Short description:

Offering the first in-depth investigation into the relationship between today's crinimal identities and consumer culture, this book uses unique data - taken from criminals locked in areas of permanent recession - to uncover feelings and attitudes towards a variety of criminal activities.

Long description:

This book offers the first in-depth investigation into the relationship between today's criminal identities and consumer culture. Using unique data taken from criminals locked in areas of permanent recession, the book aims to uncover feelings and attitudes towards a variety of criminal activities, investigating the incorporation of hearts and minds into consumer culture's surrogate social world and highlighting the relationship between the lived identities of active criminals and the socio-economic climate of instability and anxiety that permeates post-industrial Britain.

This book will be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and lecturers in all fields within the social sciences, but especially criminology, sociology, social policy, politics and anthropology.

'This book is criminological scholarship at its best: insightful, original, provocative and impassioned. Its central argument, that the rise of market culture and narcissistic consumerism lie at the heart of contemporary crime problems, deserves to be widely read, understood and appreciated.' ? Dr Majid Yar, Professor of Sociology, University of Hull, UK 

'When criminologists look back in 50 years' time at those books that pushed critical criminology forward they'll point to Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture. Frankly, if you don't love this book you shouldn't be a criminologist.' ? Professor David Wilson, Centre for Criminal Justice Policy and Research, Birmingham City University, UK

'...theoretically advanced and written with passion and flair...'

'It is a larger than life portrayal of some elements of working-class criminal life to be more precise, but the work is nonetheless ambitious, forthright and bold. Their thesis is detailed and provocative and will appeal to a range of audiences and has been very positively received by leading criminologists as the plaudits on the back cover attest.'

'The book adds a great deal to the critical criminology literature and criminologists (and sociologists with an interest in crime) will read it with interest.'
-Tracy Shildrick, Professor of Sociology, University of Teesside, in Sociology vol 45 no 2 p.343-348

Table of Contents:

Preface  1. Introduction: The Return to Motivation  2. Life on the Precipice: Economic Change and Acute Marginalisation  3. Consumption and Identification: Some Insights into Desires and Motivations  4. Criminal Biographies: Two Case Studies  5. Consumerism and the Counterculture  6. Critical Reflections on the Intellectual Roots on Post-war Criminological Theory  7. Myths of Exclusion and Resistance: A Critique of some Current Thinking on Crime and Culture  8. Consumerism, Narcissism and the Reorientation of the Western Super-ego  9. Conclusion: Consumerism, Crime and Pseudo-pacification Process