ABSTRACT
Criminology addresses a wide range of problems, issues and challenges to society. It investigates, and theorizes about, crime and control developments that threaten and protect the social, moral and economic orders of life that we take for granted. Most of these challenges are familiar and long-standing, but the various media (factual and fictional) and their audiences are most interested in sensational or new developments – hence the fascination with serial murderers and the success of numerous recent films depicting futuristic scenarios of crime, chaos and control. There is a contrast here between the ordinary and everyday forms of crime that have a practical importance for people and that are easily grasped as local threats versus the large-scale, globally cumulative, financially significant but somehow less tangible forms of crime that are generally harder to grasp as ‘our problems’. Loader and Sparks (2007: 94) make a similar point noting that:
A concern with the implications of macrolevel developments for criminological theory and research . . . is not now (any more than at any other time) simply a licence for
preferring the novel, the fashionable, and the sweeping over the grounded, the empirical, and the local, nor for disengaging from intricate and detailed problems of policy and politics wherever we happen to encounter them.
