ABSTRACT
In their introduction to this edited collection, Paul Rock and Simon Holdaway contrast theorizing as it is normally understood-that is “intellectual exegesis” of the grand sort-with a more subterranean understanding grounded in, and essential to, practice. They remark that while many criminologists have eschewed conventional theorizing, they have very of ten engaged in theorizing in this second vein. They talk about this as a “theoretical enterprise undertaken, as it were, sotto voce…” They suggest that what might at first blush look like a lack of interest in theory might indeed be theorizing in a different voice, undertaken behind the scenes so to speak, yet moving forward in a deliberate and systematic manner from project to project. This understanding conceives of theoretical work as a commonplace activity Theory is the set of claims about the world that we use to go on from one space-time moment to the next. Theory makes living possible. It orders our world by making that world visible and available to us as a terrain within which we can act. As we act through our theories in this way, we reflect on them and modify them. Theory building happens incrementally and continually. It happens in and through scholarly projects, but it also happens in whatever we do. Essential to this view of theory is a notion that it not only provides a way of understanding the relationship between events in the world, but
that it provides for a way of seeing the world in the first place-it makes “reality” thinkable. Action requires theory. What distinguishes the theories we build as scholars from those we all use to get on with the business of living in our everyday lives is the rigour we seek to achieve in terms of explicitness, parsimony, agreement with logical requirements such as internal consistency, the testability of the predictions made when a world is made visible, and so on.
