In this controversial and original study of policing, class relations and organizations, Hobbs illustrates the culture of London's East End and its relationship with the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police. Both the East Enders and the Metropolitan Police are considered in terms of their relationship with the marketplace and the emergent strategies of negotiation, trading, and entrepreneurship.

Doing the Business looks at the culture of London's East End and its relationship with the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police. The cultures of both the East End and the CID are examined in terms of their relationship with the market place and the emergent strategies of negotiation, trading, and, most importantly, entrepreneurship.
The author breaks new ground in several crucial areas. He asks how well traditional notions of working class culture fit the East End, and argues convincingly that they do not. His model of an entrepreneurial working class culture (a...

This book has two central purposes: to demonstrate the importance of qualitative research through an examination of the type of data that it is capable of producing, and, to do so using first-hand research accounts of ethnographic work. In reflecting upon personal experiences of field-work, together with the research strategies employed, the authors illustrate their arguments in a detailed and accessible manner. The themes they discuss include the ethics and politics of field-work, reflexivity and data production, feminist field-work, the publication and production of studies, and an...

Written by a leading commentator on the culture of crime and criminality, this book is a hard-hitting and disturbing insight into the activities and attitudes of professional Criminals. The work is based upon interviews with generations of criminals whose activities range from violence, intimidation, and protection rackets through to drug dealing and car theft. Professional criminals talk in graphic detail about their violent methods and ruthless attitudes to those who stand in their way. The stories show a picture of a community where criminals have an elevated status, where violence is seen...

This book is the first attempt to understand Britain's night-time economy, the violence that pervades it, and the bouncers whose job it is to prevent it. Using ethnography, participant observation and extensive interviews with all the main players, this controversial book charts the emergence of the bouncer as one of the most graphic symbols in the iconography of post-industrial Britain.

"This is an excellent collection of papers which celebrates the best of traditional approaches to fieldwork, whilst also looking to its future. The Handbook will quickly become essential reading for the novice and experienced fieldworker across many of the social sciences"
--Chris Pole, University of Leicester

Fieldwork is widely practiced but little written about, yet accounts of the exotic, mundane, complex and often dangerous are central to not only sociology and anthropology but also geography, social psychology and criminology. In all these -...

The Eternal Recurrence of Crime and Control features contributions from a distinguished group of criminologists from the UK, the US and Australia, brought together to honour the work of Paul Rock, former Professor of Social Institutions at the London School of Economics. Edited by Tim Newburn, David Downes and Dick Hobbs, it offers an exploration of the theories which underpin much of current criminological thinking.
The resulting thirteen essays all examine and build upon the central themes associated with Paul Rock's work: social and criminological theory, policy development and...

Ethnography is an extremely broad church, and the range of methodological stances adopted by ethnographers extends across theoretical, political and technological divides. As a method it is intense and often makes considerable personal demands on the researcher, but as an academic product, the ethnography can be a vivid document with human resonance impossible to recreate by the application of any other methodology. This collection emphasizes something of the range of possibilities focusing on ethnography in different settings. Implicit in the text is the very specific problems encountered by...

Geoffrey Pearson, who died in 2013, was one of the outstanding social scientists of the post second world war era. His work spanned social work, social theory, social history, criminology and sociology. In particular, his work has had a huge impact upon studies of youth, youth culture and drugs.

This collection is made up of contributions from scholars producing empirical work on some of the key areas upon which Geoff Pearson established his reputation. All of the writers in this collection have been profoundly influenced by his scholarship. This collection focuses on urban...