This thesis asks the research question In what ways do gender stereotypes inform the thoughts and actions of CCTV control room operators? Initially inspired by the problem of women’s lesser criminality, this research employs a police Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) control room ethnography to enable an exploration of the ways in which CCTV operators construct and interpret crime/deviance and sex/gender and what gender stereotypes they use to make sense of what they see on their screens. The fieldwork undertaken produces a social phenomenology of CCTV operators’ perceptions of potential crime/deviance, how these are gendered and their effects on surveillance practices. A framework for data analysis was iteratively developed. The themes it covers are: biological essentialism, social constructionism and the everyday reconciliation of theoretical problems through pragmatic solutions in the lived experience. These conceptual frames, drawn from criminological and gender theory, usefully allow the rethinking of gendered criminality/deviance and integral stereotyping. The interpretation of research findings using this framework indicates that operators' decision making is heavily based on stereotypes of sex/gender that are constructed through, and help to construct, corresponding incidences of crime/deviance, as well as a CCTV control room workplace culture. More specifically, the findings suggest that there are significant co-dependencies and co- productions of crime/deviance and sex/gender, which result in corresponding concepts and practices, and thus affinities between lay and academic theorising. These conclusions point to a need for further examination of the important consequences of assumptions contained in socially constructed stereotypes of sex/gender, especially in the context of social processes pertaining to crime/deviance, and their academic analysis and representation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:577658 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Morgan, Heather M. |
| Publisher | University of Aberdeen |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=201690 |
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