Theoretical Criminology 14(1)

Consuming security?: Tools for a sociology of security consumption
Benjamin Goold, Ian Loader, and Angelica Thumala

How does our understanding of private security alter if we treat security consumption as consumption? In this article, we set out the parameters of a project which strives—theoretically and empirically—to do just this. We begin with a reminder that private security necessarily entails acts of buying and selling, and by indicating how the sociology of consumption may illuminate this central—but overlooked—fact about the phenomenon. We then develop a framework for investigating security consumption. This focuses attention on individual acts of shopping; practices of organizational security that individuals indirectly consume; and social and political arrangements that may prompt the consumption of, or themselves be consumed by, security. This way of seeing, we contend, calls for greater comparative enquiry into the conditions under which markets for security commodities flourish or founder, and close analysis of the social meanings and trajectories of different security goods. By way of illustration we focus on four such categories of good—those we term commonplace, failed, novel and securitized. The overarching claim of the article is that the study of private security currently stands in need of greater conceptual and empirical scrutiny of what is going on when ‘security’ is consumed.

Security governance in transition: The compartmentalizing, crowding out and corralling of policing and security in Northern Ireland
Graham Ellison and Mary O'Rawe

The article suggests that while the report of the Independent Commission on Policing (ICP) provides a police reform blueprint for Northern Ireland and elsewhere, it can also be seen as an attempt to engage more elliptically with contemporary debates in security governance vis-a-vis the increasingly fragmented nature of late-modern policing and the role of the state. A decade into the reform process in Northern Ireland and in spite of the networked approach postulated by the ICP, the public police continue to enjoy a pre-eminent place and little evidence exists of any significant weakening of state steering and rowing of security. The discussion proposes a tentative typology explaining the continued colonization of security spaces by the State using constituent attendant processes of compartmentalizing, crowding out and corralling.

'A Sketch of the Neo-Liberal State': A Symposium

Editorial

Neoliberalism’s penal and debtor states: A rejoinder to Loïc Wacquant
John L. Campbell

Neoliberal penality: A brief genealogy
Bernard E. Harcourt

Punishing the Poor—a debate: Some questions on Wacquant’s theorizing the neoliberal state
Margit Mayer

While in broad agreement about the growing importance of workfare and punitive tendencies in contemporary politics, this article raises four questions about Wacquant’s model of a neoliberal state. Besides pointing out the fuzzy definition of the target group of punitive regulation, it questions whether penal containment is generalizable as ‘core’ of the neoliberal state. Third, it critiques the selective treatment of contemporary poverty policies (excluding a variety of, for example, activating, neoliberal policies), built on a skewed view of the transition from a supposedly generous ‘nanny state’ to a strict ‘daddy state’. Fourth, it challenges the claim of ‘overall fitness’ of punitive containment of urban marginality and the absence of agency and contradictions from the model.

Zombie neoliberalism and the ambidextrous state
Jamie Peck

A response to Wacquant
Frances Fox Piven

Comment on Loïc Wacquant’s ‘Theoretical Coda’ to Punishing the Poor
Mariana Valverde

Theoretical Criminology, February 2010: Volume 14, Issue 1