Book Review: Bouncers: Violence and governance in the night-time economy
| Author | J. Robert Lilly |
| Published date | 01 January 2005 |
| Date | 01 January 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/146247450500700108 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Bouncers: Violence and governance in the night-time economy, Dick Hobbs, Philip
Hadfield, Stuart Lister and Simon Winlow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
336 pp. £35. ISBN 0199252246 (hbk).
Good sociological analysis is much like a powerful novel. It takes the reader to places
they’ve never been. Great sociological writing takes readers to places they’ve never been
and leaves them there long after they’ve finished reading. Bouncers is a great book. It is
indeed much like a great novel – it is literary, stylish, and replete with plots and char-
acters as gripping and frightening as anything or anybody found in the crime novels of
James Lee Burke or Walter Mosley. It is also a penetrating study of the political economy
in England that in recent years has witnessed the transformation of night-time leisure
into a key indicator of post-industrial urban prosperity that is based primarily on youth
and the sale of alcohol. It does more – it leaves the reader with a disturbing, unromantic
view of current post-industrial urban restructuring that is driven by a complex mix of
licit and illicit opportunities that exist in the flora and fauna surrounding the promotion
of mass intoxication and the pursuit of profit. Most clearly, it is a contemporary study
of a significant transformative moment in the social order of older urban areas.
Bouncers is written in the tradition of the classic urban studies of Park (1916/1969),
Simmel (1903/1995), Wirth (1938/1995), and Weber’s (1978) two-volume tome on
economy and society. It analyses the slippery subtleties that go into making bouncers
emblematic of twenty-first century England and other parts of the European
community. It is not surprising therefore that this book succeeds in being several books
at once: history, law, economics, labor relations, political sociology and criminology.
While there may be reasons to avoid this book its erudition is not one of them.
It is largely through the rich descriptions of the bouncers’ ‘scene’ and, later, their
explanations and interpretations of their use of violence that the authors first begin to
let readers see bouncers as real people who play a key role in the leisure night-life
economy. The result is powerful – as with so many ‘dirty workers’ whose jobs gives them
largely unnoticed faces and unheard voices – the author’s sociological eye pole-axes the
reader into seeing what has been so obvious and present yet largely unnoticed. Among
the many things that are revealed is the fact that these dirty workers are much more
than their singular and collective bulk. They are articulate and keen observers of their
social world.
In the context of their work (Chapter 6), violence is calculated and required – it
makes sense. In the words of one experienced bouncer: ‘. . . I am going to fucking
punish you if you raise your hands’ (p. 150). And, with reference to the always contested
concept of ‘minimum force’: ‘I have never seen it, people have got a glass or a bottle
and they are intent on killing you. . . [T]he idea of minimum force. . . is nonsense’ (p.
160).
They work in a place where bouncing and the violence that is key to it, is not only
a manifestation of de-industrialization and transforming masculine identities. It is also
about two interrelated post-1970s developments: (1) a shift in economic development
from industrial to the post-industrial; and (2) a significant reorientation of urban
governance, involving a move away from the managerial functions of local service
provision, towards an entrepreneurial stance primarily focused upon the facilitation of
economic growth. The result is a nasty mix reminiscent of past eras when liminality
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