The Ultimate Difference: Interpreting and Using “Culture” in Comparisons of Crime and Justice

Abstract

This article examines culture, an ambiguous yet prevalent concept in comparisons of crime and justice. It investigates the extent to which culture’s application and meaning across research reflects Western-centric bias in criminological knowledge-production despite it being a concept meant to advance understanding on different groups and places beyond the “Western” worldview. The article extends the discussion on Western-centric bias but also on culture in criminology by tracing the use of this concept on East Asian populations and by identifying patterns of application and meaning in international and comparative research through a scoping review of 230 journal publications. The findings address patterns of culture’s appearance in criminology journals in the past two decades and its meaning. Similar to previous scholarship on Western-centrism in criminology, the article finds that this bias does, too, exist in uses of culture but also shows how culture’s conceptual ambiguity is conducive to this bias, in that some groups and places are given one meaning of culture while others receive another.

Abstracto

Este artículo examina la cultura, un concepto ambiguo pero prevalente en las comparaciones entre crimen y justicia. Revela hasta qué punto la aplicación y el significado de la cultura en la investigación reflejan un sesgo centrado en Occidente en la producción de conocimiento criminológico, a pesar de ser un concepto destinado a promover la comprensión de diferentes grupos y lugares más allá de la cosmovisión “occidental”. El artículo amplía la discusión sobre el sesgo centrado en Occidente, pero también sobre la cultura en criminología, rastreando el uso de este concepto en las poblaciones de Asia oriental e identificando patrones de aplicación y significado en la investigación internacional y comparada a través de una revisión de alcance de 230 publicaciones en revistas. Los hallazgos abordan los patrones de aparición de la cultura en las revistas de criminología en las últimas dos décadas y su significado. De manera similar a estudios anteriores sobre el centrismo occidental en criminología, el artículo encuentra que este sesgo también existe en los usos de la cultura, pero también muestra cómo la ambigüedad conceptual de la cultura conduce a este sesgo, en el sentido de que a algunos grupos y lugares se les da un significado de cultura mientras que otros reciben otro.

Abstrait

Cet article examine la culture, un concept ambigu mais répandu dans les comparaisons entre crime et justice. Il révèle à quel point l’application et la signification de la culture dans la recherche reflètent un parti pris occidental dans la production de connaissances criminologiques, bien qu’il s’agisse d’un concept destiné à faire progresser la compréhension de différents groupes et lieux au-delà de la vision du monde « occidentale ». L’article étend la discussion sur les préjugés centrés sur l’Occident mais aussi sur la culture en criminologie en retraçant l’utilisation de ce concept sur les populations d’Asie de l’Est et en identifiant des modèles d’application et de signification dans la recherche internationale et comparative à travers une revue de 230 publications dans des revues. Les résultats abordent les modèles d’apparition de la culture dans les revues de criminologie au cours des deux dernières décennies et leur signification. Semblable à des études antérieures sur l’occidentalcentrisme en criminologie, l’article constate que ce biais existe également dans les utilisations de la culture, mais montre également comment l’ambiguïté conceptuelle de la culture favorise ce biais, dans la mesure où certains groupes et certains lieux se voient attribuer une signification unique de la culture tandis que d’autres en reçoivent une autre.

摘要

本文探讨了文化，这是犯罪与司法比较中一个模糊但普遍的概念。它揭示了文化在研究中的应用和意义在多大程度上反映了犯罪学知识生产中的西方中心主义偏见，尽管文化是一个旨在促进对“西方”世界观之外的不同群体和地方的理解的概念。本文通过追踪这一概念在东亚人群中的使用情况，并通过对 230 份期刊出版物进行范围审查，确定了国际和比较研究中的应用和意义模式，扩展了对西方中心主义偏见以及犯罪学文化的讨论。研究结果探讨了过去二十年文化在犯罪学期刊中的出现模式及其含义。与之前关于犯罪学西方中心主义的研究类似，本文发现这种偏见也存在于文化的使用中，但也表明文化的概念模糊性如何助长这种偏见，因为一些群体和地方被赋予了一种文化含义，而另一些群体和地方则被赋予了另一种文化含义。

خلاصة

تتناول هذه المقالة الثقافة، وهو مفهوم غامض ولكنه سائد في مقارنات الجريمة والعدالة. إنه يكشف إلى أي مدى يعكس تطبيق الثقافة ومعناها عبر الأبحاث التحيز الغربي في إنتاج المعرفة الجنائية على الرغم من كونه مفهومًا يهدف إلى تعزيز الفهم بين مجموعات وأماكن مختلفة خارج النظرة العالمية “الغربية”. يوسع المقال النقاش حول التحيز المتمركز حول الغرب وأيضًا حول الثقافة في علم الجريمة من خلال تتبع استخدام هذا المفهوم على سكان شرق آسيا ومن خلال تحديد أنماط التطبيق والمعنى في الأبحاث الدولية والمقارنة من خلال مراجعة نطاقية لـ 230 منشورًا دوريًا. تتناول النتائج أنماط ظهور الثقافة في مجلات علم الجريمة في العقدين الماضيين ومعناها. على غرار الدراسات السابقة حول المركزية الغربية في علم الجريمة، يجد المقال أن هذا التحيز موجود أيضًا في استخدامات الثقافة ولكنه يوضح أيضًا كيف يؤدي الغموض المفاهيمي للثقافة إلى هذا التحيز، حيث يتم إعطاء بعض المجموعات والأماكن معنى واحدًا للثقافة بينما والبعض الآخر يتلقى آخر.

Introduction

In recent decades, explaining crime and justice has noticeably expanded beyond the United States (US) and Europe, with more international comparisons called for, so to advance knowledge on the applicability of recognized crime theories and phenomena to other places (Farrington 2015; Wikström and Svensson 2008; Winterdyk and Cao 2004). Although international criminological comparisons have been conducted since the late 1960s (Bennett 2009), this “internationalization” (Barberet 2007; Messner 2021) now seems to be encouraged, in part, by the increasing value that universities have put on expanding beyond their national borders in terms of international student numbers, research collaborations and activities abroad (Bartell 2003; De Wit, Deca, and Hunter 2015). What once was considered a marginal area of inquiry in criminology, the comparative strand has now become a significant field of research (Karstedt 2012). Recent calls to include marginalized perspectives from the Global South (Carrington, Hogg, and Sozzo 2016) and Asia (Liu 2009) have been met with welcome and a proliferation of research from those regions. International comparisons serve to decentre the Western focus – or, more like, American focus (Stamatel 2009a,b) – so to accurately reflect the fact that issues in crime and justice matter everywhere, and how they are dealt with, understood or responded to in different countries indeed have relevance to “mainstream” criminological knowledge. All of these developments seem to have coincided with the noticeable increase in a particular term in criminological journal publications related to international comparisons: culture.

The increased appearance of “culture” as a term of emphasis, whereby phenomena within international comparisons are described as “cultures”, may be predictable: such comparisons deal with and assume difference. As Karstedt (2001) noted, there is overall consensus that cultural values and practices shape and inform crime and social control, giving rise to observed differences globally. Increase in the use of “culture” suggests an expansion of criminology, to include groups that long have been considered on the periphery of focus.

Yet, all of it – the doing of research, the term “culture”, international comparisons – are situated within knowledge production that has long been Western-centric (Moosavi 2019). As noted by Faraldo-Cabana and Lamela (2021), this Western-centric bias ¹ is not a new observation but few who work in the field are able to genuinely grasp the implications of this in the current context of knowledge making. In their review of 10 leading criminology and criminal law journals to examine the extent to which these were as international as they purported to be, they provided strong evidence that “international” was still limited to a disproportionate number of Anglo-American authors, data, and membership on editorial boards.

The present paper is interested in extending the discussion of Western-centric bias through “a usefully ambiguous weasel word” (Alexander 2016): culture. How it is applied and what meaning is applied to whom may also reflect Western-centric bias. Here, the paper comprises a review of the criminological literature to identify patterns of meaning and use of “culture” in comparative research and to situate these in the broader trends of the field.

The Interpretation of Culture across Criminology

Culture’s prominence in criminology was a reflection of a larger trend: a “cultural turn” was seen across the social sciences, beginning in the early 1980s within historical studies, which emphasized culture as the construct that gave meaning to our lives (Bonnell and Hunt 1999; Nash 2001). It became a significant concept in the social sciences, making its way to becoming “centre stage” in criminology (Karstedt 2001). Bauman (1999) identified two interpretations of culture in the social sciences that depicted the concept as “ambivalent” yet necessary: the first saw culture as a dynamic creativity of “resistance” against the norm and the site in which it was created as a key feature; the second saw culture as a static, monolithic entity which served to preserve order and stability. It is this context that informed the meaning of culture across criminology; for example, the writings of Clifford Geertz – whose 1973 text, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays, is considered influential for the “cultural turn” (Bonnell and Hunt 1999) – are repeatedly referenced and quoted by key scholars in the areas of sociology of punishment and cultural criminology (see Garland 2006; Hayward and Young 2004; O’Brien 2005). Geertz’s understanding of culture – an ideographic approach where examining specific practices like rituals and social arrangements would elucidate their meanings for those involved – is one of many in anthropology that places culture at the forefront in explaining social behaviour and life (O’Brien 2005).

Across criminology, Bauman’s (1999) two opposing interpretations of culture are reproduced. Similar to Bauman, Garland (2006) identified two conceptualizations of culture in the sociology of punishment: as a characteristic such as an idea, symbol, value or meaning, while the other, as a collective entity, comprising a set of customs, beliefs and habits, which can be compared with other cultures. Cultural criminology (Hayward and Young 2004) was more aligned to Bauman’s first interpretation, whereby culture was meaning that permeated all aspects of society (Bevier 2015). In cultural criminology’s early form, it was interested in the production of meaning by different groups of people, especially by groups deemed deviant by mainstream society; lately, it was concerned with connections between “meaning, power, and existential accounts of crime, punishment and control” (Hayward 2016), or the connections between the meanings found in “situations, subcultures, and media/popular culture” (Ferrell 2013).

In the area of policing, “police culture” is often of interest, and its literature seemed to contain both of Bauman’s categorizations, whereby the world view of officers is thought important in explaining their conduct, good and bad (Reiner 2017); this world view is seen as a collective set of beliefs and attitudes and also one that was developed in the context of their role. The increase in studies on culture within the international and comparative literature was attributed to expanding globalization and rises in imprisonment rates across Western democracies, as articulated by Garland (2001) and Karstedt (2012). Bauman’s two interpretations are seen within this literature, as reflected in two 2001 publications (Garland 2001; Karstedt 2001) that emphasized the importance of the concept and use of “culture”.

The Comparative Strand of Criminology

Extolling the benefits and uses of comparative research is a literature unto itself (e.g. Bennett 2009; Nelken 2011; Stamatel 2009a; Tonry 2015; Zimring 2006). Referring to the lack of interest towards comparative work amongst his fellow American scholars, Zimring (2006) argued that without comparisons with other countries, how can one confirm whether the US was actually exceptional? Tonry (2015) reasoned that comparisons provide insight into what others do when confronted with similar issues; how well certain ideas from one place are applicable in another; and whether differences in crime and punishment trends are attributed to certain policies and practices. Ultimately, international and comparative research broadened the kinds of questions asked with particular attention to macro-level phenomena and socio-historical context (Stamatel 2009a).

Two publications with an international outlook, however, were published in 2001, and reveal the significance of the term culture for international, comparative research. David Garland’s (2001) “influential” The Culture of Control compared changes in crime control and criminal justice in the United Kingdom (UK) and the US to show why rising imprisonment rates have happened in these two countries despite lower crime levels. The same year saw Susanne Karstedt (2001) introduce “cross-cultural criminology”, which sought to avoid merely invoking culture (“cultural rhetoric”) by charting a means to use the concept of culture more systematically. Karstedt’s second paper (Karstedt 2012) expanded on this first one (Karstedt 2001) by reviewing the different approaches studies have used to measure culture in crime and justice since the 2000s, and it provided ways to advance understanding in the face of increased global migration and diversity within nations’ cultures. The two papers also reveal the growth in internationalizing criminology: whereas the first paper attempted to persuade the reader that studying culture mattered, the second paper reviewed the state of cross-cultural research, certain of its rising appeal.

Informed by the over 200 existing definitions, Karstedt (2012) defined culture as a broad, or “umbrella” concept containing a “historically shaped set of meanings, values, interpretations, and practices or habits that are shared between individuals in a community, nation, or several nations”. The definition would include studies that did not explicitly use the term culture but used concepts understood to be aspects of culture such as religion and democratic values. Many crime and justice measures were only available at the national level, so, consequently, between-country comparisons could also be between-culture comparisons. Even though Karstedt (2012) thought that this was justified because culture became more or less uniform at that level of analysis, increasing migration and ethnic diversity would pose challenges to that homogeneity. Methodological and conceptual issues and their consequences have been highlighted by other international and comparative scholars.

Pakes (2010) argued that comparisons at the national level failed to acknowledge that there was a significant amount of variation at the local level. The field’s default approach to comparing often comprised two very different regions or cultures without attention to the influences of globalization and their related issues. Globalization affected borders, making them less fixed and more porous, so to ignore this contemporary reality meant that comparative criminology was increasingly becoming irrelevant. In revisiting Freda Adler’s (1983) Nations Not Obsessed with Crime, Nivette (2011) noted that the primary theme of Adler’s study limitations was to do with assumption – assuming that the official statistics should be taken at face value; assuming that key cultural terms such as “traditionalism” were clear as is and uniformly understood; and assuming that one cultural characteristic (“synnomie”) could explain low crime in countries with vastly different political, economic and socio-historical arrangements. The reason for revisiting this text was that how and why concepts were used and understood as well as the extent of thought and care to the context in which they are embedded remained dogged issues in international and comparative research. “Culture”, with a lengthy history of trying to identify its meaning and use in the social sciences, is no exception. Its emergence as a concept of interest in the international and comparative literature coincides with other developments that seek to complicate its meaning and use.

Culture at the Intersection of “West Meets East”

In internationalizing criminology, with presumably the aspirations of inclusivity and advancing knowledge, research on populations considered “underrepresented” have increasingly emerged alongside the arrival of the “culture of control” and “cross-cultural criminology”. A particular underrepresented population that has become less so in recent years comes from Asia. With the 1990s Asian values debate (Fukayama 1998) as its backdrop, Asian criminology was introduced as a new movement in the field, meant to bring together Asian scholars and research on the region to create a unifying paradigm while highlighting the continent’s diversity (Liu 2009). Its nine-page introduction gave prominence to the concept of culture, using the term in-text 20 times, and depicting it as a “special feature of the Asian context”. Culture was defined similarly to Karstedt (2001, 2012) ² and was maintained as necessary to understanding crime and its control. Identifying and expanding upon the similarities and differences of Asian cultures were thought to advance knowledge on an Asian criminology.

Asian criminology’s noticeability through a number of scholarly pursuits, mainly in collaboration with Western scholars (Liu 2009), was described and discussed in terms of bridging gaps, while sharing and integrating knowledge from Asia. But there was also a repeated comparison between Asia and the West in these pursuits, wherein familiar underlying narratives of the “white gaze” and orientalism were embedded, reminiscent of the oft-taken-out-of-context line: “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” (see Sheptycki 2008). There are moments in Liu (2009:4) when the obvious is stated (“Asian societies present distinct and unique social and cultural characteristics that differ significantly from their Western counterparts”), but the obviousness of the observations gives the impression that they need to be so, because its targeted audience – white, Western criminologists – may actually believe Asia is a monolith. This emphasis on diversity, even uniqueness, of Asian cultures while being within the confines of Western knowledge production, is echoed in a large amount of criminological research on Asia, but the vast majority of it does not delve deep in analysing this cultural uniqueness (Suzuki, Pai, and Islam 2018). ³ Invoking cultural uniqueness or exceptionalism may attend to either clarifying that Asia is, indeed, a large and diverse region that requires addressing specific challenges to advance knowledge or playing up to the region’s underrepresented status so to be given consideration to being part of that knowledge production. Whichever way, it is meant to pander to its targeted audience. Sheptycki (2008) also noted that depictions of cultural distinctiveness or essentialism did not flow unidirectionally, as the case of Japan illustrates.

For a time, Japan was of criminological interest because of its paradoxical situation as a low-crime industrialized country (Bui and Farrington 2019). A cultural explanation, whereby a social structure that premised interdependent relationships and a blend of Shinto, Buddhist and Confucian influences, became the prominent reason for the country’s exceptionally low level of crime (Komiya 1999; Leonardsen 2002). However, emphasis on the cultural explanation, despite evidence to the contrary (Brewster 2020; Roberts and Lafree 2004), raises a number of what Goold (2004) called “interesting, but potentially disturbing” questions about orientalism, ethnocentrism and idealizing the other by Western criminologists. At the same time, theories on Japanese uniqueness, or nihonjinron, by Japanese scholars and national activities promoting Japan as incomparable during its economic prowess coincided with works like Bayley’s (1976) Forces of Order and Braithwaite’s (1989) Crime, Shame and Reintegration that upheld Japanese exceptionalism. Moosavi (2019:260), in a “friendly” critique of Asian criminology and Southern criminology, summarized the problem as: “a complex mixture of orientalist attitudes, neoliberal pressures, limited non-Western scholarship, non-Western inferiority complexes and discrimination against non-Western scholars and scholarship … the Westerncentrism of criminology may be about the limitations of non-Western criminology just as much as it is about patterns of exclusion in the West”.

How culture is interpreted and used cannot be separated from this Western-centrism of criminology; what approaches are dominant will affect the direction of how phenomena are investigated. For example, Stamatel (2009b), in a guest issue on methodological challenges in international and comparative research, explained that its quantitative focus reflected mainstream criminology’s overall bias towards quantitative research.

The Ultimate Cultural Difference

International comparative research deemed “cross-cultural” drew much of its influence from cross-cultural psychology, which centres its scientific study on the cultural context and its influence on the variation in human behaviour (Berry et al. 2011). Culture matters because the concept can provide a better understanding and prediction of human behaviour (Oyserman 2017). Everyone is versed in a particular culture. It is culture that creates the norms and expectations that structure how people interpret and respond to the world around them (Beins 2019). Mental health is pertinently related to culture because when people differ from what is considered normative, their well-being may suffer.

In introducing “cross-cultural criminology”, Karstedt (2001) was explicit in the use of cross-cultural psychology as it was the “most advanced in the field of the systematic integration of the concept of culture”. This kind of criminology embraced indigenization, which was the extent to which aspects of research (e.g. problems, methods, concepts) reflected the cultural context it stemmed from. Cross-cultural criminology aimed to transport and test theories, explore and identify variations of crime and social control, and integrate and expand information to ultimately create a universal knowledge base. In presenting two general strategies for using the concept of culture in criminological research, the construct individualism–collectivism (I-C) was introduced. Drawing again from cross-cultural psychology, Messner (2015) argued that transporting Western criminological theories to East Asian settings to test would need to consider cultural variation, in particular the field’s accumulated evidence on I-C. This dimension was later applied to introduce the Asian paradigm theory to explain differences between Western and Asian concepts of justice (Liu 2016).

A construct from cross-cultural psychology, ⁴ I-C was a major advancement in knowledge in that field, in that cultures could now be categorized by a core theme (Hofstede 1980; Triandis 1995). In short, cultures characterized by individualism assume that individuals are independent of one another, whereas those characterized by collectivism assume that individuals are interdependent of one another (see Markus and Kitayama 1991; Schwartz 1990; Singelis 1994; Triandis and Gelfand 2012). Consequently, by the 1990s, culture was thought synonymous with individualism and collectivism (Oyserman, Coon, and Kemmelmeier 2002). It was presumed that individualism prevailed in the industrialized West – specifically, Canada, the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand (see Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010) – whereas collectivism prevailed elsewhere, so that they were seen as opposites and were used to compare European American culture to East Asian culture (Taras et al. 2014; Wong, Wang, and Klann 2018). This contributed to one of the most revealing observations about that field of psychology: differences were overemphasized (Fischer and Poortinga 2018). Difference did not advance cross-cultural criminology, advised Karstedt (2001), but did have currency for being included in criminological knowledge production. I-C was used to depict the “ultimate difference”.

The common use of the singular I-C dimension as tantamount to West versus East in psychological and criminological comparative research has been criticized for its obvious lack of attention to diversity within regions from “the East” and the use of a construct indigenous to the West (Suzuki and Pai 2020). In the use of “the West” across international, comparative criminological research, however, the same monolithic thinking is made: who is imagined to be part of “the West”? Attending to the question of whether being American equated to being independent – with the US being the “ultimate” country of individualism (Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov 2010) – Markus (2017) saw the problem as: independence assumed that all Americans, including Westerners generally, were middle-class white people, so this assumption in cross-cultural research excluded the vast majority who were not. Reiterating Karstedt (2001), migration and ethnic diversity within countries challenged the feasibility of using country-level analysis as representative of a uniform culture. Even contemporary research in cross-cultural psychology has turned its gaze to within-country variation, attending to cultural differences in social identities like social class, region and ethnicity, and refining their knowledge base that has been primarily informed by the behaviours of white, middle-class populations from Western countries (Kraus, Piff, and Keltner 2011; Markus 2017; Vargas and Kemmelmeier 2013).

The I-C dimension, even though “Western” in its creation, has an extensive history of application, use and refinement with minority and immigrant populations, advancing knowledge on how it affects processes of acculturation, intergenerational and intercultural conflict, and biculturalism (Ngo and Le 2007; Phinney, Ong, and Madden 2000; Sam and Berry 2006; Tadmor and Tetlock 2006). The consequence of assuming a monolithic West is to produce theoretically and empirically ill-informed practice and interventions that further social exclusion and inequality within and beyond nations.

In criminological knowledge production, the culture(s) of “the West” is not thought about much until it is in comparison to somewhere else on the periphery. This, though, is a dynamic that is also replicated within “the West” because it has to do with what is deemed dominant and what is not. Alexander (2016), addressing an American scholarly endeavour to revive the use of culture in understanding the lives of poor black youth, warned, from a British perspective, that the concept was not simply a measurable set of norms and values; as it was embedded in the social world, it was susceptible to being unequally and unjustly applied to some and not to others, whereby the culture(s) of those considered the norm, and were likely to do the applying, were barely visible.

The Review

Projects like “cross-cultural criminology” and “Asian criminology” strive to make the subject more expansive and inclusive, despite criminology being indigenous to the West. The use and interpretation of the term culture in international and comparative research, however, may reveal possible Western-centric bias towards how culture is applied. The present paper seeks to gauge the extent to which “culture” appears in a biased manner by reviewing the criminological literature and identifying patterns of its use and interpretation. It does so by observing the overall trends of: (1) prevalence and frequency in which culture appears in criminology journals and between the decades 2001 to 2011 and 2012 to 2022; (2) what research method(s) and design are used; (3) the population of study; and (4) the meaning of culture. These observations address how culture is used and interpreted in the international, comparative criminological research.

Methods

As the “scope” of the review objective was broad, a scoping review was conducted. This was the most appropriate method, as this type of review focuses on identifying and clarifying patterns of how research is conducted, key characteristics and gaps in the literature on the topic of interest (Arksey and O’Malley 2005; Levac, Colquhoun, and O’Brien 2010).

A total of 49 criminological journals were selected, and their abstracts searched (see Table 1). What was considered “criminological” was whether the journal belonged to an official criminology society (e.g. the divisions of the American Society of Criminology, the Asian Criminological Society, or the International Society of Criminology) or was explicit in its description or aims and scope that its topics were within criminology and criminal justice (e.g. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency). For example, the journals Corrections or Policing were searched because each was an official journal of a criminological society even though it did not explicitly mention the latter. Abstracts of journals that were unable to be directly accessed were not searched (e.g. Caribbean Journal of Criminology). Identifying the journals began with reviewing a list of publications available on the American Society of Criminology website and also searching the webpages of divisions of known societies and associations. Journals were of focus because, in the context of internationalization, these are seen as the most appropriate outlets for collaborative research and global scholarly reach and communication.

Table 1. List of 49 criminology journals by earliest to latest launch date

^a Marks start of journals launched 2000 and later.

Because “culture” was the concept of interest, the key term used to identify prospective publications was: cultur*. ⁵ The first step was to identify abstracts that met the following criteria: (a) first published (in an issue or online, whichever was earlier) between January 2001 to May 2022 and written in the English language. The year 2001 was chosen to coincide with the publications of Garland’s The Culture of Control (Garland 2001) and Karstedt’s introduction to “cross-cultural criminology” (Karstedt 2001); (b) mentioned the key term, such as “cultures”, “cross-cultural” or “cultural”; (3) were either empirical or theoretical; and (4) its study was a comparison – either a comparative research design or it featured comparing its findings with the literature on other groups related to social identity, such as to do with nation, race, ethnicity or religion. ⁶ If there was a direct comparison, it could only be between groups related, also, to social identity. For example, between two ethnic groups within the US.

Findings

Systematic searches through the journals, either manually or through the university library database, identified 315 abstracts that potentially met the inclusion criteria. A review of the abstracts and further search through the full-text versions concluded 230 articles, which form this scoping review (see Appendix 1). Information from each publication was extracted to address the core aim of how culture was used and interpreted as well as overall trends of interest. The following section was organized by each of those trends.

Prevalence and Frequency

During the specified time range, out of 230 articles, the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology (IJOTCC) published the most papers highlighting culture (n = 28), followed by the European Journal of Criminology (EJC; n = 26) and the Journal of Criminal Justice (JCJ; n = 16). Of the journals, 60% published two or more papers on culture during this time. It should be borne in mind, however, that 45% of the journals were launched in the 2000s. For example, of the three most prevalent journals to publish papers on culture, the EJC is relatively recent, commencing in 2004 whereas the other two were launched in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

When data are divided into two separate decades, patterns are identified: during the first decade (2001 to 2011), the JCJ published the most on culture (n = 8) followed closely by the IJOTCC, EJC and the British Journal of Criminology (BJC) with seven each. The minimum number of total publications was zero, with 47% of the journals publishing none on culture. For the 27 journals that launched before 2000, however, 74% of them published at least one paper on culture; compare this with the journals launched after 2000: only 27% did so. In contrast, by the second decade (2012 to 2022), the IJOTCC and EJC continued to publish the most on culture (n = 21 and n = 19, respectively) but they were followed by the Asian Journal of Criminology (AJC), launched in 2006 (n = 9). The minimum number of total publications was zero, with 27% publishing none. Out of the pre-2000 journals, slightly more (78%) published at least one (as opposed to 74% from the previous decade). Post-2000 journals also published more on culture compared to the previous decade; this time, 68% of these published at least one paper on culture (as opposed to 27% in the previous decade). On average, journals increased their publications featuring culture from the first to second decade by 1.12.

Research Methods and Design

The vast majority of the publications (77%) applied quantitative research methods. Types of data used mainly came from surveys that were either self-collected or secondary sources from multi-lateral organizations like the United Nations and the World Health Organization or from research projects like the International Self-Report Delinquency Study (ISRD). Most were cross-national comparisons, whereby 49% of total publications were between nationalities. In contrast, within-national comparisons accounted for 20% of total publications. For example, Lappi-Seppälä (2011) used several secondary datasets to compare 30 European countries’ political cultures on their use of imprisonment and van der Gaag (2019) used the third ISRD to examine whether cultural alignment mediated the relationship between migrant status and offending. Some papers also made comparisons, but these were indirect, as they were comparisons with previous literature on other countries or whole areas like “the West”; these made up 31% of total publications.

Cross-national comparisons fell into the following categories: most (51%; 58 out of 114) were between countries originating from Anglo-European heritage (North America, Europe or Australia/New Zealand) and ones outside these regions (i.e. “Western” versus “non-Western”), followed by between only those Western countries (42%) and between only non-Western countries (7%). With the exception of three papers, ⁷ all were clear comparisons with specific countries, whereby most (51%) compared at least two countries; the highest number of countries compared was 57 (i.e. Salman 2015). Comparing decades, cross-national studies of the first decade were either between only Western countries or between these and non-Western countries, and were about similar in number (20/21 out of 88), with 43 as the largest number of countries compared (i.e. Altheimer and Boswell 2011). ⁸ The second decade, however, saw “Western and non-Western” comparisons nearly double and comparisons between only non-Western countries first appear. Related to regions, in terms of authorship, most were from regions considered “the West”: 51% of first authors were based in the US, followed by 6% in the UK, and 5% in Australia.

Population of Study

For cross-national comparisons between a country/region with Western heritage and one that was not, the region most compared with the West was East Asia (22 out of 58), whereby China and Japan were the most popular non-Western choices. Including indirect comparisons (with previous literature on findings from Western populations) also confirmed East Asia as a popular non-Western comparison (35 out of 70). By decade, however, East Asia – particularly China – was the popular comparison during 2001 to 2011 (11 out of 21), but then became second most popular during 2012 to 2022 (11 out of 38), because comparisons with countries from more than one non-Western region were prominent (16 out of 38). For example, Kovandzic and Kleck (2022) compared 55 countries from Europe, Asia and the Americas on gun ownership and homicide rates, taking into account national cultural influences. Figure 1 summarizes this information visually, displaying the approximate global regions of interest by decade. When comparisons were between only Western countries/regions, cross-national studies on Europe were of interest (20 out of 47), and this was the trend for both decades. The US was the most frequent country for within-group comparisons (n = 46) with 46% conducted there, followed by Australia (10%) and Canada (9%).

Figure 1. Locations of non-Western populations of interest in Western/non-Western comparisons, by decade.

The Meaning of Culture

The primary theme of study among the selected publications was refining and testing criminological theories, in particular self-control and institutional anomie theories (IAT; e.g. Chui and Chan 2016; Weiss, Testa, and Rennó Santos 2020). Disaggregating the data by region, however, revealed that themes differed between the cliché regions of West and East: most publications on East Asia were interested in theory (22 out of 61) whereas publications focused on North America (six out of 14), Europe (six out of 48) or Australia/New Zealand (two out of 11) were generally interested in imprisonment and punishment.

Now: what was culture? According to the 230 selected publications, culture was interpreted to mean comparison with another country, wherein sometimes culture was used synonymously with “country” and the term typically invoked was “cross-cultural comparison”. This interpretation was closely followed by those of normative beliefs, values and attitudes (26% and 25%, respectively) and then by I-C (13%). ⁹ Once again, disaggregating the data into regions, publications on East Asia mostly used “culture” in the context of I-C (31%; out of 61), followed by comparison with another country (26%) and Confucianism (15%). It should be noted that among comparisons where culture meant “I-C”, 66% (19 out of 29) were focused on East Asia. This observation of I-C did not change over the time range, but the second decade produced a 38% increase in papers on the dimension (from eight to 11 publications). In contrast, “the West” used culture largely to mean normative beliefs and values, although comparison with another country and identity were meanings that were used slightly more (about 1.4%) for Europe and Australia/New Zealand, respectively. Normative beliefs and values generally remained the most used meaning of culture for publications on the West for both decades. Figure 2 provides a visual summary of in which regions the top five meanings of culture are located.

Figure 2. Top five meanings of culture among populations.

How the concept of culture was used in these publications was often non-empirical: 40% of these invoked and briefly explained culture in the literature review or in the discussion as a concept that influenced variation in results, whereas 27% mentioned the term repeatedly but with multiple meanings and without contextual information. By decade or by region, there was no change in this pattern. Where the concept could be measured, the majority of quantitative research publications (69%; out of 176) did not do so; but those that did revealed diverse approaches, ranging from contexts that effectively managed corruption (Bussmann, Niemeczek, and Vockrodt 2018) to facets related to IAT (Dolliver 2015). Cultural measures were primarily used in statistical analyses as explanatory factors or ones that moderated a relationship between factors.

Discussion and Conclusion

Culture’s recent surge in usage to understand between- but also within-country variation of crime and justice suggests a broadening of criminology beyond Western-centric bias, whereby diverse and international scholars have better access than before to be involved in advancing the criminological knowledge base. Recent major works (Garland 2001; Karstedt 2001; Liu 2009) have emphasized culture’s strength and possibility to explain and provide insight into criminological matters internationally, but also within Western countries, especially on issues of race and ethnicity (Phillips 2019). However, it might actually be that only the Western-centric bias itself has broadened, so that who and where gets culture is not merely a matter of underrepresentation and inclusivity. Hence, the purpose of this paper was to identify how the term culture was used and interpreted in international and comparative research, extending the discussion on Western-centric bias and its relationship to knowledge-making.

A couple of important observations emerged: first, the use and interpretation of culture seems to reflect the broader ways criminological knowledge is produced. This is evidenced in the publications being overwhelmingly quantitative and having lead authors who were US based. This observation could be understood as obvious since all study phenomena are tied to the historical and social context in which they are situated (see Rafter 2010). Although this observation is unsurprising, considering that the field emphasizes the importance of being international and comparative, as is echoed in the “About” webpages of the journals that published the most on culture (IJOTCC, EJC, JCJ, BJC and AJC), the question becomes whether the current state of the field is actually internationalizing or the product of internationalization (Moosavi 2019). These findings echo that of Faraldo-Cabana and Lamela (2021) who found that the vast majority of international journals of criminology and criminal justice were actually predominantly Anglo-American.

Criminology journals on average have increased their publications on culture compared to the last decade, and there are more new journals published at the turn of the century that are international in focus or focused outside the mainstream (e.g. International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences and Pakistan Journal of Criminology); a journal, International Criminology, was launched in 2021 for the new American Society of Criminology’s Division of International Criminology (Marshall 2021). Investigations and explorations have expanded beyond the confines of “the West” and into populations located in Asia, Africa and Latin America, so that scholars now know more about what goes on in other places and the extent of applicability of Western crime interventions and theories. When culture is evoked and featured in a publication, however, it reveals differences in topics of interest. In particular, the difference in theme of study between “West” and “East” is intriguing: whereas the “West” is mainly interested in imprisonment when it comes to culture, the “East” is mainly interested in (American) criminological theories.

Prison may be an (unsurprising) interest for Western nations because of the high incarceration rates in these very countries and follows on from the legacy of Culture of Control (Garland 2001). The interest in testing and replicating criminological theories developed in the West by scholars based in “the East” is not a surprising observation too. Lee and Laider (2013) had made this observation nearly a decade before, noting that the dominance and “unidirectional flow” of Western theories were found in annual conferences and empirical work done by scholars in Asia. These are the consequences of university demands in Asia (and elsewhere) to aspire towards Western models of academia, graduate-school training abroad and Western ethnocentrism. The present review provides evidence for this observation on theory testing that seems unique to Asia compared with Western nations. This finding is mirrored in Asian criminology, whose quantitative and positivist features are similar to the dominant Western approaches of the field (Moosavi 2019). The evidence suggests that using culture aligns with the increases in international and comparative research, and the term is often used to mean comparison with another country. Evoking culture emphasizes that it is a study of difference – a way for Western scholars to expand the scope of their research interest and for non-Western scholars to be included in knowledge production – and recognition.

Second, and related to the previous point, the cultural psychological dimension, I-C, was found to be primarily concentrated in publications on populations from East Asia. Traditionally in cultural psychology, the I-C dimension was used in “West versus East” comparisons, emphasizing the inherent differences between the two populations. This cultural dimension has been applied in criminology similarly where it seems only applicable to East Asia, while culture as identity or normative beliefs is concentrated in Europe, Australia and the US.

Why would the “ultimate difference” be applied like this? It speaks to a larger trend of who has culture and who does not. The relationship between difference and culture is a curious one: some groups have “culture” and their behaviours are swayed by it while for others, culture and its influence are irrelevant. Culture is readily applied to emphasize the difference of the other, and as Goold (2004) observed, in portrayals of Japan in criminological research, served to reduce the unfamiliar to simplification through singular, uncomplicated cultural traits: “… Few Western criminologists would seriously suggest that attitudes to the police in England or the US can be understood by reference to a single, readily identifiable cultural trait – such as English notions of ‘fair play’ or American ‘individualism’.” The I-C dimension, though it can be wielded more complexly, seems to be applied in the simplified way that Goold mentions, and is reflected in some studies that readily assume that an East Asian country is collectivist and, often, the US, is individualist. This understanding, however, seems to disregard the diversity within these countries but also past cultural psychological studies made assumptions of their own about who Westerners and Americans were, just as who Easterners were.

Some publications did use culture less meaningfully as it was not of particular importance to the work, such that it was used to vaguely encapsulate all that characterizes a society, like the use of “etc.”. This is noted because it could be charged that, because of the interpretative nature of the paper and where there were multiple meanings of culture, the coding of I-C could have been inflated, as it was a particular cultural dimension of interest. Care was given to this potential bias so that publications were coded accordingly – by whichever interpretation was the most prominent but recording that the term had multiple meanings. So, only if the I-C dimension was the most repeated, was the publication coded as so.

Issues of bias are important to highlight, especially as “objective” forms of empirical work have been shown to be otherwise. Recently, the fields of psychology and the social sciences have had a reckoning over issues of generalizability and replication where the accuracy of findings from influential studies have now been questioned (see Fischer and Poortinga 2018; Rad, Martingano, and Ginges 2018). Criminology is no exception. Publication bias in journals has affected how studies are presented and which ones are accepted; for example, those that are, more often than not, show only statistically significant findings (as opposed to papers that present only non-statistical findings), and have major implications for the accuracy of criminological meta-analyses that may potentially inform practice and policy (Kim 2022). The present paper is situated within this oft-unappreciated matter of knowledge-making, as its focus was on the ambiguous but prevalent term “culture”, and how its use and differing meanings may reveal potential Western-centric bias.