It is not possible to identify people as normal, able-bodied, moral, responsible, healthy, law-abiding, insiders, as belonging, and as a host of other positives, unless it is also possible for others in the same society, community or milieu to be seen as abnormal, disabled, immoral, irresponsible, sick, criminal, outsiders or as strangers . Positives are only possible if negatives are too, as Wittgenstein (1958) affirmed in formulating his ‘polar opposites argument’. Moreover, these binary distinctions are not without discernible social functions. It was the proto-functionalist Durkheim , anticipating the dominant Parsonian paradigm in America in the 1950s, who noted that recognising, highlighting and sanctioning/punishing the negatives is important, or ‘functional’, for the continuing stability of social order. Conformance or compliance with the norms that define the social order at any given time and place—that is, that reproduce the status quo—relies on the rooting out of misfits in all their heterogeneity and the variety and severity of the threats they represent.
Social control, as sociologists conventionally term it, can of course be exerted in the absence of overt coercion or repression. For example, in most developed societies it has long been the—unsought and unwanted—function of state-licensed physicians to police the sick to ensure they do not too long resist the capitalist ‘imperative to work’. Sanctioning and punishment can take many forms, from executions and imprisonment to barely perceptible strategies of avoidance. The former Labour MP Jack Ashley (1973) recounted his experiences after suddenly and unexpectedly losing his hearing. In the House of Commons dining room soon after he noticed how quickly embarrassed colleagues, even friends, made excuses to slip away, unable, unwilling or simply too impatient to cope with improvised modes of communication. Insiders versus outsiders is a template that allows for an extensive reach, as this volume bears testimony.
So all societies and segments within them, from actual regions, localities, communities and neighbourhoods to their less (or almost un-)constrained virtual equivalents, have and act out these positive versus negative tensions. Many, if not all, such tensions involve attributions of shame and blame, and these provide the principal focus for this contribution. I shall draw a clear analytic distinction between the two, notwithstanding the tendency in everyday practice, in the ‘lifeworld’, to use them interchangeably. I shall deploy the term stigma to signal episodes of non-conformance. The stigmatised infringe against norms of shame. Their infringements do not imply non-compliance or culpability. It is as if they are ‘imperfect beings’. The contrast is with deviance. Deviance here refers to falling foul of norms of blame. Non-compliance is accented. Infringements bring condemnation: deviants are culpable. Whereas shame imputes an ‘ontological deficit ’, deviance reflects a ‘moral deficit ’.
Three principal themes run through this volume. The first acknowledges the ongoing interplay of agency , culture and structure in the mundane enactments or performance of shame and blame. Agency , I shall contend, is always contextualised by culture and structured (though never structurally determined). Consider the case of a young girl from Myanmar either ‘sold’ by an impoverished family or trafficked to work in a brothel in Bangkok. The new culture into which she has been inserted is likely suffocating and oppressive to the point of social claustrophobia, yet it would be quite wrong in my view, and insulting, to count her agency as lost: agency can at most be subdued and temporarily misplaced or displaced. Safe sex and the sharing of needles might register low on priorities oriented to day-to-day survival, but neither her reflexivity nor her agency is ever entirely absent. Not even concentration camp confinement and brutality can cancel agency . Agency is part of being human.
Second, a credible sociology of shame and blame must range from and do justice to macro- through meso- to micro-processes. As we shall see, it was Goffman’s (1968) signal contribution to illuminate micro-processes via his sensitisation of the concept of stigma (with which mine has some resonance), but he did not extend much beyond brief flirtations with meso-processes. No sociological explanation of the lot of the young girl deposited in the brothel in Bangkok, of an asylum seeker trapped outside Calais, or of an unemployed disabled adult rendered homeless by the rolling out of Universal Credit in the UK, can be comprehensive or complete in the absence of meso- and macro-theories of the contexts and circumstances in which people experience shame and/or blame.
Third, I shall argue that any sociology worth its salt must address issues of transformative policy and practice, and this is a logical and a moral ‘must’. Appropriate disciplinary outcomes cannot be captured in institutionalised metrics of productivity dwelling on the likes of funded projects, media exposure and articles in high-impact journals. Rather, sociology is necessarily allied with what Habermas (1984, 1987) calls ‘lifeworld rationalisation’, namely a responsibility to inform and galvanise public deliberation and action. It is not enough to document, publish and retreat or move on. I develop the notions of ‘foresight’ and ‘action sociology’ introduced elsewhere (Scambler , 2018a). The former refers to postulating and exploring possible ‘alternative futures’, the latter to an evidence-based commitment to securing a rationalisation of the lifeworld sufficient to allow for the challenging and righting of intolerable wrongs.
To lend continuity to the text, subsequent chapters will sporadically feature discussions of four groups in particular: migrants /refugees ; the long-term sick and/or disabled; the homeless ; and sex workers. For each, the stigma/deviance dialectic has a special, personal and painful relevance. It will suffice here to give brief introductions to these groups.
Migrants/Refugees
Movement around the globe is breaking historical records, both in absolute numbers and in proportions of (national) populations. The ‘push and pull’ factors at work are varied but there is no doubting the causal role of climate change and shifting ecological systems, geopolitics, wars, and absolute and relative poverty. Definitions of migrants are resonant of these causal factors, but have also become increasingly ‘weaponised’ for political purposes, as is evidenced by the election of Trump in the USA and the narrow opting for a UKIP-promoted Brexit in the UK. This is especially true of international migration, a term that only too often subsumes, and calculatingly so, asylum seekers in pursuit of places safe from persecution, torture and even state-sanctioned homicide.
A general typology of migration might differentiate between four broad categories:
- economic (e.g. to find work);
- social (e.g. to be close to family or friends or to enhance the quality of life);
- political (e.g. to flee from persecution or war);
- environmental (e.g. to escape natural disasters).
In the UK experiencing near-full employment through the 1950s and into the 1960s, economic considerations were to the fore. Moreover, pull factors were augmented by deliberate campaigns to attract workers from the British Commonwealth, initially from the Caribbean and later from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (i.e. from New Commonwealth), to work in textile factories, transport, health or steelworks, often to undertake so-called cellar jobs lacking appeal to native workers. Over time social impulses were appended to the push and pull of economic factors. Exceptionally, East African Asians who had settled in Uganda became political migrants to the UK with the assumption of power of Idi Amin. By the 1970s, however, a UK no longer enjoying either full employment or the growth, let alone prosperity, familiar in the post-war years was beginning to tighten migration controls.
Membership of the European Union (EU) facilitated further bouts of migration. In 1973, the UK joined what was then the European Economic Community (EEC), consisting initially of six states, its membership subsequently being ratified by a referendum in 1975. The number of member states grew incrementally until, in 2004, Poland and seven other countries joined, once again boosting migration to the UK, with the UK one of three countries to immediately open its borders to workers from the new member states (Polish migrants were in the vanguard). The EU now comprises 28 states, and migration controls within the EU vary from one member state to another. Prior to the ‘yes/no’ referendum on the UK’s continued EU membership in 2016, far-right advocates of Brexit effectively fermented racism among those who judged themselves deprived of jobs, houses and hope by presenting leaving the EU as the sole means of arresting migration to the UK, a process held accountable for the miseries people were enduring. Post-2010 politically motivated policies of ‘austerity ’ barely got a mention. Brexit won the day, with divisive and damaging consequences yet to be resolved.
Of growing pertinence in the twenty-first century in general are political and environmental factors. These are represented in the notion of ‘forced migration or displacement’. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), forced migration is ‘a migratory movement in which an element of coercion exists, whether arising from natural or man-made causes (e.g. movements of refugees and internally displaced persons as well as people displaced by natural or environme...