Criminologist or sociologist? Which are you? Which am I? Most of the time the answer doesn’t matter much. But there are moments of decision – Which graduate program to choose? Which job market to go on? Which job offer to accept? – when it can matter a great deal. And the nature of one’s professional identity can sometimes take on an expressive or even an existential significance that prompts us to give the question some thought.
Is there a tension between the two identities or affiliations? I don’t really think so: more of a fluidity, as with different points on a social science continuum. If there is a tension, it is mostly just an expression of the division between the general discipline and the specialist subfield; and most of us find it relatively easy to navigate back and forth between these domains. (Many of us belong to general and specialist professional associations; attend both kinds of conference; have scholarship networks that stretch across both, and so on.) It is possible, I suppose, that the usual tension has been somewhat aggravated by criminology’s increasingly forceful claim to be a stand-alone subject with its own disciplinary institutions. And the resulting distinction may seem more important in the US, where there is something of a status gap between sociology programs in the leading research universities and criminology or criminal justice departments that are more often in lower tier institutions. Elsewhere, the professional hierarchies are different.
How does one choose between affiliations, to the extent that this is necessary? For myself, the answer is situational: it depends where I am and who I’m talking to. And I notice that when other people identify me in one way or the other – in reviews, introductions, in passing references, etc. – they also appear to be influenced by context, mostly choosing the identity that makes most sense to them in that setting. (I have occasionally thought that a reviewer chose to identify me in a particular way the better to dismiss my claims, but that’s probably just paranoia on my part.)
I can’t think of many occasions when the choice of labels has presented itself as a problem, though I have occasionally felt the need to distance myself from the Lombrosian project that some people still associate with criminology. And I’m on record as being a critic of criminology’s quest for disciplinary independence, preferring to address crime and punishment as specific cases of more general sociological phenomena.
Most of the time, I think of myself as a criminological sociologist or a sociological criminologist – though I’m happy to go by the name of “legal academic,” “historian” or “socio-legal scholar” as the occasion requires. (My Edinburgh University doctorate is actually in “Socio-Legal Studies” but that name referred more to a 1980s higher education funding stream than to an established scholarly discipline.) There isn’t any great ideological divide between any of these identities, so there’s rarely any great pressure to choose between them. The joys of interdisciplinarity! However I do recall arriving at Berkeley’s Law and Society Center in the late 1980s and immediately being asked by a graduate student whether I identified with “law and society” or “critical legal studies” – the implication appearing to be that I was obliged to take sides in a sectarian dispute of which I was then mostly ignorant.
Are the authors of recent books on “mass incarceration” or “punishment and society” properly described as “criminologists?” I’m not sure. British academics might call them “penologists” but that sounds rather archaic so the better term is probably “sociologists of punishment” or something of the sort. (Full disclosure: I once held a personal chair at Edinburgh University that styled me as “Professor of Penology” but, if truth be told, the chief reason for that name choice was to ensure my promotion did not undermine the case for appointing someone else to a chair in Criminology that had recently fallen vacant in the same department.)
Given the concern of my own work to connect criminological scholarship with social theory and general sociology, I would be more than happy to be recognized as contributing to the wider as well as the narrower field: to have an impact in the broader discipline and not just my specialist subject. But that may be idiosyncratic. I certainly know of, and greatly admire, some very distinguished careers that have been fully undertaken within the scope of the criminological field in ways that weren’t in the least bit intellectually narrow.
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