Page 149 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

and division of labour, mechanization and the intensification of work. The
workshop and factory were utilized as a means of exerting discipline and the
creation of new work habits. That is, they marked new forms of surveillance, a
126 concept that refers to the collection, storage and retrieval of information, the direct
supervision of activities and the use of information to monitor subject populations.
Though surveillance is not the invention of modernity per se, it did introduce new,
more complex and extensive forms including a shift from personal to impersonal
control so that bureaucratization, rationalization and professionalization become
core institutional configurations of modernity.
Today we understand the world as divided into discrete nation-states. However,
the nation-state is a relatively recent modern contrivance which most of the human
species has not participated nor identified with. The modern nation-state is a
political apparatus recognized to have sovereign rights within the borders of a
demarcated territorial area and possessing the ability to back these claims with
military power within the context of a world-wide nation-state system. The state
specializes in the maintenance of order through the rule of law and the monopoly
of legitimate violence. The combination of state military power, political ambition
and the emotional investments of national identity have underpinned modern
twentieth-century warfare that is now fought with industrialized modern armies.
Thus soldiers are trained, disciplined and bureaucratized and arms are produced in
factories owned by capitalist corporations engaging in international arms trading.

Links Capitalism, globalization, modernism, nation-state, postmodernity, surveillance

Moral panic The concept of a moral panic came into the cultural studies vocabulary
in the early 1970s through its engagement with deviancy theory and the
investigation of youth subcultures. A moral panic is a social process by which the
media latch onto a culturally identified group and label their behaviour as
troublesome and likely to re-occur. The groups so labelled have been characterized
as contemporary ‘folk devils’. The public response to the new witchcraft is a moral
panic that involves the tracking down and punishment of the deviant culture. The
recipients of a moral panic, for example the more visible and spectacular youth
cultures including Mods, Punks and Skinheads, respond with increased deviancy so
that a cycle of labelling, amplification and deviancy is set in motion.
In this model it is assumed that the media work on previously existing
subcultural activities where youth cultures are held to exist in authentic distinct and
pristine form prior to media intervention. That is, subculture theory perceived
youth culture to be ‘outside’ of the media and opposed to it. In contrast, many
contemporary theorists suggest that youth cultures are always ‘inside’ the media
and even are dependent on it. Thus, while studies of ‘moral panics’ tend to position
youth cultures as innocent victims of negative stigmatization, media
‘misunderstanding’ can be an objective of subcultural industries where ‘moral panic’
can act as a form of marketing hype.
Hall and others applied the concept of a ‘moral panic’ to the British press
treatment of street robbery. These authors explore the articulation of ‘mugging’ with