ABSTRACT
The consistent and increasing citation of Ruth Kornhauser's Social Sources of Delinquency demonstrates its continued importance in providing theoretical and methodological ideas for the investigation of a wide array of criminological issues. Citations to her work are quite varied, the scholarship that pushed the social disorganization framework the most tended to focus on what we consider her two most salient contributions to the development of current models of neighborhood informal social control and collective efficacy. The contributions are the presentation of social disorganization theory as first and foremost a control theory and the clarification of social disorganization into its causes, components, and consequences. The chapter discusses the consequential development of, and empirical research in, the social disorganization tradition. It considers the extent to which these new disorganization and related models align with or diverge from Kornhauser's work. Areas of divergence provide grounds for further discussion of some of the important remaining issues in the development of social disorganization based theories.
