ABSTRACT
With encouragement and advice from several of the original panelists, people began the process of assembling a collection of essays that would document the main themes of Jim’s intellectual contributions while highlighting his personal and professional influence on others in the field. Although each of the chapters helps accomplish this in its own unique way, an overarching theme, and one selected for the title of this book, shows Jim to have been a bridging figure in sociology and criminology—someone who drew from shared intellectual frameworks characterizing sociological and criminological theory to integrate a range of topics and subfields. Jim was an integrative thinker whose work provides crucial theoretical and empirical links between our disciplinary roots and emergent scholarship. He asked big questions and encouraged young scholars to do the same, lamenting recent turns away from what he saw as our intellectual mandate to build shared understandings of human behavior.
