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Emotional and behavioural responses to everyday incivility

Challenging the fear/avoidance paradigm

School of Sociology and Social Work, University of Tasmania, timothy.phillips{at}utas.edu.au

Philip Smith

Department of Sociology, Yale University, philip.smith{at}yale.edu

Although antisocial behaviour has become an issue of political and policy concern, social science lacks basic information on such events. This article explores one aspect of such everyday incivility - how people react emotionally and behaviourally to the badly behaved stranger. Mainstream criminology, as well as the social theory of Goffman and Bauman, is oriented around a fear/avoidance vision. This dominant paradigm is unnecessarily restrictive on intellectual inquiry. A raft of other options including anger/intervention; disgust/aversion and indifference/do nothing are analytically reconstructed from the classical social theory of Durkheim, Elias and Simmel. These various models are applied to incidents coded from the transcripts of the Melbourne Everyday Incivility Project. The results show that emotions and behaviours tend to pair up as predicted. Fear/avoidance, however, is a relatively uncommon response to incivil encounters. Anger/intervention and indifference/do nothing are more frequent. The former is especially associated with events where the respondent is a ‘victim’, and the latter with those where the respondent is an onlooker. These findings suggest the limitations of current criminological research in areas related to incivility and fear of crime, and have implications for collective efficacy, social capital and broken windows criminology.

Key Words: emotions • everyday life • fear of crime • incivility • social theory • strangers

Journal of Sociology, Vol. 40, No. 4, 378-399 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/1440783304048382


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