With the knowledge that risk has become an omnipresent concept used to understand various social problems, this study aims to fill a perceived gap in literature by investigating the way in which risk discourse is applied to understand different categories of crime, namely traditional crime and corporate crime. It is hypothesized that risk logic is heavily applied to the understanding of traditional crime, with minimal attribution to conversations surrounding corporate crime. The pervasiveness of risk as a technique or tactic of government renders the study of its application to different types of crime an important addition to the existing risk literature. Using the method of a comparative content analysis, the parallels and discrepancies between the ways in which risk is used to discuss traditional and corporate crime by Canadian federal criminal justice organizations are explored. The results indicate a lack of focus on risk logic with respect to corporate crime, but demonstrate that risk discourse is perhaps not altogether absent from corporate crime discussions.

Crime as a social phenomenon has customarily been examined as sets of occurrences which happen outside the boundaries of the legitimate social structure. Research by Lawrence E. Cohen and Marcus Felson suggests that more fruitful explanatory models of crime may be developed from the routine activity approach, an approach which regards crime as a routine activity in the same sense that everyday work may be regarded as routine activity. Such an approach is consonant with the precepts of human ecology. Human ecology as a theoretical model posits an interrelationship among the divergent parts of the social fabric. In such a scenario crime is regarded as another manifestation of a symbiotic social interrelation, one among many that flourish in the social whole. Crime, in this approach, is a routine activity, just as work is a routine activity.

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This thesis presents a normative yet practical account of how Scots and English criminal law should assess the culpability of careless persons. At present, the law in both jurisdictions distinguishes between two types of culpable, unjustified risktaking: recklessness and negligence. In everyday language, these concepts have blurred edges: persons are labelled “reckless” or “negligent” with little thought to the difference, if any, that exists between these terms. Although unproblematic in the “everyday” context, this laxity in definition is inappropriate in the criminal courtroom. Negligence is not usually a sufficient form of culpability for serious offences, whilst recklessness typically is. In the most serious crimes, recklessness thus marks the limit of criminal liability. The concept ought, therefore, to be well understood and developed. Unfortunately, courts both north and south of the border have had difficulty defining and distinguishing between recklessness and negligence. This thesis explores the resulting jurisprudential quagmires and contends that, in both jurisdictions, the absence of a visible theory of culpable carelessness accounts for the courts’ difficulties. It then looks to criminal law theory to construct a defensible account of culpable carelessness which can distinguish clearly between recklessness and negligence and explain the circumstances in which the latter ought to be criminally culpable. Finally, the thesis considers the practical implications of this theory.

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My thesis, by offering an analysis of their individual stylistic approaches, considers how Ellroy, Higgins and Leonard expand the parameters of the crime fiction genre. The genre is still essentially conservative, a mediating detective/police hero synthesising narrative strands to indicate cause and effect, problem and resolution, thereby affirming the notion of a dominant grand narrative in society, of the status quo. I examine how Ellroy, Higgins and Leonard offer a critical perspective that subverts the artificial constraints of this concept by privileging the dialogic interaction of the multiple narratives of contemporary pluralistic society over the notion of a containable, transgressive, crime. Conventionally, in crime fiction, transgression is resolved with some restoration of the 'normal'. I review how Ellroy, Higgins and Leonard interrogate notions of normality by foregrounding ambiguity and the dialogic relationship between the multiple social narratives of normless, postmodem, society, rather than offering attempts to contain them within a single, dominant, 'normal', social narrative. I investigate how their respective 'languages' offer differing juxtapositions of words and images that freely exploit the linguistic richness of dialogue, of the language of the 'street', of the intertextual imagery of popular culture and of media dominated contemporary awareness. I view how, by using multiple intertextualities, they offer modes of narrative discourse that reflect a media dominated age and engage with a society where the simple binary divisions of good and bad, cause and effect, are increasingly inappropriate. Each explores a society where fiction, the media projection of reality, is often a more powerful source of identity than reality, itself often a result of fictionalised projections by those with vested interests in preserving a dominant social narrative. I examine how each avoids the conventional heroic figure in favour of ordinary people trying to survive within the dynamic of interacting social narratives.

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