Check for updates Presidential address Proliferation of crime causation theories in an era of fragmentation: Reflections on the current state of criminological theory European Journal of Criminology European Journal of Criminology 2016, Vol. 13(6) 659-676 @ The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1477370816667884 euc.sagepub.com ®SAGE Gerben Bruinsma Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), Amsterdam, The Netherlands Abstract In this presidential address I reflect on the theme of the 2015 annual European Society of Criminology meeting by addressing and discussing the issue of the overwhelming number of crime causation theories in criminology, as well as providing a brief assessment of their quality. The discipline possesses a mixture of hundreds of perspectives, definitions, ideas, sketches, multiple factors, theories and single hypotheses that are partly true and partly untrue, and none are completely true or untrue. It will be argued that, among other factors, criminologists in fact apply hardly any rule to distinguish between true and untrue theories. I sketch the evolution of the discipline and some of its features that led to the current state of affairs. With these issues in mind I raise the question of whether this situation is good or bad for criminology. A future challenge for the discipline will be a stronger commitment by criminological researchers to design more epistemological and methodological studies to limit further proliferation of criminological theories and improve their quality. To reach that reduction, three strategies will be discussed. Keywords Crime causation theories, collective processes in criminological theory formation, current quality of criminological theory, proliferation Putting this all together, at the current time there seems to be a tremendous proliferation of theoretical models. Old theories do not leave the stage; they are simply joined by new ones. (Thornberry, 2012: 49). Corresponding author: Gerben Bruinsma, Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), De Boelelaan 1077a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Email: gbruinsma@nscr.nl
660 European Journal of Criminology 13(6) Introduction Criminology is the result of 200 years of hard-working and enthusiastic scholars who carried out scientific research in many fields, tried to uncover phenomena systematically and suggested relationships between causes and crime. The collectivity of criminologists contributed to the advancement of the discipline by innovatively studying and improving existing theories step by step. Nowadays much research takes place in a broad spectrum of specializations. A recent Encyclopaedia needs 10 volumes and 5600 pages to cover the knowledge of the relatively young scientific discipline and is far from complete (Bruinsma and Weisburd, 2014b). Compare these volumes with the state of the art of criminological knowledge of Henderson1 a century ago (Henderson, 1914) and one can imagine that we know much more empirically about crime, its causes and effects, who the offenders are and what kind of characteristics may be relevant. This collective knowl- edge provides the materials for understanding and for theory formation. Criminologists are creatively engaged in interpreting these findings within old or new theoretical frame- works. Today, that creativity has led to a situation