Deviant Behaviour (Routledge Revivals)

Paul Rock

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134622603
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kriminologie

This book, first published in 1973, explores the manner in which conceptions of deviancy arise and shows how the attitudes of non-deviants, of society and of authority, are as instrumental in forming these conceptions as the actions of the deviants themselves. Chapters include discussions on the definition of deviants and deviancy and the enforcement of the law, alongside a detailed introduction. This title will be of particular value to students and scholars with an interest in criminology and the sociology and psychology of deviancy.

1

DEFINITIONS OF DEVIANTS AND DEVIANCY

A sociological conception of deviancy must dwell on its peculiarly social qualities. As a significant social entity, the ‘deviant’ is the occupant of a special role which is recognised and ordered in a process of interaction. If a person is not assigned to this role and not treated as deviant, he cannot be regarded sociologically as a deviant. No matter how much he may be assumed by some to be a disturbed, disruptive or atypical individual, his social meaning is not that of deviancy but something else. Those who would explain his behaviour do not account for social deviancy or a deviant role, but disturbance, disruptiveness or atypicality as they conceive it. Deviancy is a social construct* fashioned by the members of the society in which it exists. They endow it with importance and distinctiveness and they assign it to a special place in the organisation of their collective lives. As Quinney remarks:

… a thing exists only when it is given a name; any phenomenon is real to us only when we can imagine it. Without imagination there would be nothing to experience. So it is with crime. In our relationships with others we construct a social reality of crime. This reality is both conceptual and phenomenal, a world of meanings and events constructed in reference to crime.¹

Deviant roles are given names (whether Student Militant, Hooligan, Criminal, Homosexual or simply Deviant) which single them out for purposes of elucidation, action and, often, the justification of action. In one study, for instance, Turner and Surace argued that the presence and behaviour of young Mexican ‘zootsuiters’ in California evoked hostility. The hostility was marked by ambivalence because, whilst ‘zootsuiter’ conjured up images of delinquency and violence, ‘Mexican’ evoked images of the romantic and exciting. Collective action against the deviants became possible only when they were referred to as ‘zootsuiters’ and their Mexican facet was ignored. Condemnatory symbols which are unambiguous can thus mobilise a punitive response.²

The deviant role is given a recognised place in the social structure and those who assume it are led to expect that becoming deviant will be a fateful process. One of the basic problems in sociology is to explain the origins, maintenance and effects of these acts of social placement. Deviancy is a part of the social reality which organises people’s lives, and this social reality must be the primary material of analysis. As Schutz states:

[The social scientist’s] observational field, the social world, is not essentially structureless. It has a particular meaning and relevance structure for the human beings living, thinking, and acting therein. They have preselected and preinterpreted this world by a series of common-sense constructs of the reality of daily life, and it is these thought objects which determine their behavior, define the goal of their action, the means available for attaining them.… The thought objects constructed by the social scientists refer to and are founded upon the thought objects constructed by the common-sense thought of man living his everyday life among his fellow-men. Thus, the constructs used by the social scientist are, so to speak, constructs of the second degree, namely constructs of the constructs made by the actors on the social scene.…³

If deviancy is a social reality, then, it is deviancy as it is construed, responded to and generated by members of society. It is not deviancy which the social scientist would independently choose to study. Deviant roles and behaviour are prestructured for his inspection whatever he may think about the rationality or morality of their making. Marihuana smokers, witches, usurers, nationalists, internationalists and the Jews have all been variously defined as deviants in different societies.* The definitions have been of great consequence to them.

Of course, a sociologist who organised his study at the level of commonsense thought alone would be able to contribute little, if anything, to understanding about social processes. His task is to transcend the commonsense world and discern patterns and relationships which may not appear to those involved in the problematic situation. Moreover, the problem of eliciting meanings from those involved is an enormously complicated one. Not only may meanings be disguised, unclear or confused. Worse still, the very assumption that there is a set of clear meanings guiding a particular course of action may be thoroughly misleading.

It may be the case that the conceptions which people hold about deviancy are in some sense erroneous and that their placement of specific individuals in deviant roles is also misguided. Through their act of appraisal, however, they will have important social effects on those whom they condemn. Lemert contends that deviation can be divided into a primary form, the initial act of rule-breaking, and a secondary form, the set of adjustments which the rule-breaker may have to make to cope with the reactions which his rule-breaking engenders:

… if the deviant acts are repetitive and have a high visibility, and if there is a severe societal reaction, which, through a process of identification, is incorporated as part of the ‘me’ of the individual, the probability is greatly increased that the integration of existing roles will be disrupted and that reorganization based upon a new role or set of roles will occur … when a person begins to employ his deviant behavior or a role based upon it as means of defense, attack, or adjustment to the overt and covert problems created by the consequent societal reaction to him, his deviation is secondary.⁴

The assignment to a deviant role may be based on imperfect wisdom but the consequences of such an assignment are still of the greatest importance to the new role-player. To others he will be a deviant, whether or not an outsider could argue that he did not commit the acts imputed to him. ‘… It should be clear that secondary deviation can be produced when an individual is not himself motivated to adopt it, and when no “objective” or “real” primary deviation existed in the first place.’⁵ Furthermore, although the attributes ascribed to particular deviancies can be spurious, they will still shape the way in which the deviancy is handled by those who believe in these attributes. Any study of social deviancy must therefore ground itself in the understandings which prevail in a society. Deviancy is an outcome of a process of judgment and evaluation which distinguishes certain forms of behaviour as rule-breaking and attaches penalties to them. The context in which the rules emerge, are applied, and sanctions are inflicted is all-important:

Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders … 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 that label has been successfully applied; deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label.⁶

Becker’s definition regards as problematic what many criminologists have taken for granted. It does not assume in advance that crimes are alone the proper study of the sociology of deviancy; that deviancy can be construed as ‘anti-social’ behaviour; that it is statistically infrequent activity; or that it is behaviour which flouts widely held norms. Moreover, it does not prejudge the character of the causal processes that can generate deviancy. Whilst it treats social rules as an identifying system, it presupposes nothing else about the characteristics of those who may become deviant or the experiences which they may share as a result of their having become deviant. It is thus a definition of great potential fruitfulness: it assembles a wide range of events together for examination and directs attention at their changeful and interdependent nature. Above all, it anchors them in a social structure instead of viewing deviants as ‘sociopathic’ or ‘psychopathic’ individuals who develop in a social limbo. Deviancy is everywhere and always the outcome of an interaction between rule-makers, rule-enforcers and rule-breakers. As David Downes and I have remarked elsewhere:

The result has been a momentous enlargement and enrichment of the scope of criminology. The issues of defining and enforcing the criminal law are now regarded as in themselves problematic, and not objectively given. There has been a resultant loss of clarity about the kinds of question we can legitimately ask about crime and delinquency, and a loss of certainty about the ways in which we can evaluate the answers. But this erstwhile clarity and certainty have been shown to have been in large part spurious: which in turn may help account for the barrenness of a great deal of orthodox criminology and penology.⁷

It is, of course, true that the definition proffered by Becker and others does not constitute a clear guide to recognising deviant phenomena. It works best in those settings which are characterised by a well-articulated social structure; where the task of making authoritative moral rules is entrusted to a special body or set of bodies; where the rules which they produce are concisely expressed; and where there is substantial consensus about the nature of the moral world. In all other cases there are considerable difficulties in deciding what, amongst a great wealth of possibly critical groups and rules, constitutes the definitive deviancy-defining reaction.

In the first place rules themselves are often ambiguous and conflicting.⁸ The precise meaning of rules, their applicability in various contexts, and their competition with one another all promote uncertainty in delineating what is or is not deviant. Indeed, in many cases, deviancy is a very fluid and elusive phenomenon. It may be that this vagueness is not a reflection of the sociological scheme itself but a consequence of the blurred nature of the phenomenal world. Lofland states:

To be true to the character of his materials the sociologist must reflect ambiguity as well as more or less consensual public definitions. The point is here that there are likely, at any given time, to be acts and persons about which it is difficult to make a decision as to their deviance. … By being attentive to such conflict and ambiguity, it becomes possible to follow the dynamics of how items can come to be defined in terms of kinds of conflict other than deviance or can reach consensual normality (as well as how they can come to be defined as deviant).⁹

It is also possible that it is the boundaries of relatively marginal or novel behaviour that are blurred rather than those of activities which have become organised over time. Certain ‘core’ deviancies such as theft are well orchestrated, reactions to them are institutionalised and predictable, and understandings about them have become firmly established. Whilst the understandings and the reaction can be misinformed, most mundane instances of these deviancies are clearly recognisable. Even the conventions for ordering ambiguity may represent some guarantee that a deeper consensus exists about the marginal or the emergent:

Plural evaluation, shifting standards, and moral ambiguity may, and do, coexist with a phenomenal realm that is commonly sensed as deviant. The very meaning of pluralism, the very possibility of shift and ambiguity, depends on a wider consensus founded in common understandings, regarding the patently deviant nature of many nonetheless ordinary undertakings.¹⁰

As I shall argue, the outcome of such uncertainty may be a curiously fruitful one for the sociologist of deviancy. He tends to resort to those areas where particular problematic states are experienced not so much by the studied actors as by the sociologist himself. It is this sense of ambiguity which can prompt the sociologist into attaining understanding. It may be welcomed rather than deplored.

The definitive deviancy-generating reaction cannot simply be a matter of the criminal law because deviancy is taken to be a large class of which crime is but a sub-class. It cannot simply be an issue of immediate, effective power because many social aggregates (such as lynch mobs and the Ku Klux Klan) are able to enforce their notions of propriety without transforming those whom they deplore into what sociologists would call deviants. That is, the reaction itself is held to be deviant, not that which is reacted against. The reaction does not, it seems, have to be supported by legitimated authority because the pluralist model of society espoused by Becker and Lemert portrays the authority of rulers and rules as problematic. Indeed, in Becker’s analysis of the deviant occupation of the dance hall musician,¹¹ or in Lemert’s discussion of blindness,¹² no reference is made to an authoritative reaction. The use of Becker’s definition is further complicated by the fact that competing perspectives can exist in the same situation; each one emanating from a social group and each one buttressed by threats of sanctions. The selection of any one perspective as critical could be merely arbitrary. Resort to the subjective meanings of an action for the actors is not necessarily much of a solution. People may conceive of themselves as immoral or wayward although no discernible rule-making or rule-enforcement may have occurred. Indeed, their self-definition may be built around the responses of a generalised other* which is foreign to their society, imaginary or anachronistic.

In sum, there are abundant cases which can be exam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Definitions of deviants and deviancy
• 2 The effects of deviant organisation
• 3 Authoritative definitions of deviancy
• 4 The enforcement of laws
• Conclusion
• Index