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Abstract
In this article, we provide an overview of the body of knowledge associated with the Sutherland tradition in criminology. We track Sutherland’s impact through a bibliometric analysis of papers citing any of Sutherland’s works and by focusing on publications that are co-cited with Sutherland. This approach enables us to visualize Sutherland’s role in relation to the forerunners and founding fathers of criminology during his own active period, to his followers, and to contemporary scholars. The dataset consisted of 2596 genuine articles that cite at least one of Sutherland’s publications, in which he appears as first author in Web of Science TM published between 1955 and 2010. The results show a clear impact of the Sutherland tradition more or less throughout the twentieth century, peaking during the 1930s and 1940s and decreasing in the 1990s, when the Sutherland tradition was more powerfully challenged, primarily by the life-course tradition.
Notes
1. According to Laub (Citation2006), Sutherland created the theory of differential association as a response to the critical report by Jerome Michael and Mortimer J. Adler about the state of criminology at the beginning of the 1930s.
2. According to Cullen and Messner (Citation2007), the difference between the social structure anomie theory of Merton and the theory of differential association was in many ways exaggerated. In fact, Merton stated that he was including into his theory many of the propositions of differential association.