The criminology of Carlo Morselli II

Abstract

This special issue is the third in a series of three to celebrate the contribution that Carlo Morselli made to the field of criminology before passing away in October 2020. In the first special issue that was published in Global Crime, we presented the history of social network analysis (SNA) in general, as well as in the field of criminology. Carlo Morselli was not the first to raise the importance of social ties for the development of criminal trajectories; many classical criminology theories such as differential association (Sutherland, 1947) and social learning (Akers, 1985) focus on the role of social ties after all. The social network analysis approach, however, builds on these theories, and provides much needed metrics on the structure of ties, and the ability to test hypotheses empirically.