The Death and Resurrection of Deviance

Current Ideas and Research

M. Dellwing, J. Kotarba, N. Pino, M. Dellwing, J. Kotarba, N. Pino

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137303790
• eBook ISBN: 9781137303806
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Are reports of the 'death of deviance' premature? This collection brings together leading international scholars to analyse uses of the 'deviance' concept to argue its vitality and show its possible utility in a variety of fields including religion, education and media narratives.

Part I

The Death of Deviance?

1

The Meaning and Validity of the Death of Deviance Claim

Erich Goode

Introduction

Even patently untrue assertions, especially those that are ideologically appealing, if accepted as valid among certain circles, need to be falsified. But before empirical falsification comes conceptual clarification. “Define your terms”, said Voltaire, in the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), “or we shall never understand one another”. In 2007, then President Bill Clinton took Voltaire’s warning to heart by brilliantly ducking a question about his sexual indiscretions with a White House aide. “It depends”, he replied jesuitically, “on what the meaning of is is”. Such definitional evasions aside, before we investigate a given sphere of inquiry, we need to delineate and define the concepts we use. This admonition applies to no endeavor more forcefully than investigating the “death of deviance” claim.

Conceptualizing deviance

Deviance can be anything that violates a society’s, or a social collectivity’s, normative structure. All sociological notions of deviance presuppose an audience, real or hypothesized, abstractly normative or operationally reactive. Most discussions, however, focus exclusively on behavior rather than beliefs or characteristics. The study of deviance is fundamentally two independent but interlocking enterprises. When sociologists investigate normative violations and the censure that violators are likely to receive, they adopt one of two distinctly different perspectives or approaches, and thus engage in two contrasting endeavors.

When we conceptualize deviance, the questions we should ask ourselves initially are these: What is our mission? What is to be explained? Our answers place us in one or another camp, which sociologists refer to as positivism (or explanatory theory) and constructionism. We can regard these two approaches as “master visions”. They might seem contradictory but in fact they complement one another, constituting two sides of the same coin.

Although all positivist or explanatory theorists know that deviance and crime are defined by socially and legally constructed norms and laws, the focus of their analysis is such that they perforce consider their subject’s qualities as objectively real. To seek a cause is to assume that a phenomenon has a common thread, a distinctive or singular feature that permits a causal explanation. The answer to the “What is to be explained?” question is that it is the deviant behavior, beliefs or conditions themselves that must be explained. Deviance is conceived of as a type of behavior – not exclusively a way of looking at behavior. What causes “deviance” to come about or take place in a certain time, locale or setting is our guiding concern. The positivist is likely to ask: What kind of person would do or believe such a thing? What social arrangements, settings or factors make such behaviors (or beliefs) more likely? What causes the crime rate to be so high in one place, so much lower in another? These are the sorts of questions positivists who study deviance and crime ask, and they center on the guiding question: Why do they do it? Because deviance possesses a pre-given or indwelling trait, we are led to the inevitable question: “Why?”

In contrast, the approach we call constructionism or “social constructionism” answers the “What is to be explained?” question by saying that it is thinking about and reacting to rule-violators that is crucial. This approach argues that it is the rules, the norms, reactions to and the cultural representations of certain behavior, beliefs or conditions that need to be looked at and illuminated. In other words, constructionism is curious about how and why something comes to be regarded as or judged to be deviant in the first place, what is thought, made of, said about and done about it. How are phenomena generally, and deviant phenomena specifically, conceptualized, defined, represented, reacted to and dealt with? How are certain actions conceptualized and how do they come to be regarded or deemed as “crime”, “prostitution”, “treachery” or “incest”? How are certain beliefs judged as “heresy”, “blasphemy”, “godlessness”, “disloyalty” “treachery”? The constructionist is more interested in issues that have to do with thinking, talking, writing about, narrating or reacting to such actions than in why deviant behavior, beliefs or traits take place, occur or exist in the first place. To the constructionist, deviant behavior, beliefs and traits “exist” – as a social category – because they are conceptualized and reacted to in a certain way. The constructionist does not take the conceptualization of an act, a belief, a condition, for granted; instead, it is how something is regarded and dealt with that must be accounted for, not the origin of the occurrence of the behavior, the beliefs or the conditions. That is, positivists take norms and rules for granted; constructionists are interested in how rules are made and applied. Constructionism simultaneously hugely expands and narrowly focuses deviance inquiries on extra-normativity.

Delineating the “deviance is dead” notion

We can divide up the pie of the critiques of the death of deviance in many ways, but perhaps the most basic and fundamental division is between evaluations based on the argument that the sociology of deviance is not merely dead, it is stillborn – it was never alive – because it is an invalid, unviable, sterile notion to begin with, as opposed to the view that, at one time, deviance may have had some currency, traction or validity, but has outlived its usefulness. In 1972, Alexander Liazos penned the first full-blown, detailed and emphatic “stillborn” critique of the deviance sub-discipline – the “nuts, sluts, and deviated preverts [sic]” argument. Sociologists of deviance back then, he claimed, concentrated on condemned and stigmatized behavior and people, thereby ignoring “the unethical, illegal and destructive actions of powerful individuals, groups and institutions in our society” (p. 111). Corporate crime steals vastly more money from the public pocket and physically imperils the lives of ordinary citizens than is true of the sneak thief, the bank robber and the mugger. What’s really and truly deviant – and what sociologists of deviance should pay attention to, Liazos argued – is oppression, exploitation, racism, sexism and imperialism, and not prostitution, mental disorder, child molestation or rape. The enterprise of studying deviance was never valid to begin with because it has ignored what’s most important about normative violations: wrongful actions by fat cats that cause harm to the rest of us. The problem with Liazos’s argument is that sociologists do not define deviance by harm, nor is it even, primarily, about harm – it is about behavior, beliefs and conditions that elicit censure, condemnation, stigma and punishment. If objectively harmful actions do not call forth censure, that in itself would be interesting and noteworthy; if harmless acts do, that too is worth studying. However ideologically satisfying pulling monstrously and calamitously injurious actions inflicted by putative villains into the tent of deviance may be, their harm is not what imparts to them a specifically deviant tenor; it is their desecration of a valuative system and the consequent negative reactions of audiences – overlapping but not identical universes. Investigations of harm are not the primary mission of the sociology of deviance; harmful actions are not what we are charged to investigate. Of course, harm is one of the many factors that determine how audiences decide that acts and beliefs are wrongful – but it is not the only one.

Do the “deviance is dead” claimants assert that deviance itself is dead? Or that, over time, the sociology of deviance died – as any “obituary” would indicate? Or that the field of the sociology of deviance has declined – not died – in its influence and centrality – less important and innovative, let’s say, than it was in its heyday? Or that the sociology of deviance is no longer as theoretically creative or innovative as it once was, say, in comparison with other fields of sociology? Or even in comparison with the field of sociology generally?

Let’s examine each formulation in turn.

Is deviance dead?

Sociologists define deviance as the violation of a social norm, the departure from an accepted standard. It is possible that James Ford was the first academic to use the term “deviance”, or some equivalent – specifically, “deviation” – in 1936. Ford was a classic social pathologist (Mills, 1943), and his meaning of the term is now regarded as archaic. Establishing and enforcing norms represents one of the many arms of social control, which is, according to Jack Gibbs (1989, pp. 55 and 400), sociology’s “central notion”. In using this definition, sociologists imply no taint of condemnation, stigma, pathology, dysfunctionality, instability, criminality, amorality, immanent evil or a departure from psychiatric normalcy or a threat to the stability of the society; these are empirical questions to be investigated, not an assumed component of the definition.

It is true that throughout the entire stretch of human existence, norms, some species of norms – norms of one kind or another – have existed, have been ubiquitous, and they are likewise violated in every institutional sphere in every society throughout history. And reactions to these normative violations, real or imagined, are also enacted everywhere. Actors hardly ever refer to what they recognize as “deviance” when they punish, shun or condemn persons they regard as wrongdoers, but this is irrelevant; it seems an appropriate sociological term for behavior that calls forth such reactions. True, it was not until the 20th century that sociologists invented the term, deviance, but if we do not call what we’re investigating “deviance” – what should we call it? Norms are the bone and sinew of culture, social structure and everyday life where such breaches of what’s considered right are commonly enacted, and they do not, upon discovery, always (perhaps not even usually) result in censure. Moreover, this process of chastisement is sociologically patterned according to rank, privilege, race, sex and gender, age, friendship networks and situational contingencies. But the endeavor of social control is implicit in all norms. These assertions do not imply or rest on the essentialistic, universal, indwelling nature of deviance: they simply make an empirical observation about the consequences of normative violations. What it is that generates these censorious reactions is variable and relative. But normative violations occur everywhere, and so do reactions to them, though the cause and consequences of the violations themselves are social, cultural and situational – in a word, constructed.

The death of the sociology of deviance?

What of the claim that “deviance is dead”? Colin Sumner (1994) and Ann Hendershott (2002) indicate that it is the sociology of deviance – not deviance itself – that has died. What do these observers mean by their claim? Does it mean that the enterprise of studying deviance has expired? Sumner dismisses courses, students and the publication of books devoted to deviance, texts included, as a measure of viability. Researchers still work in the field, he admits, textbooks are still written and published under its rubric and students still enroll in courses with the title “deviance” or some such equivalent – but he doesn’t care. In contrast, Hendershott does care; these manifestations constitute her pivotal indicators. What do these indicators say?

Literally every one of the current editions of the first 30 introductory sociology textbooks whose title and table of contents I located included a chapter on deviance – variously entitled “Deviance, Crime, and Social Control”, “Deviance and Norms”, “Deviant Behavior and Social Control”, “Deviance and Conformity”, “Deviance and Crime” and, simply, “Deviance” – and though, as we all know, passing fashion strongly influences the college textbook market, the subject is clearly foundational for the field of sociology generally. And most departments of sociology offer courses in the sociology of deviance, undergraduates still enroll in these courses and textbooks on deviance written by sociologists still bear titles such as Deviant Behavior and Sociology of Deviant Behavior. Moreover, more than half a dozen deviance textbooks have stood the test of time; their authors have revised them and their publishers have continued to issue new editions, some, with new co-authors, while others, text-readers, updated every few years, contain new material alongside the classic readings. And scholars still write and publish advanced research monographs with “deviant” and “deviance” in their titles. Moreover, the field still produces a mountain of academic journal articles with these terms in the titles. Deviant Behavior, the field’s flagship journal, was founded in 1970, and is still issued – closing in on half a century beyond the field’s predicted demise. All of this indicates that the enterprise of the sociology of deviance field is strong, vibrant and continually in the process of undergoing revision – in short, anything but “dead” or stagnant.

In The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary, British criminologist Colin Sumner (1994, p. vii) – like Liazos, a radical and a Marxist – proclaimed that, by the 1970s, the sociology of deviance, though once useful, had “died”. During the era in which he wrote his book, two decades subsequent to its putative demise, the field, he argued, had become “barren”, “a graveyard” – and his book, a message chiseled onto the headstone of its buried corpse (p. ix). The study of deviance is no longer an intellectual pursuit with a pulse, and has not been for, now, close to four decades. Its practitioners have abandoned the intellectual territory and research program once laid out by its pioneers. Over the years, “combatants ... have completely demolished the terrain”, which, he says, is now “barren, fruitless, full of empty trenches and craters, littered with unexploded mines and eerily silent ... It is now time to drop arms and show respect for the dead” (p. ix).

What exactly is the nature of Sumner’s claim? What do his eloquent but overwrought and fanciful metaphors refer to? A close reading of Sumner’s thesis reveals that he does not mean what he alleges. In fact, his argument is not about the death of an academic specialty at all. Instead, it is a theory about the origin and function of that discipline, and the argument that the field no longer serves its original purpose. Its collapse, says Sumner, was brought on by its inability to serve its prior ideological function. In other words, Sumner is not putting forth an empirically testable hypothesis. Instead, he is guilty of a bait-and-switch scam in which metaphor and rhetoric substitute for data and analysis.

Here is Sumner’s argument. It starts with the assumption that the ruling elite follows the ideas and research of the academy very closely and makes conspiratorial use of these ideas to maintain hegemony. Social control, Sumner argues, is buttressed by theories generated by intellectuals and academics. Until the late 19th century, the powers that be made use of the concept of “degeneracy” to keep troublemakers in line and maintain control over the masses. But with the dawn of the modern age and the birth of a correspondingly more sophisticated and diverse public, a simple characterization of wrongdoers as degenerates became less and less plausible – hence, less effective as an instrument of social control. “De...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Tales of Death and Deviance
• Part I  The Death of Deviance?
• Part II  Productive Deviance
• Part III  Doing Deviance between Teaching and Research
• Index