4.3.1 - Postmodern Perspectives on Crime

Late modern life, insecurity and consumer identity

Traditional theories such as functionalism and Marxism often work with a big overall explanation of crime. Functionalists link crime to weak integration, normlessness, or the boundary-setting role of deviance. Marxists connect crime to class inequality and the needs of capitalism. Postmodern writers challenge the idea that one large theory can explain all crime in contemporary society.

For postmodernists, late-modern or postmodern society is more fragmented, unstable, and individualised. Identity is less fixed by class, community, religion, or lifelong work. People are pushed to construct themselves through lifestyle, image, taste, and consumption. That matters for crime because offending may now be tied not only to material need, but also to status, identity, and emotional experience.

Jock Young argues that late modernity combines cultural inclusion with structural exclusion. People are constantly told what a successful life should look like, yet many cannot reach it through secure work or stable opportunity. This produces relative deprivation: the sense that you are unfairly missing out compared with others around you. Young also argues that late-modern life is marked by insecurity, so crime grows in a social world shaped by instability rather than settled routines and shared values.

Zygmunt Bauman makes a similar point through the idea of liquid modernity. In a consumer society, belonging is increasingly demonstrated through what you can buy, wear, or experience. Those who cannot take part fully become what Bauman calls flawed consumers. Crime can therefore become a way of gaining goods, status, or a recognisable identity in a world where consumption is treated as proof of worth.

This also changes how we think about social order and social control. If society is less held together by a strong value consensus, order looks more fragile. Control becomes less about assuming everyone shares the same norms and more about managing insecurity, visibility, exclusion, and risk.

Crime as excitement, style and transgression

Postmodern approaches are especially useful for explaining crimes that do not fit a simple money motive. Some offences are attractive because they offer excitement, identity, danger, or a break from routine.

Jack Katz focuses on the foreground of crime: the immediate emotional experience of offending. In The Seductions of Crime, he argues that some crimes are compelling because they offer a sneaky thrill, a sense of moral superiority, or an intense rush of adrenaline. This helps explain why crime may feel meaningful to offenders even when the rewards are small.

Stephen Lyng argues that some deviance and crime are forms of edgework. In highly regulated, routine social worlds, risk-taking can feel authentic because it allows people to test themselves, show control under pressure, and escape boredom. Joyriding, violent confrontation, and some forms of drug use can be understood this way: the attraction lies partly in the risk itself.

Keith Hayward and Jock Young push this further through cultural criminology. They argue that crime should be understood as a cultural phenomenon shaped by style, image, media, and consumer desire. The night-time economy is a good example. Bars, clubs, and entertainment districts are not just places where crime happens by accident. They are spaces where identity is performed, status is displayed, intoxication is normalised, and transgression can become part of the attraction.