Scandinavian suspicions: A study of private investigators, sidewards surveillance, and social paranoia

We are surveilling each other.

In contemporary societies, we are no longer just monitored by conventional Orwellian actors but increasingly also by the local shop owner, neighbors, family, friends, and foes. Suspicion, as Guittet and Brion (2017) argue, has to some extent become normalized. It has become part of everyday life and, consequently, so have ordinary people’s everyday surveillance efforts.

This project goes to the heart of this development.

As an empirical point of departure for doing so, it homes in on the remarkable upsurge in the use of private investigators (PIs).

While different practices and technologies of surveillance have been the focus of many studies, scant attention has been paid to the use of PIs. The lack of attention is a missed opportunity indeed.

While surveillance is often accepted as a top-down control-oriented, commercial, or even political monitoring of social life, the PI represents a more relational, "sidewards" and even intimate practice of surveillance between people.

A study of Scandinavians’ private investigations will therefore not only yield insights into the concrete business of PI work and the Scandinavian suspicions that underline it; it will also serve as an exemplary case study of the growing social paranoia that governs even otherwise well-off welfare societies.