Making the Combination of Support and Social Control Work in Supervision

Consciously or unconsciously, urban inhabitants in digitally networked cities leave traces of themselves every time they interact with the digital devices and infrastructures that have become taken-for-granted parts of daily life. There have been lively discussions about the nature of social control and modes of power in such urban contexts. According to some, modulatory mechanisms of power characteristic of the digitally networked city have superseded disciplinary modes of control. This is said to involve the fragmentation of individuals into discrete units of dividual data. We argue that the shift from disciplinary to modulatory control should not be overstated. Rather, disciplinary and modulatory modes of control work together across a spectrum of personhood, from individual to dividual. Understanding the co-existence of, and the relationships between, these two forms of social control is essential for thinking through the urban politics of data and control. Our article illustrates this contention with three vignettes of how the dividualised data associated with discrete digital infrastructures and systems are also being ‘re-assembled’ by various authorities seeking to discipline the behaviour of individuals. It concludes with a discussion of such powers of re-assembly and their critical importance to the politics of control in digitally networked cities.

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Contingent Control and Wild Moments: Conducting Psychiatric Evaluations in the Home

Social Inclusion ◽

10.17645/si.v7i1.1788 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

pp. 259-268 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Robert M. Emerson ◽

Melvin Pollner

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Social Control ◽

Social Service ◽

Field Work ◽

Office Work ◽

Service Workers ◽

Distinctive Features ◽

Control Decision ◽

Control Work

When social control and social service workers go into the field, into the “native habitat” of some problem, a variety of tacit structures and controls that mark office work with its standardized documents and formal meetings are weakened or absent entirely. As a result, compared to office settings, social control work in field settings tends to become open, contingent, unpredictable, and on occasion even wild. This article provides a strategic case study of the distinctive features of social control decision-making in the field, drawing on observations of field work by psychiatric emergency teams (PET) from the 1970s. PET typically went to the homes of psychiatrically-troubled persons in order to conduct evaluations for involuntary mental hospitalization. This article will analyze the varied, situationally-sensitive practices these workers adopted to evaluate such patients in their own homes.

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