ABSTRACT
Cultural criminology seeks to explain crime and criminal behaviour and its control in terms of culture and has very close intellectual links with the postmodern and anarchist criminology we encountered in the previous chapter. From this perspective, crime and the various agencies and institutions of crime control are perceived to be cultural and creative constructs and it is argued that these should be understood in terms of the phenomenological meanings they carry. It is thus a perspective that also has clear links to the labelling tradition, which was a central component of the modernist victimized actor model and which has been so infl uential in providing crucial foundations of critical criminology. Cultural criminology involves a focus upon the continuous generation of meaning around interaction where rules are created and broken involving a constant interplay of moral entrepreneurship, political innovation and transgression.
