Torin Monahan

Tracking the social dimensions of RFID systems in hospitals

BACKGROUND Radio frequency identification (RFID) is an emerging technology that is rapidly becoming the standard for hospitals to track inventory, identify patients, and manage personnel. METHODS Research involved qualitative methods including participant observation and interviews with hospital staff members and industry consultants in the United States. RESULTS Hospital staff, especially nurses, expressed concern about the surveillance potential of these tracking technologies. Additionally, nursing staff frequently experience an intensification of labor as a result of the implementation of RFID systems because the task of keeping the systems operational often falls upon them. CONCLUSIONS The social and organizational factors that contribute to the success or failure of RFID systems in hospitals must be further analyzed. The implications of RFID systems, such as privacy concerns and work intensification for nursing and other hospital staff, should be taken into account from the outset, especially during the design and implementation of the technology.

The New American School: preparation for post‐industrial discipline

In this article we consider how broad shifts in social relations over the past 30 years have given rise to new social control regimes in US public schools. We argue that the contemporary mechanisms of control engendered by mass incarceration and post‐industrialization have re‐shaped school discipline. To illustrate contemporary discipline in the ‘New American School,’ we discuss the emergence of police officers and technological surveillance in schools. These two strategies of school social control facilitate the link between courts and schools, and expose students to both the salience of crime control in everyday life and to the demands of workers in a post‐industrial world. By incorporating police officers and technological surveillance into the school safety regime, schools shape the experiences of students in ways that reflect modern relationships of dependency, inequality, and instability vis‐à‐vis the contemporary power dynamics of the post‐industrialist labor market and the neoliberal state.

Benefits of ‘observer effects’: lessons from the field

This article responds to the criticism that ‘observer effects’ in ethnographic research necessarily bias and possibly invalidate research findings. Instead of aspiring to distance and detachment, some of the greatest strengths of ethnographic research lie in cultivating close ties with others and collaboratively shaping discourses and practices in the field. Informants’ performances — however staged for or influenced by the observer — often reveal profound truths about social and/or cultural phenomena. To make this case, first we mobilize methodological insights from the field of science studies to illustrate the contingency and partiality of all knowledge and to challenge the notion that ethnography is less objective than other research methods. Second, we draw upon our ethnographic projects to illustrate the rich data that can be obtained from ‘staged performances’ by informants. Finally, by detailing a few examples of questionable behavior on the part of informants, we challenge the fallacy that the presence of ethnographers will cause informants to self-censor.

Surveillance and violence from afar: The politics of drones and liminal security-scapes

As surveillance and military devices, drones—or ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’—offer a prism for theorizing the technological politics of warfare and governance. This prism reveals some violent articulations of US imperialism and nationalism, the dehumanizing translation of bodies into ‘targets’ for remote monitoring and destruction, and the insidious application of militarized systems and rationalities to domestic territories and populations. In this article, we analyze the deployment of drones within warzones in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan and borderzones and urban areas in the USA. What we call ‘the drone stare’ is a type of surveillance that abstracts people from contexts, thereby reducing variation, difference, and noise that may impede action or introduce moral ambiguity. Through these processes, drones further normalize the ongoing subjugation of those marked as Other.

Counter-surveillance as Political Intervention?

This paper analyzes practices of counter-surveillance—particularly against closed-circuit television systems in urban areas—and theorizes their political implications. Counter-surveillance is defined as intentional, tactical uses, or disruptions of surveillance technologies to challenge institutional power asymmetries. Such activities can include disabling or destroying surveillance cameras, mapping paths of least surveillance and disseminating that information over the Internet, employing video cameras to monitor sanctioned surveillance systems and their personnel, or staging public plays to draw attention to the prevalence of surveillance in society. The main argument is that current modes of activism tend to individualize surveillance problems and methods of resistance, leaving the institutions, policies, and cultural assumptions that support public surveillance relatively insulated from attack.

Evaluation of real-time location systems in their hospital contexts.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of the research was to assess real-time location systems (RTLS) that have been implemented in U.S. hospitals. We examined the type of uses to which RTLS have been put, the degree of functionality of the various technologies and software, and the organizational effects of implementing RTLS. METHODS The project was a 3-year qualitative study of 23 U.S. hospitals that had implemented RTLS for the purpose of tracking assets, personnel, and/or patients. We observed the systems in use and conducted 80 semi-structured interviews with hospital personnel and vendors. In order to protect the confidentiality of the hospitals and vendors in our sample, we conducted an aggregate analysis of our findings rather than providing evaluations of specific technologies or hospital case studies. RESULTS The most important findings from our research were (1) substandard functionality of most real-time location systems in use and (2) serious obstacles to effective deployment of the systems due to the material and organizational constraints of the hospitals themselves. We found that the current best use of RTLS is for asset tracking, but importantly it requires whole-hospital deployment as well as centralized control of the system, preferably by materials management or biomedical engineering departments. DISCUSSION There are serious technological, material, and organizational barriers to the implementation of RTLS, and these barriers need to be overcome if hospitals are to maximize the potential benefits of these systems. CONCLUSION In addition to considering the available technological options, hospitals must assess their unique environments, including the myriad material and organizational constraints that will affect the success of RTLS implementation.

The Emerging Politics of DHS Fusion Centers

This article explores public concerns about the US Department of Homeland Security’s data ‘fusion centers’. These centers, which are proliferating across all US states, coordinate data-sharing among state and local police, intelligence agencies, and private companies. The primary goal of fusion centers is to engage in intelligence-sharing for counter-terrorism purposes. However, they have been used for a variety of other purposes, such as basic policing, spying on social movement organizations, or restricting legal public activities such as taking photographs. Drawing upon a comprehensive analysis of media publications from 2002 to 2008, we identify and discuss three primary categories of concern with fusion centers: (1) their ineffectiveness, particularly given the financial expense, the statistical unlikelihood of terrorist attacks, and the pressing need for other law enforcement support; (2) the potential for mission creep, where the functions of fusion centers expand beyond their originally intended purposes to encompass things like all-hazards preparedness; and (3) the violation of civil liberties, especially through racial profiling or First Amendment violations.

“War Rooms” of the Street: Surveillance Practices in Transportation Control Centers

This article investigates the surveillance dimensions of “intelligent transportation systems” in the United States, with a particular focus on the mediation of data by engineers in transportation control centers. These communication systems lend themselves to surveillance by means of “function creep” beyond their primary intended purposes and through the everyday collection and manipulation of data to manage mobilities. In the U.S., dominant system protocols privilege vehicular throughput and discipline those who deviate from that norm.

Identity theft vulnerability Neoliberal governance through crime construction

Under the rubric of neoliberalism, the governance of populations occurs through new technologies and techniques of social control. Contemporary neoliberal discourses of crime control, in particular, normalize conditions of individual insecurity and responsibility while diverting attention away from root causes of social problems. The phenomenon of identity theft offers a generative case study for theorizing the ramifications of neoliberalism as a mode of crime control. The field is marked by the production of consumer-citizen subjects, who embrace self-discipline to mitigate crime threats; the transformation of mundane criminal acts into national security threats; the development of flexible accumulation skills, on the part of identity thieves, to compensate for the decline in state support for social reproduction; and the maintenance of insecure information infrastructures, which simultaneously increase the profitability of industry and vulnerability of the public.

SURVEILLANCE AS CULTURAL PRACTICE

This special section of The Sociological Quarterly explores research on “surveillance as cultural practice,” which indicates an orientation to surveillance that views it as embedded within, brought about by, and generative of social practices in specific cultural contexts. Such an approach is more likely to include elements of popular culture, media, art, and narrative; it is also more likely to try to comprehend peoples engagement with surveillance on their own terms, stressing the production of emic over etic forms of knowledge. This introduction sketches some key developments in this area and discusses their implications for the field of “surveillance studies” as a whole.