Debates around the relationships between criminology and social harm are longstanding. This article sets out some of the key features of current debates between, on the one hand, those who would retain a commitment to 'crime' and criminology and those, on the other hand who would abandon criminology for a social harm perspective. To this end, the article begins by highlighting several criticisms of criminology, criticisms raised in particular by a diverse group of critical criminologists over the past 30 to 40 years. While these are hardly new, the rehearsal of these is an important starting point for a discussion of the potential of the development of an alternative discipline. The paper then proposes a number of reasons why a disciplinary approach organised around a notion of social harm may prove to be more productive than has criminology hitherto: that is, may have the potential for greater theoretical coherence and imagination, and for more political progress.

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This paper considers the context for the development of the concept of responsive regulation, namely the transcending of the deregulation debate. It argues that claims regarding responsive regulation when allied to risk-based rationales for enforcement can, in fact, allow a "deregulatory" momentum to develop. This argument is grounded with reference to a case study of the regulation of workplace health and safety in the UK, with a particular focus upon the period 2000-2010. The paper casts doubt on the relevance and robustness of the concept of responsive regulation. In a context that might have been fertile ground for developing genuinely responsive regulatory policy, empirically we find the development of policies that are better described as "regulatory degradation." Thus we argue in this paper that, whatever the intentions of its proponents, there is a logical affinity between responsive regulation, and effective de-regulation, and that it is this affinity that has provided a convenient political rationale for the emergence of a neo-liberal regulatory settlement in the UK.

Recent debates have drawn attention to the centrality of crime and disorder discourses within the rationale of contemporary urban entrepreneurial rule and how these have targeted ideological and political resources onto policing 'quality of life' infractions on the streets. In extending these insights, the paper focuses upon the regeneration of urban order in the UK and how this is being increasingly practised through a form of corporatised statecraft that underpins the shaping of discourses and responses to crime, harm and risk in city spaces. Attention is given to the processes by which 'regeneration' and entrepreneurialised governance are not only 'opening-up' but also 'closing-down' urban spaces as objects of surveillance and regulation. It is not only that crimes on the streets and associated hindrances to entrepreneurial rule are selected as the proper objects of power; at the same time, and through a series of integrally linked processes, other urban harms are being marginalised. The trajectory of regenerative discourse and practice, it is argued, is resulting in a stabilisation of opportunity structures for corporate crimes and harms, whilst at the same further exposing the relatively powerless to the punitive gaze of the extended surveillance capacity being developed as part of the entrepreneurial landscape.

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