Environmental Engineering Reference
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(Haggerty and Ericson, 2000 : 618). For example, civil society-related
interest groups and loosely organised transboundary networks of indi-
viduals have developed their own monitoring systems and strategies to
discipline and control businesses and the cultural and political elite.
Anthony Giddens's understanding of surveillance and power seems
then more suitable for analysing and understanding present devel-
opments in environmental monitoring and informational governance.
Giddens sees surveillance, “the supervision of the activities of subject
populations in the political sphere” (Giddens, 1990 : 58), as one of the
four institutional dimensions of modernity, next to industrialism, capi-
talism and military power. Surveillance is considered to be a structural
property of both traditional and modern societies. In modern societies,
surveillance reaches “an intensity quite unmatched in previous types
of social order, made possible through the generation and control of
information, and developments in communication and transportation,
plus forms of supervisory control of 'deviance'” (Giddens, 1985 : 312).
Just like any other structural property or principle, surveillance does
not act on individuals in a deterministic way, like the forces of nature.
Monitoring and surveillance should be considered a social construc-
tion, whose functioning and social effects are dependent on the design
of the monitoring and surveillance schemes and the related interests
and relations of power.
This is, of course, not to say that monitoring of consumption, con-
sumer behaviour, and citizens runs no risk of an increased colonisa-
tion of the life-world and social control. But because of the nature of
the world of social actors, environmental monitoring will not auto-
matically lead to monopolistic social control. Potential detrimental
social consequences of monitoring social practices are related to the
design of the surveillance and monitoring arrangements and the net-
works of power and interest governing such arrangements. As we have
conceptualised in an earlier section in this chapter, under conditions
of informational governance monitoring schemes are widening and
move beyond a mere systemic monitoring, surveillance and control
of the life-world. Countersurveillance, reflexive monitoring and inter-
nal monitoring are as much prevailing as monitoring arrangements as
'producer power and surveillance' and 'state-sanctioned monitoring'.
In addition, we witness in late or global modernity new power rela-
tions in production and consumption chains and networks, in which
post-Fordism, chain-inversion and the consumerist turn all point to
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