I argue that there are unconsidered complexities to police legitimacy and use examples from my study of police-public consultation forums in Edinburgh, Scotland to illustrate. I make a number of conceptual and methodological critiques by drawing upon Steven Lukes' social theory on power to show how legitimacy can be a product of authority relations as much as it is a cause of authority relations. This view finds support from systems-justification theory. I also tackle Beetham's conception of legitimacy and argue that there is evidence from police studies that the police breach his key antecedents to legitimacy without incurring the expected consequences. Furthermore, I take an original methodological approach to studying police legitimacy which reveals additional insights. For instance, Bottoms and Tankebe suggest legitimacy addresses multiple 'audiences'; I would also add that it addresses multiple recipients as legitimacy is shown to vary among officers and positions of rank.

No abstract

No abstract

This article argues that police studies should draw on the sociology of punishment to better understand state pain-delivery. Whereas penal theorists commonly assess the pain and punishment of inmates in relation to wider social sentiments, police theory has yet to regard police violence and harm in the same fashion. As a result, police scholars often fail to address why the damage caused by public constabularies, even when widely publicized, is accommodated and accepted. Adapting the idea of ‘punitiveness’ from penal theory allows some explanation of how the public views injury and suffering caused by the police by illuminating the emotions and sentiments their actions generate.

This article examines the attempts of ‘spyware’ developers to commodify and market their products to a general audience. While consumers of ‘spyware’ have often been government and law enforcement (Citizen Lab, 2015), there is an increasing attempt to market, sell, and commodify ‘spyware’ for use by wider audiences. ‘Spyware’ is sold as a security product commonly aimed at businesses, parents, and intimate partners. Pursuant to calls for a “sociology of security consumption” (Goold et al., 2010: 3), this article analyzes how nine prominent spyware vendors attribute meaning to their products. Spyware vendors face particularly fraught marketing challenges as the general deployment of spyware: a) is often utilized in forms of intimate partner abuse; b) is “morally troubling” from the perspective of being corrosive to many forms of social relations (Loader et al., 2014: 469); and c) has limited contexts where it could be deployed without violating surveillance laws. More specifically, this article compares the social meaning that vendors attempt to give to spyware and contrasts this with the powers of surveillance provided by the product, the marketing messages that appear to support non-consensual use, and the lack of guidance for non-consenting spyware targets to have recourse with the vendors.