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Book review: M Yar, Crime, Deviance and Doping: Fallen Sports Stars, Autobiography and the Management of Stigma

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 February 2015
Date01 February 2015
AuthorRuth Penfold-Mounce
DOI10.1177/1362480614546249
Subject MatterBook reviews
/tmp/tmp-17KAK9Qz6Ffbi2/input Book reviews
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precludes its opposite, those crucial moments when hegemonic rule enters into crisis and
there is no widespread acceptance of the ideas of the ruling bloc. Most of the evidence
from Sentas’s interviews with those subject to this new ‘consensual/coercive’ policing
suggests they did not share the police version of common sense, which means that, in my
understanding of Gramsci, the argument that this new policing regime is hegemonic has
not been secured. Given her narrow focus and chosen methodology, it is difficult to see
how one could make claims about a concept like hegemony which embraces the social
order as a whole and thus requires analysis of the whole conjuncture (‘for though hegem-
ony is ethical-political, it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the deci-
sive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity’,
Gramsci, 1971, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 161). In other words, legal and
policy analysis, interviews with police and the policed and participant observation of
community legal education and police-community forums, is not a sufficient basis for
discussing hegemony.
There can be few more important topics for criminologists than the contemporary
‘war on terror’. This book offers a detailed look at the situation in a particular country
since 9/11. As such, it contributes to a growing body of scholarship on terrorism.
Unfortunately, it has ambitions to do more than this: to change the terms of the debate
and contribute more broadly to contemporary social analysis. This, for me, is less suc-
cessful. Moreover, it gets in the way of the empirical detail in two related ways: in failing
to specify how the new racialized policing of terror is fundamentally different from what
I once called ‘the racism of criminalization’, how her use of different terminology makes
a difference as Stan Cohen used to say; and in deploying theoretical concepts inappropri-
ately, as I...

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