing and documenting ever more...

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Résumé On a jusqu’ici peu étudié la surveillance en tant que phénomène sociologique, c’est-à-dire en portant attention aux dynamiques d’action et de réaction dans lesquelles s’engagent ses acteurs. On a également beaucoup trop simplifié les catégories conventionnelles des objectifs, des cibles, des acteurs et des méthodes de surveillance. Ce texte...

The topic of anonymity is conceptually and practically challenging. Among reasons for this are the multiple elements across different levels of analysis, varied contexts, and the variety of goals and dimensions that cross-cut these; 2) conflicting rationales and values; and 3) contested and/or opposing social, cultural and political trends and coun...

:In Truro, Massachusetts, at the end of 2004, police politely asked all male residents to provide a DNA sample to match with DNA material found at the scene of an unsolved murder. Residents were approached in a non-threatening manner and asked to help solve the crime. This tactic of rounding up all the usual suspects and then some is still rare in...

Neil Smelser has been an extraordinary scholar, teacher, and organizational leader. Every participant in this volume proudly brands themselves as a “Smelser student”. The distinction of these contributions speaks directly of Smelser's power as a teacher. While his immensely impressive and varied performances as organizational leader may have been l...

Teacher, scholar, and leader, Neil Smelser stands as an iconic figure in sociology in the second half of the twentieth century. The chapters in this volume, written by prominent scholars from all walks of the social sciences, reveal the range and depth of Smelser's influence and his substantial contributions to diverse fields such as British histor...

In Strategic Interaction, Erving Goffman demonstrated how the activities of intelligence agencies could be related to other social settings of information control. Intelligence gathering can be viewed as a general process whether involving national security, business intelligence, consumer behaviour or families. Goffman suggests concepts applicable...

A critique of the dictionary definition of surveillance as 'close observation, especially of a suspected person'; is offered. Much surveillance is applied categorically and beyond persons to places, spaces, networks and categories of person and the distinction between self and other surveillance can be blurred. Drawing from characteristics of the t...

It's a remarkable piece of apparatus. F. Kafka, "In The Penal Colony" The hurricane of social change wrought by information technology can be viewed along with the development of permanent agricultural communities, urbanization, and industrialization as among the great transformations of civilization. It is also important, however, to ask how socia...

Eleven behavioral techniques of neutralization intended to subvert the collection of personal information are discussed: discovery moves, avoidance moves, piggybacking moves, switching moves, distorting moves, blocking moves, masking moves, breaking moves, refusal moves, cooperative moves and counter-surveillance moves. In Western liberal democraci...

In research on computer data bases, work and electronic location monitoring, telephone identification systems and drug testing1 I encountered comments such as: “turn the technology loose and let the benefits flow”; “do away with the human interface”; “only the computer sees it”; “that has never happened”; “there is no law against this”; “the techno...

This text is devoted to dirty data phenomenon, and these data are meant as information which are secret and discrediting. The author analyzes factors contributing to increased accessibility of social researchers to such data and offers some typical situations, which dirty data researchers have to face. Some problems involving methodological, ethica...

A critique of the dictionary definition of surveillance as "close observation, especially of a suspected person" is offe red. Much surveillance is applied categorically and beyond persons to places, spaces, networks and categories of person and the distinction between self and other surveillance can be blurred. Drawing from characteristics of the t...

In discussions on the ethics of surveillance and consequently surveillance policy, the public/private distinction is often implicitly or explicitly invoked as a way to structure the discussion and the arguments. In these discussions, the distinction 'public' and 'private' is often treated as a uni-dimensional, rigidly dichotomous and absolute, fixe...