Simon Winlow

• Northumbria University

It is easy to become enthralled by foreground events, especially when they are as devastating as the Covid-19 pandemic. However, to really get a sense of what is going on, one must also look at the background. Beyond the pandemic’s spectacular foreground, we have seen a range of changes that might encourage the more optimistic among us to form the...

The concept of organic resistance has stood as a cornerstone of critical social science for decades. Countless authors have claimed that minor acts of “transgression” should be interpreted as indicators of a proto-revolutionary drive among the marginalized to fight oppressive power. Here, we argue that critical scholars must jettison such baseless...

Why has the Labour Party in Britain been unable to take advantage of the historic opportunity presented by the global financial crisis to press its case for radical socio-economic reform? Why, despite more than a decade of Tory austerity and genuine signs of social crisis, does it find itself behind in the polls to a Conservative Party openly commi...

In this brief chapter, I explore the links between the developing deviant leisure perspective and ultra-realism, a theoretical paradigm developed over many years by Steve Hall and me (see, e.g., Hall et al., Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: Crime, Exclusion and the New Culture of Narcissism, Routledge/Willan, 2008; Hall, Theorizing Crime a...

In this article, we respond to DeKeseredy and Schwartz’s (2013) article, “Confronting Progressive Retreatism and Minimalism: The Role of a New Left Realist Approach.” In that 2013 piece, the authors contend that many critical scholars are “retreating” from the crucial challenges of our time, and that many more are “minimizing” their critique and tr...

Much of the academic literature on alcohol-based leisure focuses on the pleasures of hedonism and youthful cultural exploration in environments free from the prescriptions, pressures and routines of everyday life. In this article – in which we present data from our ongoing ethnographic research exploring the experiences and attitudes of young Briti...

This chapter argues that there has never been a ‘civilising process’ across the course of modernity but an economically functional conversion of harms from physical brutality to socio-symbolic aggression. The subject’s acceptance of core harms can be best explained in a framework of transcendental materialism, with a focus on the process of deaptat...

What would it take to make society better? For the majority, conditions are getting worse and this will continue unless strong action is taken. This book offers a wide range of expert contributors outlining what might help to make better societies and which mechanisms, interventions and evidence are needed when we think about a better society. The...

This chapter discusses how society shapes people's expectations of life. The communities and networks that form an integral part of society give life colour and connect people emotionally to others. When faced with calls to break collective identities and to roll back the frontiers of the state, one should pause for a moment and think about the var...

This chapter argues that, if the goal is to rejuvenate the social, then there must be a corresponding rejuvenation of the political . There are one or two signs of life at the margins, but millions across the country now recognise that the political system is banal, stage managed, and profoundly alienating. On the surface, the political system seem...

This chapter contends that carefully evidenced analysis should remain a defining feature of social scientific writing, and that it is important to make more room in disciplines for forthright political critique and impassioned discussions. A significant motivation for many social researchers is the possibility that their work will act on and improv...

If you have a credit card, a smart phone and a health plan you have everything you need. When we started this project we wanted to do something slightly different. Our main aim was to enable researchers to write in a different voice, less constrained by academic convention, and more directly applied to the question of how their knowledge could be u...

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. (Cicero, Ad Familiares IX, 4, to Varro) Who would say they are not ‘for’ society? Society shapes our expectations of life. It informs our values, our behaviour, our dreams and our ambitions. The communities and networks that form an integral part of society give life colour and conne...

What would it take to make society better? For the majority, conditions are getting worse and this will continue unless strong action is taken. This book offers a wide range of expert opinions outlining what might help to make better societies and which mechanisms, interventions, and evidence are needed when we think about a better society. The boo...

This article presents original qualitative data gathered during prolonged ethnographic fieldwork with violent men in deindustrialised communities in the north of England. The data are used as an empirical platform for a theoretical exploration of the symbolism and subjectivising influences of traumatic life experiences in these men’s biographies. T...

Critical criminology must move beyond twentieth-century empiricist and idealist paradigms because the concepts and research programmes influenced by these paradigms are falling into obsolescence. Roger Matthews’ recent work firmly advocates this position and helps to set the ball rolling. Here we argue that Matthews’ attempt to use critical realist...

When the real world out there enters one of its periodic convulsions, and the faddish ways of seeing it which have dominated a particular era become exhausted and begin to lose their credibility, the real world appears more real than it has done in the preceding years. It looms large in our consciousness and demands that we return to it. In such pe...

The shock Brexit result highlighted a worrying trend: underemployed white men and women who have seen their standard of living fall, their communities disintegrate and their sense of value, function and inclusion diminish, desperately want a mainstream political party to defend their interests. However, no such party exists. These men and women can...

The years 2008 to 2013 saw a new generation of political protestors take to the streets. Riots disrupted many Western cities and new protest movements emerged, keen to address a bleak context of economic collapse and austerity politics. In this groundbreaking new study, Winlow, Hall, Briggs and Treadwell push past the unworldly optimism of the libe...

This paper draws together elements of cultural sociology and theoretical psychoanalysis in order to address the creation and enactment of a particular form of violent subjectivity. Its primary concern is the experience of traumatic events and prolonged periods of insecurity during childhood. The paper argues that the experience of trauma, when set...

In recent years, the expansion of night-time leisure has emerged as a key indicator of post-industrial urban prosperity, attracting investment, creating employment and re-generating the built environment. These leisure economies are youth-dominated, focusing upon the sale and consumption of alcohol. Unprecedented numbers of young people now flock t...

Most of the riots that have occurred in England throughout modernity have been associated with symbolic protests and fuelled by an underlying sense of injustice about specific, objective grievances related to the position of the agrarian or industrial working classes in the socio-economic and political structure. In the period that stretched from t...

This book offers the first in-depth investigation into the relationship between today‗s criminal identities and consumer culture. Using unique data taken from criminals locked in areas of permanent recession, the book aims to uncover feelings and attitudes towards a variety of criminal activities, investigating the incorporation of hearts and minds...

In the neoliberal West, while the growing awareness of women’s crimes in academic criminology has greatly extended our knowledge and understanding of the relation between women and crime, the growing visibility of female crime in popular culture brings with it a set of distinct problems that relate to the common misrepresentation of the actuality o...

‘…classic Winlow and Hall – bleak, brilliant and unmatched in the art of rethinking crucial social issues. Enlightening, and rather scary.’ - Professor Beverley Skeggs, Goldsmiths, University of London ‘This superb book inhabits a unique theoretical space and demonstrates Winlow and Hall at their brilliant best as theorists of contemporary social e...

This article is an initial analysis and theorization of original ethnographic data gathered from young men who participated in the English riots of August 2011. The data consistently suggest that consumer culture supplied these young men with a compelling motivation to join the rioting after the initial localized response to the original incident h...

In this article we attempt to develop an analysis of the English urban riots of 2011. Rather than build on the assumption of organic resistance and protopolitics, we argue that the disturbances were a brief eruption of social unrest that lacked the clear, unifying political symbolism necessary to turn objectless dissatisfaction into articulate poli...

We want to make one very simple claim that we hope might contribute to the developing discourse on the disciplinary and institutional governance of academic criminology: the Ethics Committee is one of a growing number of little others that attempt to compensate for the loss of the traditional symbolic order. While our focus is on the Ethics Committ...

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...

Consumption and consumerism are now accepted as key contexts for the construction of youth identities in de-industrialized Britain. This article uses empirical evidence from interviews with young people to suggest that claims of `new community' are overstated, traditional forms of friendship are receding, and increasingly atomized and instrumental...

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...

The development of alcohol-based night-time economies as part of government-sponsored post-industrial urban regeneration involves two interconnected political and economic processes. The first is the shift to a consumer economy, and the second is the movement within local governance from the provision of services towards a focus upon nurturing econ...

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...

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 f...

This paper explores the working practices, occupational culture, regulation and training of bouncers within the context of the burgeoning night-time leisure economies of Britain's post-industrial towns and cities. We argue that within these quasi-liminal urban spaces, mass intoxication, aggressive hedonism and disorder have become routine, whilst,...

This paper examines the scope, structure and impact of the occupational licensing systems designed to increase the legal accountability of licensed premise security personnel — better known as `bouncers'. Much vilified for a perceived association with high levels of violence, this form of private security now dominates the systems of social control...

This paper seeks to address some of the pragmatic and ethical issues encountered when researching violence. We seek through reference to our own work and to the work of others to highlight the inevitability of these problems and to suggest that dealing with them is instrinsic to the sociological enterprise.

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...

This paper, based on ethnographic research, is concerned with the accountability of licensed premise door staff – better known as ‘bouncers’. The situational dynamics of the bouncer's 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,...