The labour theory of value and the theory of surplus value, the necessarily antagonistic relationship between classes, the inherent tendency of capitalism to expand, destructively, whilst at the same time reproducing the contradictions upon which it is founded, all seem to be crucial tools for understanding and engaging with the trajectories of the world.
To interpret the world is not, of course, to change it. And so a Marxist analysis can only be a starting-point. Thus, within the context of Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful, to understand the permeation of neo-liberalism through state and civil society as creating the conditions for undermining critical bodies of knowledge is at the same time to appreciate the enormity of reversing this trajectory.
Critical academics who spent many years erecting ways of looking at the world have had this work, in a whirlwind quarter of a century, exposed to a withering assault. This is, therefore, an era in which academics may be less protected by intellec- tual foundations which once seemed impregnable, but when exposed to the discipline of the market, more or less turn to sand. For example, Berrington, Jemphrey and Scraton , in their experience of conducting research for a local criminal justice system, demonstrate how assumptions about the crim- inal justice system which are relatively established and uncontroversial in the context of academic criminology can be the subject of censorship when applied in policy settings.
Their experience seems symptomatic of the status of academic research within a market voracious for policy-driven knowledge. Risk theorists have been drawn into dialogue with post-modern analysis and have responded with the idea that we have reached a new reflexive phase in modernity rather than a new historical epoch Beck The post-modernist call to reject unitary or grand theoretical perspec- tives metanarratives has inspired Foucauldian governmentality theorists to move closer to an understanding of power as an almost ethereal force, so dispersed throughout the body of society that it has little relation to the traditional centres of political and economic decision making in capitalist social orders.
As Coleman argues, what the risk and governmentality theorists of the academic left have in common is a failure to discuss or describe in any detail the ways in which the state has played a key role in the sustaining and intensifying the neo-liberal project.
Such analyses offer little in the way of tangible opportunities for opposition Green The downgrading of the state as a basic object of analysis also represents a major theoretical weakness on the part of social-scientific and criminological adherents to such perspectives. Rather, it allowed the state to enlist and reorganise academics and other professional groups into more effective channels for promoting knowledge claims made by local and national state officials, so partnerships legitimate an ideological closure on the part of the state Sim Critical research must retain a concept of the state not only as a primary object of analysis, but also as a primary object of struggle.
As Fooks points out in his study of the regulation of large scale consumer fraud-thefts in the UK, since capital has a virtual monopoly over knowledge about its own activities, it is often only regulatory authorities that can penetrate this monopoly. Therefore what the state knows and allows the public to know is likely to be increasingly important.
This is illustrative of the likelihood that the state in general, and the law in particular, will remain key pressure points for counter-hegemonic struggle Alvesalo and Tombs This requires a concrete appraisal of the expansion of the power of local, national, and international state structures, their ability to regulate markets, intervene and mediate in struggles within and between social groups, and ultimately their primary role in structuring social relations.
Similarly, Power required a lucid awareness of the centres of material power in the state before attempting to explore the reconfiguration of state sovereignty and power in Ireland and Spain. In short, those who research the crimes of the powerful have to understand accurately the networks of power that operate in a given society Hillyard Taken together, the contributions to Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful Tombs and Whyte b stand as a clear testimony to the need to move beyond a view of the state as a fixed, monolithic, homogeneous entity.
Thus no state is vulnerable to the take-over, capture, or absolute control by one particular set of powerful interests or another. Similarly, any actually existing state is not a set of institutions that speak or act with a unified or permanent set of political or ethical views or strategies. The internal contradictions and conflicts that exist within and between various state agencies and depart- ments, and between individual state representatives, creates opportunities to engage in critical research.
For Power , conducting research on highly sens- itive security networks, breaking through official versions of policy was made possible by conducting simultaneous interviews with two officials from different police agencies.
Both Power and Sim note the advan- tages to be gained by identifying sympathetic individuals within the state; in fact, Sim argues that some of the most critical views of the UK prison system are actually contained in reports published by the British government. Further, research focusing on powerful actors still requires some level of access to data sources controlled by states or corporations.
Even if one can negotiate that access, the use of state data is problematic Pearce ; Tombs and Whyte b. Working for or within the state without comprom- ising the position of the researcher is possible under particular conditions Alvesalo and Virta ; Berrington et al. Of course, gaining formal and actual research access does not in itself remove the abilities of state servants to exercise influence or control over the outcomes of that research.
Berrington et al. An important lesson is that when it comes to the state, there are no hard and fast rules of engagement: ways of engaging with and confronting state institutions are contingent on the social and political conditions of the time.
Moreover, engaging with capital often involves a simultaneous engagement with the state. Challenging the state, if it is effective, means challenging social relations of power that privilege private interests. This is becoming increasingly apparent to critical researchers. But a note of caution is needed here. Our discussion of states and corporations as powerful actors, and as the subjects of critical scrutiny, is by no means intended to suggest that we conceptualise, nor challenge, state power and the power of corporate interests in identical ways: engaging with the state is a rather different task than enga- ging with corporations.
Most contemporary states — notwithstanding their well-documented hypocrisy — continue to seek to sustain some appearance of accountability, and establish a range of mechanisms through which this might be pursued, at least formally.
For example, states — via regulatory agencies, law, and access to certain kinds of information — have some regulatory groups or sites of struggle to control or mitigate the harmful activities of corpora- tions.
Such sites of struggle are not present within and around corporations. On the other hand, states enjoy certain formal coercive powers, which may be used against dissidents, including the critical academic, which corporations cannot quite match.
Thus the character of struggles with corporations and states is always going to be different in certain respects. In capitalist social orders, challenging capital effectively inevitably brings conflicts with the state. Beyond the Ivory Tower Even if, as our introduction to this paper suggests, universities will continue to act as gatekeepers in the production and dissemination of critical crim- inological knowledge, this activity has its limits.
For it is also the case that university reputations are closely tied to, and in large part rely upon, notions of impartiality and academic neutrality. Notwithstanding the increasingly obvious falsity in any claims to value-neutraility Tombs and Whyte b , the discourses of value-neutrality are central to the legitimation of Univer- sities and University-based research — so this contradiction can and should be exploited by critical researchers.
For example, the relative lack of atten- tion to crimes of the powerful represents a gaping hole within mainstream criminology. It is a hole which can be justified neither theoretically nor empir- ically, and one which supposedly value-neutral institutions cannot sustain without exposing their highly dubious preference for research and teaching programmes which do not challenge powerful interests.
The fact that there is a gap in critical studies of corporations means there is much potential for exploiting these gaps. For entrepreneurial researchers working in environ- ments that still, necessarily, place some premium on original and novel work, the study of the crimes of the powerful remains a relatively open area of interest. Further advantages in continuing to conduct critical research from within universities include the status of universities as powerful organisations in their own right, often linked into local state networks, partnerships and govern- ment initiatives, and increasingly involved in funding relationships with local, national, and international capital.
Academics therefore possess a credibility and social status as individuals that has the potential to open doors with other powerful groups. Those assumptions were subverted by the researchers and opened avenues to data that may have been barred to more established researchers or to enquiries from non-academic institutions.
Problems with securing funding to research states and corporations, partic- ularly when the research objects are the agents and organisations that retain control over research resources, may continue to cast a shadow over crit- ical social research. Yet, reasons for remaining optimistic include that, while funding for critical work is being closed down Snider , it is still possible to gain access to significant grants.
One key implication of this is that critical academics must not self-regulate by choosing not to apply for such grants. The U. Further, studies in criminology continue to be conducted without big grants or corporate funds Snider One of the overwhelming pressures that comes from within the univer- sity is the demand for mainstream academic publication, and to some extent this is important for many individual university-based researchers since it establishes credibility both within the university and in wider academic communities.
But to make a contribution beyond those publications, to engage in public dissent, and to conduct research that is socially and polit- ically relevant, academics also need to reach wider audiences. It is crucial for academics to use the power that comes with a professional position to chal- lenge neo-liberal discourse.
A project of social transformation needs more than relatively isolated academic discussion, no matter how influential this might be, but requires wider, mass dissemination. Breaking academic silences on major social problems increasingly requires looking beyond academic peers and publishing for larger, more diverse audiences. This may mean engaging the mass media or it may not. But, following Sim , it does involve at least considering the range of important media beyond the world of academic publishing.
One problem is, however, that a great deal of critical criminology is simply deemed un-newsworthy Tombs and Whyte ; see Alvesalo and Virta on newsworthiness , but the perceived lack of newsworthiness can potentially help with access when representatives calculate that research will not be well publicized Green Moreover, as Tweedale notes , and Hillyard confirms, investigative journalists have often played a more important role than academics in exposing corporate and state illegality and immorality.
Notwith- standing the demise of investigative journalism within the media, and the more general increasing and well-documented corporate control of most forms of media Monbiot , this process is by no means complete. Hillyard notes that journalists may still often look for a story that academics ignore.
Of course, media attention may also be a double-edged sword in the sense that control over representation and content is never guaranteed.
And there are other problems: methods and sources are often ill-defined and problematic, highly individualised accounts and anecdotes may represent atypical examples, and the demands of time and space within various media may mean that issues are glossed over to the point of distortion. Critical crimino- logists are more than aware of the relative dearth of textbooks around these issues Tunnell , which is all the more reason to adopt the strategy of feminist criminologists over the past twenty five years: to act upon the insist- ence of most commentators upon university teaching: that our research must inform our teaching; to establish introductory level sessions on corporate and state crimes; to build towards the inclusion of discrete modules, units, and streams in these topics; and thereby to create the demand from students for texts which publishing houses will meet, as well as to increase the possibility that some graduate students will take these issues with them into their own workplaces, research, and teaching activities.
Beyond Value-Freedom, for Partisan Objectivity To continue to produce critical research in the midst of the current neo- liberal assault upon the universities and research institutions, it is increasingly important for researchers to be linked to counter-hegemonic struggle: to workers organisations, political and social movements, to pressure groups and community organisations that are committed to challenging state and corporate power.
This begins, of course, within the University. These processes of marketisation and commodification have swept through all aspects of University life affecting, for example, the pay and conditions of all those who work within and support Universities — and includes the struggles to preserve the pay and conditions of, for example, technicians, cleaners, and administrative staff, who are struggling to defend the remaining vestiges of humanity and dignity within workplaces.
Within and beyond the universities, counter-hegemonic struggle cannot be seen as a unified, undisputed category. Certainly not every struggle which stands in opposition to the powerful is necessarily obstructive or damaging to the neo-liberal hegemony. Plenty of popular movements are conservative in character, and the fact that a movement has popular support or opposes power on a specific issue does not make it necessarily worthwhile or just.
Although this problem is discussed extensively in the literature on ethnography, where it is often described as going native see Punch , accusations of bias or subjectivity are rare where organisations have granted access on their own terms or even funded research. On the contrary, such associations, especially when it comes to large corporations and government departments, are often worn as badges of honour, or credibility McClung Lee , and at the same time reinforce the pretensions of the badge wearer to be the guardians of more robust and even more objective knowledge.
A partisan research is not, of course, free from the problems engendered in viewing the world from a particular perspective. Tombs, S. Whyte Eds. New York: Peter Lang. While much previous research paid attention to the general characteristics of crime by the USFK in Korea, relatively less attention was given to the reason why the USFK became the nuisance to many ordinary Koreans.
In order to better understand this social problem caused by the USFK and their criminal acts, thus, this study focused on how Korean judicial authorities exercised their power to deter the USFK from committing any possible crimes against Koreans during their time serving in Korea. Yet, what it means in effect is that the vast majority of workers in the vast majority of workplaces are subject to a form of regulation that has been degraded by the market.
Self-regulation merges with compliance-oriented enforcement merges with neo-liberalism. The consequences of this process could hardly be clearer. It is certainly no exaggeration to describe the trends alluded to in this paper as a collapse of enforcement. Investigations and inspections have fallen at an unprecedented rate as political and resource pressures have taken their toll on the day-to-day work of the inspectorate: the percentage falls in enforcement activities, already from low absolute levels, can hardly be described as anything other than a collapse.
The extent of this decline would simply not be sustainable in most other areas of law enforcement—imagine the efforts of a Chief Constable, for example, to defend declines in investigations of violent interpersonal assault, or falls in prosecutions of apprehended burglars, where these certainly would be represented as collapses in enforcement, which, no doubt, would cause a political furore.
By contrast, it remains to be stated that the trends described in this paper have generated no political or popular outcry. Indeed, one function of the collapse in enforcement is that safety crimes may be subject to a process of decriminalization that renders them less visible in the public eye.
But, if the collapse in enforcement has failed to attract any meaningful public attention, it is noticed by some: for it is sending a clear, calculated message to corporate criminals that, under Labour, they will be even freer to kill and injure with impunity.
This does not mean that the trends described in this paper will see more workers killed or injured. Increased harm may indeed be a product of such trends, yet one would need a longer-term analysis in order to consider this, and, in any case, occupational injury data, even fatality data Tombs , are so flawed that it is virtually useless for any such analysis. But, there can be no doubt that the trends we are describing here are trends that institutionalize impunity in the sense that inflicting death and injury is less and less likely to result in investigation, or provoke any form of enforcement response, let alone prosecution—even in comparison to previously very low levels.
Nor, to return to where this paper began, could the messages herein be rolled out at a more difficult time. For, in the midst of recession, public and political attention focuses more on the need to keep people in work, less on the conditions of that work. As employers cut back on basic maintenance, training, replacement of hardware and software, and as work is intensified in general, it is little wonder that recessions kill and injure, as our recent experience testifies: between and , for example, fatal and major injury rates increased across British manufacturing by 31 per cent and in construction by 45 per cent Tombs And these effects were felt at a time when, arguably, the other key partner in the formal tripartite nature of the Robens regulatory structure, organized labour, was better placed to resist attacks on safety protection than is the case now Tombs , thus rendering the contemporary role of external enforcement even more significant.
This likely, future pincer movement upon a system of safety regulation already in disrepair will produce further death, injury and misery for working men and women and members of the public. The financial crisis has perhaps fatally undermined the legitimacy of the neo-liberal regulatory settlement. Space has therefore been opened up for a challenge to the state on all fronts: for those who would further erode the administrative apparatuses of the state and open yet more public services to privatization; for those who see the public sector as the necessary victim of the corporate welfare that has come in the form of bank bail-outs; and for those who see state vulnerability as an opportunity for a political challenge to neo-liberalism.
It does so by using, for the most part, publicly available data, both quantitative enforcement data produced by HSE, as well as a range of policy documents and statements regarding regulation in general and enforcement in particular, from government, HSE and various commentators upon safety enforcement activities. See debate through the pages of the BJC at the start of the s Hawkins ; ; Pearce and Tombs ; ; also Pearce and Tombs — None of this is to claim that such views exhaust the spectrum of academic views on regulation.
Far from it: thus, for example, work in the United Kingdom by Croall, Fooks, Tombs and Whyte and, in North America, by Pearce, Snider, Glasbeek and Tucker, to name but a few, has developed a quite different perspective upon regulation, central to which is the view that this is an outcome and object of struggle between essentially antagonistic social forces. The point that is being made here is that the views referred to in the paper are dominant and, as we shall argue, and relatedly, cohere closely with, and indeed have informed, Governmental policies towards regulation.
Scrutinising New Regulations , at www. See www. The same trend can also probably be identified in local authority enforcement teams, though the lack of published figures providing evidence of such trends makes it difficult to say this conclusively. See, e. House of Commons, Work and Pensions Committee, , recommendation 9. Mike Macdonald, negotiations officer with Prospect, cited at www. Source: HSE published enforcement statistics, available at www.
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Revitalizing Market-Based Regulation. Dangerous Times for Safety. The New Realities of Regulatory Enforcement. Conclusions and Discussion. Oxford Academic. David Whyte. Select Format Select format. Read our guide on Where to take your learning next for more information. Not ready for formal University study? Then browse over free courses on OpenLearn and sign up to our newsletter to hear about new free courses as they are released.
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