ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to sketching the general outline of the metatheory. A metatheory, or orienting perspective, broadly based on critical-incident assumptions suggests a different way of viewing reality. A critical-incident perspective views only the aggregate products of behavior as potentially structured and is less concerned with the purposive nature of individual, chaotic events. Chaos theory in general and self-organized criticality, particularly, has some interesting lessons for criminology. In the terms of chaos theory, the patterns of behavior are generated by attractors, but the individual points may be oscillating unpredictably around any of the attractors. The critical-incident perspective assumes that there is no substantive difference between any form of behavior. Perhaps critical incidents can be used to explain “crime reporting waves” or the rise and fall of various social problems. A critical-incident perspective tells that unit theories should encompass object behavior, outside influences on variables creating that behavior, and organizational/reactive elements that serve to define the behavior.
