1. Introduction

This book reflects my growing fascination with crime, criminal behaviour and deviance in cyberspace and is a contribution towards metatheoretical development as part of the post-postmodern return to sociological theory and method associated with Archer (1995), Layder (1997, 2007), Mouzelis (1995, 2007), Owen (2009a, b, 2012a, b, 2014) and Sibeon (2004, 2007), in tandem with a cautious attempt to build bridges between criminological theory and selected insights from evolutionary psychology, behavioural genetics, neuroscience and the philosophy of Heidegger. To some extent, it reflects my role as Director of Uclan Cybercrime Research Unit (UCRU) at the University of Central Lancashire. Whilst there is no official ‘party line’ or philosophy in my UCRU research unit, the work that we do certainly draws heavily upon my ever-expanding, Genetic-Social framework. In what follows, I will suggest a way that criminological theory might move beyond several theoretical obstacles in order to conceptualise crime and criminal behaviour with a particular emphasis upon cybercrime and deviance in cyberspace. These obstacles are the nihilistic relativism of the postmodern and poststructuralist cultural turn, the oversocialised gaze and harshly environmentalist conceptions of the person; genetic fatalism or the equation of genetic predisposition with inevitability (Owen 2009a, 2012a) and biophobia (Freese et al. 2003) that appear to dominate mainstream criminology; and the sociological weaknesses of many so-called biosocial explanations of crime and criminal behaviour (see for instance Walsh and Beaver 2009; Walsh and Ellis 2003), which, although dealing adequately with biological variables, appear to neglect or make insufficient use of metaconcepts such as agency-structure, micro-macro and time-space in their accounts of the person. I will suggest that a way forward lies in the form of an ontologically flexible, metatheoretical sensitising device, alternatively referred to as post-postmodern or Genetic-Social in order to distance the framework from hardline sociobiology. In doing so, I demonstrate the explanatory potential of the latest incarnation of the Genetic-Social framework which has grown considerably in size, focus and application since my earlier attempts to expand Sibeon’s original anti-reductionist device to include ‘bringing in’ biology in analysis.