Sean P. Hier

Thinking beyond moral panic Risk, responsibility, and the politics of moralization

This article conceptualizes processes of moralization as rational, dialectic constructions of self and other that are transmitted through everyday discourses of risk management and harm avoidance. One explanation is provided for how volatile moralizing discourses, as a temporary extension of moralization in everyday life, are transmitted through configurations of grievance and risk under neo-liberalism. The article offers insights into the diverse ways in which moralization operates, and it critically assesses moral panic theorys continued use in criminological research.

Risk and panic in late modernity: implications of the converging sites of social anxiety.

Comparing moral panic with the potential catastrophes of the risk society, Sheldon Ungar contends that new sites of social anxiety emerging around nuclear, medical, environmental and chemical threats have thrown into relief many of the questions motivating moral panic research agendas. He argues that shifting sites of social anxiety necessitate a rethinking of theoretical, methodological and conceptual issues related to processes of social control, claims making and general perceptions of public safety. This paper charts an alternative trajectory, asserting that analytic priority rests not with an understanding of the implications of changing but converging sites of social anxiety. Concentrating on the converging sites of social anxiety in late modernity, the analysis forecasts a proliferation of moral panics as an exaggerated symptom of the heightened sense of uncertainty purported to accompany the ascendency of the risk society.

Tightening the focus: moral panic, moral regulation and liberal government†

The purpose of this article is to tighten the focus of moral panic studies by clarifying and elaborating on an analytical framework that conceptualizes moral panic as a form of moral regulation. The first part of the article explains why moral panic should be conceptualized as a form of moral regulation. The second part presents a rejoinder to Critchers (2009) critique of the widening focus of moral panic studies. The third part elaborates on the conceptual relationship between the sociologies of moral panic and moral regulation by offering fresh insights into the sociological and political importance of moral panic as a technique of liberal government.

Beyond folk devil resistance: Linking moral panic and moral regulation

This article is a contribution to widening the focus of moral panic studies. Our aim is to advance recent attempts to link moral panic studies to the criminological literature on moral regulation. We argue that moral panics should be conceptualized as volatile expressions of long-term moral regulation processes. To substantiate these conceptual and theoretical arguments, we examine claims-making activities about the threat posed by British youth who don hooded tops in public places.

Media, communication and the establishment of public camera surveillance programmes in Canada

Throughout Europe and North America, policing services, government agencies and private-sector interests have turned increasingly to open-street closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance to address crime, fear of crime and perceptions of social disorder. Although recent scholarly contributions have displaced the traditional explanatory reliance on the panopticon with mechanisms of consumer seduction, ‘post-panoptic’ insights into the establishment of open-street monitoring programmes have not advanced completely beyond the determinism reminiscent of the exercise of panoptical power. With the intention of supplementing the displacement of the panoptic paradigm with a less deterministic and more flexible framework, we conceptualize the establishment of public monitoring programmes in terms of the central role of communications and media in surveillance policy development and change. Presenting empirical data from an investigation of public camera surveillance in Canada, we develop theoretical and, necessarily, empirical insights that enable us to move beyond explanatory emphases on responsibilization strategies and social ordering techniques.

Privacy pragmatism and streetscape video surveillance in Canada

This article contributes to international debates about public-area streetscape video surveillance by assessing the Canadian policy context. Based on findings from an ongoing empirical investigation, the authors argue that Canada’s pragmatic policy framework enables surveillance advocates and adversaries to selectively endorse privacy protection principles institutionalized in best practice protocols. The authors explain their findings in relation to the international literature on video surveillance policy diffusion and privacy.

Good moral panics? Normative ambivalence, social reaction, and coexisting responsibilities in everyday life:

This article breaks the silence on the politically progressive characteristics of a moral panic. In contrast to the tacit scholarly consensus that moral panics entail regressively conservative social reactions to putative harms, moral panics are alternatively conceptualized as normatively ambivalent operations of power. The article builds on continuing efforts to conceptualize moral panic as a form of moral regulation by explaining how moral panics are capable of perpetuating as well as disrupting and potentially even reversing the norms of intelligibility that buttress hegemonic understandings of, and moral responsiveness to, violence, injustice, suffering, and harm.

Policy Mutations, Compliance Myths, and Redeployable Special Event Public Camera Surveillance in Canada

This article examines redeployable special event public camera surveillance in the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. We show how a policy discourse of situational awareness simultaneously adheres to and subverts principles articulated in the provincial privacy commissioner’s privacy protection policy framework on public surveillance. Drawing from interview and observational data, we analyse how understandings of situational awareness inform policy design and how policymaking and implementation processes diverge as local policymakers tailor an imported policy framework to address tacit knowledge about public safety. Our findings contribute to the sociology of policymaking by developing empirical insights into policy meanings, mobilities, mutations, and myths.

Risk society and Current Sociology

In the early 1990s, Ulrich Beck’s theory of the risk society became a sociological force to reckon with. Beck argues that industrial modernity’s rule-enforcing logic of prediction, intervention and control is being undermined by the realization that industrially produced risks (be they environmental, chemical, or political in nature) are not only human-made but also uncontrollable and global in reach. With the growing realization that manufactured risks are unknowable (and thereby uninsurable), the industrial modernization process is becoming an issue and problem for itself. The latter produces a reflexive, rule-altering (rather than enforcing) orientation to human existence that is at once global and experiential in scope. As the once-latent side effects of first modernity unleash their destruction, industrial modern sensibilities (conditioned by class, gender, nationalism, etc.) are being replaced by new collective cosmopolitan identities articulated in a global public sphere. These shifting modern sensibilities and collective identities are a testament to the contributing role of a risk ethos in present social formations. The risk society thesis offers a viable counter-narrative to existing sociological accounts of modernity in light of the increasing realization that the linearity of progress can no longer be verified and that the promise of democracy remains largely unkept. 447706 CSI0010.1177/0011392112447706Anaïs and HierCurrent Sociology 2012

Moral panic, moral regulation, and the civilizing process.

This article compares two analytical frameworks ostensibly formulated to widen the focus of moral panic studies. The comparative analysis suggests that attempts to conceptualize moral panics in terms of decivilizing processes have neither substantively supplemented the explanatory gains made by conceptualizing moral panic as a form of moral regulation nor provided a viable alternative framework that better explains the dynamics of contemporary moral panics. The article concludes that Eliass meta-theory of the civilizing process potentially provides explanatory resources to investigate a possible historical-structural shift towards the so-called age of (a)moral panic; the analytical demands of such a project, however, require a sufficiently different line of inquiry than the one encouraged by both the regulatory and decivilizing perspectives on moral panic.