Content uploaded by Randy K. Lippert
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Randy K. Lippert on Nov 05, 2015
Content may be subject to copyright.
Bo o k Re v i e w /Co m p t e R e n d u : Su R v e i l l a n C e St u d i e S 471
Bo o k Re v i e w /Co m p t e R e n d u
David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Oxford: Polity
Press, 2007, 256 pp., $US 22.95 paper (978-0-74563-592-7), $US
64.95 hardcover (978-0-74563-591-0).
This book introduces the burgeoning cross-disciplinary eld of surveillance
studies. Derived from the French word, surveiller, meaning to “watch
over,” surveillance is dened as “the focused, systematic and routine atten-
tion to personal details for purposes of inuence, management, protection or
direction” (p. 14). It includes everything from face-to-face encounters to medi-
ated arrangements dependent on a wide and ever-growing range of information
technologies. Surveillance is intrinsically ambiguous. It can entail watching to
enhance the care and safety of the watched (e.g., the lifeguard at the beach) or
it can involve an effort to control those whose conduct is under suspicion (e.g.,
police on a neighbourhood stakeout) and permit discriminatory practices.
To illustrate the remarkable range and prevalence of surveillance practices,
Lyon describes several contemporary institutional sites, including the military,
the nation-state, the workplace, and policing. Yet, the book also highlights
consumption as an additional site of surveillance (pp. 40–44). This neglect-
ed realm involves use of radio-frequency identication and customer loyalty
card programs and is arguably the most routine and fastest growing domain in
which the details of people’s practices are vigorously collected, analyzed, and
then acted upon. Coupled with the workplace, the discussion of consumption
makes clear that surveillance is a set of processes not limited to state minions
watching the citizenry; it is equally at home in traditionally private spheres.
Betting the expanding range and diversity of surveillance sites, Lyon
abstains from grand theorizing, choosing instead a “tool-box” approach to
explain surveillance. He sifts through a variety of theoretical traditions and
specic contemporary works such as Gandy’s early work on the “Panoptic
Sort,” distinguishing among those that “interpret the causes, the courses and
the consequences of surveillance” (p. 47). In so doing he considers the roots of
surveillance theories in the writings of Orwell and sociology’s classical theor-
ists, the latter illustrating that although cross-disciplinary in scope, surveil-
lance studies is a eld in which sociology looms large. Lyon also appreciative-
ly introduces signicant postmodern inuences on surveillance theories from
the writings of Foucault, Deleuze, and Agamben, among others. A major theme
here is that the Panopticon, popularized by Foucault’s inuential account of
Bentham’s inspection house, has become overused in surveillance studies and
472 © Ca n a d i a n Jo u R n a l o f So C i o l o g y /Ca h i e R S C a n a d i e n S d e S o C i o l o g i e
tends to yield a one-sided account that emphasizes coercion and rational-
ity. It also fails to allow for contemporary media-saturated contexts and
those in which, for example, digital technologies of surveillance swarm.
For a replacement concept, Lyon takes the lead of Haggerty and Ericson
(2000) in embracing the Deleuzian notion of the “assemblage,” dened
as “a coming together of disparate elements to create a loosely associated
surveillance entity” (p. 95). For Lyon, surveillance processes are more
complex, ambiguous, and open-ended than the Panopticon allows.
To interrogate surveillance systems, Lyon identies three types of
surveillance relation: face-to-face, bureaucratic le-based, and electron-
ic interface. Intended as heuristic devices these can be found together
in any particular surveillance system. These systems are seen in cities
and across nation-states, and increasingly employ the newest surveil-
lance technologies, including biometrics, face-recognition, and global
positioning. While potentially and sometimes actually leading to “social
sorting” (p. 99) and discrimination, this surveillance is ambiguous and is
not without resistance.
A key theme of the book is the surveillant subject’s participation in
surveillance and to the relations between surveillance processes and the
surveilled. Surveillant subjects do not just accept their assigned roles in
surveillance systems, as would those in the prison cell under the central
tower’s gaze, but instead resist the gaze and recongure their identities
using the myriad categories in which they are assigned. Furthermore,
subjects often actively participate in their own surveillance and encour-
age the implementation of the surveillance systems brought to bear upon
them. The book’s nal chapter focuses on transparency, which Lyon sees
as central to democracy and to sustain human dignity in the face of social
sorting and possibilities for discrimination raised by the new mechan-
isms of surveillance and what he calls the “safety state” (p. 184). Trans-
parency becomes crucial because surveillance can detrimentally affect
people’s life chances via discrimination and sorting. Thus, Lyon outlines
the limitations of privacy regulation and concerns, and encourages more
scrutiny of proling and classication processes since they are directly
implicated in creating and sustaining discriminatory practices.
This is a fascinating and accessible introduction to a new cross-
disciplinary eld of inquiry, authored by its most prolic practitioner.
Indeed, given Lyon’s voluminous work on surveillance from the ear-
ly 1990s onward, much of it carried out in conjunction with the aptly
named “Surveillance Project” at Queen’s University, it is difcult to im-
agine a scholar better positioned to introduce the eld. This book will be
of interest to established scholars and students active in the disciplines
from which surveillance studies draws, but especially the sociology of
Bo o k Re v i e w /Co m p t e R e n d u : Su R v e i l l a n C e St u d i e S 473
governance and critical strains of criminology. Given the dizzying range
and breath-taking developmental pace of new and ever-mutating sur-
veillance technologies and their “creeping” functions as they become
integrated into assemblages, the book is also remarkably up-to-date. Of
particular value for newcomers and appropriate to an introduction is the
merciful inclusion of a glossary of surveillance terminology — like all
new elds, surveillance studies has developed an insider language of
“dataveillance” and “synopticons” that can otherwise quickly alienate
new scholars. For these reasons policymakers dealing with privacy and
data protection regulation will also nd the book useful, as will privacy
activists and others outside academia.
In providing an intentionally ironic “overview,” the book is superior
to recent edited collections on surveillance featuring disparate theoretical
and empirical writings that can easily leave readers wondering whether
surveillance was an appropriate banner under which to collect them. Not
so here. Lyon effectively discusses works likely encountered in very
different academic contexts and elds (e.g., Agamben or Deleuze) and
places them under the fresh light of surveillance studies. In this respect,
the book is also theoretically and conceptually up-to-date. To be sure,
some readers may be unclear on whether surveillance studies has yet
fully emerged as a eld in its own right, completely distinct from newer
Foucault-inuenced studies of governance or possibly from visual soci-
ology or critical criminology. As Lyon notes, surveillance studies reson-
ate with studies inuenced by the concept of governmentality and my
own view is there may be a bit more future work required to show why
the former cannot be subsumed within the latter’s broader umbrella. For
example, it is true that some scholars in the sociology of governance are
already engaged in realist inquiry, contrary to the dictates of governmen-
tality theorists like Nikolas Rose, and thus have overcome a common
criticism that might otherwise distinguish the two literatures. Admittedly,
this is an abstruse point and its aim is not to criticize this excellent work
so much as to encourage future elaboration of the family resemblances
across bodies of work that this book effectively brings to light. What is
clear is that this timely introduction to an exciting emerging eld of in-
quiry authored by a leading proponent will go far in helping this eld to
carve its own distinctive path. This is what superb books like this do.
Re f e R e n c e s
Haggerty, K. and R. Ericson. 2000. The surveillant assemblage. British Journal
of Sociology 51(4):605–22.
un i v e R S i t y o f wi n d S o R Ra n d y li p p e R t
474 © Ca n a d i a n Jo u R n a l o f So C i o l o g y /Ca h i e R S C a n a d i e n S d e S o C i o l o g i e
Dr. Lippert is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Wind-
sor. He is the author of a recent book (Sanctuary, Sovereignty, Sacrice, UBC
Press, 2006) on illegal sanctuary practices. He is currently conducting a major
SSHRC-funded study on urban governance, security, and surveillance in several
Canadian cities. Drawing from this project, in 2007 he co-edited (with Kevin
Stenson of Middlesex University) a special issue of the Canadian Journal of
Law and Society on “Urban Governance and Legality from Below.” He teaches
courses in the sociology of law, governance, and policing. lippert@uwindsor.ca
