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Jock Young:
The
Criminological
Imagination
Introduction: The Legacy of C. Wright Mills
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Mills published SociologicalImagination in 1959
--advocated sociology as avocation
--idealized craftsmanship: joyof writing, weaving theory andresearch, conceptuallyinsightful and empiricallygrounded
the key nature of the SI wasto situate human biography inhistory and in social structure to bridge gap betweenhuman actors and historicaland social settings in which
they find themselves.
He talks of the earthquakesof social change, and of
widespread feelings of peoplefeeling themselves adrift, ofbeing unable to understandwhat is happening to them, ofindividualizing their problems.
Nowadays men often feel that
their private lives are a seriesof traps.
if the downside of such amomentum is feelings ofentrapment and alienation, the
upside is an increasedreflexivity, a dereification of thesocial world, and anawareness of the ever-presentpossibility of change.
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The sociological imagination:
--personal troubles of a milieu
--public issues of structure
In a world characterized byinstability, in work, family and
community In late modern social
order chaos of reward and identity
people face an existential quandray;
their uncertainty can be interpreted inself-blame and failure, yet the
widespread nature of economic and
cultural instability and its daily
dissemination on the global media,
facilitate feelings of connectedness and
of recognizing the parallel nature of the
social condition
Mills identifies two
opposing tendencies
where academic
sociology loses
contact with social
reality
-- abstracted
empiricism
-- grand theory
Goode says there
has been a neglect of
the transformative
politics in Mills work
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1. Closing down the imagination
the confetti of Greek letters
seems in a different universe
from the louche bars, dope
smokers, snitches and police
harassment in downtown
Pittsburgh
abstracted empiricism
the data mysteriously detach
themselves from their subject
matter and lose all context
paradoxically, the less their
contact with the subject matter
the more knowledgeable they
feel
whole swaths of theory and
controversy are simply not
mentioned p12
--the war against drugs
--the failure of deterrence --racism in drug enforcement
--drug war counterproductive
--police corruption common
this is the study of deviance
without deviance
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the authors.the more they are distanced from what
they are studying, the more secure they feel
How do we understand such research?
as theory atrophies, methodology becomes a substitute And what of Mills three guidelines? there is no history
the actors have no past, and their future is mundane
The researchers are searching for generalizations
independent of people, structure, history and place --the new social science orthodoxy looks to positivism
--compare to the work of Bourgois on crack dealers
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Let me introduce you to the datasaur
The elevation of the journal
--theories decontextualized to become operational
what we need is a method which can deal withreflexivity, contradiction, tentativeness a method whichis sensitive to the way people write and rewrite theirpersonal narratives.
Mertons social structure and anomie manifestly
connects private troubles to public issues where is hisevidence that the american dream is a sop for thosewho might reel against the entire structure were thisconsoling hope removed?
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bracketing off issues of power
and inequality [is] more
pronounced in criminology
the criminological gaze is
more exposed to problems ofpower, stigmatization, and the
context of values than any
other area of social sciences
norms are formed, broken,
disputed and selectively
enforced deviance isenacted and concealed
the 1960s and 1970s was the
time of a cultural turn a
stress on the interpretative
rather than the mechanistic
focusing on the way in which
human actors generate
meaning consisting of two
strands, subcultural and
labelling, phenomenological
and constructionist p19
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--statistics are social constructions
--deviance is not in the act but a quality imposed on it
--meaning is dependent on social contexts
--people construct meaning, in sitns beyond their control --individuals have to be placed within wider structure
--contested definitions of deviance in pluralistic society
--agencies of social control impose defns of powerful
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The hubris of positivism:
--growth of the criminal justice system
--universities have expanded to train practitioners
--market society has become dominant ethos
--qualitative methods seen as 2ndto quantitative
the affinity between positivist criminology and thebureaucratic needs of the criminal justice system is aquestion of shared notions of ontology and of social
order, of world views which are coincident in theirmapping of the social world and the place of the deviantwithin it, backed by common anxieties about socialorder.
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7. Mayhem, Magic and Margaret Mead
late modernity brings with a loosening of the ties
between social structure and behaviour, between
material predicament and the subcultural solutions which
human beings create in order to facilitate and give
meaning to their lives
Words become blurred, eg. marriage, gay, rape
in late modernity such narratives not only change but
they are more fragmented, they are contested and they
co-exist, That is, there are several possible/plausiblenarratives available at any one time. And in a media
saturated society these narratives are freely available ...
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none of the choices available has the weight of absolute
certainty as in the past. Narratives lose their singularity,
their cohesion and their gravitas. The narratives are
not only contested, but they are not coherent, well
formed: they are contradictory and inconsistent not onlybetween themselves but within themselves. There is
always an element of mayhem in late modernity.
[yet] much ethnographic work has] vignettes of urban
life which have as much validity as a posed photographat a formal wedding. It replaces the reification of
numbers with the reification of representation.
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The meta-narrative of the lensinterpretive structure
Ethnography and incoherencehomo performans
The metaphor of the photographif reality
Hiatus and relationshiporientalism and power The ethnographers audience readers choose
Ethnography and the end of innocenceMead
-- representativeness, masquerading, translation probs
-- arguments over what counts as sex
-- the influence of the meta-narrative