The ‘great unwatched’ and the ‘lightly touched’: surveillance and stock market fraud
Version 2 2024-06-06, 11:44Version 2 2024-06-06, 11:44
Version 1 2015-02-13, 12:26Version 1 2015-02-13, 12:26
chapter
posted on 2024-06-06, 11:44authored byL Snider, A Molnar
This chapter examines financial corporate crime, specifically the discontinuities
and asymmetries in power that condition the differential uses of surveillance and
surveillance technologies in the governance of stock market fraud. It studies
state and non-state control ('rule at a distance') (Rose and Miller 1992), the
resistance practiced by the powerful economic actors who make up national and
international equity trading markets, and the control efforts of regulatory agencies
charged with preventing, regulating and enforcing laws to counter stock
market crime. At a theoretical level the study critiques the claims of surveillance
literatures that technologically mediated surveillance, 'the new transparency',
renders all social fields visible, and therefore knowable, manageable and governable
(Haggerty and Ericson 2000), by documenting and interrogating how code
is used by powerful bankers, lawyers, accountants and stock brokers to construct
'visibility covers' (Williams 2008: 1; Snider 2009; Braithwaite 2005).