Three themes emerge in considering the nature of police and society in the late 20th century. First, policing faciliates economic shifts in society, often following the movement of capital into locations of value and leaving residual locations free to police themselves. Second, the force employed by police is influenced and transformed by available forms of technology and innovations in their application. Third, there has been a shift from local elites to international business to define danger and the need for order. One of the most dramatic changes in police institutions is their emergence as organizers, managers, and generators of an array of complex formal and informal social controls. This phenomenon involves a fundamental change in the alignment of social control in a postindustrial society. Policing, a traditionally reactive institution, is emerging as a proactive institution that not only administers the law through the distribution of overt force, but also generates and directs an array of social control efforts. Policing philosophy thus transplants its crime-control ideology into the total fabric of agencies and states. The police have thus assumed roles in the domains of education, law, economics, and family. These incursions into social institutions have combined with and increased the use of enforcement tactics unthinkable a few decades ago. As citizens participate in these various domains of their daily lives, they increasingly encounter surveillance, regulations, and sanctions designed to prevent, detect, control, and punish an increasing list of unacceptable behaviors that violate society's attempts to create uniform behaviors that pose no threat to dominant values and interests. Changes in the form and distribution of police violence, the enhanced ability of police to manage and organize external social control institutions, and emerging rhetorical devices that reduce resistance to social control all represent shifts that bring the police institution into alignment with a postindustrial global economy. Collectively the historical, social, and institutional changes constitute a "spectacle" of global social control that will not only alter the police institution but also transform transactions and interactions among states. 19 references