Introduction

The aim of this paper is to bring some aspects of the recent debate on the transition from 'Fordism' to 'post-Fordism' to bear on the issues of criminality and crime control. The latter is an area generally ignored by recent debates in social theory about the dynamics of contemporary social change 'Fordism' and Regulation Theory in general derive from studies of the labour process and capital accumulation. Notable attempts to extend the analysis to the level of the state (Jessop 1990, 1994) have generally focused on welfare and social policy. If it is useful to speak of a transition to the 'post-Fordist welfare state' (Burrows and Loader 1994), it may be possible to identify similar dynamics at work in the area of criminal justice and crime control.

There are, of course, disadvantages in any attempt to bring a body of theory to bear on some new area hitherto considered the preserve of a distinct discipline with its own theorisations and problematics. One may end up addressing two distinct audiences, neither satisfactorily. Nevertheless the effort is worth making. In what follows I shall firstly elaborate a model of the classic Keynesian Welfare State (KWS) in the context of the expanding post war economy and explore some of its implications for crime and crime control. Secondly I shall identify some problems and instabilities in the classic welfare state model in the area of crime and crime control and which might be identified as contradictions to be 'resolved' by any transition to a new form of economy, state, social structure. Finally I shall attempt to identify some of those changes and developments as they are identified by post Fordism and to critically assess their implications for crime and crime control.

The Post War Boom and The Classic Welfare State

The period of post war stable economic expansion is conventionally defined as the period from 1950 until the early 1970's. The characterisation of this period as 'Fordist ' by regulation theorists refers to the development of a mass consumption market adequate to sustain expanding production through rising labour productivity and the introduction of mass production line systems as pioneered by Henry Ford. Market demand was kept high through rising wages negotiated by well organised but 'responsible' trade unions, Keynesian economic measures and through the welfare state, as a set of universal social rights to minimum income, housing, health and education. But Fordism was more than simply a set economic arrangements. "Post-war Fordism has to be seen.... less as a mere system of mass production and more as a total way of life. Mass production meant standardisation of the product as well as mass consumption; and that meant a whole new aesthetic and a commodification of culture...." (Harvey 1989 pp135-6). An integral part of Fordism concerned social homogenisation around common patterns of consumption and lifestyle. Rising wages, it was widely believed, were accompanied by a narrowing of income inequalities (Crosland 1956 ) and a meeting of working class and middle class lifestyles around an orientation to leisure and the nuclear family displacing older identities based on work, class conflict and community. Old class conflicts, would fade as the technical solution of social and economic problems heralded the 'end of ideology' while work was simply a means of income for individuals to "maintain their relatively prosperous and rising standard of living and for their inclination towards a family centred style of living" (Goldthorpe et al. 1968 p150).

It is fairly simple to spell out the implications of such an ideal typical state of affairs for crime and crime control. Firstly, the elimination of major social inequalities would enable a democratic criminal law and criminal justice agencies to serve all sections of society alike. A new popular consensus around crime control could be built to parallel that around universalist social welfare rights. The consolidation of shared values through mass consumption, mass education and social mobility would, in turn, standardise sensitivities to violence, cultural reactions to crime, concepts of harm and victimisation, around those deployed by criminal law and criminal justice agencies. One example of the dynamics of such a process could be identified at the level of the new suburban 'neighbourhood' which would articulate middle class notions of space in which ïnterpersonal relations are unnecessary at the street level and the command over space does not have to be assured though continuous appropriation." (Harvey 1987/94 pp 371-2). Middle class lifestyles appropriate space through mobility - cars and telephones by contrast with the traditional working class community where Ëxchange values are scarce, and so the pursuit of use values for daily survival is central to social action.... The result is an often intense attachment to place and 'turf' and an exact sense of boundaries because it is only through active appropriation that control over space is assured." (ibid.). For the traditional working class the defence of local space was a defence of networks of mutual aid and direct appropriation of use values - often involving local 'criminal' economies. Thus while the traditional community was hostile to outsiders, including state agencies - the police in particular - as a threat to the direct domination of space¹, the middle class, being concerned simply with external threats to property and the 'tone' of the neighbourhood view the state äs basically beneficial and controllable, assuring security and helping keep undesirables out, except in unusual circumstances (the location of 'noxious' facilities, the construction of highways etc.)." (ibid.). Thus Fordism and the welfare state would complete that long process of penetration of the police into working class communities, begun during the second half of the last century (Brogden 1982, Cohen 1979, Storch 1976, ), and establish a consensual basis for the criminal justice system, and for societal reactions to crime.

Meanwhile the elimination of poverty and bad housing would remove the main source of crime and gradually eliminate the traditional working class community which sanctioned certain types of 'social crime'², resisted police incursion into its streets and deployed its own moral economy of offenders and victims - in which concrete communal knowledge of events (e.g. shared notions of legitimate and illegitimate violence in specific situations) could provide alternative descriptions and solutions to those provided by criminal law and its agencies. The persistence of generalised juvenile delinquency in older working class areas, for example, was to be seen as rooted in the nature of traditional working class culture. This was the interpretation of the juvenile crime problem which had been followed by Mays (1954) and other British studies. "The evidence of all the English studies appears strongly supportive of ... (the)... theory that the bulk of delinquency represents straightforward adolescent conformity to the expectations of lower class culture." (Downes 1966 p.113). In this way delinquency could be seen as an essentially residual problem, a question of areas of economic and social structure which had yet to be incorporated into Fordism and the consequent cultural homogenisation around consumption and family oriented norms. Once these communities had been reconstructed then residual working class criminality would assimilate to a middle class experience of crime as consisting overwhelmingly of disruptions to normal social interaction by mainly marginalised or isolated individuals. Whether such pathology needed to be dealt with by welfare, medical treatment, or punishment was largely a technical matter upon which experts could decide. (Wootton 1959). The important point was that the systematic social bases of crime had been removed and all that was left were individuals. That the juridical legal subject presupposed free will while the welfare client less so, was less important than that they were both varieties of the individualisation of social problems.

Such a view of the effects of Fordism and the Keynesian welfare state is of course simply the extrapolation of one tendency. There was indeed a relative consensus around criminal justice and crime control during the 1950's and early sixties as witnessed by the relative paucity of legislation in the area or by social survey findings indicative a cross-class consensus in generally positive attitudes to the police (Reiner 1993). Crime, although it began its exponential rise from the mid 1950's, was low by present standards. The social stabilisation and cohesion of Fordist welfare state society was to some extent reflected in the proportionate decline of incarceration in the face of non supervisory and non disciplinary - in the Foucauldian sense - forms of penality such as fines and community service. As Bottoms remarked: "The implication would be that the penal project of the classical reformers failed at the end of the eighteenth century because it did not in itself produce order... and there was insufficient social control exercised elsewhere in society to make the classical juridical project possible. In modern states, however, such power does exist, and so the schemes of classical penality render themselves as more realistic possibilities, at least for some crimes and some offenders." (Bottoms 1983 pp195-6). Fordism and the KWS were, in other words, the main agencies of the social control which made possible an extension of the classical juridical project. For Bottoms non-custodial penality is not to be seen as 'spreading the net' of disciplinary power (See Cohen 1985) since Fordism and the KWS have already completed this task - although as we shall see, in contradictory ways.

Contradictions of the Fordist Welfare State

As Bob Jessop remarks Ä minimum condition for referring to post-Fordism is to establish the nature of the continuity in discontinuity which justifies the claim that it is not just a variety of Fordism but does actually succeed Fordism..... This... condition is met where: (a) post-Fordism has demonstrably emerged from tendencies originating within Fordism but still marks a decisive break with it; or (b) the ensemble of old and new elements in post-Fordism demonstrably displaces or resolves basic contradictions or crises in Fordism... " (Jessop 1994a p257). In short, to talk of 'post-Fordism' one has first to identify the contradictions within Fordism that produce, and are resolved by, the transition. In fact there are two problems. Prior to any consideration of those contradictions and limitations of Fordism which constituted the driving force in the development of post-Fordism, it is necessary to consider the extent to which Fordism was an accurate characterisation of British society during a substantial part of the post-war period³. At the level of economic development, the declining performance of the British, relative to other capitalist economies, is well known and the weak performance of the Fordist mass production industries has been noted (Overbeek 1990). Jessop considers that Britain only achieved a 'flawed Fordism' which ultimately has affected the ability to move to a successful post-Fordism (1989, 1994b). The tendencies to homogenisation in terms of class structure, income distribution and consumption patterns were shown, by the early 1960's to have been grossly exaggerated (Titmuss 1962, Nicholson 1967).

However, it became clear that Fordism, to the extent that it did develop, itself contained some important fissile tendencies at the level of economic and social organisation. The expansion of mass production industries generally involved the movement of skilled workers out of the older industrial and inner city areas. The remaining poor were situated decreasingly in cohesive working class communities with their networks of social support and more in polarised isolated housing estates where they had been 'left behind' as more skilled elements of the working class had moved out of the area. The experience of poverty was increasingly one of isolation and individualisation. Paradoxically, rising crime was one result of the breakdown of the very traditional working class communities whose indigenous criminality had attracted the attention of sociologists like Mays (ibid.) An obsession with alleged criminogenic features of these communities glossed over the fact that while they may have sanctioned elements of social crime - such as pilferage from work or shoplifting, they also exercised control over many forms of interpersonal violence and victimisation⁴. Indeed the very process of incorporation of such communities into a Fordist culture heightened criminogenic tendencies. While mass production and consumption failed to consolidate social homogenisation in terms of income and class, the diffusion of a Fordist culture and expectations of mass consumption was more successful with the resultant increase in relative deprivation.

Fordism, in other words, achieved an 'Americanisation' of mass culture, the criminogenic effects of which had been studied in some detail by American subcultural theorists (Merton 1957, Cloward and Ohlin 1960, Cohen 1955) as a result of the earlier development of Fordism in North America. In Robert Merton's classic formulation, anomie as a source of criminal and deviant behaviour became an inbuilt structural contradiction in Fordist culture in which ä system of cultural values extols, virtually above all else, certain common success-goals for the population at large which the social structure rigorously restricts or completely closes access to approved modes of reaching" (Merton 1957 p146). Meanwhile, in his review of British subcultural studies, David Downes had noted the paradoxical effects of the incorporation of 'traditional' communities with their more insulated field of aspirations (Runciman 1965), into the mass consumption oriented (Fordist) culture. He noted that "the very measures proposed to cut down on delinquency might seem to aim at promoting status-consciousness and -by inference- status frustration, thus providing the necessary base for the emergence of delinquent motivations on 'American' lines. By breaking down working class conservatism, the main force for aspiration-control would be removed." (Downes 1966 p 268). As post-war capitalist expansion began to decline with the resultant growth in poverty - which could only now be conceptualised as relative deprivation or inequality (Townsend 1979) it is hardly surprising that crime continued to rise⁵.

There is a second area in which the development of the KWS introduced problems and conflicts in the area of crime and its control. I refer to what might be termed 'widening and deepening' of criminality. In the work of Habermas (1976, 1987), for example, the welfare state is seen to exercise simultaneously a stabilising and destabilising effect on social relations. This is because "while the welfare state guarantees are intended to serve the goal of social integration, they nevertheless promote the disintegration of life-relations when these are separated, through legalised social intervention, from the consensual mechanisms that co-ordinate action and are transferred over to media such as power and money." (1987 p 364). Thus the welfare state, particularly the KWS, aimed at social integration through the granting of social rights. Even where these rights aimed at preserving traditional family structures, by displacing taken for granted consensus - e.g. around patriarchal family values - to political and economic structures of rights and welfare provision, they enabled the politicisation and critical questioning of such values. This process, in Habermas' view, lies behind the development of new social movements. These can be of two types 'offensive' and 'defensive' (Ray 1993) , the former aimed at the repoliticisation and reclamation of the life world through the discursive justification of values, while the latter attempt to restore traditional authority in the only form that it can now be re-imposed: as conservative political ideology. The feminist movement is the obvious example of the first type and the New Right of the latter.

As far as crime is concerned there are two implications. Firstly legal relations and criminal justice intervention can follow on the heels of welfare and social rights. Once the relations of family members are de-traditionalised, then hidden areas of family violence can be opened up as relations between offenders and victims as legal subjects, and the stronger intervention of criminal justice agencies demanded. In such a context at least a proportion of violence by men to women or children, in the family context can be seen as individualised attempts to restore traditional unspoken authority relations while conservative social movements attempt the same through political channels. In this sense the personal is political and crime is politics. The KWS not only failed to solve the traditional class problems of poverty and inequality, but the shifting of identity formation from work to consumption, celebrated by the theorists of homogenisation and 'civic privatism' (Almond and Verba 1965) as a form of depoliticisation, had the contrary result in widening the sphere of social conflict from 'class' to the private sphere.

An analogous process occurred in the area of business and white collar crime. Keynesian public financing, much of it concerned with welfare state provision, together with economic and social regulation opened up both new opportunities for crime (fraud against state contracts, welfare fraud etc.) but new categories of regulatory crime as criminal law is deployed as part of the armoury of state regulation (e.g. insider trading, health and safety or environmental regulation). A distinction emerges between sophisticated forms of traditional crime - complex fraud as a sophisticated example of theft - which business, as with any other potential victim, sees it as in its interests to control - and regulatory crimes which are seen as the state adding to costs - as with pollution or safety regulations (Snider 1991). The 'loss of identity' of criminal law (Scheerer 1986) as it merges into administration or economic planning and becomes a matter of 'mere transgression' (Sgubbi 1990), parallels the 'politicisation' of criminal law as it advances into areas in which the construction of the participants as legal subjects, offenders and victims, involves a practical critique of the substantive relations of power and dependency between the parties. A double process takes place in which key social relations are deconstructed as relations between offenders and victims, and the latter concepts become simultaneously blurred such that the distinct identity of the offender and the victim, as required by the criminal law and the process of criminal justice fade somewhat (Kelly 1988).

A final set of issues concerned the relationship between the criminal justice system and the welfare state as alternative strategies for guaranteeing rights and dealing with social problems. Firstly, the very presence of the welfare state further contributes to the 'denaturalisation' of crime by establishing a tactical division of labour between welfare and criminal justice agencies about who should deal with particular problems and individuals (Pitch 1995) . This leads both to a competition between 'welfare' and 'justice' and their associated bureaucracies over who should deal with a particular set of problems - as in the case of juvenile delinquency, drugs etc. The consequence is further politicisation of criminal justice - as in movements for 'back to justice'. The competition with welfare leads to a tension within criminal justice between a formal legitimacy based on due process and the rule of law and one based on output criteria of effectiveness in dealing with social problems. As Foucault remarked, concerning the way in which characteristically modern institutions aimed at regulation and surveillance displace those based on law and right: Ï do not mean to say that law fades into the background or that institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory" (Hist of Sexuality144).

Thus Criminal justice institutions such as police and prison systems start to look increasingly 'inefficient' in solving the problems of crime. Highly politicised 'offensive' social movements demanding a return to traditional notions of punishment and responsibility run into growing cynicism about the effectiveness of criminal justice as a solution to social problems. Even Conservative Home Secretaries succumb to the fact that the prison is än expensive way of making bad people worse."

A decade ago many followed Habermas (op. cit.) and Offe (1984) into identifying a legitimation crisis at the heart of the Fordist KWS in parallel with its gathering economic crisis. Certainly there were no shortage of elements in the areas of criminal justice. As social polarisation increased, criminal justice agencies found themselves engaged in classic activities of generalised repression of the new marginalised in the inner cities who achieved episodic cohesion in recourse to the streets, so classic demands for fairness and justice, increased while new social movements demanded widening of the concepts of justice, and procedures appropriate to them - such as revisions legal notions of provocation, responsibility etc., or criminalisation of environmental damage. Simultaneously these were joined by a growing critique of criminal justice in terms of its efficiency. The prison was joined by the police as an institution which 'fails to deliver' under conditions of continually rising crime and exploding prison populations. By the mid 1980's growing support for democratic accountability of institutions, the police in particular, was evident (Lea and Young 1993, Spencer 1985).

Yet the dynamics of legitimation crisis are quite unclear. Habermas could speak of a growing demand for the 'discursive justification of values', yet how, precisely this would lead to movements and pressure resulting in a social or political crisis in western capitalist states was never spelled out (McCarthy 1978, Ray 1993). The ambiguity was illustrated by the appeal of the theme of legitimation crisis to the New Right who observed ä breakdown of traditional means of social control," (Crozier et al. 1975) and the need for a reassertion of authority by mobilising new bases of conservative support and the ending of the civic privatism of the middle classes. Fear of crime, of the 'underclass', and of a criminogenic potential of any departure from traditional forms of socialisation was of course a key theme in such mobilisation. Attempts, meanwhile, on the left, to articulate a more precise concept of hegemonic crisis (Hall et al. 1978) tended both to read crisis symptoms too widely - as in the simple fact of increased class struggle in the early 1970's - and to misread strategies of consolidation - as with 'moral panic' about crime - as evidence of the exhaustion of hegemony. The real source of change in direction lay undoubtedly in the changed economic conditions after 1970. In this context we can approach the issue of a transition to post-Fordism.

Post-Fordism: a new form of regulation or deeper crisis ?

The key question concerning the adequacy of the concept of post-Fordism is whether it describes the emergence of a new, stable, mode of development overcoming the limitations of Fordism or whether in fact it simply grasps, at an empirical level, the symptoms of deepening capitalist recession and confuses these with a new form of stability. This issue goes to the heart of the debate on the underconsumptionist tendencies associated with some varieties of regulation theory (Brenner and Glick 1991). If, for example, the expansion of mass consumption was what enabled stable post-war development (Aglietta 1979), then a new regime of 'flexible accumulation' (Harvey 1989) involving flexible production systems catering for market diversity, and a return to the smaller enterprise, might overcome the limitations of existing mass consumer markets. An alternative view would find the original cause of post-war expansion in the destruction of capital during the Second World War combined with a temporary post-war stability of the international monetary system. The expansion of consumption into new mass produced commodities is seen as a consequence, rather than a cause, of profitable production. The current crisis is not a matter of the exhaustion of markets as such, but of over accumulation of capital⁶. From this perspective what is central to the present transition is the onslaught by capital on the 'Fordist' organisation of the European and North American working class - and the determination to replace the KWS with a regime of low wages, impotent unions and highly flexible labour with a strong emphasis on women and ethnic minorities. Simultaneously much Fordist production is being 'decentralised' to low wage, politically authoritarian third world areas. 'Post-Fordism' can be another name for the fact that in order to restore the conditions for profitable accumulation, capital must intensify its attack on the working class. It is only a new form of stability in that, if successful, the conditions for profitable accumulation will be eventually restored and the expansion of markets will result from the normal process of capital accumulation (Brenner and Glick op. cit.).

From this perspective, diversification of production and consumption is entirely secondary. It is not the 'discovery' of new niche markets that replace an exhausted Fordist mass consumption, but the restoration of profitability through the 'discovery' of a low wage flexible diversified working class. Much of the so-called postmodern diversity of lifestyles is a cynical inversion of this growing social polarisation. In fact many of the empirical tendencies identified and discussed by the exponents of post-Fordism fit such a perspective of 'Hard Times' (Peck and Tickell 1994). Apart from the optimistic, yet ephemeral, scenario of 'New Times', (see below) it is, as Jessop admits, not (yet) possible to specify the character of post-Fordism as a 'mode of societalisation' Ät best we could describe, on a case to case basis, the societalisation effects of the uneven transition toward post-Fordism. And this means.... that a well developed and relatively stable post-Fordist social formation remains an as yet unrealised possibility." (Jessop 1994a p. 260). So we are in transition to something we cannot yet fully specify the contours of. For this reason it is best to concentrate on the dynamics of transition itself rather than attempting the specification of an 'ideal' type of a stable post-Fordist mode of development. In the remainder of this paper I shall therefore, select a number of themes from the post-Fordist debate and then attempt to assess their stabilising or destabilising effects in the area of crime and crime control.

1. the global city

A useful focus for many of the processes associated with post-Fordism is its impact on urban structure (Esser and Hirsch 1994) Issues such as the rediscovery of flexible low wage labour and the decentralisation of Fordist production to the third world finds a focus in the literature on the 'global city'. Theorists such as Manuel Castells (1989) and Saskia Sassen (1991) see large cities like New York, Los Angeles and London moving towards a post-Fordist type of social structure characterised by the growth of high paid employment in financial services, the decline of 'Fordist' manufacturing employment and stable middle income communities and the growth of the informal sector of flexible, low wage, unorganised labour in construction and increasingly privatised city services, sweated labour trades such as clothing, restaurants etc. Working class organisation is weakened as industrial unions decline with the emigration of Fordism, and public sector unions - particularly strong in cities like London - decline with the privatisation of city services and the welfare state. Meanwhile, the pool of permanently unemployed expand in the form of an 'underclass' which no longer fulfils the functions of a 'reserve army of labour' in competition with the employed but inhabit the informal sector and increasingly its criminal parts.

At the same time the high income employments in the financial sector have the characteristic of being largely disconnected from the organic life of the city. In the classic capitalist city, even where it was part of an imperialist economy which dominated the world, the bankers and industrialists had some relationship with the working class in the city. The function of the city was to allow capital and labour to combine and reproduce. The global city is simply a convenient site for activities which could be located anywhere, since they concern not production but the, increasingly computerised, transfer of funds. For Castells this is part of a new 'informational mode of development' (Castells op.cit.) whose dynamism lies in the replacement of the old capital accumulation process by the drive for information. This could be taken as a component of a new post Fordist stability. But as Fitch (1994) asks: "Do urban 'information industries' represent wealth creation or wealth transfer? Fictitious capital or real capital? What indeed is 'information'? The fact that this 'drive for information' is largely concerned with the transfer rather than production of wealth helps explain its precarious and speculative nature and lack of integrative impact on the rest of the urban economy. The consequent segregation of the high income professionals - earning salaries determined by global rather than local market forces - cut off from local communities by segregated and guarded walkways and generating little employment for locals except in the informal and consumption sectors results in what Mike Davis called the 'militarisation of public space' (Davis 1990). or what Susan Christopherson describes as a "...piecemeal spatial mosaic of the safe and the unsafe... dominated by security cages and a honeycomb of residential and business fortresses." (Christopherson 1994 p 421). The mirror image of the growth of footloose information based sectors is the growth, in the face of declining Fordist manufacturing, of the informal sector of low wage flexible labour in manufacturing sectors competing with third world cheap labour, in privatised city services previously run by local authorities or welfare state agencies, and in the conspicuous consumption needs of the information and financial sectors.

This scenario, which by no means of course represents all cities, is a backdrop against which to observe new trends in crime. Crime rates continue to rise, but what is specific to post-Fordism is changes in the organisation and functionality of various types of crime. We have noted that the tendency under Fordism is contradictory. On the one hand the decline of 'social crime' and the assimilation of crime to a general model of individualisation and marginalisation from normal social relations: the perfection of the juridical model. On the other hand growing relative deprivation as the basis for rising individual crime combined with the 'widening and deepening' process which begins to undermine the juridical notion of the offender and rediscovers criminality in the normal processes of social life, as a result of which 'the criminal' begins to deconstruct into the father, the husband, the businessman... etc. Post-Fordism, carries this a stage further. The global city is the context for the re- discovery of the normal processes of social and economic life embedded in criminality.

Much of this concerns changing forms of organised crime, or the criminal economy, which takes on a new functionality in the 'flexible accumulation' of the informal sector. Under Fordism organised crime tends to follow a Mertonian dynamic as a route to social mobility essentially in parallel to legitimate structures. Under post-Fordism it becomes fused with them in more complex ways. As far as the informal sector is concerned the methods of organised crime: the willingness to use violence to achieve business goals becomes especially appropriate as a form of 'resocialisation' of labour into new post - welfare state, post - trade union working conditions in which "Class consciousness no longer derives from the straight class relation between capital and labour, and moves onto a much more confused terrain of inter-familial conflicts and fights for power within a kinship or clan-like system of hierarchically ordered social relations." (Harvey 1989 p. 153). The 'archaic' forms of organisation appropriate to the insecurities of the underworld such as the role of ethnic and family loyalties (Reuter 1983) are precisely those of the new 'sweated labour' activities of the informal sector.

Organised crime is itself, of course, a form of economy, as in the drugs trade. The 'social crime' of early capitalism is turned on its head. From the criminalisation of the defence of traditional popular economy and forms of social control to the absorption of popular economy and social control by crime. The drugs economy, finding its labour force in the ranks of the permanently unemployed, brings together all the elements of the global city: a major form of employment in the informal sector, linked, through a global division of labour and money laundering, to the financial sector. Thus Castells notes that "booming criminal activities, particularly related to the drug traffic....generate income and a kind of employment for some sectors of the ghetto population... (but are)... not limited to the underclass. In fact, the money laundering activities that are a substantial part of the drug economy lie behind the flourishing of many ephemeral businesses, from restaurants to art galleries, that blossom and disappear in the space of a few months ... Ironically, these money laundering processes epitomise the oft praised flexibility of the new economy." (Castells 1989 p. 214). Such crime becomes simultaneously more organised and more disorganised. Traditional professional 'project' crime - such as armed robbery - is becoming deskilled and relatively unplanned (Matthews 1995 p. 179) while, through the drugs trade such 'disorganised organised crime' itself becomes globalised. Unlike traditional, neighbourhood or city based organised crime, drugs involves a global division of labour - in production or distribution, banking etc., and in particular in cities, concerned mainly with distribution, may become 'disorganised' and appear superficially as lacking any large scale organisation (Dorn et al. 1991). Also, unlike traditional organised crime, there is less concern with status, with the achievement of legitimate social goals by illegitimate means (Massing 1992). The entrepreneurs of global organised crime are increasingly shadowy figures shunning publicity or reputation. This is partly a matter of the increased effectiveness of law enforcement agencies but increasingly because organised crime is no longer a route to capitalism but increasingly one of its leading sectors⁷.

2. diversity and social polarisation

Many theorists have attempted to link the move to more flexible forms of economy to the emergence of a new 'postmodern' identity. Thus Stuart Hall argues that "the increased product differentiation which characterises 'post-Fordist' production... (mirrors) wider processes of cultural diversity and differentiation related to the multiplication of social worlds ... the pluralisation of life expands the potentialities and identities available to ordinary people in their everyday working, social, familial and sexual lives." (Hall 1989 p. 129). This optimistic view of 'New Times' seems to imply a restabilisation of capitalism, in particular as regards the issues of crime and crime control ⁸. To the extent that the social homogenisation - at least as regards consumption aspirations - characteristic of Fordism is replaced by the preoccupations of a plurality of 'local' identities or social worlds, then the basis of relative deprivation and anomie might be seen to crumble. While criminality might retain some meaning as forms of identity which impede and oppresses the freedom of other groups to develop their diversity and identity, the forces giving rise to crime, certainly from the perspective of anomie, would be diminished.

However, consumption based diversity requires money, and this is true even of a decentralised pluralistic system of consumption with less focus on central symbols of status. Money becomes the pure form of status, that which commensurates the plurality of 'postmodern' culture. Merton almost understood this when he noted that ''Money' is peculiarly well adapted to become a symbol of prestige. As Simmel emphasised, money is highly abstract and impersonal. However acquired, fraudulently or institutionally, it can be used to purchase the same goods and services.... The measure of 'monetary success' is conveniently indefinite and relative." (Merton 1957, p136). Money, however acquired, is also necessary to purchase a diversity of goods and services. Given that the concept of Fordism exaggerated the extent of homogenisation in mass produced products and lifestyles, then the important point about post-Fordism is not so much a greater diversity and decentralisation of consumption - though there undoubtedly is - but the shift to social polarisation as part of new labour flexibility and the growth of permanent unemployment. The result is both increases in relative deprivation from the close proximity of the very poor and the very rich in the global city together with the weakening of older (traditional working class and Fordist middle class) restraints upon innovative ways to acquire money. Thus not a reduction in crime but rather changes in its forms.

Post-Fordist flexibility extends, of course, to the business world. The 'rocket scientists' and others in the global city rich are, by virtue of the disaggregation of urban life, freed from restraints, either by communal norms or the state, to develop the same pathologies in search of which the sociologists poured over the traditional working class community: lack of a universalistic concept of crime, a generalised notion of outsiders as legitimate victims or potential predators. There is an increase in the 'anomie of affluence' (Simon and Gagnon 1976). In the British case the deregulation of the Stock Exchange in 1986 was symbolic in breaking up the old 'cultural' regulation of the City of London (Clarke, M. 1990) while computerisation and the establishment of direct global links between financial traders minimises the possibility of surveillance by the national state, as illustrated by the Barings fiasco of 1995. A reciprocity between legal and illegal business is a general feature of contemporary capitalism (Ruggiero 1986, 1993) and is symptomatic of an economic climate in which capital has to resort increasingly to breaking its own rules in order to remain viable.

A second form of stabilisation which might be expected from 'New Times' involves the collapse of legitimation crisis tendencies in the face of the fragmentation of the social subjects who were the bearers of such critique (Barcellona 1988, Crook et al 1992). Earlier critics of Habermas (McCarthy 1978) noted that one response to legitimation problems may well be a passive cynicism, a state of mind which also forms part of postmodern consciousness (Sloterdijk 1988). The social fragmentation of the critical subject combines with the spatial fragmentation of the global city to undermine the possibility of a public sphere. The consequence is that: Ïf we accept that fragmented discourses are the only authentic discourses and that no unified discourse is possible then there is no way to challenge the overall qualities of a social system" (Harvey 1992, p. 594). From the standpoint of the state, a fragmentation of critique leaves it free to develop 'post-legitimate' policies, or re-impose technicist solutions which no longer appeal to generalised notions of either juridical or instrumental legitimacy while at the same time adapting to the demands of particular coalitions of organised groups and ignoring those who are not organised, in a 'postmodern' variant of classic pluralist politics. A good example of this process is the way in which the gathering movement for democratic police accountability during the 1980's was effectively short circuited not via a high profile 'law and order' campaign but through the transformation of accountability into issues of market based efficiency, while at the same time the police made especial efforts to accommodate to the needs of specific groups of victims - of rape and domestic violence for example. But the other side of such cynicism, the abandonment of any search for concern with meta-narratives of justice, in volatile combination with poverty, social polarisation and marginalisation from communal or political organisation could hardly be a more potent source of crime. There is little to be found here in terms of stabilising tendencies.

3. Workfare and the 'hollowed out' state

The issue of the state brings us to the third theme. Post-Fordists such as Jessop (1994b) identify two processes at work. Firstly, the transition from the welfare to the 'workfare state' and, secondly, a process of 'hollowing out' of the state. The first is a fairly straightforward and familiar theme of the abandonment, under the impact of capital's need to reorganise the working class, of the relative autonomy of welfare policy from economic policy. The workfare state is aimed at guaranteeing labour flexibility, creating an attractive 'business environment' through vocational training, removal of restrictions on land use etc. rather than guaranteeing universalistic social rights and involves a shift to vocational training, innovation. This is not really a fundamental change in the relationship between state and economy in the sense that, during the Keynesian period, demand led public contracts for welfare facilities - hospitals, schools - were seen as economic stabilisers maintaining predictable levels of effective demand. Now the state has to assist in the dismantlement of the gains of the previous period.

This has a number of implications for crime and its control. Obviously a dismantling of welfare 'citizenship' under conditions of income polarisation has criminogenic consequences through the removal of a cushion to relative deprivation. Attempts by vocational training schemes to secure a downward revision of expectations further reinforce criminogenic cynicism among the unemployed. But more fundamentally, there is a parallel between the transition from welfare to workfare and changes in the role of the state in the control of petty crime. If the growth of non custodial and non supervisory punishment (Bottoms op. cit.) exemplified some of the characteristics of the Fordist KWS period, such a tendency has been displaced by a de facto return to the prison, and to supervised non custodial 'punishments in the community'. Bottom's argument (ibid.) that the growth of non supervised alternatives to custody presupposed that basic disciplinary functions were being exercised elsewhere no longer holds. The growth of the permanently unemployed, the need to breakdown notions of social rights in favour of flexibility and 'responsibility' places new tasks on the agenda of social control. While the juridical relationship of criminal justice in many ways conflicted with the modes of operation of the welfare state - particularly around the notion of individual responsibility - in other ways the two were compatible: the social control and integration produced by Fordism and the KWS was a foundation on which juridical responsibility could be imposed.

The transition to post-Fordism (that is, dismantlement of Fordism) involves a return in some respects to pre-Fordism, to the generalised surveillance and disciplining of the working class. Crime control thus becomes 'actuarial' (Feeley and Simon 1992, 1994), concerned with risk assessment, incapacitation and the management of delinquency. This takes a juridical - as opposed to a welfare - form as it did in the early nineteenth century (Garland 1985). But the object is less to prepare the new working class, through the experience of penal discipline, for the 'responsibility' required by labour for capital - factory discipline - and more that of introducing new flexibility, dismantling social rights and keeping the 'underclass' under control⁹. The relationship between the workfare state and actuarial criminal justice continues to be that of reciprocity: the criminal justice system picking up those who are unwilling to bend to the new flexibilities of the workfare state. But since the workfare state increasingly sheds older welfare guarantee functions, the criminal justice system increasingly picks up those who simply cannot find work, rather than actively refusing it. This reinforces the actuarial element in criminal justice (see below).

The 'hollowing out of the state' thesis involves the fragmentation of the old Keynesian planner welfare state linked to a national economy and social citizenship in two directions. Firstly, globalisation, or a loss of functions to global and supra regional bodies as economic processes can no longer be regulated at national level. This theme, which will not be pursued further at this time, has obvious implications for the development of international police agencies seeking to regulate multinational crime. Secondly, a process of localism, often combined with privatisation, in which regulatory functions are decentralised down from the national state to the level of 'entrepreneurial' cities and regions which, at the economic level, compete for investment opportunities in new forms of partnership with local capital or other cities which cut across national boundaries. The hollowing out process is made possible on the one hand by a collapse of Fordist corporatist, welfare and economic planning functions centred on the national state and on the other by 'flexible accumulation' and the establishment of new local state-private and inter-regional linkages that bypass the national territory. Privatisation and localism go hand in hand.

Such a process has a number of implications for crime and crime control. Local delivery of welfare state services is classically held to have weakened the basis for clientalism and organised crime by forcing client groups to articulate their claims in terms of universalistic categories of need centrally administered. Robert Merton saw the welfare state as a factor in the decline of American 'machine' politics: ït was a basic structural change in the form of providing services, through the rationalised procedures of what some call 'the welfare state,' that largely spelled the decline of the political machine." (1957 p.194). This is a one-sided view, the co-existence between powerful organised crime syndicates, big business and the planner state is now well understood (Ruggiero op. cit.). Nevertheless a combination of localism and privatisation can be seen to offer new opportunities. Weakening of central supervision, and the subcontracting of services minimises accountability may allow organised crime groups to repossess from the state some of their classic 'protection' functions.

At the level of crime control and criminal justice agencies the actuarial tendency, precisely because it is concerned with generalised containment, can be privatised. There is a tendency to return to eighteenth century local forms, as in the 'rebirth' of private policing (Johnson 1992). Private based property protection and crime prevention schemes reinforce the polarisation of the city and displace democratic or centralised bureaucratic forms of accountability, discourses of rights and justice, in favour of accountability to decentralised groups of customers. The last residues of a common welfare state citizenship fragment with the privatisation - alongside the militarisation - of public space. In a similar way criminal justice agencies begin to develop their own local criteria and strategies for managing disorder. Police forces function locally as semi-autonomous micro criminal justice systems provoking a continual expansion of, for example, informal cautioning and resulting in many cases in a decline in reported crime rates reflected in traditional centrally recorded criminal statistics (Matthews op. cit.). They are eventually joined by organised crime, which once established as a major employer becomes a major source of stabilisation and social control and reassumes some of its traditional functions of protection and dispute resolution.

However it would be wrong to interpret this process, as do some functionalist accounts of 'postmodernisation' as a withering away of the state in which de-differentiation through new local public-private combinations is carried out to such an extent that the "...very notion of 'the state' as a separate and autonomous institutional entity intimately linked with the notion of 'politics' and 'public sphere' and clearly separated from the domains of economy, societal community and culture, is increasingly problematic." (Crook et al. 1992 p.104). Jessop, for example, is careful to distinguish hollowing out from a process of demise, stressing that the maintenance of social cohesion ßtill depends on the state's capacities to manage... conflicts." (1994 pfws p27, 1994amin p 274). The matter can be put in stronger terms: the national state - and to some extent the supra-national state appears increasingly in a 'Leninist' guise as 'marching bodies of armed men' the central core of force, the agency of last resort for the containment of resistance.

conclusion

In such a brief attempt to relate some of the themes from the debate around a transition to post-Fordism to issues of crime and crime control conclusions might seem hazardous. The emphasis has been on seeing in 'post' Fordism less the emergence of a new form of stability than a characterisation of the as-yet-to-be-resolved crisis conditions of late twentieth century capitalism. However, the present phase of capitalist development may be unique as a slow and protracted crisis following the long post war boom and thus the need for capital is less that of a sudden or 'episodic' strategy to restore profitable accumulation in traditional sectors than the need to develop new forms of economy and social control insulated from previous gains of the KWS. In this sense post-Fordism as the concept of a social formation in 'slow crisis' may be is a useful direction of development.

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Footnotes:

¹ Echoed, in a different way, by the aristocracy and the very rich with their contempt for bourgeois universalistic notions of law and criminal responsibility and for the agencies of criminal justice - vide the impenetrable wall of silence thrown up to protect Lord Lucan who 'only' murdered a servant.

² Defined by Eric Hobsbawm, (1972). as 'a conscious, almost a political, challenge to the prevailing social and political order and its values'

³ This is distinct from the argument that the whole concept of Fordism as a distinct stage of capitalist development is spurious (Cf. Clarke, S. 1990, Brenner and Glick 1991)

⁴ When one considers the continuous decline in crime from 1850 in 'traditional' working class communities it might have seemed more appropriate to investigate these areas in terms of their successful social control of crime rather than their pathological features. This reveals the ideological nature of much sociological investigation.

⁵ The question of organised crime throws an interesting light on the dynamics of Fordism and anomie. The 'American' form of organised crime as typified by Cosa Nostraprovided in many respects a classically 'Mertonian' solution in the form of surrogate routes to social mobility for social groups assimilated to the aspirations of Fordist mass consumption but excluded from its achievement (Bell 1961, Cloward and Ohlin 1960). In Britain Fordism combined with a more consolidated KWS and high levels of employment kept syndicate crime localised in traditional communities even if some of its members emulated the flamboyant characteristics of American mobsters. (Hobbs 1988, Pearson 1973).

⁶ The issue goes to the heart of Marxist political economy and cannot be debated here. For a discussion see Mattick 1969. Clarke 1988.

⁷ This tendency can be seen writ large in the former USSR where the formation of a new business class is virtually indistinguishable from the growth of organised crime. (Handelman 1994)

⁸ Of course, from the standpoint of postmodern philosophy the very concept of crime is ripe for deconstruction. Cf. Smart 1995, Lea (forthcoming)

⁹ The notion of the 'juridical' relationship is in fact used in a number of different ways.Garland mistakenly juxtaposes it to the 'disciplinary' arguing, contra Foucault, that the early nineteenth century prison was juridical as opposed to disciplinary, the latter only coming in with the welfare model at the turn of the century. Yet at this time Foucault's analysis of discipline as the 'dark side' of the juridical relation is surely correct: the working class was a wilful threat due to its resistance to capital and also needed disciplining into appropriate habits. The disciplinary and juridical part company in the welfare model which emerges in penality, as Garland says, at the end of the nineteenth century when the criminal is no longer perceived as willful threat but as pathology. The juridical punishment detected by Bottoms presupposes, as we have argued, the accomplishment of discipline and hence the full responsibilisation of the individual. The actuarial relationship again combines the juridical and disciplinary but the latter only in the negative sense of keeping under control rather than socialisation for capital, and as a device for 'victim precipitation' deflecting responsibility for social problems onto their victims.