Social Deviance Midterm

Thinking About Social Deviance (Sept. 10)

Two branches of theory

1. Objectivist theory

2. Subjectivist theory

Objectivist

• They suggest that certain social phenomena are deviant in of themselves

• Without cultural/social factors

• You can rationalize it with harm

Subjectivist

• Philosophical

• Any phenomenon socially defined as deviant

• No action is inherently deviant, it’s just classed as such by society

• Levels of social construction:

  • Global

  • Socio-cultural

  • Institutional

  • Interactional

  • individual

Four categories for objectivists to spot deviance

1. Harm

2. Rarity of occurrence

   1. Underage drinking, domestic violence, ingestion of alcohol are things that could be considered deviant behaviours, but are still incredibly common.

3. Social reaction

   1. Just too hard to quantify

4. Norm violation

Subjectivist Theories (September 12th)

Questions Subjectivists Ask

• why/how are phenomena interpreted or labelled as deviant? (Becker 1963)

• Who has the power to classify what norms are and what is classified as deviance?

  • Referred to as moral entrepreneurs (parents, political figures, etc.)

• What are the effects of labels/classifications

• Example: Christian Temperance Movement (20th c.)

  • Christian group of women were aggressively pushing for the ban of alcohol

  • Example of a moral entrepreneur

  • Drinking and driving used to be considered normal

Critiques of Subjectivist Theory

• Doesn't factor for what causes these behaviours

• What about real impact and pain caused?

• Relativism can never be really defined

Examples of Subjectivist Theories

• Labelling theory

• Constructionist theory

• Marxist conflict theory

Middle Ground

• A hybried

  • Deviance is what violates social norms/values, and those must be observable (objectivist)

  • They are also subjective and often a product of power relations (subjectivist)

Deviance & Social Control

• Formal Social control

  • Exercised by recognized institutions (govt, organization, etc.)

  • Formal sanctions (jail, ticket, demotion)

• Informal Social Control

  • No institutional actions, excercised socially by friends, peers, strangers even

  • Informal sanctions (social reactions. Glances, whispers, etc.)

• Retroactive Social Control

  • Deviant behaviour happens, we notice it, and then we attempt to correct it (the reaction happens after the event)

• Preventative Social Control

  • Preventing deviance before it happens through social practices (telling people to stop, glaring, etc. before the action occurs)

Spiritual Theories: Christianity & Satan (NOT ON THE TEST)

• Holy Inquisition (13th c. France)

  • Not believing in god was deviant, and their deviance was a function of Satan

• The 17th century witch hunts

  • Women who violated norms (femininity, beauty, domesticity, etc.) were considered deviant

  • Only explanation is Satan obviously

Positivist Theories of Deviance

Positivism Def.

• Rational assertions about the world can be scientifically verified. A rejection of any religious explanations

• 3 positivist theories

  • Functionalist

  • Learning

  • Control 

3 Positivist Theories Breakdown

• Functionalist theory

  • Sees society as setters of structure in order to maintain social order (family, educational/political systems)

  • Manifest functions: recognized structures

  • Latent functions: unrecognized and unintentional structures

Emile Durkheim

• Positivist, objectivist, and functionalist

• Objectivist because he doesn’t try to interpret or classify norms, he assumes we know

• Functionalist because he tries to understand society as a system (forward thinking for his time)

• Deviant behaviour has a role to play in society

  • Increases social solidarity (school shooting example)

  • Determines moral boundaries and serves as a reminder

  • Tests moral boundaries and instigates change

  • Reduce social tensions (blowing off steam)

Mechanical and Organic Solidarity (Durkheim)

• Mechanical: 

  • order via shared norms and values

  • low division of labour (roles and responsibilities of life were shared)

  • Strong collective conscience

  • Deviant behaviour will arise when someone exercises modest self-interest

• In Modern Industrial Societies:

• Organic Solidarity

  • What holds us together is our interdependence on one another

  • Roles aren’t shared, they are divided and highly specialized

Anomie

• Norms and bonds begin to deteriorate through this rapid social change

• When bonds deteriorate, social control is at it’s lowest

• Norms deteriorate

• Self-interest

• Example: the great depression

  • When the economic system crashes, the social system and values shift

• Suicide

  • When integration changes, suicide rates rise

  • Egoistic suicide (excessive individuation, essentially saying you are poorly integrated with people and systems around you)

  • He alternatively believes people can also have too much integration

  • Altruistic Suicide (over identification)

    • Eg. cult mass suicide

    • Profound dedication to group/community

  • Anomic Suicide (social deregulation motivated)

    • During times of social crisis (eg. great depression)

  • Fatalistic Suicide (no control over your behaviour)

    • No form of integration, being overregulated

    • (eg. prison suicide)

  • Suicide occurs most at the teen years and the elderly years, the years in which people are the least integrated

Deviance, The Social System and Social Integration

Robert Merton

• Wrote “Social Structure and Anomie” (1938)

• Like Durkheim, he thinks in terms of the broader social system

• The “American dream” of working hard and succeeding (cultural American dream)

• His message is that the (American) Social system is Anomic and poorly integrated because the emphasis on cultural success is disproportionate to available means (problem for any social system)

• The lack of social integration is what leads to deviant behaviour

• Says the population will respond to Anomie in 5 ways (4 of which are deviant)

  • conformist: (not deviant)

    • People will sense the disconnect of the social system but won’t give up

  • Innovation 

    • Accepts the goals, but rejects the means of obtaining them (make money, but perhaps through crime)

  • Retreatism

    • Rejects both means and goals

  • Ritualism 

    • Rejects or doesn’t feel impassioned about societal goals, accepts means

  • Rebellion

    • Rejecting goals and means, adding new goals and means

• Other Applications of Merton

  • What about a different cultural goal?

  • For example, love

    • Love can be the 5 methods of anomie (eg. ritualist, lazy spouse) (retreats, giving up on love) (innovation, early users of dating apps) 

  • Fame

    • Retreatist and stage fright

    • Innovation and social media

    • Ritualism (giving up on making it big, actors who quit)

Critiques of Merton

• Dominant success goal in America

  • People argued that people embrace different goals, not everyone’s dream is the classic American one

• He identifies the four that are deviant, but he dosen’t explain what triggers each behaviour, according to his theory it’s random who conforms and who deviates

• Mutual exclusivity (seems to argue that if 1 of the 5 occurs, you can’t be any of the others)

  • The maximiser is someone who is both an innovator (deviant) but also a conformist (for example, someone who owns a construction company is into the American dream, but are also employing illegal immigrants)

Edwin Sutherland

• Differential Association

• From macro to micro (from systems to individuals)

• Deviance is learned, but how?

  • Through communication from meaningful others

  • Learned technique, motives, and attitudes

  • Can shape how people view the law

• Differential Association varies in terms of

  • Frequency

  • Duration (how much time are you spending with these people)

  • Priority (interactions in early life)

  • Intensity (overall importance of the people doing the teaching)

• Examples:

  • Police corruption

    • Officers who indulge in corrupt behaviour, were typically taught how to do so by other officers or officers they look up to

  • Drug dealing

    • Typically taught to young people by older siblings or friends

• Critique

  • Didn’t theorize opportunity

  • Deviance requires an opportunity 

  • If you have no drugs to sell, the theory doesn’t work

Labelling Theory

Labelling Theory

1. Deviant label is applied

2. Label becomes internalized as part of self

3. Label is usually confirmed by key stakeholders

4. Master status may emerge (the idea that people don’t see your qualities past your label)

5. Consonant behaviour 

Primary vs. Secondary Deviance

• Lemert’s Social Pathology (1951)

  • How a label leads to a reorganization of self

• Primary deviance

  • People will do things to violate norms

  • Usually not serious

  • Act might  be recognized and labelled, but is deemed as typically an isolated behaviour

  • The act doesn’t define the person’s self, so there tends to be no reorganized or identity based on this action, they don’t internalize the label

• Secondary deviance

  • Violation of norms in a serious and persistent way

  • Stronger reaction from the community and consistent labelling

  • Label is internalized (maybe i am a criminal)

  • Once the label is internalized, people’s social status starts to change and their life has to rearrange itself in accordance with this label

  • Conventional opportunities become limited (maybe you can’t get/hold a job, so you keep selling drugs and delve further into deviance)

• Master Status (Not Lemert’s idea)

  • If opportunities start to shrink and you internalize your labels, you could have master status

  • Eg. Harvey Weinstein is labelled as a sex offender (that is his master status, he will never be anything other than a sex offender)

  • When your label trumps any other part of your identity

  • Once master status gets kicked in, you are further marginalized

  • Self-fulfilling prophecy

  • This can cause people’s social circles to be limited. Eg. sex offenders might only be able to be friends with other sex offenders and patterns continue

  • Denied legitimate opportunities, so illegitimate actions often become necessary

Classic Research

• Test the previous theories out!

• Shwartz and Skolnick (1962)

  • Took 4 employment files and sent them to a hundred companies looking to hire.

  • All info was the same except one included that someone was convicted of assault and sentenced, one included that they were charged but not convicted, one was charged but acquitted and has a letter from the judge to prove innocence, and one is neutral, no criminal record.

• Matsueda (1992)

  • If a parent labels their kid as a troublemaker, can that predict future delinquency

  • Looked at 1700+ young males

  • The young people who were labelled troublemakers by their parents proved to be a very strong predictor of future delinquency

  • Accounted for all factors like age, past delinquency, race, income, etc.

  • Can’t fully isolate if it’s just the labelling or if there were other factors, such as these kids having rocky relationships with their parents

• “Stickiness” of label factors

  • Severity of reaction

  • Visibility of deviance (meaning who saw it!)

  • Degree of consensus

  • power/status of “deviant” and “labeler” (powerful people like Trump can sexually assault people and brag about it and get away with it) (if a random person sexually assaults an a-list celebrity, they will certainly be labelled negatively)

  • Gender and age of deviant (labells don’t stick as much to young or old people)

Labelling as Stigmatization

• Erving Goffman

  • Stigma: characteristic socially defined as deviant

  • Stigma and labelling are very similar

  • Results in a spoiled identity

• Why do we label/stigmatize so aggressively?

  • Exploitation and dominance

  • If you look at the labelling process, there lies the desire of one group to systematically dominate another group

  • To enforce social norms

  • Avoidance of disease (historically we would stigmatize people we thought would share disease with the tribes, and we retained the need to label)

  • Primates do this too

Resisting Labels and Stigma

• Kitsuse’s “Tertiary deviance” as resistance

  • If you were part of a stigmatized group, and you decided to push back on the label

  • Implies organized response (not at the individual level)

• Information control (Goffman 1963)

  • Biographic and symbolic information control

  • Biographic: you don’t let people know about your label

  • Symbolic: visible things, eg. a scar

• Homophobia and women’s sport (Blinde and Taub 1992)

  • Prevailing stigma on women in aggressive sports like Rugby

  • Because of the lesbian stigma, women wouldn’t talk about their athletic ability or their involvement in sports (biographic)

  • Not spending time or being associated with team members or other people perceived as lesbians (symbolic)

• Winnick and Bodkin (2008) on stigma and ex-cons

  • Of the convicts who anticipated high stigma, they favoured social withdrawal (symbolic) or secrecy (biographic)

  • Those who anticipated minimal stigma favoured “preventative telling” (biographic)

• Positive effects (Herman and Miall 1990)

  • Situations where you want to be labelled

  • Therapeutic contexts

  • Personal growth (eg. AA)

  • Interpersonal opportunities (meet people like you)

Policy

• Decriminalization of things like homosexuality or abortion

• Deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill (1980s)

• Young Offenders Act (need to stop labelling young people when they get involved in crime, labelling young people as criminals tends to continue the spiral)

Critiques of Labelling Theory

• Initial cause of deviance?

• Hard to say that the process of labelling is what causes deviance, it’s very difficult to prove

• Correlation does not equal causation!!!

Conflict Theory

• Conflict theories

  • Norms, values and consensus?

  • Institutions, norms and values, and the powerful

  • The idea that the norms are set by those with power to protect their interests

  • Resistance is criminalized and controlled

Marxist Conflict Theory

• Bourgeoise vs proletariat

• The poor deviate due to alienation and deprivation

• Laws of any capitalist system will represent the values of the bourgeoise and aims to control the lower class

• Wealthy are rarely criminalized

• Canadian incarceration trends

  • Younger men, generally poor, undereducation, racialized

• G20 Summit (Toronto 2010)

  • Meeting of all the major world leaders to talk about economics

  • “Anti-capitalist” resistance via protesters

  • Protesters were concerned about worker’s right, the environment, human rights and were labelled as anti-capitalist because they challenged the ideals of the upper class capitalists

  • Protesters arrested, as the laws are there to protect the people in the meeting rooms from annoyances as opposed to protecting the rights/interests of the protesters

• Occupy Wall Street (2011)

  • Massive resistance to corporate domination

• Ideologies such as that the system offers equal opportunity, and the poor just don’t work hard enough is labelled as common sense

• Because of this and because of the blame and pressure put on the lower class, the capitalist system is rarely contested

Critiques of this theory

• Uprisings can just lead to a power shift, and nothing gets solved

• There are some laws that protest collective interests (eg. charter of rights and freedoms)

• 1970s “discovery” of crime victims via surveys

  • The crimes occurring across the nation weren’t the lower class trying to offend against the upper class, but instead the poor victimizing the poor

• Origins of crime aren't entirely economic

  • Can be emotional/psychological

  • Can be because of racism and discrimination

• Marx envisioned a revolution, but how likely is this revolution? How far away is this revolution?

Why is conflict theory subjectivist?

• What’s deviant is what the powerful consider deviant

Deviant Subcultures

• “A system of values, attitudes, modes of behaviour, and lifestyles of a social group that is somewhere distinct from, yet nevertheless connected to, dominant culture.”

Deviant Subcultures: University of Chicago (early 20th)

• Anthropologies influence

  • Innersion, documentation, and natural settings (you want to be with the furries at the club)

• Durkheim’s influence

  • Subcultures as normal extensions of a social system

• Robert Park

  • City as Social Ecology (crim stuff)

• Thrasher’s The Gang (1927)

  • He set out to understand the way criminal gangs cluster by race/ethnicity

  • These groups all had their own norms and values (eg. street smarts, loyalty, toughness, masculinity)

• The Taxi Dance Hall book

  • As big cities were urbanizing, the argument was that young women (just starting to branch out of the domestic sphere) and would go out to the bars

  • The women quickly realized that the men wanted attention so badly, they could dance for money

• Albert Cohen’s “General Theory of Subcultures” (1955)

  • If you look carefully, there are identifiable characteristics. How and why do they form?

  • Subcultures tend to form over a shared problem between a community

  • Eg. women have lack of fun and money, so they create the taxi dance hall

  • People seek people with similar experiences and/or desires

  • Characteristics:

    • Shared norms/values

    • Status differences (usually a hierarchy within the community)

    • Regulated membership

    • Ambivalence (unfriendliness to people outside the subculture)

Test Review

• Objectivist theories

  • Deviance is inherent, not subjective

  • Four categories!

  • Eg. Merton’s anomie, differential association, and techniques of neutralization!(in photos)

• Subjectivist theories

  • Deviance as a social construct

  • Eg. Labelling, Marxist conflict, postmodernism

• Micro vs. macro

  • Eg. Sutherland vs. Durkheim

  • Individual vs. system

• Durkheim

  • Macro theorist and functionalist

  • Know 4 roles of deviance

  • Mechanical vs organic solidarity

  • Theme: deviance and social integration!!

    • Control bond theory

  • Suicide types/examples

• Merton’s anomie and social structure

  • Macro and functionalist

• Differential Association

  • Micro theory and objectivist

  • Deviance is learned

  • Opportunity and receptivity weren’t considered!

• Techniques of neutralization

  • Objectivist and micro

  • Drifting in and out of deviance, guilt, and 5 neutralizatons

  • People neutralize their guilt

  • Sutherland alternatively suggests that once people are in, they’re in

  • What about people who don’t feel guilt and don’t need to neutralize?

  • Neutralization vs. rationalization (is this happening before or after the crime?)

• Hirshi’s control/bond theory (do quick research)

  • Objectivist

  • About institutions and groups

  • Flipping the question

  • What is preventing people from commiting crime?

  • How connected are you to the social system around you? People you love, your community, your job etc.

  • Attachment, commitment, involvement, belief

  • Critique: are people disposed to serious crimes like rape or murder?

  • Are the weak controls and bonds before or after the crime

• subjectivist/interpretive approaches

  • Labelling theory

  • Origins

  • Relationship between how people view you and how you see yourself

  • Primary and secondary deviance

  • Master status and how that contributes to repeated deviance. Self fulfilling prophecy

• Goffman

  • Labelling and stigma

  • Pressures to manage your label

  • Tertiary deviance

  • Information control (biographic and symbolic)

• Labelling critiques

  • Correlation does not equal causation

  • Initial cause of deviance?!

• Conflict theory

  • Macro and subjective

  • Deviance is whatever the powerful people say it is

  • Instrumental vs structural Marxists

  • Critiques!

    • Victimization surveys

    • Benevolent laws

    • Revolution and practicality

• Deviant subcultures

  • Cohen’s theory of subcultures + the 4 characteristics

• Argot vs. Jargon

  • Argot

    • Group identity slang

    • Allows certain dynamics to happen with subcultures

    • Language used to identify status differences to the outside, as well as with each other