ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with technology, consumption, markets and related crimes and harms (although these are, of course, also connected to the ways in which innovation and demand shape the production of certain goods). Our starting point is that criminology and sociology have paid considerable attention to production, industry and work as mechanisms of discipline, and to technology as a contributor to the maintenance of social control. Relatively less attention, however, has been paid to the criminological significance of consumption. Yet, as Bauman (1997) has noted, consumerism is one of the central mechanisms by which societies establish social order in late modernity. It is also related to the establishment of citizenship (see, e.g. Aas 2013: 159 (citing Klein 2000; Loader and Walker 2007; Wood and Dupont 2006; Zedner 2000); Brisman 2013: 276 (citing Giroux 2004)) and, inversely, to what is, perhaps, the most symbolic and obvious way in which social order and citizenship are rejected, refuted and rebuked by those who feel excluded, as in Hallsworth’s Street Crime in which young black males in newly gentrified areas of London steal coveted consumer goods – not because of their “inhumanity” but because “these strange behavioural rituals are entirely consistent with the seductive and spectacular world that consumer capitalism has built and to which these young people have been so relentlessly exposed” (2005: 166). The young people who become involved in street robbery, Hallsworth explains,
learn from a very early age that wellbeing and success in life are contingent upon the possession of desirable goods. In particular, branded goods marketed to them by the culture industries. … In and through mass consumption, identities are produced and reproduced. In consumption, a lifestyle is simultaneously lived and constructed. To ‘be’ is literally to be in a world defined by the possession of these desirable goods. … Your status relative to others is marked out and defined by the kind of phone you possess, the trousers you wear, and the way you wear them.
(2005: 123–24)