Policy Legitimacy,Rhetorical Politics,and the Evaluation of City‐Street Video Surveillance Monitoring Programs in Canada

This article examines the evaluation and legitimization of city‐street video surveillance in Ontario, Canada. We demonstrate how monitoring programs are promoted, designed, and justified based on rhetorical claims about their efficacy. Although program evaluation data do not commonly corroborate or support program objectives, we show how the rhetorical politics of video surveillance evaluation research finds legitimacy by adhering to the Ontario privacy commissioner's best practices guidelines—guidelines that are formulated to minimize rhetoric in system design. The findings raise questions about how city‐street video surveillance remains a viable policy option given the lack of evidence pertaining to its usefulness.     

Dynamic booking rules for flights with an intermediate stop

A feasible model has been developed to find the optimal decision rule for allocating seats to passengers seeking to fly on the long or short span of a flight with an intermediate stop from which no boarding rights exist to take passengers to the terminal stop. The model is feasible from the point of view of estimating the data and of computer calculation and memory capacity and is implementable under real life conditions. A computer program was written and a short sample problem was calculated to show the differences in computation time and memory requirements vs the loss of revenue in comparison with a complicated and thus unfeasible higher order model.     

Blood donation and institutional trust: risk, policy rhetoric, and the men who have sex with men lifetime deferral policy in Canada

This article examines the process of rebuilding institutional trust in the Canadian blood system in the aftermath of the tainted blood scandal. Our focus is the policy of lifetime deferral from donating blood for men who have sex with men. Drawing on findings from interviews with representatives of Health Canada's Expert Advisory Committee on Blood Regulation, the National Liaison Committee, Canadian Blood Services, and blood consumer groups, we demonstrate how claims making about rights, discrimination, science, and risk contribute to policy continuity. We also examine the link between policy continuity and the management of reputational risk.     

Tightening the focus: moral panic, moral regulation and liberal government

The purpose of this article is to tighten the focus of moral panic studies by clarifying and elaborating on an analytical framework that conceptualizes moral panic as a form of moral regulation. The first part of the article explains why moral panic should be conceptualized as a form of moral regulation. The second part presents a rejoinder to Critcher's (2009) critique of the widening focus of moral panic studies. The third part elaborates on the conceptual relationship between the sociologies of moral panic and moral regulation by offering fresh insights into the sociological and political importance of moral panic as a technique of liberal government.     

Risk and panic in late modernity: implications of the converging sites of social anxiety

Comparing moral panic with the potential catastrophes of the risk society, Sheldon Ungar contends that new sites of social anxiety emerging around nuclear, medical, environmental and chemical threats have thrown into relief many of the questions motivating moral panic research agendas. He argues that shifting sites of social anxiety necessitate a rethinking of theoretical, methodological and conceptual issues related to processes of social control, claims making and general perceptions of public safety. This paper charts an alternative trajectory, asserting that analytic priority rests not with an understanding of the implications of changing but converging sites of social anxiety. Concentrating on the converging sites of social anxiety in late modernity, the analysis forecasts a proliferation of moral panics as an exaggerated symptom of the heightened sense of uncertainty purported to accompany the ascendency of the risk society.     

Moral panic,moral regulation,and the civilizing process

This article compares two analytical frameworks ostensibly formulated to widen the focus of moral panic studies. The comparative analysis suggests that attempts to conceptualize moral panics in terms of decivilizing processes have neither substantively supplemented the explanatory gains made by conceptualizing moral panic as a form of moral regulation nor provided a viable alternative framework that better explains the dynamics of contemporary moral panics. The article concludes that Elias's meta‐theory of the civilizing process potentially provides explanatory resources to investigate a possible historical‐structural shift towards the so‐called age of (a)moral panic; the analytical demands of such a project, however, require a sufficiently different line of inquiry than the one encouraged by both the regulatory and decivilizing perspectives on moral panic.