Search

Female aggression in night-time economies (NTE) is a relatively under-researched area of criminological inquiry. This article focuses on a group of White, working-class local women (Locals) drawing on a mixed-method qualitative study of 78 women (18–58 years) who participated in the NTE of a Welsh city centre. This article explores the women's accounts and understandings of engaging in aggressive behaviours in this particular situational context. Foregrounding their voices, the research found that stereotypical assumptions surrounding the women's reputation for unprovoked aggression is not supported. Rather, the women themselves understand their aggression as justifiable responses to breaches of shared group norms and values in relation to both reputation and manners. This group of women's aggressive behaviour often was oriented towards maintaining their relationships and loyalty to each other and their group. This further challenges research in which women's violence is framed as a response to or modelled on the behaviour of men. This article reports on a subgroup ('Locals') of a larger study that included two additional female groups, Professionals and Students, the perspectives of which are occasionally included to draw out distinctions with the working-class women focused on here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the 50th anniversary of its original publication, this article revisits The Established and the Outsiders, a largely forgotten and in our view unfairly neglected community study by Elias and Scotson (1965). Drawing from our ethnographic research on an urban community in South Wales, the contemporary significance of the theoretical and empirical contributions to the analysis of insider-outsider relations in bounded, household-based communities made by the original work is foregrounded. The findings from our research on 'Cornerville' confirms many of the empirically based conceptual claims of Elias and Scotson's earlier diagnosis of largely intra-working class relations, distribution of status honour, and processes of micro-sociality. The article concludes by drawing out some of the implications of community-based research for advancing sociological criminology's contribution to the specific analysis of group stigmatization and more broadly of social processes of communal ordering and informal rule-making and rule-breaking in contemporary localities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]