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At the time when the journal Sustainability [1] was launched, as a chemist and a scientist, I started to believe that social sciences may be more important to make humans sustainable. The broad journal title Social Sciences presents the opportunity for all social science scholars to have integrated consideration regarding the sustainability of humanity, because I am sure that science and technology alone cannot help. Science and technology may have in fact been contributing to accelerate the depletion of nonrenewable natural resources and putting human sustainability at risk since the industrial revolution about 150 years ago. I hope all intellectuals studying anthropology, archaeology, administration, communication, criminology, economics, education, government, linguistics, international relations, politics, sociology and, in some contexts, geography, history, law, and psychology publish with us to seek a solution to sustain humanity. Sustainability itself will also be a main topic of the journal Social Sciences. In addition to this integrated forum for social sciences, more topic specific journals, such as the already publishing Societies [2], will be launched. [...]

The development of new approaches in recent times has brought about major changes in the study of social and political life. They reject almost everything that has been traditionally accepted, for which they have been severely criticized. But focusing on academic issues alone won't help much. We can understand the new approaches, their concerns, their rejection of science as model, their disdain for objectivity, universality, truth, relevance and so on, more adequately by relating them to the social conditions that obtain in the West. There are, however, major differences between these conditions and those that obtain in countries like India. And the kind of problems facing these countries can be addressed meaningfully by the more traditional approach than by the approaches developed recently. This is why, while it does not seem to have much future in the West, where it originated and continued for long, it may survive, even flourish, in countries like India.

A review essay on one of many books by Craig Calhoun. References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd, copyright 2006.]

Abstract: How has knowledge been constructed in British criminology since the 1960s? While histories of theory are plentiful and, due to such activities as the Research Assessment Exercise, awareness of citation counts has grown, we have become interested in a less formal – harder to assess – area of knowledge construction. Our questions have formed around the ways in which current, practising criminologists perceive the development of their discipline (if it is sufficiently unitary to be called such), and what has influenced them more directly. In so doing, we are attempting to tap into the creative impact on criminology and criminologists of the range of studies that do not necessarily figure as largely in international citation studies. In collecting from fellow‐criminologists a sense of which studies and writers have both shaped criminology and influenced their own thinking, we have arrived at a paradoxical picture of British criminology: one in which there is tension between how current practitioners present a highly‐fragmented, wide‐ranging set of influences, yet do so within a discipline in which there appears to be constant repetition of similar questions over time.