Shearing’s work, located within Criminology, focuses on identifying and understanding developments in governance through the lenses of security and justice. Uniting this work has been a decade’s long programme of theory-building that has sought systematically to develop more adequate conceptions and explanations of governance developments as well as normative prescriptions for shaping these developments. These prescriptions typically focus attention on the excluded and the disadvantaged.
Shearing’s preferred approach has been to promote and engage in a practice/theory dialogue, together with a style of engagement that favours working with collaborators and which challenges his (and their) thinking. These collaborations have deliberately included early career scholars.

“The New Structure of Policing” (2001) brought together, and sought to crystallize, his previous research and thinking. This provided a platform for the development of the nodal governance approach outlined in “Governing Security” (2003) and taken forward in “Nodal Governance, Democracy, and the New ‘Denizens’” (2003). An example of Shearing’s ongoing theory/practice engagement is “Justice in the Risk Society” (2005) a piece that also illustrates his commitment to facilitating experiments that enable the “weak” to engage in shaping governance development.