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First published in 1999. This concludes work on a series Current Issues in Criminal Justice. Criminology. The book represents another milestone in a criminologist's journey to uncover some "truths" about the discipline and to reflectcritically on how that field has evolved. This journey, some of youmay remember, began in The Sociology of Criminological Theory:Paradigm or Fad and continued in The Demise of the CriminologicalImagination. To date, this latest work has already attracted considerabledebate and in the tradition of C. Wright Mills, engendered somewhatheated discussion about the philosophy of criminology and the logic ofits paradigms. What is perhaps most exciting about this work is that it is critical, in the true sense of critical, a term that has been abused and overused.
List of contents
Chapter One: Thought and Ideology, Chapter Two: Recent Criminological Theorizing , Chapter Three: A Critique of Contemporary Criminological Theory , Chapter Four: Conceptualizing and Measuring, Chapter Five: The Search for Reality, Chapter Six: Chaos, Complex Systems, and Self-Organized Criticality, Chapter Seven: A Critical-Incident Orienting-Perspective, Chapter Eight: Specific Features of the Perspective , Chapter Nine: Implications of a Critical-Incident Metatheory, Chapter Ten: Conclusions
About the author
Frank P Williams III
Summary
Critiques contemporary positivist-based criminology and proposes an alternative that is not in itself a new theory but a new orienting perspective, a different way of perceiving reality, under which existing theories can be used and reinterpreted. Because Williams proposes a metatheory rather than
