A sociological analyse on social surveillance

ABSTRACT MASTER THESIS A Sociological Analyse on Social Surveillance AYŞE MERMUTLU FIRAT UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY 2004-Page: VI+175 In this study it is aimed to deal with surveillance as a social fact and to examine it in the base of socio-historical variations that it displays. In pursuit of this object, surveillance is based on a sociological context and formulated as "a sociation form", the term that has been developed by Georg Simmel to study social facts in the base of sociological viewpoint. In this context, surveillance as a social form is investigated in traditional society, modern society and late-modern society with its various appearances. While surveillance in traditional society is characterized by its publical nature, in modern and late-modern society it is rather characterized by its institutional nature. Surveillance has undergone a radical transformation in the conditions of modernity that afterwards would determined the surveillance system of the late-modern society. Panopticon, which is a metaphor that has been developed to illustrate modern surveillance system by Michel Foucault, is main notion by which institutional nature of the surveillance in modernity is described. In addition to Panopticon, the rational bureaucratic organizations that are analyzed by Max Weber to explain the nature of modern society in his theoretical framework are also dealt with in this context. Finally, surveillance in the late-modern society is analyzed according to variables such as electronic databases and consumption. Key words: Surveillance, Social Control, Panopticon, Bureaucratic Control, Discipline II