Book review: Managing modernity: Politics and the culture of control, Matt Matravers (ed.). London & New York: Routledge, 2005. 200 pp. £65.00 (hbk). ISBN 0—415—34805—6
| Author | Barry Vaughan |
| Date | 01 October 2007 |
| Published date | 01 October 2007 |
| DOI | 10.1177/14624745070090040402 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
ethnicity, citizenship/migration status and economic position. It doesn’t help that she
sets this against ‘global feminism’ but among antipoverty feminism, antiracism feminism
and the work of women of color advocates. Such a mapping creates insiders and
outsiders, those on the side of right and those on the side of wrong, and insecurity in
the rest of us who worry that we are not up on the latest groupings. Sisterhoods can be
as oppressive as patriarchies, and both have their own global politics.
It may be unfair to single out this book for a problem it did not create, and none of
these criticisms should take away from gauging this book’s contribution. It would be
nearly impossible to overstate the value of this collection for exposing us to the personal
and local ways that the global War on Drugs, a neoliberal version of capitalism, and
overtly punitive and implicitly racist immigration policies in the West bear down on
women trying to get on with their lives. This is a book that will reverberate personally,
professionally and politically.
Sarah Armstrong
University of Glasgow, UK
Managing modernity: Politics and the culture of control, Matt Matravers (ed.). London &
New York: Routledge, 2005. 200 pp. £65.00 (hbk). ISBN 0–415–34805–6.
When does a text become canonical and why? Perhaps the account derived from the
philosophy of science is still the best one we have. A discipline orientates itself around
a central paradigm that guides attempted resolutions of problems. Anomalies accumu-
late that threaten the explanatory value of this paradigm and the discipline is plunged
into crisis until a new heuristic emerges, triggering a paradigm shift. Therefore, a text
is revered if it persuasively points out the accumulation of anomalies or ushers in a new
paradigm that sets the discipline on a new orbit.
The culture of control (2001) (hereafter CoC) and its author, David Garland, seem to
have ushered in such a shift. CoC questions whether the paradigm of penal-welfarism,
concerned with ameliorating crime through benign individual intervention, has sunk
beneath the weight of anomalies that have been forced upon it. Garland also contends
that we are witnessing the rise of a crime complex, split between a pragmatic attitude
of prevention and an emotive one of retribution.
The essays in Matt Matravers’ edited collection, each scrutinizing an aspect of
Garland’s account, fall into three camps. The first question is whether the penal-welfare
complex has degenerated to the extent envisaged by Garland or whether it stagnated due
to the reasons adduced by Garland. The second broadly supports Garland’s narrative of
a new penal paradigm, while the third indicts it for failing to provide sufficient guidance.
Loader and Sparks argue for a historical sociology of crime policy that is attuned to
the struggles within an era rather than simply viewing crime policy as emerging from
a shift in structural forces, such as a shift to ‘late-modernity’. This approach would
return debates about crime control to the political sphere, especially to those within
and about liberalism. A better grasp of the sociological conditions of criminology would
result and thus a greater sense of what is and is not possible in terms of crime control.
Gelsthorpe questions the relative omission of women from CoC. Rather than seeing
the problems of penal-welfare as a crisis of modernism, Gelsthorpe sees them as
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