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This article addresses corporate environmental responsibility (CER) and aims to present a criminological analysis of it. We studied the opinion of a number of principle actors involved in CER in Europe in order to determine how they perceive it in terms of its definition, aetiology and approaches. For each of these dimensions we relate back to a criminological framework to ascertain how it is positioned in the green criminological debate. We start out by providing information on what corporate environmental responsibility is and how it relates to corporate social responsibility and sustainable development. Then we outline the theoretical framework in accordance with the three central themes for the criminological analysis of CER: definition, aetiology and approaches. We also explain the method that was used (semi-structured interviews). Next, we present the results according to the same threefold structure. Finally we discuss these results in a last part, which is divided in two. First, we look at the challenges that the criminological perspective poses for CER in terms of definition, aetiology and approaches. The second part of the discussion turns the question around and wonders how CER could contribute to greening criminology.

Critical criminology must move beyond twentieth-century empiricist and idealist paradigms because the concepts and research programmes influenced by these paradigms are falling into obsolescence. Roger Matthews' recent work firmly advocates this position and helps to set the ball rolling. Here we argue that Matthews' attempt to use critical realist thought to move Left Realism towards an advanced position can help to put criminology on a sound new footing. However, before this becomes possible numerous philosophical and theoretical issues must be ironed out. Most importantly, critical criminology must avoid political pragmatism and adopt a more critical stance towards consumer culture's spectacle. A searching analysis of these issues suggests that, ultimately, criminology is weighed down with obsolete thinking to such an extent that to remain intellectually relevant it must move beyond both Left Realism and Critical Realism to construct a new ultra-realist position.

In his presidential address to the American Statistical Association in 1931, William Fielding Ogburn, an American sociologist important particularly in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, took as his theme the difference between statistics and art. His argument, articulated here and in a wide range of writings throughout his career, was that "statistics has been developed to give an exact picture of reality, while the picture that the artist draws is a distortion of reality" (Ogburn 1932: 1). He then went on to express his belief that emotion leads to distortion in our observations. "It is this distorting influence of emotion and wishes," he said, "that is more responsible for bad thinking than any lack of logic" (ibid.: 4). But statistics, he believed, could ameliorate the distorting effects of emotion on our empirical observations. There was a problem, however, because "the artist in us wants understanding rather than statistics. But understanding is hardly knowledge. . . . The tests of knowledge are reliability and accuracy, not understanding" (ibid.: 5).

This paper traces aspects of the development of a 'green' criminology. It starts with personal reflections and then describes the emergence of explicit statements of a green criminological perspective. Initially these statements were independently voiced, in different parts of the world but they reflected shared concerns. These works have found unification as a 'green', 'eco-global' or 'conservation' criminology. The paper reviews the classifications available when talking about not only legally-defined crimes but also legally perpetrated harms, as well as typologies of such harms and crimes. It then looks at the integration of 'green' and 'traditional' criminological thinking before briefly exploring four dimensions of concern for today and the future.DOI: 10.5204/ijcjsd.v3i2.172

Abstract
This publication meets a long-felt need to show the relevance of cybernetics for the social sciences (including psychology, sociology, and anthropology). User-friendly descriptions of the core concepts of cybernetics are provided, with examples of how they can be used in the social sciences. It is explained how cybernetics functions as a transdiscipline that unifies other disciplines and a metadiscipline that provides insights about how other disciplines function. An account of how cybernetics emerged as a distinct field is provided, following interdisciplinary meetings in the 1940s, convened to explore feedback and circular causality in biological and social systems. How encountering cybernetics transformed the author's thinking and his understanding of life in general, is also recounted.

Beyond criminology? / Paddy Hillyard and Steve Tombs -- Towards a political economy of harm: states, corporations and the production of inequality / Steve Tombs and Paddy Hillyard -- Violence in democratic societies: towards an analytic framework / Jamil Salmi -- A theory of moral indifference: understanding the production of harm by capitalist society / Simon Pemberton -- State harms / Tony Ward -- Re-orientating miscarriages of justice / Michael Naughton -- The victimised state and the mystification of social harm / Joe Sim -- The war on migration / Frances Webber -- Workplace injury and death: social harm and the illusions of law / Steve Tombs -- Prime suspect: murder in Britain / Danny Dorling -- Gendering harm through a life course perspective / Christina Pantazis -- Heterosexuality as harm: fitting in / Lois Bibbings -- Children and the concept of harm / Roy Parker -- Poverty, death and disease / Dave Gordon

"Mahoney's starting point is the problem of essentialism in social science. Essentialism--the belief that the members of a category possess hidden properties ("essences") that make them members of the category and that endow them with a certain nature--is appropriate for scientific categories ("atoms", for instance) but not for human ones ("revolutions," for instance). Despite this, much social science research takes place from within an essentialist orientation; those who reject this assumption goes so far in the other direction as to reject the idea of an external reality, independent of human beings, altogether

RESUMEN: El artículo tiene como objetivo revisar algunos aspectos del proceso de institucionalización de las ciencias sociales en Colombia, para ello aborda como en los procesos de maduración de estas se han dado condiciones de interdisciplinariedad, así como la manera en que las políticas públicas de ciencia y tecnología han presionado el acceso a determinas reglas; que si bien han generado procesos de internacionalización, también han puesto en crisis la autonomía respecto a lo que se considera conocimiento científico social. Por ello se termina con una reflexión sobre la necesidad de reflexionar continuar reflexionando sobre lo que se entiende como objetividad de las ciencias sociales frente a tal proceso de institucionalización. ; ABSTRACT: The objective of this article is to inspect some aspects about the institucionalization process of the Social Sciences in Colombia, for this it takes the way in how the processes of maduration of those have been given in interdisciplinarity conditions, just like the way how the public politics of science and technology have pushed the access to certain rules that have generated processes of internacionalization and that have placed in crisis the autonomy respect to what its considered social scientis knowledge. Finally, the article ends with a reflection about the need of take in consideration what its known like Social Science objectivity in front to the institucionalization process.

Cover -- The Realist Image in Social Science -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1 The Possibility of Realism -- 2 Epistemology and Levels of Discourse -- 3 Realism and Validity Claims -- 4 Causality, Acausality and the Implicate Order -- 5 Behaviour and Social Ontology -- 6 The Language of Social Analysis -- 7 The Prospects for Realism -- Appendix: The Philosophical Bogeyman -- References -- Index.