Last Updated on September 16, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Cultural criminology seeks to understand how consumer culture has changed the motives and nature of crime in contemporary society.
Cultural criminologists argue that crime in contemporary society has changed because of hyper consumerism.
Grouping the argument, today crime is more about:
- Instability of Desire – consumer culture encourages insatiable desire, and crime is one way to get what one wants
- New forms of ‘hyper strain’ – people commit crime because they want to stand out, rather than just accumulating stuff
- Engagement with Risk – crime is more likely to be about seeking thrills and excitement, and escape from mundane, regulated working life
- Instant Gratification and Impulsivity – people commit crime because they want a thrill now; they don’t think about the future as much as they used to
This topic is part of the post and late modern section of the crime and deviance module for AQA A-level sociology, Paper 3 (7192/3).
Crime and emotions
Cultural criminologists stress the highly emotional nature of crime – instead of what the criminals will gain, these researchers are interested in how committing the crime actually makes people feel. The focus of cultural criminologists is on the thrill of the act. Crime can offer a brief escape from an otherwise grey emotional existence. They argue there is an intoxicating mix of fear and pleasure that often accompanies risk taking.
Crime is not a rational mundane activity, where costs and benefits are weighed up. Rather it is a reaction against the mundane. It is a time when those involved momentarily experience status, excitement and even some control over their own lives, which are otherwise characterised by feelings of worthlessness and insecurity.
The crime consumerism nexus
The crime-consumerism nexus is a theoretical concept developed by Keith Hayward in City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban Experience (2004). It refers to the relationships that exist within consumer societies between the values and emotions associated with consumerism and various forms of acquisitive criminality.
The crime-consumerism nexus asserts that consumerism cultivates new forms of subjectivity based around desire, individualism, hedonism and impulsivity, which can find expression in transgressive and even criminal behaviour. Examples include gang activity, rioting, mugging and drug use. This applies especially to young people.
The crime-consumerism nexus simply outlines the striking convergence between novel forms of subjectivity propagated by consumerism and many aspects of criminality as outlined by traditional criminological theories.
It does not claim there is any causative link between capitalism, consumerism and crime. This is worth noticing, because it is what separates cultural criminology from Marxist theories of crime, which do make that causal claim.
Cultural Criminology: four themes
Cultural criminology is interdisciplinary and draws on behavioural economics, consumer research, and the sociology of risk and identity. Reading across this literature over the years I have found it useful to group what cultural criminologists emphasise under four headings. These are my own grouping rather than a typology any single writer has set out, and they lean particularly on Hayward’s work on the crime-consumerism nexus:
- Instability of Desire
- New forms of ‘hyper strain’
- Engagement with Risk
- Instant Gratification/ Impulsivity
Instability of desire
In contemporary consumer culture insatiable desire is not only normalised but essential to the survival of the economy. Insatiable desire is actively cultivated in consumer culture.
The flip side of this is a constant sense of unfulfillment, dissatisfaction and disillusionment. The criminogenic consequences of this are that a lot of crimes – from shoplifting to street robbery – are an attempt to bridge a perceived ‘consumer deficit’ and as a form of identity construction. A lot of crimes are no longer simply a response to poverty.
New forms of hyper strain
Contemporary hyper-consumerism is contributing to the crime problem in ways qualitatively different from those expressed by classic strain theorists such as Merton. Today people are feeling deprived of not just the physical products themselves but also the sense of identity that products bestow on people. This means that crimes which happen because of hyper strain rather than just ordinary strain are about people expressing themselves, rather than about the instrumental desire to simply have a product they can’t get through legitimate means.
Engagement with risk
In contemporary society there is a tension between the desire for excitement which is a part of consumer culture and the over-controlled nature of ordinary, mundane life – as we see in the over surveilled and drudge like nature of many jobs.
People try to compensate for this by exerting more personal control – or rather a ‘controlled loss of control’ through engaging in risky activities. Many crimes within urban areas such as street fighting and graffiti writing can be interpreted as risk-seeking activities.
Instant gratification and impulsivity
Consumer culture cultivates a need for immediate rather than deferred gratification. We see this in the buy-now nature of advertising and the expansion of buying on credit. This constant focus on the ‘now’ separates people from the longer term consequences of their immediate actions. People are more likely to pursue excitement in the moment rather than thinking longer term.
Examples of cultural criminologists
Two examples of cultural criminologists are Katz (1988) and Lyng (1990). These are two separate contributions by two different authors, not a single piece of joint work — textbooks and revision sites routinely run them together as “Katz and Lyng”, and it is worth getting right.
Katz (1988) argued that people get drawn into crime because it is seductive, because it is thrilling. He saw this simply as part of a postmodern society which calls on us to enjoy our leisure time – crime is one means whereby some people do just that – this is very much the feeling of many people who took part in the London Riots in 2011.
Lyng (1990) developed the concept of edgework – by this he meant that crime was a means whereby people could get a thrill by engaging in risk-taking behaviour – going right to the edge of acceptable behaviour, and challenging the rules of what is acceptable. Again, we can see this very much as an outgrowth of a postmodern society which encourages and rewards risk-taking behaviour.
Edgework is the term worth memorising. It captures the paradox at the centre of the whole approach: the offender is not trying to avoid risk, and is not failing to notice it either. The risk is the point. Skill is involved — an edgeworker is testing how close to the boundary they can get and still come back.
The risks involved in law breaking act as a challenge, and crime is carried out precisely because the rules are in place. Cultural criminologists argue that most young offenders do not set out on their escapades assessing the chances that they will be arrested, and this is why the steady increase in control in our culture does nothing to deter, but actually creates more law breaking as offenders are faced with more ‘thrilling’ challenges.
Winlow and Hall: edgework in the night-time economy
The best British evidence for this approach is Simon Winlow and Steve Hall’s Violent Night: Urban Leisure and Contemporary Culture (2006), an ethnography of young people in the night-time economy of north-east England.
They found that the camaraderie working-class men once got from heavy industry has gone, replaced by dead-end service work that offers no identity and no realistic prospect of a conventional adult future. Weekend circuit drinking and clubbing fill the gap, and the violence that comes with them is about status — but it is also, plainly, exciting.
The study is useful because it shows edgework in a specific setting rather than as an abstraction, and because it connects the thrill-seeking to the economic conditions that produce it.
Relevance to A-level sociology
Cultural criminology can be used to criticise many earlier criminological theories within the crime and deviance module.
Cultural criminologists argue the exact opposite of right realists, who focus on the ordinary motivations and repetitiveness of much crime. For cultural criminologists crime is about feelings and identity, not just accumulating stuff.
In a way they develop some aspects of Marxism by looking at the relationship between consumer capitalism and crime. However they do not argue that capitalism is criminogenic; they don’t see capitalism as causing crime.
We can regard cultural criminology as a postmodern theory of crime. This is because they look at how consumer culture encourages crime. Also because they focus on how crime makes individuals feel, and ultimately hold them responsible for the crimes they commit.
Contemporary evidence: the control culture has changed (2026 update)
The argument that intensifying control produces more thrilling challenges rather than deterrence is often illustrated with ASBOs. That example needs updating.
ASBOs were abolished in England and Wales by the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, with effect from 20 October 2014. They were replaced by civil injunctions and Criminal Behaviour Orders, and by a wider set of powers including Community Protection Notices, Public Space Protection Orders and police dispersal powers. ASBOs remain available in Scotland and Northern Ireland under separate legislation.
The reasons given for abolition are themselves useful to the cultural criminological argument: high breach rates, and the criticism that for some young people an ASBO functioned as a badge of honour rather than a deterrent. That is more or less exactly what Lyng’s account would predict.
HOWEVER, the replacement regime is broader than what it replaced, not narrower — so the claim that control keeps intensifying survives the legislative change intact.
Criticisms of cultural criminology
It is usual in A-level sociology to evaluate a perspective using others, and cultural criminology attracts criticism from several directions.
It over-generalises from a very narrow evidence base. The supporting studies are mostly small ethnographies of young working-class men in urban settings. Fraud, domestic abuse, shoplifting by people who are simply poor, and corporate offending all look nothing like edgework, and together they account for a great deal of crime.
It is close to untestable. You cannot observe a motivation. Establishing that someone offended for the thrill rather than the money requires taking their account at face value, and offenders have obvious reasons to present their behaviour as exciting rather than desperate.
Left realists would say it romanticises offending. Presenting crime as thrilling transgression sits awkwardly with the fact that its victims are overwhelmingly working class, and often the neighbours of the offenders. There is something uncomfortable about a theory of street robbery that finds it exciting.
Marxists would say it stops short. Cultural criminology explicitly declines to claim that capitalism causes crime — it describes a convergence rather than a cause. Marxists would argue that this is a failure of nerve, and that consumer culture is not a free-floating thing but a product of how capital needs people to behave.
Feminists would point out that it is a theory about men. The thrill-seeking offender in this literature is almost always male, and the approach has little to say about why women, subject to the same consumer culture, offend so much less.
Right realists would say the policy conclusion is unusable. If deterrence does not work because punishment adds to the thrill, cultural criminology offers nothing in its place.
Signposting and Related Posts
This post has been written for students studying the crime and deviance topic as part of the AQA’s A-level sociology course, Paper 3 (7192/3).
Cultural criminology is usually taught within the post and late modern section — see postmodern criminology for the overview and a 30-mark essay plan.
It develops the emotional side of Jock Young’s argument about social exclusion and the bulimic society, which is the best place to start if you want the structural account rather than the cultural one.
It is usually contrasted with right realist criminology, which takes the opposite view of offender motivation.
For the wider theory of a society organised around risk, see Ulrich Beck on risk society.
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