Beyond Positivism: Learning Form. Contextual Integrated Strategies

Good criminologists are interpretively flexible, searching to read situations from the different angles illuminated by multiple theories. Plural understandings of a crime problem stimulate a disparate range of action possibilities that can be integrated into a hedged, mutually reinforcing package of...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Braithwaite, John 1951- (Author)
Format: Electronic/Print Article
Language:English
Published: 1993
In: Journal of research in crime and delinquency
Year: 1993, Volume: 30, Issue: 4, Pages: 383-399
Online Access: Volltext (doi)
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Availability in Tübingen:Present in Tübingen.
IFK: In: Z 31
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Keywords:
Drogenpolitik
Kriminologische Theorien
Präventionstheorie
Positivistische Kriminologie
Gelegenheitstheorie
Generalpräventionsforschung
Differentielle Gelegenheit
Description
Summary:Good criminologists are interpretively flexible, searching to read situations from the different angles illuminated by multiple theories. Plural understandings of a crime problem stimulate a disparate range of action possibilities that can be integrated into a hedged, mutually reinforcing package of preventive policies. Positivist criminology has its uses in informing the kind of research-policy interface advanced. Its limitation is that it focuses on shortetenn, decontextualized policies that are intentionally disentangled from integrated policy packages. This when it is long-term, dynamically responsive, and contextualized, integrated assaults that are more likely to bearfruit. Some suggestions are made on how to reform criminology so that its creative and evaluative focus is more directed at what Bateson in 1972 called "systemic wisdom." The alternative is to settle for a positivism that almost inevitably leads to a policy analysis of despair about the intractability of the crime problem. That "nothing works" is not an empirically established fact, but an artifact of the epistemology of a science with a particular structure. This structure can be reformed. ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR
ISSN:0022-4278
DOI:10.1177/0022427893030004002