Book Review: Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers

Folk devils and moral panics

Governing morals. A social history of moral regulation

Chas Critcher has recently conceptualized moral panic as a heuristic device, or ‘ideal type’. While he argues that one still has to look beyond the heuristic, despite a few exceptional studies there has been little utilization of recent developments in social theory in order to look ‘beyond moral panic’. Explicating two current critical contributions — the first, drawing from the sociologies of governance and risk; the second, from the process/figurational sociology of Norbert Elias — this article highlights the necessity for the continuous theoretical development of the moral panic concept and illustrates how such development is essential to overcome some of the substantial problems with moral panic research: normativity, temporality and (un)intentionality.

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Moral panic and social theory: Beyond the heuristic

The Nobel peace prize

This paper explores the open and contested concept of moral panic over its 40-year history, exploring the contributions made by the concept’s key originators, as well as contemporary researchers. While most moral panic researchers are critical, humanist, interpretivist, interventionist and qualitative, this paper highlights ten areas of productive dispute within and around the meaning of moral panic theory’s ‘common sense’. Such diversity of interpretation creates multiple possibilities for convergent and divergent theorization and research within a supposedly singular conceptual framework. This lack of closure and consequent diversity of political standpoints, intellectual perspectives and fields of empirical focus, rather than representing the weakness of the concept of moral panic, reflects and contributes to its successful diffusion, escalation and innovation.

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The idea of moral panic – ten dimensions of dispute:

Combining the theories and concepts of Norbert Elias with the empirical example of climate change, this article aims to extend and develop the concept of moral panic. The focus of the analysis is on the documentary An Inconvenient Truth — an exemplar of a more general trend in popular culture regarding the moralization and individual regulation of climate change. In the final sections of the article, Al Gore’s short-term campaign is related to more long-term social processes.

Extending the Concept of Moral Panic: Elias, Climate Change and Civilization

The papers in this special issue stem from the conference ‘Moral Panics in the Contemporary World’, held at Brunel University in December 2010 – nearly 40 years since the landmark publication of Stan Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) and Jock Young’s The Drugtakers (1971) and ‘The role of the police as amplifiers of deviancy, negotiators of reality and translators of fantasy’ (1971). Over 150 international delegates from a variety of disciplines came together to discuss the continuing relevance of the concept of moral panic to analysing a range of contemporary phenomena. The aim of the conference was to explore and evaluate how the concept has developed and continues to develop, and how relevant and useful it remains to the analysis and understanding of current fears, risks, social problems and controversies. Speakers from the plenary sessions included the key progenitors of the moral panic concept, Stan Cohen and Jock Young, and current central figures in moral panic (re)conceptualizing, Chas Critcher and Sean Hier; the academic Catharine Lumby and the journalist James Oliver offered their reflections on being involved and implicated in specific moral panics. This issue includes: papers featuring four of the six speakers from the plenary sessions; a paper authored by Chris Jenks, who gave the opening address at the conference; and two papers from the thematic strands, the first by Julia M. Pearce and Elizabeth Charman, the second by Ragnar Lundstrom. The conference began with an opening address from Brunel University’s Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Sociology, Chris Jenks. In his paper here, ‘The context of an emergent and enduring concept’, Jenks traces the genesis of the concept of moral panic against the backdrop of the social and intellectual upheaval that accompanied its development. He then goes on to explore some of the subsequent developments since its initial formulation, in particular how the possibilities for breaking free of moral constraints have, in contemporary culture, become increasingly individualized and privatized – a process which has accompanied a more general shift in which questions of liminality and transgression have effectively moved to centre stage. Jenks discusses how transgression can be understood as at once a component of, and a counterpoint to, moral panics. He shows how transgressive behaviour is intimately tied up with the continual drawing and redrawing of limits on behaviour, with moral panics a means simultaneously to secure and redefine the

Foreword: Moral panics in the contemporary world

This paper draws from a variety of case study examples of �moral panic analyses�, in combination with
figurational analyses of the same topics, to comparatively explore the variant forms �moral panics�
take and how they develop, thereby analysing the multiple forms civilising processes can take. Using
�moral panic� as an illustrative example, this paper will discuss how and to what extent civilising
processes can give rise to decivilising trends (in the form of moral panics) yet, at the same time, these
moral panics can also bring about integrative �civilising� effects in the form of civilising offensives
that reflect possible long-term civilising trends (in the form of accelerated campaigns; a civilising
�spurt�). Throughout this comparative discussion, I aim to highlight not only the complexity of
civilising processes, but also the complex civilising and decivilising aspects of moral panics, thereby
overcoming the dichotomous normative conceptualization of moral panics as being either �good� or
�bad� panics. The paper then moves onto a discussion of the paradoxical idea of viewing moral panics
as civilising and decivilising processes. Drawing from Foucault, Elias, and moral panic, the paper
concludes with a discussion of a rethinking of civilising and decivilising processes, intended and
unintended developments, short-term and long-term processes, and the role of knowledge in civilising
processes

Amanda Rohloff

Papers

Moral panic and social theory: Beyond the heuristic

The idea of moral panic – ten dimensions of dispute:

Extending the Concept of Moral Panic: Elias, Climate Change and Civilization

Foreword: Moral panics in the contemporary world

Moral panics as civilising and decivilising processes? A comparative discussion