Book Review: Miethe, T. D., & Regoeczi, W. C. (with K. A. Drass). (2002). Rethinking Homicide: Exploring the Structure and Process Underlying Deadly Situations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 320

Published date01 December 2007
Date01 December 2007
DOI10.1177/0734016807310606
AuthorRonet Bachman
Subject MatterArticles
emotional dimension of offending. Drawing on the work of Jack Katz and Jock Young, he
posits that late modern consumerism has precipitated new emotional states of ontological
uncertainty/insecurity, with urban crimes often resulting from the anxiety and frustration
associated with the inability to fulfill consumptive desires. Hayward concludes that street
crime is a transgressive act that bridges material deficits and thus represents a form of identity
construction in late modernism.
Some readers may ponder whether the theoretical exposition in City Limits moves beyond
classical strain theory, or merely reiterates it within the context of late modernity. Hayward
indeed makes a strong case that his work expands classical strain theory by considering the
emotive states associated with strain/anomie and how late modern consumerism precipitates
new types of desire where individuals’ sense of identity and self-realization are strongly tied
to the products they consume. Yet it is relatively late in the book before these contributions are
explicated (chap. 5), which may exacerbate some readers’ skepticism of the work’s theoretical
innovation. Similarly, the book leaves the reader with some unanswered questions regarding,
“Where do we go from here?” Despite the fact that this is a theoretical work, some discussion
about the empirical ramifications of the theory would have been useful, particularly in terms
of how to examine these outlined theoretical processes distinctly from tests of classical strain
theory. Similarly, we are left to ponder the book’s relevance for different types of offending
as well as offending in nonurban areas.
Despite these minor issues, Hayward’s theoretical analysis of consumer culture in late
modernity and its implications for urban crime should be a challenging and provocative read
for criminologists, cultural theorists, social theorists, and urban theorists alike. City Limits
should be particularly relevant for those interested in the growing field of cultural criminology,
and those interested in reconciling structural and motivational theories of criminal behavior.
Indeed, this work presents a historically contextualized phenomenology of transgression that
helps us understand the late modern sociocultural context of urban crime.
Emily E. Tanner-Smith
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
Miethe, T. D., & Regoeczi, W. C. (with K. A. Drass). (2002). Rethinking Homicide:
Exploring the Structure and Process Underlying Deadly Situations. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 320
DOI: 10.1177/0734016807310606
The topic of murder receives a tremendous amount of attention, in the scholarly litera-
ture and in media portrayals of violent crime in America. In fact, since 2000, in a search of
Criminal Justice Abstracts, there is a hit rate of more than 1,000 articles on murder and/or
homicide. Despite this proliferation, I believe that with Rethinking Homicide, Miethe and
Regoeczi have advanced our understanding of homicide more than any empirical investi-
gation on the topic since Marvin Wolfgang’s classic study of murder in Philadelphia. Their
analysis of murder is methodologically and theoretically rigorous, and they are explicit
about the policy implications of their findings.
Book Review(s) 439

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