Professor Dick Hobbs grew up in the East End of London. He is known for his research on working class crime and entrepreneurship, the night-time economy and on alcohol-related behaviour. Earlier this year he gave a presentation with Stephen Green, the Chief Constable of Nottingham, to the Home Affairs Select Committee on 24-hour licensing.
“After I left school I had one job after another. I worked as a labourer for a while, then as a clerk. Then I decided to go back to night school. My way into Higher Education was through teacher training college. I did a teaching degree then taught for about six years, mainly in primary schools in London.
I decided I wanted to take education further. I wrote to all the London unis and polys and none of them got back except the LSE, who were happy to accept me to do my Masters degree (in Sociology) when they found out I was intending to pay my own fees! I liked the ethos of the place, and worked very hard. I got a distinction and was then offered an ESRC studentship to do a PhD at the University of Surrey.
My thesis was on working class crime and entrepreneurship. It was an area I felt hadn’t really been written about before - the fact that for some people, certain types of crime can be life-enhancing. Detectives in the East End were also ‘entrepreneurs’ in some respects, so there were points where the two cultures came together. Also, I was fed up with the way working class people were presented in sociology texts. They tended to be depicted as horny-handed sons of the earth. It was all a bit ‘Passport to Pimlico’, and certainly didn’t fit with my own experience.
Unfortunately when I finished my PhD there were no jobs in academia. I got a post working on a policing study in the Centre for Criminological Research at Oxford University, and in my spare time I wrote up my PhD thesis as a book. This became Doing the Business, and won the British Sociological Association’s Philip Abrams Prize. After that, more jobs came along and I got a post at the University of Durham. It was a fabulous place to be and everyone was so friendly. I did research on organised crime that led to another book, Bad Business.
In 1998-2000, I did research for a project on bouncers that was part of the ESRC’s Violence programme. I worked with some really good people, including Simon Winlow, Stuart Lister and Phil Hadfield, who’re all ex-students of mine. We looked at questions like ‘Why are we suddenly hearing a lot about bouncers?’ That project went particularly well.
More recently I’ve been working on a project on female bouncers that fills in some of the gaps from the original project. It addresses issues like why more women are becoming bouncers. The answer is there’s a market for them. The leisure industry needs women to search other females, for example, and to go into women’s toilets. Also, there’s a belief in certain circles that women draw people in - if they see them standing on the door. I’m also working on an EC-funded project that looks at organised crime in Europe, and I’ve just received a Home Office grant to look at drug dealing.
The work I’ve done on alcohol was originally a spin-off from my research on the night-time economy. When I first started researching these areas back in 1998, no one was interested, but it’s really taken off since then. There are two reasons for this: one is the Government’s interest in urban regeneration and in growing the night-time economy; the other is the problems this has caused and the media’s interest in these.
The most influential research I’ve done was probably Doing the Business. It was very popular - it just seemed to strike a chord with people at the time. It was quite strange as both my kids did ‘A’ Level Sociology where it’s used as a set text. They’d come back from school quoting some nasty thing that dad had said! The alcohol work has also been influential, but more with critics of the Government’s policy than on policy itself.
My favourite area of research is the way in which certain types of crime reveal a wit and imagination - it’s an alternative to life as a merchant banker! For those who get involved in that sort of crime, it’s often either that, or they go under. I was brought up in an environment where theft was a part of everyday life. The whole drugs thing came after my generation. Old-style villains used to serve a kind of ‘apprenticeship’. Now those involved in the drugs trade can be multi-millionaires by their early twenties. They make money very quickly, and burn out very quickly. A lot of them are also users, and that has a big impact. Some people who start off dealing drugs then go into legitimate business. The big thing at the moment is ‘commodity hopping’, where you move your investments into whatever happens to be making money at the time. These people aren’t really ‘drugs dealers’, they’re more like money makers.
Now I’m back in London it feels like my life has come full circle. In a few years’ time I think I’d quite like to go back to the East End where I did the groundwork for Doing the Business and update it. It’s not that it’s all gone ‘legit’ now - there’s still crime. But the ethnic background has changed. Most of the people from the original study now live in Essex; some have flats in Spain - they’ve paid the mortgage. Some have drunk themselves to death. But some are still there.
If there’s a common thread in my progression from labourer to Professor of Sociology, I suppose it’s a willingness to engage with criminals on the ground. I always try to make sure my work is readable. I believe it’s the duty of academics to make complex issues simple.”