Criminal practice : fieldwork and improvisation in difficult circumstances

"Quant rules" in criminology, as Richard Wright and his colleagues explain in Chapter 17, especially amongst policy makers and their academic apparatchiks. However, fieldwork-based studies of drug users, gang members, thieves, robbers, and other deviants are among some of the most lauded within the criminological canon, imbuing to some of their authors an almost mythical veneer of authenticity that is derived from close proximity to "the street," or what Shover shrewdly calls our "bread and butter" (Shover 1996: xiii). While it is often presented, particularly to students, in terms of a sequence of interdependent and linked procedures, in practice fieldwork is like life itself-an improvised gig (Becker 1964: 602-603; Denzin 1989: 245). This chapter will stress the contribution that field-based studies have made to our understandings of crime and control, while locating some of the theoretical boundaries of field-based contributions in criminology.