Disciplinarity and Drift

Abstract

Abstract A half century or so after its publication, Gresham Sykes and David Matza's (2003 [1957]) article, ‘Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of Delinquency’, has settled in as an accepted component of the criminological canon. This canonization is certainly merited; the article offered an important complement and corrective to criminological thinking at the time of its publication, and the innovative ‘theory of delinquency’ that it presented has been usefully employed by criminologists since. Yet canonization is not without its dangers. Divorced from the broader analysis that Sykes and Matza developed, the model of ‘techniques of neutralization’ has at times become a caricature, its themes recast as a simple checklist of deviant techniques. This chapter attempts to reclaim ‘techniques of neutralization’ from the criminological canon and, in so doing, suggests something of its unrealized potential for analysis and critique. This reclamation project proceeds on three fronts. First, it explores a delicate dialectic essential to Sykes and Matza's (2003: 233) analysis: that between the ‘dominant social order’ and those who would free themselves, if episodically, from it. Second, it turns to the model of ‘techniques of neutralization’ back on the discipline that has embraced it, utilizing Sykes and Matza's insights as a lens through which to view criminological norms and criminological deviance. Finally, the chapter explores the potential of drift as a form of knowledge, in the hope that some of criminology's participants — perhaps even the discipline itself — might be made to drift.