Chapter 3

Question 1

Interpretive theories

Answer 1

Send in contrast to positivist theories that seek to identify generalizable, immutable laws that govern the environment.
-Emphasize how people develop understandings of the world around them, other people, and themselves

Question 2

Critical theories

Answer 2

Underlying interest in emancipation and working toward social justice. Focus on the power relations that underlie the creation of social rules

Question 3

What are interpretive and critical theories interested in

Answer 3

The social construction of deviance

Question 4

Symbolic interactionism

Answer 4

Suggest social action emerges from meaning, and meaning is continuously created and recreated through interpreting processes during interactions with others.

Interpreting processes that contribute to our meanings and understandings are: role taking and looking-glass self.

Question 5

Role taking

Answer 5

Try to see what the world from a different person’s perspective

Question 6

Looking-glass self

Answer 6

to determine how to look or act and how we feel about ourselves, we imagine how we appear to others and what they think of that appearance.

May be significant or generalized others.

Question 7

Labelling theories:

Answer 7

When individuals are given a deviant label, people start to treat them differently, in a way that corresponds to that label. Overtime, it impacts how these labelled individuals see themselves. As their identities change so do their subsequent behaviours and life choices. Being labelled deviant serves as the force for the transition from primary to secondary deviance.

Question 8

Primary deviance

Answer 8

We all engage in little acts of rule breaking that are seldom noticed and rarely caught by others

Question 9

Secondary deviance

Answer 9

When one is caught and builds a lifestyle around the way others see you

Question 10

Master status:

Answer 10

A core characteristic that overrides your other characteristics. Once a person is labeled deviant that becomes their master status.

Question 11

Dramaturgy, front stage selves, and back stage selves

Answer 11

dramaturgy: in social life we all have particular roles we play

Front stage selves: when in front of certain groups we play our roles in certain ways; controlling the images we present and the messages we convey to the audience

Back stage selves: when around people from our private lives we feel like we don’t have to play a particular role and can be our true selves

Question 12

Stigma management

Answer 12

Having to control one’s characteristic that’s stigmatized. There are implications for specific stigma management strategies.

Question 13

Tertiary Deviance

Answer 13

A stage that can potentially emerge after the transition from the primary to secondary deviance. Those labelled who develop an identity and lifestyle around that label may resist the label as being deviant. Seek to redefine “normal”

Question 14

Deviant career

Answer 14

refers not to those who make a living out of deviance, but rather to the way that deviance unfolds in people’s lives. People enter deviance, manager their experiences of deviance, and may quit (or exit) deviance, all of which are intertwined with changes in their identities and understandings of self.

Question 15

Career contingencies

Answer 15

influence the directions that people take at various points in the deviant career.

Question 16

Critical Theories–Theoretical level and practical level

Answer 16

Theoretical: they analyze the centrality of structures and processes of power in the creation of societal expectations and rules, and people’s everyday experiences within them.

Practical: these are all theories that have an emancipatory interest—an interest in working toward social justice for society’s powerless.

Question 17

Conflict Theories

Answer 17

¬ Presume that social rules do not emerge out of consensus but rather out of conflict and serve the interests of the most influential groups in society.
¬ Suggest that members of powerful groups are less likely to break the rules because the rules were created to serve their interests in the first place.
¬ Propose that members of less powerful groups are more likely to act in ways that violate social rules, either because
1. their sense of oppression and alienation causes them to act out in rule breaking ways.
2. Social rules have defined the acts of the powerless as deviant in the first place.

Question 18

What did Karl Marx propose in regards to conflict theories

Answer 18

¬ proposed that society consists of a small group of powerful people at the top and a large group of powerless people at the bottom

o Society’s powerful (the bourgeoisie) are those who own the means of production; society’s powerless (the proletariat) are the wage earners who work for the people who own the means of production.

Question 19

Difference between instrumental marxists and structural marxists

Answer 19

Structural marxists: propose that institutionalized social rules are created by the powerful to protect the capitalist economic system rather than to protect individual capitalists.

Instrumental marxists: propose that institutionalized social rules are created by the powerful to serve the interests of the powerful—the owners of the means of production.

Question 20

Pluralist conflict theory

Answer 20

focuses on multiple axes of inequality that make up the structure of society based on conflicts between various economic, religious, ethnic, political, and social groups.

Question 21

Culture conflict theory

Answer 21

that in societies having multiple diverse cultural groups there will be multiple sets of norms that may conflict with each other.

Question 22

Group conflict theory

Answer 22

George Vold suggested that multiple groups are always maneuvering for more power in society and clash with each other as a result of their simultaneous struggles for power.

Question 23

Power reflexive theories

Answer 23

Emphasize the intertwining of power relations and claims to knowledge. Some power-reflexive theorists analyze structures of surveillance and the creation of self-surveillance, by which we regulate our own behaviour even if no one else is doing so

Question 24

Postmodern theories

Answer 24

Propose the notion of the “end of the individual: and posit that people have become consumers rather than citizens. These theorists reject overarching theories of society and claim that the moral codes that would enable people to rationally understand society have eroded.