Constructing British Criminology

Abstract

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.