Exam 14: Criminology and Sociological Theory: Exploring Different Perspectives and Approaches

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Answer should include: Edgework is the term coined by Stephen Lyng to describe and explain the high-risk "adrenaline-rush" behavior of those who engage in a variety of deviant activities such as skydiving, BASE jumping, hang gliding, surfing, downhill skiing, and other extreme sports. Edgework denotes situations of voluntary risk taking where those involved match illicit and life-threatening risks with highly honed subcultural survival skills. Lyng and his colleagues are particularly interested in how and why edgeworkers invoke a high degree of control and skill to avoid the extreme dangers, possibly death, in order to reap the 'pleasures of sensation and emotion' of the body. Edgework theorists reject biopsychological arguments and rational choice explanations. Instead, they invoke a nonmaterial explanation for deviant motivation as an end in itself, as a place of freedom from constructed limits and borders, in which humans experience their own humanity, enjoyed as one approaches "the invitational edge" that most control systems prevent humans from approaching.

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(1) Globalization is the process whereby people react to issues in terms of reference points that transcend their own locality, society, or region. Globalization: (a) Is a process of unification in which differences in economic, technological, political, and social institutions are transformed from a local or national network into a single system, (b) Relates to an international universalism, whereby events happening in one part of the world affect those in another, and (c) Relates to the recognition of different cultures' diversity of experience and the formation of new identities.
(2) Ecological psychology is the study of how environmental factors, such as unemployment and social settings, prevail on a person's mind to affect behavior. Ecological psychology developed as a reaction against the narrow clinical approach to treatment and disenchantment with psychotherapy, and it is considerably more eclectic in its assumptions.

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(1) Cultural theorists observe that people from different origins and ethnic groups have distinct cultural heritages. One group may numerically or economically dominate, and their culture is then considered "normal" or mainstream. Members of a 'minority' culture may have values and cultural norms that are in conflict with the dominant culture. Sometimes, these behaviors are criminalized by the dominant culture, creating criminals of people who are doing what they would normally do: conforming. The norms and behavior patterns of each culture are taught by a process of socialization and social learning.
(2) Cultural criminology is "an orientation designed especially for critical engagement with the politics of meaning surrounding crime and crime control, and for critical intervention into those politics." Cultural criminology as a field of study emerged in the mid-1990s, although its ideas had been percolating in criminological thought longer than that. In addition to its connection with edgework and Katz's studies of the shared thrill, pleasure, excitement, and sensuality that are the emotion and seduction of crime, cultural criminology has its roots in several theoretical perspectives. Using ethnography, its advocates study "the situated meaning and subtle symbolism constructed within criminal subcultures and events. What cultural criminology captures through its qualitative engagement is the richness of the experience of crime and its control as a contested arena of symbolic representation. Cultural criminology sees a blurring of the boundaries between image and reality in a variety of representational arenas, not least in popular culture, advertising, news, and films.