It informed the groundbreaking work of Merton (1938), Sutherland (1947), and Cohen (1955), but it has become a more positive school over the last twenty years (see Messner 1989).
Since society should be aiming for rationality in its justice and punishment systems, it is important to re-evaluate the concepts of social control, but the intention should be to formulate new research to challenge assumptions (e.g. that what integrates society does not have to be the same thing that socialises people) or devise better operationalised hypotheses (e.g. to develop an equivalent scale for the measurement of different rewards and costs) on a more comprehensive basis rather than merely seeking confirmation that one existing theory is more valid than another.
The proposition that a complex social phenomenon such as crime and its punishment can be researched using a single philosophical tenet is less acceptable in a postmodern world given that analyses limited in their metamethodology or methodologies are likely to ignore more factors than they consider.
According to Barak (1998), integration involves linking and/or synthesising the different models and theories into formulations of crime and crime control that are more comprehensive, but progress is slow as those who have power over the separate discipline discourses resist imperialist absorption into a more diffuse discourse.
Brown (1989: 1) advocated a synthesis through narrative: "the conflict that exists in our culture between the vocabularies of scientific discourse and of narrative discourse, between positivism and romanticism, objectivism and subjectivism, and between system and lifeworld can be synthesised through a poetics of truth that views social science and society as texts."
Some focus on particular types of behaviour or offenders in social process-micro modelling, e.g. Wilson and Herrnstein (1985) concentrated on predatory street behavior using a social learning-behavioural choice model that relies on both positivist determinism and classical free will as it considers possible links between criminality and heredity, impulsivity, low intelligence, family practices, school experiences, and the effects of mass media on the individual.