Book Review: Jennifer Wood and Clifford Shearing Imagining Security Cullompton, UK: Willan Publishing, 2007. 192 pp. ISBN 13: 978—1—84392—075—5 (pbk); ISBN 10: 1—84392—074—3 (hbk)

AuthorJonathan Simon
Published date01 November 2007
Date01 November 2007
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/1748895807084502
Subject MatterArticles
469-472 CRJ-084502.qxd 469-472 CRJ-084502.qxd 4/10/07 1:58 PM Page 469
B O O K R E V I E W
Criminology & Criminal Justice
© 2007 SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
and the British Society of Criminology.
www.sagepublications.com
ISSN 1748–8958; Vol: 7(4): 469–471
DOI: 10.1177/1748895807084502
Jennifer Wood and Clifford Shearing
Imagining Security
Cullompton, UK: Willan Publishing, 2007. 192 pp.
ISBN 13: 978–1–84392–075–5 (pbk); ISBN 10: 1–84392–074–3 (hbk)
Reviewed by Jonathan Simon, UC Berkeley, USA
Imagining Security by Jennifer Wood and Clifford Shearing is less a mono-
graph about a security policy than an introduction to a new grammar of
policy analysis drawn from the research vocabularies of Michel Foucault
and Bruno Latour, and deployed largely in the normative direction of John
Braithwaite’s theories of restorative justice and responsive regulation. This
grammar is then used upon a range of contemporary security fields, includ-
ing policing, transnational security, and security from government.
Both Wood, who has studied the neo-liberal refashioning of security policy
during the 1990s in Ontario, and Shearing, whose path breaking work (some
with Phillip Stenning) on private security and mass private property has been
widely influential, do research primarily on issues of policing and security. The
chapters devoted to policing are the strongest in the book, but the grammar
deployed by Wood and Shearing offers promising purchase on a wide range of
governance problems today and should be of real value to lawyers, policy pro-
fessionals, and political activists, as well as social scientists.
The introduction and Chapter 1 provide context and an overview of
Wood and Shearing’s policy grammar. Their analysis foregrounds ‘nodes’ or
(treated analogously) ‘networks’ through which governing gets done (and
increasingly how threats to security themselves are realized). Treating secur-
ity as ‘nodal’ (a term they take from political scientist, Janice Gross Stein
(2001)),...

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