A Sociology of Crime has an outstanding reputation for its distinctive and systematic contribution to the criminological literature. Through detailed examples and analysis, it shows how crime is a product of processes of criminalisation constituted through the interactional and organizational use of language.
In this welcome second edition, the book reviews and evaluates the current state of criminological theory from this "grammatical" perspective. It maintains and develops its critical and subversive stance but greatly widens its theoretical range, including dedicated chapters on gender, race, class and the post-als including postcolonialism. It now also provides questions, exercises and further readings alongside its detailed analysis of a set of international examples, both classical and contemporary.
1. Sociology
Part I: Positively Undertaken
Introduction
2. State
3. Society
Part II: Interpretatively Turned
Introduction
4. Claims-Making
5. Defining the Situation
6. Practical Reasoning
Part III: Politically Challenged
Introduction
7. Class
8. Gender
9. Race
Part IV: Epistemically Undermined
Introduction
10. Power
11. People?
12: Conclusion
Biography
Stephen Hester was Professor of Sociology at Bangor University, UK. He retired in 2009 but continued to be active in ethnomethodological and conversation-analytic research. He authored, co-authored or co-edited eight books and over forty articles and book chapters, notably An Invitation to Ethnomethodology and Orders of Ordinary Action, both with David Francis, and Descriptions of Deviance, a book on membership categorization analysis left unfinished at his untimely death in April 2014.
Peter Eglin is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. He has been Humboldt Research Fellow at the Universität Konstanz and Visiting Research Associate at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Wolfson College, Oxford. As a visiting professor he has taught at the University of Toronto, Northumbria University and Bangor University. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese. He has contributed chapters to the Handbook of Sociology and Human Rights (2013) and the Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture (2014). He wrote extensively with Stephen Hester, including the monograph The Montreal Massacre.
By any standards, this book is remarkable. Comparisons between this Second Edition of Hester and Eglin’s classic text, and the original, are both instructive, and moot; for, not only is this an updating of material 25 years on, sadly, one of the authors – Stephen Hester – died in 2014. Peter Eglin has, then, secured an outstanding achievement. The analytic reach of this book moves it beyond classification as a textbook. It collects together and evaluates a wide range of highly advanced research in an unusually accessible manner. So while this can be used as a university course textbook, it is also an extremely valuable contribution to the literatures on crime, criminology, ethnomethodology, MCA, policing and police work, and sociology, in its own right.
Andrew Carlin, Department of Sociology, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK, Policing and Society Journal
