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The contributions in this book shed light on the complexity of surveillance in a digital age and problematise power relations between the many actors involved in the development and performance of surveillance culture. More and more actors and practices play an increasing role in our contemporary digitalised society, and the chapters show how people negotiate surveillance in their use of digital media, often knowingly leaving digital footprints, and sometimes trying to avoid surveillance. The digital transformation will continue in the foreseeable future. The coordination and analysis of data is viewed by many government agencies, corporations, and other actors as important tools for improving public administration, health, and economic growth. For this development to be legitimate, it is important that hard values, such as technical and legal developments, and soft values, such as ethical and cultural values, are taken into consideration. 

Over the recent decades, the possibilities to surveil people have increased and been refined with the ongoing digital transformation of society. Surveillance can now go in any direction, and various forms of online surveillance saturate most people’s lives, which are increasingly lived in digital environments.

To understand this situation and nuance the contemporary discussions about surveillance – not least in the highly digitalised context of the Nordic countries – we must adopt cultural and ethical perspectives in studying people’s attitudes, motives, and behaviours. The “culture of surveillance”, to borrow David Lyon’s term, is a culture where questions about privacy and publicness, and rights and benefits, are once again brought to the fore.

This anthology takes up this challenge, with contributions from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical frameworks that discuss and shed light on the complexity of contemporary surveillance and thus problematise power relations between the many actors involved in the development and performance of surveillance culture. The contributions highlight how more and more actors and practices play a part in our increasingly digitalised society.

The book is an outcome of the research project "iAccept: Soft surveillance – between acceptance and resistance", financed by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation. The anthology’s editors are project members, all based at Umeå University, Sweden: Lars Samuelsson, associate professor of philosophy; Coppélie Cocq, professor of Sámi studies and digital humanities; Stefan Gelfgren, associate professor of sociology of religion; and Jesper Enbom, associate professor of media studies.

The possibilities to surveil people have increased and been further refined with the implementation of digital communication over the last couple of decades, and with the ongoing process of digital transformation, surveillance can now go in any direction, leaving a label such as “surveillance state” somewhat outdated. Corporations and governmental organisations may surveil people, people may surveil each other, and surveillance may take place in subtle ways that are difficult for the surveilled to detect. In David Lyon’s terms, we are living in a “culture of surveillance”, a culture that surrounds and affects our everyday life. Today, it is of utmost relevance to study people’s attitudes, motives, and behaviours in relation to the fact that we live in a culture of surveillance. This includes the need for cultural and ethical perspectives to understand and nuanced contemporary discussions on surveillance, not least in the highly digitalised context of the Nordic countries. The chapters in this anthology address these issues from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical frameworks.  

Within the school sector, the development towards a market paradigm has put measurement of performance and accountability in a new context. During the last two decades, this development has been especially apparent in Sweden where substantial reforms have transformed the entire school system and opened up the educational market to for profit organizations and competition between schools. Such reforms have placed an increased stress on performance in schools, for instance through benchmarking and open statistics on grades. Based on such premises, it might be argued that reputation management strategies - i.e. creating an appealing image and coherent brand to consumers on the educational market - become an important practice of the management of educational organizations. 

Empirical Research on reputation management in the public sector is a growing field (c.f. Wæraas, 2020) and reputation management as a practice appears to be increasingly institutionalized in the public sector (Salomonsen et al., 2016). Previous studies have covered a range of topics such as hospitals (Blomgren et al., 2016), place branding (Wæraas et al., 2015), for-profit schools (Gustrén, 2021). Therefore, we consider this paper as an important contribution to the literature on reputation management and public sector communication in general. The empirical data on which this study is based consists of 15 semi-structured qualitative interviews with public servants responsible for communication/pubiic relations in upper secondary school at the municipal/administrative level. Topics covered in the interviews included media relations and social media use. Furthermore, problems associated with the work of reputation management and potential conflicts between organizational self-interest and public good. 

Results from the study shows how reputation management in the Swedish school sector is both enabled and constrained by specific institutional conditions inherent to the public sector. The results also underline the importance of the market-driven Swedish school system to produce these specific conditions. 

Users of digital media leave traces that corporations and authorities can harvest, systema-tise, and analyse; on the societal level, an overall result is the emergence of a surveillance culture. In this study, we examine how people handle the dilemma of leaving digital footprints: what they say they do to protect their privacy and what could legitimise the collection and storing of their data. Through a survey of almost 1,000 students at Umeå University in Sweden, we find that most respondents know that their data are used and choose to adjust their own behaviour rather than adopting technical solutions. In order to understand contemporary forms of surveillance, we call for a humanistic approach – an approach where hermeneutic and qualitative methods are central.