Jock Young: Social Exclusion, the Bulimic Society and Crime

Last Updated on September 16, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Jock Young (1999) argues that we live in a society that culturally includes everyone and economically excludes a great many — a combination he calls the bulimic society, and one he believes makes the problem of crime substantially worse.

Structurally and economically there is much more insecurity and marginalisation than there was. Culturally there is far more pressure to publicise how successful you are, even if you have no means of becoming successful.

This is really an application of Merton’s anomie theory, but the nature of the ‘strain’ between legitimate means and ends is different, more constant and more severe.

Increasing Insecurity and marginalisation

Young contrasts today’s society (since the 1970s) with the period preceding it, arguing that the 1950s and 60s represented a golden age of modern capitalist society. This was a period of stability, security and social inclusion, characterised by full employment and a well functioning welfare state. There was also a low divorce rate, strong communities and a general consensus about right and wrong, and crime rates were very much lower.

Since the 1970s, however, society has become a lot more unstable. De-industrialisation and the corresponding decline of unskilled manual jobs has led to increased unemployment, underemployment and poverty, especially for young people. These changes have also destabilised family and community life and contributed to rising divorce rates, as have New Right policies designed to hold back welfare spending. All of this has contributed to increased marginalisation and exclusion of those at the bottom.

Young’s account of New Right welfare policy driving family breakdown is asserted rather than evidenced, both in his work and in the older version of this post. Treat it as part of his argument rather than as an established finding.

A Media saturated society

However, just as more and more people are suffering from the economic exclusion described above, we now live in a media saturated society which stresses the importance of leisure, personal consumption and immediate gratification as the means whereby we should achieve the ‘good life’.

The media today generally informs us that the following are normal and desirable — in order to belong to society we are required to do the following:

• We need to have high levels of consumption — and buying now, paying later, and debt are seen as legitimate strategies for maintaining our consumption levels.
• We need to have active leisure lives and publicise this — in effect we should turn ourselves into mini-celebrities. In short, we need to be somebody.
• We should strive to achieve success ourselves rather than depending on others. Anyone can be successful if they try hard enough is the message.

The bulimic society

This is the concept the rest of Young’s argument rests on, and it is worth learning by name.

A bulimic society is one that takes people in culturally and spits them out structurally. Everybody watches the same television, wants the same trainers, absorbs the same message that success is available to anyone who tries. That is the cultural inclusion. Then the labour market, the housing market and the education system exclude a large minority from any realistic chance of getting there. That is the structural exclusion.

The metaphor is deliberately unpleasant, and Young meant it to be. A society that binges on inclusion and then purges is doing something more corrosive than simply being unequal. Straightforward exclusion — the Victorian workhouse, say — at least told people where they stood. The bulimic society tells everyone they belong and then demonstrates daily that they do not.

This is what makes the resulting anomie chronic rather than occasional. The gap is not a one-off frustration to be got over. It is refreshed every time someone opens their phone.

Crime in Late Modernity

Young essentially applies Merton’s Strain Theory to explain crime in late modern society. He argues that today there are millions of people (just in the UK) who will never earn enough money to live a high-consumption, celebrity lifestyle, and this results in many people suffering relative deprivation and frustration — basically anomie.

However, Young goes beyond Merton by arguing that deviant and criminal behaviour become a means whereby people can not only attempt to realise material goals, but can also seek to achieve celebrity, or simply seek a temporary emotional release from the anomic frustrations of coping with the usual contradictions and pressures of late modern life.

Two further consequences of the trend towards economic exclusion combined with the media message of ‘cultural inclusion through consumption and celebrity’ are firstly that crime is more widespread and found increasingly throughout the social structure, not just at the bottom, and secondly that crime is nastier, with an increase in hate crime.

Examples of attempts to achieve celebrity through deviance include extreme subcultures, or any form of extreme one-upmanship on social media, while examples of escapism include binge drinking and violence at the weekends. Young also argues that the anomie and frustration generated in late modern society explains the increase in more serious crimes such as hate crimes against minority groups and asylum seekers.

The vertigo of late modernity

Young’s later book, The Vertigo of Late Modernity (2007), gives the experience a name.

Vertigo is Young’s term for the pervasive unease of a society where nothing is settled. Neither jobs nor relationships nor neighbourhoods are for life. Everybody is insecure — not only the poor. The middle classes fear falling; the excluded resent being excluded; both groups deal with the anxiety by drawing sharp moral lines around themselves and treating those on the other side as less than fully human.

That second move is what connects vertigo to crime. Young argues the insecurity produces both offending — as escape, as identity, as release — and an increasingly punitive public response to it. A frightened society demands harsher punishment, which deepens exclusion, which produces more of what frightened it.

It is a bleaker argument than The Exclusive Society, and a more useful one in an essay, because it explains the reaction to crime as well as crime itself.

Contemporary evidence: does the hate crime evidence support Young? (2026 update)

Young predicted crime would get nastier and pointed to hate crime. This is the obvious place to test him, and the answer is genuinely mixed — which makes it good evaluation material rather than bad news.

Police in England and Wales recorded 115,990 hate crimes in the year ending March 2025, excluding the Metropolitan Police Service, a 2% increase on the previous year (Home Office, Hate crime, England and Wales, year ending March 2025, published 9 October 2025). Race hate crime rose 6% and religious hate crime 3%, with a 19% rise in religious hate crime targeting Muslims and a spike around the time of the Southport murders and the disorder that followed.

That looks like support. HOWEVER, the Home Office itself attributes much of the longer-run increase to improvements in police recording since 2014 rather than to more offending. And the Crime Survey for England and Wales estimates around 176,000 hate crime incidents a year — similar to the estimates published before the pandemic.

A rising police count set against a flat survey estimate is not evidence that society has become nastier. It may be evidence that the police have become better at recognising and recording hostility. Young’s prediction is not refuted, but it is not confirmed either, and a student who can say that will do better than one who simply quotes the police figure.

Evaluating Jock Young’s theory of crime

The section that previously sat here restated Young’s own argument against rational choice theory rather than criticising him. That material has moved into the positive evaluation below, and genuine criticisms have been added.

In his favour: these ideas add a real dimension to our understanding of the causes of crime, particularly the non-economic reasons why people offend — those acts with no obvious monetary reward. Young argues against the idea that crime happens simply where opportunity exists and controls are absent, which depicts crime as routine and logical and casts the rest of us as potential victims who must defend ourselves. He points out that drug use, vandalism, joyriding and violence clearly involve much more than a cost-benefit calculation, and that street robbery in particular offers profits far too small to explain the risk. Something more appealing is going on, and rational choice theory has nothing to say about it.

It is largely Merton with the volume turned up. Young says so himself. Relative deprivation, a gap between goals and means, anomie as the result — the structure of the argument is straight out of 1938. What is new is the claim that the strain is now constant and culturally universal rather than concentrated among the poor, and it is fair to ask whether that is a new theory or an adjective.

The golden age may be nostalgia. The 1950s and 60s were stable and low-crime for some people. They were also a period of routine domestic violence that went unrecorded, child abuse that went unreported, and racial discrimination that was entirely lawful. Some of the apparent rise in crime since is a rise in reporting. Feminists in particular would argue that Young’s golden age looks golden mainly from a male vantage point.

The crime drop is a serious problem. Crime measured by the Crime Survey for England and Wales has fallen substantially since the mid-1990s — long-term declines in theft, criminal damage and violence — in Britain and across most comparable countries, at exactly the time when Young’s conditions were intensifying. If the bulimic society causes crime, crime should have risen. The usual defence is that the older figures missed the new categories: fraud has indeed grown, and by the year ending March 2026 accounted for more incidents than all theft combined. HOWEVER, that defence only goes so far. Computer misuse has fallen by around 55% since 2017, and CSEW headline crime including fraud and computer misuse was 14% lower in the year ending March 2026 than in the year ending March 2017. Crime has fallen even on the measure that counts the new crimes. Young explains the changing shape of crime well; he does not explain its falling volume.

It is very difficult to test. “People commit crime to feel like somebody” is close to unfalsifiable. You would need access to offenders’ motivations at the moment of offending, and the supporting evidence is mostly small-scale ethnography of young working-class men in a handful of northern towns.

It does not explain who does not offend. Most people experiencing exactly the exclusion Young describes never commit a crime. Control theorists would say the interesting question is not why the excluded offend but why so few of them do.

Marxists would say the mechanism is capitalism, not late modernity. Consumer culture, insecure employment and widening inequality are not features of a historical era that arrived in the 1970s. They are what capitalism does, and Marxists would argue you do not need a theory of late modernity to explain them.

Signposting and Sources

This material is mainly relevant to the crime and deviance module, and is part of the AQA A-level sociology specification, Paper 3 (7192/3).

Young is usually taught as part of the post and late modern section — see postmodern criminology for the overview and a 30-mark essay plan.

His argument about crime as escape and identity is developed further by the cultural criminologists, who take the emotional side of it and make it central.

For late modernity as a concept in social theory rather than criminology, see modernity, postmodernity and late modernity.

Jock Young (1999) The Exclusive Society.

Jock Young (2007) The Vertigo of Late Modernity.

Home Office (2025) Hate crime, England and Wales, year ending March 2025.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com