Sue Penna

Postmodernism and Social Policy: a small step forwards?

The term ‘postmodernism’ has recently entered the study of social policy, prompting debate over its usefulness for social policy analysis. Peter Taylor-Goobys (1994) appraisal of literatures often described as ‘postmodern’ leads him to reject them as having little to offer the discipline of social policy. This article argues that such a view derives from a confusion about the field of ‘postmodernism’; in particular, from a conflation of several different theoretical positions and schools of thought. This article provides a clarification of these literatures in order to argue that the issues they raise have important implications for the way in which we might understand the prospects for policy formulation and implementation. The article distinguishes between the political economy strand of the ‘post’ literatures – postindustrialism and postfordism – and the cultural studies strand – poststructuralism and postmodernism – showing that the different issues they highlight, and the ways in which they conceptualise power and control will lead to different theoretical connections between social policy and political action.

The Children Act 2004: Child Protection and Social Surveillance

This article considers the passage of the Children Act 2004 through Parliament. Drawing on recent debates in social science, particularly those concerned with informationalism, governance and cultural political economy, the article examines how welfare policies can be used as a vehicle for pursuing broader political goals. In particular, the development of information, retrieval and tracking systems (IRT) raise questions concerning the rapid growth in the use of instruments of surveillance. The aims of the article are, firstly, to analyse the use of surveillance as a mode of societal governance and, secondly, to illustrate how attempts to exercise governance take place through a particular discursive construction of children and their protection, a construction which presents the Children Act as a solution to some technical problems of information‐sharing and inter‐agency working in the service of childrens welfare. The article argues that such a discursive construction is necessary in order to delegitimise and obscure key political questions of civil liberties and human rights that are raised by the Children Act.

Policing mobile criminality: implications for police forces in the UK

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider how the national intelligence model (NIM) of policing in Britain has been affected by changing patterns of mobility, since its inception in 2004.Design/methodology/approach – Conceptually, the paper draws on the “new mobilities paradigm”. Empirically, it is based on a small, exploratory study, comprising analysis of investigations carried out over a three‐month period in 2007 and 2008, by a serious and organised crime unit in a police force in England, and 11 interviews carried out in three police forces in England. The data are used for illustrative purposes only.Findings – It is argued that increased levels of mobile criminality are impacting significantly on British police forces, placing considerable strain on the practical structures which underpin the NIM, and posing serious challenges to operational efficiency and effectiveness.Originality/value – This paper makes a contribution by linking the social changes documented in the emergent social scienc...

Postmodern theory and politics: Perspectives on citizenship and social justice

Abstract In this paper we consider some contributions made by postmodern perspectives to theoretical and political questions of citizenship and social justice. Postmodern theory is often dismissed as a distraction from pressing questions of material inequality and economic and political exploitation. In the paper we distinguish between ‘ludic’ or ‘spectral’ postmodernisms and ‘oppositional’ or ‘resistance’ postmodernisms. We suggest that the latter provide theoretical resources for analysing the cultural construction of inequalities and struggles around social inclusion and exclusion. The paper is divided into three sections: in the first, three dominant narratives of modernization are addressed and their implications for concepts of citizenship and social inclusion noted; in the second, some postmodern challenges to these narratives are explored in order to disclose some of the key problems with modern paradigms of citizenship and social justice; in the third section we outline two postmodern approaches ...

Bridge Over the River Crime: Mobility and the Policing of Organised Crime

Abstract This paper examines the significant disparity between the mobility of organised crime and the mobility of law enforcement through the use of Kaufmann’s (2002) three categories of motility: access, skills and appropriation. It argues that the differential mobility of organised crime and law enforcement can be accounted for by the differential insertion of these groups of actors into ‘the practice and politics of market liberalisation and the practice and politics of market criminalisation’, and suggests that it is possible to view each of these as inhabiting ‘different modernities’. It concludes that whilst mobility systems are critical to understanding the movement of these groups of actors, these systems are themselves embedded within different institutional structures that shape the opportunities to be mobile, in particular economic and political structures.

Review Essay: Critical Criminology: Continuity and Change: Schwartz, M. D., & Hatty, S. E. (2003). Controversies in Critical Criminology. Albany, NY: Anderson. Carrington, K., & Hogg, R. (2002). Critical Criminology: Issues, Debates and Challenges. Cullompton, Devon, United Kingdom: Willan. Milovanovic, D. (2002). Critical Criminology at the Edge: Postmodern Perspectives, Integration, and Application. Westport, CT: Praeger

We want to situate our review essay in the space between two essays in social science that exemplify the distance between critical criminology’s origins and its present formations. The first is an essay by Alvin Gouldner (1968/1973b) that sets the tone for the emergence of a critical criminological enterprise. The second is an essay by Michael Burawoy (2005a) that helps to define some of the contemporary problems facing any “critical” social scientific project. The two essays only tangentially address core issues in critical criminology, but nevertheless they establish important parameters within which that project has developed. In the Spring of 1968, when Europe’s major cities were besieged by radicals and revolutionaries and waves of political opposition swept the developed and developing world, when Paris was barricaded and Prague was in the calm of its socialistic experiment before the approaching communist storm, Alvin Gouldner published an essay in The American Sociologist titled “The Sociologist as Partisan: Sociology and the Welfare State” (Gouldner, 1968/1973b). It was a sometimes sarcastic and brutal but characteristically insightful and sharp critique of what he called the “Becker School” of sociology—especially as it related to law-breaking and norm-transgressing outsiders. Gouldner’s attack came as something of a surprise to the academic world for two reasons. First, as Gouldner pointed out, only a few years earlier he had laid into the “dominant ideology of professional sociologists”: the ideology of a value-free social science. This ideology, he had claimed in 1961, was