J J Savelsberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 133581 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J J Savelsberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | J J |
| FAMILY NAME | Savelsberg |
| SIGNATURE | SAVELSBERG J J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Minnesota |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6950-1098 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 64 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 336 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1984 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Stigma management, group interaction, and cultural trauma: A Rwanda–Germany comparison
Universal Jurisdiction and Civil Society: Institutional Learning and Knowledge About Mass Atrocity Crimes
Important innovations have occurred and spread in international criminal law and justice. Arguing that they result from institutional learning, this essay focuses on universal jurisdiction, a principle of international law that invites the prosecution of perpetrators of core international crimes (war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression, and genocide), irrespective of their nationality and the country of perpetration. It further …
Prosecutorial-NGO Complex: New legal opportunity structures and the role of (I)NGOs in universal jurisdiction trials on Syria
Changing legal environments create new opportunities for legal mobilization by civil society groups. At stake is mobilization in Germany and Europe for the prosecution of agents of the Syrian Assad regime accused of committing core international crimes. Changes in the legal environment include the (a) spread of universal jurisdiction; (b) increasing use of "crimes against humanity"; (c) new prosecutorial and policing units specialized in core int…
Diaries and Bearing Witness of the Armenian Genocide: Micro-foundations of a Circle of Genocide Knowledge
Collective Memories and Community Interventions: Peace Building in Northern Ireland
This paper examines the role of community interventions in post-conflict settings. The focus is on peacebuilding through the shaping of collective memories, achieved through the transformation of social ties. By addressing community interventions, this paper opens the black box between interventions by formal institutions (such as peace treaties, trials, or truth commissions) and outcomes. It is based on a study of one specific cross-community in…
Social fields, journalism, and collective memory: Reporting on the Armenian genocide in legal, political, and commemorative field events
Conflictual processes unfolding in legal and political social fields as well as commemorative events differentially shape social memories, including memories about genocides, in line with their rules of the game and institutional logics. News media subsequently process mnemonic struggles—carried out in law, politics, and commemorations—submitting them to the rules and norms of journalism before their messages reach the public. This article explor…
Darfur Model, Rwanda, and the ICTR: John Hagan’s Sociology of Genocide Continued
Core contributions from John Hagan’s scholarship on genocide are at stake in this article. First, this article examines, for the Rwandan genocide, the applicability of Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond’s multi-level causal model of genocide, developed in Darfur and the Crime of Genocide . Asking how causal factors and processes highlighted in that model play out in scholarship on the Rwandan genocide, it moves toward answering the question of exte…
Control Balance Theory
The entry describes control balance theory, as developed by Charles Tittle, a theory that explains deviance as a consequence of control imbalance. It summarizes theoretical critiques and evaluates empirical tests, summarizes Tittle's response, and points at future potential
Contextualizing Advocates of Humanity: History, Ecology of Fields, and Transnational Legal Ordering
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Writing biography in the face of cultural trauma: Nazi descent and the management of spoiled identities
Punitive turn and justice cascade: Mutual inspiration from Punishment and Society and human rights literatures
This essay compares punishment and society scholarship, especially on the punitive turn of recent decades, with work on the punishment of grave offenses against human rights norms, especially the justice cascade. It compares trends and literatures along six analytic dimensions: offending, group conflict and power asymmetries, penal entrepreneurs, cultural receptivity, institutional constraints, and feedback loops from punishment to structure and …
The Crime of All Crimes: Toward a Criminology of Genocide
Tribute to Nicole Rafter for Crime, Media, Culture
Discussion Law & Society Review at Fifty: A Debate on the Future of Publishing by the Law & Society Association
This contribution presents a series of statements on the future of publishing by the Law & Society Review and the Law & Society Association generally. Framed by the first author's introductory and concluding comments are contributions by Halliday, Liu, Morrill, Seron, and Silbey. This debate, based on a LSR 50th anniversary panel held at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the LSA, is intended to open up a broader conversation among members of the Associa…
Criminology, History of
A Brief Note from the Editors
Editors Letter
Representing Human Rights Violations in Darfur: Global Justice, National Distinctions
This article examines how international judicial interventions in mass atrocity influence representations of violence. It relies on content analysis of 3,387 articles and opinion pieces in leading newspapers from eight Western countries, compiled into the Darfur Media Dataset, as well as in-depth interviews to assess how media frame violence in the Darfur region of Sudan. Overall, it finds that UN Security Council and International Criminal Court…
Crime, Law, and Regime Change
Complex reciprocal relationships between crime, law, and regime change are explored through a review of the literature. The first part of this article examines the stabilizing function of law for political regimes and the risks for regime stability associated with weakened rule of law and state crime. The literature on experiences from state socialist regimes prompts questions regarding the future of Western interventionist states, especially dur…
NGO s, IO s, and the ICC: Diagnosing and Framing Darfur
Nongovernmental organizations ( NGO s) have become influential forces in global society. They exert their influence in part by framing issues and thereby suggesting particular courses of action. This article examines how NGO s with distinct missions represent mass violence for the case of Darfur. Content analysis of reports, speeches, and other documents from Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and Save Darfur reveals distinct pattern…
A Brief Note from the New Editors
Writing Human Rights History—And Social Science Encounters
This review essay on Aryeh Neier's The International Human Rights Movement : A History (Princeton University Press, 2012) discusses Neier's central themes: the origins and maturation of the movement and its effects, including the expansion of human rights and humanitarian law, enhanced criminal accountability for human rights crimes, and the appearance of criminal tribunals, culminating in the International Criminal Court. An overview is interspe…
Highlights in the Sociology of Law: Globalizing Law and Penalizing Human Rights Violations
American Memories: Atrocities and the Law
American Criminology Meets Collins: Global Theory of Intellectual Change and a Policy‐Oriented Field 1
Ideas from Randall Collins’s Sociology of Philosophies are applied to U.S. criminology, a policy‐oriented field and one case of differentiation out of a fragmented sociological discipline. Building on previous quantitative work, in‐depth interviews with eight prominent scholars provide the empirical material. As in philosophy, vertical network ties are important. Yet, they may take different forms, with consequences for the shape of horizontal ne…
Law That Does Not Fit Society: Sentencing Guidelines as a Neoclassical Reaction to the Dilemmas of Substantivized Law
Chances of realizing a legal rationality that does not fit society are limited. Referring to weber's "Sociology of Law," to related themes in the sociology of polity, organizations, and occupations, and to recent debates on technocratization, juridification, delegalization, and responsive law, this article presents a theoretical discussion of this thesis. An empirical case, using the neoclassical concept of sentencing guidelines, exemplified by t…
Knowledge, Domination, and Criminal Punishment
Recent dramatic increases of criminal punishment in the United States and very different trends in the Federal Republic of Germany suggest a critique of basic sociological theory traditions. The article confronts structural-functionalist, Marxist, and legalistic approaches with these trends and suggests an alternative and more complex theory. Utilizing and ideal-typical comparison between the two countries, this article develops a set of interrel…
Institutionalizing Collective Memories of Hate: Law and Law Enforcement in Germany and the United States
The institutionalization of distinct collective memories of hate and cultural traumas as law and bureaucracy is examined comparatively for the case of hate crime law. A dehistoricized focus on individual victimization and an avoidance of major episodes of domestic atrocities in the United States contrast with a focus on the Holocaust, typically in the context of the destruction of the democratic state, in Germany. Such differences, in combination…
Law and Collective Memory
Law and collective memory are reciprocally associated. Law steers collective memory, directly but selectively, as trials produce images of the past through the production and presentation of evidence in ritual practices and public discourse. Law affects collective memory indirectly by regulating the production, accessibility, and dissemination of information about the past. Simultaneously, collective memory is preserved and activated by carrier g…
Introduction: Global Processes, National Institutions, Local Bricolage: Shaping Law in an Era of Globalization
The articles by Carruthers and Halliday and by Hagan, Levi, and Ferrales in the present issue of Law and Social Inquiry provide a wonderful opportunity to carry out a brief reflection on the broader field of research on globalization and law. As the discussant and organizer/chair, respectively, of a panel on “Law between Globalization and National Institutions,” from which these two articles emerged, we use the following pages to: (1) show how bo…
Introduction: Mutual engagement: Criminology and sociology
Religion, Historical Contingencies, and Institutional Conditions of Criminal Punishment: The German Case and Beyond
Religion and historical contingencies help explain cross-national and historic variation of criminal law and punishment. Case studies from German history suggest: First, the Calvinist affiliation of early Prussian monarchs advanced the centralization of power, rationalization of government bureaucracy, and elements of the welfare state, factors that are likely to affect punishment. Second, the dominant position of Lutheranism in the German popula…
Criminological Knowledge: Period and Cohort Effects in Scholarship
Period and cohort effects are explored in regard to criminological knowledge. Hypotheses are inspired by biographies and by research in the sociology of knowledge, based on Karl Mannheim's essay on generations, Maurice Halbwachs' partly conflicting arguments about the presentist orientation of collective memory and newer ideas about the institutional context of knowledge production. The data set results from content analysis of 1, 390 articles in…
Knowledge, Domination and Criminal Punishment Revisited: Incorporating State Socialism
A theory of criminal punishment that introduces the organization of knowledge production and of political and legal decision-making as central concepts (Savelsberg, 1994a) is further developed. This article first explicates the general theoretical model. Second, the comparative perspective is enhanced as a previous comparison between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the United States (US) is extended to include the experience of state so…
Institutional Environments and Scholarly Work: American Criminology, 1951-1993
Neoinstitutional theses are examined for the constitution of criminological knowledge during the transformation of penal regimes and the accompanying emergence of a specialized field of criminology. Effects of this reorganization, historical period, and research funding on scholarly journal publications are examined. Results are based on a content analysis of 1,612 articles published in leading journals between 1951 and 1993. Multivariate analyse…
Politicized Scholarship? Science on Crime and the State
The association between state actions on the one hand and the production of scholarly knowledge about crime and crime control on the other is examined. This article provides an empirical examination on how the polity affects scholarly work. This can occur directly through research funding or indirectly as academic institutions change their internal organization in response to government-induced demand for training (e.g., by creating specialized c…
The Making of Criminal Law Norms in Welfare States: Economic Crime in West Germany
Using the cognitive mapping approach, I investigate the genesis of criminal law norms against economic crime in West Germany. Four theoretical approaches can be derived from the interaction of two dimensions: differentiation versus Marxist theory, and functionalist versus conflict-group theory. Focusing on interests, anticipated functions, and conflict lines, I analyze the argumentation structures in the judicial committee of the Bundestag concer…
Discussion Law & Society Review at Fifty: A Debate on the Future of Publishing by the Law & Society Association
This contribution presents a series of statements on the future of publishing by the Law & Society Review and the Law & Society Association generally. Framed by the first author's introductory and concluding comments are contributions by Halliday, Liu, Morrill, Seron, and Silbey. This debate, based on a LSR 50th anniversary panel held at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the LSA, is intended to open up a broader conversation among members of the Associa…
Representing Human Rights Violations in Darfur: Global Justice, National Distinctions
This article examines how international judicial interventions in mass atrocity influence representations of violence. It relies on content analysis of 3,387 articles and opinion pieces in leading newspapers from eight Western countries, compiled into the Darfur Media Dataset, as well as in-depth interviews to assess how media frame violence in the Darfur region of Sudan. Overall, it finds that UN Security Council and International Criminal Court…
Cultures of Control in Contemporary Societies
Human Nature and Social Control in Complex Society: A Critique of Charles Tittle's Control Balance
Contradictions, Law, and State Socialism
The relationship of law to antagonisms and contradictions within state socialism is explored from a Weberian and a Marxian perspective. Examining legislation, court decision making, legal control of economic behavior, and law enforcement reveals contradictions between (I) a radical participatory ideology versus muted or extinct civil society; (2) the ideology of comprehensive planning versus the impotence of law; (3) strategies aiming at total co…
Punitive turn and justice cascade: Mutual inspiration from Punishment and Society and human rights literatures
This essay compares punishment and society scholarship, especially on the punitive turn of recent decades, with work on the punishment of grave offenses against human rights norms, especially the justice cascade. It compares trends and literatures along six analytic dimensions: offending, group conflict and power asymmetries, penal entrepreneurs, cultural receptivity, institutional constraints, and feedback loops from punishment to structure and …
NGO s, IO s, and the ICC: Diagnosing and Framing Darfur
Nongovernmental organizations ( NGO s) have become influential forces in global society. They exert their influence in part by framing issues and thereby suggesting particular courses of action. This article examines how NGO s with distinct missions represent mass violence for the case of Darfur. Content analysis of reports, speeches, and other documents from Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, and Save Darfur reveals distinct pattern…
Control Balance: Toward a General Theory of Deviance. Charles R. Tittle
Writing biography in the face of cultural trauma: Nazi descent and the management of spoiled identities
Crime, Law, and Regime Change
Complex reciprocal relationships between crime, law, and regime change are explored through a review of the literature. The first part of this article examines the stabilizing function of law for political regimes and the risks for regime stability associated with weakened rule of law and state crime. The literature on experiences from state socialist regimes prompts questions regarding the future of Western interventionist states, especially dur…
Dialectics of Norms in Modernization
The frequently lamented weakening of wakening of social and law norms in modern societies is examined. After some concern about norm erosion in classical sociology, empirical social research on mass communication, industry, the military, and urban life soothed earlier concerns. Yet criminological evidence on late modern and rapidly modernizing societies, qualitative research in the sociology of culture, and quantitative lifecourse research attest…
Rationalities and Experts in the Making of Criminal Law Against Economic Crime
Prosecutorial-NGO Complex: New legal opportunity structures and the role of (I)NGOs in universal jurisdiction trials on Syria
Changing legal environments create new opportunities for legal mobilization by civil society groups. At stake is mobilization in Germany and Europe for the prosecution of agents of the Syrian Assad regime accused of committing core international crimes. Changes in the legal environment include the (a) spread of universal jurisdiction; (b) increasing use of "crimes against humanity"; (c) new prosecutorial and policing units specialized in core int…
A Review Essay on Recent Urban Social Science in West Germany: Social Ecology and Community Power Studies
Editors' Note: The following essay was originally submitted as a book review. As John Walton notes in his introduction, modern urban sociology has its roots in German and French traditions. Since this essay reviews the most important recent developments in German urban social science, we have taken the unusual step of treating this review essay as an article in the context of this symposium on European urban social science
Socio-spatial attributes of social problems: The case of crime and delinquency
The Making of Criminal Law Norms in Welfare States: Economic Crime in West Germany
Using the cognitive mapping approach, I investigate the genesis of criminal law norms against economic crime in West Germany. Four theoretical approaches can be derived from the interaction of two dimensions: differentiation versus Marxist theory, and functionalist versus conflict-group theory. Focusing on interests, anticipated functions, and conflict lines, I analyze the argumentation structures in the judicial committee of the Bundestag concer…
Rationalities and Experts in the Making of Criminal Law Against Economic Crime
Studies in Law, Politics, and Society: A Research Annual, Volume 11
Law That Does Not Fit Society: Sentencing Guidelines as a Neoclassical Reaction to the Dilemmas of Substantivized Law
Chances of realizing a legal rationality that does not fit society are limited. Referring to weber's "Sociology of Law," to related themes in the sociology of polity, organizations, and occupations, and to recent debates on technocratization, juridification, delegalization, and responsive law, this article presents a theoretical discussion of this thesis. An empirical case, using the neoclassical concept of sentencing guidelines, exemplified by t…
Constructing White-Collar Crime: Rationalities, Communication, Power
In Constructing White-Collar Crime , Joachim J. Savelsberg, a sociologist, and Peter Brühl, a lawyer, have provided an interdisciplinary case study of the construction of new German laws against white-collar crime, relating their results to internationally comparative findings.
Taming the System: The Control of Discretion in Criminal Justice, 1950-1990
Law as an Autopoietic System
And God laughed the new self-referentiality law - a hypercycle blind legal evolution social regulation through reflexive law intersytemic law of conflict unitas multiplex - corporate governance as an example
Knowledge, Domination, and Criminal Punishment
Recent dramatic increases of criminal punishment in the United States and very different trends in the Federal Republic of Germany suggest a critique of basic sociological theory traditions. The article confronts structural-functionalist, Marxist, and legalistic approaches with these trends and suggests an alternative and more complex theory. Utilizing and ideal-typical comparison between the two countries, this article develops a set of interrel…
Constructing White-Collar Crime: Rationalities, Communication, Power
A sociologist and a lawyer delve into the political processes that led to Germany's new laws against white-collar crime. They conclude that economic and political rationalities carried more weight than concerns about justice, and that though the laws are intended to curb the behavior of the powerful
Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker. Stephen P. Turner , Regis A. Factor
Rethinking White-Collar Crime
Control Balance: Toward a General Theory of Deviance. Charles R. Tittle
Knowledge, Domination and Criminal Punishment Revisited: Incorporating State Socialism
A theory of criminal punishment that introduces the organization of knowledge production and of political and legal decision-making as central concepts (Savelsberg, 1994a) is further developed. This article first explicates the general theoretical model. Second, the comparative perspective is enhanced as a previous comparison between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the United States (US) is extended to include the experience of state so…
Human Nature and Social Control in Complex Society: A Critique of Charles Tittle's Control Balance
Kulturen staatlichen Strafens: USA und Deutschland
Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (USA) sind Europäern als ein Ort der Gewalt bekannt. Filmbilder über die Indianerkriege, den Wilden Westen, die Ära der Sklaverei und die Bandenkriege der Mafia zur Zeit der Prohibition paaren sich mit Erinnerungen an Fernsehbilder aus Vietnam und mit gegenwärtigen Berichten über Gewalt in den Ghettos der Innenstädte und über Schießereien in Schulen der Mittelschicht. Abgerundet wird dieses Image der USA durch …
Linking Mean Streets with Adverse Structures
Contradictions, Law, and State Socialism
The relationship of law to antagonisms and contradictions within state socialism is explored from a Weberian and a Marxian perspective. Examining legislation, court decision making, legal control of economic behavior, and law enforcement reveals contradictions between (I) a radical participatory ideology versus muted or extinct civil society; (2) the ideology of comprehensive planning versus the impotence of law; (3) strategies aiming at total co…
Cultures of Control in Contemporary Societies
Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880-1945
Introduction: Mutual engagement: Criminology and sociology
Politicized Scholarship? Science on Crime and the State
The association between state actions on the one hand and the production of scholarly knowledge about crime and crime control on the other is examined. This article provides an empirical examination on how the polity affects scholarly work. This can occur directly through research funding or indirectly as academic institutions change their internal organization in response to government-induced demand for training (e.g., by creating specialized c…
Dialectics of Norms in Modernization
The frequently lamented weakening of wakening of social and law norms in modern societies is examined. After some concern about norm erosion in classical sociology, empirical social research on mass communication, industry, the military, and urban life soothed earlier concerns. Yet criminological evidence on late modern and rapidly modernizing societies, qualitative research in the sociology of culture, and quantitative lifecourse research attest…
Religion, Historical Contingencies, and Institutional Conditions of Criminal Punishment: The German Case and Beyond
Religion and historical contingencies help explain cross-national and historic variation of criminal law and punishment. Case studies from German history suggest: First, the Calvinist affiliation of early Prussian monarchs advanced the centralization of power, rationalization of government bureaucracy, and elements of the welfare state, factors that are likely to affect punishment. Second, the dominant position of Lutheranism in the German popula…
Sociology (53 works) · Political science (45 works) · Law (40 works) · Criminology (32 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (19 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (17 works) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance (17 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Social science (11 works)