Do We Really Need Collective Social Process to Understand Why Crime Occurs and Offenders Commit Crime?

This chapter examines the potential role of social process in contributing to our understanding of why crime occurs where it does. It focuses on the role of social process in explaining crime that occurs at microplaces; in “small-scale social systems whose components include people and inanimate objects” known as behavior settings. Behavior settings emphasize the situational and dynamic nature of interactions between the social and physical environment of the microplace as situated within a particular context. The chapter begins with a brief introduction to social process and its operation at microplaces. It then identifies instances where the inclusion of social process enhances current environmental criminology. It concludes by discussing some of the challenges to the measurement of social process-related mechanisms hypothesized to affect crime events and suggesting a way forward.

Affect (linguistics) · Commit · Context (archaeology) · Criminology · Geography · Political science · Process (computing) · Situated · Situational ethics · Social environment · Social science · Sociology · Communication · Computer Science · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Psychology · Social Psychology