Keele Research Repository

Since it was first advanced by Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay (1969), Social Disorganization Theory (SDT)- which claims that neighbourhood ecological conditions shape crime rates over and above the characteristics of individual residents- has enjoyed its ebbs and flows, first being discredited for its substantive and methodological deficiencies(Bursik and Gramsick, 1993; Sampson and Groves, 1989), but also enjoying a revival in the seminal works of Kornhauser (1978), Sampson (1986) and Bursik (1988). Although the social disorganization literature has grown tremendously since the appearance of these works,there hasn’t been a concomitant surge in ‘grounded research’; that is, research which examines the model’s relevance to contemporary social conditions, especially in the UK. This paper, then, is an attempt to ‘practice’- rather than theorize- the key tenets of SDT: Based on a case study of the A8 immigration of Slovakian Roma community into Govanhill- a neighbourhood in South East Glasgow- the paper elucidates the hitherto neglected interplay of the extraneous factors that shape the policing needs of a neighbourhood experiencing sudden changes in demographics. Along the way, the notion of Scotland as post-racial is deconstructed.