Book Reviews 93

All in all, this book should be judged on its content, and the main body(the critical theory that dare not speak its name) contains more than enoughtopicality, originality, asperity and insightöespecially about the drug busi-ness and state corruptionöto make it an essential text for any course dealingwith the relationship between crime and political economy. Ignore the sub-title, skip the introduction and go straight to chapter two.

STEVE HALLUniversity of Northumbria at Newcastle

doi:10.1006.ijsl.2001.0136, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

ALI WARDAK: Social Control and Deviance: A South Asian Community in Scotland,Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000, 288pp., »39.95 (Hb).

This is the ¢rst in-depth study of social control and deviance within a BritishPakistani community. If this were not reason enough to read the book thenthe fact that little systematic social scienti¢c knowledge is available aboutthese communities o¡ers further enticement. That the study is both clearlywritten and rigorous is an added bonus. Readers interested in adapting socialcontrol theory to speci¢c community and cultural contexts will bene¢t di-rectly, and a more general readership will ¢nd much of interest in how BritishPakistani communities are socially organized. Ali Wardak’s timely survey andethnographic study of young male conformity and deviance in the ScottishEdinburgh Pakistani community sets out to refashion social control theory totake account of culturally speci¢c institutional mechanisms of social controlfound in this community. He concludes that certain mechanisms are more im-portant than others, and that social control and social deviance act togetherto socially organise the community.

The ¢rst part of the study examines how the fundamental community so-cial institutions of family, Biraderi (social network of kinship/friendship rela-tionship), mosque and Pakistani Association interconnect, operate and aremaintained as agencies of social control. However, social control and devianceare necessarily linked because ‘‘social control de¢nes what deviance is, andspeci¢es how it should be dealt with’’ (p. 4). Consequently the second part ofthe study discusses deviance. The ¢rst part deals with the historical back-ground to discrimination and the exclusion of Edinburgh’s Pakistani commu-nity from mainstream Scottish society. The community reacted by becomingrelatively ‘closed’, reinforcing a sense of social belonging and strengthenedcommon social bonds. It is this context and response that promotes orderand regulates behaviour through the social bonding of members to the com-munity’s moral and social order. Part two looks at how these agencies de¢ne

# 2001 Academic Press

94 Book Reviews

deviance and the reception of these de¢nitions among a sample of 60 British-born Pakistani boys attending religious instruction classes at the localmosque/community centre. Whether boys are regarded as deviant or not,and their degree of deviance, depends on their adherence to the fundamentalnorms and rules of the mosque/school and the community.

Against social control theory’s abstract notions of social control, social bondand society, Wardak suggests that these require more speci¢cation and re¢ne-ment if they are to have meaning at the local community level and in ethni-cally diverse situations. Indeed the support that Wardak’s ¢ndings lend to themain tenets of control theory may in part have resulted from the diligencewith which he speci¢es the social and organizational context of its use. ThusHirschi’s elements of the social bond become operationalized so that ‘commit-ment’ becomes ‘family Izzet (honour)’, ‘involvement’, ‘participation in the activ-ities of Mosque/community,’ ‘belief ’ ‘the extent to which one follows Islamicteachings,’ etc. Although the Pakistani community shares some of the values,norms and rules of the wider British society, particularly the rule of law, italso holds di¡erent values.

Wardak argues that in a ‘normative’ cultural/religious community,‘‘the mainpatterns of compliance to the community’s norms are ‘attitudinal’’’ (p. 16). At-titudes indicating attachment to family, school, friends and communityproduces a four-fold typology: conformists, accommodations, part-time con-formists and rebels, representing a continuum from the least to the most de-viant. The study found that the general theoretical assumptions of controltheory were supported but that attachment to peers and friends andassociation with delinquents/deviants had little relationship to deviance andconformity.

More than anything Social Control and Deviance reveals how mechanisms andprocesses of conformity and deviance relate to Islamic teachings thatgovern individual conduct over a wide range of issues related to obligations(Awamir) and prohibitions (Nawahi). These operate on private and individual(internal) and on public and social (external) levels. The most importantagency of social control is the Biraderi where Izzat and Bizati (honour and dis-honour) determine social standing. This dense network of controls and obliga-tions provides the context in which conformity, deviance and delinquency isde¢ned and given meaning.

This reviewer is sceptical of Wardak’s claim of a clear-cut demarcation be-tween this ‘closed’ community and wider Scottish society. His own descriptionof the range of meanings and behaviour found in the sample suggests a moreculturally and socially heterogeneous community than the study implies. Inreacting to rejection by the wider majority ethnic society, the community issaid to have reinforced its controls on deviance through o¡ering its youngermembers ‘‘inclusion and acceptance’’ (p. 253) denied elsewhere. Yet as Wardaktantalisingly concludes, social processes of deviance from the community’snorms prompt revaluations, stimulate social change and pave the way for

Book Reviews 95

cultural and normative innovations. Nevertheless the paradoxical e¡ect of ra-cism on this community is to strengthen and revive its traditional culturalinstitutions in the face of ‘‘little positive interaction with the wider exclusivesociety’’. (p. 253)

COLIN WEBSTERUniversity of Teesside

doi:10.1006.ijsl.2001.0137, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

BENJAMIN BOWLING:Violent Racism:Victimization, Policing And Social Context(2nd Edn.) Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, 377pp., »45.00 (Hb),»14.99 (Pb).

In the preface of the second edition of Violent Racism, Dr Benjamin Bowlingpoignantly describes his own personal experience of racism. This is occa-sioned by his confrontation with, and examination of, the racist murder ofthe black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, whose cold-blooded killing in April1993 ¢nally received o⁄cial national recognition and sympathy in early 1999with the publication of the Macpherson Report. Whether the Lawrence In-quiry into the conduct of the investigation of this murder will be a ‘turningpoint’ in how violent racism is perceived and understood remains to be seen(p. xiii). Bowling’s richly textured study combines theoretical and empiricalanalysis of the complex history of developing strategies to combat racismand violence with an account of the North Plaistow Project that aimed tocurb violent racism by multi-agency co-operation.

The book critically scrutinizes and assesses those issuesöviolent racism,victimization, and policingösubsequently tackled by the Lawrence Inquiry.Its central concern are violent forms of racism, that is a speci¢c form of ra-cism rather than a speci¢c form of violence (p. 13). Di¡erent agencies use dif-ferent terminology to describe racist violenceö‘racial incident’, ‘racial attacks’,‘racial harassment’, and ‘racist violence’öthat generates di¡erent interpreta-tions of the phenomena, showing that agencies are not working together. Eth-nic minority communities experience disjointed approaches because agencieshave a di¡erent concept of what violent racism is and how to curb it. Bowlingargues that it is only when we have established a clear, universal meaning ofviolent racismöat all levelsöthat the phenomenon can start to be under-stood. Part I provides the context for such an understanding and reviews his-torical and sociological literature on violent racism and policing in the recentperiod; describes the events and pronouncements recorded in the national andlocal press during the 1980s; and examines the policy documents published byvarious statutory agencies from around the beginning of the 1980s.

# 2001 Academic Press