Steve Hall

Receiving shadows: governance and liminality in the night-time economy.

This paper focuses upon the emergence of the night-time economy both materially and culturally as a powerful manifestation of post-industrial society. This emergence features two key processes: firstly a shift in economic development from the industrial to the post-industrial; secondly a significant orientation of urban governance involving a move away from the traditional managerial functions of local service provision, towards an entrepreneurial stance primarily focused on the facilitation of economic growth. Central to this new economic era is the identification and promotion of liminality. The States apparent inability to control these new leisure zones constitutes the creation of an urban frontier that is governed by commercial imperatives.

Violence in the night-time economy; bouncers: The reporting, recording and prosecution of assaults

This paper, based on ethnographic research, is concerned with the accountability of licensed premise door staff – better known as ‘bouncers’.2 The situational dynamics of the bouncers enacted environment ensures that theirs is a role consistently exposed to the interactions of violence. As such, allegations of assault, both upon and by door staff, are common. This paper reports upon incidents of door staff violence and why they often fail to be investigated and, when they are investigated, why they frequently fail to be successfully prosecuted at court. In doing so, the paper highlights the adopted attitudes and procedural methods employed by both bouncers and police officers, which have a detrimental impact upon the deterrent function of the criminal law. The paper ends by offering some policy prescriptions to local police managers, suggesting that the state police become more (pro)actively involved in overseeing the provision of this expanding sector of the private security industry.

Rethinking social exclusion : the end of the social?

About the Authors Acknowledgements Introduction: Post-crash Social Exclusion Social Exclusion: The European Tradition Social Exclusion: The US Tradition Re-positioning Social Exclusion Politics at the End of History A Reserve Army of Labour? A Reserve Army of Consumers? Occupying Non-Places Excluded from What? Conclusion Glossary of Terms Bibliography Index

Retaliate first: Memory, humiliation and male violence

This article explores the ways in which memory and humiliation can shape the social engagement of persistently violent men. Drawing upon field data from two of our previous ethnographic studies conducted in the North East of England, we hope to make a few basic points about the importance of emotion and memory as constitutive and dynamic components in the core of identity. Focusing on the emotional ‘feelings’ of humiliation and regret, we will outline how violent incidents or verbal challenges from earlier stages of the individual’s life-course can be drawn upon, both directly and indirectly, as motivational and justificatory instruments in potentially violent interactions in the here and now. The intention is to propose what might be important psychosocial elements of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and how an exposition of these elements might further our understanding of subjective violence.

A tale of two capitalisms: Preliminary spatial and historical comparisons of homicide rates in Western Europe and the USA

This article examines comparative homicide rates in the United States and Western Europe in an era of increasingly globalized neo-liberal economics. The main finding of this preliminary analysis is that historical and spatial correlations between distinct forms of political economy and homicide rates are consistent enough to suggest that social democratic regimes are more successful at fostering the socio-cultural conditions necessary for reduced homicide rates. Thus Western Europe and all continents and nations should approach the importation of American neo-liberal economic policies with extreme caution. The article concludes by suggesting that the indirect but crucial causal connection between political economy and homicide rates, prematurely pushed into the background of criminological thought during the ‘cultural turn’, should be returned to the foreground.

Rehabilitating Leviathan: Reflections on the State, Economic Regulation and Violence Reduction

This article argues that some currently influential liberal-culturalist discourses tend to underplay the direct link between violent street crime, economic marginalization and the more ruthless adaptive aspects of advanced capitalist culture. In doing so they consistently reify the state, misconstrue its social role and represent its decline as a fait accompli. There is also a tendency to misrepresent the relative and moderate success in reducing street violence that it once achieved by using its political mandate to help maintain underlying economic stability above the required threshold. Underneath these discourses is a tacit political endorsement of the global neo-liberal project that is revealed by their collusion in the political neutralization of populations and the delegitimization of the potentially democratic state and its vital role in socio-economic stabilization and violence reduction.

Cultural criminology and primitive accumulation: A formal introduction for two strangers who should really become more intimate

In this brief polemic we argue that a renewed critical approach to the destructive power of capitalism is essential for criminological theory. The current focus on the allegedly plural and transgressive sub-cultural foreground of criminality has drawn our attention away from the restrictive and constitutive politico-cultural power that the mutating ‘deep structure’ of capitalism wields over contemporary social life. Rather than delve into the hapless post-political worlds of inter-subjectivity, relativism and micro-exotica in the expectation of finding organic forms of ‘resistance’, yield ground to cynical actuarialism and retreat from serious critical reasoning, 21st-century criminology must take a step forward in addressing the increasingly competitive, anxious and criminogenic culture of advanced capitalism as it enters a revived and notably brutal phase of primitive accumulation. It can do this by tightening its empirical focus, strengthening its theoretical approach and deepening its philosophical foundations.

Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Towards a new Ultra-Realism

This book provides a short, comprehensive and accessible introduction to Ultra-Realism: a unique and radical school of criminological thought that has been developed by the authors over a number of years. After first outlining existing schools of thought, their major intellectual flaws and their underlying politics in a condensed guide that will be invaluable to all undergraduate and postgraduate students, Hall and Winlow introduce a number of important new concepts to criminology and suggest a new philosophical foundation, theoretical framework and research programme. These developments will enhance the discipline’s ability to explain human motivations, construct insightful representations of reality and answer the fundamental question of why some human beings risk inflicting harm on others to further their own interests or achieve various ends.

Anti-nirvana: Crime, culture and instrumentalism in the age of insecurity

The disintegration of traditional forms of community and social order is one of criminology’s core issues for the twenty-first century. As these forms are replaced by individualism, fragmentation and differentiation in a fluid, unstable culture governed by advanced capitalism’s economic command to consume and discard with increasing rapidity, everyday values and practices are undergoing radical reconfiguration. Here we offer field data from two distinct social groups that are caught up in this process of change: socially incorporated young people in low paid service work, and socially excluded criminal young men from the north east of England. If this set of data is analysed in critical rather than celebratory ways, it suggests that current economic and cultural forces, rather than liberating individuals from repressive structures and traditions, are promoting sufficient atomization, instrumentalism and insecurity in specific locales to threaten social cohesion and further increase the flow of young people into criminality.

Night-time leisure and violence in the breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process

A stubbornly high level of interpersonal violence in town and city centres across Britain every weekend is gradually being recognized as a key aspect of the general problem of crime. In this article we want to explore some of the important criminological outcomes of night-time leisure in a culture dominated by hedonism and the logical needs of the free-market consumer economy. Our ongoing research into the night-time economy in its broader social and economic contexts suggests that alcohol-related violence is emblematic of British society at this point in its history; a point we have conceptualized as the ‘breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process’. Since the 1980s, the altering cultural norms accompanying Britain’s enthusiastic adoption of the free-market consumer economy seem to have opened the door for specific types of interpersonal violence, the containment of which is proving very difficult for traditional-informal techniques of control and state-centred agencies alike.