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 how 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 rulebreaking.
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 1960s, 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?