2 : Interactionalism and labelling theory

Moral entrepreneurs

people who lead a moral campaign to change a law. 

Social control agency

The police, laws, judges → often campaign for changing of law to benefit themselves

Typifications

Common sense theories about stereotypes of what a delinquent is like

Dark figure of crime

The difference between the official statistic and the ‘real’ rate of crime.

Alternative statistics

Some sociologists use victims surveys or self-report studies to gain a more accurate view of the amount of crime, but they have several limitations.

Primary deviance

Deviant acts that have not been publically labelled, these are often not caught and are also often trivial, few consequences.

Secondary deviance

Result of social reaction and labelling. Behaviour that has been publicly exposed and the label of ‘deviant’ has been added to it

Master status

when others see an individual for only their deviant label

Deviant career

Secondary deviance is likely to provoke further hostile reactions from society and reinforce the deviant’s ’outsider status’. → lead to more crime and a deviant career

Deviance amplification spiral

The process in which the attempt to control deviance leads to an increase in the level of deviance

Disintegrative shaming

Where not only the crime but also criminal is shamed, and the offender is excluded from society.

Reintegrative shaming

Labelling the deviant act but not the perpetrator - e.g. he has done a bad thing but he is not a bad person.

Becker

A deviant is someone to whom a label has been successfully applied - no act is deviant in itself

Becker 2 effects

1. Creation of a new group of ‘outsiders’

2. Creation/expansion of a social control agency

Platt

Juvenile delinquency was created by upper class Victorian moral entrepreneurs which established a separate category for the offender→ turned criminal offences involving youth into ‘status-offenders’

Piliavin and Briar

Police decisions to arrest the youth were mainly based on physical cues (manner or dress) , from which they made assumptions of the youths character

Cicourel

Typifications led officers to concentrate on certain ‘types’. All members of criminal justice system had bias. M/c less likely to be charged (crime is negotiated)

Lemert

Primary and secondary deviance

Young

Notting Hill hippies- after being labelled by police they became outsiders and made deviant activities such as smoking weed central to their cultural

Chambliss

Saints and roughnecks → Racism is prevalent in typifications in criminal justice system

Downes and Rock

Can’t predict whether someone who has been labelled will follow a deviant career, because they are always free to choose not to deviate further

Cohen

Mods and Rockers

Triplett

Increasing tendency to see young offenders as evil and to be less tolerant of minor deviance.

Braithwaite

Reintergrative and disintegrative labelling

Douglas

Critical of the use of official suicide statistics because they are socially constructed → we must use qualitative methods instead, such as the analysis of suicide notes, unstructured interviews with friends or relatives etc.

Atkinson

Official statistics are merely a record of the labels coroners attach to deaths; he argues that it’s impossible to know for sure what meanings the dead give to their deaths

Lemert (mental illness)

Study of paranoia → some individuals don’t fit easily into groups (primary deviance) others (social audience) label the person as odd and begin to exclude them → respond with secondary deviance key lead to psychiatric intervention

Rosenhan

Pseudo-patient experiment, in which researchers had themselves admitted to a number of hospitals claiming to have been ‘hearing voices’. They were diagnosed as schizophrenic and this became their master status

Goffman

Possible effects of being in an institutions.

Institutionalisation (Goffman)

People internalise their new identity and unable to re-adjust to the outside world

Braginski Et Al

Found that inmates manipulated their symptoms so as to appear ‘not well enough’ to be discharged but ‘not sick enough’ to be confined to the ward. As a result, they were able to achieve their aim of free movement around the hospital.