Introduction

This chapter explores the complementary possibilities of the work of Habermas and Tyler for reinterpreting non-participation and its relationship to crime among young people. It begins by reflecting on how empirical work on that relationship has clustered around instrumental and expressive motivations for crime, and on how aspects of Habermas’ and Tyler’s analyses add to understanding it. The possibilities and limitations of these approaches are then tested by two case studies that highlight complexities that both utilise and test the scope of Habermas’ and Tyler’s analyses. Sections 2 and 3 then consider how theories of governance and theories of ‘governing through crime’ that utilise and extend Habermas’ and Tyler’s approaches can provide a reinterpretation of the non-participation‒crime relationship.

The majority of explorations of the non-participation‒crime relationship have produced findings and analyses influenced by or directly aligned with instrumental or expressive motivations. And, as the Interlude between Parts Two and Three made clear, elements of these motivations are more readily associated either with nomothetic levels of analysis and exogenous factors of analysis, or with idiographic levels of analysis and endogenous factors of analysis.

Table 7.1 builds on these distinctions, and other schematic distinctions employed in earlier chapters. It is primarily intended to provide an overview of the range of distinctions that have been made up to this point, to draw attention to a number of congruences that have been identified in previous chapters, and to highlight some of the possible associations they might imply. Beginning with the ‘levels/factors of analysis’ distinctions schematised in the Table in the Interlude, it maps them against the two dominant analytical traditions of youth studies, the theoretical approaches of Habermas and Tyler, and the dominant policy responses that emerge from and are associated with both.