James B. Rule

Office:SBS S-449
Office Hours: By appointment
Phone Number: (631) 632-7713
e-mail:james.rule@sunysb.edu
Areas of Interest: Sociology of Advanced Societies, Privacy, Technology

EDUCATION

Harvard University. PhD 1969 in Sociology.
University of Oxford. MA, by Special Resolution, 1969.
Brandeis University. BA, 1964.

BIOGRAPHY, PUBLICATIONS, AND RESEARCH INTERESTS

Before coming to Stony Brook, Rule carried out research and taught at MIT, Oxford University, the University of Bordeaux, and Cambridge University. More recently, he has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford; the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; and the Russell Sage Foundation, New York. He is a member of the editorial boards of Dissent magazine and Theory and Society.

James Rule carries out research and writes on a variety of topics. He is author or co-author of the following books and monographs:

Measuring Political Upheaval, Charles Tilly and James Rule, 1964

Private Lives and Public Surveillance, London 1973 and New York 1974 (awarded C. Wright Mills Award by Society for the Study of Social Problems) Insight and Social Betterment, 1978

The Politics of Privacy, by James Rule, Doug McAdam, Linda Stearns and David Uglow Theories of Civil Violence, 1988

Theory and Progress in Social Science, 1997 (Chinese edition 2004)

Computing in Organizations: Myth and Experience, James Rule, Debra Gimlin and Sylvia Sievers, 2002.

In addition to his scholarly work, Rule writes for a variety of periodicals more general interest. He is actively involved in editing the political quarterly Dissent, where many of his articles have appeared and where he is currently editing a series on the politics of high technology. One of his Dissent essays, "Dissenting from the American Empire," has just been reprinted in 50 Years of Dissent (Yale University Press 2004). He has authored a number of Op-Ed essays, a favorite of his being An Invasive Trend? It’s a Cultural Weed , from the International Herald Tribune, 18 May 2001.

Rule’s teaching at Stony Brook focuses on the history of social and political thought and on social change in the world’s “advanced” societies. In the spring of 2005 he will be giving an undergraduate seminar on privacy and the law, a joint offering with Professor Michael Simon of the Philosophy Department.

During his years at Stony Brook, Rule has filled a number of administrative roles in department and university life, including stints as departmental Graduate Director, Acting Chair, and (on many occasions) Recruitment Chair. He is an active participant in the Sociology Department’s working group on Global Studies.

In his most recent work, Rule has returned to a subject that has occupied him on and off since the beginning of his career—the appropriation and use of personal data by government and private organizations, and their use of such data in dealing with the people concerned. In short: privacy and surveillance. The long-term pressure for more surveillance, he contends, dates to well before the rise of the computer, and cannot simply be considered an “effect” of any technology. Since his first book on this subject, Private Lives and Public Surveillance, Rule has characterized the spreading collection and use of personal data as sharpening tensions between widely-held values of privacy and demands for efficiency in bureaucratic action. Accordingly, he has consistently argued against notions that satisfying organizations’ “needs” for the “free flow of information” can be reconciled with meaningful defense of personal privacy. Instead, he has urged participants in privacy debates to acknowledge frankly the losses to privacy values incurred as organizations continue to find more and more ways to acquire and use more and more personal data.

As government and private agencies exploit possibilities for doing “better” by knowing more about the people they deal with, the ability of the latter to control their own informational destinies suffers. It suffers even when the subjects of record-keeping are notified of the activities in advance; provided with formal rights of “consent”; and permitted to protest “abuses” of their files. Accordingly, meaningful privacy protection requires more than such due processes guarantees. As with meaningful environmental protection, taking privacy seriously demands that some forms of personal information simply remain off-limits to appropriation and exploitation.

Rule is currently engaged in a multi-year comparative study of success and failure in various countries’ efforts to protect “private” citizens’ control over their personal information. Supported by a Research and Writing Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, this work seeks critical judgments as to whether law and policy aimed at privacy protection have prevailed in any serious way against the onslaught of privacy-invading forces. It focuses on Australia, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and other countries that have created privacy codes over the last four decades. Over this period, nearly every liberal democracy around the world has developed some laws, institutions and policies to this end—with very mixed results. The work in progress seeks to identify the conditions of success and failure in these efforts, and thereby to assess the global prospects for meaningful privacy protection over the coming years. The provisional title for the work is Privacy under Pressure.

In August of 2004, under a grant from the National Science Foundation, Rule began creation of an edited volume intended to evolve in parallel with Privacy under Pressure. The chapters in this work will be critical histories of law and policy aimed at protecting personal data in seven or more countries. Each chapter will trace the historical development of key laws and institutions; note crucial victories and defeats for privacy interests; identify groups and interests mobilized over the issue; and present an analytical, summary picture of what forms of information “private” citizens can expect to keep private versus where disclosure is inevitable in the country under consideration. Graham Greenleaf, Professor of Law at the University at the University of New South Wales in Sydney (www2.austlii.edu.au/~graham/), is co-editor of this work and will author the chapter on Australia. Other chapters will survey the evolution of privacy protection efforts in the United States, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Germany and other countries. Rule will write the Introduction and Conclusion. The provisional title for this work is Privacy at Forty: Seven National Histories; it is scheduled for completion in August, 2006.

Some of Rule’s recent publications are:

“McTheory”, a review essay on Dynamics of Contention by Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly and Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics by Ronald Aminzade et al., in Sociological Forum, March 2004.

“Toward Strong Privacy: Values, Markets, Mechanisms and Institutions”, University of Toronto Law Journal, March 2004.

“Bait and Switch” (on the alleged WMDs in Iraq), Dissent, Spring 2004.

James Rule is father of Alix Rule, a student at Balliol College, Oxford, and Adam Rule, a senior in public high school in Port Jefferson, New York. Their summer home is in Aniane, Herault, France, where a number of the writings noted above were done. More details on Aniane can be seen at www.members.tripod.com/aniane/

Rule will spend the 2005-06 academic year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, where he first was Fellow in 1976-77.