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The Neighborhood

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Neighborhood Disorganization and Social Control

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Criminology ((SBICC))

Abstract

The social disorganization theory by Shaw and McKay points the importance of neighborhoods for youth delinquency. Following Kornhauser’s interpretation, this theory consists of a control-theoretical part and a culture-theoretical part. The control-theoretical model explains how location-dependent crime is encouraged by a chain of attributes of living environments. The exogenous structural characteristics, such as poverty, ethnic heterogeneity, residential mobility, and incomplete families, cause social disorganization, which weakens the informal social control; this again leads to crime. High individual delinquency is associated with low self-control. The differences in self-control between neighborhoods can arise from the “composition” of the residents, which is a consequence of urban selection processes, or it can be caused by neighborhood “contexts”. Only a few studies have examined the relationship between the neighborhood context and self-control.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. HafenCity University Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Olga Siegmunt

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  1. Olga Siegmunt
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Correspondence to Olga Siegmunt .

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Siegmunt, O. (2016). The Neighborhood. In: Neighborhood Disorganization and Social Control. SpringerBriefs in Criminology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21590-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21590-7_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-21589-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-21590-7

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