Deviance and Control

Chapter 3 introduced norms and said that breaking them can bring reprimands, exclusion or, in the extreme, legal penalties. It also promised that labelling would come back in this chapter, and Chapter 8 ended by saying that this one would cover how norm-breaking is defined, labelling, crime and the ways societies control behaviour. The chapter follows that order. It starts with what "deviance" means, moves through four explanations (strain, learning, labelling and moral panic), then looks at crime as a category made by law and at the formal and informal means of control. One warning applies throughout: in sociology "deviant" is a description of breaking a norm, not a verdict that someone is bad.

What Counts as Deviance

Wikipedia's Deviance (sociology) article describes deviance as behaviour that breaks social norms, covering both formal rules such as crime and informal violations of unwritten norms. It separates the two: formal deviance "can be described as a crime which violates the laws of a society", while informal deviance means "minor violations that break unwritten rules of social life". It says that deviance "is relative to the place where it was committed or to the time the act took place", so the same act can be deviant in one society and ordinary in another. It also says that positive deviation exists in some situations, which is a reminder that the word is not automatically an insult.

The article connects this to Chapter 1. It says Durkheim held that deviance was "a normal and necessary part of social organization", and that he listed four functions, among them affirming cultural values and pushing moral boundaries, which can lead to social change. That is the Chapter 2 functionalist idea applied to rule-breaking. The article also reports that conflict theory "explains white-collar crime less well" (it ties conflict theory to Marx, Foucault and others), and it attributes a biological theory to Lombroso that it describes as largely disproved by later work. The page I read did not give a single agreed answer to which theory is best, and neither does this chapter.

Strain: Merton on Goals and Means

Wikipedia's Strain theory (sociology) article says the theory "was originally introduced by Robert King Merton (1938)". It says Merton argued that a society's cultural goals and its institutional means can conflict, which pushes some people toward deviance, and that he borrowed Durkheim's idea of anomie. His main example was monetary success in the United States. Durkheim's suicide study dates to 1897 on the Deviance page, so Merton's article came 41 years later (1938 minus 1897, computed in Python). Chapter 6 already used Merton for the role set, so the same name appears in a different role here.

Retreatism and rebellion share the same two answers in the table, so the page tells them apart only by what the person does next: withdraw, or try to replace the goals and means. The article lists criticisms: that the theory best fits the lower class, that it does not explain white-collar crime, that it ignores people who feel strain without offending, and that it has weak empirical support. It dates Robert Agnew's General Strain Theory to 1992, 54 years after Merton (computed in Python). Agnew, it says, thought Merton's version too vague and moved the focus to individual, emotional strain, naming three sources: loss of positive stimuli, presentation of negative stimuli, and inability to reach a desired goal.

Learning It: Differential Association

Wikipedia's Differential association article names Edwin Sutherland as the developer but, as I read it, gives no year for the theory, so none is stated here. It says individuals learn "the values, attitudes, techniques, and motives for criminal behavior", mostly within close personal groups, and that a person becomes delinquent through "an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law". The nine propositions it lists include that associations differ in frequency, duration, priority and intensity. It calls the theory "the most talked about of the learning theories of deviance", and it adds that the theory "does not concern itself with why they become criminals".

Labelling: Deviance as a Reaction

Wikipedia's Labeling theory article says self-identity and behaviour may be shaped by the terms used to describe people, and treats deviance as produced by society's reactions rather than as a property of the act. It quotes Howard Becker's Outsiders (1963): "The deviant is one to whom that label has been successfully applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label." This is the idea Chapter 3 mentioned when it said Becker added that society defines subcultures as outsiders. The Chapter 4 self (Cooley, Mead, Goffman) is the background: how others see you feeds into how you see yourself.

• Primary deviance (Lemert): minor, early rule-breaking that does not change how the person sees themselves.
• Secondary deviance: what follows once a person has taken on the deviant label and organises behaviour around it. Lemert's book on this is listed in 1951, which is 12 years before Becker (computed in Python).
• Stigma: the page defines it as "a powerfully negative label that changes a person's self-concept and social identity" and describes Goffman's Stigma (1963) as the theory's most important contribution. That is the same year as Becker's book.
• Self-fulfilling prophecy: the page links negative labels such as "criminal" or "felon" to a prophecy that promotes deviant behaviour.

The page gives no figures for any of these studies, so none are given here. It lists criticisms too: that Becker neglected biological and genetic influences and personal responsibility, that the theory has been accused of promoting impractical policy, and that it fails to explain the most serious offences. It also reports a disagreement: Gove argued against Scheff's view and held that society has essentially no influence on mental illness. I only read a short summary of this exchange and cannot say how it was settled. The page appeared complete in the fetch, but it carried no length figure, so I cannot tell how it compares with the others (it is also flagged on the page as needing more citations).

Moral Panics

Wikipedia's Moral panic article defines it as a widespread fear that some evil person or thing threatens a community's values, interests or well-being. It credits Stanley Cohen with the phrase, from a thesis that became his 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, based on British reaction to the rivalry between Mods and Rockers in the 1960s. His group names appear on the page: those who start panics are "moral entrepreneurs" and those seen as threats are "folk devils". Cohen wrote that "the untypical is made typical". Cohen's book came nine years after Becker's (1972 minus 1963, computed in Python), which fits the sense of both being about reactions to behaviour.

The page adds Goode and Ben-Yehuda's 1994 model with five elements: heightened concern, hostility, consensus that the threat is real, disproportionality and volatility. It gives a list of historical cases, among them the Red Scare and the 1950s comic book scare, and it says that fears of rising crime persist despite declines of 50 percent or more since the late 1980s and early 1990s. I did not follow that figure to a source, and 50 percent or more is a range, not a precise number. The page also reports criticisms: that there is no clear way to measure a "proportionate" reaction (the idea of disproportionality), and that Paul Joosse argues classic moral panic theory resembles Durkheim's collective conscience, which it claimed to critique. Other critics on the page argue that the concept accepts "morality" uncritically or reflects middle-class fear of a working-class "mob".

Crime: A Legal Category

Wikipedia's Crime article opens with "an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority" and says the term does not "have any simple and universally accepted definition" in modern criminal law. The "most popular view", it says, is that crime is a category created by law, so that what counts is "defined by the criminal law of each relevant jurisdiction". It says sociological definitions hold that "societal attitudes determine what is considered criminal", and that adultery, blasphemy and apostasy are crimes in theocratic or religion-influenced societies. The overlap with deviance is partial: every crime is formal deviance, but plenty of deviance is not a crime. The reverse, a crime that is not seen as deviant, is possible too, but I did not see the page say so, so treat it as my own inference (check).

The page also reports a 2013 study finding that increased policing reduced crime through deterrence, with an estimated elasticity of -0.67 for murder and -0.56 for robbery. The excerpt I read did not explain what elasticity means beyond that, so what I can say is limited: a negative value means more policing went with less crime, and a larger absolute value means a stronger effect, so the murder figure is larger than the robbery figure (this reading of elasticity is my own general knowledge) (check). The Crime article lists strain, differential association, labelling and social control among its theories, which is why they appear together in this chapter. It says men are "significantly more likely to commit crimes than women in virtually all cultures". It also says that a small fraction of people who reoffend many times account for much crime. The Crime article is 192,121 characters long and I read the first 100,000 (52.1 percent, computed in Python), so its sections on later history and causes may add to or qualify what is stated here.

Social Control: Formal and Informal

Wikipedia's Social control article defines it as "the regulations, sanctions, mechanisms, and systems that restrict the behaviour of individuals in accordance with social norms and orders" and calls it "one of the foundations of social order", the idea Chapter 6 treated. It separates two kinds.

The page lists agents of control, among them individuals, groups, governments, religion, the education system, mass media, police and city governments. It says Albion Woodbury Small and George Edgar Vincent introduced the term to sociology in 1894, and that Edward A. Ross argued in 1901 that belief systems control behaviour more than laws do. That is 7 years apart (computed in Python), and it is 78 years from Small and Vincent to Cohen's book (1972 minus 1894, computed in Python), which shows that control was named as an idea long before moral panics were. The page has no dedicated criticism section, but raises critical points, among them Chomsky and Herman's 1988 argument that media serve political and business elites, and the claim that broken windows policing and civility laws disproportionately affect homeless people. The Deviance page adds that violent crime in New York City fell 28 percent during the 1990s broken windows campaign, but that critics question whether policing caused the fall. 28 percent is the figure as the page gives it, with no year range or source on the page.

Where to Read More

• Pages used. Seven Wikipedia pages: Deviance (sociology), Labeling theory, Social control, Strain theory (sociology), Differential association, Crime and Moral panic.
• How much was read. Deviance 100,000 of 156,035 characters (64.1 percent), Crime 100,000 of 192,121 (52.1 percent) and Moral panic 100,000 of 217,007 (46.1 percent); percentages computed in Python. The Labeling theory, Social control, Strain theory and Differential association pages appeared complete in the fetch, but those fetches gave no length figures, so I cannot tell exactly how long they are.
• Summaries. The fetch tool returns a summary by a small model, not raw page text, so quotations are only as exact as that summary.
• Not covered by the pages. I did not read anything on how deviance rates vary by social group or on specific modern policing policies beyond what is mentioned above, so this chapter does not state any.
• Primary sources. I have not read Merton, Sutherland, Becker, Lemert, Goffman or Cohen directly.

Exercises