Moral Panic and the Politics of Anxiety

SEAN HIER

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415555555
• eBook ISBN: 9781135198114
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Moral Panic and the Politics of Anxiety is a collection of original essays written by some of the world's leading social scientists. It seeks to provide unique insight into the importance of moral panic as a routine feature of everyday life, whilst also developing an integrated framework for moral panic research by widening the scope of scholarship in the area.

Many of the key twenty-first century contributions to moral panic theory have moved beyond the parameters of the sociology of deviance to consider the importance of moral panic for identity formation, national security, industrial risk, and character formation. Reflecting this growth, the book brings together recognized moral panic researchers with prominent scholars in moral regulation, social problems, cultural fear, and health risks, allowing for a more careful and critical discussion around the cultural and political significance of moral panic to emerge.

This book will prove valuable reading for both undergraduate and postgraduate students on courses such as politics and the media, regulatory policy, the body and identity, theory and political sociology, and sociology of culture.

1 Introduction

Bringing Moral Panic Studies into Focus¹

Sean P. Hier

DOI: 10.4324/9780203869727-1

Moral panic studies traces back to Jock Young’s (1971) analysis of the social meaning of drug taking and to Stanley Cohen’s (1972) canonical investigation of the construction of the Mods and Rockers. Significant developments took place through the 1970s and 1980s, focusing primarily on the role that claims makers, moral guardians, and the media play in the construction, amplification, and exaggeration of deviance. Critical revisions invigorated moral panic studies in the 1990s, and some of the most recent contributions have widened the conventional focus of research by incorporating advances in risk communications, discourse studies, cultural sociology, and moral regulation.

Despite consistent interest in the concept of moral panic, debate about the purpose, application, and scope of moral panic studies persists. For instance, scholars within and beyond the panic literature commonly conceptualize moral panics as exceptional rather than ordinary phenomena to explain seemingly irrational reactions to putative threats. Conceived of in this way, critics charge that panic researchers deploy vague explanatory criteria to speculate disapprovingly about the underlying causes of random (even trivial) claims-making episodes. A small number of critical assessments of moral panic studies has started to demonstrate how moral panics are properly conceptualized as rational and routine forms of social action and how moral panic studies can contribute to and benefit from broader scholarship concerned with regulation, deviance, civilizing processes, and social control (e.g., Rohloff and Wright 2010; Hier 2008; Critcher 2009; Rohloff 2008; and see Goode and Ben-Yehuda 2009). Efforts to widen the conventional focus of research are gaining momentum, but moral panic studies remains divided among varying analytical orientations.

With some simplification, three analytical orientations characterize the moral panic literature: conventional, skeptical, and revisionist. Conventional analyses (the primary source of criticism for external observers) are based on selective readings of Cohen’s original work and Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s (1994, 2009) summary statement. Regardless of the complexity of argumentation found in these studies (see below), the aim of empirically informed conventional analyses is to show how various social problems frames qualify as moral panics by applying Cohen’s stages or testing Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s five crucial indicators of panic (e.g., Rothe and Muzzatti 2004; Welch, Price, and Yankey 2002; Doyle and LaCombe 2000; Victor 1998).

By contrast, skeptical analyses tend to rely on selective readings of conventional models as a source of criticism to dismiss the explanatory power of moral panic. They do so by pointing to so-called amoral phenomena (e.g., assumed real-world, tangible threats) to qualify the explanatory power of moral panic or by arguing that specific responses to putative concerns are proportional and rational responses to empirically verifiable threats (e.g., Waiton 2008; Cornwell and Linders 2002; and see Ungar 2001 and Waddington 1986). Both skeptical and conventional orientations focus on a more or less agreed upon set of theoretical, methodological, and conceptual parameters that were institutionalized between 1972 and 1994; they rarely engage analytically with (or even acknowledge) studies that fall outside the conventional scope of analysis.

Revisionists approach moral panic studies in a different manner. Although revisionists recognize the continuing significance of conventional approaches (and endorse some of the insights offered by skeptics), they nevertheless seek to rethink (McRobbie and Thornton 1995; Hier 2003), reappraise (deYoung 1998; Thompson 1998; Critcher 2003), think beyond (Hier 2002a, 2002b, 2008), or widen the focus (Rohloff and Wright 2010; Critcher 2009) of conventional analyses. Revisionists simultaneously retain many of the defining components of conventional analyses and strive to link panic episodes to broader explanatory models in the sociologies of deviance, regulation, culture, and control. They do so to address persistent limitations with applications of conventional approaches and to enhance the analytical purchase of moral panic studies beyond a relatively narrow range of concerns in the sociology of culture. The project of revising moral panic studies by widening the focus of research traces to the 1980s (e.g., Ben-Yehuda 1986, 1985), yet what is unique about the resurgence of revisionist efforts is the cumulative and interactive debate that is starting to take hold.

As a contribution to the ongoing project of revising moral panic studies, the aim of this collection is twofold. The first aim is to critically assess theoretical, conceptual, and methodological debates among panic scholars, past and present, to bring the purpose and scope of moral panic studies into focus. Although revisionists are beginning to move beyond the limitations of conventional analyses, disagreement remains about the substantive scope and conceptual parameters of moral panic studies (see, for example, Rohloff and Wright 2010; Critcher 2009; Goode and Ben-Yehuda 2009; Rohloff 2008).

One reason why moral panic studies lacks clear focus concerns the popular use of the moral panic concept among journalists and politicians (Altheide 2008; McRobbie and Thornton 1995; Hunt 1997). Sociologists no longer enjoy exclusive control over how moral panic is applied and the concept is indiscriminately used for a broad range of purposes (far beyond social control processes). A second, related reason concerns expanding applications of moral panic to phenomena not traditionally associated with moral panic studies (Critcher 2009). As moral panic is applied to an expanding number of unfamiliar issues (inside and outside moral panic studies), problems with the analytical boundaries and political underpinnings of moral panic studies emerge. The chapters in the volume critically assess the strengths and limitations of conventional, skeptical, and revisionist approaches across a range of theoretical and empirical fields in a collective effort to bring the politics and analytical parameters of moral panic studies into focus.

An integral part of bringing moral panic studies into focus involves widening the focus by examining how moral panic contributes to and benefits from analytical advances in broader areas of inquiry – the second aim. Moral panics do not take place in a cultural vacuum. One of the main limitations of moral panic studies has been narrowing the focus of research to examine the short-term dynamics involved in episodes of ‘deviance amplification.’ This narrowing trend lends itself to conceptualization of moral panic as a heuristic device (Rohloff and Wright 2010) to rhetorically explain phenomena ranging from Satanism (Best 2003) and tabloid journalism (Eide and Knight 1999) to crime control (Innes 2004) and contemporary surveillance practices (Lyon 2003). The volume brings panic researchers into dialogue with scholars not commonly associated with moral panic studies to examine possibilities for how moral panic can benefit from and contribute to the sociologies of social problems, moral regulation, culture, and law, as well as the sociologies of emotion, health, fear, and environment.

The remainder of this chapter provides an overview of the shifting focus of moral panic studies. The purpose of the overview is to flesh out general trends in moral panic studies and to clarify the status of past and present research. I explain how the focus of moral panic studies increasingly narrowed between 1972 and 1994 and how recent efforts to widen the focus of research are simultaneously reconnecting with many of the original intentions of moral panic studies and drawing from broader trends in social and cultural theory.

The Shifting Focus of Moral Panic Studies

Over the past 25 years, moral panic studies became institutionalized as an intellectual area of research. The positive benefits of institutionalizing moral panic studies flow from an expansive body of literature that enables us to explore the nuances and complexities of moralization. But institutionalization also has limitations. The growing number of books and articles that were published in the 1980s and 1990s increasingly focused on a narrow set of standard criteria to document the empirical features of short-term claims-making episodes. Such studies – whether supportive or critical of the explanatory purchase of moral panic – were often presented in the intellectual context of a set of exemplary studies and legitimized by an accompanying set of customary citations. Mostly forgotten (or at least taken for granted) in the process of institutionalization were the reasons why moral panic studies originally developed and the intellectual and political context it developed from (see Young 2009).

Moral panic studies arose from developments in ‘the skeptical approach to deviance’ (Cohen 2003: 3; Cohen 1971: 14). The skeptical approach to deviance was a deconstructionist reaction to traditional (British) criminologists (and, to an extent, conservative sociologists) who viewed deviance and social problems as a set of qualities inherent in a certain kind of person or behavior. The new radical criminologists took their lead from Becker (1967, 1964, 1963) and others (e.g., Lemert 1967; Erikson 1966, 1964; Schur 1965), who sought to reconnect deviance studies to mainstream concerns in sociology – especially the processes and dynamics involved in the social construction of normality and deviance. For radical criminologists inspired by labeling/transactional approaches to deviance and certain developments in subcultural theory, deviance and social problems, far from being fixed by a set of stable attributes, entailed a transaction of sorts between rule breakers and conformists.

More than this, radical criminologists were self-consciously political. In the few decades leading up to the 1950s, many traditional British criminologists, much like mainstream American sociologists, became apolitical, functionalist oriented, and/or administratively inclined. The epistemological force of Durkheim (1895) or Thomas (1928) – that is, studying deviance to learn about general social (and psychical) structures – was eclipsed by normative research pursuits influenced by government priorities. In aligning themselves with the critical constructionist orientation, radical criminologists adopted an explicit value orientation by denaturalizing deviance, defending subcultures, and challenging the appropriateness of reactions to putative problems.

The influence of radical deviancy theory on the rise of moral panic studies came to a head with Albert Cohen’s (1965) attempt to formulate a general theory of deviant behavior. Cohen offered a corrective to anomie theory by linking the deviant act as a history of interaction processes to ‘the normatively established division of labour’ (p. 9) (i.e., the normative context that conditions the substance of claims-making and counter-claims-making activities). What was especially significant about Cohen’s synthesis – at least for past and more recent developments in moral panic studies – was his brief commentary on moral indignation.

The dedicated pursuit of culturally approved goals, the eschewing of interdicted but tantalizing goals, the adherence to normatively sanctioned means – these imply a certain self-constraint, effort, discipline, inhibition. What is the effect of the spectacle of others who, though their activities do not manifestly damage our own interests are morally undisciplined, who give themselves up to idleness, self-indulgence, or forbidden vices? What effect does the propinquity of the wicked have on the peace of mind of the virtuous? […] In several ways, the virtuous can make capital out of this situation … building his self out of invidious comparisons to the morally weak.

(Cohen 1965: 6–7, original emphasis)

In other words, moral indignation signifies simultaneously a threat to one’s own identity and a confirmation of it. Young (1971) picked up on the existential and phenomenological importance of moral indignation during the National Deviancy Symposia in the late 1960s, where he argued that social problems constru...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Bringing moral panic studies into focus
• Part 1: Conceptualizing moral panic studies
• Part 2: Examining moral panic studies
• Part 3: Applying moral panic studies
• Index