Abstract
In this article I focus on the prominent themes of a need for `discipline' and punishment in people's understandings of crime, authority, and the law, on the outer-city estates of Lower Shepton in Manchester, UK, drawing on my ethnography of the estates. I develop a Foucauldian analysis of the uneven relationships between local discourses and practices of `discipline', and `national' institutional frameworks — of legality, crime control and media — whilst avoiding the functionalist tendencies of recent studies employing the notion of governmentality. Using Fitzpatrick's formulation of the law as myth (1992), I show how disciplinarian strands in crime discourse, and their appeal to intact authority, provided a measure of symbolic resolution to some of the social conflicts and personal anxieties involved in the negotiation of everyday life on the estates, building consent for more punitive measures at the level of crime control policy in the process.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
