Bouncer Culture and the Nighttime Economy

Pietro Saitta is full professor of Sociology at the University of Messina. His works, mostly ethnographic in nature, focus mostly on informal economy, environment, urban life and politics. He has worked and conducted research in different Italian and international institutions.

• Introduction 1. Elements of Work Organization 2. Managing Violence: Success and Failure 3. Relationships with Control Agencies 4. Ordering the Public 5. An Urban Working Class: Personal Profiles 6. Conclusion

For years, Pietro Saitta has carried out ethnographic research on social frames that were often unknown or understudied. Once again his latest work can be regarded as highly significant for showing how peaceful management of disputes and conflicts appears to prevail, contrary to prevalent narrations on youth, bouncers and the realm of the night. Salvatore Palidda, Professor of Sociology, University of Genoa Ethnography is a dying craft. It takes time to negotiate access, to establish field relationships, and to perform with sufficient competence to maintain a credible presence. All this and much more within the ethnographic enterprise is riddled with risk, and the increasingly risk averse university sector does little to encourage its practice. Pietro Saitta is to be congratulated for producing such a valuable study of one of post-industrial society’s more maligned professions.Dick Hobbs, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, University of Essex and Professor of Sociology, Western Sydney UniversityThe strength of this book lies in its sobriety. Nightclubs appear here not as liminal worlds suspended from social structure, but as ordinary sites where exploitation, inequality, and social order are reorganized and managed after dark. Saitta’s refusal to aestheticize the night, combined with his deep immersion in the labour process of security work, makes this one of the most grounded and analytically serious ethnographies of the nightclub to date. George Rigakos, Professor of the Political Economy of Policing at Carleton University