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Final Draft - Cathy Jervis Student ID: 2135133

 Deviance (Sociology) 

Sociology of deviance is the study of acts and behaviour that violate social norms. Deviance or what may be considered deviant would vary according to history, time periods, culture, societies, and the societal expectations of the audience. Deviance may hold negative connotations, however, a violation of norms depends on the collectivities of the culture and what defines deviance within a particular society. As a society's understanding of social norms change over time, so to does the collective perception of deviance. Deviance in sociology started as an umbrella concept with much focus on juvenile delinquency, crime (including moral crimes), drug use, non-marital and sexual relations (prostitution). Criminology and gender studies are disciplines that have formed separate fields of study although the underlying concept of deviance or deviant status remains valuable to the micro-ethnographies of behaviour and the social processes experienced in everyday life. The violation of norms can be categorised as two forms of deviance. Formal deviance and informal deviance. Formal deviance refers to a violation of formally enacted laws in a society. These laws refer not only to the prevention of criminal acts and enforced by groups with power (law enforcement), they can also apply to organisations, institutions and structures in society that feature division of labour, hierarchy, or relationships where a formal sanction can be applied. Formal deviance within a workplace can consist of an infraction of laws, policies and procedures that generally would be workplace specific. Informal deviance within a workplace can consist of violating the unwritten rules expectations and social conventions (gossip, ridicule, ostracism). Informal deviance are violations of social norms, and this can vary between cultures.

Contents

Three Sociological Perspectives

Sociology views society through three major theoretical perspectives, functionalism, symbolic interactionism and conflict theory.

Functionalism[edit | edit source]
Main article: Structural functionalism

Functionalism or structural functionalism is a perspective in sociology that views society as an organisation that comes together and interacts in strengthening the bonds of social order as a whole. Functionalism views deviance as a positive contribution to this organisation. It strengthens the collective consciousness, is important for social integration, maintains group bonds and the boundaries of a society/community. Deviant acts can be assertions of individuality and identity, and thus as rebellion against group norms of the dominant culture and in favour of a sub-culture. In a society, the behaviour of an individual or a group determines how a deviant creates norms. The work of theorists Émile Durkheim and Robert Merton have contributed to the Functionalist ideals.

 Émile Durkheim 

According to Durkheim, deviance is a necessary part of a normal functional society. Durkheim identified functional dimensions of deviance that included:

Boundary setting: without boundaries a society struggles to function. Deviance defines moral boundaries, people learn right from wrong by defining people as deviant.

Group solidarity: strengthening of the collective consciousness. Deviance unifies the group, bonds a society to come together against "others" that break rules and cause social disruption.

Tension reduction: the social strain of conformity can be alleviated by transference of pressures to the function of deviance.

Innovation: deviance pushes society's moral boundaries which, in turn leads to social change. Historically, society evolves, normative social boundaries are crossed and over time what was once labelled a deviant act can be challenged, modified and lead to social change for future norms.

Durkheim's normative theory of suicide[edit | edit source]
Main article: Suicide (book)

Durkheim attributed suicide to social deviance. When social deviance is committed, the collective conscience is offended. Durkheim describes the collective conscience as a set of social norms by which members of a society follow. Without the collective conscience, there would be no absolute morals followed in institutions or groups.

Social integration is the attachment to groups and institutions, while social regulation is the adherence to the norms and values of society. Durkheim's theory attributes social deviance to extremes of social integration and social regulation. He stated four different types of suicide from the relationship between social integration and social regulation:


 * 1) Altruistic suicide occurs when one is too socially integrated, with extremely strong social cohesion.
 * 2) Egoistic suicide occurs when one is not very socially integrated, the bonds with society are broken.
 * 3) Anomic suicide occurs when there is very little social regulation from a sense of aimlessness or despair.
 * 4) Fatalistic suicide occurs when a person experiences too much social regulation.

As a functionalist Durkheim states the structures of society work together to function. Perception of social causes or factors and the meanings people pertain to such situations, deviant or otherwise play a role in the motives for suicide. Durkheim suggested modern life and increased economic changes lead to transition from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity. Bonds of society became broken and individualistic resulting in normlessness, dissatisfaction and desires not met. Durkheim suggested this left society unable to regulate, anomic and vulnerable he believed to the social forces behind suicide and acts of deviance.

 Kai T Erikson 

Kai T Erikson, American sociologist and author of Wayward Puritans, A study in the Sociology of Deviance, uses the Massachusetts puritan settlement in the 17th century to examine community boundaries, social cohesion and the way deviant behaviour plays a role in the social order of the community.

"The deviant is a person whose activities have moved outside the margins of the group, and when the community calls him to account for that vagrancy it is making a statement about the nature and placement of its boundaries. It is declaring how much variability and diversity can be tolerated within the group before it begins to lose its distinctive shape, its unique identity". Erikson believed that community boundaries are not fixed, they are a cultural framework that exists to preserve the inner stability of social life. People can not relate to each other unless they understand where the boundaries are, what behaviours deviate from the expected social norms: the deviant and the conformist share the same social systems that create the deviance nominated by the community.

 Robert K Merton 

Merton's strain theory[edit]
Main article: Strain theory (sociology)

Robert K. Merton discussed deviance in terms of goals and means as part of his strain/anomie theory. Where Durkheim states that anomie is the confounding of social norms, Merton goes further and states that anomie is the state in which social goals and the legitimate means to achieve them do not correspond. He postulated that an individual's response to societal expectations and the means by which the individual pursued those goals were useful in understanding deviance. Merton viewed collective action as motivated by strain, stress, or frustration in a body of individuals that arises from a disconnection between the society's goals and the popularly used means to achieve those goals. Often, non-routine collective behaviour (rioting, rebellion, etc.) is said to map onto economic explanations and causes by way of strain. These two dimensions determine the adaptation to society according to the cultural goals, which are the society's perceptions about the ideal life, and to the institutionalised means, which are the legitimate means through which an individual may aspire to the cultural goals.

Merton described 5 types of deviance in terms of the acceptance or rejection of social goals and the institutionalised means of achieving them:

1. Innovation is a response due to the strain generated by our culture's emphasis on wealth and the lack of opportunities to get rich, which causes people to be "innovators" by engaging in stealing and selling drugs. Innovators accept society's goals, but reject socially acceptable means of achieving them. (e.g.: monetary success is gained through crime). Merton claims that innovators are mostly those who have been socialised with similar world views to conformists, but who have been denied the opportunities they need to be able to legitimately achieve society's goals.

2. Conformists accept society's goals and the socially acceptable means of achieving them (e.g.: monetary success is gained through hard work). Merton claims that conformists are mostly middle-class people in middle class jobs who have been able to access the opportunities in society such as a better education to achieve monetary success through hard work.

3. Ritualism refers to the inability to reach a cultural goal thus embracing the rules to the point where the people in question lose sight of their larger goals in order to feel respectable. Ritualist's reject society's goals, but accept society's institutionalised means. Ritualist's are most commonly found in dead-end, repetitive jobs, where they are unable to achieve society's goals but still adhere to society's means of achievement and social norms.

4. Retreatism is the rejection of both cultural goals and means, letting the person in question "drop out". Retreatists reject the society's goals and the legitimate means to achieve them. Merton sees them as true deviants, as they commit acts of deviance to achieve things that do not always go along with society's values.

5. Rebellion is somewhat similar to retreatism, because the people in question also reject both the cultural goals and means, but they go one step further to a "counterculture" that supports other social orders that already exist (rule breaking). Rebels reject society's goals and legitimate means to achieve them, and instead creates new goals and means to replace those of society, creating not only new goals to achieve but also new ways to achieve these goals that other rebels will find acceptable.

 Albert K Cohen's  Cohen's Subcultural Theory

Albert K Cohen an American criminologist combined Merton's anomie theory with Edwin Sutherland's differential association theory. According to Cohen, delinquent boys under social strain, restricted from opportunities and achievement, driven by working class or lower class status emerge to collectively form subcultures. These subcultures share the same problems of restriction from obtaining society's goals and the legitimate means of obtaining these goals. A new collective is formed, with status and structure and the opportunity to learn, communicate and innovate delinquent or deviant behaviour and illegitimately attain opportunities and goals. In Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang , Cohen argues that subcultures form due to the status deprivation and problems of adjustment for the "working class boy" resulting in membership of a delinquent subculture as a solution.

Symbolic Interaction[edit | edit source]
Main article: Symbolic interaction

Symbolic interaction refers to the patterns of communication, interpretation and adjustment between individuals. Both the verbal and nonverbal responses that a listener then delivers are similarly constructed in expectation of how the original speaker will react. The ongoing process is like the game of charades, only it’s a full-fledged conversation.

The term "symbolic interactionism" has come into use as a label for a relatively distinctive approach to the study of human life and human conduct (Blumer,1969). With symbolic interactionism, reality is seen as social, developed interaction with others. Most symbolic interactionists believe a physical reality does indeed exist by an individual's social definitions, and that social definitions do develop in part or relation to something “real.” People thus do not respond to this reality directly, but rather to the social understanding of reality in that moment. Humans therefore exist in three realities: a physical objective reality, a social reality, and a unique. A unique is described as a third reality created out of the social reality, a private interpretation of the reality that is shown to the person by others (Charon 2007). Both individuals and society cannot be separated far from each other for two reasons. One, being that both are created through social interaction, and two, one cannot be understood in terms without the other. Behaviour is not defined by forces from the environment such as drives, or instincts, but rather by a reflective, socially understood meaning of both the internal and external incentives that are currently presented.

Herbert Blumer (1969) set out three basic premises of the perspective:


 * "Humans act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things"
 * "The meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with others and the society."
 * "These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters."

Sutherland's differential association[edit | edit source]
Main article: Differential association

In Edwin Sutherland's differential association theory, Sutherland posited that criminal and deviant behaviours are learned. Deviance is not inherently a part of a particular individual's nature. When an individual's significant others engage in deviant and/or criminal behaviour, criminal behaviour will be learned as a result to this exposure. He argues that criminal behaviour is learned in the same way that all other behaviours are learned, meaning that the acquisition of criminal knowledge is not unique compared to the learning of other behaviours.

Sutherland outlined two core assumptions in his theory:


 * "Deviance takes place when people come to define a situation as an appropriate occasion for violating conventional norms or laws"
 * "definitions of the situation favouring deviance are supplied through an individuals past history of learning, particularly one's associations with others"

Howard Becker outlines in his article "Becoming a Marijuana User", social interaction and social experience play a role in the perceptions and meanings given to situations. Thus, motivate an individual to learn to engage in the activity, Becker states: "An individual will be able to use marijuana for pleasure only when he:


 * learns to smoke it in a way that will produce real effects
 * learns to recognise the effects and connect them with drug use
 * learns to enjoy the sensations he perceives".

Becker argued, long before the user engaged in the use of the drug, and became socially deviant, an individual had to go through learning the techniques and acquiring a meaning or conception of the activity. Being a marijuana user was not a predisposition or trait for deviance.

Neutralisation theory[edit | edit source]
Main article: Techniques of neutralisation

Gresham Sykes and David Matza's neutralisation theory explains how deviants justify their deviant behaviours by providing alternative definitions of their actions and by providing explanations, to themselves and others, for lack of remorse. Techniques of neutralisation enables deviance through learned justification that then facilitates the movement between functional and deviant behaviour evading guilt. This alleviates any rejection of societal norms and values.

There are five types of neutralisation:


 * Denial of responsibility: "it was an accident", the deviant believes s/he was helplessly propelled into the deviance, and that under the same circumstances, any other person would resort to similar actions
 * Denial of injury: "No one got hurt", the deviant believes that the action caused no harm to other individuals or to the society, and thus the deviance is not morally wrong
 * Denial of the victim: "They got what was coming to them", the deviant believes that individuals on the receiving end of the deviance were deserving of the results due to the victim's lack of virtue or morals
 * Condemnation of the condemners: t"The police are corrupt", he deviant believes enforcement figures or victims have the tendency to be equally deviant or otherwise corrupt, and as a result, are hypocrites to stand against
 * Appeal to higher loyalties: "I did it to protect my family", the deviant believes that there are loyalties and values that go beyond the confines of the law; morality, friendships, income, or traditions may be more important to the deviant than legal boundaries.

Labeling theory[edit | edit source]
Main article: Labeling theory

Frank Tannenbaum and Howard S. Becker created and developed the labelling theory, which is a core facet of symbolic interactionism, and often referred to as Tannenbaum's "dramatisation of evil". Tannenbaum describes the "dramatisation of evil" as a process of 'tagging, defining, identifying, segregating, describing, emphasising, making conscious and self-conscious',. The individual becomes labelled as evil instead of the act. Becker believed that "social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance". Labelling is a process of social reaction by the responses of others judging and accordingly defining (labelling) someone's behaviour as deviant or otherwise.

Labeling theory, suggests that deviance is caused by the deviant's being labeled as morally inferior, internalising the label and finally acting according to that specific label (in other words, one may label the "deviant" and they act accordingly). As time goes by, the "deviant" takes on traits that constitute deviance by committing such deviations as conforming to the label. Individual and societal preoccupation with the label, leads the deviant individual to follow a self-fulfilling prophecy of abidance to the ascribed label.

This theory, while very much symbolically interactionist, also has elements of conflict theory, as the dominant group has the power to decide what is deviant and acceptable, and enjoys the power behind the labelling process. Labelling theorists have addressed that there is ambiguity between rule breaking and deviance, Howard S. Becker wrote,"Deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an 'offender'. The deviant is one to whom the label has successfully been applied; deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label."Certain behaviours in one cultural or social group can be seen to be perfectly acceptable, or overlooked, in contrast when viewed by other audiences, as undesirable. Society is not always correct in its labelling, often falsely identifying and misrepresenting people as deviants, or attributing to them characteristics which they do not have. Harold Garfinkel describes this form of social control as the "degradation ceremony". An actor's public identity is ritually transformed into a lower status altering the individuals identity and imposing feelings of shame, guilt and embarrassment. A person labelled "homosexual" or "unemployed" carry additional attributes automatically acquired through the process of degradation restricting access to legitimate resources irrespective of conformity to norms and values. A person unemployed can carry the label of "dole bludger" or "lazy" leading to denunciation, limit social opportunities, limit access to communicative resources and lead to stigmatisation. This acquired status can overtake all other aspects of a person's identity. Legally, people can be wrongly accused, yet many of them must live with the ensuing stigma (or conviction) for the rest of their lives.