Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Introduction
Developmental criminology is concerned with the description and explanation of within-individual changes in deviant behavior along the life course. This chapter focuses on individual development in the context of a community environment. Earlier, we proposed an integrated multi-layered control theory of general deviance (Le Blanc, 1997a). This chapter expands this theory with propositions about the developmental interaction between self and social controls. This chapter is not directly concerned with the general deviance syndrome. Elsewhere, we have proposed an analytical paradigm to study its development (Le Blanc & Loeber, 1998), tested an operatationalization of this hierarchical construct (Le Blanc & Bouthillier, 2003), and formulated a theory of its growth and decline using the chaos–order paradigm (Le Blanc, 2005). In this chapter, we keep in mind these theoretical formulations and the empirical facts about within-individual changes in deviant behavior (Le Blanc & Loeber, 1998; Piquero, Farrington, & Blumstein, 2003), but we are particularly concerned with the development of self and social controls in an environmental context.
We use the term control according to its third literal definition in Webster's Dictionary: “a mechanism used to regulate and guide the operation of a system.” This notion is compatible with Gibbs' (1989: 23) sociological definition of control: “control is overt behavior by humans in the belief that (1) the behavior increases the probability of some subsequent condition and (2) the increase or decrease is desirable.” This definition is central in psychology (Lytton, 1990) and in the social sciences since Comte (Le Blanc, 2004).
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