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Welfare to social control: a neo-liberal transformation

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Details: Category: Frontpage Articles; Last Updated: Monday, 01 May 2017 09:08; Published: Sunday, 27 April 2014 20:46; Written by Tom Boland; Hits: 15270

Work is normative in modernity, therefore, non-work, construed as ‘idleness’ is considered problematic or even deviant. Recent neo-liberal transformations of welfare policy have increasingly constructed all welfare recipients as suspicious individuals who must be monitored and either incentivised into employment or retrained, all the time threatened with sanctions. Empirically, I look at the Irish case, from the Pathways to Work policy and interview data from the Waterford Unemployment Experiences Research Collaboration. I conclude that the new normative identity of ‘job-seeker’ is created by institutions of social control which render any ‘idleness’ as criminal.

National Socialist Law and the Censuring of Modernist Culture, Art and Literature

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Details: Category: Frontpage Articles; Last Updated: Monday, 01 May 2017 09:08; Published: Friday, 17 May 2013 12:27; Written by Anthony Amatrudo and Fritz Wefelmeyer; Hits: 16780

book burning berlin 1933 National Socialist laws and public policy towards the arts were intended to defend a particular nationalistic conception of German history. The National Socialists, by making their leader the 'highest source of law' (Schmitt), conflated the concept of law as created in legislative processes with the idea of law relevant to aesthetic judgement and artistic creation, thus providing legality and legitimacy for their policy. The laws which suppressed modernist art were both part of a wider suppression of alternative ideas and a defence of a restrictive notion of Aryan personhood and ideology. The burning of books, of art and of persons was at heart the cleansing, through fire, of those elements not considered compatible with the National Socialist view of the future.

Power, Crime, and Society: Internal Issues Facing Contemporary Criminology

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Details: Category: Frontpage Articles; Last Updated: Monday, 01 May 2017 09:08; Published: Tuesday, 29 January 2013 09:28; Written by Johannes Wheeldon and Craig Harper; Hits: 13091

This is the second of a three-part series examining how criminologists can better engage what Jock Young has called ‘the criminological imagination’. The authors consider developments in the UK, USA and Canada and argue that criminology faces both external and internal challenges that constrain how crime is interpreted and how criminologists communicate their work in the public realm. In this piece, the authors consider internal challenges within criminology including careerism and citation counts, and the methodological fetishization associated with the quantitative turn in contemporary criminology. Perhaps most worrying is the lack of modesty about both knowledge and methods in leading publications.

Power, Crime and Society: External Issues facing Contemporary Criminology

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Details: Category: Frontpage Articles; Last Updated: Monday, 01 May 2017 09:08; Published: Monday, 15 October 2012 16:42; Written by Johannes Wheeldon and Craig Harper; Hits: 17068

This is the first in a three-part series examining the basis on which criminologists can better engage what Jock Young has called ‘the criminological imagination.’ We consider developments in the UK, USA and Canada and argue that criminology faces external challenges that constrain how crime is interpreted and how criminologists can communicate the results of an ever-growing, international evidence-base into the public realm. In our view, future efforts to re-define criminology as contentious, as in some cases, or conciliatory, as in others, require a new way to conceive of the intersections between crime, power, and society.

Securities fraud, Goldman Sachs and critical criminology USA

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Details: Category: Frontpage Articles; Last Updated: Monday, 01 May 2017 09:08; Published: Wednesday, 05 September 2012 14:24; Written by Matthew G. Yeager; Hits: 11662

I am stunned that people are not more upset about this. You know, $8.7 billion of our money has gone missing in Iraq. I didn’t even know they had a Goldman Sachs over there. (Jay Leno)^[i]

In April of 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil fraud complaint against Goldman Sachs and Company, and its employee, one Fabrice Tourre.^[ii] In the words of one knowledgeable observer, this was the SEC’s “only major case against Wall Street since the crisis” (Sorkin 2010: 550). The complaint accused the defendants of making misleading and deceptive statements with respect to a debt instrument marketed by Goldman Sachs in 2007 that was based on subprime residential mortgage-backed securities.^[iii] Undisclosed to investors was that a hedge fund called Paulson & Company was involved in the selection of assets which formed the basis for the new debt instrument, and paid Goldman Sachs a fee of $15 million to market the new instrument. Paulson thereupon took a short position against the very security it helped to market – a position which Goldman Sachs did not disclose to investors as required under the Security and Exchange Commission Acts of 1933 and 1934.