Moral panic, moral regulation and essentialization of identities: Discursive struggle over unethical business practices in the Finnish national media

Siltaoja, Marjo

doi:10.1080/14759551.2011.644667

Cited by 14 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Rather than democratizing the ethical management of the self through techniques of individualization and normalization, moral panics represent more acute forms of regulatory intervention that actively constrain rather than passively encourage certain activities and identities (Hier, 2017). Examples of the constraining character of moral panics include anti-social behaviour legislation in Britain (Hier et al, 2011) and responses to unethical business practices in Finland (Siltaoja, 2013). In this way, moral panics are characterized by the intensification of regulatory activities that attend to perceived breakdowns in the moral regulation of everyday life.…”

Section: Moral Panic and Moral Regulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral panic and the new neoliberal compromise

Hier

2019

Current Sociology

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Moral panics are conventionally explained as socially regressive overreactions to objectively minor problems. In the early 2000s, moral panics were recast as collective grievances that arise from perceived crises in the moral regulation of everyday life. Emphasizing neoliberal forms of entrepreneurial risk management, the panic-as-regulation perspective provides ways of thinking beyond some of the limitations associated with conventional perspectives. This article shows how the new neoliberal compromise, characterized by ongoing submission to the rule of capital in the absence of familiar ways of securing hegemonic consensus, is calling attention to the importance of theorizing the conjunctural norms of personal responsibility that underscore the panic-as-regulation perspective. By locating market-oriented subjectivities in the wider trajectory of neoliberalism, we achieve two things: first, a clearer understanding of the normative phase of neoliberal rule in whose image the panic-as-regulation perspective is crafted; second, a stronger position to develop insights into post-hegemonic claims-making activities that are appearing across the political and cultural spectrums.

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Section: Moral Panic and Moral Regulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral panic and the new neoliberal compromise

Hier

2019

Current Sociology

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“…Attempting to move beyond explanatory limitations associated with the conventional perspective, moral panics have been recast as specific kinds of claims-making activities that derive from and act back on routine processes of moral regulation in everyday life (Hier, 2002, 2011). Attentive to Cohen’s (2003, 2011) periodic remarks about the more ambivalent than resolute political underpinnings of moral panics, the panic-as-regulation perspective explicitly conceptualizes moral panics in terms of discursive logics (Siltaoja, 2013) that adhere to a common rhetorical form. Because moral panics derive from and condition codes for everyday living that legitimize and naturalize different ways of being human, they are transmitted through normative judgments about how to conduct oneself and others.…”

Section: Moral Panic and The Polarizing Politics Of The Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monumental Panic: Reconciliation, Moral Regulation, and the Polarizing Politics of the Past

Hier

2019

Critical Sociology

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In 2018, the City of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada removed a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald from the grounds of City Hall. As Canada’s first prime minister, Macdonald is both revered for the role he played in Confederation and vilified for enacting and promoting racist if not culturally genocidal policy initiatives aimed at destroying Indigenous cultures in the last part of the 19th century. Set in the context of truth and reconciliation politics playing out across the country, this article explains the removal of the monument and the social reactions it provoked, using the sociologies of moral panic and moral regulation. By focusing on one city council’s efforts to interpret and act on the moral imperatives associated with political reconciliation in post-colonial Canada, insights are provided into some of the practical challenges and potential contradictions that municipal governments can encounter when they adopt idiosyncratic strategies to atone for historical injustices in non-transitional democratic nations.

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“…Hier, Walby, Lett, and Smith () subsequently demonstrated how attempts to ban hooded tops from public locations in Britain derived from perceived breakdowns in the regulatory power of the Anti‐Social Behavior Act as a state mechanism of moral regulation. Lundström () applied the framework to claims about benefit fraud in Sweden, Siltaoja () to unethical business practices in Finland, Critcher () to anti‐doping policies in sport, Carlson () to radically motivated police violence and Smoczynski and Fitzgerald () to polish migrants in the UK. The merits of the model have also been examined in a critical exchange between Critcher () and Hier (), as well as in the works of Hunt (), Best (2011), and Rohloff and Wright ().…”

Section: Moral Panic and Moral Regulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral panic, moral regulation, and the civilizing process

Hier¹

2016

British Journal of Sociology

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This article compares two analytical frameworks ostensibly formulated to widen the focus of moral panic studies. The comparative analysis suggests that attempts to conceptualize moral panics in terms of decivilizing processes have neither substantively supplemented the explanatory gains made by conceptualizing moral panic as a form of moral regulation nor provided a viable alternative framework that better explains the dynamics of contemporary moral panics. The article concludes that Elias's meta-theory of the civilizing process potentially provides explanatory resources to investigate a possible historical-structural shift towards the so-called age of (a)moral panic; the analytical demands of such a project, however, require a sufficiently different line of inquiry than the one encouraged by both the regulatory and decivilizing perspectives on moral panic.

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Moral panic, moral regulation and essentialization of identities: Discursive struggle over unethical business practices in the Finnish national media

Cited by 14 publications

References 29 publications

Moral panic and the new neoliberal compromise

Moral panic and the new neoliberal compromise

Monumental Panic: Reconciliation, Moral Regulation, and the Polarizing Politics of the Past

Moral panic, moral regulation, and the civilizing process

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