No abstract

The abuse and neglect of older people in care homes is widespread across England, but current causative explanations are limited and frequently fail to highlight the economic and political factors underpinning poor care. Informed by social harm and state-corporate crime perspectives, this study uses ethnographic data gathered through a nine-month period of working in an older person's residential care home to show how neglect is embedded in working routines. Three aspects of care are interrogated to reveal the embedded nature of harm in the home; all reveal the rift between official, regulatory rules and informal working practices shaped by material constraints of the labor process. This article explores the role of regulatory regimes in actively legitimizing sectors, such as the residential care industry, even in the face of routine violence, by bureaucratically ensuring the appearance of compliance with formal rules. While the harms of contemporary institutionalized care for older people have its roots in material conditions, performative compliance through regulation guarantees that these injurious outcomes are concealed. This article contends that malpractice (and harm) can be explained with reference to conjoint state-corporate relationships and practices.

The last two years have seen a small but significant increase in the level of resistance by service users and practitioners to the coalition government’s policy of austerity and neoliberal restructuring of mental health services in England. This article provides an overview and analysis of these developments by examining four recent campaigns that feature alliances between service users, workers, trade unionists and anti-cuts activists. It considers both challenges faced and successes achieved by campaigners

BackgroundMen continue to have a lower life expectancy in most countries compared to women. Explanations of this gendered health inequality tend to focus on male risk taking, unhealthy lifestyle choices and resistance to seeking help from health services. In the period 2005–2008 the Scottish Government funded a nationwide community health promotion programme aimed at improving men’s health, called Well Men Service Pilots (henceforth WMS).MethodThis paper explores WMS programme users’ perspectives and experiences of health help-seeking against theories of hegemonic masculinity as explanatory frameworks for men’s behaviour around health and illness, and their views on a male-specific focus of the programme. It is based on a secondary analysis of 43 semi-structured interviews with men who engaged with this programme.ResultsWe challenge the commonly held notion of men as being disinterested in their health, and point to their heterogeneity in relation to their views about health and notions of health seeking. Moreover, men in our study were largely ambivalent about the need for gender specific services, despite their positive reactions to the programme in general.ConclusionsOur findings question the utility of some theories of masculinity that posit somewhat simplistic explanations for men’s reluctance to seek help from formal healthcare services. They also suggest that providing male-specific health services may not significantly address men’s supposed reluctance to seek help from formal health services. Essentially, age seemed to be more important than gender. All encompassing health programmes are likely to fail to meet their health improvement objectives if they attempt to engage with men on the simple basis that they are male.

Recent appeals to decolonize criminology argue for a radical reorientation of the subject towards Global South relevant research agendas, theories and scholars. This paper begins by problematizing the current theoretical tendencies in Southern criminology’s view of coloniality and the vision for decolonization. First, Southern criminology has not directly engaged in investigating ‘empire’ in its current form; second, decolonization is viewed as primarily epistemological (transforming systems of knowledge production is seen as the central mode for decolonization); and, third, there is a tendency to reify Southern institutional responses to crime as preferable to Northern crime control. Launching from this critique, we argue that a successful Southern criminology should take seriously the continuing importance of structures of neo-colonialization: the Global system of accumulation founded on various matrixes of inequality, facilitating dispossession, appropriation and exploitation. We develop three criminological analyses of contemporary neo-colonization in Global South contexts: state-corporate ‘regimes of permission’, political economies of gender violence and racialization through criminalization regimes.