Law

Unpicking the lives of dedicated drinkers, hedonists and adult consumers, Contemporary adulthood and the Night Time Economy examines the emergence of new forms of cultural and aesthetic attachment to alcohol and reconsiders the way we think about and use our city centres. The first generation to experience the new experiential markets of the night-time economy are now in their thirties and forties, but have been largely neglected in research on alcohol consumption and night time leisure practices. While the general assumption appears to be that such individuals simply grow up and grow out of excessive alcohol consumption and adopt the identity of a respectable adult, Contemporary adulthood and the Night Time Economy highlights how the late night city centre continues to act as a significant draw and as a means of examining the relationship between consumer capitalism and the erosion of traditional adult identity. For committed consumers the night time economy represents part of a powerful trend that is destabilising identity, cultivating narcissism and infantilising a new generation.

"Avoiding both cliché-ridden hysteria, and the over-ripe products of redundant theoretical silos, Oliver Smith has produced a beautifully written, carefully nuanced account of post-industrial leisure that normalises and explains the contemporary night-time economy. Read it before going to the pub". Professor Dick Hobbs, University of Essex

"Skilfully weaving sophisticated theory and interview data, Smith provides a sharp analysis of how the young (and the not-so-young) use alcohol and the night time leisure economy to structure identity and give meaning to their lives as they attempt to negotiate today’s long march to adulthood’. Professor Keith Hayward, University of Kent, UK

“Smith treads carefully around the piles of puke and discarded beer cans to offer a trenchant analysis of depressive hedonism and ideological incorporation. It is not a happy story, but it is one that everyone interested in the reality of contemporary culture must digest. I can't recommend it more highly”. Professor Simon Winlow, Teesside University

“This book is a 'must read' for anyone wanting to make sense of the relationship between 'extended' adolescence, alcohol consumption, and the night-time economy (NTE). This book theoretically and empirically redefines the phenomenon of 'going out' in contemporary society”.
Professor Robert Hollands, Newcastle University

Oi, mate! If you aren't gonna grab anything then fuck off out the shop!"-Comment from Black Friday shopper made toward the researcher On 28 th November 2014 British shops, both online and real-world, offered a day of huge savings on a range of consumer products under the banner of Black Friday. Retailers and superstores across the country opened either at midnight or provided extended opening hours, offering 'door buster' deals and significant discounts on a range of consumer goods. The widespread importation of the US shopping phenomenon onto the UK high-street and, with it, the chaotic disorder and sporadic violence which has become a defining feature of Black Friday in the US, represents an intriguing conundrum for criminologists. The terms 'crime' and deviance suggest a breaking of rules and boundaries both formal and informal. However on Black Friday such behaviours occurred within the quintessentially normal leisure activity of postmodernity: going shopping. The challenge for criminologists is how to offer a social-scientific analysis and explanation of such a strange mix of normativity with what appeared to be a deviation from social norms and values. While theories around the etymology of the term vary wildly, to us, the most likely explanation is that Black Friday refers to the first point in the financial year at which retailers begin to see a profit-in accounting terms moving from the red into the black (Thomas and Peters, 2011). While other explanations exist, this one appears to illustrate the import with which the sales are viewed by retailers whose very existence depends on enticing customers to part with their cash. Regardless of the origin of the term, the impact of this single day of trading was little short of staggering, with retail sales rates rising 6.4% compared to November 2013 and online spending hitting £810m, eclipsing the more modest prediction of £650m (BBC News, 2014b; Wood and Smithers, 2014). These figures alone distinguish Black Friday from the myriad other sales events throughout the calendar year, while the 24-hour 'opportunity' offered by retailers creates a desperate sense of 'event' that is largely absent from the January sales. The chaotic scenes of pushing, shoving, trampling and fighting which have become a familiar, even defining, characteristic of Black Friday in the United States emerged across several cities in the UK (BBC News, 2014), providing a snapshot of the sharp end of contemporary consumerism. Police were called to stores in Manchester, Cardiff, Newcastle upon Tyne, London, Dundee and Glasgow, among others, to deal with reports of violence and disorder. While firm official statistics on arrests and injuries seem hard to come by, Greater Manchester police confirmed making three arrests, with one woman suffering a broken wrist and head injury from a falling television during a confrontation. These were not isolated incidences whipped into a moral panic by a hyperbolic media. We witnessed several exchanges of physical violence between customers in addition to abusive behaviour towards other shoppers and staff-none of which were deemed serious enough (or perhaps abnormal enough) to constitute arrest. One notable incident involved a quite blatant display of common assault and attempted criminal damage, with the only punishment being that the perpetrator did not get the item he wanted: Author's Fieldnotes Two men, probably in their thirties are fighting over a television. They swing around and one man loses his grip slightly-it's clear who is going to come out on top. As he realises he's about to lose out, he starts to kick out at the other man's leg, swinging repeatedly at the back of the knee. When this doesn't work, he turns his attention to the television, frantically trying to rip at the cardboard packaging, and trying to yank it down toward the ground to stamp on it in an effort to sabotage his opponent's victory. Security finally intervenes, storming over and pulling the men apart, clumsily trying to move them to opposite ends of the store. As the loser is being pulled away, he swings his leg out and gets good contact, kicking the television and putting his foot through the cardboard. The television falls to the floor between them, claimed by nobody, before another shopper goes up to inspect the damage and considers a potential 'steal' of a purchase. As the original 'loser' is pushed toward the exit he refuses to leave, demanding that they provide another television despite the manager making it quite clear that they're now out of stock on that particular deal-but that he could purchase one for a slightly higher price if he wished. The man refuses, standing defiantly and demanding the original deal for several minutes. He swears to himself and, clearly irate, paces in front of the security guard who was trying to keep him from entering the shop, mirroring one another in their sideways movements. Finally after a few minutes he concedes defeat, waving his hand dismissively at the security guard and stomps off.

This article argues that the 2014 adoption of the US shopping tradition of Black Friday sales to stores and supermarkets in the United Kingdom and beyond represents an important point of enquiry for the social sciences. We claim that the importation of the consumer event, along with the disorder and episodes of violence that accompany it, are indicative of the triumph of liberal capitalist consumer ideology while reflecting an embedded and cultivated form of insecurity and anxiety concomitant with the barbaric individualism, social envy and symbolic competition of consumer culture. Through observation and qualitative interviews, this article presents some initial analyses of the motivations and meanings attached to the conduct of those we begin to understand as ‘extreme shoppers’ and seeks to understand these behaviours against the context of the social harms associated with consumer culture.

This article explains why an understanding of deviant leisure is significant for criminology. Through reorienting our understanding of ‘deviance’ from a contravention of norms and values to encompassing engagement in behaviour and actions that contravene a moral ‘duty to the other’, the new ‘deviant leisure’ perspective outlined here describes activities that through their adherence to cultural values inscribed by consumer capitalism, have the potential to result in harm. Using the ideological primacy of consumer capitalism as a point of departure, we explore the potential for harm that lies beneath the surface of even the most embedded and culturally accepted forms of leisure. Such an explanation requires a reading that brings into focus the subjective, socially corrosive, environmental and embedded harms that arise as a result of the commodification of leisure. In this way, this article aims to act as a conceptual foundation for diverse yet coherent research into deviant leisure.

The formation of online, or virtual, communities has been a feature of the Internet since its public inception. Mass participation and access to permanently stored online content have allowed for the development of the network structure into a prolific venue for sharing knowledge and common interests, and, just as the operational capabilities of the network expands, so too does the role, and potential, of the online community. The variety of ways in which users have established, developed and contributed to online communities is as diverse as culture itself, and as such, to try and map the sum of online geographies would prove rather redundant. In general however, there exist two core models of 'virtual community', within which subsist Electronic Personae.

This paper is an introductory summary of a large-scale project, which I first outlined in more detail during the assessment for my Masters degree and is currently under development. It describes what I call the "Cyber Law Protocol", an automatic system capable of enforcing legal rules into networking operations.

By the term “personality” is defined in law the most coherent quality of empowered and protected subjectivity. As post-modernity features the division of the individual self, utilising in addition the intervention of technological themes to explore variants of activity and expression, contemporary legal science is challenged, on frequent occasions, with assessing the parameters of subsequently emerging trends and clearing the reshaped landscape by defining in its language the characteristics of advancing practices. With all these in mind, and overwhelmed by concepts of scattered identity as appearing within the ICTs context, we are facing a new problem of potential fallacy: could permanent manifestations of the person be accepted as extensions of the legally protected personality? Are e-mail accounts, online game characters and others similar projections of the individual on the information streamline, parts of the natural self that law enshrines or, simply,an enthusiastically overrated deception? Taking into account instances of legal persons contesting human rights in court and proprietary items being addressed-for functional purposes- by national legislations as persons, we may imagine the importance of granting personality rights or, at least, conceding to a limited ground of thereupon set line of defence. Opposite to the growing overpopulation of laws, which results in sluggish administration of justice, we need to reach to conclusions while carefully dealing with the conflict between legal and societal realism: the first calls for symmetry and prudence; the second demands for seeking out to preserve the most threatened value in our age of advancing commercialism and thin identity: the human individual.