Steve Tomb
Biographic Data
| ID | 253103 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steve Tomb |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steve |
| FAMILY NAME | Tomb |
| SIGNATURE | TOMB S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Liverpool John Moores University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0512-2563 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 238 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Justice After Grenfell? Crime, Harm and Structural Inequality
What does justice look like for the people affected by Grenfell? This study addresses that question variously. First, via the lens of social harm, highlighting searing and ongoing effects of the fire. Then, I explore Grenfell as a site of injustice, through law and within contexts of structural inequalities, not least at the intersections of ‘race’ and class. This leads to a series of observations on the role and outcomes of the public inquiry, b…
Regulating exposure
This paper examines the juxtaposition of two phenomena – deaths at work and coronavirus deaths – in the context of regulatory strategies which are ostensibly to prevent such deaths. More specifically, my particular focus is on the ways in which work, working and workplaces were managed – and indeed somewhat obscured – during the pandemic, so that the normalisation of work-related deaths by and large continued, even perhaps exacerbated, certainly …
Deaths and Covid‐19
This article critically considers the UK Government's insidious attempts to control the narrative around COVID‐19 deaths through using the interrelated strategies of “talk and ‘silence’ in order to socially construct a definitive ‘truth’” around the virus. The article traces how these strategies worked in practice and the shift which took place from numerous press briefings and Parliamentary debates to an ominous silence around the number of deat…
The Escalating Crisis of Health and Safety Law Enforcement in Great Britain
This paper explores occupational safety and health regulation in Great Britain following the UK's exit from the European Union. In particular, the paper focuses on the credibility of regulatory enforcement. The prospects raised by the UK's exit from the European Union have long been part of a free-market fantasy-even obsession-of right-wing politicians and their ideologues. As the UK's relationship with the EU is recalibrated, this will present r…
Towards social harm and zemiology
Here we focus upon the areas of contention between criminology, critical criminology, social harm and zemiology. It pulls together some of the key responses to the early works established in Beyond Criminology (2004) to outline criticism from various academics working in the fields of criminology and critical criminology. The chapter also considers what we know about harm, and introduces some of its characteristics.
Conclusion
In our concluding chapter, we emphasise that zemiology must be a participative and co-operative activity, operating beyond academic borders – zemiology, we argue, must be embraced as an activist as well as an academic activity.
The relations and ontologies of harm
Further focusing upon the contours and dynamics of the concept of social harm, this chapter explores various ways in which harms need to be considered in relational terms – where harm is also always linked to benefit, whether this is for identifiable agents, institutions and interests, or for maintaining or exacerbating existent, unequal power structures. Then we review efforts to determine the ontology of harm. That review traverses in particula…
A provisional typology of harm
In this chapter we develop in-depth definitions of how harm itself is defined, and how dimensions of harms might be categorised heuristically. This is based upon the development of a tentative critical typology, exploring physical harms, emotional/psychological harms, economic and financial harms, cultural harms, harms of recognition and autonomy harms. While we set our apparently discrete categories, however, we emphasise that harms are experien…
Understanding social harm
This chapter defines the term and usage of the word ‘zemiology’: its origins in the Greek xemia , or harm, and its use in studying social harm, and will briefly introduce dimensions of harm. It maps the historical use of the term as an approach to studying social problems which is alternative to – but linked with – criminology. Furthermore, as a basis for understanding the objectives of zemiology, this chapter will outline the nine fundamental cr…
Doing zemiology
Here we focus on some of the dimensions of how a zemiological approach might be operationalised. Researching social harm often involves doing at least one of two things: exposing, documenting, mapping and understanding a harm or harms as they have been experienced and how they have been produced. In this chapter we shall make some zemiological observations on these two – inter-related, of course – activities – and then consider what they imply fo…
Reframing Regulation
This paper considers how the re-framing of regulation, in ways that have allowed an inter-penetration of private sector mentalities and actors with state regulators, have combined in the UK to produce both a de-democratisation and the erosion of social protection. It does so through an exploration of the enforcement of law designed to regulate business. In particular, I examine enforcement and regulatory policy at Local Authority level under the …
K. S. León, Corrupt Capital
From Social Harm to Zemiology
This book outlines key developments in understanding social harm by setting out its historical foundations and the discussions which have proliferated since. It examines various attempts to conceptualise social harm and highlights key sites of contestation in its relationship to criminology to argue that these act as the basis for an activist zemiology, one directed towards social change for social justice. The past two decades have seen a prolif…
K. Lasslett, Uncovering the Crimes of Urbanisation
Corporate Crime
Corporate crime has been a contested and often loosely defined term, but covers a range of illegalities produced by corporate actors. Such crimes have considerable economic, physical, and social costs. That said, these crimes have been relatively marginal to criminology and most useful work has proceeded at the margins of or beyond the narrow confines of criminology, seeking to develop integrative forms of understanding of the production of corpo…
Undoing Social Protection
The UK’s corporate killing law
The annual total of occupational deaths in the UK is measured in the tens of thousands, yet the overwhelming majority attract no criminal justice attention. More recently, a very small number of deaths have generated attempts to prosecute companies for manslaughter. In 1996, following a series of multiple fatality ‘disasters’, the Law Commission proposed for a new law on corporate manslaughter; in 2008, the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Ho…
Making better regulation, making regulation better
Better Regulation is a re-regulatory strategy that has unfolded in Britain (and, of course, beyond, through Europe and the OECD) across the past decade. This article beings by setting out some quantitative indicators of trends in national and local enforcement in three key areas of protective regulation – food hygiene and food safety, workers’ health and safety, and pollution control – from 2003/2004 to 2012/2013. It then goes on, in its main sec…
Social Protection after the Crisis
The Corporate Criminal
Drawing upon a wide range of sources of empirical evidence, historical analysis and theoretical argument, this book shows beyond any doubt that the private, profit-making, corporation is a habitual and routine offender. The book dissects the myth that the corporation can be a rational, responsible, 'citizen'. It shows how in its present form, the corporation is permitted, licensed and encouraged to systematically kill, maim and steal for profit. …
Social Protection after the Crisis
Social Protection After the Crisis looks closely at the regulation of corporate crime and subsequent social harm that takes into account the economic, political, and social consequences of the economic crisis of 2008 and the austerity measures that followed. Steve Tombs lays out clearly the incompatibility of social and economic welfare with deregulated corporate activity, and he builds a rich empirical and theoretical analysis of regulatory refo…
Counterblast
Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Crimes of the Powerful’
Crisis, What Crisis? Regulation and the Academic Orthodoxy
What can criminology or socio‐legal studies tell us about the causes of the financial crisis – a failure of regulation, at the very least – or ways in which further such crises might be prevented, mitigated, responded to? The article begins by setting out the emergence and dimensions of the academic orthodoxy on regulation – a series of shared assumptions regarding feasible and desirable forms of regulation. Then it undertakes a quantitative and …
The Myths and Realities of Deterrence in Workplace Safety Regulation
Given the proliferation of the use of deterrence in neo-liberal crime control policies, it is remarkable that this concept remains absent from the study and practice of corporate regulation. The paper explores this absence in the regulation literature, highlighting a series of widely accepted myths about deterrence in this literature, myths that have also been reproduced in British policy debates. Having discussed the enduring, if hidden, adheren…
From Social Harm to Zemiology
This book outlines key developments in understanding social harm by setting out its historical foundations and the discussions which have proliferated since. It examines various attempts to conceptualise social harm and highlights key sites of contestation in its relationship to criminology to argue that these act as the basis for an activist zemiology, one directed towards social change for social justice. The past two decades have seen a prolif…
Transcending the deregulation debate? Regulation, risk, and the enforcement of health and safety law in theUK
This paper considers the context for the development of the concept of responsive regulation, namely the transcending of the deregulation debate. It argues that claims regarding responsive regulation when allied to risk‐based rationales for enforcement can, in fact, allow a “deregulatory” momentum to develop. This argument is grounded with reference to a case study of the regulation of workplace health and safety in theUK, with a particular focus…
Ideology, Hegemony, and Empiricism
In this article we engage in an extended critique of the thesis that the illegal conduct of corporations necessarily calls for different forms of regulation than other kinds of law-breaking. The proponents of that view argue that the unique nature of such illegalities is one reason why they necessitate a particular type of enforcement attitude or response. They advocate a strategy that produces compliance through persuasion rather than through th…
Hazards, Law and Class
Responding to the crisis
This article reviews some of the mainstream policies proposed to tackle the economic crisis of 2008-09 and its aftermath, and goes on to advocate a policy of economic stabilisation grants (ESGs). It argues that ESGs, which would be paid to every citizen at a rate that could be varied according to the severity of the crisis, would be more effective in boosting aggregate demand and more efficient in terms of resource allocation. Unlike the alternat…
A Deadly Consensus
This paper documents the vulnerability of the UK workplace safety regime to ' regulatory degradation ' . Following a brief overview of this regime, the paper examines the dominant arguments within academic literature on appropriate and feasible regulatory enforcement, arguing that the approaches to regulation thereby advocated have been easily degraded as a result of their compatibility with neoliberal economic strategy. A subsequent analysis of …
Capital, Crime Control and Statecraft in the Entrepreneurial City
Recent debates have drawn attention to the centrality of crime and disorder discourses within the rationale of contemporary urban entrepreneurial rule and how these have targeted ideological and political resources onto policing 'quality of life' infractions on the streets. In extending these insights, the paper focuses upon the regeneration of urban order in the UK and how this is being increasingly practised through a form of corporatised state…
Hegemony, risk and governance
Recent improvements in the ways in which hazardous substances are produced, stored and distributed are often explained in terms of advances in scientific knowledge and technique, and an increased social awareness of danger. Drawing largely upon the Gramscian tradition, and referring to recent writings on risk and governance, this paper provides an alternative account of these changes. Improvements in the 'social regulation' of hazardous economic …
Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful
Policing Corporate ‘Skid Rows’
Foucault, Governmentality, Marxism
Violence', Safety Crimes and Criminology
While safety crimes far outweigh crimes of ‘conventional’ violence, British criminology continues to operate with rather narrow definitions of violence which exclude these. The aim of this paper is to examine the key ways in which occupational injury and death remain excluded by criminological definitions of violence. To do so, we review briefly three recent examples of approaches to, or discussions of, violence. Our discussions of each point to …
Industrial Injuries in British Manufacturing Industry
This paper begins by considering the effects of the business cycle upon the incidence of industrial accidents in British manufacturing industries, arguing that a generalized discussion of such cycles obscures important aspects of the political economy within individual cycles. In particular, the strength of the labour movement is related to the incidence of accidents at work. Since the trade unions are only one part of the tripartite system of th…
How do you get your voice heard when no-one will let you?’ Victimization at work
A longstanding separation between corporate crime and ‘real’ or ‘conventional’ crime is both reflected in and institutionalized through state responses to corporate offending, excluding the victims of corporate crime from consideration or treatment as real victims of real crime. Experiences of this institutionalized disjuncture are treated in this article, through consideration of criminal justice, legal and regulatory responses to six cases of o…
Stemming the flow of bood? The illusion of self-regulation
Whistleblowing, organisational harm and the self-regulating organisation
Whistleblowing has emerged as a key element of regulatory strategy. This article provides a brief, theoretical analysis of the claimed affinities between whistleblowing, self-regulation and corporate social responsibility. It then addresses a series of key issues in relation to whistleblowing: the individual, organisational and social characteristics associated with the decision to blow the whistle (or not); the consequences of reporting organisa…
Death and Work in Britain
Official figures indicate that there were 302 fatal occupational injuries in Britain in 1996/97. This paper is a sustained critique of the means by which this 'headline figure' is reached. Drawing upon other, more or less recoverable, officially collected data on fatal injuries it demonstrates that there are at least five times more fatal occupational injuries during this time period. It then considers various anomalies and inconsistencies within…
Law, Resistance and Reform
The UK’s corporate killing law
The annual total of occupational deaths in the UK is measured in the tens of thousands, yet the overwhelming majority attract no criminal justice attention. More recently, a very small number of deaths have generated attempts to prosecute companies for manslaughter. In 1996, following a series of multiple fatality ‘disasters’, the Law Commission proposed for a new law on corporate manslaughter; in 2008, the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Ho…
The Myths and Realities of Deterrence in Workplace Safety Regulation
Given the proliferation of the use of deterrence in neo-liberal crime control policies, it is remarkable that this concept remains absent from the study and practice of corporate regulation. The paper explores this absence in the regulation literature, highlighting a series of widely accepted myths about deterrence in this literature, myths that have also been reproduced in British policy debates. Having discussed the enduring, if hidden, adheren…
An independent review of British health and safety regulation? From common sense to non-sense
The view that regulatory provisions protecting the employment conditions of workers need to be minimised in order to protect the business needs of employers has been an ongoing theme in British governmental policy discourse over the past three decades. For the present Coalition government, the assumption that current levels of regulation are unduly burdensome on employers and hence harmful to the economy has continued to be enthusiastically voice…
Working for Criminalization of Economic Offending
Can Economic Crime Control be Sustained? The Case of Finland
In this paper, we present some findings from research conducted in Finland on the emergence and nature of the Finnish government's Action Plans to Reduce Economic Crime and the Grey Economy. We set out the origins of the Finnish economic crime control programme, a programme that, if not unique, is peculiar in its concerted effort to attack this particular form of crime. We then address at length the prospects of such a programme - which has had s…
Deaths and Covid‐19
This article critically considers the UK Government's insidious attempts to control the narrative around COVID‐19 deaths through using the interrelated strategies of “talk and ‘silence’ in order to socially construct a definitive ‘truth’” around the virus. The article traces how these strategies worked in practice and the shift which took place from numerous press briefings and Parliamentary debates to an ominous silence around the number of deat…
Making better regulation, making regulation better
Better Regulation is a re-regulatory strategy that has unfolded in Britain (and, of course, beyond, through Europe and the OECD) across the past decade. This article beings by setting out some quantitative indicators of trends in national and local enforcement in three key areas of protective regulation – food hygiene and food safety, workers’ health and safety, and pollution control – from 2003/2004 to 2012/2013. It then goes on, in its main sec…
Class and Health
Ideology, Hegemony, and Empiricism
In this article we engage in an extended critique of the thesis that the illegal conduct of corporations necessarily calls for different forms of regulation than other kinds of law-breaking. The proponents of that view argue that the unique nature of such illegalities is one reason why they necessitate a particular type of enforcement attitude or response. They advocate a strategy that produces compliance through persuasion rather than through th…
Industrial Injuries in British Manufacturing Industry
This paper begins by considering the effects of the business cycle upon the incidence of industrial accidents in British manufacturing industries, arguing that a generalized discussion of such cycles obscures important aspects of the political economy within individual cycles. In particular, the strength of the labour movement is related to the incidence of accidents at work. Since the trade unions are only one part of the tripartite system of th…
Policing Corporate ‘Skid Rows’
Research Note
This article considers three criticisms made by Nichols of my article on ‘industrial injuries in British manufacturing’. First, I argue that, notwithstanding recognised problems with data which include ‘minor’ accidents, this should not be rejected. I then question the reliability of the alternative data used by Nichols, namely that related to fatalities in British manufacturing. Second, I show that Nichols' claim that accident rates were increas…
Stemming the flow of bood? The illusion of self-regulation
Law, Resistance and Reform
Hegemony, risk and governance
Recent improvements in the ways in which hazardous substances are produced, stored and distributed are often explained in terms of advances in scientific knowledge and technique, and an increased social awareness of danger. Drawing largely upon the Gramscian tradition, and referring to recent writings on risk and governance, this paper provides an alternative account of these changes. Improvements in the 'social regulation' of hazardous economic …
Hazards, Law and Class
Foucault, Governmentality, Marxism
Death and Work in Britain
Official figures indicate that there were 302 fatal occupational injuries in Britain in 1996/97. This paper is a sustained critique of the means by which this 'headline figure' is reached. Drawing upon other, more or less recoverable, officially collected data on fatal injuries it demonstrates that there are at least five times more fatal occupational injuries during this time period. It then considers various anomalies and inconsistencies within…
The Emergence of a “War” on Economic Crime
In 1996, the Finnish government initiated an Action Plan aimed at the more effective control of economic crime and the grey economy, involving wide-scale reform in legislation, regulatory agencies, enforcement practice, and research activities. The emergence of this Action Plan forms the empirical focus of this article, which addresses two specific research questions. First, what were the economic, social and political factors that produced this …
Can Economic Crime Control be Sustained? The Case of Finland
In this paper, we present some findings from research conducted in Finland on the emergence and nature of the Finnish government's Action Plans to Reduce Economic Crime and the Grey Economy. We set out the origins of the Finnish economic crime control programme, a programme that, if not unique, is peculiar in its concerted effort to attack this particular form of crime. We then address at length the prospects of such a programme - which has had s…
Working for Criminalization of Economic Offending
Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful
Hawkins
Economic Crime Control in Finland
The activities of criminal justice systems focus almost entirely upon the crimes of the relatively powerless. If this relative downplaying of the crimes of the powerful is both a ubiquitous and long-term phenomenon, it has become more pronounced in a period marked by 'globalization', within which states are less rather than more likely to regulate business. In this research note, we report upon a recent initiative in Finland, aimed at controlling…
Capital, Crime Control and Statecraft in the Entrepreneurial City
Recent debates have drawn attention to the centrality of crime and disorder discourses within the rationale of contemporary urban entrepreneurial rule and how these have targeted ideological and political resources onto policing 'quality of life' infractions on the streets. In extending these insights, the paper focuses upon the regeneration of urban order in the UK and how this is being increasingly practised through a form of corporatised state…
Violence', Safety Crimes and Criminology
While safety crimes far outweigh crimes of ‘conventional’ violence, British criminology continues to operate with rather narrow definitions of violence which exclude these. The aim of this paper is to examine the key ways in which occupational injury and death remain excluded by criminological definitions of violence. To do so, we review briefly three recent examples of approaches to, or discussions of, violence. Our discussions of each point to …
From ‘crime’ to social harm?
The Phantom Capitalists
It was a pleasure to learn of the re-publication of what is surely a classic criminological text, Mike Levi's The Phantom Capitalists. Originally published in 1981 but, as Levi himself notes, out of print now for some 20 years, I had approached reviewing the book with the mindset that readers of this journal would be familiar with its contents, save of course for the newly written ‘Introduction and Postscript’ to this second edition—a generous 67…
A Deadly Consensus
This paper documents the vulnerability of the UK workplace safety regime to ' regulatory degradation ' . Following a brief overview of this regime, the paper examines the dominant arguments within academic literature on appropriate and feasible regulatory enforcement, arguing that the approaches to regulation thereby advocated have been easily degraded as a result of their compatibility with neoliberal economic strategy. A subsequent analysis of …
How do you get your voice heard when no-one will let you?’ Victimization at work
A longstanding separation between corporate crime and ‘real’ or ‘conventional’ crime is both reflected in and institutionalized through state responses to corporate offending, excluding the victims of corporate crime from consideration or treatment as real victims of real crime. Experiences of this institutionalized disjuncture are treated in this article, through consideration of criminal justice, legal and regulatory responses to six cases of o…
Responding to the crisis
This article reviews some of the mainstream policies proposed to tackle the economic crisis of 2008-09 and its aftermath, and goes on to advocate a policy of economic stabilisation grants (ESGs). It argues that ESGs, which would be paid to every citizen at a rate that could be varied according to the severity of the crisis, would be more effective in boosting aggregate demand and more efficient in terms of resource allocation. Unlike the alternat…
An independent review of British health and safety regulation? From common sense to non-sense
The view that regulatory provisions protecting the employment conditions of workers need to be minimised in order to protect the business needs of employers has been an ongoing theme in British governmental policy discourse over the past three decades. For the present Coalition government, the assumption that current levels of regulation are unduly burdensome on employers and hence harmful to the economy has continued to be enthusiastically voice…
Political science (41 works) · Law (32 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses (21 works) · Criminology (19 works) · Economics (17 works) · Law (17 works) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Regulation and Compliance Studies (14 works)