Nutshell Studies: Young (2007)

Students (and teachers) of Left Realism should find the latest nutshell study particularly useful for the way it extends Young’s Realist arguments in a couple of interesting ways:

Firstly, the concept of subculture that features so prominently in the three-cornered approach to crime (the criminogenic triangle) is extended to include recent developments in online behaviours. This is a significant step towards acknowledging the increasing social significance of online communities and their role in crime and deviance.

Secondly, by posing the interesting contradiction between online cultural inclusion and real-world material deprivation (the latter, of course, being another key Left Realist theme) Young forges explicit links between Merton’s Strain Theory and Realist ideas about the social tensions that propel individuals into crime.

Young “The Vertigo of Late Modernity” (2007)

Illustration:  “The Maze of Modern Life”

Joe is 18 years old, lives in a tower block with his parents and two sisters and spends most of his time online. His Instagram feed is filled with influencers showing off designer clothes, luxury holidays and perfect bodies, but the zero-hours shifts he works at a local fast-food chain leaves him with little or no spare cash once the bills have been paid. His family struggles financially. He struggles financially and his lack of educational qualifications makes it unlikely he’s ever going to land a job that will give him the financial freedom he needs to start a family.

He feels anxious, invisible and stuck, but Joe wants to belong.

He buys branded trainers on credit, posts filtered selfies of the best life he’s living and joins online groups that hold out the promise of status and respect. He repeatedly hears he can “be anything”, if he “just believes” and can find the right hustle.

His reality is very different to the life he desires.

Offline, he’s excluded: from higher education, stable work and a house of his own. He starts skipping shifts, argues constantly with his parent and starts hanging out with a local group he met online who talk about “how to hustle” and the “easy money” to be made from normies and muggles…

Joe’s experience reflects what Jock Young calls “the vertigo of late modernity” – a disorientating mix of online cultural inclusion and offline social exclusion.

Insights…

Young argues that late modernity (or what some writers call “postmodernity”) is a time of rapid social, cultural and technological change that creates a general sense of uncertainty around work, relationships and individual identities.

In particular, the disjunction between the rapid technological changes that have opened-up a new universe of cultural inclusion – everyone is invited to follow their dreams, consume the latest fashions and trends and find a sense of identity and belonging in brands and media – and the social exclusion that results from a real-world denial of access to secure jobs, educational opportunities, affordable housing and face-to-face relationships.

The contradiction between cultural inclusion in a virtual world and social exclusion in the real world creates ontological insecurity: the concept, originally coined by the radical psychiatrist R.D.Laing (The Divided Self, 1960) and developed sociologically by Anthony Giddens (Modernity and Self-Identity, 1991) refers to “a deep sense of uncertainty about who we are, how the world works, its stability and predictability”.

In this respect, although crime and deviance frequently have their roots in poverty and social deprivation, Young argues that in late modernity they are increasingly a response to the existential pressures created by ontological insecurity. The metaphor Young uses to express this idea – the vertigo of late modernity – describes the idea that many young people feel as if they are continually being pushed and pulled in a multiplicity of different directions that leaves them feeling dizzy and unable to find solid ground in their lives.

Symbolic inclusion coupled with material exclusion creates a tension that many can only resolve through crime.

Implications…

Perspective	Implications
Marxism	Young’s Left Realism doesn’t dispute ideas like class inequality and social exclusion are drivers of crime, but adds the pressures generated by cultural inclusion as a new factor in understanding criminality.
Functionalism	Directly challenges the idea of shared norms and values as a form of social glue. Late modernity creates fragmented values, normative confusions and unstable personal and social identities.
Strain Theory	Young’s arguments refence strain theory and the tensions between cultural inclusion (Merton’s “American Dream”) and the reality of social exclusion through low-skill, low paid work.
Interactionism	By introducing questions of identity struggles and individual meaning Young adds an Action dimension to Left Realism.
Postmodernism	While many of the concepts Young employs – social and cultural fluidity, uncertainty, media-driven identities – would be familiar to postmodernists, Young, like Giddens, argues we live in late modernity, rather than postmodernity.
Left Realism	While crime is still seen to be rooted in a combination of relative deprivation, political marginalisation and subculture, the latter is extended through the concept of online cultural inclusion.

Exam Tips and Where to Apply Them:

In addition to adding a new dimension (the contradiction between cultural inclusion and social exclusion) to Young’s Left Realism this work can be used to illustrate how strains and tensions in

late modernity creates unstable identities that are often resolved through criminal behaviour.

Young’s ideas can be linked to wider ideas about crime, criminality and the role of (social) media, inequality and social change.

Critically, compare the similarities and differences between Young’s work and Merton’s (1938) Strain Theory of crime.