This volume addresses a variety of issues related to economic crisis in the broadest sense of the term, involving diverse national and international contexts, historical epochs, and a range of problems related to economic life. The chapters in this volume tackle criminologically relevant questions
in connection with crime/deviance and/or the control thereof, on the basis of an analysis of any aspect of economic life, in general, and economic crisis, in particular. Thematically diverse within the province of criminology and the sociology of crime, deviance, and social control, the chapters are
not restricted in terms of theoretical approach and methodological orientation. In these and all other relevant respects, this book is usefully varied in examining selected dimensions of economic crisis in relation to important questions of crime and crime control. Specific themes discussed include:
corporate crime, money laundering, foreclosures, and mortgage fraud. This volume provides timely analyses of the impact of the current economic crisis, innovative perspectives on problems of economy and finance, and criminological insights on often neglected aspects of social life.
There has been a revitalization of interest in social control over the last decade, and this volume contributes to renewed attempts to explain and conceptualize social control in all its diversity. It provides a broad conceptualization of social control which is unique. Rather than concentrating
solely on law and legal control (the criminal justice system), there are also treatments of informal control (socialization, group formation and the controls exerted in everyday life) as well as medical control (norms regarding health and illness, particularly with regard to notions of 'normal'
behaviour). This volume brings together cutting edge analyses - both theoretical and empirical - of social control from leading scholars in the fields of sociology, criminology, and related social sciences. "Perspectives on Social Control" is of interest not only to sociologists and criminal justice
practitioners, but also to medical professionals (primarily for the focus on medical control or medicalization), as well as a wide array of scholars from a variety of disciplines concerned with the socialization process and the pressures toward conformity exerted by social groups in everyday life.
According to this volume an understanding of violence has to be social because violence is so situationally contingent, culturally and subculturally patterned and historically variable. And yet for all its ubiquity its causes and contextual variations are not fully understand. Lonnie Athens's work
on violence is applied, assessed, and extended in this publication by scholars from a wide variety of fields, including clinical psychology, criminology, history, psychiatry, and sociology. Athens, who is both a criminologist and sociologist, opens the volume with a restatement of his violentization
thesis, which Richard Rhodes made famous in his book, "Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist". Contributors to this volume extend and test the theory of violentization in the contexts of child abuse, clinical psychology, corrections, soldiers in wartime, and the Holocaust. The
contributions subject the theory of violentization to both qualitative and quantitative analyses. Finally, sociologists Jeffrey Ulmer, Jay Meehan, and David Maines situate Athens's work in criminology and sociology, providing crucial insights into its contribution to the theory and methods used in
these two fields.