No Escape from the Iron Cage? Governmental Discourse in New Labour's Community Safety Policy

Abstract

This article seeks to provide an explanation for why it is that local crime and disorder reduction partnerships (CDRPs), established by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, have thus far failed to display the kind of self-governing networked governance that is generally expected of partnership approaches. Rather than searching for explanations that focus upon the “competence” of the CDRPs, the politically inspired “control freakery” of the centre, or the structural influences on late-modern crime control, the concept of grid-group theory is employed to show how CDRPs exist as structures that are vulnerable to the influence of a range of conflicting, competing and contradictory modes of social organization that pull in very different directions. This meso-level focus affords a better understanding of the difficulties faced by CDRPs, and of how they might be overcome in the pursuit of networked governance.