Abstract
This paper highlights the ways in which recent comparative criminological research has begun to advance theory development by directing systematic attention to the role of institutional structure. The overarching thesis is that sensitivity to the institutional context in recent criminological studies, especially those conducted in Asia, has paved the way for the productive elaboration of two highly influential theories: Routine Activities Theory and the General Theory of Crime (or self-control theory). Such theoretical elaboration promises to enhance the explanatory power of these theories by placing individual behavior in a multilevel, institutional context. The paper also outlines a transformed variant of self-control theory that posits two distinctive forms of self-control, which are likely to have differential impacts on criminal offending depending on features of the institutional structure of societies.
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Notes
The occasion was the 54th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology that was convened in 2002. The conference paper was subsequently published as a chapter in Beyond Empiricism: Institutions and Intentions in the Study of Crime (Messner and Rosenfeld 2004). See Messner et al. (2013) for an elaboration of some of the core themes developed in the chapter.
See, for example, Kornhauser’s (1978) widely cited exposition of classical social disorganization theory. Kornhauser cites the “disruption” or “decay” of social institutions as a major mediating factor that links structural conditions such as residential mobility, population heterogeneity, and poverty with crime, according to social disorganization theory.
In his Presidential Address to the American Society of Criminology, Gary LaFree (2007:1,16) argued that one of the five most important tasks that needs to be pursued to advance the field is to conduct more “cross-national comparative analysis,” explicitly noting that this approach permits the analysis of macro-level characteristics of society.
When using the term “comparative research,” I refer to inquiry that is concerned explicitly with similarities and differences across societies, regardless of whether or not the data under investigation come from a single society or from multiple societies. See Bennett (2004), Kohn (1987), and Swaaningen (2011) for discussions of different ways of conducting comparative research in criminology. Friedrichs (2011) explains the distinctions between comparative criminology and transnational criminology, international criminology, and global criminology.
See LaFree (1999), Messner (2003), and Neapolitan (1997) for extensive reviews of the comparative literature prior to 2000, much of it focused on cross-national analyses of homicide. Examples of comparative longitudinal studies of offending can be found in Weitekamp and Kerner (1994). See Tonry (2007) for comparative research on penal policy. Despite the accumulation of these studies, David Farrington (2000:5) observed in his Presidential Address to the American Society of Criminology in 1999 that “cross-national comparative studies in criminology are important but relatively infrequent.”
See Messner (2012) for an example of an attempt at multilevel, institutional theorizing that integrates elements of Situational Action Theory within the framework of Institutional-Anomie Theory.
Bennett (1991) analyzed crime rates based on data for offenses reported to the police, whereas Anderson and Bennett (1996) employed arrest data to be able to disaggregate offending by gender. In this latter study, the authors found that gender also constitutes a scope condition of routine activities theory, with the theory working best for men in developed societies (Anderson and Bennett 1996:53).
Stein also reported differences in the correlates for different types of victimizations (“expressive” vs “instrumental crimes”) that are for the most part in accord with the underlying logic of routine activities theory.
In analyses of her sample of developed and developing nations, Stein created a variable for “living alone” that combined the status of being single with being divorce or separated, or being a widow or widower. The indicator of “living alone” was positively associated with the risk of assault victimization but was not significantly related to the risk of burglary victimization.
Kuo et al. (2012) conducted a criminal victimization survey focused on repeat victimization with data for Taiwan. The overall conclusions were similar to those that we reached in our Tianjin study. The data supported the “general applicability” of the routine activities approach, but the authors emphasized “…the importance of considering the broader socio-cultural context in the association between risk factors and the concentration of criminal victimization” (Kuo et al. 2012:573). See, in particular, their interpretations for unexpected findings concerning income and gender that point to distinctive residential patterns and transportation patterns (use of motorcycles) in Taiwan (Kuo et al. 2012:592–594).
We also cited the role of guanxi networks in reducing the extent to which single persons in China engage in solitary, “risky” activities (Messner et al. 2007:515). Guanxi is explained below. See Xu (2009) for an analysis of the importance of the macro-structural context in China for understanding the relationship between routine activities and a distinctive form of victimization, i.e., the robbery of motorcycle taxi drivers.
It is important to acknowledge that despite that longstanding centrality of the family in Chinese society, the economic reform has fundamentally changed social relationships in many significant ways that are likely to bear upon routine activities and risks of victimization. In particular, growing economic inequality has promoted greater independence of the young from their families at opposite ends of the socioeconomic hierarchy for different reasons. Youths from impoverished rural areas are separated from families as they are attracted to urban areas to pursue economic opportunities, while the children of the economic elite increasingly have the resources to gain independence from parents in a manner similar to that observed in the West. A promising topic for future research is to examine systematically how marital status interacts with economic status in influencing activity patterns and victimization risks. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.
Stein (2010:52) similarly calls attention to the potential utility of estimating random effects models of individual-level indicators of routine activities in a multilevel analytic framework.
See Pratt and Cullen (2000) and Engel (2012) for meta-analyses of research testing self-control theory, and Gottfredson (2006) for a further review of the supportive empirical evidence. References to assessments of self-control theory in Western nations other than the US are provided in Cheung and Cheung (2008:416), Kobayashi et al. (2010:115–116), Rebellion et al. (2008:335), and Vazsonyi et al. (2004:191–193).
One exception to the overall pattern was the finding of a negative relationship between low self-control and alcohol use for Japanese youths.
Cheung and Cheung (2010) also reported that self-control moderated the effect of strain on delinquency for females but not for males. Rebellion et al. (2008) conducted a multilevel analysis of the effect of self-control on violent and property offending for convenience samples of college students in 32 Western and non-Western nations, including some Asian nations. They found that self-control was significantly related to offending in all nations. Unfortunately, their regression models do not include indicators from other criminological theories, so it is not possible to determine if the pattern suggestive of indirect rather than direct effects indicated in some other Asian studies would emerge in these data as well.
Different scholars have interpreted guanxi differently. As Gold et al. (2002:6) explained, guanxi is commonly used to refer to “particularistic ties” that “are based on ascribed or primordial traits such as kinship, native place, and ethnicity, and also on achieved characteristics such as attending the same school (even if not at the same time), serving in the same military unit, having shared experiences, such as the Long March, and doing business together.” See also Chen and Chen (2004) for a review of different perspectives on guanxi.
Kobayashi et al. (2010) introduced these arguments to provide a rationale for an a priori hypothesis that the effect of self-control on delinquency would be weaker in Japan than in the US. The objectives of their study thus explicitly extended beyond those of the “evaluative” method of comparative research. Indeed, their analyses serve as an instructive example of the fruitful blending of the evaluative and generative methods of comparative research.
My ideas for re-conceptualizing the concept self-control were stimulated by Kobayashi et al.’s (2010) theorizing about the congruency between personal attributes and overt behavior. In building their arguments, they relied in part on the work by Kitayama and Uchida (2005), which initially brought this reference to my attention.
See also Blockland and Nieuwbeerta (2010:84) for an extended discussion of the importance of attending to the socio-historical context when conducting life-course criminology. These authors explicitly called for more “comparisons between countries or historical periods.”
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Messner, S.F. Social Institutions, Theory Development, and the Promise of Comparative Criminological Research. Asian Criminology 9, 49–63 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-013-9175-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-013-9175-1