Shopping with violence: Black Friday sales in the British context

This article argues that the 2014 adoption of the US shopping tradition of Black Friday sales to stores and supermarkets in the United Kingdom and beyond represents an important point of enquiry for the social sciences. We claim that the importation of the consumer event, along with the disorder and episodes of violence that accompany it, are indicative of the triumph of liberal capitalist consumer ideology while reflecting an embedded and cultivated form of insecurity and anxiety concomitant with the barbaric individualism, social envy and symbolic competition of consumer culture. Through observation and qualitative interviews, this article presents some initial analyses of the motivations and meanings attached to the conduct of those we begin to understand as ‘extreme shoppers’ and seeks to understand these behaviours against the context of the social harms associated with consumer culture

From "Infant Hercules" to "Ghost Town":Industrial collapse and social harm on Teesside

This article explicates the harms associated with deindustrialization in Teesside in the North East of England in the context of neoliberalism. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews (n = 25), the article explores how ongoing industrial collapse, typified by Sahaviriya Steel Industries’ (SSI) closure in 2015, has generated various harms. First, the article examines industrialism’s socioeconomic security and stability. It then explores the negative impact of SSI’s closure in 2015, including a sense of loss and unemployment. Next, it demonstrates how the absence of economic stability produces harmful outcomes, namely insecurity, mental health problems and bleak visions of the future. The article concludes by casting industrial ruination as an impediment to human flourishing; the normal functioning of capitalism represents a “negative motivation to harm” that prevents the stability and security necessary for individual and collective flourishin

Deviant leisure: A criminological perspective

This article explains why an understanding of deviant leisure is significant for criminology. Through reorienting our understanding of ‘deviance’ from a contravention of norms and values to encompassing engagement in behaviour and actions that contravene a moral ‘duty to the other’, the new ‘deviant leisure’ perspective outlined here describes activities that through their adherence to cultural values inscribed by consumer capitalism, have the potential to result in harm. Using the ideological primacy of consumer capitalism as a point of departure, we explore the potential for harm that lies beneath the surface of even the most embedded and culturally accepted forms of leisure. Such an explanation requires a reading that brings into focus the subjective, socially corrosive, environmental and embedded harms that arise as a result of the commodification of leisure. In this way, this article aims to act as a conceptual foundation for diverse yet coherent research into deviant leisure

The Paradox of Parkour: Conformity, Resistance and Spatial Exclusion

Drawing upon two years of ethnographic research into the spatially transgressive practice of parkour and freerunning, this chapter attempts to explain and untangle some of the contradictions that surround this popular lifestyle sport and its exclusion from our hyper-regulated cities. While the existing criminological wisdom suggests that these practices are a form of politicised resistance, this chapter positions parkour and freerunning as hyper-conformist to the underlying values of consumer capitalism and explains how late capitalism has created a contradiction for itself in which it must stoke desire for these lifestyle practices whilst also excluding their free practice from central urban spaces. Drawing on the emergent deviant leisure perspective’s interest in issues of infantilisation and adultification, this chapter explores the lifeworlds of young people who are attempting to navigate the challenges and anxieties of early adulthood. For the young people in this study, consumer capitalism’s commodification of rebellious iconography offered unique identities of ‘cool individualism’ and opportunities for flexibilised employment, while the post-industrial ‘creative city’ attempted to harness parkour’s practice, prohibitively if necessary, into approved spatial contexts under the buzzwords of ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’. Therefore, this chapter engages in a critical criminological reappraisal of issues of transgression, deviance and resistance in urban space under consumer capitalism

What lies beneath? Some notes on ultra-realism, and the intellectual foundations of the ‘deviant leisure’ perspective

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 and Deviance: A New Perspective, Sage, 2012, Human Studies: Special Issue on Transcendence and Transgression, 35, 365–381, 2012; Hall and Winlow, Revitalizing Criminological Theory: Towards a New Ultra-Realism, Routledge, 2015; Winlow, Badfellas: Crime, Tradition and New Masculinities, Berg, 2001, The Sociological Review, 62, 32–49, 2014; Winlow and Hall, Crime, Media, Culture, 5, 285–304, 2009, British Journal of Criminology, 52, 400–416, 2012, Rethinking Social Exclusion: The End of the Social?, Sage, 2013). I will describe in very simple terms ultra-realism’s intellectual framework before discussing how deviant leisure scholars might use these resources to solidify the intellectual foundations of their project