Book Review: Marc Schuilenburg, The Securitization of Society: Crime, Risk and Social Order
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480617693710 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 563
indicate respondents endeavoured to enact licit identities as either law-abiding workers in
Melbourne’s legalized system, or quiet citizens in Vancouver’s criminalized industry.
Further consideration is afforded to the potential implications of illegality and legality for
sex workers whose labour guards against or averts their citizenship.
Chapter 7 examines the professional frameworks utilized by respondents to manage
interaction with clients and co-workers in collective workspaces. Though much research
demonstrates collective working environments can enhance sex worker safety, Ham seeks
to address the often neglected question of how sex workers work collectively. In so doing,
two means of understanding the management of relationships in the workplace are identi-
fied. First, Ham offers a typology of three contrasting approaches, identifying how
respondents construct and experience their co-workers so as to manage their own labour
and understand the industry more generally. The ‘protective approach’ captures those who
view colleagues and others engaging in sex work as risks that require management, while
the ‘professionalism approach’ refers to those who acknowledge that other sex workers
can be of value, but who maintain a degree of caution, citing factors such as competition
and risk. By contrast, the ‘solidarity approach’ applies to individuals who conceptualize
co-workers as allies. Ham continues to identify a second framework to facilitate an under-
standing of the management of relationships in collective environments. This considers
sex workers’ active management and performance of ethnicity, nationality and race within
the workplace to optimize income and construct a desired workspace.
The book concludes in Chapter 8, which considers how the governance and regulation
of sex work and migration produce and shape professional identities for racialized,
migrant and immigrant sex workers. Ham explores how these identities are negotiated
through the grounded experiential knowledge shared among sex workers. A subsequent
discussion reifies the empirical, practical and theoretical contributions of the book, plac-
ing particular emphasis on the need for continued efforts to address the disjuncture
between the lived realities of sex work and its social stereotypes. Doing so highlights the
applicability of this book to a range of actors including policy-makers, practitioners and
academics. Indeed, the contributions of this book offer much to ongoing international
debates on the governance and regulation of those who trade sexual services.
Reference
McCall L (2005) The complexity of intersectionality. Signs 30(3): 1771–1800.
Marc Schuilenburg, The Securitization of Society: Crime, Risk and Social Order (trans. George Hall,
intro. David Garland), New York University Press: New York, 2015; 368 pp.: 9781479854219
Reviewed by: Phil Carney, University of Kent, UK
Marc Schuilenburg’s book, The Securitization of Society, in a lucid translation by George
Hall from Jeff Ferrell’s excellent Alternative Criminology Series, represents an impor-
tant intervention in recent academic attempts to pin down the slippery phenomenon of
security. Amid the discursive affects accompanying right-populist concerns about nation,
borders and now, of course, migration, we discover something perhaps more profound: a
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