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This chapter restates the key points of our argument and considers some of the implications of our findings and analysis with reference to notions of ‘transition’ and ‘political imprisonment’. At the same time, this chapter broadens the analytic frame. In the light of the foregoing interview-based accounts, we elaborate upon the relationship between prison and politics as revealed at the interface between prison and society and prison and history. And we return to the present moment of revolutionary struggle and examine the specific ways the contemporary criminal justice system and the prison have been weaponised by the State Administrative Council with nefarious effects. Our final plea is for further research on the dynamics and effects of penal practice in Southeast Asia and for increased recognition of the ongoing injustices facing the people of Myanmar within the confines of a carceral state.

This chapter situates our study of the organisation and regulation of prison life in Myanmar. With broad brush strokes, we introduce the country context and describe the pre-colonial and colonial history of Myanmar prisons. We unpack and justify the book’s core analytic themes, describing how we will answer questions about how authority is distributed and enacted within prisons; how power is embodied and embedded in mundane social and institutional relations; and how historical relations of penal duress endure (even) under conditions of socio-political transformation. Further, we introduce how our interview-based account of the organisation, regulation and experience of prison life during the (now terminated) transition from overt military rule to disciplined democracy provides crucial insight into the current situation of thousands of people from all walks of life imprisoned since the military coup in February 2021.

This chapter grapples with the issue of power in Myanmar prisons. It is about punishment, the disciplinary system, and the ubiquity of violence. Taking point of departure in the idea that power is not pregiven or intrinsic but is produced in practice, we look at how power is exercised in everyday lived experience through practices of punishment and discipline that are laced with violence. Our orientation is to power as diffusely distributed and exercised and performed in ways that are often accepted as habitual and natural by all parties. The often-brutal structures and practices we describe conspire to generate the compliance and subjection of the prisoner and the production of an orderly prison. Our examination and delineation of these practices complete our characterisation of prisons in Myanmar as bureaucratic, martial, and violent marketplaces with authoritarian pretensions.

This chapter delves into the everyday dynamics of prison life with specific focus on mundane survival and exchange economies showing how governance plays out differentially depending on prisoners’ relative positions in hierarchies of worth. We focus on the prevailing climates that prisoners inhabit and must negotiate if they are to survive. We examine the temporal routines that structure prisoners’ days and nights, and the spatial arrangements of the wards showing how set routines and strict arrangements of sleeping space serve to regulate and limit possibilities based on prisoners’ perceived value. Relatedly, we look at how exchange economies based on money, labour, and sex contribute to making prisons (more or less) survivable. Essentially, everyday prison governance is hierarchical and position in the hierarchy is determined by relative worth. If the prisoner does not add value, they are treated as worthless.

This chapter explores the question of how Myanmar prisons are administered, with specific focus on bureaucracy, rules, and the distribution of authority. We attend to the question of who runs the prison with focus on the supervisory and disciplinary roles designated to prisoners and the figure of the prison Superintendent. We examine the multiplicity of rules and the various ways in which they are learned, experienced, arbitrarily enforced, and inevitably broken. We demonstrate the value of thinking about everyday prison governance as a bureaucratic, authorising endeavour that involves practices of registration, ordering, sequencing, queueing, and organising, informed by values like facelessness, invisibility, and apparent neutrality. Attending to rules – to their inculcation and their effects – reveals the value of conceiving of them as ordering technologies that contribute to the organisation and regulation of everyday prison life.

Prisons are hyper-intense crucibles of emotion. Constrictive, limiting, and controlling they call forth strong reactions; they have also been shown to deaden, to numb, and to dull the senses. This chapter examines the emotional infrastructure of prison landscapes and the emotional responses the prison experience evokes. We illustrate the significance of fear as constitutive of order and subjection and explore the way the prisoner is rendered fear-filled and emotive through the organisation and regulation of everyday life. We consider under what conditions people in prison dare not act or speak; and address what generates sadness, sorrow, and worry. We also attend to the occasions when prisoners articulate happiness or, against all the odds, a sense of freedom.

The prevailing conceptualization of information system (IS) capabilities, rooted in the resource-based view (RBV) framework, tends to focus on unique firm resources. In the digital age, as emphasized by dynamic capabilities (DC), resource reconfiguration is critical in maintaining strategic advantage. This paper focuses on big data analytics capabilities (BDAC) from a DC perspective to present a novel conceptualization of BDAC–DC. We examine its effects on product, business model and business process innovation, including the effects of enterprise architecture (EA) on the BDAC business model innovation relationship.

This research presents a novel DC-based BDAC conceptualization, operationalized as a hierarchical construct. A survey-based approach is used for data collection and data analysis is done using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The novel conceptualization and the effects of BDAC DC on BDA sensing-seizing and reconfiguration capacities support BDAC’s functional and evolutionary roleplay. Empirical results confirm the positive effects of BDAC–DC on first-order value targets (innovation) and the moderating effects of EA.

The novel BDAC–DC conceptualization has several implications for BDAC, DC, EA and business value research. Practicing managers must adopt a multifaceted approach to BDAC development by considering non-technical and organizational factors, collaborate with their business counterparts to explore unique big data ideas, initiate proof-of-concept projects to secure support and allocate resources synchronously, considering a multidimensional view of the process, product and business model innovation.

Practicing managers must adopt a multifaceted approach to BDAC development by considering non-technical and organizational factors, collaborate with their business counterparts to explore unique big data ideas, initiate proof-of-concept projects to secure support and allocate resources synchronously, considering a multidimensional view of the process, product and business model innovation for synergistic outcomes.

To the best of our knowledge, this research is the first attempt toward DC-based BDAC conceptualization, empirical validation of first-order effects on various forms of innovation and the often-overlooked role of critical EA capability.