Beyond the Panopticon? Foucault and Surveillance Studies

Surveillance Studies is a transdisciplinary field that draws from sociology, psychology, organization studies, science and technology studies, information science, criminology, law, political science and geography. It emerged through combination of the mainstream liberal sociological approach of Rule (1973) via Giddens (1985) which, following Zuboff (1998) and Gary Marx (1988), was combined with Foucault, in particular Discipline and Punish (1977), and its reading of Bentham’s Panopticon. There are of course other theoretical approaches: Marxism; Weber; Machiavelli; anarchism and situationalism, all offer useful avenues. But a relatively smooth story can be told of the movement from Foucault’s panopticism to a ‘surveillance society’ (Lyon 1993; 1994), via a ‘new surveillance’ (Marx 1988; 2003) of computerized and increasingly automated ‘social sorting’ (Gandy 1993; Lyon 2001; Lyon 2002a) based on ‘categorical suspicion’ (Marx 1988; Norris and Armstrong 1999).