From Threat To Promise: Nightclub 'Security', Governance and Consumer Elites

Drawn from an ethnographic investigation of Central London's contemporary nightclub scene, this paper seeks to map previously obscure elements of the private governance of ‘security' and the wider network of ‘nodes' which govern Britain's night-time economy (NTE). Attention to the constitution and operation of nodes and the interfaces between them provide insight into the co-production of particular forms of social order and situated meanings of the term ‘security'. The paper identifies a criminogenic NTE in flux, driven by entrepreneurial zeal, a stratified consumer culture and forms of regulatory closure that conspire to exacerbate underlying tendencies toward social exclusion in the night-time city.