Ian Loader
Biographic Data
| ID | 301376 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ian Loader |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ian |
| FAMILY NAME | Loader |
| SIGNATURE | LOADER I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6419-0486 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 849 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 61 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Mobility freedoms
The link between urban transport and freedom has long been recognised in academic literature and is drawing renewed attention in controversies over initiatives to reduce car use within urban areas and flying between cities. This paper analyses how multiple conceptualisations of freedom from across the humanities and social sciences are, and can be, implicated in public contestations over urban transport. It suggests that individualised notions of…
Beyond motonormative punishment
Criminology has a blind spot concerning road safety. The field tends to accept that the problem is best left to technical specialists; treats road safety as separate from its focal concerns with public safety; and reproduces an ideology of streets as distinct socio-juridical spaces. In so doing, criminology leaves unaddressed a significant dimension of the question of how to create safe and liveable urban environments. In this article, I set out …
Inescapable objects? Automobility and everyday disorder in an English town
In our study of everyday security in one English town (Macclesfield in north-west England), numerous sources of data suggest that annoyance about cars—their volume, speed, (bad) parking, presence at the school gate, and overall effect on the quality and character of everyday life in the town—loom large in the preoccupations of local people. It has been common in work on public insecurities—including, we should add, our own study of the same town …
Seeing disorder’ in an English town
Perceptions of low-level social and physical disorder loom large in criminological theory and research. When disorder seems high, trust in authorities is eroded, concerns about crime precipitated, and a general sense of unease develops. In this article, we use fine-grained survey data from a medium-sized town in the north of England to consider why some people experience their environment as disorderly while others do not. People are more likely …
The Greening of Environmental Criminology
Grounded in a detailed local study of everyday security, in this paper we set out a path for bringing together environmental and green criminology. Revisiting an old research site, Macclesfield in north-west England, we encountered marked shifts in the local meanings of disorder that seem to have developed since we were last there in the mid-1990s. Residents described ‘chronic harms’ that focussed on various forms of ‘litter’ (e.g. drugs detritus…
Concerning Cars
Criminology has been coincident with the motor age, at least in the Global North. The history of automobility is bound up—in mutually conditioning ways—with changing patterns of crime and social control. Yet the car has remained in relative obscurity as a focus of criminological attention—often present, sometimes investigated as a niche topic but at the same time somehow absent. Against this backdrop, this review describes some key elements of th…
Policing and Sense of Place
Much policy discourse concentrates on the contribution police make to keeping people safe. Often, this means minimizing fear of crime. Yet, more expansive accounts stress the extent to which deeper-rooted forms of security and belonging might also be important ‘outcomes’ of police activity. Using data collected from a survey of residents of a mid-sized English town, Macclesfield in Cheshire, we consider the extent to which evaluations of policing…
The morality of security
The purpose of this introduction is to concisely present The Morality of Security: A Theory of Just Securitization so that those unfamiliar with this work are better able to engage with the symposium. The book develops a Theory of Just Securitisation outlining when securitisation is morally permissible. Securitisation, here, refers to more than a securitising speech act coupled with a legitimising audience's tacit or actual acceptance of the thre…
Recognition and Redemption
Recognition and Redemption
In this paper, I recover and appraise the principal ways in which movements motivated by the ideal of racial justice have sought to transform how questions of police and punishment are imagined and acted upon. The focus of the enquiry is the visions of safety and justice found in Black Lives Matter. I offer an interpretive reconstruction and appraisal of the core claims found with the Black Lives Matter movement and their ideological lineage and …
Crime, Order and the Two Faces of Conservatism
Over the past half century, conservatism has been a powerful force in shaping public and political responses to crime in Britain. But within criminology, conservative ideology remains curiously neglected and poorly understood. In this paper, I develop an interpretive reconstruction of conservative thinking about crime that seeks to make good this inattention. My central contention is that one finds in conservative ideology both an emotionally and…
Democratic experimentalism and the futures of crime control
The ‘resources of hope’ which the socialist thinker Raymond Williams searched for in his last works seem to be in short supply. The authors suggest that, in recent times, many commentators, especially those writing as professional criminologists in the privileged yet pessimistic circumstances of the global North, have found their view of radical democratic aspiration blocked by the long shadows of mass incarceration, and other seemingly immoveabl…
Justice Alternatives
This chapter seeks to critically examine current approaches to criminal records and their disclosure outside of criminal justice processes. In particular, it questions the rationalities underpinning disclosure practices where the rights of people with convictions (henceforth ‘PWCs’) to live a life free of stigma are often subordinated to the perceived need to maintain ‘public safety’ by disseminating criminal record information. Instead, an alter…
A Question of Sacrifice
Deaths in police custody present a set of enduring and troubling puzzles. Why do such deaths seldom result in prosecutions or adequate redress? Why are victims’ families so under-resourced and typically met with a conflicted mix of empathy and hostility? Why do acknowledged problems remain unresolved despite review after review making the same criticisms and seemingly consensual recommendations? Why is the state’s failure to fulfil its duty of ca…
Valour for Money? Contested Commodification in the Market for Security
Scholars of security governance generally assume that the labour of private security officers can straightforwardly be transformed into discrete commodities. We argue, by contrast, that it is extremely difficult to commodify the labour of private security officers because their duties frequently require them to confront and work through both economic responsibilities (what does my contract say?) and moral obligations (what does my conscience say?…
Cautionary Tales
Juvenile crime makes headlines. It is the stock-in-trade of politicians and pundits. But young people are also the victims of crime. They too have demands to make of the police. Drawing upon survey and interview research with 11 to 15 year-olds in Edinburgh, this book examines how crime impacts upon young people’s everyday lives. It reveals that young people experience far more serious problems as victims and witnesses of crime, than they cause a…
Private security as moral drama
This article explores the phenomenon of scandals as they unfold in the private security industry. We begin by outlining our theoretical understanding of scandals, before tracking the key phases of two recent events – one in Sweden, the other in Britain. Scandals, we suggest, are best viewed as moral tales which dramatize a host of societal norms and values about private security and criminal justice, prompting a great deal of normative conflict. …
How can we better align private security with the public interest? Towards a civilizing model of regulation
How can we better align private security with the public interest? This question has met with two answers in the literature on private security regulation, one seeking tocleansethe market of deviant sellers, the other tocommunalizethe market through the empowerment of buyers. Both models of regulation are premised upon a limited neoclassical economic conception of how market transactions map onto the public interest. This article makes the case f…
The Sage Handbook of Global Policing
Going beyond the confines of police sociology and criminology, this book brings together global scholars from a wide range of disciplines and jurisdictions to engage with the instrumental aims of police activity, as well as with the organisations, institutions and sets of practices that comprise 'policing'
Democratic Theory and Mass Incarceration
This chapter introduces the central theme that animates the chapters in this volume: that one underexploited resource for a better penal politics lies in investigating the ideals and institutions of democracy, and thinking about how these ideals can be theorized and given practical effect in reshaping the criminal justice and penal arrangements of advanced capitalist democracies today. Penal scholarship has seen the emergence of a defensive, nost…
Justice and Penal Reform
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Ideologies and crime
This article assembles some theoretical resources for a project that investigates the ways in which thinking about politics has since the 1970s been bound up with thinking and action around crime. Such investigation is hampered by a dominant (neoliberal) narrative of governance that tends to reduce crime policy to a ‘contest’ between tactics and technique. In contrast, we establish a political framework for theorising crime and its control. This …
Más allá de la lamentación. Hacia una política sobre el delito y la justicia democrática e igualitaria
Americanae nace como un proyecto conjunto que surge dentro de la Red Europea de Información y Documentación sobre América Latina (REDIAL), y que ha afrontado la Biblioteca de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID). Esta nueva biblioteca virtual hace más accesibles los libros digitales de tema americanista a los investigadores y usuarios interesados de cualquier parte del mundo
Grudge Spending
In the paper, we use data from an English study of security consumption, and recent work in the cultural sociology of markets, to illustrate the way in which moral and social commitments shape and often constrain decisions about how, or indeed whether, individuals and organizations enter markets for protection. Three main claims are proffered. We suggest, firstly, that the purchase of security commodities is a mundane, non-conspicuous mode of con…
Beyond Mass Incarceration
This symposium is a timely, welcome and valuable addition to the developing body of work that strives to draw productive linkages between accounts of the problems of contemporary democratic politics, the vagaries and extravagances of punishment in advanced capitalist countries today and efforts to sketch how these matters might be theorised, approached, and done differently. We therefore want to use these brief reflections on the papers to take s…
Plural Policing and Democratic Governance
This article asks how we might best come to terms with - and seek to govern - the multiplicity of institutional forms that are now involved in the delivery of policing and security services and technologies. I begin by documenting briefly the network of providers that constitute the policing field locally, nationally and transnationally, before specifying how the fragmentation and pluralization of policing has called radically into doubt a number…
Policing and the Social
Taking as its point of departure the tension that currently exists in Britain between official crime control discourse and popular sentiment towards policing, this paper has two aims. Drawing upon P. Bourdieu's concept of symbolic power the author argues, first, that sociological enquiry needs to devote more attention to understanding the social meanings of policing, and outline a framework within which the role and significance of policing as a …
Policing, Recognition, and Belonging
In this article, the author reflects on the question of how policing institutions can help to foster and sustain the values and practices of democracy. The author’s overarching concern is to outline and defend a conception of democratic policing that highlights the role of policing agencies in recognizing the legitimate claims of all individuals and groups affected by police actions and affirming their sense of belonging to a political community.…
A tainted trade? Moral ambivalence and legitimation work in the private security industry1
The private security industry is often represented - and typically represents itself - as an expanding business, confident of its place in the world and sure of its ability to meet a rising demand for security. But closer inspection of the ways in which industry players talk about its past, present and future suggests that this self-promotion is accompanied by unease about the industry's condition and legitimacy. In this paper, we analyse the sel…
Consumer Culture and the Commodification of Policing and Security
This paper sets out to make sociological sense of some contemporary trends in the consumption of policing services and security products. I argue that the commodification of policing and security can fruitfully be theorised and investigated in terms of the spread of consumer culture, a contention that I demonstrate in three (related) ways. I begin by examining how a culture of consumption is pervading the practices and rhetoric of the public poli…
Policing as a Public Good
The gradual de-coupling of police and state is an increasingly well-documented phenomenon. Against this backdrop, we set out in this article to reformulate and defend a positive (rather than pejorative) connection between policing and the state. We begin by reconstructing four candidate means by which the state-policing nexus might plausibly be established—the monopoly of legitimate coercion, the delivery of civic governance, the guarantee of col…
Consuming security
How does our understanding of private security alter if we treat security consumption as consumption? In this article, we set out the parameters of a project which strives—theoretically and empirically—to do just this. We begin with a reminder that private security necessarily entails acts of buying and selling, and by indicating how the sociology of consumption may illuminate this central—but overlooked—fact about the phenomenon. We then develop…
On the emotions of crime, punishment and social control
Private security and the demand for protection in contemporary britain
Against a backdrop of uncertainty created by an escalating and unmet public demand for police protection, and the reemergence of unregulated commercial security, this paper has three aims. First, it outlines the developments in security provision currently unfolding in Britain and reviews some of the responses that have been made. It then develops a critique of recent suggestions that private security is best countered by introducing novel ways o…
For an historical sociology of crime policy in England and Wales since 1968
This essay proposes an approach to understanding changes in political responses to crime in England and Wales over the last third of the twentieth century and developments in criminological knowledge over the same period. To explore the association between these in some empirical detail, we argue, would provide a historical–sociological understanding that is currently lacking, notwithstanding Garland's significant intervention in The Culture of C…
The moral economy of security
In this article we draw upon our recent research into security consumption to answer two questions: first, under what conditions do people experience the buying and selling of security goods and services as morally troubling? Second, what are the theoretical implications of understanding private security as, in certain respects, tainted trade? We begin by drawing on two bodies of work on morality and markets (one found in political theory, the ot…
For penal moderation
The 2008 financial crash, and the lessons it teaches us about the costs of unregulated excess, offers an opportunity to think anew about, and seek to temper, the enthusiasm for excessive punishment that has swept across several western societies in recent years. Taking this as my point of departure, I make the case in this article for a public philosophy of punishment that can speak to the times we now inhabit—what I call penal moderation. I begi…
Fall of the ‘Platonic Guardians’
Journal Article Fall of the 'Platonic Guardians': Liberalism, Criminology and Political Responses to Crime in England and Wales Get access Ian Loader Ian Loader Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 46, Issue 4, July 2006, Pages 561–586, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azi091 Published: 07 October 2005
How can we better align private security with the public interest? Towards a civilizing model of regulation
How can we better align private security with the public interest? This question has met with two answers in the literature on private security regulation, one seeking tocleansethe market of deviant sellers, the other tocommunalizethe market through the empowerment of buyers. Both models of regulation are premised upon a limited neoclassical economic conception of how market transactions map onto the public interest. This article makes the case f…
Narratives of Decline
The paper is concerned with how adult residents of one medium-sized, moderately affluent English town which is generally regarded as having a relatively low crime rate interpret and respond to teenage ‘incivilities’. We begin by locating the conflicts over teenage mis/behaviour that occur across many of the town's diverse areas and assessing how the intensity of adult response varies according to people's relationship to place. We then examine th…
The Banality of Security
Why do certain security goods become banal (while others do not)? Under what conditions does banality occur and with what effects? In this paper, we answer these questions by examining the story of closed circuit television cameras (CCTV) in Britain. We consider the lessons to be learned from CCTV’s rapid—but puzzling—transformation from novelty to ubiquity, and what the banal properties of CCTV tell us about the social meanings of surveillance a…
Fear and Everyday Urban Lives
A Telling Tale
This paper considers one 'vigilante' episode in an English town in 1993 and its subsequent appearances in the press and in local 'crime-talk'. In so doing it a) proposes as an alternative to most current constructions of 'fear of crime' an interpretive approach grounded in place; b) considers the intersections between the generic 'law and order' preoccupations of the national press and the salience in local knowledge of a particular sequence of e…
Bringing the ‘outside’ in and the ‘inside’ out
The notion that there is an artificial distinction between the domestic and the international, or between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, is hardly new. 1 However, disciplinary divisions in the social scie
Thinking Normatively About Private Security
A Question of Sacrifice
Deaths in police custody present a set of enduring and troubling puzzles. Why do such deaths seldom result in prosecutions or adequate redress? Why are victims’ families so under-resourced and typically met with a conflicted mix of empathy and hostility? Why do acknowledged problems remain unresolved despite review after review making the same criticisms and seemingly consensual recommendations? Why is the state’s failure to fulfil its duty of ca…
Governing European Policing
In this article, I address some of the 'democratic deficits' raised by the development of a cross-border policing capacity within the European Union and consider how these might best be made good. The argument unfolds in three parts. I seek, first of all, to clear a little ground by offering a critique of two currently prevalent and - in certain political quarters - appealing responses to European policing's democratic shortcomings. Secondly, I i…
Ideologies and crime
This article assembles some theoretical resources for a project that investigates the ways in which thinking about politics has since the 1970s been bound up with thinking and action around crime. Such investigation is hampered by a dominant (neoliberal) narrative of governance that tends to reduce crime policy to a ‘contest’ between tactics and technique. In contrast, we establish a political framework for theorising crime and its control. This …
State of Denial
Crime, Order and the Two Faces of Conservatism
Over the past half century, conservatism has been a powerful force in shaping public and political responses to crime in Britain. But within criminology, conservative ideology remains curiously neglected and poorly understood. In this paper, I develop an interpretive reconstruction of conservative thinking about crime that seeks to make good this inattention. My central contention is that one finds in conservative ideology both an emotionally and…
Cautionary Tales
Juvenile crime makes headlines. It is the stock-in-trade of politicians and pundits. But young people are also the victims of crime. They too have demands to make of the police. Drawing upon survey and interview research with 11 to 15 year-olds in Edinburgh, this book examines how crime impacts upon young people’s everyday lives. It reveals that young people experience far more serious problems as victims and witnesses of crime, than they cause a…
Democracy, Justice and the Limits of Policing
Imagining Crime
Textual Outlaws and Criminal Conversations Criminology and the Question of Feminism The Universal Victim and the Body in Crisis The Scene of the Crime Reading the Justice of Detective Fiction The Bulger Case and the Trauma of the Visible Criminological Concordats On the Single Mother and the Criminal Child Fatal Frames HIV/AIDS as Spectacle in Criminal Justice Afterthoughts The Imagination of Crime
Private security and the demand for protection in contemporary britain
Against a backdrop of uncertainty created by an escalating and unmet public demand for police protection, and the reemergence of unregulated commercial security, this paper has three aims. First, it outlines the developments in security provision currently unfolding in Britain and reviews some of the responses that have been made. It then develops a critique of recent suggestions that private security is best countered by introducing novel ways o…
Thinking Normatively About Private Security
Thinking Normatively About Private Security
Policing and the Social
Taking as its point of departure the tension that currently exists in Britain between official crime control discourse and popular sentiment towards policing, this paper has two aims. Drawing upon P. Bourdieu's concept of symbolic power the author argues, first, that sociological enquiry needs to devote more attention to understanding the social meanings of policing, and outline a framework within which the role and significance of policing as a …
Narratives of Decline
The paper is concerned with how adult residents of one medium-sized, moderately affluent English town which is generally regarded as having a relatively low crime rate interpret and respond to teenage ‘incivilities’. We begin by locating the conflicts over teenage mis/behaviour that occur across many of the town's diverse areas and assessing how the intensity of adult response varies according to people's relationship to place. We then examine th…
A Telling Tale
This paper considers one 'vigilante' episode in an English town in 1993 and its subsequent appearances in the press and in local 'crime-talk'. In so doing it a) proposes as an alternative to most current constructions of 'fear of crime' an interpretive approach grounded in place; b) considers the intersections between the generic 'law and order' preoccupations of the national press and the salience in local knowledge of a particular sequence of e…
Consumer Culture and the Commodification of Policing and Security
This paper sets out to make sociological sense of some contemporary trends in the consumption of policing services and security products. I argue that the commodification of policing and security can fruitfully be theorised and investigated in terms of the spread of consumer culture, a contention that I demonstrate in three (related) ways. I begin by examining how a culture of consumption is pervading the practices and rhetoric of the public poli…
Crime and Social Change in Middle England
Crime and Social Change in Middle England offers a new way of looking at contemporary debates on the fear of crime. Using observation, interviews and documentary analysis it traces the reactions of citizens of one very ordinary town to events, conflicts and controversies around such topical subjects of criminological investigation as youth, public order, drugs, policing and home security in their community. In doing so it moves in place from comf…
Plural Policing and Democratic Governance
This article asks how we might best come to terms with - and seek to govern - the multiplicity of institutional forms that are now involved in the delivery of policing and security services and technologies. I begin by documenting briefly the network of providers that constitute the policing field locally, nationally and transnationally, before specifying how the fragmentation and pluralization of policing has called radically into doubt a number…
Policing as a Public Good
The gradual de-coupling of police and state is an increasingly well-documented phenomenon. Against this backdrop, we set out in this article to reformulate and defend a positive (rather than pejorative) connection between policing and the state. We begin by reconstructing four candidate means by which the state-policing nexus might plausibly be established—the monopoly of legitimate coercion, the delivery of civic governance, the guarantee of col…
Fear and Everyday Urban Lives
The Power of Legitimate Naming
Journal Article The Power of Legitimate Naming: Part II Making Sense of the Elite Police Voice Get access Ian Loader, Ian Loader Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Aogn Mulcahy Aogn Mulcahy *Respectively, Department of Criminology, Keele University and Department of Sociology, University College Dublin. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology…
The Power of Legitimate Naming
This paper—which appears in two separate parts—traces the advent since 1945 of chief constables as significant commentators on both ‘law and order’ in particular and ‘the state of the nation’ more generally. Drawing upon autobiographies (and other writings), force annual reports, and interviews with serving and retired chiefs, we set out to understand how police elites have come to acquire the power to legitimately ‘name’, diagnose and classify s…
On the emotions of crime, punishment and social control
Governing European Policing
In this article, I address some of the 'democratic deficits' raised by the development of a cross-border policing capacity within the European Union and consider how these might best be made good. The argument unfolds in three parts. I seek, first of all, to clear a little ground by offering a critique of two currently prevalent and - in certain political quarters - appealing responses to European policing's democratic shortcomings. Secondly, I i…
Policing and the Condition of EnglandMemory, Politics and Culture
Polls repeatedly show that trust in, and respect for, the police have declined from the high levels achieved during the 1950s. This work, on the relationship between English policing and culture, revises the received sociological and popular wisdom on the fate that has befallen the English police.
The New Parapolice
Your file Voire rskrenceOur Ne Noue relerence L'auteur a accordé une Licence non exclusive permettant a la Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduire, prêter, distnbuer ou vendre des copies de cette thèse sous la forme de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique.L'auteur conserve la propriété du droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse.Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés ou…
State of Denial
For an historical sociology of crime policy in England and Wales since 1968
This essay proposes an approach to understanding changes in political responses to crime in England and Wales over the last third of the twentieth century and developments in criminological knowledge over the same period. To explore the association between these in some empirical detail, we argue, would provide a historical–sociological understanding that is currently lacking, notwithstanding Garland's significant intervention in The Culture of C…
Necessary virtues
Thus far ... we have no reason to suppose that there is any better general solution to the problem of security, and little, if any, reason to regard any other possible countervailing value as a serious rival to security as the dominant continuing human need. (Dunn 2000: 212) In their recent book Governing Security , Johnston and Shearing pinpoint what they see as a significant shift in criminological writing about ‘the problem of the state’ ( 200…
Democracy, Society and the Governance of Security
The promotion of security is no longer a state monopoly. It is dispersed and takes place through the practices of states, corporations, non-governmental actors and community-based organizations. But what do we know about the ways in which 'security' is thought about and promoted in this pluralized field of delivery? Are democratic values being advanced and protected, or threatened and compromised? Wood and Dupont bring together a team of renowned…
Policing, Recognition, and Belonging
In this article, the author reflects on the question of how policing institutions can help to foster and sustain the values and practices of democracy. The author’s overarching concern is to outline and defend a conception of democratic policing that highlights the role of policing agencies in recognizing the legitimate claims of all individuals and groups affected by police actions and affirming their sense of belonging to a political community.…
Sociology (52 works) · Political science (51 works) · Law (42 works) · Criminology (31 works) · Policing Practices and Perceptions (24 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (23 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (22 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (19 works) · Psychology (17 works)