New Institutionalism and Theory Building in Criminal Justice

• In Event: Expertise, Evidence and Knowledge Production in Criminology

Abstract

Now that a critical mass of criminological scholarship using neo-institutional theory (NIT) has emerged in recent years, it is time to take stock of this important area of inquiry. In this paper, we provide directions for scholars interested in using this productive framework, and we propose especially useful ways that criminologists might harness NIT to answer persistent questions in the study of criminal justice. NIT’s promise lies in its departure from common criminological approaches in three respects. First, NIT emphasizes the centrality of legitimacy in explaining the popularity of an idea or policy in criminal justice, without reference to how they perform their stated function. Second, NIT is profitably versatile. It enables scholars to imagine diverse phenomena from throughout the criminal justice system as all being susceptible to a common theoretical approach. That versatility has value for consolidating and synthesizing the study of criminal justice under a coherent analytical framework. Third, NIT advances parsimony in efforts to theorize criminal justice. Specifically, it creates a set of formal theoretical expectations that engender testable hypotheses about how ideas in criminal justice spread. Together, these three features of NIT represent an important step forward in devising a unified theory of criminal justice.

Authors

• Johann Koehler, University of California, Berkeley

• Ashley Rubin, University of Toronto