‘It’s what you have to do!’: Exploring the role of high-risk edgework and advanced marginality in a young man’s motivation for crime
| Author | Tea Torbenfeldt Bengtsson |
| Published date | 01 February 2013 |
| Date | 01 February 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1748895812447084 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
2012
Article
Criminology & Criminal Justice
13(1) 99 –115
‘It’s what you have to do!’:
© The Author(s) 2012
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Exploring the role of high-
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895812447084
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risk edgework and advanced
marginality in a young man’s
motivation for crime
Tea Torbenfeldt Bengtsson
SFI – The Danish National Centre for Social Research and University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract
By focusing on one young man’s self-presentations in a secure care unit for young offenders
in Denmark, this article explores how his contradictory and incoherent self-presentations can
be analysed as meaningful. Drawing on Stephen Lyng’s theory of high-risk edgework and Loïc
Wacquant’s theory of advanced marginalization, it is argued that this young man’s engagement
in youth crime cannot be fully understood by focusing only on the criminal experience itself.
Also, specific social and symbolic relations must be integrated into the analysis to understand his
engagement in crime. The article argues that although edgework theory is compelling, it needs
further development if it is to capture the full complexity of young people’s motivation for crime.
Keywords
Advanced marginality, crime, edgework, self-presentation, youth
Introduction
I met 16-year-old Bashaar while conducting field studies in a Danish secure care
institution1 for young offenders. Bashaar was under confinement in police custody for
street fighting. In this article I will explore Bashaar’s presentation of self (Goffman, 1990
[1959]) in the secure care setting, focusing on his understanding of reality and his
motivation for crime. Bashaar was a keen and very good boxer about to lose a promising
boxing career because he would not give up street fighting. I did not understand why
Corresponding author:
Tea Torbenfeldt Bengtsson, SFI, Herluf Trolles Gade 11, 1052 Copenhagen K, Denmark
Email: ttb@sfi.dk
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Criminology & Criminal Justice 13(1)
Bashaar did not just fight in the ring and not in the streets. After ending the field study, I
could not let go of Bashaar’s apparently illogical reasoning and this article looks into his
creation of meaning and thus seeks to understand his actions.
Earlier studies have focused on the seductions of crime (Katz, 1988), processes of
neutralization (Sykes and Matza, 1957) and the search for respect through discourse
(Sandberg, 2009) as well as crime as high-risk edgework (Lyng, 1993). Meeting and
interacting with the young people in secure care, I found the insights of these studies, and
in particular Stephen Lyng’s edgework theory on risk taking, highly relevant. The young
men’s presentations of their crimes reflected many of the elements found in edgework
theory focusing on excitement seeking and exploring personal limitations. When
‘hanging out’ in the unit, the young men talked eagerly about the excitement and action
involved in committing crimes. They discussed the dangers involved and the skills
needed. Their descriptions of their crimes fitted edgework theory by repeatedly stressing
their drive to seek the limits of their own capabilities in an ongoing quest for illicit
excitement. In contrast to the other young people, boxing gave Bashaar a clear, legal and
appealing alternative to crime. Nonetheless, he had no plans to give up street fighting.
Consequently, his self-presentation and situation provides an ideal case study to ground
the analysis of young men’s motivation for crime. At the same time it contains the
‘oscillations between disillusioned realism and fatalistic oneirism’ (Wacquant, 1998: 12),
showing his difficulties in constructing a meaningful presentation of the self and thus
uncovering central elements in his engagement in crime. As earlier studies have pointed
to, when describing their crimes, people often actively draw on both the discourse of
oppression and that of being a tough gangster: both discourses are context dependent
(Anderson, 1999; Sandberg, 2009; Topalli, 2005).
I discovered that Bashaar’s motivation for crime could not be understood separately
from the situation in which it took place, embedded in street subculture and friendships.
Furthermore, to focus solely on his motivation for crime as a quest for the edgework
experience meant leaving out significant experiences of isolation, marginalization and
stigmatization to which his edgework is profoundly linked. Loïc Wacquant (2008, 2009)
shows in his work on the increasing social insecurity in modern western societies a
development where crime, poverty and insecurity go hand-in-hand in creating a situation
of advanced marginality. He argues that to understand this situation of advanced
marginality, not only must the individual experience be included in the analysis, but also
the conditions facing the individual (Wacquant, 1998, 2008). By including both Bashaar’s
quest for edgework experiences and his general experience of advanced marginality, I
wish to demonstrate that his motivation for crime, and in particular street fighting, is not
as illogical or irrational as it first appeared.
Youth Crime as Edgework
Viewing young people’s crimes as edgework reveals the cultural sides of crime – the
individual experience of the edge which separates ‘limit’ and ‘transgression’, ‘boundary
making’ and ‘boundary breaking’, ‘control’ and ‘hedonism’, ‘rationality’ and
‘irrationality’ (Lyng, 1993, 2004; O’Mally and Mugford, 1994; Presdee, 2004: 277–278).
The concept of edgework was first introduced by Stephen Lyng (1990) in ‘Edgework: A
Bengtsson
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social psychological analysis of voluntary risk taking’ and later modified and readjusted
to integrate new theoretical and empirical findings (Lyng, 2005c). Overall, edgework
theory seeks to explain risk taking, such as extreme sports and high-risk occupations, in
contemporary western societies, aiming to answer the question: ‘Why would anyone risk
their lives when there are no material rewards for doing so?’ (Lyng, 2005a: 5).
The theory shows that the edgework experience in itself can provide sufficient
motivation for engaging in high-risk activities. The defining sensations of edgework
come from the risk-taker being forced to handle and face the demands of the ‘edge’, the
dangerous boundary between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, sanity
and insanity. Confronting the edge places the risk-taker on the border between control
and non-control, forcing him or her to rely fully on his or her pre-attained skills. Since it
is not possible to formulate a reflective response in the edgework situation, the risk-taker
is dependent on bodily experience and impulses. It is this confrontation with the edge
that risk-takers describe as self-actualizing, self-determining, authentically real and
creatively satisfying (Lyng, 1990, 2005a; Young, 2003).
Although crime was not a central theme in the original work on edgework, it has later
inspired studies associated with cultural criminology (Ferrell et al., 2001; Halsey and
Young, 2006; Hayward, 2002, 2007; Miller, 2005). Focusing on the phenomenology of
crime and the experience of crime, this body of research demonstrates the relevance of
the exciting, sensual and dynamic sides of crime. This research has shown how the
experience of crime cannot fully be understood through rational choice theory, and has
convincingly demonstrated that crime in itself does not necessarily constitute a reaction
to latent conditions or a means beyond itself. Rather, the criminal experience carries both
motivation and meaning (Ferrell et al., 2001; Katz, 1988; Lyng, 1993, 2004; Sandberg,
2009). In developing the concept of edgework to analyse the criminal experience, Lyng
emphasizes the importance of the disciplined body and an innate ‘survival skill’. With
references to Katz’s (1988) earlier work on the seductions of crime, Lyng (2004: 368,
emphases in original) writes:
Once the hardman succeeds in taking the situation close to the edge, the disciplined body
dissolves into a ‘becoming-body’ this is unpredictable and beyond control of the ego. In
accepting the inevitable inversion of the disciplined body into a ‘becoming-body’ that cannot
control chaos but rather is transfigured by chaos, these edgeworkers achieve transcendence.
Lyng shows how the criminal act transfigures the body and makes transcendence
possible, thus arguing that the very experience becomes the drive for committing a wide
range of crimes. Such aspects as ‘getting away with it’, ‘surviving it’ and ‘having the
skills’ add to the edgework experience of transcendence only obtained through bodily
control (Lyng, 2004). Thus, linking the experience of edgework crime to the individual’s
experience and creating a theory where the edgework experience is primarily dependent
on individual competence and skill.
Edgework theory does not however only seek to capture the individual experiences
‘but also an understanding of the relationship between this experience and broader social
structural conditions of modern American life’ (Lyng, 1993: 108). What underlies the
hunt for edgework experiences is the development of the structures of modern society
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Criminology & Criminal Justice 13(1)
through a rationalization of systems and human interaction. In short, by creating a sense
of alienation from systems and structures of society, this development has led to a loss of
meaning for the actors. To...
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