Compliance-Industrial Complex: The Operating System of a Pre-Crime Society

This is the first book to examine the growth and phenomenon of a securitized and criminalized compliance society which relies increasingly on intelligence-led and predictive technologies to control future risks, crimes, and security threats. It articulates the emergence of a ’compliance-industrial complex’ that synthesizes regulatory capitalism and surveillance capitalism to impose new regimes of power and control, as well as new forms of subjectivity subservient to the ’operating system’ of a pre-crime society. Looking at compliance beyond frameworks of business management, corporate governance, law, and accounting, it looks as it as a social phenomenon, instrumental in the pluralization and privatization of policing, where the private intelligence, private security, and big tech companies are being concentrated at the very core of compliance, and hence, governance of the social. The critical book draws on transversal, rather than interdisciplinary, approaches and integrates disparate perspectives, inspired by works in critical criminology, critical algorithm studies, critical management studies, as well as social anthropology and philosophy.

Tereza Østbø Kuldova is Research Professor at the Work Research Institute, OsloMet - Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. She holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Oslo and is the author of How Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People (Palgrave, 2019), Luxury Indian Fashion: A Social Critique (Bloomsbury, 2016), co-editor of Crime, Harm and Consumerism (Routledge, 2020), Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Street Gangs (Palgrave, 2018) and Urban Utopias: Excess and Expulsion in Neoliberal South Asia (Palgrave, 2017).