ABSTRACT
In 1968 the ineptly named National Deviancy Conference (NDC), the major institutional vehicle through which new deviancy theory was developed and diffused in Britain, was founded. Its major ideas, as formulated initially through its own internal discussion and soon a series of publications, were largely programmatic. They took the form, that is, of placing on the agenda a number of items self-consciously different from those that appeared on the agenda of mainstream British criminology at the time. The pragmatic approach had become an indisputable feature of British criminology. This was not a characterization made in retrospect by current observers but one that had been proudly proclaimed by the leading representatives of the indigenous British criminological tradition. In the United States, by contrast, although an autonomous criminology also developed, it was much more firmly located among the social sciences.
