Are you a criminologist or a sociologist? Ben Crewe Responds

Last year, I contributed to a departmental panel discussing the future of criminology at which each panellist expressed some ambivalence about declaring himself or herself a straightforward ‘criminologist’. One had trained as a historian; another as a natural scientist. I explained that I was a sociologist by background, and still considered this my primary academic identity: my Master’s degree was in Sociology, and I then spent four years as a doctoral researcher in a mainstream sociology department at the University of Essex, where my research was not in any way criminological.

My transition into the field of criminology altered my intellectual practices, at least initially. As a sociologist in a sociology department, I read sociology journals; as a sociologist in a criminology department, my reading narrowed, because of the set of journals, scholars and studies that began to feel more salient for my new institutional and disciplinary existence. It goes without saying that articles in criminology journals are very often informed by concepts, theories and ideas that draw from a much wider field of study. Criminology is, after all, a ‘rendez-vous discipline’ (Downes 1988) – a place where other disciplines meet, and exchange ideas– and is rightly celebrated for its intellectual eclecticism. But ‘straight criminology’ articles often seem pretty thin in terms of their theoretical and conceptual inputs, and some criminological theory courses do not push students to look very far beyond a relatively limited range of thinkers and issues. One of my concerns about the growth of criminology undergraduate degrees is that students can now advance into the discipline without having read much of the foundational theory of social science, which itself undergirds a good deal of the theory that is central to criminological research. My own work has been informed, over the years, by theorists such as Weber, Bourdieu, Foucault, and Margaret Archer, and by ideas taken from political science, moral anthropology and psychoanalysis. I would like to think that it has been enhanced as a result. It has certainly helped me make better sense of the world that I study.

I have never felt excluded or marginalised as a consequence of being a sociologist working within criminology. If anything, in the UK, sociology feels like the primary disciplinary influence on the field. Being a penologist is a slightly different matter. Although most definitions of criminology refer to responses or reactions to the breaking of laws, sometimes I detect an informal hierarchy in the minds of scholars who study the causes of crime, in which studies of prisons, probation and other aspects of the criminal justice system are subordinate to their concerns. I have very little interest in this kind of policing of disciplinary boundaries. All disciplines and departments need boundaries, but I am suspicious of the people who are most keen to monitor them (there’s a criminological theme right there). My way of navigating these issues is to get on with my work, to try to ignore the internal politics of the discipline, and to proudly retain my interests and identity as a sociologist.