Becoming Criminal: The Socio-Cultural Origins of Law, Transgression, and Deviance

Crime is perceived as a perennial problem in society. However, in the one hundred and fifty years or so of criminological study, we have, arguably, learned very little about questions of criminality. The reason for this is that criminology remains largely a modernist empirical discipline with attendant modernist assumptions. Primary among these is the assumption that criminals are pathological in their responses to the world around them. This book demonstrates that this is not the case. In order to do this it deconstructs conventional modernist criminological conceptualizations of the role of individuals in the construction of the world of which they are a part and provides a radically new model of the relationship between humans' way of being in the world and the capacities of society to constrain them.