Clifford Shearing
Biographic Data
| ID | 302950 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Clifford Shearing |
| GIVEN NAMES | Clifford |
| FAMILY NAME | Shearing |
| SIGNATURE | SHEARING C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5036-8335 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 74 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 774 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 73 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Artificial intelligence harmscapes: Rethinking digital governance in the age of cognitive tools
Community‐centred disaster recovery: A call to change the narrative
This paper challenges current approaches to undertaking community‐centred disaster recovery. Community‐centred approaches are widely recognised as ‘the gold standard’ for effective recovery from disasters. Yet, they are rarely applied well enough in practice. Challenges include the ‘authority’ culture of command‐and‐control agencies, the emphasis on discrete recovery time frames, and the reluctance to relinquish centralised control. The paper foc…
Building age-inclusive disaster risk reduction: Insights among geographically mobile young adults in regional Australia
Community centred disaster risk reduction (DRR) is viewed as the gold standard, linking local networks, skills, capacities and knowledges together with government and nongovernment supports. However, despite the best of intentions young adults still experience exclusion due in part to adult centrism because initiatives are largely curated by adults. While research has sought to address this bias, outmigration by young adults at key life-stages cr…
Adaptive policing for a climate crisis
Climate change is the 'defining issue of our time' and human societies face extraordinary and growing hazards that threaten public safety, social cohesion, and the economy. Heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, floods, and coastal erosion are projected to increase in frequency and severity and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has long called upon societies around the world to urgently improve their capacity 'to moderate or avoid harm'. In …
Reshaping disaster management: An integrated community‐led approach
The management of disasters has traditionally involved public, private, and nongovernmental organisations working together. While scholars have examined the value of collaborations among these entities, less is known about how to successfully engage and empower communities in disaster management. Based on network governance theory, this article contributes to the growing body of public management literature on community engagement by presenting f…
Everything-old-is-new-again’: Private urban security governance responses to new harmscapes
This article reflects on the proliferation of novel forms of private urban security governance assemblages, specifically the roles of private auspices and providers in responding to contemporary climate-related socio-material harmscapes. The authors use the lens of climatic harms and associated discursive shifts in understandings of the relationship between humans and ‘nature’ to draw attention to gating adaptations, assemblages of powers and cap…
Building cross-sector recovery collaborations after Australian bushfires: The Importance of Embracing and Linking Diverse Capitals and Capacities
The literature on disaster management highlights that communities that mobilise and integrate a range of local capacities, resources and knowledges tend to fare best. This demonstrates the critical, yet underappreciated, role these attributes play in disaster management. This paper contributes to scholarship by examining the conditions, values and practices for building effective cross-sector ties. Importantly, it highlights the need for decentra…
Private security’s accountabilities within polycentric assemblages
This article will reflect on the multiple ways in which private security can, and is, being held responsible and accountable to the public (and other security providers), in formalised, polycentric, or nodal assemblages. Drawing on empirical research conducted on plural policing partnerships, the article will show that private security is influenced by market forces, but that this is part of an interwoven, layered, formal-informal system of accou…
Policing, politics, and democracy: David Bayley’s enduring contributions
This special issue pays tribute to the life and work of David Hume Bayley, professor emeritus in the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany, who passed away in May of 2020 at the age of 87. We regard Bayley as the world’s pre-eminent comparative policing scholar. In this introduction to the special issue, we begin by providing a brief synopsis of his evolution as a scholar, from his Ph.D. training in political science to his most …
Conceptualizing Policing and Security: New Harmscapes, the Anthropocene, and Technology
This review explores past and future shifts in policing and criminology scholarship that have shaped, and been shaped by, what is done to enhance safety within political domains. Investigating established policing conceptualizations, the review demonstrates how the ideal of state-delivered safety as a public good was challenged by a sizeable policing industry, giving rise to debates about legal context, service provision, and conceptualizations o…
David Bayley – 1933–2020: A personal tribute
We both knew and loved David Bayley for almost 50 years. Throughout that time he was recognized as the world’s leading international comparative policing scholar. Since his death many tributes from fellow academics have been published, in which the highlights of his academic career, his prolific publication record, and his significant contributions to the development of policing scholarship have been recounted. And in 2015, an exceptional chronic…
Gated Adaptation during the Cape Town Drought: Mentalities, Transitions and Pathways to Partial Nodes of Water Security
Illustrating how mentalities govern private responses to risk, this article highlights the importance of mental frames in the selection of adaptation pathways. Scholarship emanating out of the Cape Town drought (2015–2018) has drawn attention to the effect of the drought on public mentalities and their response to the drought, transitional governance arrangements and off-grid responses to secure water supply. This article focusses on what mentali…
South Africa’s Minerals-Energy Complex
Concepts of ‘plural, nodal forms of governance’ and ‘constitutive regulation’ are used to analyse how an industrial policy elite spanning public and private spheres formed in conjunction with the minerals/industrial/energy core economy. Government, in collaboration with minerals industries and electricity monopoly Eskom, employed state capitalism, as well as sophisticated control and surveillance of migrant labour to structure a system to ensure …
Environmental Security and the Anthropocene: Law, Criminology, and International Relations
This article analyzes the implications of the Anthropocene for the governance of security. Drawing on environmental law, green criminology, and international relations, the article examines the development of environmental security scholarship over recent decades and shows similarities and differences in perspectives across the three disciplines. It demonstrates that the Anthropocene represents a significant challenge for thinking about and respo…
Governing-through-Harm and Public Goods Policing
Among scholars of law and crime and practitioners of public safety, there is a pervasive view that only the public police can or should protect the public interest. Further, the prevailing perception is that the public police predominantly governs through crime-that is, acts on harms as detrimental to the public good. We argue that governing harm through crime is not always the most effective way of producing public safety and security and that t…
Nodal Governance
This entry describes the concept of nodal governance. After a long history of seeing the state as the main institution responsible for the governance of security, nodal governance provided a way of exploring security governance “beyond the state.” This entry considers the concept, its development, critiques, and different domains of governance within which it has been used as a theoretical framework.
Note on Authorship
Register
Chapter One: Security in the Anthropocene
Chapter Six: Conclusions
Chapter Three: Postnatural Security
Chapter Five: Towards a Security of Care in the Anthropocene
Chapter Four: The Horizon of Holocene Security
Criminology and the Anthropocene
Chapter Two: More-Than-Human Worlds
Governmentality, criticism, politics
The growth of the governmentality literature represents a significant development in current social theory. However, certain prominent and interlinked tendencies, which are associated with the place of politics as a subject and object of theoretical work, are queried. Most especially the concerns are with: the rejection of critique as part of the work of social theory; the rendering of government programmes as univocal and as overly coherent and …
The Future of Policing
This essay examines the restructuring of policing currently taking place in developed democratic societies. It argues that restructuring is occurring under private as well as government auspices and will have profound effects on public safety, equity, human rights, and accountability. These effects are discussed, along with the trade-offs they represent for public policy. The driving forces behind restructuring are fear of crime, the inability of…
Culture as Figurative Action
Private Security: Implications for Social Control
Private security has become a pervasive feature of modern North American policing, both because of its rapid growth since 1960 and because it has invaded the traditional domain of the public police. Because this development has been viewed as an addendum to the criminal justice system, its significance for social control has not been recognized. This paper traces the development of private security in Canada and the United States since 1960, exam…
Nodal Governance, Democracy, and the New ‘Denizens
We begin this paper by reviewing some recent transformations in governance. We then propose three new concepts that we believe assist us in coming to terms with these transformations and the political statuses that have emerged as part of them. These concepts are ‘nodal governance’, ‘denizens’, and ‘communal space’. Following this we will explore the normative implications of nodal governance as it has taken shape to date, with an emphasis on the…
Modern Private Security: Its Growth and Implications
On the North American continent, in Europe and elsewhere, the dramatic growth in private security in the past several decades has reshaped the structure and function of modern policing. The development of private security has been facilitated by fundamental shifts in the nature of property relations. These changes have encouraged the development of a preventative mode of policing consistent with the principles and hopes of nineteenth-century poli…
Punishment and the Changing Face of the Governance
The article explores the implication of shifts in the way in which security and justice are being conceived. It argues that the emergence of a logic of risk is refiguring the way in which punishment is being used as a tactic of governance
Housing, institutions, money: The failures and promise of human settlements policy and practice in South Africa
This paper considers why the housing subsidy programme in South Africa has had so little impact on poverty reduction despite its scale and generous funding. It discusses how this was linked to the government’s conception of housing, the institutions involved and who controlled funding flows for housing. Most government funding went to contractors to build new units “for the poor”; it was assumed that these would replace homes in informal settleme…
Criminology and the Anthropocene
The article explores how criminology is responding to, and might respond to, the challenges presented by changes in earth systems, and the reasons for them, that the term 'Anthropocene' signals. It begins with a very brief review of these developments and the meaning of the term. It then examines the responses within criminology that have emerged under the sign 'green criminology'. Thereafter it explores how criminology might respond to the chall…
A nodal conception of governance: Thoughts on a policing commission
Fragile Facades: Stuttering and the Strategic Manipulation of Awareness
This is a study of how stutterers cope with their disability. We examine strategies used to manage interactional order and identity by concealing, revealing, or disavowing stuttering. This offers insights into the way people manage disabilities: the articulation of premeditated and spontaneous tactics, and how management strategies shape, and are shaped by, the experience of disability
Governing security for common goods
A Museum of Hope: A Story of Robben Island
This article explores hope as a technology of collective governance through an exploration of the work that is being done to celebrate and promote a hope for a New South Africa at the Robben Island Museum—former prison to the political opponents of apartheid that is situated on a small island off the coast at Cape Town
The Relation between Public and Private Policing
Employment by private policing agencies equals or exceeds public police employment in many countries. Reigning conceptions of relations between public police and private policing have changed markedly. A state-centered view of police functions disparaged "private armies" and saw order maintenance as a quintessential function of government. In recent decades, a laissez-faire view has emerged that celebrates "private-public partnerships" and sees p…
Governing-through-Harm and Public Goods Policing
Among scholars of law and crime and practitioners of public safety, there is a pervasive view that only the public police can or should protect the public interest. Further, the prevailing perception is that the public police predominantly governs through crime-that is, acts on harms as detrimental to the public good. We argue that governing harm through crime is not always the most effective way of producing public safety and security and that t…
Thoughts on sovereignty
These introductory remarks canvas some of the debates over shifts in the governance of security that prompted the development of this Special Issue of Policing & Society. They show how while there is an Anglo‐American/Continental European focus to these debates, they draw attention to issues that extend beyond this particular context. At the heart of these, and the wider debates of which they are a part, are questions about the nature of contempo…
Building cross-sector recovery collaborations after Australian bushfires: The Importance of Embracing and Linking Diverse Capitals and Capacities
The literature on disaster management highlights that communities that mobilise and integrate a range of local capacities, resources and knowledges tend to fare best. This demonstrates the critical, yet underappreciated, role these attributes play in disaster management. This paper contributes to scholarship by examining the conditions, values and practices for building effective cross-sector ties. Importantly, it highlights the need for decentra…
Criminology in the face of flows: Reflections on contemporary policing and security
Much has been written about the governance of crime – indeed, this is the thread that has unified criminology. Yet, property crimes and attacks against individuals – traditionally at the core of the discipline – are plummeting in many societies. Meanwhile, harms and harm management emerge outside the narrowness of criminal justice definitions. Despite this, little criminological attention has been paid to the fact that the security of flows incre…
Nodal wars and network fallacies: A genealogical analysis of global insecurities
In this article we examine three prominent discourses of security governance and suggest, through a critical review of organizational network theory, that the nodal model can offer theoretical, methodological and ethical benefits over alternative ones. These benefits, we argue, are especially pertinent to the analysis of contemporary global insecurities. The article closes by reflecting on two issues raised in the earlier analysis: how an awarene…
Taking care of business: Public police as commercial security vendors
The article examines practices in `user-pays' policing. It locates these practices historically as well established, with a lineage that stretches back to the beginnings of the police in Britain and earlier. The article identifies different forms of user-pays policing, the various practices they include and the regulatory issues raised by them. Consideration of the tension between a conception of policing as a public service and charging for poli…
Gated Adaptation during the Cape Town Drought: Mentalities, Transitions and Pathways to Partial Nodes of Water Security
Illustrating how mentalities govern private responses to risk, this article highlights the importance of mental frames in the selection of adaptation pathways. Scholarship emanating out of the Cape Town drought (2015–2018) has drawn attention to the effect of the drought on public mentalities and their response to the drought, transitional governance arrangements and off-grid responses to secure water supply. This article focusses on what mentali…
Environmental Security and the Anthropocene: Law, Criminology, and International Relations
This article analyzes the implications of the Anthropocene for the governance of security. Drawing on environmental law, green criminology, and international relations, the article examines the development of environmental security scholarship over recent decades and shows similarities and differences in perspectives across the three disciplines. It demonstrates that the Anthropocene represents a significant challenge for thinking about and respo…
Curbing the Killing Fields: Making South Africa Safer
South Africa is often held up as an enviable example of a country that avoided a full-blown civil war. Twenty years into the new constitutional democracy, however, the continuation of social conflict and criminal violence begs the question as to whether South Africa deserves to be described as "postconflict." In this article, we take stock of contemporary conversations about crime. First, key dimensions of South Africa's crime problem are describ…
A New Beginning’ for Policing
The paper provides an idiosyncratic view of the framework developed by the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland in response to the call for a ‘new beginning’ for policing in Northern Ireland in the Belfast Agreement signed on 10 April 1998
Adaptive policing for a climate crisis
Climate change is the 'defining issue of our time' and human societies face extraordinary and growing hazards that threaten public safety, social cohesion, and the economy. Heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, floods, and coastal erosion are projected to increase in frequency and severity and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has long called upon societies around the world to urgently improve their capacity 'to moderate or avoid harm'. In …
How to Make Theories Untestable: A Guide to Theorists
Private Security and Private Justice
Subterranean processes in the maintenance of power: An examination of the mechanisms coordinating police action
Cet article souligne tout d'abord q'uen dépit de leurs idéaux égalitaires, lés démocraties libérates mettent à profit leur système juridique pour maintenir les structures d'autorité dans les conflits politiques. L'auteur attire ensuite L'attention sur la théorie requise pour dégager les mécanismes précis servant à perpétuer cette hypocrisie. Dans ce contexte théorique, L'organisation policiére est vue comme une théorie sociale laique qui permet a…
Modern Private Security: Its Growth and Implications
On the North American continent, in Europe and elsewhere, the dramatic growth in private security in the past several decades has reshaped the structure and function of modern policing. The development of private security has been facilitated by fundamental shifts in the nature of property relations. These changes have encouraged the development of a preventative mode of policing consistent with the principles and hopes of nineteenth-century poli…
An Analysis of the Prosecution of Shoplifters
This article examines the decisions to prosecute shoplifters by Canadian retail investigators. A hypothetical case method that permits a statistical simulation of an experimental design is used. The findings support recent research which indicates that both the value of the item and the age of the suspect are the most important predictors of investigators' decisions to prosecute. In addition, our results identify admission of the offense and the …
Fragile Facades: Stuttering and the Strategic Manipulation of Awareness
This is a study of how stutterers cope with their disability. We examine strategies used to manage interactional order and identity by concealing, revealing, or disavowing stuttering. This offers insights into the way people manage disabilities: the articulation of premeditated and spontaneous tactics, and how management strategies shape, and are shaped by, the experience of disability
Private Security: Implications for Social Control
Private security has become a pervasive feature of modern North American policing, both because of its rapid growth since 1960 and because it has invaded the traditional domain of the public police. Because this development has been viewed as an addendum to the criminal justice system, its significance for social control has not been recognized. This paper traces the development of private security in Canada and the United States since 1960, exam…
La sécurité privée au Canada: Quelques Questions Et Réponses
Ce texte sera consacr examiner un aspect important et jusqu'ici nglig du processus de maintien de l'ordre: la scurit prive. La scurit prive s'est normment dveloppe au cours des vingt dernires annes. Ce phnomne nous atteint tous, d'une faon tranquille mais pntrante. Dans les difices bureaux, les magasins, les universits, les bibliothques, les centres commerciaux, les maisons de rapport et les subdivisions 1 , nous apercevons souvent et rgulirement…
Control in the Police Organization
Policing South Africa: Reflections on Botha's Reforms
South Africa is a puzzle that seems to become harder and harder to fathom the closer one gets to the excitement, urgency and pathos of day-to-day events. This is particularly true of Botha's reforms and the reactions to them. The problem is finding a framework that allows one to distinguish what is significant, and essential, from what is not. This is made all the more difficult by the constant stream of politically motivated and contradictory in…
The "I," the "Me," and the "It: Moving beyond the Meadian Conception of Self
Michael Petrunik, Clifford D. Shearing, The "I," the "Me," and the "It": Moving beyond the Meadian Conception of Self, The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 435-448
Joining Forces: Police Training, Socialization, and Occupational Competence
A la recherche d'une police communautaire. L'histoire d'un grand ensemble de Toronto
De auteur beschrijt een Canadees programma over de «gemeenschaps- polities» («community policing»). Dit project heeft als doel de politiefunctie onder verantwoordelijkheid van de gemeenschap te stellen, op kosten van de gemeenschap en opererend onafhankelijk van de staatspolitie en het straf- rechtssysteem. In het onderhavige geval wil deze politiedienst de veiligheid ver- zekeren van een groot complex van sociale woningen in Toronto en dit op ba…
Culture as Figurative Action
Criminology: A Reader's Guide
The Relation between Public and Private Policing
Employment by private policing agencies equals or exceeds public police employment in many countries. Reigning conceptions of relations between public police and private policing have changed markedly. A state-centered view of police functions disparaged "private armies" and saw order maintenance as a quintessential function of government. In recent decades, a laissez-faire view has emerged that celebrates "private-public partnerships" and sees p…
Policing for a New South Africa
Introduction 1. Through the loking-glass PART 1 - Catharsis 2. Policing apartheid - violence within the rules 3. Police culture and the discourse of supremacy 4. Township policing - experiencing the S.A.P. PART 2 - Pathways of reform 5. An orthodox solution 6. Processes of ordering in the townships 7. Towards a dual system of policing Notes Bibliography Name Index Subject Index
The Future of Policing
This essay examines the restructuring of policing currently taking place in developed democratic societies. It argues that restructuring is occurring under private as well as government auspices and will have profound effects on public safety, equity, human rights, and accountability. These effects are discussed, along with the trade-offs they represent for public policy. The driving forces behind restructuring are fear of crime, the inability of…
Governmentality, criticism, politics
The growth of the governmentality literature represents a significant development in current social theory. However, certain prominent and interlinked tendencies, which are associated with the place of politics as a subject and object of theoretical work, are queried. Most especially the concerns are with: the rejection of critique as part of the work of social theory; the rendering of government programmes as univocal and as overly coherent and …
Reshaping Security: An Examination of the Governance of Security in South Africa
This article seeks to trace the way in which the reform of policing has developed in South Africa and to identify some of the lessons that can be learned from the problems that have arisen. In developing the argument, the article will:- explore the situation that the new government found themselves in;- identify the policy framework developed to respond to this situation;- trace the trajectory of reform and the reasons for the departure from what…
A New Beginning’ for Policing
The paper provides an idiosyncratic view of the framework developed by the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland in response to the call for a ‘new beginning’ for policing in Northern Ireland in the Belfast Agreement signed on 10 April 1998
Punishment and the changing face of the governance
The article explores the implication of shifts in the way in which security and justice are being conceived. It argues that the emergence of a logic of risk is refiguring the way in which punishment is being used as a tactic of governance.
Punishment and the Changing Face of the Governance
The article explores the implication of shifts in the way in which security and justice are being conceived. It argues that the emergence of a logic of risk is refiguring the way in which punishment is being used as a tactic of governance
A nodal conception of governance: Thoughts on a policing commission
Governing Security: Explorations of Policing and Justice
1. Introduction: Thinking About Security 2. Dimensions of Governance 3. The Punishment Mentality and Coercive Technologies 4. Historical Shifts in Security Governance 5. Corporate Initiatives: The Risk Paradigm 6. Zero Tolerance, Community Policing and Partnership 7. Security Governance in Britain 8. Nodal Governance, Security and Justice
Political science (55 works) · Sociology (46 works) · Law (33 works) · Corporate governance (24 works) · Business (23 works) · Policing Practices and Perceptions (22 works) · Public Administration (21 works) · Criminology (19 works) · Law (19 works) · Economics (18 works)