"Disciplines, according to [Jeffrey] Alexander, give people ways of managing the inherent babble and confusion. They provide forums for discussion using shared vocabularies - they make possible the sort of fruitful disagreement in which at least the participants have a 'fair idea of what one another is taking about' (ibid.: 31). But because the idea of a discipline implies social organization as well as intellectual work, sometimes disciplines get captured by orthodoxies which suppress or marginalize heterodox perspectives. Then they tend to disguise or to forget the fact that the conflict of interpretations is endemic. Under such conditions of closure and mutual isolation the disciplines become obstacles to theoretical reflection and constraints on debate (see Garland, this volume)...

To qualify as science, Runciman argues, it is not necessary for the social sciences to attempt to expunge problems of meaning, ethics, and evaluation - indeed he insists that this cannot be done. it is only necessary that they (i) are pursued under some degree of methodological constraint which is different from, say, the creative arts; (ii) that they acknowledge the possibility of 'intersubjectively testable knowledge'; and (iii) that some such knowledge may be cumulative. That is, whatever their special complexities, the social sciences still in some sense aspire to 'discovery' (1983: 4-9). Unless we accept some such baseline, Runciman argues, we cannot rule anything out - for example the assertion that the First World War was initiated by the Belgian Army's invasion of Germany."

--- Richard Sparks, Social Theory and Crime and Punishment, The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (2nd edition)


"Debates over the causes and control of white-collar crime do connect to different political evaluations of the misdeeds of business or capitalism (thus it is interesting to note how political conservatives tend to favour structural explanations of business malpractice rather than peronal (sic) guilt - thus changing places with liberals in comparison with their positions on ordinary crime (Zimring and Hawkins, 1993)." - David Nelken, White-Collar Crime, The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (2nd edition)