Pieter Wagenaar

Zooming in on 'heterotopia': CCTV-operator practices at schiphol airport

Airports are places that are heavily surveilled by different (technical) means, including CCTV (Closed Circuit Television). So far, the literature on CCTV has not paid much attention to the practices behind the screens of the CCTV monitors at airports. In this article, we present an in-depth, ethnographic study of the use of CCTV in the Military Polices control room at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. We find that, since nobody is ‘at home’ at Schiphol, surveillance through CCTV is a challenge for the police. The operators in the control room are constantly struggling with the question how to spot deviance in a situation where they believe normal behavior does not exist. Our study shows that the categories for singling out the abnormal identified by Norris and Goold are rarely used by the Military Police at Schiphol. Instead, they heavily rely on routine, transmitted, and retrospective surveillance.

Public-Private Partnership in Poland: A Cosmological Journey

A language barrier prevents us from understanding how other cultures look at public administration, as “semantic fields” differ between languages. These differences can never be fully grasped, but what we can do is study what happens when a particular concept crosses the border. In this article we select a concept, public–private partnership, that in recent times migrated from one administrative order, the United States, to another, Poland. We follow this concept on its migration to see how it changes and to find out what these shifts in meaning tell us about the differences between the two social realities involved.

Cultural Contestation: Heritage, Identity and the Role of Government

This chapter aims to bring together two related concepts from political science and heritage studies: cultural contestation and contested heritage, which are the central concepts of this volume. Although these concepts are to a large degree intertwined, they have until now not been related to each other. Yet it is exactly the bringing together of these disciplines, by combining the concepts of cultural contestation and contested heritage, which are key to getting a better understanding of the role of governments in heritage practices. This chapter also gives a short overview of the contributions to the volume and of their relation to each other and to the core concepts of the book.

Conclusion: Roles Governments Play in Shaping the Symbolic Landscape

The volume concludes with the observation that governments play a major role in the continuing process of shaping and re-shaping of a society’s symbolic landscape. What has also become clear is that governments do not act as unitary actors, but play different and often conflicting roles. We should thus speak of ‘the roles of governments,’ instead of ‘the role of government.’ We have also seen that what is important is not so much the role governments play in instances of cultural contestation, but rather the way they shape the symbolic landscape. As this volume demonstrated, governments always have a part in this, by articulating historical narratives and heritage discourses through policies. The various and conflicting roles governments play in instances of cultural contestation are an effect of their actions in shaping and re-shaping the symbolic landscape.

Acting in a National Play: Governmental Roles During the Zwarte Piet Contestation

Recently, the contestation surrounding ‘Black Pete’, the Dutch ‘Santa Claus’ black faced companion, has risen to new heights. The clash between opponents of the figure—deeming him a remnant from a sinister colonial past—and his supporters—to whom he is a vital part of their identity—has been so fierce that government found itself compelled to intervene. Political science and governance studies distinguish several strategies governments can use to mitigate cultural contestation. How has Dutch government gone about the Zwarte Piet controversy, and why?

MAKING SENSE BEHIND THE LENS: CLOSED CIRCUIT TELEVISION AND THE DUTCH CUSTOMS OFFICE

Using Goold’s categorization the heuristics of the customs office’s CCTV-operators at Schiphol Airport (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) are mapped. Then, Weick’s sensemaking concept is applied to explain the difference in heuristics – and also in effectiveness - between the two customs office regions studied. It turns out that the inability of one of the regions to apply all of Weick’s properties provides the answer.