Criminological Imagination
1. Auflage Juli 2011
224 Seiten, Softcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
For the last three decades Jock Young's work has had a profound impact on criminology. In this provocative new book, Young rejects much of what criminology has become, criticizing the rigid determinism and rampant positivism that dominate the discipline today. His erudite and entertaining examination of what's gone wrong with criminology draws on a range of research - from urban ethnography to sexology and criminal victimization studies - to illustrate its failings.
Young makes a passionate case for a return to criminology's creative and critical potential, partly informed by the new developments in cultural criminology. A late-modern counterpart to C. Wright Mills' classic The Sociological Imagination, this inspirational piece of writing from one of the most brilliant voices in contemporary criminology will command widespread attention. The concluding part of the author's trilogy of influential texts including The Vertigo of Late Modernity and The Exclusive Society, it will be essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of criminology, and the social sciences more generally.
1. Closing Down the Imagination
2. Measurement and the Sexologists
3. Amnesia and the Art of Skating on Thin Ice
4. The Bogus of Positivism
5. The Loosening of the Moorings: The Emergence of Cultural Criminology
6. Giuliani and the New York Miracle
7. Magic, Mayhem and Margaret Mead: Towards a Critical Ethnography
8. Subcultures as Magic: Problems of Urban Ethnography
9. Dangerous Knowledge and the Politics of the Imagination
10. Rescuing the Imagination
fields of knowledge."
Kriminologisches Journal
'The terms "criminology" and "imagination" do not naturally belong
together. Jock Young's singular achievement is to apply a fine
"criminological imagination", exposing the soulless discourse of
mainstream criminology and reflecting upon the alternative critical
tradition in which he himself played such a central role.'
Stan Cohen, London School of Economics and Political
Science
'If reading a clever and consequential book were a crime,
you would get arrested and hauled straight to jail for picking up
The Criminological Imagination. Adapting and deepening
C.-Wright Mills's classic critique of the foibles of sociology,
Young not only offers a razor-sharp diagnosis of how criminology
lost its way in a funny-mirror house of methodological fetishism,
empirical legerdemain, conceptual confusion and policy
subservience. He also clears a path toward rescue and renewal:
criminology can regain its analytic poise and civic relevance by
embracing its sociological grounding and by reconnecting crime to
formations of meaning and power. This book will energize all those
who wish to free the craft from the clutches of the profession, and
it is sure to fire up vigorous debate between and among partisans
of mainstream and critical criminology.'
Loïc Wacquant, author of Urban Outcasts: A Comparative
Sociology of Advanced Marginality and Punishing the Poor:
The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity.