SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY AND CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH: VIEWS FROM EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES i SOCIOLOGY OF CRIME, LAW AND DEVIANCE Series Editor: Mathieu Deflem (Volumes 1–5: Jeffrey T. Ulmer) Recent Volumes: Volume 1: Edited by Jeffrey T. Ulmer, 1998 Volume 2: Edited by Jeffrey T. Ulmer, 2000 Volume 3: Legal Professions: Work, Structure and Organization. Edited by Jerry Van Hoy, 2001 Volume 4: Violent Acts and Violentization: Assessing, Applying and Developing Lonnie Athens’ Theory and Research. Edited by Lonnie Athens and Jeffrey T. Ulmer, 2002 Volume 5: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: Criminological Perspectives. Edited by Mathieu Deflem Volume 6: Ethnographies of Law and Social Control. Edited by Stacey Lee Burns, 2005 ii SOCIOLOGY OF CRIME, LAW AND DEVIANCE VOLUME 7 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY AND CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH: VIEWS FROM EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES EDITED BY MATHIEU DEFLEM University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA Amsterdam – Boston – Heidelberg – London – New York – Oxford Paris – San Diego – San Francisco – Singapore – Sydney – Tokyo JAI Press is an imprint of Elsevier iii JAI Press is an imprint of Elsevier The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, UK Radarweg 29, PO Box 211, 1000 AE Amsterdam, The Netherlands 525 B Street, Suite 1900, San Diego, CA 92101-4495, USA First edition 2006 Copyright r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. 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Because of rapid advances in the medical sciences, in particular, independent verification of diagnoses and drug dosages should be made British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13: 978-0-7623-1322-8 ISBN-10: 0-7623-1322-6 ISSN: 1521-6136 (Series) For information on all JAI Press publications visit our website at books.elsevier.com Printed and bound in The Netherlands 060708091010987654321 iv CONTENTS LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ix INTRODUCTION: THE BEARING OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY ON CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH Mathieu Deflem 1 PART I: FROM MACRO TO MICRO MODELS IN CRIME AND DELINQUENCY ANALYSIS WORK AND CRIME: CAN THE MISSING LINK BE UNDERSTOOD THROUGH MAX WEBER’S PROTESTANT ETHIC Karl F. Schumann 9 TRUANTS AND THE FAMILY: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF DEVIANT BEHAVIOR IN EARLY ADOLESCENCE Imke Dunkake 29 REVISITING MERTON: CONTINUITIES IN THE THEORY OF ANOMIE-AND-OPPORTUNITY- STRUCTURES Sanjay Marwah and Mathieu Deflem 57 CRIMINOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE THOUGHT OF GEORGE HERBERT MEAD Ross L. Matsueda 77 v vi CONTENTS OPENING THE BLACK BOX: THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF GENDER AND DELINQUENCY Karen Heimer, Stacy De Coster and Halime U¨nal 109 COMMENTARY ON PART I: THEORY AND RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF CRIME AND DEVIANCE Ronald L. Akers 137 PART II: CRIME AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN SOCIO-HISTORICAL CONTEXTS IDENTITY AND INTELLECTUAL WORK: BIOGRAPHY, THEORY AND RESEARCH ON LAW ENFORCEMENT Nigel G. Fielding 159 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY IN THE STUDY OF SENTENCING: LIGHTHOUSE FOR A TRAVELER BETWEEN CONTINENTS Joachim J. Savelsberg 183 ‘‘THEY BRING YOU UP TO DO LIKE YOUR DADDY DONE’’: STRATIFICATION THEORY, EMPLOYMENT, AND CRIME Robert D. Crutchfield 203 EMOTIONS, CRIME AND JUSTICE: EXPLORING DURKHEIMIAN THEMES Susanne Karstedt 223 IN SEARCH OF CRIMINOLOGY’S EPISTEMOLOGICAL THRESHOLD Rene´ van Swaaningen 249 Contents vii COMMENTARY ON PART II: THE FIELDS OF SOCIOLOGY AND CRIMINOLOGY Fritz Sack 271 SUBJECT INDEX 283 This page intentionally left blank viii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Ronald L. Akers Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of Florida, FL, USA Robert D. Crutchfield Department of Sociology, University of Washington, WA, USA Stacy De Coster Department of Sociology, North Carolina State University, NC, USA Mathieu Deflem Department of Sociology, University of South Carolina, Sloan College, SC, USA Imke Dunkake Forschungsinstitut fu¨ r Soziologie, Universita¨ t zu Ko¨ ln, Ko¨ ln, Germany Nigel G. Fielding Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK Karen Heimer Department of Sociology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA Susanne Karstedt School of Criminology, Education, Sociology and Social Work, Keele University, Keele Staffordshire, UK Sanjay Marwah Sociology and Anthropology Department, Guilford College, Greensboro, NC, USA Ross L. Matsueda Department of Sociology, University of Washington, WA, USA Fritz Sack Institut fu¨ r Kriminologische Sozialforschung, Universita¨ t Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Joachim J. Savelsberg Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA ix x LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Karl F. Schumann Universita¨ t Bremen, Bremen, Germany Rene´ van Swaaningen Department of Criminology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands Halime U¨nal Department of Sociology, Mugla University, Sosyoloji Bolumu, Mugla, Turkey INTRODUCTION: THE BEARING OF SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY ON CRIMINOLOGICAL RESEARCH Mathieu Deflem ABSTRACT Modern criminology is unthinkable without the contributions of sociology and sociological theory. Yet, not all criminology is sociological in ori- entation and, far more troublesome, not all sociologically minded crim- inological work is resolutely and thoroughly grounded in theory. The chapters in this book address various ways in which insights from soci- ological theory have been helpful in the contributing authors’ crimino- logical research. Revealing the global reach and nationally distinct variations in the practice of sociological theory and criminology, this volume is explicitly trans-atlantic in terms of its contributors and the topics and theories they discuss. No discipline has made a greater theoretical contribution to the research domain of criminological research than has sociology. Of course, the birth and development of criminology are historically rooted in systems of knowledge that were intimately connected to the practical and administra- tive demands of criminal justice policy (Pasquino, 1991; Foucault, 1978). Sociological Theory and Criminological Research: Views from Europe and the United States Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Volume 7, 1–6 Copyright r 2006 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1521-6136/doi:10.1016/S1521-6136(06)07001-1 1 2 MATHIEU DEFLEM But, it is likewise the case that modern criminology as it has matured toward an independent scholarly activity is firmly grounded in sociology and other social-science disciplines (Garland, 1992). The triple alliance of criminology, criminal statistics, and police that existed during the early days of the crim- inal sciences has thus been replaced in serious social-science scholarship on crime and its control by an alliance of theory, methods, and research. It is the role of theory in this nexus in the area of criminological sociology that this volume is devoted to. The authors in this book present chapters that highlight the value of sociological theorizing in their respective efforts in criminological research. The chapters do not merely involve discussions about the ideal value of sociological theory for research nor about the relation between the field of criminological sociology and the discipline of sociology at large. Instead, they present concrete analyses and discussions of how sociological theory has actually been useful to the author’s own criminological research. Pre- senting this volume, we collectively aim to show that some of the very best criminological work is distinctly informed in useful and varied ways by sociological theory. SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY AND CRIMINOLOGY Not only was criminological thinking until the late-19th century not dis- tinctly sociological, even when the earliest generation of criminologists fo- cused on the social (rather than the biological or mental) correlates of crime, their analyses were not particularly informed by the theoretical insights from the burgeoning discipline of sociology. Most famously, the work of the Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet rested on a simplistic inductivism to construe the perspective of the ‘average man’ (Quetelet, 1835). Because it lacked any serious theoretical inspiration, Auguste Comte thought very little of Quetelet’s work and particularly despised his perversion of the term of ‘social physics,’ for which reason Comte had to cook up the neologism ‘sociologie’(Comte, 1839). While the sociological classics did not discuss crime and criminal justice as central elements in their analyses of the transformations of modern society, the research domain of criminology was not entirely neglected by the founders of the discipline. Probably best known today is Emile Durkheim’s (1895) discussion on the normality of crime. Yet, unlike his penetrating analysis of