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Radio 4 programme on surveillance

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Who's Looking At You?, Archive on 4 - BBC Radio 4

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Novelist Nick Harkaway says we need to talk about surveillance before it is too late.

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Sociology Factsheet

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Functionalism is a system of thinking based on the ideas of Emile Durkheim that looks at society from a large scale perspective. It examines the necessary structures that make up a society and how each part helps to keep the society stable. According to functionalism, society is heading toward an equilibrium. I know it sounds a bit strange that a society can be at equilibrium, but consider the changes many businesses have had to make in response to companies like Amazon. Local businesses must adapt to find a new way to cater to customers in order to restore the balance. In the theory of functionalism, society is made from a bunch of connected structures. One structure is institutions, which are structures that meet the needs of the society, like education systems, financial institutions, businesses and marriage, laws, mass media, nongovernmental organizations, medicine, religion, the military, police forces, and lots of others, too. Another structure is what Durkheim called social facts. Social facts are ways of thinking and acting formed by the society that existed before any one individual and will still exist after any individual is dead. They are unique objects that cannot be influenced by an individual. They have a coercive effect over the individual that is usually only noticed when we resist against them. So for example, one social fact is the law. It is always there, but we don't notice it until we try and break it or act against it. Some other examples are moral regulations, religious faiths, and social currents like suicide or birth rate. You might wonder how suicide can be a social fact. Well, one person committing suicide has no effect on the presence of suicide in the society . Social facts are a facet of the society itself and, according to Durkheim, are a necessary structure. But society is more than just the sum of its parts. It is dependent on the structures that create it, just like a cell is dependent on all the little parts that make it up. Every part of the cell has a specific vital function that depends on other parts of the cell. Without everything working together smoothly, the cell would die. The same is true of a society. Every structure has a function that meets a need of the society, and all the structures work together to maintain the social equilibrium. So for example, you have schools, which educate students so they can find good jobs and support the community. And businesses provide specialized services. And laws maintain social order. These recognized and intended consequences of institutions are known as manifest functions. But sometimes the institutions have unintended consequences. Schools allow the students and professors to make social connections, and they expose the students to new activities through extracurriculars. Businesses connect people across societies. These unrecognized and unintended consequences are called latent functions and are often indirect effects of the institution. Now, Durkheim's main question was, what holds a society together? How can it remain relatively stable even as traditions disappear and customs change? He thought that small societies were held together by their similarities, and the individual was self-sufficient. But that only works for small societies, and we all know societies change and grow large. The small society would eventually evolve into a large society where the individual was interdependent on others. But what causes the evolution of society to occur? The most basic factor is population growth within a limited space. Suddenly there isn't enough land for everyone to own their own farm and feed themselves. So just a few farmers grow enough food for the entire community. But now the farmers don't have enough time for other necessities like making clothes or teaching their kids. The people who no longer have to grow food now take on different roles like tailoring or education. And everyone becomes dependent on one another for their continued well being. People have become specialized, which forces mutual interdependence. This interdependence helps to ensure that the community won't fall apart. Now that people depend on each other for the production of goods and services there's a need for a method of distribution and a way to control and coordinate that production and distribution. In functionalism, a change to either production, distribution or coordination will force the others to adapt in order to maintain a stable state society. Social change is annoying and upsets the equilibrium and threatens the mutual interdependence of the people within that society. The institutions and structures of the society adapt only just enough to compensate for a change and maintain the stability of mutual interdependence. Phew. All right, that just about covers it. While functionalism is a nice way to look at society with its equilibrium of institutions all filling the needs of the society they create, there are some serious problems here. Functionalism focuses completely on the institution with little regard for the importance of the individual. The individual is acknowledged, but nothing they do really affects the structures of society. Functionalism is also largely unable to explain social change and conflict. We know it happens, but functionalism is so focused on maintaining the equilibrium of the society that little significant change is modeled and no conflict can occur. The structures of a society adapt only just enough to find stability again. Right, so, while there's more to understanding a society than just looking at the stable state of its parts, functionalism is helpful in understanding the workings of society by examining the functions of its integral structures.

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Functionalism (video) | Social structures | Khan Academy

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Functionalism is a system of thinking based on the ideas of Emile Durkheim that looks at society from a large scale perspective. It examines the necessary structures that make up a society and how each part helps to keep the society stable. According to functionalism, society is heading toward an equilibrium.

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Analysis of right realist policies

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In 1969, Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist from Stanford University, ran an interesting field study. He abandoned two cars in two very different places: one in a mostly poor, crime-ridden section of New York City, and the other in a fairly affluent neighborhood of Palo Alto, Calif. Both cars were left without license plates and parked with their hoods up.

After just 10 minutes, passersby in New York City began vandalizing the car. First they stripped it for parts. Then the random destruction began. Windows were smashed. The car was destroyed. But in Palo Alto, the other car remained untouched for more than a week.

Finally, Zimbardo did something unusual: He took a sledgehammer and gave the California car a smash. After that, passersby quickly ripped it apart, just as they'd done in New York.

This field study was a simple demonstration of how something that is clearly neglected can quickly become a target for vandals. But it eventually morphed into something far more than that. It became the basis for one of the most influential theories of crime and policing in America: "broken windows."

Thirteen years after the Zimbardo study, criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson wrote an article for The Atlantic. They were fascinated by what had happened to Zimbardo's abandoned cars and thought the findings could be applied on a larger scale, to entire communities.

"The idea [is] that once disorder begins, it doesn't matter what the neighborhood is, things can begin to get out of control," Kelling tells Hidden Brain.

In the article, Kelling and Wilson suggested that a broken window or other visible signs of disorder or decay - think loitering, graffiti, prostitution or drug use - can send the signal that a neighborhood is uncared for. So, they thought, if police departments addressed those problems, maybe the bigger crimes wouldn't happen.

"It's to the point now where I wonder if we should back away from the metaphor of broken windows. We didn't know how powerful it was going to be. It simplified, it was easy to communicate, a lot of people got it as a result of the metaphor. It was attractive for a long time. But as you know, metaphors can wear out and become stale."

"Once you begin to deal with the small problems in neighborhoods, you begin to empower those neighborhoods," says Kelling. "People claim their public spaces, and the store owners extend their concerns to what happened on the streets. Communities get strengthened once order is restored or maintained, and it is that dynamic that helps to prevent crime."

Kelling and Wilson proposed that police departments change their focus. Instead of channeling most resources into solving major crimes, they should instead try to clean up the streets and maintain order - such as keeping people from smoking pot in public and cracking down on subway fare beaters.

The argument came at an opportune time, says Columbia University law professor Bernard Harcourt.

"This was a period of high crime, and high incarceration, and it seemed there was no way out of that dynamic. It seemed as if there was no way out of just filling prisons to address the crime problem."

An Idea Moves From The Ivory Tower To The Streets

As policymakers were scrambling for answers, a new mayor in New York City came to power offering a solution.

Rudy Giuliani won election in 1993, promising to reduce crime and clean up the streets. Very quickly, he adopted broken windows as his mantra.

It was one of those rare ideas that appealed to both sides of the aisle.

Conservatives liked the policy because it meant restoring order. Liberals liked it, Harcourt says, because it seemed like an enlightened way to prevent crime: "It seemed like a magical solution. It allowed everybody to find a way in their own mind to get rid of the panhandler, the guy sleeping on the street, the prostitute, the drugs, the litter, and it allowed liberals to do that while still feeling self-righteous and good about themselves."

Giuliani and his new police commissioner, William Bratton, focused first on cleaning up the subway system, where 250,000 people a day weren't paying their fare. They sent hundreds of police officers into the subways to crack downon turnstile jumpers and vandals.

Very quickly, they found confirmation for their theory. Going after petty crime led the police to violent criminals, says Kelling: "Not all fare beaters were criminals, but a lot of criminals were fare beaters. It turns out serious criminals are pretty busy. They commit minor offenses as well as major offenses."

The policy was quickly scaled up from the subway to the entire city of New York.

Police ramped up misdemeanor arrests for things like smoking marijuana in public, spraying graffiti and selling loose cigarettes. And almost instantly, they were able to trumpet their success. Crime was falling. The murder rate plummeted. It seemed like a miracle.

The media loved the story, and Giuliani cruised to re-election in 1997.

George Kelling and a colleague did follow-up research on broken windows policing and found what they believed was clear evidence of its success. In neighborhoods where there was a sharp increase in misdemeanor arrests - suggesting broken windows policing was in force - there was also a sharp decline in crime.

By 2001, broken windows had become one of Giuliani's greatest accomplishments. In his farewell address, he emphasized the beautiful and simple idea behind the success.

"The broken windows theory replaced the idea that we were too busy to pay attention to street-level prostitution, too busy to pay attention to panhandling, too busy to pay attention to graffiti," he said. "Well, you can't be too busy to pay attention to those things, because those are the things that underlie the problems of crime that you have in your society."

Questions Begin To Emerge About Broken Windows

Right from the start, there were signs something was wrong with the beautiful narrative.

"Crime was starting to go down in New York prior to the Giuliani election and prior to the implementation of broken windows policing," says Harcourt, the Columbia law professor. "And of course what we witnessed from that period, basically from about 1991, was that the crime in the country starts going down, and it's a remarkable drop in violent crime in this country. Now, what's so remarkable about it is how widespread it was."

Harcourt points out that crime dropped not only in New York, but in many other cities where nothing like broken windows policing was in place. In fact, crime even fell in parts of the country where police departments were mired in corruption scandals and largely viewed as dysfunctional, such as Los Angeles.

"Los Angeles is really interesting because Los Angeles was wracked with terrible policing problems during the whole time, and crime drops as much in Los Angeles as it does in New York," says Harcourt.

There were lots of theories to explain the nationwide decline in crime. Some said it was the growing economy or the end of the crack cocaine epidemic. Some criminologists credited harsher sentencing guidelines.

In 2006, Harcourt found the evidence supporting the broken windows theory might be flawed. He reviewed the study Kelling had conducted in 2001, and found the areas that saw the largest number of misdemeanor arrests also had the biggest drops in violent crime.

Harcourt says the earlier study failed to consider what's called a "reversion to the mean."

"It's something that a lot of investment bankers and investors know about because it's well-known and in the stock market," says Harcourt. "Basically, the idea is if something goes up a lot, it tends to go down a lot."

A graph in Kelling's 2001 paper is revealing. It shows the crime rate falling dramatically in the early 1990s. But this small view gives us a selective picture. Right before this decline came a spike in crime. And if you go further back, you see a series of spikes and declines. And each time, the bigger a spike, the bigger the decline that follows, as crime reverts to the mean.

Kelling acknowledges that broken windows may not have had a dramatic effect on crime. But he thinks it still has value.

"Even if broken windows did not have a substantial impact on crime, order is an end in itself in a cosmopolitan, diverse world," he says. "Strangers have to feel comfortable moving through communities for those communities to thrive. Order is an end in itself, and it doesn't need the justification of serious crime."

Order might be an end in itself, but it's worth noting that this was not the premise on which the broken windows theory was sold. It was advertised as an innovative way to control violent crime, not just a way to get panhandlers and prostitutes off the streets.

'Broken Windows' Morphs Into 'Stop And Frisk'

Harcourt says there was another big problem with broken windows.

"We immediately saw a sharp increase in complaints of police misconduct. Starting in 1993, what you're going to see is a tremendous amount of disorder that erupts as a result of broken windows policing, with complaints skyrocketing, with settlements of police misconduct cases skyrocketing, and of course with incidents, brutal incidents, all of a sudden happening at a faster and faster clip."

The problem intensified with a new practice that grew out of broken windows. It was called "stop and frisk," and was embraced in New York City after Mayor Michael Bloomberg won election in 2001.

If broken windows meant arresting people for misdemeanors in hopes of preventing more serious crimes, "stop and frisk" said, why even wait for the misdemeanor? Why not go ahead and stop, question and search anyone who looked suspicious?

There were high-profile cases where misdemeanor arrests or stopping and questioning did lead to information that helped solve much more serious crimes, even homicides. But there were many more cases where police stops turned up nothing. In 2008, police made nearly 250,000 stops in New York for what they called furtive movements. Only one-fifteenth of 1 percent of those turned up a gun.

Even more problematic, in order to be able to go after disorder, you have to be able to define it. Is it a trash bag covering a broken window? Teenagers on a street corner playing music too loudly?

In Chicago, the researchers Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush analyzed what makes people perceive social disorder. They found that if two neighborhoods had exactly the same amount of graffiti and litter and loitering, people saw more disorder, more broken windows, in neighborhoods with more African-Americans.

George Kelling is not an advocate of stop and frisk. In fact, all the way back in 1982, he foresaw the possibility that giving police wide discretion could lead to abuse. In his article, he and James Q. Wilson write: "How do we ensure ... that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry? We can offer no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question."

In August of 2013, a federal district court found that New York City's stop and frisk policy was unconstitutional because of the way it singled out young black and Hispanic men. Later that year, New York elected its first liberal mayor in 20 years. Bill DeBlasio celebrated the end of stop and frisk. But he did not do away with broken windows. In fact, he re-appointed Rudy Giuliani's police commissioner, Bill Bratton.

And just seven months after taking over again as the head of the New York Police Department, Bratton's broken windows policy came under fresh scrutiny. The reason: the death of Eric Garner.

In July 2014, a bystander caught on cellphone video the deadly clash between New York City police officers and Garner, an African-American. After a verbal confrontation, officers tackled Garner, while restraining him with a chokehold, a practice that is banned in New York City.

Garner died not long after he was brought down to the ground. His death sparked massive protests, and his name is now synonymous with the distrust between police and African-American communities.

For George Kelling, this was not the end that he had hoped for. As a researcher, he's one of the few whose ideas have left the academy and spread like wildfire.

But once politicians and the media fell in love with his idea, they took it to places that he never intended and could not control.

"When, during the 1990s, I would occasionally read in a newspaper something like a new chief comes in and says, 'I'm going to implement broken windows tomorrow,' I would listen to that with dismay because [it's] a highly discretionary activity by police that needs extensive training, formal guidelines, constant monitoring and oversight. So do I worry about the implementation about broken windows? A whole lot ... because it can be done very badly."

In fact, Kelling says, it might be time to move away from the idea.

"It's to the point now where I wonder if we should back away from the metaphor of broken windows. We didn't know how powerful it was going to be. It simplified, it was easy to communicate, a lot of people got it as a result of the metaphor. It was attractive for a long time. But as you know, metaphors can wear out and become stale."

These days, the consensus among social scientists is that broken windows likely did have modest effects on crime. But few believe it caused the 60 or 70 percent decline in violent crime for which it was once credited.

And yet despite all the evidence, the idea continues to be popular.

Bernard Harcourt says there is a reason for that:

"It's a simple story that people can latch onto and that is a lot more pleasant to live with than the complexities of life. The fact is that crime dropped in America dramatically from the 1990s, and that there aren't really good, clean nationwide explanations for it."

The story of broken windows is a story of our fascination with easy fixes and seductive theories. Once an idea like that takes hold, it's nearly impossible to get the genie back in the bottle.
The Hidden Brain Podcast is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Maggie Penman, Jennifer Schmidt and Renee Klahr. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain, and listen for Hidden Brain stories each week on your local public radio station.

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How A Theory Of Crime And Policing Was Born, And Went Terribly Wrong

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subscribe to Short Wave podcast In 1969, Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist from Stanford University, ran an interesting field study. He abandoned two cars in two very different places: one in a mostly poor, crime-ridden section of New York City, and the other in a fairly affluent neighborhood of Palo Alto, Calif.

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Topic sheet 2 Interactionism and labelling theory 

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Topic sheet 2 Interactionism and labelling theory 

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The world's most advanced surveillance state

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Will our governments soon know everything about us? In China, facial recognition is driving the government's social credit system to rate the trustworthiness of its 1.4 billion citizens.

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Extended reading

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Topic sheet 6: Ethnicity, Crime & Justice

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Topic sheet 6: Ethnicity, Crime & Justice

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Topic Sheet 8: Globalisation, Green and State Crime

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Topic Sheet 8: Globalisation, Green and State Crime

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The world's most advanced surveillance state

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Will our governments soon know everything about us? In China, facial recognition is driving the government's social credit system to rate the trustworthiness of its 1.4 billion citizens.

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Flip Pack 5 Control, Punishment & Victims (word)

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Flip Pack 5 Control, Punishment & Victims (word)

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Extended reading

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Liar, liar: Four genuine fake news headlines which were shared on Facebook this year.

'Post-truth' could be 'one of the defining words of our time', says Oxford Dictionaries. The announcement comes as Facebook continues defending itself from criticism over fake news stories.

Last year Oxford Dictionaries declared that the word which best described 'the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015' was in fact an emoji - specifically the 'face with tears of joy emoji'.

But 2016 has been a very different year. After a divisive referendum in Britain and an explosive election in America, this year's top word is 'post-truth'. According to Oxford, its usage rose by 2000% as people tried to understand the new political landscape. The trend has been fuelled by 'social media as a news source' and a 'growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment.'

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has spent all week fighting off criticisms over this very subject. Since Donald Trump's victory, his shocked opponents have been searching for answers. How could a man who so frequently lies be elected president?

One possible explanation? Fake news on Facebook.

Almost half of American adults get their news from the site. The problem with this is that its algorithm promotes the stories with the most 'engagement' without checking if they are true. During the election, hundreds of fake news sites exploited this by writing outlandish stories about the candidates. Buzzfeed found that 38% of stories shared on three popular right-wing Facebook groups were fake, plus 19% of stories on three left-wing groups.

Our brains are wired to believe stories which confirm our own opinions - and so thousands shared stories about Pope Francis endorsing Trump (which never happened), or Trump calling Republicans the 'dumbest group of voters' in 1998 (which he did not do).

The result of all this, say some, is that voters do not just disagree about politics any more - they disagree on truth itself.

Welcome to the 'post-truth' world.

Mark Zuckerberg says it is 'a pretty crazy idea' to say that Facebook influenced the election. But 'dozens' of his employees have anonymously admitted that they are concerned. Meanwhile, Google has announced that it will try to curb the profit that can be earned from fake news.

Pants on fire

This can't go on, say some. Facebook must stop fake news stories from spreading so quickly. The rest of us must try to heal society's divisions and break out of our own echo chambers. Facts are the lifeblood of democracy. But in the post-truth age, all that matters is what you feel to be the truth. That will not end well.

Calm down, say others. The losers of the election are hysterically declaring a 'post-truth' age because they cannot possibly understand how anyone could disagree with them. To dismiss half the population as uninformed, emotional conspiracy theorists with no grip on reality is extremely patronising - and it does nothing to 'heal divisions'.

Activities

1. The shortlist for word of the year comprised Adulting, Alt-right, Brexiteer, Chatbot, Coulrophobia, Glass cliff, Hygge, Latinx, Post-truth and Woke. As a class, look up the definitions and then vote on which you think best represents 2016.

2. Write a satirical fake news story about the US election.

Word watch

Referendum

In June, 52% of British voters chose to leave the EU. The Remain campaign accused the Leave side of misleading voters, not least by promising to spend £350 million a week extra on the NHS.

Election

Last week, the Republican Donald Trump was elected president with 290 electoral college votes (in the American system, candidates need 270 of these to win).

Frequently lies

The fact-checking website Politifact rates 70% of Trump's statements as mostly false, false, or 'pants on fire' - a label given to the most outrageous lies. Hillary Clinton received similar ratings 31% of the time.

Half

According to Pew Research Center in May 2016, 44% got their news from Facebook. In total, 62% get news on social media.

38%

To reach this figure Buzzfeed analysed and fact-checked the posts from three 'hyperpartisan' groups from each end of the political spectrum over the course of seven weekdays in September.

Wired

Psychologists call this 'self-confirmation bias' - the tendency to consume stories that fit with our idea of the world, and dismiss anything that challenges it.

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Facebook's fake news: 'post-truth' is the word

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'Post-truth' could be 'one of the defining words of our time', says Oxford Dictionaries. The announcement comes as Facebook continues defending itself from criticism over fake news stories. Last year Oxford Dictionaries declared that the word which best described 'the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015' was in fact an emoji - specifically the 'face with tears of joy emoji'.

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Radio 4 programme on surveillance

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Who's Looking At You?, Archive on 4 - BBC Radio 4

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Novelist Nick Harkaway says we need to talk about surveillance before it is too late.

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Flip Pack 5 Control, Punishment & Victims

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Flip Pack 5 Control, Punishment & Victims

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Flip Pack 5 Control, Punishment & Victims

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Sociology factsheet

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Extended reading

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Globally, we are currently experiencing tremendous social and political turbulence. At the institutional level, liberal democracy faces the threat of rising authoritarianism and far-right extremism. At the local level, we seem to be living in an ever-increasing age of anxiety, engendered by precarious economic conditions and the gradual erosion of shared social norms. How might we navigate these difficult and disorienting times?

Emile Durkheim, one of the pioneers of the discipline of sociology, died 101 years ago this month. Although few outside of social science departments know his name, his intellectual legacy has been integral to shaping modern thought about society. His work may provide us with some assistance in diagnosing the perennial problems associated with modernity.

Whenever commentators argue that a social problem is "structural" in nature, they are invoking Durkheim's ideas. It was Durkheim who introduced the idea that society is composed not simply of a collection of individuals, but also social and cultural structures that impose themselves upon, and even shape, individual action and thought. In his book The Rules of the Sociological Method he called these "social facts."

A famous example of a social fact is found in Durkheim's study, . In this book, Durkheim argues that the suicide rate of a country is not random, but rather reflects the degree of social cohesion within that society. He famously compares the suicide rate in Protestant and Catholic countries, concluding that the suicide rate in Protestant countries is higher because Protestantism encourages rugged individualism, while Catholicism fosters a form of collectivism.

What was so innovative about this theory is that it challenged long-standing assumptions about individual pathologies, which viewed these as mere byproducts of individual psychology. Adapting this theory to the contemporary era, we can say, according to Durkheim, the rate of suicide or mental illness in modern societies cannot be explained by merely appealing to individual psychology, but must also take into account macro conditions such as a society's culture and institutions.

In other words, if more and more people feel disconnected and alienated from each other, this reveals something crucial about the nature of society.

The shift from premodern to modern

Born in France in 1858, the son of a rabbi, Durkheim grew up amid profound social change. The Industrial Revolution had drastically altered the social order and the Enlightenment had by this time thrown into doubt many once-taken-for-granted assumptions about human nature and religious (specifically Judeo-Christian) doctrine.

Durkheim foresaw that with the shift from premodern to modern society came, on the one hand, incredible emancipation of individual autonomy and productivity; while on the other, a radical erosion of social ties and rootedness.

An heir of the Enlightenment, Durkheim championed the liberation of individuals from religious dogmas, but he also feared that with their release from tradition individuals would fall into a state of anomie - a condition that is best thought of as "normlessness" - which he believed to be a core pathology of modern life.

Nubis Digital Library, CC BY

For this reason, he spent his entire career trying to identify the bases of social solidarity in modernity; he was obsessed with reconciling the need for individual freedom and the need for community in liberal democracies.

In his mature years, Durkheim found what he believed to be a solution to this intractable problem: religion. But not "religion" as understood in the conventional sense. True to his sociological convictions, Durkheim came to understand religion as another social fact, that is, as a byproduct of social life. In his classic The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he defined "religion" in the following way:

"A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."

The sacred and the quest for solidarity

For Durkheim, religion is endemic to social life, because it is a necessary feature of all moral communities. The key term here is sacred. By sacred Durkheim meant something like, unquestionable, taken-for-granted, and binding, or emitting a special aura. Wherever you find the sacred, thought Durkheim, there you have religion.

There is a sense in which this way of thinking has become entirely commonplace. When people describe, say, European soccer fans as religious in their devotion to their home team, they are drawing on a Durkheimian conception of religion. They are signaling the fact that fans of this nature are intensely devoted to their teams - so devoted, we might say, that the team itself, along with its associated symbols, are considered sacred.

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We can think of plenty of other contemporary examples: one's relationship with one's child or life partner may be sacred, some artists view art itself - or at least the creation of it - as sacred, and environmentalists often champion the sacrality of the natural world.

The sacred is a necessary feature of social life because it is what enables individuals to bond with one another. Through devotion to a particular sacred form, we become tied to one another in a deep and meaningful way.

This is not to say that the sacred is always a good thing. We find the sacred among hate groups, terrorist factions and revanchist political movements. Nationalism in its many guises always entails a particular conception of the sacred, be it ethnic or civic.

But, at the same time, the sacred lies at the heart of all progressive movements. Just think of the civil rights, feminist and gay liberation movements, all of which sacralized the liberal ideals of human rights and moral equality. Social progress is impossible without a shared conception of the sacred.

Durkheim's profound insight was that despite the negative risks associated with the sacred, humans cannot live without it. He asserted that a lack of social solidarity within society would not only lead individuals to experience anomie and alienation, but might also encourage them to engage in extremist politics. Why? Because extremist politics would satiate their desperate desire to belong.

Thus we can sum up the great dilemma of liberal modernity in the following way: how do we construct a shared conception of the sacred that will bind us together for the common good, without falling prey to the potential for violence and exclusion inherent to the sacred itself?

This question which preoccupied Durkheim throughout his entire life - remains as urgent today as ever before.

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Pioneering sociologist foresaw our current chaos 100 years ago

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Globally, we are currently experiencing tremendous social and political turbulence. At the institutional level, liberal democracy faces the threat of rising authoritarianism and far-right extremism. At the local level, we seem to be living in an ever-increasing age of anxiety, engendered by precarious economic conditions and the gradual erosion of shared social norms. How might we navigate these difficult and disorienting times?

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Extended reading

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When the political right confront the left in debate, the arguments of the former usually boil down to a simple underlying idea: that the left's "grand projects" of social change are incompatible with human nature. Those on the left, in this view, do not understand - or cannot bring themselves to accept - the grim reality in relation to the fundamental determinants of human behaviour. Human beings are essentially selfish, greedy, competitive, individualistic and generally unpleasant. This nature, furthermore, is fixed and immutable.

Rather conveniently, we happen to live in the kind of social order that is most in tune with our natural inclinations - a capitalist free market economy. In fact, for conservatives, capitalism is not really a discrete "system" at all; it is simply the natural and spontaneous state of things.

Almost all political ideologies, in fact, are based on a specific understanding of the nature of humanity, whether this is explicitly formulated or simply implied. The plurality of modern political ideologies implies a plurality of different conceptions of human nature - which implies, in turn, that the conservative understanding of human nature is contested. This is something that many conservatives have difficulty in accepting.

It is simply self-evident for most conservatives that human nature is unquestionably the way that they say it is (this is a defining feature of conservative thought in general, bound up with its broadly positivist assumption that one can understand the world through simple observation and application of "common sense") - and this tends to dictate that their conception of human nature is articulated at the level of mere assertion. Human nature just is egoistic, selfish and so on. Such an approach obscures the historical specificity of their view of human nature.

The modern right's understanding of human nature (and thus the broader political doctrine founded on this conception) first emerged with the birth of liberalism which was itself bound up with the emergence of capitalism. In fact modern conservatism is really a form of liberalism. The formation of the Conservative party in the 1830s represented an alliance of the rump of the old Tory party - previously dedicated to the defence of broadly feudal traditions and institutions - with a faction of the rising bourgeoisie dedicated to free trade and capitalist values. This marked the point at which conservatism, which used to be rather sniffy about nouveau riche bourgeois upstarts, reconciled itself to capitalism. Indeed the intimate connection between modern conservatism and liberalism is revealed in the political affiliation of Edmund Burke. Widely regarded as the "father of modern conservatism", Burke was in fact a Whig rather than a Tory.

Liberalism, which first emerged in the 17th century, has at its core a distinctive conception of human nature. The most important point about humans for liberals is the fact that they are individuals. It involves "seeing the individual as primary, as more 'real' or fundamental than human society and its institutions and structures" and "involves attaching a higher moral value to the individual than to society" ( Arblaster). Furthermore, this conception of human nature "tends ... to impute a high degree of completeness and self-sufficiency to the single human being, with the implication that separateness ... is the fundamental, metaphysical human condition".

As a fundamentally "complete" individual, the liberal human has pre-given and fixed, rather than socially constructed needs and preferences. More often than not, the liberal individual is also a radical egoist who enters into interaction with other individuals simply in order to satisfy pre-formed preferences.

The relationship between this conception of human nature and capitalism is obvious. The atomised liberal individual reflects the atomised conditions of bourgeois society in which social ties of kinship and fealty have been dissolved. It is worth stressing that this was a new understanding of human nature. In pre-capitalist philosophy wholeness or completeness usually belonged to the community rather than to the individual.

Rather than self-sufficient individuals, humans were seen to be embedded in communal relations that almost wholly defined them. The view of human nature that underpins the politics of the modern-day right, then, arose at a particular historical juncture. It is not some ideologically "neutral" description.

So what, if anything, is human nature? Marx provides a much richer account. He is often said to have argued that there is no such thing as human nature. This is not true. Though he did think that human behaviour was deeply informed by social environment, this is not to say that human nature does not exist. In fact it is our capacity to adapt and transform in terms of social practices and behaviours that makes us distinctive as a species and in which our specifically human nature is to be located.

For Marx, we are essentially creative and producing beings. It is not just that we produce for our means of survival, it is also that we engage in creative and productive activity over and above what is strictly necessary for survival and find fulfilment in this activity. This activity is inherently social - most of what we produce is produced collectively in some sense or another. In opposition to the individualist basis of liberal thought, then, we are fundamentally social creatures.

Indeed, for Marx, human consciousness and thus our very notion of individual identity is collectively generated. We become consciously aware of ourselves as a discrete entity only through language - and language is inherently inter-subjective; it is a social practice. What we think - including what we think about ourselves - is governed by what we do and what we do is always done socially and collectively. It is for this reason that Marx refers to our "species-being" - what we are can only be understood properly in social terms because what we are is a property and function of the human species as a whole.

Marx, then, has a fairly expansive view of human nature - it is in our nature to be creatively adaptable and for our understanding of what is normal in terms of behaviour to be shaped by the social relations around us. This is not to say that any social system is as preferable as any other. We are best able to flourish in conditions that allow us to express our sociability and creativity.

As Terry Eagleton argues, Marx's notion of "species-being" implies an ethics of self-realisation or flourishing through social interaction. Eagleton argues that Marx was "a closet Aristotelian of sorts", by which he means that Marx, like Aristotle, felt that humans live well when they act to realise their own creative nature. The main difference between Marx's (tacit) ethics and those of Aristotle is that for Marx, self-realisation must be an reciprocal process because we are social animals.

"What this means", Eagleton explains, "is that we become the occasion for each other's self-realisation. It is only through being the means of your self-fulfilment that I can attain my own, and vice versa." "The political form of this ethic," he continues, "is known as socialism", which can be regarded as a form of "politicised love, or reciprocity all round".
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Who's correct about human nature, the left or the right? | Ed Rooksby

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When the political right confront the left in debate, the arguments of the former usually boil down to a simple underlying idea: that the left's "grand projects" of social change are incompatible with human nature. Those on the left, in this view, do not understand - or cannot bring themselves to accept - the grim reality in relation to the fundamental determinants of human behaviour.

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Extended reading - Committed Sociologists

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Marxist, difference and poststructuralist feminsm 

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Marxist, difference and poststructuralist feminsm 

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Why do Feminists Disagree about Hw to Overcome Women's Subordination? Marxist, Difference and Poststructuralism

Video Resources

As we have noted in Part 1 ( What do Liberal and radical Feminists Believe?), there are many different types of feminism, and they all suggest that there are different problems with society and different solutions to those problems. For example, Marxists feminists believe that Liberal feminists are wrong to suggest that inequality is mainly the product of outdated laws, whilst they reject the radical feminist view that it is the result of patriarchy. For a Marxist Feminist, gender inequality is the result of capitalism, and women's position in society and their subordination perform a number of important functions for capitalist society.

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Why do Feminists Disagree ? Marxist, Difference and Poststructuralism

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Video Resources As we have noted in Part 1 ( What do Liberal and radical Feminists Believe?), there are many different types of feminism, and they all suggest that there are different problems with society and different solutions to those problems. For example, Marxists feminists believe that Liberal feminists are wrong to suggest that inequality is mainly the product of outdated laws, whilst they reject the radical feminist view that it is the result of patriarchy.

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Extended reading: Stuart Hall - policing the crisis

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Extended reading: Stuart Hall - policing the crisis

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Flip Pack 2 Crime and Deviance-converted

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Why do feminists disagree about how to overcome women's subordination? Liberal and radical feminism.

Video Resources

Though 'feminists' have differences of opinion, they all believe society is male dominated and seek to change this. As such, feminism is a political movement and a sociological theory. As a modern theory, feminism's origins can be traced back to the enlightenment, which sought to promote ideals such as equality, and the idea that, through human reason, a better society can be created. For a feminist, the principles of the enlightenment should apply to women as well as men, and its goals should include gender equality.

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What do Liberal and Radical Feminist Believe?

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Video Resources Though 'feminists' have differences of opinion, they all believe society is male dominated and seek to change this. As such, feminism is a political movement and a sociological theory. As a modern theory, feminism's origins can be traced back to the enlightenment, which sought to promote ideals such as equality, and the idea that, through human reason, a better society can be created.

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Extended reading: institutional racism in the MET

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Extended reading: institutional racism in the MET

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Sociology Review

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Theory 1 - Functionalism Flipped Pack

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Theory 1 Fuctionalism Flipped Learning Pack

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(also see 'Green Crime')

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Case study for corporate crime

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Police investigating the Grenfell Tower fire have concluded there are "reasonable grounds" to suspect the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) and the council's tenant management organisation (TMO) may have committed corporate manslaughter.

Chiefs from both organisations will be formally interviewed by officers as part of the criminal investigation into the tragedy that claimed at least 80 lives.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed to The Independent it had updated those affected by the fire today.

A statement circulated to those involved said an "initial assessment" of seized material and witness statements had allowed police to conclude that each organisation may have committed the offence.

Both organisations will be questioned under the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007.

"We have seized a huge amount of material and taken a large number of witness statements," the letter to those affected by the disaster said.

"After an initial assessment of that information, the officer leading the investigation has today notified Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the Kensington and Chelsea TMO that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that each organisation may have committed the offence of corporate manslaughter under the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007.

"In due course, a senior representative fo each corporation will be formally interviewed by police in relation to the potential offence."

It was unclear which senior figures will be interviewed by police and the legislation does not allow for the arrest of any individual.

A Met Police spokesperson told The Independent: "This is a complex and far reaching investigation that by its very nature will take a considerable time to complete.

"The Met has made a commitment to the families who lost loved ones in the fire and survivors that they will be kept updated, as far as we possibly can, as the investigation continues.

"As is routine, we will not give a running commentary on this investigation."

Samia Badani, residents association chair for Bramley House - a block that overlooks the tower - told The Independent the move was a positive step forward for the community.

"I'm very pleased, I think over the years we have had a very good relationship with local police and the relationship with the council is the opposite," she said.

"We are so bruised in the community that we needed some reassurances so it's a step forward."

It comes after a number of stakeholders from both RBKC and the TMO resigned in the wake of the tragedy over accusations they ignored a catalogue of warnings over fire safety.

The council's chief executive Nicholas Holgate was the first to step down in the aftermath over the borough's handling of the fire.

"Despite my wish to have continued, in very challenging circumstances, to lead on the executive responsibilities of the council, I have decided that it is better to step down from my role, once an appropriate successor has been appointed," he said in a statement on 21 June.

A week later, TMO leader Robert Black stepped aside to "concentrate on assisting with the investigation and inquiry", followed by RBKC leader Nick Paget-Brown and deputy leader Rock Feilding-Mellen just hours later.

Council leader Elizabeth Campbell said she would fully support the Met's investigation.

"Our residents deserve answers about the Grenfell Tower fire and the police investigation will provide these. We fully support the Metropolitan Police investigation and we will cooperate in every way we can," she said.

"It would not be appropriate to comment further on matters subject to the police investigation."

The news comes after family and friends of five of those killed in the blaze, including two child victims, gathered to remember their loved ones.

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, joined a congregation in north Kensington, little more than half a mile from the scene of the disaster.

The lives of artist Khadija Saye, her mother Mary Mendy, Berkti Haftom and her 12-year-old son Beruk, as well as five-year-old Isaac Paulos were being celebrated at the ecumenical service in St Helen's Church.

The service opened with a recording of Michael Jackson's "Heal The World", and the Gospel For Grenfell choir later sang a number of well-known songs including "Something Inside So Strong".

Ms Saye's cousin Adelaide Mendy recalled the fear and panic on the night of the fire, and her desperate hope that her relatives would not be caught up in it.

She told those gathered: "I felt an excruciating and an almost unbearable pain. I felt powerless at the thought that there was nothing else that I could have done."

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Grenfell police have 'reasonable grounds' to suspect Kensington council committed corporate manslaughter

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Police investigating the Grenfell Tower fire have concluded there are "reasonable grounds" to suspect the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) and the council's tenant management organisation (TMO) may have committed corporate manslaughter. Chiefs from both organisations will be formally interviewed by officers as part of the criminal investigation into the tragedy that claimed at least 80 lives.

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Overview of modernity and postmodernity 

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Overview of modernity and postmodernity 

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Two key processes which underpin the move from 'Modernity' to 'Postmodernity' are technological changes and globalisation. The development of satellite communications and transport technologies seem to be the main causes of globalisation, or the increasing interconnectedness of people across the world. Today we live in a truly global economy with many products in the UK produced in other parts of the world, and many British products being exported to other countries. Cultural globalisation has also taken place - with more people moving and communicating with each other across the world. We also face a number of shared global problems - such as new risky technologies and ecological problems. There are many different perspectives on Globalisation, but it is hard to argue that it is happening and that we have moved into a post-modern era as a result

Unfortunately grids don't cut and past that well into WordPress. A much neater version of the above grid can be found in my Theory and Methods Revision Notes, along with summaries of all the other perspectives too...

The notes cover the following sub-topics:

1. Functionalism

2. Marxism

3. Feminism

4. Social Action Theory

5. Postmodernism

6. Late Modernism

7. Sociology and Social Policy

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Technological changes, globalisation and the move from Modernity to Postmodernity Two key processes which underpin the move from 'Modernity' to 'Postmodernity' are technological changes and globalisation. The development of satellite communications and transport technologies seem to be the main causes of globalisation, or the increasing interconnectedness of people across the world.

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The London Riots of August 2011 are a good way of introducing 'perspectives' on crime and deviance, as well as the strengths and limitations of studying crime using different methods.
The 2011 London Riots - Background/ Context

Between 6 and 10 August 2011, several London boroughs and other cities and towns across England suffered widespread rioting, looting and arson.

The first night of rioting took place on 7 August 2011 after a peaceful protest in Tottenham, following the death of Mark Duggan, a local man from the area, who was shot dead by police on 4 August 2011. Police failed to notify Duggan's family of his death and no senior police officer was available to meet the protest, creating anger at perceived disrespect. The protesting crowd outside the police station set light to two police cars, and the pictures of this circulated on social media attracted other people to the area - what started as a relatively peaceful protest quickly descended into a riot involving mass looting.

The following days saw similar scenes in other parts of London with the worst violence taking place in , Brixton, Chingford, Peckham, Enfield, Croydon, Ealing and East Ham. The city centre in Oxford Circus was also attacked. From 8 until 10 August, other cities in England including Bristol, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool, along with several towns, saw what was described by the media as 'copycat violence'.

The riots were characterised by rampant looting and arson attacks of unprecedented levels. As a result, David Cameron returned early from his holiday in Italy and other government leaders also ended their holidays to attend to the matter. All police leave was cancelled and Parliament was recalled on 11 August to debate the situation.

There were a total 3,443 crimes across London linked to the disorder, including 5 deaths and at least 16 others injured as a direct result of related violent acts. An estimated £200 million worth of property damage was incurred, and local economic activity was significantly compromised.

The riots have generated significant on-going debate among political, social and academic figures about the causes and context in which they happened.
This Daily Mail article on the London riots by Melanie Phillips on is a superb example of a New Right take on the 'causes' of the event...extracts below.....
Biased Media Reporting on the London Riots

' The violent anarchy that has taken hold of British cities is the all-too-predictable outcome of a three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtually every basic social value. What is so notable and distressing is that this mayhem has been carried out in the main by teenagers and children, some as young as eight. These youths feel absolutely entitled to go 'on the rob' and steal whatever they want.'

'What has been fuelling all this is not poverty... what we have been experiencing is a complete breakdown of civilized behavior among children and young people... We are not merely up against feral children, but feral parents... either they are too drunk or drugged or otherwise out of it to care, or else they are helping themselves to the proceeds, too.'

'As David Cameron observed yesterday, there are clearly pockets of society that are not just broken, but sick. Most of these children come from lone-mother households. And the single most crucial factor behind all this mayhem is the willed removal of the most important thing that socialises children and turns them from feral savages into civilised citizens: a father who is a fully committed member of the family unit. The result is fatherless boys who are consumed by an existential rage and desperate emotional need, and who take out the damage done to them by lashing out from infancy at everyone around them. Such children inhabit what is effectively a different world from the rest of society. It's a world without any boundaries or rules. A world of emotional and physical chaos.'

'This breaking of the family was encouraged by the Welfare State... Welfare dependency further created the entitlement culture that the looters so egregiously display. It taught them that the world owed them a living. It taught them that their actions had no consequences.'
Melanie Philips no doubt enjoys writing for the right wing daily mail, and her readers no doubt enjoy the sense of righteous moral indignation they feel when reading her articles (they are all in pretty much the same vein!). Unfortunately for them, but more unfortunately the impoverished teenage children of the single parents she lambasts, this is an extremely narrow analysis of the causes of the Riots. Moreover, Philip's analysis is not supported by the rigorous quantitative and qualitative research carried out by the London School of Economics in the year since the riots. This is not to say that irresponsible parenting and the breakdown of social control didn't have something to do with the riots - but there are a lot of other factors that need to be considered as well.
Actual evidence on the 'causes' of the London Riots'

The findings below are based on the research findings taken from Reading the Riots - Researchers spoke to 270 rioters: 185 people in London, 30 in Birmingham, 29 in Manchester, 16 in Liverpool, seven in Salford and three in Nottingham. Thirteen were in prison.

Who were the Rioters?

They ranged in age from 13 to 57

A third said they had never been found guilty in court or cautioned

The overwhelming majority said gangs played little or no part in what happened.

About three-quarters were aged 24 or under, only a small minority, people over 40.

Around 80% of interviewees were male, although anecdotal evidence from observers of the riots, suggest the proportion was nearer 90%

They came from a wide range of ethnic groups but A slightly larger proportion were from an ethnic minority (50% black, 5% Asian) or of mixed race (18%); this also varied by area: the ethnic makeup of interviewees in Salford and Manchester overwhelmingly white.

The general attainment levels were lower than those of the population as a whole: of the adults, a third had no qualification higher than GCSE , one-fifth of the rioters claimed to have no educational qualifications at all, one in 20 said they had a degree.

Most had prior experience with the Criminal Justice System - only 32% said they had never been found guilty in a court or been cautioned.

Based on the above interviews, the rioters themselves stated the following five main causes (percentages reporting this as a factor in brackets)
What were the main causes of the riots?

Poverty (86%)

Policing (85%)

Government Policy (80%)

Unemployment (79%)

The shooting of Mark Duggan (75%)

Of course, if you conducted the research again using a broader sample and different methods, then you might get different results. But based on this evidence, there does not appear to be any support for the New Right's perspective on what caused the riots...
Asking about the 'causes' of crime is only one aspect among many in the crime and deviance course. Some of the perspectives on crime look at crime much more broadly.
Sociological (/Criminological) Perspectives on the London Riots

Functionalism - argues that society needs crime. Rather than looking at crime as a purely negative phenomenon, crime also has positive social functions. The riots, for example, lead to a temporary suspension of inter-gang violence, and, as a media event, it gave the rest of us something unite against, thus increasing unity in society more generally.

Bonds of Attachment Theory (Functionalism) - The cause of deviance is the breakdown or weakening of informal agencies of social control such as the family and community. Criminal activity occurs when the individual's attachment to society is weakened. This theory would blame poor parenting as the main cause of the riots.

Consensus Subcultural Theory - argues crime is a collective response to the above situation of frustration - If you can't gain status by getting a job, you seek status by some other means within a subculture (possibly a gang) and riots can offer you an opportunity to gain status by 'going further than the next person'.

Traditional Marxism - Argues that crime is a response to a Capitalist system that breeds materialism, greed and selfishness. They also point out that many members of the Elite classes are criminals themselves, but it is generally only the powerless that get punished for their criminal acts, while elites tend to avoid punishment. The rioters were largely teenage youths living in poor areas and many got disproportionate punishments for their involvement in the riots, while politicians engaging in criminal acts often get away without punishment.

Interactionists - See criminal behaviour as a response to labelling by agents of social control - mainly the police. Focussing on the riots - Interactionists would argue that police racism over the last 3 decades has led to black youths being disproportionately targeted by stop and search - and it was this history of negative attention from the police that sparked the riots.

Right Realists - Argue that the riots were caused because of a basic breakdown of both informal and formal social control - weak communities and too few police on the streets, and society not being tough enough on crime. Rioters had too much freedom and felt like they could get away with their crimes.

Left-Realism - Argues there are two main causes of crime - Marginalisation and Relative Deprivation - largely borne out by the Guardian research above.
Explore the 'causes' of the London riots in more depth...
Post-modernism - Argues that the riots are a response to a postmodern society characterised by consumerism, an obsession with self-identity and a quest for excitement. For many the riots were a 'scene' where they could 'play a game' - engaging in vandalism and challenging the police provide both status and excitement - much more than any nightclub could offer.

They're all pretty left wing, so redressing the balance of the right-biased mainstream media...

1. The Moral decay is as bad at the top of our society as it is at the bottom by Peter Oborne -

2. and Zygmunt Bauman - The London Riots - Consumerism coming home to roost as the World's leading critical sociologist - he's got to get in somewhere near the top..

3. ' Look whose ruling now' - London Rioters speak out

4. David Harvey - Feral Capitalism is to blame!

5. Another post focussing on consumerism - Let them yearn for Tatt

6. A nice Balanced view from the JRF - What do we actually know about the riot areas and rioters?

7. Guardian article - the rioters - young, poor and unemployed

8. Some Observations on the Riots by Mark Metcalf - a view from someone familiar with the area

9. It wasn't just youths involved in the riots

10. The Guardian data maps - a nice visual resource!

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Sociological Perspectives on the London Riots

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The London Riots of August 2011 are a good way of introducing 'perspectives' on crime and deviance, as well as the strengths and limitations of studying crime using different methods. The 2011 London Riots - Background/ Context Between 6 and 10 August 2011, several London boroughs and other cities and towns across England suffered widespread rioting, looting...

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Functionalist Theories of Crime & Deviance - Durkheim | tutor2u

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Durkheim - Functionalist Theories of Crime & Deviance

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Emile Durkheim's contribution to functionalist theories of crime and deviance is explored in this video.

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Sociology Factsheet - extended reading