Page 155 - The Disneyization of Society

THE DISNEYIZATION OF SOCIETY

policies and surveillance systems, West Edmonton Mall is the setting for a
surprising variety and number of criminal activities and various other disturbances. 41
146 Wooden has shown that crimes of various kinds are quite rife in North American
malls: one upscale Florida mall reported in a two-year period in the late 1980s, 10 sex
offences, 176 assaults, 64 hold-ups, 597 burglaries, 445 stolen cars, and round 2,000
larcenies, including shoplifting. 42 However, it is the perception that malls are safe
venues that has led to the declining patronage of many city centres for shopping and
other leisure activities. Moreover, it may be that the more Disneyized a mall or leisure
complex is in terms of having theming, hybrid consumption, and similar dimen-
sions of Disneyization, the safer the consumer feels because of the more ludic ambi-
ence that is created, especially when surveillance systems are clearly in evidence.
Shopping in large Disneyized malls is by no means the only way in which
Disneyization is underpinned by surveillance. Tourist enclaves are frequently the
focus of such systems, with the concomitant tendency for undesirables to be
evicted. For example, homeless young people are tracked and evicted from the
sidewalks of Victoria, British Columbia. The rationale for this activity is that the
city is ‘a tourist town with “Olde English” charm, a Scottish castle and a replica
of Anne Hathaway’s cottage’. 43 Not only do such undesirables undermine the
charm, they might also prevent tourists from lingering and therefore spending
money. Tourist enclaves like this tend to be subject to surveillance for these kinds
of reasons. Indeed, one of the main ways that large cities have been able to entice
tourists and often locals is to create such enclaves through redevelopment, as in
New York’s Times Square, or festival marketplace areas (see Chapter 3), like
Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston 44 or Baltimore’s Harborplace. 45 Surveillance is
a marked feature of such tourist enclaves so that the perceived threats of the wider
city can be kept at bay and affluent tourists and locals can be enticed back into
cities for shopping, restaurants and other leisure activities.

Surveillance of the worker

In Chapter 5, a major element in the narrative was the importance of the frontline
worker to the success of service companies, and in particular of the worker conform-
ing to behavioural norms of emotional labour and to the appearance and style norms
of aesthetic labour. While companies were described as going to great lengths to con-
trol the worker, most notably through training, rules and regulations and inculcating
organizational commitment, surveillance forms a further element in their arsenal of
methods to secure conformity with required modes of behaviour and style.

Surveillance of Disney theme parks employees
Just like the security guard dealing with a transgression by Clifford Shearing and
his daughter (see above), security personnel also prowl the parks to check on the