Last Updated on September 16, 2026 by Karl Thompson
Postmodern and late modern criminologists argue that crime has changed since the 1970s, and that the older theories no longer explain it well. There are four main claims:
- Consumer society is a high-crime society
- Economic exclusion combined with cultural inclusion produces a constant, low-level anomie
- A lot of crime is emotional rather than rational — done for the thrill
- Control has shifted from punishing bodies to watching everyone
This topic sits near the end of the crime and deviance module for AQA A-level sociology, Paper 3 (7192/3). It is usually taught last because it works best as a critique of everything that came before it.
What postmodernists mean by “postmodern society”
Most of these theorists date the shift to somewhere around the 1970s, though you should treat that as a convenient marker rather than a fact — the periodisation is contested, and some of the writers below prefer “late modernity” precisely because they think modern society has intensified rather than ended.
Whichever label you use, the social changes they point to are the same ones:
- The rise of the consumer society, in which people identify themselves through what they buy rather than the work they do
- De-industrialisation and globalisation, producing insecure work and greater instability
- A media-saturated culture that treats high consumption and celebrity as normal and desirable
- Individualisation — more personal freedom, weaker shared norms, more cultural diversity
- Rapid technological change, especially the centrality of the internet
If you want the underlying social theory rather than the criminology, see modernity, postmodernity and late modernity and the introduction to postmodernism.
Consumer society is a high-crime society
Robert Reiner (2007) argues that the post-war rise in crime tracks the rise of consumerism almost exactly. Crime began climbing in the 1950s, when mass consumption arrived, and accelerated through the 1980s under neoliberal economic policy. The argument is simple: the more portable, desirable stuff there is in circulation, and the more people are taught to want it, the more property crime there will be.
Most crime is acquisitive, and it is worth knowing how lopsided the picture is. On the Crime Survey for England and Wales, violence with or without injury accounts for roughly one incident in eight. The overwhelming majority of the rest is theft, fraud, computer misuse or criminal damage.
Avoid quoting a single percentage for “property crime” — the figure shifts depending on whether fraud counts as property crime, and an unqualified number is a methods error waiting to happen.
This matters because it reframes the question. Earlier theories asked what is wrong with criminals. Reiner asks what it is about the society itself that generates crime at this volume, and answers: the economy depends on making people want things they cannot all afford.
Jock Young: exclusion, anomie and the bulimic society
Jock Young (1999) argues that the 1950s and 60s were a golden age of stable employment, strong communities and low crime, and that since the 1970s society has become far more insecure.
His central idea is that people today are culturally included but structurally excluded. The media tells everyone that consumption, success and visibility are what make a life worth having. The economy then denies a large minority any realistic means of achieving them. Young calls a society that does both things at once a bulimic society — it takes people in and spits them out.
The result is a constant, grinding anomie. Crime becomes a way of coping with it, and not only a way of getting rich. Merton’s strain theory assumed people broke the rules to reach material goals. Young argues they also break them to be somebody, to vent frustration, or simply to escape.
Two consequences follow. Crime is more widely spread through the class structure rather than concentrated at the bottom, and crime is nastier — Young points particularly to hate crime.
Cultural criminology: crime as edgework
Cultural criminologists take the emotional side of Young’s argument and make it the whole story.
Katz (1988) argued that crime is seductive — that people are drawn into it because it thrills them, not because they have calculated a benefit. Lyng (1990), separately, developed the concept of edgework: going deliberately to the edge of what is acceptable and controlling the loss of control. These are two distinct contributions by two authors, and it is worth getting that right, because the textbook shorthand “Katz and Lyng” makes them sound like collaborators.
Keith Hayward (2004) connects this to consumerism directly through what he calls the crime-consumerism nexus — the observation that consumer culture cultivates desire, individualism, hedonism and impulsivity, and that these same dispositions show up in a great deal of offending.
This connects to a wider argument about risk. Ulrich Beck (1992) described contemporary society as a risk society, one increasingly organised around managing hazards it has manufactured itself. If everyday life is saturated with risks nobody chose, deliberately seeking out a risk you did choose starts to look less strange.
A word of caution if you use Beck in an essay: he argued we are moving towards a second modernity, not a postmodernity, and would have objected to being filed here at all. Saying so is worth a mark.
The practical upshot is a direct attack on right realism. If offenders are not weighing costs and benefits, then increasing the costs — more CCTV, tougher sentencing — will not deter them, and may even add to the thrill.
Winlow and Hall: violence in the night-time economy
Simon Winlow and Steve Hall’s Violent Night: Urban Leisure and Contemporary Culture (2006) is an ethnography of young people in the night-time economy of north-east England — circuit drinking, clubbing, and the violence that goes with them.
They found that the camaraderie which working-class men once got from heavy industry has gone, replaced by dead-end service-sector work that offers no identity and no prospect of a conventional adult future. Weekend drinking and fighting fill the gap. Fighting is about status, but it is also simply exciting.
Winlow’s earlier Badfellas (2001) is a different study, about masculinity and criminal careers in Sunderland. Older versions of this post merged the two. If you are writing about the night-time economy, the study you want is Violent Night.
This study is useful in an exam because it supports Young and the cultural criminologists simultaneously: insecure work producing anomie, and crime as thrill-seeking escape.
Foucault: from punishing bodies to watching everyone
The other half of the post/late modern contribution is about crime control rather than crime.
Michel Foucault argued that punishment used to be violent, physical and public, and is now psychological, hidden and aimed at changing how people think. This reflects a shift from sovereign power — obedience through fear of force — to disciplinary power, obedience through being watched.
His larger point is that this logic escaped the prison. Surveillance now runs from cradle to grave: school, work, pregnancy, health data, the roads. Most people obey not because they fear punishment but because they fear becoming the wrong kind of person — a failing student, an unproductive worker, an obese person.
Two developments extend the argument. Synoptic surveillance is surveillance from below — the many watching the few, rather than the few watching the many. Actuarial justice is statistical: people are sorted by calculated risk and monitored accordingly, whether or not they have done anything.
The postmodernist view of punishment
Postmodernists argue that the concept of crime itself should be rethought. Because crime is defined by law, and law reflects the interests of whoever writes it, a lot of serious harm is not crime and a lot of crime is not seriously harmful.
The suggestion is to replace “crime” with social harm — which would bring in environmental damage, corporate negligence and state violence, and would take out a good deal of what currently fills the courts. Punishment, on this view, should be about repairing harm rather than inflicting suffering, which is one of the arguments behind restorative justice.
Contemporary evidence to evaluate post and late modern criminology (2026 update)
Hate crime: does the evidence support Young?
Young argued crime would get nastier, and pointed to hate crime. The current figures are genuinely ambiguous and this is a good place to show evaluation skill.
Police in England and Wales recorded 115,990 hate crimes in the year ending March 2025, excluding the Metropolitan Police Service, a 2% rise on the previous year (Home Office, Hate crime, England and Wales, year ending March 2025, published 9 October 2025). Race hate crime rose 6%, religious hate crime 3%, and religious hate crime targeting Muslims rose 19%, with a spike around the Southport murders and the disorder that followed.
HOWEVER — and this is the part that matters for AO3 — the Home Office itself attributes much of the long-run rise to better police recording rather than 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 against a flat survey estimate is not strong evidence that society has become nastier. It may just be evidence that the police got better at writing things down.
Anti-social behaviour policy has moved on
Older accounts of this topic cite ASBOs as the classic example of the control culture cultural criminologists complain about. ASBOs were abolished in England and Wales by the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, with effect from 20 October 2014, and replaced by civil injunctions and Criminal Behaviour Orders. They remain in use in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The argument survives the change — the replacement powers are broader, not narrower — but using the right name is free marks.
Cybercrime and the hyperreal
Baudrillard (1994) described postmodern society as hyperreal: experience mediated through screens becomes more real than face-to-face life. The clearest evidence is that fraud is now the largest single category of crime in England and Wales, accounting for more incidents than all theft combined — and in around 79% of fraud incidents there was no contact at all between offender and victim (ONS, Nature of fraud and computer misuse in England and Wales, year ending March 2025).
The most common crime in the country is one where the two parties never meet. That is about as good an illustration of hyperreality as the topic offers.
Romance fraud is a useful illustration because it is hyperreal in Baudrillard’s precise sense — the criminal constructs an identity that exists only as data, and the victim falls for the construction rather than a person. Specific romance fraud figures have not been verified for this update; use the CSEW fraud headline instead if you need a number.
Positive evaluations
These theories take seriously something older criminology ignored: that crime feels like something to the person doing it. A theory of shoplifting that cannot explain why people steal things they do not need is incomplete, and Merton’s version genuinely cannot.
They are also better at explaining the crimes that have actually grown — cybercrime, fraud, hate crime — than theories built around post-war industrial Britain.
And they avoid the narrowness of Marxist accounts, which reduce crime to class power, by looking at culture, emotion and identity as well as economics.
Criticisms
It is usual in A-level sociology to criticise one perspective using others, and there is plenty of material here.
Much of it is Strain Theory in new clothes. Young’s argument is explicitly an update of Merton. Hayward’s “hyper-strain” is strain with an intensifier. It is fair to ask what is genuinely new.
The theories are very difficult to test. “People commit crime for the thrill” is close to unfalsifiable — you would have to get inside the offender’s head, and the evidence is mostly small-scale ethnography of young men.
They over-generalise from a narrow sample. Violent Night and Badfellas are both about young working-class men in north-east England. A great deal of crime — fraud, domestic abuse, corporate offending — looks nothing like weekend street violence.
They are no use for policy. If crime has many complex global causes, it is unclear what anyone is supposed to do. Left realists would say this is theorising as a substitute for helping actual victims.
Marxists would say the diagnosis is right and the explanation is shallow. Consumer culture and global inequality are features of capitalism. You do not need a new theory of postmodernity to explain them.
The crime drop is the awkward fact. 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 — and the same fall has happened across most comparable countries, at exactly the time when the conditions this theory blames for crime were intensifying. 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. What has changed is the shape of crime, not simply the total — and a theory that predicts more crime has to account for less of it.
Exam practice: 10-mark question
Analyse two ways in which crime has changed in postmodern society (10)
This is the no-item type, so both points come from your own knowledge and there are no marks for evaluation. An example answer, not an exhaustive one.
The first way crime has changed is that consumer society has produced far more property crime. Postmodern society is organised around consumption rather than work — people identify themselves through what they buy. There is simply more portable, desirable property in circulation, and more opportunity to take it. Reiner links the post-war crime explosion directly to the arrival of mass consumption in the 1950s. This is intensified by strain in Merton’s sense: the media presents high consumption and celebrity lifestyles as normal and desirable, while legitimate opportunities to fund them are unevenly distributed. Jock Young’s account of the bulimic society describes exactly this gap, and argues it produces a constant anomie rather than an occasional one.
The second way crime has changed is the growth of cybercrime. Baudrillard (1994) describes postmodern society as hyperreal — life experienced through media becomes more real than face-to-face life. It is unsurprising, then, that the fastest-growing categories of crime are ones where offender and victim never meet. Online abuse and harassment are an obvious case: a great many people will type things they would not say to someone’s face. Romance fraud illustrates the pattern more completely, since the offender’s identity is itself a construction, the transaction is entirely mediated, and the offence is frequently committed across national borders. Global connection, cheap access and a low risk of detection together explain the growth.
Exam practice: 30-mark essay plan
Assess the contribution of post and late modern perspectives to our understanding of crime and deviance (30)
An A-level sociology essay plan written for the AQA’s 7192/3 specification, Paper 3. Evaluation points in italics.
Introduction. Postmodern society differs from modern society: more consumerist, more individualised, more globally connected, more surveilled. Late modernists argue crime has changed in kind, not just in quantity, and that older theories cannot account for it.
Point 1 — Consumer society is a high-crime society (Reiner)
- Crime rose with mass consumption from the 1950s
- Accelerated under neoliberal economic policy from the 1980s
- Property crime dominates the recorded figures
- Correlation, not causation — crime also fell sharply from the mid-1990s while consumption kept rising
Point 2 — Exclusion and the bulimic society (Young)
- Cultural inclusion, structural exclusion: wanting what you cannot have, permanently
- Anomie becomes chronic rather than situational
- Crime as identity and escape, not just acquisition
- Essentially Merton updated; the “golden age” of the 1950s is arguably nostalgia
Point 3 — Crime as emotion and edgework (Katz, Lyng, Hayward, Winlow and Hall)
- Crime is thrilling; the risk is the point
- Hayward’s crime-consumerism nexus links hedonism and impulsivity to offending
- Violent Night supports both this and Young
- Very hard to test; based on small ethnographies of young men
Point 4 — Globalisation and cybercrime
- New flows of money, goods and people create new criminal opportunities
- Drug trafficking, people trafficking, cybercrime, terrorism
- Driven partly by global inequality, and by heightened risk consciousness
- Marxists would say global inequality explains this without needing postmodern theory
Point 5 — Control has changed too (Foucault, synopticism, actuarial justice)
- Discipline through surveillance rather than punishment of the body
- Risk profiling rather than response to offending
- Foucault was writing about modernity, not postmodernity — using him as a postmodern theorist is a stretch
Conclusion. The nature of crime has clearly changed, and these perspectives describe the changes better than functionalism or subcultural theory do. But describing change is not the same as explaining it, and much of the explanatory work is still being done by Merton and by Marx. The strongest claim these theories can support is that the forms crime takes are culturally specific — which is worth knowing, and is less than it first appears.
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).
For the individual theorists covered above in more depth, see Jock Young on social exclusion and the bulimic society and cultural criminology and edgework.
On crime control, see Foucault on surveillance, which is usually taught alongside synoptic surveillance and actuarial justice.
For the social theory underneath all of this rather than the criminology, see modernity, postmodernity and late modernity and Ulrich Beck on risk society.
Students often study this topic immediately after the Marxist theory of crime, which it partly criticises and partly extends.
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