Constructing British Criminology

TLDR: The Questioning Crime and Criminology (QC&C) series as mentioned in this paper is a set of books designed for students with the intention of explaining not just crime, but the study of criminology in accessible and questioning ways.

Abstract: How has knowledge been constructed in British criminology since the 1960s? While histories of theory are plentiful and, due to such activities as the Research Assessment Exercise, awareness of citation counts has grown, we have become interested in a less formal - harder to assess - area of knowledge construction. Our questions have formed around the ways in which current, practising criminologists perceive the development of their discipline (if it is sufficiently unitary to be called such), and what has influenced them more directly. In so doing, we are attempting to tap into the creative impact on criminology and criminologists of the range of studies that do not necessarily figure as largely in international citation studies. In collecting from fellow-criminologists a sense of which studies and writers have both shaped criminology and influenced their own thinking, we have arrived at a paradoxical picture of British criminology: one in which there is tension between how current practitioners present a highly-fragmented, wide-ranging set of influences, yet do so within a discipline in which there appears to be constant repetition of similar questions over time. We have been involved in the past few years in the development of a set of books designed for students, with the intention of explaining not just crime, but the study of criminology in accessible and questioning ways. So, when we first started trying to make some sense of the discipline of criminology, an introductory text - Making Sense of Criminology (Polity Press, 2002, with Claire Taylor as co-author) - was the outcome. After making some sense of the discipline for new criminologists, we wished to encourage students to question criminology and, with colleagues' contributions, we edited a collection entitled Questioning Crime and Criminology (Willan, 2005). Following the publication of this book, our publisher asked whether we had any ideas for a future book, encouraging us perhaps to think about research issues. We had, already, decided it was about time to set aside clarifying and questioning criminology in favour of asking questions about how we have developed and constructed knowl- edge in the discipline. We were keen not to write the standard 'cookbook' text on how to do research, but wanted to do something a bit different. We thought of focusing on, say, six major studies in British criminology, and using each of them as a pivot for a chapter that would introduce a wider