ABSTRACT
The idea of 'social crisis' is uncomfortable territory for the professional field of criminology. It is also a messy area for those journalists, politicians and other contemporary 'soothsayers' who, in modern Western society, are given the responsibility of interpreting the outbreak of individual or collective instances of crime. Professional criminologists often spend any time they have in the public sphere of television, radio or newspapers trying to deny the reality of people's fears or, alternatively, reduced into the recital of vulgar forms of nineteenth-century statistical positivism. In the course of the last fifteen years, during what Piore and Sabel refer to as 'the crisis of mass manufacturing', and Hall and Jacques call 'the crisis of Fordism', there has been a massive haemorrhaging of full-time employment in most Western societies, particularly in heavy or manufacturing industries. Nearly every traditional criminological text of the earlier post-war period, in both North America and Europe, is written against a set of 'statist assumptions'.
