Mark Horsley - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Books by Mark Horsley

Crime, Harm and Consumerism

Crime, Harm and Consumerism, 2020

This book offers a collection of cutting-edge essays on the relationship between crime, harm, and... more This book offers a collection of cutting-edge essays on the relationship between crime, harm, and consumer culture. Although consumer culture has been addressed across the social sciences, it has yet to be fully explored in criminology. The editors bring to this field an impressive list of authors with original ideas and fresh perspectives. The collection first introduces the reader to three sets of ideas which will be especially useful to students and researchers piecing together theoretical frameworks for their studies. New concepts such as pseudo-pacification, the materialist libertine, and the commodification of abstinence can be used as foundation stones for new explanatory criminological analyses in the twenty-first century. The collection then moves on to present case studies based on rigorous empirical work in the fields of consumption and debt, 'outlaw' gangs, illegal drug markets, gambling, the mentality that drives investment fraudsters, and the relationship betwe...

This book offers a critical analysis of consumer credit markets and the growth of outstanding deb... more This book offers a critical analysis of consumer credit markets and the growth of outstanding debt, presenting in-depth interview material to explore the phenomenon of mass indebtedness through the life trajectories of self-identified debtors struggling with the pressures of owing money.

A rich and original qualitative study of the close relationship between financial capitalism, consumer aspirations, social exclusion and the proliferation of personal indebtedness, The Dark Side of Prosperity examines questions of social identity, subjectivity and consumer motivation in close connection with the socio-cultural ideals of an ‘enjoyment society’, that binds the value of the lives of individuals to the endless acquisition and disposal of pecuniary resources and lifestyle symbols. Critically engaging with the work of Giddens, Beck and Bauman, this volume draws on the thought of contemporary philosophers including Žižek, Badiou and Rancière to consider the possibility that the expansion of outstanding consumer credit, despite its many consequences, may be integral to the construction of social identity in a radically indeterminate and increasingly divided society.

A ground-breaking work of critical social research this book will appeal to scholars of social theory, contemporary philosophy and political and economic sociology, as well as those with interests in consumer credit and cultures of indebtedness.

Papers by Mark Horsley

Thesis Eleven

In recent years, labour markets have been characterised by stagnant wages, reduced incomes and gr... more In recent years, labour markets have been characterised by stagnant wages, reduced incomes and growing insecurity supplemented by the ongoing proliferation of outstanding payment obligations at almost all levels of economy and society. We draw upon current debates in social and economic theory to explore the disconnect between the deterioration of late capitalism’s distributive measures and the relative vitality of consumer cultures, suggesting that the latter relies substantially on immaterial, credit-based payment means to bridge the gap between the fundamental fantasy of ‘more and better’ and the decline of material productivity denoted by base rate of profit. We then use this disconnect as a breach-point for an in-depth interdisciplinary discussion of the substantive and ideological function of credit.

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology, 2017

In the spirit of Jean Baudrillard's Forget Foucault this article offers a step-by-step critique o... more In the spirit of Jean Baudrillard's Forget Foucault this article offers a step-by-step critique of the 'moral panic' concept. It begins with a short review of Cohen's original thesis and its gradual evolution before addressing its remarkable popularity and ascent to the stature of a domain assumption. The rest of the article uses and extends the existing critique of moral panic theory before suggesting that the entire conceptual repertoire, rather than undergo another period of adaptation, should be ditched to make way for much-needed innovation.

In contrast with the rather violent and unstable period between the collapse of the Roman Empire ... more In contrast with the rather violent and unstable period between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of Plantagenet monarchy, the earliest phase of England’s market economy coincided with a remarkable attenuation of brutal interpersonal violence. While, for some, this diminution of aggression is indicative of a ‘civilizing process’, this paper sets out to advance our theorization of the shift from physically violent to pacified socioeconomic competition in England and Western Europe between the late fourteenth century and the mid-twentieth century. In this pursuit we draw upon the more critical theory of the ‘pseudo-pacification process’ to explain how physical violence was sublimated and harnessed to drive the nascent market economy, which established and reproduced an economically productive condition of pseudo-pacified ‘orderly disorder’.

The publication of Colin Sumner's obituary for the sociology of deviance captured the criminologi... more The publication of Colin Sumner's obituary for the sociology of deviance captured the criminological zeitgeist of the early twentieth century by drawing attention to a marked transformation on the theoretical side of the discipline. In a wide-ranging work Sumner pointed to the emergence of a new way of doing criminology, a dramatic change of emphasis that put an entirely different spin on conceptual explanations for criminality. Where the Chicago tradition offered a Durkheimian perspective that located criminality within the transgression of shared social norms, a new generation were less convinced by the idea of monolithic social ideals. In the context of nineteen-sixties counter-culturalism Sumner identified an increasingly forceful pluralist critique which placed much greater emphasis on the censorious nature of centralised power, hysterical social reactions to perceived deviance and the potential illegitimacy of normative prohibitions.

International Journal of Criminology and Sociological Theory, 2013

This paper offers an appraisal of the relationship between sociology and philosophy grounded in... more This paper offers an appraisal of the relationship between sociology and
philosophy grounded in a critique of the former discipline’s failure to contend with
the dominance of neoliberalism in the run up to the financial crisis. In the first instance, it considers the prevailing philosophical ethos after the end of the Cold War and what Francis Fukuyama (1992) called the ‘End of History’. It observes
the emergence of an increasingly unchallenged political monad around the conjoined principles of liberal democracy and neoliberal economics and its ascendance to the status of socio-historical universality despite becoming increasingly problematic. The second half of the essay then carries this political- philosophical analysis into an exploration of contemporary sociology and its approach to the intellectual critique of dominant ideas and structures. It proposes that an emergent strain of philosophical relativism has inadvertently moved us away from some of the critical responsibilities of the traditional intellectual and eroded our capacity to offer practical alternatives to overwhelmingly neoliberal governance. The article ends on the hopeful note that a slight change in tack might push us toward reclaiming responsibilities and revitalising the debate on social transformation.

Relativizing Universality

This dissertation discusses the neo-liberal capitalist hegemony that exists in the Anglo-American... more This dissertation discusses the neo-liberal capitalist hegemony that exists in the Anglo-American nations and its implications for national crime rates. It elaborates upon the tendency of neo-liberal nations to have dramatically higher crime rates than nations governed by other ideologies. It discusses the problems associated with the widespread adoption of values like competitive individualism, the rise of consumer culture and other factors like rising social inequality. These problems are backed up by case studies of the USA, Japan and the Scandinavian Nations. It concludes that although neo-liberalism may not lead directly to higher crime rates some of its effects are hardly conducive to a peaceful society.

Chapters by Mark Horsley

Without the remarkable explosion of the credit industry since the early 1990s it’s almost inconce... more Without the remarkable explosion of the credit industry since the early 1990s it’s almost inconceivable that late capitalism, in its neoliberal mode, could have maintained the vibrant and multifaceted consumer markets of the last few decades. Its capacity to create payment means by attaching contractual claims to prospective futures has allowed capitalism to transcend the decline of its material productivity, sustaining consumption against the upward concentration of wealth. In this chapter we consider both the source and the implications of that transcendence, tracing it from the rarefied confines of the financial industry into the lives of consumers to explore the implications of distributing payment means as a kind of ‘systemic luxury’ running counter to the material productivity of prevailing systems and processes.

The publication of Colin Sumner's (1994) The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary marked a critical... more The publication of Colin Sumner's (1994) The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary marked a critical transformation in the theorisation of crime and criminality. In a work that offered a narrative history of criminological theory from Durkheim's ( [1895) Sociological Method to ) The New Criminology, Sumner explored the rise and fall of early sociological explanations for criminality, the emergence of a new perspective and a radical transformation of the discipline during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The original 'sociology of deviance' -the book's initial object of study -emerged during the 1920s as an early attempt to offer a sociological theory of criminal causation. Its reliance on a normative perspective, however, left little room for the putative plurality of social norms in light of the counter-cultural ideals of the nineteensixties. In these circumstances Sumner goes on to identify an increasingly forceful pluralist critique that placed greater emphasis on the potential illegitimacy of normative prohibitions, the censorious nature of centralised power and hysterical social reactions to the perceived deviance of subordinate groups.

The concept of white-collar crime remains an area of intense debate within criminology. There is ... more The concept of white-collar crime remains an area of intense debate within criminology. There is little agreement over the range of malpractices a discriminating definition should cover, nor its relationship to other kinds of 'economic', 'occupational' or 'corporate' criminality. Nevertheless, definitions of white-collar crime generally boil down to a recognition of an offenders' elevated occupational status and the possibility of their exploiting power, trust, responsibility and respect for personal financial gain resulting from immediate monetary rewards or long-term professional advancement. White-collar crime, in other words, is a label generally applied to the crimes of businesspersons, managers, administrators and other professionals and which appear to be generated by the kinds of privileged access derived under certain occupational conditions. It is, for example, all but impossible to defraud consumers without, at the very least, being deemed to be in a position of relative trust, often generated by having some kind of specialist knowledge.

Conference Presentations by Mark Horsley

In criminological circles the concept of a ‘moral panic’ has become one of the most popular, freq... more In criminological circles the concept of a ‘moral panic’ has become one of the most popular, frequently referenced and, at least in terms of prevalence, ‘successful’ ideas employed within the ongoing analysis of crime and deviance. The assertion that sensationalist media reporting drives often-unfounded public fears about crime, which then feed into reactive, ill-considered legislation and punitive public policy that further excludes minimally deviant populations has arguably become something of a criminological truism. It seems to be a very accessible idea that is often picked up very quickly by undergraduate students, seems to have colonised public discourse and continually features very heavily within the academic literature. In this later case, for instance, Goode and Ben-Yehuda (2013) point to a significant expansion of publication volume since the turn of the millennium.

Unfortunately the use of moral panic theory comes laden with a set of problems, which crystallise around the assertion that this sort of interactionist analysis seems to have very little interest in the real world effects of crime or, for that matter in real world political, economic and cultural transformations (see, for instance, Jewkes, 2004; Thompson & Williams, 2014). The purpose of this explicitly theoretical paper is to push beyond such existing work to offer a two-headed critique of moral panic theory’s underlying precepts. In the first instance, moral panic relies on an overarching concept of punitive ‘conservative’ morality that bears little resemblance to the consolidation of post-political liberalism over the last half-century and the consequent decline of any sort of homogenous moral order in favour of ‘freedom of conscience’ and ‘free markets’. With this in place we will then move on to the idea of ‘panic’, which again shares little with contemporary social processes suffused by vague, ill-defined forms of ‘objectless anxiety’, cynicism, nihilism and disaffection.

In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel set out to develop a theory of subjectivity to shed light on... more In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel set out to develop a theory of subjectivity to shed light on the relationship between material reality – the physical stuff of everyday life, our fleshly bodies and their place in the world – and the thinking being capable of recognising its existence as such, the ‘geist’ or, in English, the ‘mind’, ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’. Finding the latter rather difficult to pin down, he eventually declared, “the spirit is a bone” by which he meant that the internal life of the mind is inseparable from our materially contingent being-in-the-world. In other words, the things that we think and do, the ideas and beliefs to which we subscribe and the actions to which we commit are contingent on the material and ideational circumstances of our collective life-world just as the quality and sustainability of our social environment depends on us.

In this explicitly theoretical paper I want to build on Hegel’s basic idea to critically explore growing interest in the ontology of the criminal subject. The paper will begin with a short analysis of cultural conditions around the increasingly divided nature of British society and the proliferation of inequalities which seem to breezily co-exist with a rampant and rapacious ‘enjoyment society’. In what follows, I will argue that contemporary social ideals, deeply enmeshed within the structures and ideologies of late capitalism, have condemned us to a distinct lack of symbolic prohibitions and dependable socio-economic structures. The resultant sense of radical social isolation, dislocation and imminent threat seems to have contributed to the accretion of criminal subjectivities by restructuring the ways that we think about our being in the world as we try desperately to shore up the ultimate sustaining fantasy of liberal society – the fiction of self-reliant individualism and autonomous subjectivity. In short it will suggest that we are liberalism’s damned subjects condemned to a form a radical agency that has eroded social relations and captured our souls.