Mike Presdee, who has died of cancer aged 64, was a sociologist of international acclaim and great personal magnetism. His work focused on the sociology of youth and cultural criminology. He was fascinated by the way in which young people can be criminalised and controlled, and of youth being seen as a problem, rather than young people being the locus of the problems of the system. In later life, he attempted to understand and explain New Labour's neurotic obsession with antisocial behaviour.

He was a key figure in the now burgeoning field of cultural criminology, convinced of the impossibility of understanding crime (or any other form of human behaviour, for that matter) in terms of survey data and quantitative analysis. He argued that "numerical life" had little, if any, relationship with "actual life", that there was a chronic split between academic knowledge (the gaze from above) and everyday experience (the view from below), revealed by ethnography and biography. Mike was one of those people who, because of class, ethnicity or migration, are permanent outsiders, who never feel quite at home with the world as it is presented by authority, and who, because of this, make the best sociologists and the most perceptive critics.

Full obituary: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/aug/20/obituary-mike-presdee