ABSTRACT
Criminology at the end of the 20th century was said to be in a state of fragmentation (Ericson and Carriere, 1994), stricken by a chronic sense of failure (Hogg, 1996), identity crisis (Pavarini, 1994) and recurring ambivalence (Garland, 1996). This chapter examines recent theorising of broader social and political trends in modern societies and discusses their implications for the practice of criminology. It is suggested that processes of globalisation and reflexivity have already led to changes in both the status of criminology and the politics of criminal justice policy. First of all, globalisation has facilitated the ‘free trade’ of criminological knowledge and ideologies and accelerated the deterritorialisation of culture and politics. Under ‘reflexive modernisation’ (Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994), in which social processes are ‘turned back’ upon themselves, criminology as science is increasingly being challenged, not only from within the discipline in the form of academic critique, but also from without, in the arena of law and order politics. At the same time, criminologists and criminal justice policies are increasingly being ‘governed’ by ‘technologies of performance’ and the ‘technologies of agency’ as part of ‘reflexive government’ in advanced liberal societies (Dean, 1999). While these interpretations of social and political trends should not be read as deterministic, they provide ways of seeing and understanding the challenges facing criminology in the new millennium.
