Crime in Context

A Critical Criminology of Market Societies

Ian Taylor

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745606675
  9780745606668
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745668727
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is a timely and wide-ranging account of the relationship between the development of a 'free market society' in Europe and North America and the fears and anxieties provoked by crime. It offers an evaluation of the theoretical schools in social theory and in criminology which continue to dominate the academy, but whose purchase on contemporary realities is everywhere slipping.

1

SOCIAL TRANSITIONS OF THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY: ‘CRIME’ AND ‘FEAR’ IN CONTEXT

The idea of ‘social crisis’ is uncomfortable territory for the professional field of criminology. It is also a messy area for those journalists, politicians and other contemporary ‘soothsayers’ who, in modern Western society, are given the responsibility of interpreting the outbreak of individual or collective instances of crime. The usual preference of these commentators, in most Western societies in the 1990s, is for the ‘blaming’ of individuals. In British crime reportage, there is very often also a resort to some kind of cultural nostalgia.¹ Professional criminologists often spend any time they have in the public sphere of television, radio or newspapers trying to deny the reality of people’s fears or, alternatively, reduced into the recital of vulgar forms of nineteenth-century statistical positivism. Taking seriously the idea of a social crisis would involve engaging in some kind of analysis of historical processes and logics – the kind of analysis which, as Roland Barthes explained, is beyond the imagination (and the practical mandate) of journalists employed in the unending everyday production – against fast-approaching deadlines – of readable and immediate, newsworthy material for the next edition. Far easier to draw on that body of individualistic, largely psychologistic, but sometimes theological ‘mythologies’ (Barthes 1973) that is now constituted as ‘criminology’ in the popular mind. In most Western societies at the end of the twentieth century, the mass of audiences for newspapers, television and cinema are bombarded by the day with an essentially theological, medieval criminology, with a gallery of insane or evil individuals, devils and witches, and a range of theories of individual possession, through which they are asked to make sense of a fast-breaking story about ‘crime’.

The notion of crisis has probably been overdone in most post-war Western societies. The analysis of capitalist crisis developed by Marxists and other oppositional voices in the turbulent – but relatively affluent – ‘full-employment’ 1960s now looks strained indeed. But in the last years of the twentieth century, a number of important commentators, of different persuasions, on the economic, cultural and social realities in North America, Europe or other late-capitalist societies are speaking in such terms. In his magisterial historical retrospect on ‘the short twentieth century’ Eric Hobsbawm identified three major logics of social transformation which, in these last decades, have begun to exhibit ‘crisis tendencies’. I vary the order in which Hobsbawm identified these dimensions of change in order to highlight, first, what so many different authors refer to as the phenomenon of globalization:

Between 1914 and the early 1990s, the globe has become far more of a single operational unit, as it was not, and could not have been, in 1914. In fact, for many purposes, notably in economic affairs, the globe is now the primary operational unit and older units such as the ‘national economies’, defined by the politics of territorial states, are reduced to complications of transnational activities. (Hobsbawm 1994: 15)

This particular engine of change, globalization, is accelerating so fast, Hobsbawm suggests, as to problematize the capacity of any existing set of ‘public institutions’ in any one nation – or, indeed, he adds, the ‘collective behaviour’ of human beings – ‘to come to terms with it’ (1994: 15).

Closely associated with this acceleration of economic transformation, according to Hobsbawm, is ‘a disintegration of the old patterns of human social relations’ and, in particular, ‘the snapping of links between generations, that is to say, between past and present’. Hobsbawm sees this process of ‘disintegration’ of ‘old patterns’ as having a global, rather than merely Western, importance:

[It] has been particularly evident in the most developed countries of the Western version of capitalism, in which the values of an absolute a-social individualism have been dominant, both in official and unofficial ideologies ... Nevertheless, the tendencies [are] to be found elsewhere, reinforced by the erosion of traditional societies and religions, as well as by the destruction, or autodestruction, of the societies of ‘real socialism’. (1994: 15)

Finally, by comparison with the early years of the century, the world is no longer ‘Eurocentric’:

Europeans and their descendants were now reduced from perhaps one third of humanity to at most one sixth, a diminishing minority living in countries which barely, if at all, reproduced their populations, surrounding themselves by, and in most cases – with some shining exceptions such as the USA (until the 1960s) – barricading themselves against the pressures of immigration from the countries of the poor. The industries Europe had pioneered were migrating elsewhere. The countries which had once looked across the ocean to Europe were looking elsewhere. Australia, New Zealand, even the bi-oceanic USA, saw the future in the Pacific. (1994: 14)

There are, in truth, many other formulations available with which we can try and account for the kind of fundamental social and economic transformation currently occurring in Western ‘late-capitalist societies’ – not least, within sociology, the analysis offered by Scott Lash and John Urry of a transnational, ‘disorganized’, post-industrial capitalism, now committed to the non-stop, competitive search for new products for sale, and therefore new sources of profit and accumulation, within what they call the ‘economies of signs and space’, and endlessly competing across the globe for new markets and also for new ways of savings on human labour and investment (Lash and Urry 1987: 1994). In Britain, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques follow the example of many scholars in political economy in wanting to identify the economic motor driving the transformation as the collapse of the ‘Fordist’ system of mass, factory-based, production resulting from the exhaustion of demand in the West for the kind of consumables these factories produced (Hall and Jacques 1990). Ash Amin (1994) has provided a useful summary account of these changes, especially in respect of their effects within the sphere of work, employment and productive activity, which is set out schematically in table 1.

This emergent post-Fordist market society is discussed in more detail in chapter 2; for the moment, the need is to situate the recurrent panics about crime that are so obvious a feature of contemporary experience in the context of this broader framework of fundamental social transition (rather than within some individualistic psychology or theology of individual amorality or depravation). The stances adopted by different social scientists and social commentators towards these changes vary – for example, as between, on the one hand, sympathetic enquiries by Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash into ‘de-traditionalization’ as a social and economic process which creates the conditions for ‘reflexive’ re-negotiation of personal identity (not least amongst enquiring social scientists in the academy themselves), and, on the other, the veritable dislocation of life of particular social groups (the homeless and the long-term unemployed) and communities (the ‘sink estates’, mining communities) offered by enquiring journalists (N. Davies 1994; Danziger 1997), as well as by people in the psychiatric and social work professions (James 1995). So there is significant variation in the analysis being attempted – as between Hobsbawm’s generalizations about the ‘disintegration’ – simply – of ‘old patterns’, on the one hand, and Giddens’s attentive hermeneutic interpretation of the different ways in which people are creatively making use of past understandings and immediate contingencies of everyday life in order to construct new personal languages and assumptions for practical, everyday purposes in the ‘new times’ of ‘High Modernity’.

The purposes in this text on crime are not to adjudicate, abstractly, on the merits or limitations of these particular theoretical accounts. It surely is clear, however, to all but the most uncompromising moral conservative and behavioural psychologist, that the analysis of crime itself (the object of analysis of any serious ‘criminological’ project) must be located in relation to the fundamental transformation of social formation that is currently in progress (resulting from a deep crisis in the pre-existing configurations of social and economic organization). This text, in part informed by Eric Hobsbawm, tries to follow through the unfolding of a set of different crises – or fundamental transitions – occurring at the end of the twentieth century. However, where Hobsbawm speaks of three crises, I want to provide separate but focused discussion, of nine discrete and fundamental transitions – nearly all of which appear, but with uneven power and influence, in different Western capitalist societies at the end of ‘the Fordist period’. My concern in recommending the separate treatment of these nine dimensions is not merely narrative convenience and clarity. In contrast to some of the generalizing cultural social commentaries of our time (for example, within the postmodernist canon), this device will enable us more clearly and carefully to identify, analytically, the discrete social strains which may be being experienced by any one individual. Against the apparently chaotic whole of contemporary change glimpsed in postmodern theory (for example, ‘chaos theory’), with its promise to extinguish sociology, I want to examine the analytic and social-political purchase of a sociological analysis of different logics of social change running in parallel, overdetermined by the economic crisis of Fordist society. These nine different ‘transitions’ will each have real effects – sometimes in a singular fashion but usually in combination with other elements – on the lived biography of individual actors. In contrast to the metaphysicians of ‘free market’ economics, I recognize and understand that people are born and are raised into adulthood from particular positions (of advantage and disadvantage) in an ‘imperatively coordinated’ social order: that is, to recognize that every human actor is socially, economically and culturally situated in historical time and place. In the Fordist period, only a proportion of any one new cohort of youthful social actors can escape the ‘destinies’ which these situated processes of social reproduction inscribe for them in adult life.² So this book follows the example of a host of writers and scholars – from James Agee, Daniel Bertaux, Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, to the criminologist David Matza – in recognizing that we all only live once. Today’s youthful generations will have to live their lives, not with the certainties of the Fordist period (including the near-certainties of High Modern Capitalism) but with the manifold uncertainties of life in societies which are in constant process of ‘restructuring’ and change. Thinking forward from the work of Ulrich Beck, in his analysis of the emergence of a set of different ‘risk-positions’ in risk society, I suggest that the emergence of a post-Fordist world, or a set of different ‘market societies’, carries with it the production of a new set of ‘market-positions’ within market societies themselves, with profound effects on the life-chances and possibilities of individuals located in these specific positions. It is becoming more and more clear by the year, especially to the young, that the prospects for paid employment for life (and, with it, the security, status and means to self-advancement taken for granted in earlier periods) are in steep decline. The 1990s generation is one of the first generations in the post-war period to confront the prospect of a reduction in overall material prospects in the employment market, by comparison with preceding generations. For a large proportion of these youthful cohorts, therefore, the experience of ‘post-Fordist society’ will involve new and different forms of inequality and subordination, on a temporary or long-term basis – in the casual labour markets of fast-changing economies or in the underclasses, the ‘new poor’, being left behind by the motor of change. The factors which will inform young people’s recruitment into these new positions of opportunity within market society will be far more complex and variable than the social processes which ‘determined’ the reproduction of the labour force or the ‘bourgeois class’ in the era of mass manufacturing capitalism. The relationship between the legitimate labour markets and the illegitimate, alternative economies (including, in particular, the ‘economies of crime’) seems likely to be far more contingent and uncertain than in earlier periods – for example, as discussed in chapter 4, in the developing night-time economies of post-industrial cities. In developing discussion of the nine transitions of the late twentieth century, it must be remembered, all the while, after the example of Daniel Bertaux (1981), that these transitions are not only abstractions helping analysis, but also a part of the turmoil of any individual’s biographical experience in a particular moment of historical change (a particular ‘time’). Eight of these transitions are dealt with in this first chapter, leaving focused discussion of the definitive transition to a post-Fordist market society for separate discussion in chapter 2.

Table 1 Fordist and post-Fordist cultures of work

	Fordism	Post-Fordism
Social character of work	Masculinist domination, muscularity, male bonding	Increasingly feminine
Organized forms of work	‘Production lines’, workgroups, shifts	‘Decentred’ in shops, offices, small enterprises
Objectives of work	Production	Distribution and sale
Induction into work/training/	Informal (exc. apprenticeship for craft positions)	Qualifications, accreditation
Regulation of the worker	Contractual and corporate through trade unions	Individual agreements, withdrawal of contractual guarantees
Working prospects, careers	Lifetime employment	Short-term ‘full-time’ contracts; part-time and temporary employments; return of ‘sweatshops’
Domestic sphere	Sphere of social reproduction, dominated by matriarch	Families in work: increase in two-career households, ‘family speed-up’, and a range of ad-hoc arrangements for routine social reproduction (childcare, shopping etc.) Families out of work: imaginary re-invention of Fordist divisions of labour
‘Leisure’	Male dominated: drinking, participant/spectator sport/Sunday family time	Increasingly individualist and consumerist, but also related to relief of stress and maintenance of physical and mental fitness and competivity in a competitive market

Source: developed from Amin 1994

THE JOB CRISIS

In the course of the last fifteen years, during what Piore and Sabel refer to as ‘the crisis of mass manufacturing’, and Hall and Jacques call ‘the crisis of Fordism’, there has been a massive haemorrhaging of full-time employment in most Western societies, particularly in heavy or manufacturing industries. At the beginning of 1997, some 12 per cent of all people officially registering for work across the European Community (20 million people) were unable to find any employment – an increase of 2 million people on 1995 (The Economist, 14–20 June 1997: 50). This ongoing process of ‘job loss’ had gathered pace throughout the early 1990s – in 1981 EEC unemployment totalled just 9.1 million (Massey and Meegan, 1982: 3) – in a process described by a leading Gaullist politician in France, Philippe Séguin, as ‘a social Munich’, a million and half Europeans having just lost their job in the twelve months before November 1993.³ In the mid-1990s the crisis appeared still more severe in statistical and political terms in Spain than in most other large European societies: unemployment in Spain was still being measured officially in February 1997 at 21.7 per cent, by comparison with official rates of 7.1 per cent in Britain and 6 per cent in the Netherlands.⁴ But European anxieties focused, in particular, on France, where unemployment, on official measures, continued to creep upwards (reaching 12.5 per cent in 1997).⁵ The presidential election campaign of 1995 had been fought between Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin around competing programmes for job-creation, and in 1997 Lionel Jospin’s persistence was repaid with an election victory. In Germany, the survival of Helmut Kohl in the Presidency was clearly threatened by unemployment rates reaching 9.5 per cent in 1997, up 3.1 per cent from 1992.

The telling contrast was with the 1960s: the average unemployment rate in France, on the official measures then adopted, was less than 1.8 per cent throughout that decade. In Germany over the same period, unemployment averaged about 0.6 per cent; in Britain some 2.7 per cent (adjusted to US concepts) and in Italy 3.2 per cent (Sinfield 1981: 15). The changes in the official definitions used to measure unemployment since the 1960s make direct comparison precarious – and it is also important, as official spokes-people often insist, to recognize the increase in the absolute number of people in paid employment in the 1970s and 1980s. For these and other reasons, any direct and one-dimensional comparison between the ‘mass unemployment’ of the 1990s and that of the inter-war Depression is also potentially misleading. At the peak of this great ‘Slump’, in 1935, some 11.4 per cent of ‘the civilian workforce’ (i.e. of those, largely male, citizens registering for work) in the United Kingdom was unemployed, and some 17.5 per cent in the United States (Jordan 1982: 2). The highest levels of unemployment, as officially measured, in the year after the oil shocks of 1982 were 14.3 per cent in the United Kingdom and 9.5 per cent in the United States (Kemp 1990: 155). From another perspective, however, the comparison with the 1930s is illuminating. The total number of officially unemployed people in the United Kingdom in July 1936 was measured at 1,717,000 (Stevenson and Cook 1977: 56). About one-tenth of these had been unemployed for more than a year, and of these over two-thirds were aged between forty-five and sixty-five (1977: 60). In April 1997 the official unemployment total fo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Social Transitions of the Late Twentieth Century: ‘Crime’ and Tear’ in Context
• 2 The Ninth Transition: The Rise of Market Society
• 3 Young People, Crime and Fear in Market Societies
• 4 Crime in the City: Housing and Consumer Markets and the Social Geography of Crime and Anxiety in Market Society
• 5 Fraudsters and Villains: The Private Temptations of Market Society
• 6 Lethal Markets: The Legal and Illegal Economies in Firearms
• 7 The Market in Social Control
• 8 Crime in the Future(s) Market
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject and Place Index