Steve Hall

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 youth identities are now being culturally constituted and reproduced by the pressures and anxieties created by enforced adaptation to consumer capitalism. Analysis of the data opens up the possibility of a critical rather than a celebratory exploration of the wider theoretical implications of this process.

A stubbornly high level of interpersonal violence in town and city centres across Britain every weekend is gradually being recognized as a key aspect of the general problem of crime. In this article we want to explore some of the important criminological outcomes of night-time leisure in a culture dominated by hedonism and the logical needs of the free-market consumer economy. Our ongoing research into the night-time economy in its broader social and economic contexts suggests that alcohol-related violence is emblematic of British society at this point in its history; a point we have conceptualized as the ‘breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process’. Since the 1980s, the altering cultural norms accompanying Britain’s enthusiastic adoption of the free-market consumer economy seem to have opened the door for specific types of interpersonal violence, the containment of which is proving very difficult for traditional-informal techniques of control and state-centred agencies alike.

The disintegration of traditional forms of community and social order is one of criminology’s core issues for the twenty-first century. As these forms are replaced by individualism, fragmentation and differentiation in a fluid, unstable culture governed by advanced capitalism’s economic command to consume and discard with increasing rapidity, everyday values and practices are undergoing radical reconfiguration. Here we offer field data from two distinct social groups that are caught up in this process of change: socially incorporated young people in low paid service work, and socially excluded criminal young men from the north east of England. If this set of data is analysed in critical rather than celebratory ways, it suggests that current economic and cultural forces, rather than liberating individuals from repressive structures and traditions, are promoting sufficient atomization, instrumentalism and insecurity in specific locales to threaten social cohesion and further increase the flow of young people into criminality.