Robert Bursik

Robert J. Bursik Jr. is an American sociologist and criminologist who has held academic positions including at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. With his frequent collaborator Harold G. Grasmick, he wrote Neighborhoods and Crime: The Dimensions of Effective Community Control, a book that reformulated Chicago School social disorganization theory within a broader systemic framework, arguing that a neighborhood's ability to control crime depends on interacting private, parochial and public networks of association operating at the level of family, community institutions and city government. Bursik's 1988 article Social Disorganization and Theories of Crime and Delinquency: Problems and Prospects became a widely cited assessment of the theory's strengths and gaps, helping to revive social disorganization research as a major line of criminological inquiry in the late twentieth century.