ABSTRACT

In the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of sociologists in Britain and the United States began to think about crime in a fundamentally new way. Previous generations of theorists were preoccupied with the behaviour of criminals and sought to comprehend their deviance from the perspective of various deterministic models – family dysfunctions (Glueck and Glueck), genetic dispositions (Lombroso), community disorganisation (Mackay and Shaw) and peer and other environmental influences (Sutherland). Under the influence of key sociological founders – Marx and Engels, Durkheim, Max Weber and the symbolic interactionists – the concept of crime itself became problematic in post-war scholarship. In various ways each perspective questioned how stigma was selectively attached to certain behaviours and how social groups associated with such behaviours became marginalised as a result. This represented a shift from a classical criminological perspective based on the analysis of the offender’s behaviour to a study of the sociological forces behind the legal process that labelled such behaviours as crimes and policed the social boundaries between good and evil. In this context, the sociology of law and a rising interest in what may now be termed ‘governmentality’ began to examine harms that traditionally had attracted little attention in criminology, specifically ‘white-collar’ crimes, and offences in government and business. The contributions to this volume take the work of W.G. Carson as their point of departure because it exemplifies this revolution in the approach to thinking about crime and social control, and because of Carson’s enduring contributions to pressing contemporary issues in criminology.