Test #4 Crime and Work - SOCIOL 1Z03

Crime

• Designates certain behaviours and actions that require social control and social intervention, codified in law 

Deviance

• Actions that violate social norms, and that may or may not be against the law

• Most crimes are understood as deviant however all deviant acts are not criminal 

• Changes over time

Social Deviance

• Any acts that involve the violation of social norms 

Howard Backer 

• Not the act itself, rather people’s reaction to the act that makes it deviant 

Erving Goffman

• Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity 

• Who defines Deviance?

• Politicians/governments, scientists, religious institutions, media 

• Moral entrepreneurs 

• Informal and formal social controls 

Rational Choice Theory

• Behaviour not the result of supernatural forces, but rather purposeful 

Beccaria (1764) and Bentham (1838)

• If crime results in some form of pleasure for the criminal, then pain must be used to prevent crime

• Sentences must be proportionate to the seriousness of the crime

• Early reformers in approaches to criminology

• Four basic beliefs (of Rational Choice Theory)

1. People have free will to choose criminal or lawful solutions and thus crime is a rational choice

2. Criminal solutions are seen as more attractive than lawful ones if they require less work for a greater payoff

3. The fear of punishment can control people’s choices 

4. A society is better able to control criminal behaviour, when criminality is met with:(dealt with immediately) 

• Measured severity 

• Certainty of punishment

• Swiftness of justice

Positivism

• Application of the scientific method to the social world

• Focused on the individual, assuming that once we identify features that distinguish criminals from non-criminals, then possible to determine how to eliminate criminal behaviour

Biological determinism

• the hypothesis that biological factors completely determine a person’s behaviour

Cesare Lombroso - The Criminal Man

• Can be distinguished by his asymmetrical features 

• Lower on the evolution level 

Biological Explanations include (but are not restricted to) are now ruled out and dismissed

• Intelligence: low intelligence leads to crime 

• The XYY theory 

• Body type

Sociological Approaches to Crime

• Shift the focus of criminology toward a consideration of the environments in which people are located

Functionalism 

• Roots in emile durkheim's notion of anomie 

• Rules governing behaviour break down resulting in people no longer knowing what to expect from one another 

• Normlessness leads to deviant behaviour 

The Rules of Sociological Method 1895

• Durkheim argues that crime is inevitable or “normal” in all societies because crime defines the moral boundaries of a society and, in doing so, communicates to its inhabitants the range of acceptable behaviours. 

• Durkheim maintains, “A society exempt from [crime] is utterly impossible” because crime affirms and reaffirms the collective sentiments upon which it is founded and which are necessary for its existence

Functionalism Cont’d 

• Deviance, including crime, has certain functions:

• Clarifies moral boundaries 

• Promotes social unity 

• Promotes social change

Merton’s Strain Theory 

• Anomic conditions are produced in society when culturally defined goals cannot be met through socially approved means 

• Some people have inadequate means of attaining success, others who have means reject societal goals

5 goals and means 

1. Conformity 

2. Innovation - illegitimate means to meet these goals but rejecting legitimate means (dealing drugs, gambling)

3. Ritualism  - social adaptation: goals of society are reduced in its importance. Removing yourself from it (priests, joining a group of people whose focus is also not this, convent.) 

4. Retreatism - reject society’s goals and desires and also remove themselves. (doing drugs, alcoholism)

5. Rebellion -  want to create a different set of goals and desires so they call for radical change in society’s goals and desires. (1950’s hippies movement)

Illegitimate Opportunity Theory 

• Cloward and Ohlin extend strain theory by considering specific environments 

• People are constrained by available opportunities 

• Individuals must be located in deviant learning environments that provide them with the opportunities to learn and develop the expertise needed to engage in deviant behaviour 

Conflict Theorists 

-Crime is the product of class struggle/inequality 

• Focus on role government plays in creating a criminogenic environment

• An environment that, as a result of laws that privilege certain groups, produces crime or criminality 

•  Challenge the commonly held belief that law is  neutral and reflects the interests of society as a whole

• Also focus on the role that bias plays in the criminal justice system 

• Criminal law is a tool to protect the interests of the affluent and the powerful 

• Role of the government in producing criminogenic environments 

William Chambliss

• Observed two groups: Saints and the Roughnecks 

• Saints committed more criminal acts but still perceived as “headed for success”

• Roughnecks perceived as “headed for serious trouble:

• Differences in social class positioning 

• Differential experience in both their school and in the justice system

• Differential long term consequences

• Social class matters

• Labelling matters

Symbolic Interactionism 

• Criminal behaviour learned through interactions with others

• Differential Association Theory (Sutherland)

• People learn criminal behaviour through social interaction

• “Excess of definitions” lead us to conform or deviate 

• Labelling Theory (Becker)

• Based on reactions of others to an individual’s act; response leads to the labelling of a person as deviant 

• No act inherently deviant until a group with socially powerful statuses labels it as such

Feminist Theory 

• Concerned with issues of power, distributions of resources

• Explain gendered nature of crime

• Historically female criminals viewed as ‘sick’ or ‘pathological’ 

• Chivalry hypothesis 

• Women who commit violence are constructed as ‘victims’, ‘mad’ and ‘bad’

• Patriarchy underlying condition behind certain crimes

Rule of law:

•No person is above the law, and there should be no arbitrary exercise of state power

•Creation, administration and application of the law based on acceptable procedures that promote fairness and equality

Theorizing the Law

•Historically, 3 approaches to the law; consensus, conflict, interactionist

•Consensus view

•Law is neutral framework for maintaining social cohesion

•Definition of crime is a function of norms, morality

•Applied fairly and uniformly

•Conflict view

•Law as a tool to protect the haves from the have-nots

•Protects the property of those in power, suppresses potential political threats to the elites

•Interactionist view

•Crime and law reflect opinions of people who impose their definitions of right and wrong on the rest of society

•Critical Legal Studies

•Focuses on contradictions and inconsistencies of the law

•Rejects notion that law can ever be value-free

•Laws exist as a legitimized way to support the interests of specific classes and groups of people

•Differential experience based on your social location

•Feminist Legal Studies

•How law plays a role maintaining women’s subordinate status

•Look at how gender and sexuality are taken up in legal discourse

•Ex. Patriarchal Relations of Production in Nineteenth century Ontario by

Marjorie Griffin Cohen 2009

Overrepresentation of Indigenous people in Canada’s Prisons persists amid a drop in overall incarceration.

• Although comprising about 5 percent of Canada’s population Indigenous people accounted for 27 per cent of the federal prison population in 2016-2017.

• In Saskatchewan and Manitoba where Indigenous populations are proportionately the largest, they formed as much as three-quarters of prison admission in 2016-2017.

• In Alberta, where Indigenous people make up 42 percent of correctional admission, and only 6 percent of the total population 2016-2017.

Sociology of Law Cont’d

•Critical Race Theory

•Focuses on issues of oppression and discrimination

•Racism is an embedded feature of modern society

•Interested in topics such as racial profiling

•Studies by Wortley and Tanner (2003) point to the racial disparity in police stop and search practices.

Crime, Risk and Regulation in Canada

• Media

•Actively constructs our sense of who is “at risk”

•Create moral panics: the reaction of a group based on the false or exaggerated perception that some group or behaviour threatens the well-being of society

• FACTS

•Since 1991 the crime rate has significantly decreased

•2014 crime rate at its lowest level in more than 25 years

•Canada’s Crime Severity Index (CSI) measures the seriousness of crimes reported to the police

•Highest CSI values in NWT and Nunavut, lowest in Ontario, New Brunswick and PEI

•Homicide rate remains fairly stable; slight increase 2017

Fear-gender paradox

Men are more likely than women to be victims of crime; women have higher fear of crime

• Consequences of women’s fear

• Policies such as the Safe Streets Act

• Reinforces women’s dependence on men

• Focusing on risk shifts responsibility from the state protecting its citizens to individuals being responsible for avoiding risk and risky situations

• Focus on public spaces and ignores the dangers in the private space

Public order or victimless crimes

•Acts considered to be crimes based on moral principles (prostitution, gambling, pornography, substance abuse)

Moral Regulation

•Used to describe how some behaviours become constituted as immoral and are thereby regulated

•E.g., welfare recipients, sex and sexual relationships

•Perpetuated through discourse

•Affects our perception of crime victims

The Economy 

• Social arrangements that organize the production, distribution, and consumption of goods 

Hunting and Gathering 

• Lightly exploit food resources for immediate consumption 

• Everyone participated in acquiring food

Horticulturalism 

• Domestication of various species of animals and plants 

• Between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago 

• Simple techniques of turning the soil, slash, and burn 

Pastoralism 

• People make their living by tending herds of large animals 

• Usually nomadic 

• Exploits animals 

• Distinct division of labour 

• Exhibit larger levels of social inequality

Agriculture 

• Between 6,000 to 10,000 years ago 

• Led to dramatic increase in population 

• Use of animals to pull plows- plow technology 

• Beginning of sedentary lifestyle, greater accumulation 

• People liberated from food production 

• Few agrarian societies evolving into great empires 

• Warfare is linked to governance 

• Small communities evolving into large dynasties

Pre-Industrial/Feudal 

• Artisanal Work (art, crafts, woodworking, pottery)

• Life revolved around largely around farming-family centered 

• Time growing in importance 

• Around 13th century we see people want around the same time 

• First clock made in China, made its way around in 14th century 

• Time gaining increasing importance - linked to capitalism (weber)

Industrialization 

• Use of non-animate sources of energy to produce goods 

• Harnessing new sources of power, centralization of work, mass production, emergence of the factory, specialization, wage labour

• Exploitative working conditions in these early factories

Post-Industrialization

• Reorganization of society resulting from the growth of information technology, global consumerism, integrated financial markets, and cultural pluralism 

• Smaller more flexible workplaces, increase in PT work 

• An economic system based on knowledge-based activities and the service sector. 

Primary Sector

• Exporting raw materials from the natural environment 

Less than 2% of canadian workforce are farmers 

Secondary Sector 

• Transform raw materials in consumers goods 

• 10% of the labour force 

Tertiary Sector

• Provide services (waiters, salespeople, police officers, etc)

• 75% of all jobs 

Primary Labour Market (core jobs)

• Often requires post-secondary training or education 

• Stable and comfortable salary, fringe benefits 

• Professions: prestigious occupations that require a specialised body of knowledge (extended on slide below)

Secondary Labour Market (peripheral jobs)

• Insecure and temporary, offer minimal pay, few opportunities to advance

• Jobs in this market often called Mcjobs 

• Devalue, demean and oppress workers 

• Heavily routinized, rationalzied, and managed, it oppresses the person that works there

Professions:

1. Common body of specialized knowledge 

2. Regulated performance standards 

3. Representative professional organization 

4. Perceived by the public as a profession 

5. Code of ethics 

6. Formal Programme of training and professional development 

Labour Unions:

• Ability of unions to come together depends on:

• Labour laws and regulations 

• Workers attitudes

• Social and economic context 

• Profits, productivity, and competition 

• Collective bargaining 

Sociological Approaches to Work 

• Functionalism 

• Work is an integral part of the social structure 

• People need to connect to their work 

• Occupational groups (durkheim) promote the integration of workers 

• Conflict theory 

• Alienation of workers (Marx)

• Deskilling

• Symbolic Interactionism

• Social drama of work (Hughes)

• Work defines sense of self-worth and acceptance

• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber,1904/1958)

• Work defined as the expression of one’s commitment to God, referred to as “The Calling”

• Protestantism (in particular) defined work as the expression of “one’s devotion to God” (Vallas, et. al. 2009)

Alienation:

1. Workers no longer owned their goods, what the produced was not important to them, they became alienated / estranged from their product.

2.Their labour devoid of any meaning

3. Fight to get their jobs (became alienated from fellow workers)

4. Unable to fulfill all the things we are truly capable of (Vallas et al. 2009: 18).

Sociological Approaches to Work cont’d.

• Feminist Theory

•Separate lives for working women

• Bifurcated consciousness (Dorothy Smith): living in two worlds

•Women’s unpaid work (domestic work not seen as productive work)

•Need broader definition of labour

•(we have talked to this in our gender lecture, our families lecture and inequality lecture and education lecture.

Capitalism

•Grounded in private ownership of the means of production

• Defining features: private ownership, ability to pursue personal gain and profit, competition among businesses

•Pure capitalism does not exist

• State/Welfare Capitalism

•Political and economic system combining free-market principles with social welfare programs

•Involvement in the economy in order to assure that all

citizens have access to health care, education, EI, etc.

•Difficult to compete with countries who are able to exploit resources

• Socialism

•Raw materials and the means of production are collectively owned

•Defining features: collective ownership,

centralized, state-administered planning agency, production and distribution of goods without profit motive

•Attempts to address the needs of the majority

•NOT the same as Communism

• Politics

•Endeavour to gain and maintain control of the state apparatus

• State

•Institutions that maintain a monopoly over the legitimate use of force in a given territory

• Political Economy

• Interactions of politics, government and governing, and the social and cultural constitution of markets, institutions and actors

Wallace Clement

Defining feature of Canadian Sociology

Harold Innes

The staples thesis– Canadian development based on exploitation of raw materials for export

Power

the ability to achieve one’s desires in the face of resistance

Domination

situations in which an entire group of people could be directed to comply with commands

Authority

describes the situation in which subordinates consider the domination by leaders to be legitimate

Traditional authority

is present when power is legitimated by respecting long-established cultural patterns and traditions

Rational-legal authority

is present when power is legitimated through laws, rules, and regulations

Charismatic authority

Is based on the personal magnetism of individuals who compel people to believe in them and grant them their support

Bureaucracy

•a rational organization designed to complete many routine tasks as efficiently as possible

•Max Weber’s (1946) defining characteristics of bureaucracies:

•An extensive division of labour

•Written policies and procedures for workers and customers/clients

•Ongoing written records

•A hierarchy of authority

•Performance-based hiring and promotion

Bureaucracy continued

-features of bureaucracy and bureaucratic organization: -specialization in functions;

-codification of norms with written rules and regulations;

-emergence of an elaborate hierarchy of authority;

-hiring based on expertise; share separation between official duties and personal relationships;

-decisions based on rational calculations

-Authority tied to position

Economic Organization and the Iron Cage of Max Weber

•Dehumanizing and depersonalizing experience of bureaucracy

•Bureaucratic domination allows for the “more efficient suppression of the individual in modern society” (Faught, 1986: 239)

Corporations

Primary organizational structure in capitalist economies is the corporation.

•Legal entity that has rights and liabilities that go beyond those of its individual members

•Can own property and enter into contracts

•Required to pay taxes, at lower rates

•Flexibility to sell interests

•Richest Canadians control the largest corporations, possess disproportionate share of the country’s wealth

•Excellent documentaries: The Corporation (2003), Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005)

Monarchies

Power and legitimacy resides in a single person or single family, passed down generationally

Absolute monarchy

Monarchs defined through family membership or a divine connection

Constitutional monarchy

•Symbolic in that true leadership is held by elected body

Authoritarian Regimes

•Controlled by rulers who do not allow citizens to participate

Dictatorship

•Leader relies on personal loyalties and threats of force

Totalitarianism

•No limits on leaders’ use of force, state apparatus attempts to regulate virtually every area of people’s lives

Democracy

•Political system in which individual adult citizens select their representative leaders through an electoral process

Participatory democracy:

• citizens involved personally in decision making

Representative democracy:

• citizens elect representatives to act on their behalf