ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to bring together cultural criminology and the study of internet crime, reflecting upon the convergences of substantive concern and approach that exists between these domains, and draw out the lessons that each might learn from the other. The foundational assumptions of cultural criminology rest upon a recuperation and reassertion of the tradition of interpretive sociology, and its corresponding critique of social scientific positivism. One of the significant innovations offered by cultural criminology is a movement beyond the ethnographic elicitation of subcultural meaning in order to address the myriad cultural forms that increasingly saturate and constitute an intensely mediated social world. The study of computer crime largely originates in the fields of information security, electronic engineering and computer science. The challenge of developing explanatory accounts of online offending has been taken up in the social sciences from the disciplines of psychology and criminology.
