The peripheral core of law and criminology: On postmodern social theory and conceptual integration

Despite significant challenges to some of the ideological underpinnings of the postmodern critique, critical theory building in law and criminology increasingly is subjected to the wholesale advances of this growing, albeit heterodox, school of thought. One greatly underexamined component of postmodern research is a provisional treatment of how its various formulations might suggest alternative approaches to understanding criminal justicians, their research, and their practice. Accordingly this essay assesses core themes (both sociological and epistemological) informing the regard of this perspective for theory construction in law and criminology. Several topics are considered: the social structure of society, role formation, human agency, discourse construction, knowledge or sense making, and social change. Building on Milovanovic's conceptual distinctions between the modernist and the postmodernist projects, the author concludes by speculating on what a model of postmodern conceptual synthesis might encompass, and on how this vision of reality promotes a more humanistic justice than the conventional forms of theoretical integration.