Reporting Power

An eclectic genealogy (Foucault, 1977) that reconstructs the previous understanding and emergence of a ‘taken for granted’ global practice: the practice of suspicious activity reporting. A governance practice whereby financial institutions worldwide document and report the conduct of consumers deemed suspicious. At the center of this practice is a material artefact, a multipage fillable form called the Suspicious Activity Report. Following Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 1987), the form also serves as the centerpiece of the dissertation. Beginning in the 1970s and stretching into the 1990s, the dissertation shows how previous iterations of the same form were used by financial institutions and regulatory agencies in the United States to document the misconduct of financial institutions and their employees. The research shows that while the physical form itself remained largely the same, the momentous change was the relationships between actors: who held the power to deem dangerous whom, and what type of conduct was being documented. While much has been written on the topic, this contribution represents the first to document empirically the neglected connection to former iterations of the form, the network and practice of reporting that previously surveilled the conduct of the financial industry rather than the everyday citizen, and finally, the powerful social groups that instigated and benefited from this transformation (Gramsci, 1971). It is also a work in the tradition of critical criminology that looks at white-collar and corporate crime in lieu of wars on drugs or terrorism. The research represents a counterpoint and also empirical manifestation of the shifting emphasis in both crime control and crime control studies: from white-collar misconduct to the everyday activity of citizens and consumers.