Being Sociological Chapter 14 Straying deviance Deviance like

Being Sociological Chapter 14 Straying: deviance

‘Deviance, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder. There is nothing inherently deviant in any human act; something is deviant only because some people have been successful in labelling it so’ (Simmons, 1969, p. 4).

Deviance and social control are counterparts that mutually condition each other. On one side is the ritual construction and defense of normative boundaries or what is socially acceptable and what is forbidden or condemned; on the other, those individuals or groups judged to have ‘strayed’ from what society ritually demands of its members. People labelled as ‘deviants’ are viewed as ‘outsiders’ to society. This sets deviants apart from ‘normal’ people. It also limits deviants’ chances for success in the conventional world.

Being deviant does not necessarily mean that someone has actually committed a punishable social offence. From a sociological perspective, being deviant means that someone (or some group) has been labelled as an ‘outsider’ by those with sufficient power to make this negative judgment stick.

Power and Deviance • Unequal access to power often determines why certain activities or types of people are categorized as deviant, shaping how control agents apply deviant labels and why some categories of people are especially targeted for control. • Those who are poor and non-white are the most likely to attract police attention on the streets of wealthy neighbourhoods. • The poor and powerless are more likely to engage in certain forms of deviance, for example, street crime and petty theft.

The significance of power in mediating the social construction, labelling, and expression of deviance is not surprising. To be deviant is, after all, to resist dominant forms of power.

• Perceived deviance may take the form of: • law breaking (becoming criminal) or of apparent disorientation; • emotional disturbance or irrationality (being mad, crazy, or mentally ill). • People may also be seen to deviate through violating rules for the informal conduct of daily life, such as dress, maintaining of body space, polite conversation, and, more importantly, religious practice and the expression of sexuality.

Deviance and Social Norms • Deviants are thought to violate powerful social norms, binding cultural rituals, and common sense ideas and affects about the everyday organization of social life. • Social norms are rules that guide the ways we interact with others; they guide actions and define legitimate and illegitimate modes of thinking and feeling and they are reminders of the acceptable and the forbidden.

Social Norms and Ritual • Deviance breaks with normative pathways of meaning, moral judgment, attraction/repulsion, and action, threatening to subvert or overturn powerful social conventions and rituals of control. • Ritual binds us to specific cultural pathways of meaning and action, while forbidding access to others. • When effective, binding cultural rituals make normgoverned life appear as if natural and ruled by common sense.

Deviance and Cultural Hegemony • Common sense ideas and affects acquire their power by filtering out (or sacrificing) other ways of doing things. To secure common sense in the interests of power creates cultural hegemony. • Conformity can also be won by hegemonic rituals that inform us about why things are the way they are and why they should remain that way. • When hegemonic, common sense ideas are typically accompanied by feelings of comfort with existing structures of power and anxiety about deviance.

The Battle Between Deviance and Social Control • Stereotypical ‘deviants’ are juvenile gang members, serial killers, illegal drug users, and so on. Arguably, though, other categories of people may actually be more dangerous to society – those responsible for the impoverishment of the neighbourhoods where youth gangs flourish; i. e. ‘gangs’ of corporate executives whose greed for short-term profits has led to the systemic ‘off-shoring’ of paid industrial jobs to ‘underdeveloped’ countries where labour is cheap and more easily exploitable.

• Similar questions can be asked in relation to deviance and drug use and abuse, concerning the distinction between illegal ‘controlled substances’ and ‘legitimate’ pharmaceutical substances, such as alcohol, tobacco, and chemical food additives. • To raise such concerns is not to claim that legal drugs are more dangerous than illegal drugs, but simply to suggest that what gets officially labelled as illegal or deviant often has more to do with what society economically values than with whether something is physically harmful in itself.

• From a sociological perspective, the answer to why some behaviours are perceived as ‘deviant’ and others are not has everything to do with power. • People who are branded deviant in one way or another threaten those best positioned to define and police boundaries between what is socially acceptable and what is forbidden.

Sociological Theories of Deviance: Functionalism • Emphasizes the positive contributions of deviance. • Deviance is said to be functional because it strengthens the bonds of an existing social order. • This view of deviance originates in the late-nineteenth century writings of French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858 -1917).

• Durkheim pictured a pathological society as one in which norms were paradoxically either too strong or too weak. • When norms are too strong, society becomes overly rigid and unable to adjust to new historical circumstances. • When social rules (and the rituals that support them) are too weak, society loses coherence and the ability to reproduce itself.

• How does society erect and maintain boundaries in ways that are healthy rather than pathological? • According Durkheim, the answer involves rituals aimed at fending off those condemned as criminals or deviants. • This is what makes deviance a necessary and normal part of all healthy societies.

Positive Functions of Deviance • Boundary setting: Deviance is required so that members of a society have a symbolic means of clearly demarcating what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong. ’ Without deviants to mark the boundaries, there would be no boundaries, and without boundaries a society could not exist. • Group solidarity: Waging war against deviant ‘Others’ can intensify emotional group bonds that unite social insiders against a common enemy. In other words, by creating a ‘them’ against whom to bring the ‘us’ of a society together, deviance functions to reinforce collective social ties.

Tension reduction: Defining others as deviant permits social insiders to blow off steam by dumping the stresses of daily life onto deviants. This provides society with a kind of safety valve for releasing pressures brought about by conformity. In this, the deviant functions as a scapegoat upon which to blame social ills— a convenient symbolic target for people’s frustrations and a means for alleviating social strain.

Innovation: Deviance also helps society adjust to changing historical conditions by challenging old and outdated social rules. In this sense, although condemned as a rule-breaker, the deviant of today may function as an innovative agent of social change and a pioneer of future norms. Think, for instance, of such famous ‘deviants’ as the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. During his own life Dr. King’s activism was met by brutal doses of social control. Nevertheless, over time, King’s willingness to suffer on behalf of those denied full legal and human rights led to significant social change and major steps in the direction of racial equality.

Too Much Deviance? • Too much deviance can turn society upside down, leading to normative breakdown and chaos. When this happens, ritual control mechanisms—such as persuasion, the promise of profit or the threat of coercion—may be called into play to restore balance between the functions and dysfunctions of deviance. • This was the viewpoint of American theorist Talcott Parsons (1902 -1979), who pictured society as a selfadjusting system, and the battle between deviance and social control as a dynamic aspect in the evolution, defence, and modification of normative social boundaries (Parsons, 1951).

Criticisms of Functionalism • Critics have often commented upon the overly mechanistic character of this approach, as well as functionalism’s failure to ask about who benefits most by the social control of deviance. • Functionalism can appear to justify—rather than analyze—the relationship between deviant labelling and power.

• In The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison Jeffrey Reiman and Paul Leighton (2010) demonstrate the functional benefits of a failing criminal justice system to those with most power. Reiman and Leighton show stereotypical portrayals of prisoners and prisons make it appear as if the problem of crime is strictly a problem of poor people acting badly. Lost along the way is meaningful attention to the complex web of social inequalities, strains, and tensions in which actual criminal acts typically take place.

The Anomie Perspective • The concept of anomie is also rooted in the writings of Durkheim. • Anomie describes a state of normlessness. • Anomic societies lack the regulatory constraints necessary for the social control of their members. • Durkheim’s best-known example of anomic deviance concerned suicide.

Durkheim demonstrated that high rates of suicide were associated with normative breakdown, prompted by rapid changes in economic conditions, and also by the historical transition from tightly integrated mechanical solidarity, characteristic of medieval society, to the still emerging forms of organic solidarity that were a feature of densely populated modern urban societies.

Durkheim argued that modern social life lacked normative cohesion and was thus unable to regulate the desires and aspirations of its members. This anomic condition left people morally isolated from one another, thus making them vulnerable to suicide and other forms of deviance.

Robert K. Merton (1910 -2003) • Durkheim’s thinking about anomie was both amplified and altered in the mid-twentieth century by Robert K. Merton (1938). • Like Durkheim, Merton viewed deviance as the result of unfulfilled social aspirations. But unlike Durkheim, Merton’s theory of anomie focused less on normative breakdown than on structural strain between dominant cultural aspirations and the available social pathways for fulfilling valued goals.

• Merton contended that at home, at school, and in the media virtually everybody is urged to pursue the ‘American dream’ of possessing wealth, power, and prestige. But despite such ritual urgings, not everyone had the opportunity to fulfill such grandiose aspirations. • In Social Structure and Anomie Merton (1957) pictured anomie as a structured contradiction between normative aspirations and the available means for realizing valued goals. Structural disparity between widely accepted goals and the means for attaining them resulted in social strain that pushed people in the direction of deviance.

Merton envisioned a series of deviant ‘adaptations’ for those who lacked the means or who failed to acquire dominant cultural goals, or both.

Culturally Determined Goals/Aspirations Availability of Legitimate Means For Goal Attainment Conformity + + Innovation + - Ritualism - + Retreatism - - Rebellion +/-

Social strains of various sorts resulted in pressure to deviate along four other paths: • Innovation: This path belongs to those who accept society’s emphasis on being successful but who are blocked in their efforts to achieve wealth, power, or prestige in a legitimate or lawful manner. According to Merton, innovative deviance is a likely outcome in societies that encourage everybody to strive to be ‘number one’ but provide only limited opportunities for people to actually achieve this goal. • Ritualism: This applies to people who have access to legitimate means but, for one reason or another, have not internalized dominant cultural goals. Ritualists appear to play by the rules but are really just ‘going through the motions. ’

• Retreatists: They adapt to strain by detaching themselves from dominant cultural goals and legitimate channels for goal attainment. They are dropouts. They ‘can be included as members of society … only in a fictional sense…. People … in the society but not of it. ’ (Merton, 1957: 153). • Rebellion: Those who adapt in this way not only depart from dominant goals and means but also seek to replace them with aspirations and institutional pathways of a decidedly different sort. Rebels include heretics, revolutionaries, and political deviants of many sorts.

• Rebels also deviate by employing unauthorized means or tactics. Rebellious acts of deviance range from nonviolence and civil disobedience to more dramatic forms of nonconformity, such as sabotage, kidnapping, assassination, hijacking, or terror. • Rebellion is political deviance. As with other of Merton’s adaptations, rebellion results from the structural strains of a contradictory coupling of dominant societal goals and means.

Merton’s Social Structure and Anomie has inspired generations of research and social reforms, aimed at reducing strain between valued goals and the opportunity to realize such goals.

Criticisms of Merton • Critics have occasionally chided his conceptualization of anomic deviance for its exaggerated picture of social unity, noting variations in what people strive for in keeping with their adherence to contrasting religious, ethnic, and gender norms. • Committed to the framework of expert social science rather than critical thought, Merton settled for a program of social reforms aimed at equalized economic opportunity. But, in so doing, he failed to reckon with the ways that the structural constraints of capitalist society as a whole limited the effectiveness of most reform efforts. • However, Merton’s theory remains one of the most important approaches to the sociological study of deviance.

The Learning Perspective • The central theme of this theoretical framework is that learning to be deviant takes place in the same way as learning anything else. • The background to this perspective is found in the writings of the French criminal court judge and sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843 -1904). Tarde’s theory of ‘imitation and suggestion’ contends that the lessons of life pass between people in much the same way as a command by a hypnotist suggestively shapes the behaviour of someone mesmerized or entranced.

Tarde’s ‘Laws of Imitation’ • The ‘law of close contact, ’ which states that we are most likely to imitate those with whom we interact on a regular basis; • The ‘law of imitation of superiors by inferiors, ’ which contends that people imitate those who possess high levels of prestige and power; • The ‘law of insertion’, which stresses the allure of novelty in attracting people away from outdated, boring, or tired social customs and norms.

Edwin H. Sutherland (1883 -1950) and ‘Differential Association’ Sutherland was convinced that deviant acts were learned in the course of repeated social interaction. Sutherland’s theory involves two core assumptions: • That deviance takes place when people come to define a situation as an appropriate occasion for violating conventional norms or laws; • That ‘definitions of the situation’ favouring deviance are supplied through an individual’s past history of learning, particularly one’s associations with others. To succeed in deviance someone also has to learn to master certain ‘tricks of the trade, ’ such as how to smoke marijuana correctly, crack a safe, rob a bank, or keep a watchful eye out for the police.

• Acquiring the right mixture of motives, attitudes, and rationalizations for deviance is also a key aspect of learning. • Other factors include the frequency, duration, priority, and intensity of one’s associations with people who voice a positive attitude to rule-breaking.

Daniel Glaser and ‘Differential Identification’ (1956) Glaser’s theory is of particular relevance in today’s media-saturated society. Going beyond Sutherland’s emphasis on face-to-face learning, Glaser’s pedagogy of deviance points to the ways people sometimes identify with prestigious ‘role models’, such as celebrities.

• Other learning theorists have reframed Sutherland’s ideas in behaviorist or operant social psychological terms, emphasizing how definitions favouring deviance are reinforced in certain situations and punished in others. • Regardless of emphasis, the premise behind various models of learning remains the same: individuals learn not only when it is acceptable to violate certain norms, but also how to both deviate successfully and rationalize nonconformity in ways that neutralize guilt.

• The learning perspective views deviance as brought into being by the same interactional processes through which we learn anything else. This suggests that anyone might become deviant if surrounded by pro-deviant associations, role-models, and ritualized reinforcements. • However, we should avoid thinking about learning in strictly deterministic terms. While we may be influenced – even mesmerized – by our relations to others, it is crucial to remember that it is always possible say ‘no’ to the lessons in deviance they offer.

Resisting differential associations that teach deviance is always a possibility, even if this sometimes requires associations of another sort – contact with others that fosters unlearning or counter-learning. This is how learning theorists approach social control – countering the learning of nonconformity with conventional role models and associations that reinforce rather than depart from social norms.

The Societal Reaction Perspective • The roots of this theory lie in George Herbert Mead’s 1918 essay, ‘The Psychology of Punitive Justice’; • It was in the 1960 s, however, that the societal reaction perspective emerged as a guiding theory of deviance as political turmoil, struggles for economic justice, and cultural unrest unsettled boundaries between the inside and outsides of power.

The societal reaction perspective focused on the dialectical relationship between control agents and deviants. The focus was on three interrelated concerns: • The socio-historical development of deviant labels; • The application of labels to certain types of people in specific times and places; • The pragmatic and symbolic consequences of being labelled.

• Societal reaction theory is particularly sensitive to socio -historical context, exploring how collective action is mobilized against certain kinds of behaviour or people in particular times and places. • Actions which today are commonly thought deviant were in the past deemed ‘normal’ or at least tolerated. • Other actions previously considered deviant, while still contested, have recently lost much of their negative charge. • Historical attention to shifting claims about what is deviant teaches important lessons about how power can be mobilized to either forbid or welcome particular kinds of behaviour.

• The study of how deviant labels are actually applied asks about the effect of gender, race, age, or economic status in perceptions of deviance and also about organizational and environment factors. • A further focus is on the effects of being labelled: how deviance can operate as a ‘master status’ overshadowing all other aspects of a person’s identity.

• Labels can also stigmatize and limit social opportunities, and can even amplify nonconformity, pushing people in the direction of secondary deviance. (Lemert, 1967) • For example, being labelled a drug user may limit one’s chances for legitimate employment, making it more likely that someone will begin to sell drugs as well as to use them. • Labelled deviants also sometimes fight back— organizing into subcultures that value activities condemned by society-at-large or into social movements aimed at changing dominant norms and ridding people of the burden of being deviant.

Criticisms of the Societal Reaction Perspective The societal reaction perspective has often focused on micro-interactions between controllers and deviants, whilst ignoring the role played by larger social structures and global institutions of power (religious, political, economic, etc. ).

The Critical Perspectives Four interrelated ways of thinking about power and resistance are of particular importance: • Marxism; • Anarchism; • Feminist and queer theory; • Radical multiculturalism.

• Each strand of critical thought attempts to deconstruct binding cultural rituals and norms and the forms of power they serve. By explicitly reckoning with matters of power, critical perspectives also amplify questions raised by other theories, such as: • ‘Who is the system functional for? ’ • ‘Why don’t all members of a society have equal access to legitimate means of success? ’ • ‘In what contexts does social learning take place, and why do some people learn deviance while others learn conformity? ’ • ‘Who is granted the authority to label someone else ‘deviant’?

• Marxism focuses on the influence of economic structures or modes of production in policing boundaries between what is ritually valued or condemned. Marxist theorists pay particular attention to antagonisms generated by profit-driven capitalist/colonialist modes of production. • Anarchist critical theory asks about how ritual structures of authority shape battles between social insiders and deviants. Centralized institutions of authority tend to ‘naturalize’ power-charged social arrangements, making the divide between deviance and social control appear as if timeless and universal. Anarchist theory defies such mystification by calling for a renewed politics of deviance based on the age-old principles of direct action, mutual respect, and the reciprocal negotiation of power by everyday people.

• Critical feminist and queer social thought explore the diverse ways that gender and sexuality are implicated in social practices of power. Feminist and queer theoretical perspectives raise critical questions about how the power to control deviance is simultaneously gendered and sexualized. • Radical multiculturalism casts a critical eye upon how white supremacy and the legacies of colonial conquest have historically plagued Western societies. Here racialized formations of power are conceptualized as a central axis in the ritual mediation of people’s perceptions and actions.

Future Sociologies of Deviance and Social Control • Critical theorists today identify the following as arenas where battles between deviance and social control are most intense: • An exponential rise in the use of prison in the United States and certain other ‘over-developed’ nations; • Far-reaching medical, pharmaceutical, and genetic control practices aimed at ‘normalizing’ minds, emotions, and conduct; • Omnipresent technologies of surveillance that keep an eye out for potential deviance from cradle to grave;

• The use of military drones, political assassination, and other weapons of war in transnational police actions against suspected terrorists; • Global media technologies capable of both preempting and amplifying resistive deviance by means of suggestive waves of fascination and fear; • A global resurgence of hard-hearted religious judgments as self-righteous weapons of power and control.

• The benefits of being sociological about deviance are clear. • Effective strategies of social control must reckon not only with the behaviour of deviants, but with the (global and local) vectors of power that today inform battles between deviance and social control.

Discussion Point 1: The Deviant Rich? • It is far less common for the label of ‘deviance’ to be applied to corporate rule-breakers than to streetlevel property offenders. Consider the deleterious effects on society of suspect financial practices engaged in by elite bankers and investment house executives. • ‘Respectable’ financial agents of various sorts have helped spur global economic crises world-wide. • This was fuelled by a lack of regulatory controls over the global financial services industry.

As a result, since 2009 elite banks and investment firms have made record profits, while the global economy as a whole has been shocked by wave after wave of home mortgage foreclosures, massive job layoffs, and a widespread loss of retirement funds, accompanied by growing anxiety about the future.

• Is this an appropriate way for the rich to become richer? • Why is the stealthy suite-level deviance of upper echelon and corporate rule- breakers far less feared and, when discovered, typically less severely punished than are less costly street-level property crimes, such a burglary or robbery? • Is all deviance simply a matter of individual subjective evaluation?

Discussion Point 2: The Politics of Deviance Labels • Over the last several decades, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual (GLBT) activists have engaged in unprecedented struggle to remove the label of deviance from homosexuality and other ‘queer’ sexual expressions and to secure the same legal rights for sexual minorities as for heterosexuals. • Despite important gains, nearly everywhere there remains more concern with the supposed ‘deviance’ of those who embrace alternative expressions of sexuality than with the gendered harms of sexism in even its most virulent forms.

• Why do different forms of sexual expression attract such different social and legal responses? • Should sexuality ever be the subject of legal regulations and, if so, how and why? • Is it possible to see changes over time in the ways in which different sexual practices are seen as deviant or normal?