Marx's approach to his subject is exhaustive and can feel exhausting. However, one use for these materials is immediately apparent: as aids to teaching. For a class on surveillance studies, it is hard to imagine any more generously gathered
and easily excerpted
pr cis of the kinds of questions that can, do, or might arise about surveillance.
Jeffrey Clapp Law and ... Read moreLiterature For better and for worse, surveillance is now central to politics and our lives, and Marx's magisterial survey is essential to understanding its multiple forms and facets. Simultaneously personal and learned, it is full of ideas and connections. To call it eye-opening would not only be too much of a pun but would be an understatement
it is mind-opening. Marx gives us no easy answers, but ensures that we will ask better questions.
Robert Jervis author of Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War The book is an important and timely statement on the subject; but more, it is a tour de force of Marx's trademark witty intelligence, engaging writing, and insightful social commentary....It is a provocative and bold summation of a life's work that challenges us to eschew inflated pronouncements and focus our attention on understanding the context and consequences of the new technologies and surveillance mechanisms that permeate our lives.
William G. Staples Contemporary Sociology This is a very important book.
David L. Altheide Information, Communication and Society This is a remarkable book. . .The detailed stories make his analysis vivid, while serving to clearly develop his own reasoning. . .Gary T Marx develops and clearly writes these sociological fictions with a great sense of irony and accuracy.
Nils Zurawsku Kriminologisches There are two phrases which I think well represent both the book and the field of surveillance itself. The first is that 'surveillance is neither good nor bad, but context and comportment make it so'. The second is that 'modern democratic society is a farrago in a cauldron of conundrums accompanied by myths shielding harsher realities'. I most definitely recommend this book to academics, security practitioners and those interested in surveillance and security.
LSE Review of Books Courteney J. O'Connor No review can begin to do justice to this grand synthesis of a lifetime of critical social science research on surveillance. . . .Marx dresses his encyclopedic quest in sharply crafted prose that has a strong but humbly skeptical voice full of wit and wisdom, which informs, surprises and intrigues as he culls examples and insights from sources ranging from Shakespeare to Superman. . . .Marx has proposed a laudable normative standard for democratic surveillance, much as Jurgen Habermas has developed one for democratic communication. They provide platforms for critics and activists to call out violations of democratic ideals.
Sue C. Jansen Secrecy and Society Windows into the Soul is a distillation of the best of sociology and surveillance studies, it probes, it provokes, and it presents an account of the many tensions at the heart of surveillance. . .Windows is the product of a career's worth of knowledge, experience, and research that enables Marx to move seamlessly between empirical work, satirical accounts, and theoretically grounded discussion. . .Marx has crafted an exceptionally crafted piece of sociological writing which constantly reminds us of the demands and questions we must ask of ourselves, of technology and of society.
Robert Thornton-Lee Surveillance and Society From the beginning, Gary T. Marx played a critical role in shaping these deep shifts in the tectonic plates underlying our theoretical [surveillance] landscape....In Undercover (Marx, 1988), perhaps his most celebrated work, he developed a searching analysis of situations where police investigators assumed the identities of participants ....That work is properly hailed as a masterpiece for its sensitive accounts of the effects of these activities. . . . All these analytical and moral virtues are on display in Windows into the Soul. In many ways, this is a still more ambitious work than its predecessors. Here, he aims to present nothing less than a conspectus of lessons learned about surveillance over a long and distinguished career, a career devoted not only to empirical studies but also to deep reflection on the changing roles of surveillance and their significance for key values.
James B. Rule British Journal of Criminology The first word that came to mind while reading this book was cornucopia. After decades of research on surveillance, Gary Marx has delivered an abundant harvest indeed. The book is much more than a straightforward treatise. It borders on the encyclopedic, and is literally overflowing with ideas, observations, and analyses. Windows into the Soul commands the attention of anyone interested in surveillance, past, present, and future. The book's website contains a rich abundance of complementary material. An additional chapter consists of an intellectual autobiography discussing the author's interest in, and personal experience with, surveillance over the course of his career. Because of its extraordinary breadth, the book should appeal to a wide readership.... it will be of interest to scholars of deviance and social control, cultural studies, criminal justice and criminology. But the book should be read well beyond the towers of academe. The security industry, broadly defined to include private security and intelligence companies as well as state law enforcement and intelligence agencies, would benefit from the book's insights. So too should it be read by those in the information technology industries, including the manufacturers of the devices and applications which are central to contemporary surveillance, and which are shaping our future.
Peter Grabosky Criminal Justice Windowsinto the Soul offers a framework for surveillance structure, organization, practice, function, process, culture (including lengthy fictional scenarios), and ethical considerations. . . . A 'magisterial' study. . . . This is Marx's strongpoint: a taxonomic completeness in many categories couched in a precise and expansive terminology, presented in many detailed charts and tables. . . . There is so much diverse material in this encyclopedic overview that the publisher expunged chapters on art, music, advertisements, policy, and other topics, some of which are available on the University of Chicago Press's website. Here one will discover a total of 156 additional pages, often beautifully illustrated.
A. Robert Hauptman Journal of Information Ethics Marx's Windows into the Soul addresses the one-way mirror stacked up to provide law enforcement and business enterprise with penetrating knowledge of anyone anywhere. In his magnificent style of inquiry Marx zooms in on the myriad ways by which this multi-focal mirror is engineered, instituted, and maintained. Expanding on his broad and deep knowledge of the capillaries of emerging surveillance engines, taking an analytical approach in the tradition of Goffman, Marx incorporates a pertinent acuity in relation to both technical and cultural aspects. He takes empirical research to another level. Ushering the reader beyond the current fascination for solutionism and Big Data fetishism, this book raises rigorous empirical questions, while testing the hidden assumptions of supposedly neutral solutions. A great read for all who need to know how back-stage operations inform front-stage presentations in the wondrous world of private and public surveillance.
Mireille Hildebrandt author of Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law: Novel Entanglements of Law and Technology In a world punch-drunk on data, with both governments and corporations
not to mention private persons
increasingly recording and correlating our every move, Windows into the Soul is an important and timely book. With his decades of academic and policy experience, there's no one better than Marx to examine and explain surveillance in all its facets and complexities.
Bruce Schneier author of Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World Sociologist Marx is one of the pioneers in surveillance studies. . . . Thirty years after his famous publication on undercover police he has now published a second, far reaching monograph. . . . Windows into the Soul impresses the reader through its content, as well as through its analytic stringency and the density of the material offered. . . . With ease, Marx approaches the complex and difficult questions of contemporary surveillance culture. Without any doubt, this must be defined as his 'Opus magnum' and rightfully so. However, in the reading it is much lighter and more entertaining than such a heavy title would make the reader believe.
Hanna Reichel Criminologia Marx has played a vital role in anchoring surveillance studies as a distinct and important area of research. . . . Marx's playful writing and crisp articulation make surveillance and social control approachable and coherent for inquiring minds and researchers old and new. . . . Marx has a presence in Windows that awards the book personality and wit, as pages are brought to life with humor, pop culture references, cartoons, and stories (both fictional and real). . . . The text is a must-read for anyone entering the field.
Justin E. C. Tetrault Policing and Society Gary T. Marx, emeritus professor at MIT, has spent a lifetime devoted to sociology in capital letters. . .Windows into the Soul is a compendium and deep reflection drawing on the laboriously elaborated fruit of a life time of work. . .As Marx points out at the beginning of the book: the artist knows that something worthwhile lies within, but only immersion in the work can reveal it (Marx, 2017: IX). The book is therefore a humble, but necessary, demolition of the epistemological barriers that inhibit understanding surveillance
whether these involve prejudice or annoying inaccuracies.
Fran Morente Revista de Investigaciones Politicas y Sociologticas Marx's research and writing are very much in the tradition of Lewis Mumford, an historian and philosopher, Erving Goffman, a sociologist, and Seymour Martin Lipset, a political scientist and sociologist
all intellectual giants of the twentieth century whose scholarship revealed and explained much about post World War II society and whose insights continue to inform how we view the world today. Marx's concern that social scientists have been overly concerned with narrow methodologies and speaking to the informed audience sharing their perspective derives from his respect for the earlier social scientists who asked large research questions and systematically evaluated the evidence. It is this type of scholarship that makes a long-lasting intellectual contribution. I suspect Windows into the Soul will as well.
Priscilla M. Regan Society Show Less