Moral Panic and Social Theory

2010/04/22 by Amanda Rohloff, Sarah Wright · 2 citations
Social Sciences · #Crime, Deviance, and Social Control #Crime Patterns and Interventions #Gothic Literature and Media Analysis #Moral panic #Sociology #Epistemology #Temporality #Ideal (ethics) #Heuristic #Intentionality #Order (exchange) #Moral order #Social science #Criminology #Philosophy #Economics

paper · doi:10.1177/0011392110364039

openalex publication_date 2010/04/22 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/27

Abstract

Chas Critcher has recently conceptualized moral panic as a heuristic device, or ‘ideal type’. While he argues that one still has to look beyond the heuristic, despite a few exceptional studies there has been little utilization of recent developments in social theory in order to look ‘beyond moral panic’. Explicating two current critical contributions — the first, drawing from the sociologies of governance and risk; the second, from the process/figurational sociology of Norbert Elias — this article highlights the necessity for the continuous theoretical development of the moral panic concept and illustrates how such development is essential to overcome some of the substantial problems with moral panic research: normativity, temporality and (un)intentionality.

Citations

• Conceptualizing Moral Panic through a Moral Economy of Harm
• Moral Panic Analysis: Past, Present and Future
• Moral Panic: Its Origins in Resistance, Ressentiment and the Translation of Fantasy into Reality
• Widening The Focus: Moral Panics as Moral Regulation
• Folk Devils and Moral Panics

Cited by

• Tightening the focus: moral panic, moral regulation and liberal government1
• Moral panic [wikipedia]