13: Interactionist Theories

Question 1

Symbolic Interactionism

Answer 1

• A sociological perspective that focuses on the dynamist of how people interpret social situation and negotiate the meanings of these situations with others.
• It differs from more structurally focused perspectives in seeing individuals as actively creating the social world rather than just acting within the constraints of culture and social structure.

Question 2

Interactionist theories

Answer 2

Turn our attention to the smaller details of social life. They view crime as a consequence of interpersonal relationships and of what those relationships mean.

Question 3

Blumer re symbolic interactionism

Answer 3

1. People act towards the human and nonhuman objects in their lives according to

Question 4

Primary deviation

Answer 4

When an individual commits deviant acts but do not adopt a primary self-identity as a deviant (eg. tries opioid drugs, shoplifts once or twice without getting caught).

Question 5

Secondary deviation

Answer 5

When an individual accepts a label as a deviant. They thereafter adopt a self-identity that confirms and stabilizes a deviant lifestyle/career.

Question 6

Drift

Answer 6

A psychological stat of weak normative attachment to either deviant or conventional ways.

Question 7

Moral rhetorics

Answer 7

In the study of crime, this is the set of claims and assertions deviants make to justify their deviant behaviour. The moral rhetoric if a group is an important component of socialization onto a deviant identity.

Question 8

Stigma

Answer 8

Erving Goffman - a personal characteristic that is negatively evaluated by others and thus distorts and discredits the public identity of the individual. For example, a prison record may become a stigmatized attribute. The stigma may lead to the adoption of a self-identity that incorporates the negative social evaluation.

Question 9

Moral entrepreneurs

Answer 9

Someone who defines new rule and laws or who advocated stricter enforcement of existing laws.
Often such entrepreneurs have a financial or organizational interest in particular definitions or applications of law.

Question 10

Empirical evidence

Answer 10

Evidence as observed through the senses (smell, touch, hearing, taste, sight) and to some extend measured. Only form of scientifically acceptable evidence.

Question 11

Ethnic groups

Answer 11

A group of individuals having a common, distinctive subculture. Ethnic groups differ from races; refers to values, norms, behaviours and language, not necessarily physical appearance.

Question 12

Master status

Answer 12

A status overriding all others in perceived importance. Whatever other personal or social qualities individuals possess, they are judged primarily by this one attribute. “Criminal” exemplifies a master status that influences the community’s identification of an individual.

Question 13

Career contingency

Answer 13

An unintended event, process, or situation that occurs by chance, beyond the control of the person pursuing the career.

Question 14

Continuance commitment

Answer 14

Adherence to a criminal

Question 15

Self-enhancing commitment

Answer 15

Commitment leading to a better opinion of oneself.

Question 16

Self-degrading commitment

Answer 16

Commitment that leads to a poorer opinion of oneself.

Question 17

Criminal identity

Answer 17

Social category, imposed by the community, which correctly or incorrectly defines an individual as a particular type of criminal. The identity pervasively shapes his or her social interactions with others. This concept is similar to master status.

Question 18

Differential association.

Answer 18

Developed by Edwin Sutherland in the 1930s, this theory argues that crime, lie any social behaviour, is learned in association with others. If individuals regularly associate with criminals in relative isolation from law-abiding citizens, they are more likely to engage in crime. They learn relevant schools for committing crime and ideas for f
justifying and normalizing it.

Question 19

Nine propositions describing the complicated pattern of interaction: Differential Association

Answer 19

1. Learn how to engage in crime
2. Through interaction with other who know the ways
3. small, face-to-face groups
4. Learn: Criminal technique, motives, attitudes and rationalization.
5. Disregard for the community’s legal code
6. Through association with likeminded, not associating with law-abiding citizens.
7. Association with criminals and noncriminals vary in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity.
8. Rests in the same principles as learning any other kind of behaviour.
9. Response to the same cultural need and values as noncriminal behaviour.

Question 20

Drift among juvenile delinquents

Answer 20

The deviant drifts between two moral worlds. In youth offender subcultures, the deviance is facilitated by certain moral rhetorics and by other aspects of the subterranean tradition. Neither compelled to deeds nor freely choosing them; neither different in any simple or fundamental sense from the saw abiding, nor the same; conforming to certain traditions in life while partially unreceptive to other, more conventional traditions.

Question 21

How moral entrepreneurs create and enforce the laws

Answer 21

1. Assert the existence of a particular condition, situation, or state of affairs in which human action is implicated as a cause. (State the problem)
2. Define the asserted condition as offensive, harmful, undesirable –> but amenable to correction. (Define the problem - why)
3. Stimulate public scrutiny of the condition.
   - - Claims are explained by non-scientific quasi-theories, which are selectively constructed to square with the views of the claims makers.

Question 22

How people are socialized into a life of crime (according to interactionist theory)

Answer 22

Firstly, deviants learn the criminal ways, attitudes, perspectives and justifications through differential association with others who are already criminals.
Secondly, they are socialized into a life of crime by being placed in, and come to accept (often grudgingly) a criminal identity.

Question 23

Strengths and limitations of interactionist theory on crime

Answer 23

Limitations notes by neo-Marxists (not enough focus on how society influences delinquency), empiricalists (who believe the theory does not provide empirical data to support their claims), and ethno-methodologists. At the moment, none of these approaches have progressed beyond finding weaknesses in the interactionist perspectives.

Theoretical and practical implications: Juvenile delinquents should avoid the official label of criminal unless the crime is very serious.