ABSTRACT
The use of video surveillance by government, businesses, and individuals to watch activities in and around their space of responsibility has grown steadily in recent decades in modern societies and in many other parts of the world. The possibility to observe and record events at areas and places, for which they are responsible, attracts executives in private enterprise as well as in public administration, as it offers new and unique instruments for control. The advances in surveillance technology and its new applications have subsequently gained increasing interest from academics (Bennett 2011; Tække 2011; Monahan 2010). Still diverging in a disciplinary sense, and in many cases transdisciplinary in its approach, the predominant entrance into this field of study has long been Foucault’s panopticonism (Wood 2003). Recently educational, sociological, and psychological theoretical perspectives have also been applied to the study of this phenomenon (Flaherty 1989). However, in this research area the literature is less extensive on the use of political approaches, particularly political institutionalism. In this chapter, public video surveillance in Sweden is investigated from an institutional perspective, aiming to scrutinise the surveillance phenomenon in Sweden by focusing on its values structure, rules, and practices.
