ABSTRACT
Thus far, we have concentrated on sociological answers to one important question: What is deviance and crime? The next question is one that, over the years, has concerned researchers like us more than any other: Why do people commit deviant or criminal acts? Similarly, the general public is always eager to know why people such as Martha Stewart break the law or violate social norms. Unfortunately, despite access to generations of exhaustive research and deep thought, few social scientists would be so bold as to state that they can easily answer this question. Further, if anyone does claim to have the definitive answer, most other sociologists and criminologists would quickly find fault with it (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 1996). Note, too, that people who attend the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology intending to discover from the most prominent scholars in the field the current thinking on the major causes of crime usually encounter:
Our experience dictates that students, too, find the “smorgasbord of theories” presented in textbooks as diverse, confusing, and partisan (DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 1996), and most of them are overwhelmed by the constantly growing number of theorists’ names and perspectives they are required to learn (Curran & Renzetti, 2001). In this book, rather than briefly describe every theory we know, we cover a broad range of the most widely read and cited sociological perspectives on deviance, crime, and social control. The theories reviewed here and in subsequent chapters are grouped under five general headings: strain, social control, interactionist, ecological, and critical. Because elements or parts of one perspective are combined with elements of others, these groupings only roughly separate the five perspectives from each other. Still, they are sufficiently different from one another to warrant their groupings under the headings indicated above. However, before describing and evaluating these contributions, it is first necessary to define the term theory and explain the value of developing the sociological imagination (Mills, 1959).
