In the late 1990s, an overhaul of the youth justice system entailed the creation of interagency Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) for the delivery of youth justice services. The new YOTs were designed to tackle an “excuse culture” that was accused of spreading throughout the youth justice system. It sought to encourage the emergence of a shared culture among youth justice practitioners from different agencies. YOTs work as officers of the court as opposed to local authority social workers. The management of youth offending would become a multi-agency responsibility. YOTs were to replace the specialist teams of social workers in local authority social services youth justice or juvenile justice teams. With this new approach came a period of intense disruption in the youth justice system. This book explores a previously neglected area of organizational cultures in criminal justice through a detailed ethnographic study of the formation of YOT. It examines the nature of occupational culture and professional identity through the lived experience of youth justice professionals during a transition period. It attempts to show how profound and complex the effects of organizational change are, and the fundamental challenges it raises for practitioners’ sense of professional identity and vocation. This book is organized as a chronological account of the formation of the Midlands YOT in order to describe how a complex series of problems and processes unfolded as the team developed. The account of the YOT sought to describe the processes involved in the formation of the Midlands YOT as they were understood by the practitioners involved. The book is divided into to two main sections: the Youth Justice Team (YOT) and change and ambiguity. References