Digitizing Sociology: Continuity and Change in the Internet Era

This article outlines and contextualizes the development of digital sociology as an introduction to this e-special issue, charting the development of the field through the pages of the journal, Sociology. In doing so, the article sketches key contours of this rich and varied terrain, accenting how technological innovation has permeated the domains of politics, culture and society. Of central concern has been the intellectual origins of ‘digital sociology’. While first coined in 2009, the article highlights a longer history, noting the continued resonance of modernity’s currents of categorization, ordering and rationality while recognizing the crucial shifts brought by digitally mediated life. The article then discusses landmark articles contributing to the development of digital sociology, beginning with interventions seeking to theorize digital society. We then turn to articles focusing on methodological questions before addressing the digital turn in selected areas of enduring sociological concern including: work and organizations; inequality; migration; activism; communities; emotions; and everyday life. The article concludes with a series of observations regarding potential futures of digital sociological analyses

Resilient planning for sporting mega-events: designing and managing safe and secure urban places for London 2012 and beyond Planejamento resiliente para megaeventos esportivos: planejando e gerindo lugares seguros para Londres 2012 e além

Since the 1960s both regeneration and security have been prominent themes in Olympic planning. However, this paper argues that the prominence given to post event legacies in Londons bid to host the 2012 Summer Games has fomented a merger of these hitherto distinct ambitions oriented around notions of resilience. In addition to identifying this merger, based on analysis of planning for the 2012 Games the paper sets out its component features and considers a range of key implications. These include the accommodation of Olympic security amid shifting national security arrangements and, at a local level, the impact and importance of the 2011 London riots on Olympic safety and security processes. Organised over four areas of discussion the first three comprising of the coupling of spatial strategies of resilient planning and design with concerns for security; the temporal framework of such approaches; analysis of the altered physical and institutional landscape of London ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games the paper concludes by identifying and discussing the ways in which urban rejuvenation and securitisation which are increasingly being combined into resilient designs and master plans in the Olympic context and, crucially, standardised, exported and transferred to new urban hosts of similar events

Seeing Surveillance: Twenty Years of Surveillance & Society

This paper reflects on the development of surveillance studies over the twenty years since the first publication of Surveillance & Society. It starts by pointing to key contextual changes that have provided fertile ground for surveillance-focused analysis and, in turn, shaped the emphasis of the field. The main body of the paper is organised over three (temporal) frames: origins of the field, present considerations, and future concerns. In doing so, attention is given to the reproduction, development, and innovation of intellectual knowledge in the context of surveillance studies

‘Assisted’ Facial Recognition and the Reinvention of Suspicion and Discretion in Digital Policing

Automated facial recognition (AFR) has emerged as one of the most controversial policing innovations of recent years. Drawing on empirical data collected during the United Kingdom’s two major police trials of AFR deployments—and building on insights from the sociology of policing, surveillance studies and science and technology studies—this article advances several arguments. Tracing a lineage from early sociologies of policing that accented the importance of police discretion and suspicion formation, the analysis illuminates how technological capability is conditioned by police discretion, but police discretion itself is also contingent on affordances brought by the operational and technical environment. These, in turn, frame and ‘legitimate’ subjects of a reinvented and digitally mediated ‘bureaucratic suspicion’

Constructing Resilient Futures: Integrating UK multi-stakeholder transport and energy resilience for 2050

The 2005 terrorist attacks in London and 2007 flooding throughout the UK revealed the shortcomings of the UK Government approach of 'governing through resilience' in practice: low levels of stakeholder co-ordination, lack of understanding about critical infrastructure interdependencies, and little attention to long-term adaptation. We found that developing futures scenarios coupled with natural and malicious hazard episodes provided an effective way to draw in key stakeholders to engage with and address these problems. Starting with a detailed analysis of extant futures studies, scenarios were combined with episodes in order to both draw stakeholders out of their institutional contexts by setting the exercise in the future and to elicit participant responses during future crisis events. A procedure was developed and applied to construct integrated scenario-episodes built upon existing scenarios in order to investigate multi-stakeholder interactions around the resilience of energy and transport infrastructures. The full resulting scenario-episode narratives are also presented. These scenario-narratives were applied in key stakeholder focus groups to address the gaps in the aforementioned 'governing through resilience'. Participants actively engaged with these scenario-episodes in order to highlight overlapping conceptualisations of 'resilience', identify critical infrastructure interdependencies, and reflect deeper and more collaboratively on the longer-term resilience implications. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd

Constructing resilient futures: integrating UK multi-stakeholder transport and energy resilience for 2050

The 2005 terrorist attacks in London and 2007 flooding throughout the UK revealed the shortcomings of the UK Government approach of ‘governing through resilience’ in practice: low levels of stakeholder co-ordination, lack of understanding about critical infrastructure interdependencies, and little attention to long-term adaptation. We found that developing futures scenarios coupled with natural and malicious hazard episodes provided an effective way to draw in key stakeholders to engage with and address these problems. Starting with a detailed analysis of extant futures studies, scenarios were combined with episodes in order to both draw stakeholders out of their institutional contexts by setting the exercise in the future and to elicit participant responses during future crisis events. A procedure was developed and applied to construct integrated scenario-episodes built upon existing scenarios in order to investigate multi-stakeholder interactions around the resilience of energy and transport infrastructures. The full resulting scenario-episode narratives are also presented. These scenario-narratives were applied in key stakeholder focus groups to address the gaps in the aforementioned ‘governing through resilience’. Participants actively engaged with these scenario-episodes in order to highlight overlapping conceptualisations of ‘resilience’, identify critical infrastructure interdependencies, and reflect deeper and more collaboratively on the longer-term resilience implications

Constructing resilience through security and surveillance: The politics, practices and tensions of security-driven resilience

This article illuminates how, since 9/11, security policy has gradually become more central to a range of resilience discourses and practices. As this process draws a wider range of security infrastructures, organizations and approaches into the enactment of resilience, security practices are enabled through more palatable and legitimizing discourses of resilience. This article charts the emergence and proliferation of security-driven resilience logics, deployed at different spatial scales, which exist in tension with each other. We exemplify such tensions in practice through a detailed case study from Birmingham, UK: ‘Project Champion’ an attempt to install over 200 high-resolution surveillance cameras, often invisibly, around neighbourhoods with a predominantly Muslim population. Here, practices of security-driven resilience came into conflict with other policy priorities focused upon community-centred social cohesion, posing a series of questions about social control, surveillance and the ability of national agencies to construct community resilience in local areas amidst state attempts to label the same spaces as ‘dangerous’. It is argued that security-driven logics of resilience generate conflicts in how resilience is operationalized, and produce and reproduce new hierarchical arrangements which, in turn, may work to subvert some of the founding aspirations and principles of resilience logic itself

Observing Potentiality in the Global City

This article examines how strategies originally developed to tackle “conventional” forms of criminality are increasingly aimed at averting terrorism in London's public spaces. A central theme regards the increasing orientation of these controlling strategies around (progressively asocial) technological surveillance. The utilization of closed-circuit television (CCTV) during terrorist campaigns in London since 1992 is examined. The potential efficacy of electronic surveillance is argued to be partly contingent on configurations of differing dissident groups. Although reactionary terrorist activity may be amenable to disruption through CCTV, the same does not necessarily apply for groups with more nebulous formations. Difficulties are identified in grafting crime-control surveillance strategies onto counterterrorism. Moreover, the postevent functionality of such surveillant applications emphasizes the role of the human agent and thus questions moves toward asocial strategies. Finally, a number of unintended corollary effects of such strategies, including their likely impact on the categorization and potential radicalization of individuals, are identified. </jats:p