Emotional and behavioural responses to everyday incivility

Challenging the fear/avoidance paradigm

Bibliographic Data

ID7435282
AuthorsTim Phillips (0000-0002-5349-6324, University of Tasmania), Philip Smith (0000-0001-7781-4350, Yale University)
Year2004
Volume40
Issue4
Pages378-399
Publication date2004-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1440-7833 • E-ISSN: 1741-2978
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1440783304048382
OpenAlexW2055154549
LanguageEN
Citations received27
References cited24

Although antisocial behaviour has become an issue of political and policy concern, social science lacks basic information on such events. This article explores one aspect of such everyday incivility - how people react emotionally and behaviourally to the badly behaved stranger. Mainstream criminology, as well as the social theory of Goffman and Bauman, is oriented around a fear/avoidance vision. This dominant paradigm is unnecessarily restrictive on intellectual inquiry. A raft of other options including anger/intervention; disgust/aversion and indifference/do nothing are analytically reconstructed from the classical social theory of Durkheim, Elias and Simmel. These various models are applied to incidents coded from the transcripts of the Melbourne Everyday Incivility Project. The results show that emotions and behaviours tend to pair up as predicted. Fear/avoidance, however, is a relatively uncommon response to incivil encounters. Anger/intervention and indifference/do nothing are more frequent. The former is especially associated with events where the respondent is a ‘victim’, and the latter with those where the respondent is an onlooker. These findings suggest the limitations of current criminological research in areas related to incivility and fear of crime, and have implications for collective efficacy, social capital and broken windows criminology

Disgust · Incivility · Mainstream · Nothing · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Crime, Deviance, and Social Control · Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses

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