Book Reviews : JAMES MESSERSCHMIDT, Crime as Structured Action: Gender, Race, Class, and Crime in the Making. London: Sage, 1997, 144 pp., £33.00 hardback, £15.00 paperback
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399800700415 |
| Author | Betsy Stanko |
| Published date | 01 December 1998 |
| Date | 01 December 1998 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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While there is a need to encourage sureties to think more like self-interested,
contracting individuals, and to encourage judges, lenders, and debtors to
think more like sureties, the implementation of both suggestions in fact
extends beyond mere law reform to a change in social attitudes. Of crucial
significance is the assumption of both judges and sureties that it is in the public
interest that people should be able to use the family home as security for
business loans. The research findings suggest that the position of sureties
cannot be effectively addressed without challenging this assumption. Ulti-
mately, the role of the law in this process, and in regulating or changing private
agendas and private inequalities in a fundamental way, is likely to be limited
(p. 281).
ALICE BELCHER
Department of Law, Dundee University, UK
JAMES MESSERSCHMIDT, Crime as Structured Action: Gender, Race, Class, and Crime
in the Making. London: Sage, 1997, 144 pp., £33.00 hardback, £15.00 paperback.
This book is a short collection of the author’s essays illustrating the use of the frame-
work of structured action theory in exploring crime. As an extension of his earlier
book Masculinities and Crime, Messerschmidt argues that only an appreciation of
the active and ongoing intersections of gender, race and class in time and space will
provide crucial ingredients for understanding crime and criminality. Following in
theoretical pathways of Giddens (1984), Connell (1995), West and Zimmerman
(1987) and West and Fenstermaker (1995), he demonstrates his approach to ’doing’
crime through four examples: lynching, hustling, girl gangs and corporate
manslaughter. I shall look at two of these in more detail later. The book is intended,
it seems to me, as an undergraduate text, aimed to stimulate students to ponder
criminal social action as lived, dynamic, located in history and in society based in
multiple hierarchies, resistances, and state, group and individual decision-making
strategies.
Messerschmidt begins the monograph with his brief overview of structured...
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