Avi Brisman, Eamonn Carrabine and Nigel South (eds): The Routledge Companion to Criminological Theory and Concepts

Abstract

Edited criminology ‘companions’, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, handbooks and textbooks, produced by Routledge are not uncommon, and this means that there is serious competition in the same marketplace to entice students or libraries to buy them. To succeed in that competitive space, the product needs to be able to set itself apart—if it can—from the others that are available and vying for that valuable space on those library shelves (or on an instructor’s syllabus). Timing makes a difference: newer texts can usurp older titles (hence, the common 2nd, 3rd, 4th editions of popular titles) by dint of simply being more up to date. The form of the text may also impact sales. Criminology textbooks can be weighty volumes and we have recently seen attempts in the market for more focussed, less comprehensive textbooks looking to appeal to the student that will want to carry them around like a normal monograph. While quality through sufficient critical and depth insight is obviously important, it is in the nature of all textbooks of this ilk to be compromised, to some degree, in this regard. Any text that seeks to encapsulate, summarise and provide meaningful and reasonably critical insight into a wide range of topic areas will be constrained by available word length for each entry. Even the weightiest of tomes suffer this challenge.