Theories of crime

Theorizing the rural is a critical rejoinder to the urban normative bias in criminology. Central to the entries in this section is a concern with meeting this challenge, but it is not only a restorative or indeed ameliorative pursuit. Rather, it is one that celebrates the diversity and richness, in terms of both the application of theory and the formation of theory in rural contexts. The criminological theories reviewed in this section are those previously used by rural crime scholars in their studies.

From the outset, criminological theorizing has centred around a number of paradigmatic divisions, and derives its origins from sociology. Critically here, we have grand narratives such as those of Durkheim who sought to frame a science of how a whole society integrates or disintegrates and the structuring power of morality in bringing together social functions with individual adjustment. Or, indeed, Marxist scholars who sought to capture the direction of history and to encapsulate crime as part of historical and dialectical materialism. The historical appeal of the Chicago School in their noble project to capture the major transformations of the early twentieth century can easily be dismissed for contributing to the normalization of the urban (and therefore generalizable to all spaces). Yet they have each left us a legacy of the qualitative tradition and the tools for theory-building that continues to enrich both sociological and criminological imaginations today.

The entries in this section bring together examples of theory-testing and theory-building in equal measure and provide readers with a short capture of some of the main points of note, along with suggested reading. With a project like this encyclopedia, we have sought to provide a broad scope of theoretical perspectives drawing from traditions across the globe, from a range of areas such as theories of modernity, feminist theory and civic community theory, but also extant challenges to criminology such as thinking about the implications of the Anthropocene as a new epoch capturing the existential challenges facing the future of human and non-human species.