Research Methods: A Practical Guide for the Social Sciences. By B. Matthews and L. Ross (Harlow: Longman, 2010, 490pp. 30.00 pb) * * Crime: Local and Global. By J. Muncie, D. Talbot and R. Walters (Cullompton: Willan, 2010, 263pp. 75.00 hb, 23.00 pb)

Abstract

Criminology textbooks and other pedagogical resources, such as handbooks and encyclopaedias, rarely feature in the review sections of scholarly journals. This is arguably the result of a sense of academic weariness with a market that seems to be saturated with introductory texts at the expense of scholarly monographs. The vast increase in the number of textbooks in recent years can be attributed, in part, to the mass commercialization and commodification of higher education in the United Kingdom. Pedagogically, there appears to be a growing concern amongst academics that the ‘supremacy’ of the textbook in the student consciousness will diminish and distil the extent and quality of their disciplinary understanding. Against the current lacklustre backdrop of formulaic, goal-orientated education, these fears are not totally unfounded. The commodification of higher education has seen knowledge become constructed as the product of a technical process obtainable via ‘a set of applications and instruments’ (Monereo 2004: 35) rather than the outcome of ‘human intellectual work’ (Ferudi 2004: 7) with pedagogical decisions made on the basis of the most efficient way of securing the ‘end result’. A surfeit of all-purpose, introductory texts, with their apparent emphasis on developing breadth rather than depth of knowledge and on the development of ‘ technical’ competences rather than critical thinking skills, is symbolic of this shift.