Private security discretion: Economic rules, social norms and situational judgement in the night-time economy

Abstract

This article seeks to transform private security discretion from a subject discussed in passing to a substantive area of research. It first draws upon the police discretion literature to construct a socio-economic model of private security discretion. It then uses this model to explore one specific articulation of discretion: the moral discretion of door supervisors as they deal with serious incidents in the night-time economy. It uncovers three distinctive rule–norm–discretion configurations: ‘enabling’ (where economic rules and moral standards line up to facilitate a straightforward mode of moral discretion); ‘constraining’ (where economic rules override countervailing moral standards to prevent a desired mode of moral discretion); and ‘complex’ (where moral standards take precedence over prohibitive economic rules to generate a circuitous mode of moral discretion). Through this analysis, the article offers an original set of categories for studying private security discretion while simultaneously deepening our socio-economic understanding of the market for security.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.