NCJ Number
121987
Date Published
1990
Length
25 pages
Annotation
This essay shows how social science casts crime and deviance as morally repugnant features of individual lives and produces a reified concept of rule violation. An interactional view of collectivities is developed to incorporate them as actors into criminological and sociological theory.
Abstract
All crimes are the product of interaction among many participants. The attribution of agency, whether to natural persons or collectivities, is an example of the social construction of reality according to certain rules. The criminologist's task is to figure out what the rules are for a given social system. Similarly, there are rules for determining who or what is a natural person. Crimes of both natural persons and collectivities are outcomes of interaction processes interpreted in light of structural frames that govern the processes themselves. Like other actors in society, collectivities have names and reputations that range from families and corporations to nation-states. Legislation creating new crimes or increasing penalties for established crimes, such as legislation to protect consumers, the environment, and worker safety, is increasingly directed at collective actors. Because all crimes are the outcome of interaction processes that occur over a period of time rather than all at once, the author proposes two analytically distinct questions to explain criminal actions: how interaction processes unfold and make things happen; and how individuals conceptualize these processes, describe participants, and assign agency. The ecology of collective versus individual identity in the United States and Japan and the role of legitimation and punishment in criminological and deviance theory are explored. 26 references.