This paper focuses upon the emergence of the night‐time economy both materially and culturally as a powerful manifestation of post‐industrial society. This emergence features two key processes: firstly a shift in economic development from the industrial to the post‐industrial; secondly a significant orientation of urban governance involving a move away from the traditional managerial functions of local service provision, towards an entrepreneurial stance primarily focused on the facilitation of economic growth. Central to this new economic era is the identification and promotion of liminality. The State's apparent inability to control these new leisure zones constitutes the creation of an urban frontier that is governed by commercial imperatives.

‘…classic Winlow and Hall – bleak, brilliant and unmatched in the art of rethinking crucial social issues. Enlightening, and rather scary.&

Dick Hobbs, Philip Hadfield, Stuart Lister, Simon Winlow; ‘Door Lore’. The Art and Economics of Intimidation, The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 42, Is

The development of alcohol-based night-time economies as part of government-sponsored post-industrial urban regeneration involves two interconnected political and economic processes. The first is the shift to a consumer economy, and the second is the movement within local governance from the provision of services towards a focus upon nurturing economic growth. The violence and disorder that have resulted from the huge expansion in these night-time economies have produced a crisis for state policing that has led, via licensing, to the expansion of commercially relevant control strategies. This paper, based upon extensive empirical research, discusses the hypocrisy that is inherent in the governance of liminal licence.

This article is an initial analysis and theorization of original ethnographic data gathered from young men who participated in the English riots of August 2011. The data consistently suggest that consumer culture supplied these young men with a compelling motivation to join the rioting after the initial localized response to the original incident had died down. The data are analysed in a way that builds a theory of the rioting as a product of objectless dissatisfaction. Drawing upon the resources of contemporary cultural and critical criminological theory, it argues that, in the current post-political vacuum, the rioters could not locate or articulate the objective structural and processual causes of their marginalization. Neither could they clearly recognize or ethically censure their structural antagonists. Thus, in the entire absence of truthful, comprehensible and unifying political symbolism, they had nowhere to go but the shops.

This paper seeks to address some of the pragmatic and ethical issues encountered when researching violence. We seek through reference to our own work and to the work of others to highlight the inevitability of these problems and to suggest that dealing with them is instrinsic to the sociological enterprise.