Prof Kirstie Ball

Prof Kirstie Ball

Professor of Management

Researcher profile

Email
Kirstie.Ball@st-andrews.ac.uk

 

Biography

Kirstie joined the School of Management in 2016 having held positions at Aston, Warwick, Birmingham and The Open Universities.  She is Professor in Management and co-director and founder of CRISP, the Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance and Privacy. CRISP is a joint research centre between St Andrews, Edinburgh, Stirling and Essex Universities. She is also Research Fellow at the Surveillance Studies Centre, Queen's University, Canada and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Business in Society at Coventry University. 

Over the last 20 years Kirstie’s research has been funded by ESRC, EPSRC, SSHRC (Canada), The Leverhulme Trust, The British Academy and the European Framework Programme. In 2015 she published 'The Private Security State? Surveillance, Consumer Data and the War on Terror', the first empirical study, from an organizational perspective, of private sector involvement in government surveillance regimes. She is also co-editor of a new Routledge book series entitled 'Studies in Surveillance' and edited ‘The Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies’, a key resource for those who teach about surveillance. She has consulted to the UK's Information Commissioner, authoring ‘A Report on the Surveillance Society’ in 2006, which prompted two parliamentary committee enquiries, and its follow up in 2010.

Kirstie co-founded and co-edited the journal Surveillance and Society and the charitable company Surveillance Studies Network, an educational charity which supports the journal. She has also advised numerous NGOs, research funding bodies and news media organizations about surveillance, privacy and security. She frequently appears in the broadcast and print media and at public events to speak about surveillance as a contemporary social phenomenon.

Teaching

  • MN1001 Understanding the Business Environment
  • MN4214 Management of Change
  • MN5001 Contemporary Global Issues in Management

Research areas

Kirstie’s research focuses on surveillance in and around organizations and surveillance in society. Her theoretical interests surround subjectivity and the experience of surveillance, while her empirical work focuses on the organizational forms surrounding pervasive employee monitoring, the surveillance-industrial complex and big data consumer surveillance.

Selected publications

 

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