In Badfellas: Crime, Tradition, and New Masculinities, criminologist Simon Winlow explores the changing role of violence and masculine identity in northeast England due to the processes of deindustrialization and globalization and the arrival of postmodernity. Though his focus is primarily on the role of violence and crime in the lives of working-class males in the city of Sunderland, his interest in the ways that masculinities change across epochs and in response to shifting economic and social conditions makes for a more expansive argument. The rise of “disorganized capitalism,” including the decline of local shipbuilding and coal mining industries and rising unemployment, means that traditional male roles involving hard work, physicality, “shop floor masculinity,” and providing for one’s family “have become of limited relevance to a new generation of North-Eastern males” (p. 20). As men face barriers to legitimate careers, favorable attitudes toward delinquency arise, as well as toward violence used in both legitimate and illegitimate arenas (p. 66). Whereas crime in Sunderland was once limited primarily to work-related pilfering and conflict-oriented status struggles, in recent years an entrepreneurial and professional criminal element has emerged. Crime, Winlow writes, “is one of the few traditional trades that still offers an apprenticeship in the post-industrial North East” (p. 170).

Born and raised in the city of Sunderland, Winlow came to his project with preexisting contacts and certain advantages (his accent, his age, his physical appearance, his knowledge of appropriate social behavior and hierarchies, etc.) that helped him gain access to the people and situations he wished to study. He employed both overt and covert research techniques and took on numerous and varying participant-observer roles—conducting unstructured interviews; drinking and socializing at the homes of the men he was studying; attending football matches, boxing events, weddings, and funerals; and eventually working as a bouncer in the city’s nightclubs. Indeed, Winlow’s method is one of the strengths of this text and he pays careful attention to the benefits, limitations, and complexities of the participant-observer role without slipping into solipsism.

Northeast England is an environment in which one can examine the effects of cultural and economic change, and Winlow argues, “there is no better place to observe these changes than in the gyms, bars, nightclubs, and drug dens of the region” (p. 164). The “new men” who populate this landscape are not “the kind who would do the ironing and are not afraid to cry” (p. 164); nor are they just men “of fighting repute” like those from the modern era (p. 166). Rather, they are men who are learning to capitalize on violent capabilities and criminal opportunities, sometimes even as professional gangsters with national and global links. Masculine “protocols” of the past—physical prowess, the ability and readiness to fight, autonomy, and skill—“are not rejected but merge with new influences and take on new meanings in the post-modern age” (p. 22). Physicality, in this new context, “need not be expressed by the hardship of manual labour” but by bodybuilding; “fighting ability need not be restricted to personal displays of toughness to win the respect of one’s peers, but can become a viable commercial asset” (p. 22). In a highly competitive marketplace, violence becomes not only a “cultural expectation” of working-class men, but also a business advantage, a “highly valued commodity that must be recognized, nurtured and defended at all costs” (p. 163).

Winlow’s analysis sidesteps tired debates about structure versus agency: The subjects of his book are shown actively shaping their worlds but always in the context of the changing social and economic conditions of the community in which they live. Though the book is slow reading at first, the characters that Winlow introduces us to are interesting and multifaceted men who engage in local criminal activity, watch Goodfellas and The Godfather, listen to foreign rap music, and enjoy the sensual and aesthetic aspects of violence in addition to valuing its practical uses in their everyday environment. To be a gangster, Winlow writes, “represents an idealized form of masculinity to elements of the male working-class, with the money, the women, the esteem and respect, the fear, the lack of mundanity and regimentation, the battle with convention, all comparing favorably with the blunt reality of life in the working-class northern city” (p. 167).

Though Winlow is primarily focused on the ways men define their masculinity in relation to one another, it might have been helpful to know more about how this new masculinity was affecting and was being affected by women’s changing aspirations and practices. Women are a backdrop in the world presented here—“bouncer groupies,” strippers, lasses, or bitches—and are seen as one of the rewards of successful masculine performances. They seem somewhat disconnected from this changing environment of work and play and the men’s adaptive responses to it. Of course, an ethnographer cannot do everything, and Winlow gives us a humanistic portrayal of the men whose lives he explores. Winlow’s ethnography adds to a growing literature on masculinity in different cultural contexts, social situations, and historical periods, and given its interesting predictions and attention to the ways in which the local is informed by the global (and vice versa), it should be of interest to anyone studying the material basis of gendered expression as well as to those working in criminology or the sociology of deviance.