Moral panic and social theory: Beyond the heuristic

Copyright @ 2011 by International Sociological Association.Critcher has recently conceptualized moral panic as a heuristic device, or 'ideal type'. While he argues that one still has to look beyond the heuristic, despite a few exceptional studies there has been little utilization of recent developments in social theory in order to look 'beyond moral panic'. Explicating two current critical contributions - the first, drawing from the sociologies of governance and risk; the second, from the process/figurational sociology of Norbert Elias - this article highlights the necessity for the continuous theoretical development of the moral panic concept and illustrates how such development is essential to overcome some of the substantial problems with moral panic research: normativity, temporality and (un) intentionality

Screen Savers. Case Histories of Social Reaction to Mass Media, Children and Violence

Historically the mass media have often been blamed for causing violent behaviour by children and young people. Two case studies of new media, film and video games, are compared in terms of their emergence, reactions to them and outcomes of the debate, mainly in the USA and Britain. Both cases are used to test the sociological model of moral panic which is found to be of limited appli­cation. It needs to be supplemented by two other concepts, those of media panic and moral regulation. Only then can be grasped the complexities of continuities and changes in these historical debates, at the heart of which remains the figure of the eternally vulnerable child

Policing public order : theoretical and practical issues/ Critcher

xi. 267 hal. ; ill. : 23 cm

Policing public order : theoretical and practical issues/ Critcher

xi. 267 hal. ; ill. : 23 cm

Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (2nd ed.)

35th anniversary edition of this book. This collaboratively authored book begins as an attempt to analyse the apparent rise in a new form of crime in Britain of the early 1970s, mugging. The authors expose the ways in which changes of operational procedure and priority on the part of the police were at least partly responsible for this phenomenon, as concern that mugging needed to be cracked down on led to more arrests as well as to more offences being classified as muggings. The coverage of the resultant court cases led to much media comment on this apparent new phenomenon, fuelling public concern which resulted in the handing down of greatly increased sentences to convicted muggers in the name of deterrence. Thus, the authors aim to demonstrate that the phenomenon was certainly fuelled and indeed, to a certain extent, created by the very institutions to which fell the task of controlling it. The authors then examine this chain of events as an instance by which a crisis of ideology within British society and late capitalism in general is managed by the authorities. Supposedly deviant groups, in this case young black males, are periodically singled out and placed at the centre of a series of moral panics which allow the state to demonstrate that it has the people's consent to maintain the status quo through an increasing reliance on a authoritarian `law'n'order' model. The book concludes with an extended and unashamedly polemical Marxist analysis of the situation of the black British as a super-exploited sub-proletariat, and attempts to lay the theoretical ground for those trying to reconfigure society for the better. Its sometimes uneven tone reflects its collaborative authorship, and the terms of the debate and the nature of the identified crisis root the book firmly in its 1970s point of origin, but there is nonetheless a great deal in this classic cultural study to provoke thought and debate into the twenty-first century