ABSTRACT
This chapter is a contribution towards meta-theoretical development as part of the post-postmodern return to sociological theory and method associated with Archer (1995), Layder (1997, 2007), Mouzelis (1995, 2007), Owen (2009a, 2009b) and Sibeon (2004, 2007), in tandem with a cautious attempt to build bridges between criminological theory and selected insights from evolutionary psychology and behavioural genetics. In the pages that follow I will suggest a way that criminological theory might move beyond its four main theoretical obstacles. These obstacles are the nihilistic relativism of the postmodern and post-structuralist cultural turn; the oversocialised gaze and harshly environmentalist conceptions of the person; genetic fatalism or the equation of genetic predisposition with inevitability (Owen 2009b) and bio-phobia (Freese et al., 2003) that appear to dominate mainstream criminology; and the sociological weaknesses of many so-called biosocial explanations of crime and criminal behaviour (see for instance Walsh and Beaver, 2009; Walsh and Ellis, 2003), which, although dealing adequately with biological variables, appear to neglect or make insufficient use of meta-concepts such as agency–structure, micro–macro and time–space in their accounts of the person. I will suggest that a way forward lies in the form of an ontologically flexible, meta-theoretical sensitising device, alternatively referred to by Owen (2009b) as post-postmodern or genetic-social in order to distance the framework from hard-line sociobiology.
