Each of the chapters that make up this section concentrate on one key theme: the making and remaking of policy-relevant theory. In an era of rapid social, political and economic change, it is important that we (re)examine theory ‘reflexively’ for at least three reasons. First, there is a need continually to assess the capacity of accepted theoretical perspectives to provide insights into, and explanations of, changing policy arenas – literally to maintain, and where necessary to readjust, their explanatory power. Second, it is important that new theories are ‘tested’ against social and political actuality in an effort both to judge their policy relevance and to gauge their influence on policy making. Third, and conversely, it is equally important that new departures in policy making are used to inform theoretical debate in ways that stimulate new thinking about, and new interpretations of, the policy process.

The section begins with Chris Crowther's piece, which revisits “recent analyses of the policing of the underclass by considering old and newly emergent theorisations of developments in police policy and practice in relation to social exclusion”. The theoretical approaches under review are neo-Marxist and Foucauldian, and the chapter assesses the capacity of these perspectives to ‘explain’ or conceptualise the policing of the ‘underclass’. Crowther notes that, while neo-Marxist analyses favours ‘macro’, or structural, social, political and economic changes as factors capable of explaining how populations, surplus to production requirements, are excluded and criminalised, Foucauldian thinking privileges the ‘micro’ influences of “discursive practices and political rationalities”. Both perspectives need refining, however, if they are to take proper conceptual account of what Crowther refers to as the new “police-policing continuum”, a concept that focuses theoretical attention on the ways in which the role of the police is being increasingly supplanted, as well as complemented, by the policing and control activities of non-police agents and agencies. The linkages between macro- and micro-level changes have to be re-examined in this evolving context, Crowther argues, because forms of exclusion and criminalisation are continually being made and remade in this new and highly complex, multi-agency policy environment. In addition, if these processes are to be fully understood, greater attention needs to be paid not only to new agencies of social control but, in an increasingly fluid policy context, also to the role of agency itself.