Locating Televisual and Non‐Televisual Textual Sequences with Institutional Ethnography: A Study of Campus and Apartment CCTV Security Work

Abstract

There is a longstanding social scientific practice of focusing on verbal and written accounts as forms of data to the neglect of televisual materials. In this paper I address the above problematic by examining the productive power of video as a means of organizing social and work relations. Treating video as a form of text which is activated by human subjects and therefore an active constituent of organization in both local and extra-local settings, I draw on interview and observation data collected from research conducted with closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance camera operators engaged in various forms of security work. This research is an extension and utilization of institutional ethnography: a method of inquiry which problematizes social relations at the local site of lived experience, while examining how textual sequences coordinate consciousness, actions, and ruling relations. Taking up visual culture and the question of surveillance in institutional ethnography is a novel approach, and is ultimately important for de-routinizing the organizational role camera surveillance plays in everyday life.

Ottawa’s National Capital Commission Conservation Officers and the Policing of Public Park Sex

“…The report has sections for the name of the officer, the location of the occurrence, details of the occurrence, the number of the infraction or warning given, CPIC codes, officer signature, and date. Occurrence reports like those the NCC conservation officers work with are key tools in the material relations of surveillance because they allow for monitored activity to be translated into written language, which can then be stored, sent to other governance agencies, and used to prohibit from certain spaces and sometimes criminalize those about whom the report was written (Walby 2006). Through access to information requests I received seventy five occurrence reports filed by NCC conservation officers between 2004-2007.…”

On the Social Relations of Research

“…The facticity of "truth" is socially organized through textual practices producing a virtual reality of "what is," which accomplishes the exclusion of the subject's standpoint from the account. This producing of truth, whereby texts become active constituents of social relations, is achieved through people's actual doings with texts at "processing interchanges" (Pence, 2001;Walby, 2005aWalby, , 2006. Interpretive work people do activating and adding to the text "co-ordinates organization of what happens in the setting in which the reading takes place and the multiple sites in which the same text is read, as well as the local settings of work connected in the ongoing process" (Turner, 2002, p. 309).…”