Introduction
In the late 1990s, a group of academics began a series of conversations about how a concept of social harm could be more progressively developed as an alternative to crime. It is at once important to emphasise that the motivations, or routes, via which individuals joined these conversations were various. Some were pursuing long-standing struggles to operationalise a concept of crime in their respective areas of work. Others approached this enterprise on the basis of a concern with the marked expansion of criminology as a discipline and the concomitant increase in the number of degree courses in British and Irish universities, while older subjects, such as social policy and sociology, were declining. Others still felt that the notion of social harm could be developed at the margins of criminology, through challenging the discursive power of concepts of crime, ‘criminal’ and ‘criminal justice’. But for some, given the integral nature of these latter concepts to the discipline of criminology itself, any sustained focus on social harm could only be achieved within a new and separate discipline, soon-to-be-named ‘zemiology’.
The most tangible outcome of these conversations was an edited collection, Beyond Criminology : Taking Harm Seriously (Hillyard et al. 2004). The range of areas covered in, and the diversity of disciplines contributing to, the edited collection was notable. Beyond Criminology was an eclectic, somewhat contradictory work reflecting such a wide variety of contributors, theoretical positions, and levels and objects of analysis. It should also be noted that the content—and indeed the title—of the book was deliberately provocative, as well as indicating arguments which were bold (far too bold, as some might say): in other words, many of the book’s contributions were couched within the frame not simply of taking social harm seriously, but in terms of abandoning criminology for a new discipline, zemiology. Yet, we were clear within the book that the shift to social harm from criminology was not one endorsed by all of the authors, nor indeed editors. The book was designed to generate debate—and indeed it has done so (Hillyard and Tombs 2017).
This chapter returns to some of the issues raised in and by Beyond Criminology , albeit from a personal standpoint. I embraced some notion of social harm, and continue to do so, because it allows me to document empirically, to analyse and to theorise forms of corporate activity for which criminology has historically struggled to account. That said, it remains unclear what is meant by a social harm approach. Moreover, is this synonymous with a zemiological approach? If not, what is the latter? And, however one answers these previous questions, must one be a critical criminologist or someone utilising a social harm approach or a zemiologist? If so, or indeed if not—to what ends?
From Crime to Social Harm
I came to the social harm conversation through my long-standing academic and campaigning interest in corporate crime. More specifically, workplace death, injury and illness are phenomena which are undoubtedly equated with a great deal of harm, harm with economic, physical, financial, emotional, and psychological dimensions.
Notwithstanding that these harms obviously represented a significant social problem, in an attempt to pursue this work within and around the discipline of criminology, I had long struggled to represent these as a crime problem, and in so doing had engaged in a number of (entirely unoriginal) strategies, which included, but were not restricted to:
- expanding the use of the term crime to cover violations of non-criminal law (Pearce and Tombs 1998);
- using Sutherland’s distinction between what is punished and what is punishable to expand the ambit of ‘crime’ and thus criminology (Tombs and Whyte 2009);
- reconstructing specific incidents and groups of incidents to indicate how the essential ingredients of ‘real’ crime were clearly present therein (Pearce and Tombs 2012), and thus making invisible crimes visible (Tombs 1999);
- challenging and reconstructing some of the assumptions within popular, political, academic and legal constructions of ‘real’ crime either to indicate how these were logically or conceptually unsustainable, or could in fact be applied to corporate activity which produces death, injury and illness or, indeed, both (Tombs 2007).
In these ways, and through what felt like a series of intellectual gymnastics, I was constantly seeking to legitimate the area of harm-producing social life with which I was concerned as the proper stuff for criminology and, indeed, for the Criminal Justice System (CJS). At the same time, at least in the latter context, we sought to be cognizant of the contradictions and dangers of so doing (see Alvesalo and Tombs 2002), and always to challenge the ‘illusions of law’ (Tombs 2004). In these contexts, the idea of ‘social harm’ felt liberating, and had progressive potential.
In not dissimilar ways, contributors to Beyond Criminology , and those working in a similar vein since its publication, minimally urged that we go at least beyond ‘crime’ if not beyond criminology. This might be a relatively short or somewhat long journey, and I wish here to indicate the range of intellectual distance that a commitment to going ‘beyond’ might, and does, take us—some of which guided the ‘intellectual gymnastics’ to which I have summarised in bullet-points above. I wish here to suggest several ways in which criminologists can or do go ‘beyond’ crime and criminology, albeit that these are certainly not mutually exclusive.
One most obvious resort to moving beyond crime is to focus upon violations of law other than the criminal law. Without entering into a definitional debate here regarding the appropriate use of the term ‘crime’ (one which has been tirelessly rehearsed since the exchanges between Sutherland and Tappan over seventy years ago), it has become common-place to use the term ‘crime’ to encompass violations of law other than criminal law, notably civil, administrative and regulatory law (Pearce and Tombs 1998). Indeed, if perhaps more latterly, ‘crime’ has also been used to refer to violations of soft law such as ‘standards’ or ‘codes of conduct’ (typically as these apply to corporate actors, not least in their multinational forms; Bittle and Snider 2013). Such efforts have considerable legitimacy, at least in critical criminological circles.
Moving slightly further are those who wish to embrace within their intellectual ambit those harms which are punishable but not punished. This commitment can, again, be traced back notably to the work of Edwin Sutherland, who sought to bring to centre-stage those acts and omissions by corporations and their senior executives which could and should in principle be incorporated within criminal justice processes and within the discipline of criminology—but which remain at best relatively marginal, at worst absent. Thus, in terms of the CJS, he argued that most such violations of law remained non-criminalised, whilst his work during the 1940s was a ‘call to arms’ to criminologists to focus not simply on the crimes and incivilities of the relatively powerless, but equally to shift their gaze upwards, to focus on the crimes committed by the powerful, within corporate contexts (Tombs and Whyte 2009).
A somewhat different approach to incorporating harms within the criminological purview is represented by long-standing and heterogeneous attempts to focus upon the harms produced by the activities of the CJS itself or, indeed, in a related variation, upon the harms associated with non-criminalisation, that is, the omissions of the CJS. The latter is increasingly signalled by the use of the phrase ‘crime and harm ’ (Corteen et al. 2016; Quality Assurance Agency 2014). Somewhat differently, it involves substituting the term ‘social harm’ for crime completely to encompass the legal and illegal (Ruggiero 2015), or via an implicit or explicit reference to immorality, that is, that which is self-evidently harmful...