Making Sense of Social Disorganization

Crime is a common social phenomenon existing for thousands of years. Due to different political and economic system, national tradition, and cultural background, crime presents various patterns in different countries. Rapid social transition accompanying economic growth and system transformation make crime a serious social problem. Social transition affects social life in all directions and induces social disorganization in every respect. Its influence to commit crime proves easy to cause a power vacuum in social institutional change, and negatively affect on crime prevention and social control; it tends to produce negative psychological phenomena such as anomie, stress, resentment, and confusion due to disorganization and reconstruction of social order and social norms, which result in frequent anomie and deviant behavior (Zhou 2004). Altogether, crime is natural product of rapid social transition (Zhou and Cao 2007). A study on the relationship between social disorganization and crime in China has irreplaceable significance to clearly understand criminal phenomenon in periods China’s social transformation. Proper crime prevention and control measures could be made through a deep study on the influences of various factors of social disorganization on crime. Thus criminal legislation could be improved. Although social disorganization theory is one of the earliest developed sociological theories in modern Western, “social disorganization,” the basic concept of social disorganization theory is still to be one of the few sociological terms with “the most confusing and most indistinct definitions” (Cohen 1959). This book creatively understands “social disorganization” on two levels: spatial structural disorganization and social structural disorganization. Because of this, the social disorganization theory will be re-annotated and step forward in a much clearer form of conceptualization. Chapter 2 Making Sense of Social Disorganization