Managing Deviance I: The
Deviant Career
The Concept of Management
• “Management” refers to social control
– Prevention
– Treatment
– Punishment
• “Management” also refers to personal control
– Organization
– Facilitation
– Sometimes, prevention etc as w/ social control
Managing a Deviant “Career”
• A “career” is an enduring lifestyle which entails
practical skills and an emotional attachment- not
all “jobs” are “careers.”
• Deviant “careers” are more challenging than nondeviant ones given the disparaged nature of
deviant careers, so there are various methods of
concealment and vocabularies of motive that are
part of the deviant career.
Managing Deviance by Deviants:
Elliott on “Dimensions of Coping”
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Secrecy
Rationalizations
Change to non-deviance
Participation in deviant subcultures
Duff and Kay on Female
Bodybuilders
• Claim of benefit
• “Blasting”
• “Basking in reflected glory”
(“BIRGing”)
• Denying the issue (implied in Duff and
Kay)
Thompson and Harred on
Strippers
• Dividing the social world (from Goffman)
• Techniques of neutralization
– “I need the money, and where else can I make
this kind of money”
– “The people who condemn me are hypocrites”
– “I’m doing this for my kids”
Troiden on Managing
Homosexuality among Gay Men
• Capitulation: Becoming celibate or attempting to “go
straight”
• Minstrelization: Behaving consistently with stereotypes,
which is safer since it does not entail allegations of
“deception” from bashers
• Passing: More “dividing the social world”
• Group alignment: More “participation in deviant
subcultures”
• Troiden’s research was conducted in a southern US college
town- perhaps he saw no examples of gay men who simply
lived openly as in many larger cities.