Social disorganization theory - pt. 1

I just finished reading through my material on social disorganization theory. This is the most daunting of all of the pieces I'm going to have to write (several times) in preparation for the exam, because outside of theories of biology and rational choice, it is one of the oldest and most written about theories of crime. Major studies on this subject have come out of Chicago, Poland, and most recently, Great Britain, dating as far back as 1927. The difficulty, then, is narrowing it down to about a dozen citations that adequately and accurately sum up the entirety of the theory & the research that has been conducted on it.

So, I went through my notes and was a little unhappy with how it looked, because everything conducted recently is scattered and only focuses on little twists and nuances without looking at the larger body, more or less. To address this, I went through a couple of syllabi from classes I'd taken over the past couple of years to shore it up, because one class I had explicitly spent two weeks on the theory, and that shored it up nicely. Now I can cite those classic studies in Chicago and Poland, and I can cite the more recent stuff in England, and I can cite the the major conceptual and methodological changes done recently. Pretty good start to this.

In other news, the faculty meeting is finally scheduled for this Friday. We'll see how that goes. I don't know that I have high expectations for this.