Abstract
Challenging Criminological Theory celebrates the legacy of Ruth Rosner Kornhauser in the sociological study of crime and delinquency. The unusual feature of Kornhauser’s legacy is that it consists of only two—but two highly important—contributions. One is an unpublished manuscript she circulated in the early 1960s, of which only fragments survive, and the other is her book, Social Sources of Delinquency, based on her dissertation and published in 1978. Her career was shortened due to a stroke she suffered in 1975, and she passed away in 1995. The editors of this volume, Francis T. Cullen, Pamela Wilcox, Robert J. Sampson, and Brendan D. Dooley, bring together leading scholars to comment on the enduring significance of Kornhauser’s brief career and contributions to contemporary sociological understandings of crime and delinquency.
Kornhauser was a theorist, known for her incisive assessment of the dominant ideas of pre-1970s criminological scholarship. Shewas a harsh critic of what she termed “cultural deviance” theories, including subcultural, differential association, and social learning perspectives. Although she initially embraced them, she also came to reject classic strain models expressed in work by Robert Merton, Richard Cloward, Lloyd Ohlin, and others. She is also known for recasting and reviving social disorganization theory and for her contributions to the advancement of control theory. Her views on these topics, particularly her rejection of strain and cultural theories of delinquency, remain controversial, and much of the volume consists of various scholars’ engagement with and rebuttal of Kornhauser’s key criticisms.
The volume unfolds as a kind of dossier of materials relating to Kornhauser’s career and the sources and impact of her ideas. The early section includes a chapter by Kornhauser’s daughter, Anne Kornhauser, an intellectual historian, who places her mother’s work in the broader context of the 1960s, prevailing criminological theories, and 1970s feminism. In his chapter, “Ruth and Me,” Travis Hirschi describes his relationship to Kornhauser and clarifies some of the commonalities and differences in their thinking. The surviving portions of Kornhauser’s 1963 manuscript, entitled “Theoretical Issues in the Sociological Study of Delinquency,” are also reprinted, providing evidence of the development of her ideas about culture, control, and crime.
The remaining sections of the book consider Kornhauser’s legacy with regard to particular theoretical streams. Several chapters elaborate on or contest Kornhauser’s reenvisioning of social disorganization perspectives. Other chapters provide contemporary responses to her criticisms of strain theory, opportunity, and the place of motivation in criminological theory. Most of Kornhauser’s more strident positions are effectively countered in these latter chapters. However, rather than detracting from her legacy, this has the effect of dramatizing the enduring importance of culture, motivation, opportunity, control, and the ecological context of criminal activity to criminology—topics that Kornhauser’s work highlighted in a profound way.
A recurring theme in several chapters is a rebuttal of the way Kornhauser conceived of culture and what she referred to as “cultural deviance theories.” She placed in this group theories that emphasized offenders’ differential socialization to values that conflict with dominant values expressed by the law. Particular examples include some of the early social disorganization theories and theories focusing on the transmission of deviant values among peers. These perspectives represented some of the dominant canons of pre-1970s criminology, and Kornhauser was, pardon the pun, ruthless in her appraisal of them.
Kornhauser saw culture as a ubiquitous feature of society and therefore as a constant that is not useful in explaining variation in crime. She called for the outright abandonment of the concepts of culture and subculture, writing that these terms should be “struck from the lexicon of criminologists” (a quote repeated multiple times throughout the volume: p. 175, p. 193, p. 259). Her view was consonant with a key pillar of control theories: the view that criminality results from a weakening of social bonds, attenuated culture, and the breakdown of mechanisms of informal social control rather than from an oppositional culture.
Although a chapter on control theory by Chester L. Britt and Barbara J. Costello contends that Kornhauser’s directive to abandon the concepts of culture and subculture has been largely followed, other chapters by Charis E. Kubrin, Ross L. Matsueda, and David S. Kirk and Andrew V. Papachristos provide several arguments to the contrary. As some of these latter writers point out, sociology in the 1980s and 1990s began to conceive of culture in more nuanced ways, rejecting Kornhauser’s view of culture-as-values through ethnographic studies of the community contexts of crime and, more recently, studies of legal cynicism. To be fair to Kornhauser, these views of culture were not part of the intellectual context within which Kornhauser was working.
The introductory essay by Cullen and Wilcox describes the goal of the volume: “to honor Ruth Rosner Kornhauser and thus preserve her scholarly legacy” (p. 1). The book certainly succeeds in this regard, but it does much more by using Kornhauser’s work as a bridge between twentieth- and twenty-first-century criminology and by showing the continuity and change in key theoretical ideas past and present. As such, the volume serves as a compelling entry point for graduate students and other newcomers to criminological theory.