Transforming Youth Justice

The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 brought about a radical transformation in the way that youth justice is organised and delivered, with the creation of multi-agency Youth Offending teams throughout England and Wales.

These new YOTs were designed to tackle an 'excuse culture' that was thought to pervade the youth justice system, and aimed to encourage the emergence of a shared culture among youth justice practitioners from different agencies.

This book provides an ethnographic study of creation and development of one of these new Youth Offending Teams (YOTs), exploring a wider range of hitherto neglected areas of occupational cultures.

This book therefore sets out to explore the nature of occupational culture, team membership and professional identity through the lived experience of youth justice professionals in this time of transition and change.

It shows how profound and complex the effects of this organisational change were, and analyses the fundamental challenges to their sense of professional identity and vocation that many practitioners faced. The author draws on critical management literature to examine the ways in which occupational cultures can be understood, and through which the complexity, ambiguity, conflict and flux of organisational life can be captured.

It makes a highly significant contribution not only to the way that professional cultures are understood in criminal justice, but to an understanding of the often dissonant relationship between policy and practice.