Book review: The New Social Control: The Institutional Web, Normativity and the Social Bond
| Published date | 01 November 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480612454951 |
| Author | Kevin D Haggerty |
| Date | 01 November 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 527
towards unity and integration? At what point does healthy debate and the energetic
exchange of ideas produce disciplinary divides? Has criminology, indeed, reached this
point (assuming that this can be measured)?
If criminology is a divided discipline, is this such an unfortunate development? Agnew
points to the inability of criminologists to agree on recommendations for controlling crime
and the decreasing likelihood that policymakers will listen to criminologists as evidence of
the pernicious effect of criminology’s divisiveness. But is this the only way to measure a
discipline’s ambit and well-being? Throughout the book, Agnew alternates between
discussing the need for a ‘unified theory of crime’ and a ‘unified criminology’. But these
are different matters; criminology is much more than the search for why people commit
crime so that we can control crime.
In the second century, Tatian the Assyrian wrote the Diatesseron—the first Biblical
assimilation of the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) into a single narrative.
While Gospel harmonies may provide a neat chronology of events and may help resolve
inconsistencies, Tatian’s work was later rejected as heresy by the Catholic Church.
Toward a Unified Criminology is neither heretical nor apostatic. Rather, it is an important
book and criminologists should heed Agnew’s call to discuss and empirically examine
the underlying assumptions of the discipline. While a little more open-mindedness
toward differing underlying assumptions would well serve criminologists on personal,
professional, and intellectual levels, whether we should reformulate the underlying
assumptions and use this integration toward a unified theory of crime is a matter of more
debate—something exciting for which we can all thank Robert Agnew.
References
Barak G (2003) Revisionist history, visionary criminology, and needs-based justice. Contempo-
rary Justice Review 6(3): 217–225.
DeKeseredy WS (2011) Contemporary Critical Criminology. London and New York: Routledge.
Ferrell J, Hayward K and Young J (2008) Cultural Criminology: An Invitation. London: SAGE.
Lehrer J (2012) Dept. of science: Kin and kind: Evolution and the origins of altruism. The
New Yorker, 5 March, 36–42.
Control in an institutional world
Michalis Lianos, The New Social Control: The Institutional Web, Normativity and the Social Bond, Red
Quill Books: Ottawa, 2012; 199 pp.: ISBN 9781926958170, C$34.94
Reviewed by: Kevin D Haggerty, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
Stanley Cohen’s (1985: 2) characterization of social control as a ‘Mickey Mouse’ concept
has become a cliché point of reference in criminology. Cohen used that expression out of
frustration with how analysts had expanded the concept to cover any and all efforts to
induce conformity, from the most subtle to the most barbaric. Michalis Lianos’ book,
The New Social Control, accentuates some extremely subtle forms of social control, but
in doing so also helps return the concept to the realm of serious discussions about the
mode of contemporary social organization.
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