Deviance and Social Control

Question 1

What is social cohesion?

Answer 1

The willingness of members of a society to cooperate with each other to survive and prosper.

Question 2

What is social deviance?

Answer 2

1. Any transgression against the socially established norm.
2. Behavior that violates a group or society’s standards of conduct or expectations.

Question 3

What are informal deviances?

Answer 3

Violating folkways and selected mores.

Question 4

What is formal deviance?

Answer 4

Crimes, deviance formalized into laws.

Question 5

What changes whether something is labeled as deviant or not?

Answer 5

1. Characteristics of the people involved.
2. Social context.
3. Time period.

Question 6

What is deviance (lowercase d)?

Answer 6

Rule violations that do not result in a label being placed on your social identity, violating folkways.

Question 7

What is Deviance (uppercase D)?

Answer 7

Violating social rules in a way that causes a label to be placed on our social identity.

Question 8

How is deviance created?

Answer 8

1. It is a social structure.
2. Relative.
3. Identity, bodies, and behaviors can be labeled as deviant.

Question 9

What are the social qualities of deviance?

Answer 9

1. When the behavior occurs (time of day or time period).
2. Who performs the behavior (Adult drinking alcohol v. child drinking alcohol).
3. Where the behavior is performed (ex: Nudity is fine in the home, but not accepted in public).

Question 10

If socialization works, why does deviance occur?

Answer 10

1. The arrangement or structures of social life.
2. Culture.
3. Social intentions.

Question 11

What are the assumptions that structural functionalists make about deviance?

Answer 11

1. Crime and deviance are inevitable and necessary elements of society.
2. Deviance is an adaptive function and serves a part of human social experience.
3. Laws and norms serve key social functions.

Question 12

What is mechanical solidarity?

Answer 12

1. Characterized pre-modern societies.
2. Cohesion was grounded on the sameness of societal parts.
3. We evidence reliability in parts.
4. I can…

Question 13

What is organic solidarity?

Answer 13

1. Characterized more recent human societies.
2. Social cohesion is based on interdependence.
3. I cannot… but you can…

Question 14

What is the collective conscience?

Answer 14

A set of social norms or a common faith by which a society and its members abide, includes assumptions about how the world works.

Question 15

How does society heal a social gash under mechanical solidarity?

Answer 15

Collective acts of vengeance that reinforce the boundaries of acceptability and unite collectively through harsh actions.
ex: Death penalty.
*Gave rise to mechanical sanctions.

Question 16

How does society heal a social gash under organic solidarity?

Answer 16

Focuses on the individual and the punishment is tailored to them for rehabilitation and restitution.
ex: Drug rehab.
* Gave rise to organic sanctions.

Question 17

What is the paradox of deviance?

Answer 17

When someone breaks down social rules, it brings society closer together through collective punishment.

Question 18

What is social control?

Answer 18

A set of mechanisms, strategies, and techniques that create normative compliance and thus prevent deviance.

Question 19

What are informal social sanctions?

Answer 19

Tend to be based on unexpressed but widely known rules of group membership and the bedrock of social control.
*Allows formal social sanctions to have an impact.

Question 20

What are formal social sanctions?

Answer 20

Official or memorialized rules that prohibit types of laws and behavior.

Question 21

What is anomie?

Answer 21

1. The loss of direction felt in a society when social control of individual behavior has become ineffective.
2. The feelings of aimlessness that arises when people can no longer expect life to be predictable, resulting in a state of too little social regulation (increased crime, aggression, and depression).

Question 22

What is the structural-functionalist perspective on crime and deviance?

Answer 22

1. Induces needed social change.
2. Strengthens solidarity.
3. Serves as a safety valve to relieve social pressure.
4. Enhances conformity and social boundary maintenance.

Question 23

What is strain theory/means-ends theory?

Answer 23

The adaption of Durkheim’s theory of anomie by Robert Merton, where anomie is classified as a strain on the individual that is the direct result of conflict between social norms and social reality.
ex: When people have goals, but not the socially acceptable means to reach them.

Question 24

What is the main problem behind anomie?

Answer 24

When society holds out the same goals for all members but does not give people an equal ability to achieve these goals. The strain occurs when the means do not match up to the designated ends.

Question 25

How does strain theory lead to deviance?

Answer 25

When people fail to recognize or accept socially appropriate means, goals, or both.

Question 26

What are retreatists?

Answer 26

Deviants that stop participating in society.

Question 27

What are rebels?

Answer 27

Deviants that reject traditional societal goals and means. Often will seek to replace these goals and means.

Question 28

What are ritualists?

Answer 28

Deviants that reject socially defined goals but not the means. People who seek to “get by”.

Question 29

What are innovators?

Answer 29

Deviants who yearn for material success but lack the patience or economic resources to pursue this in socially acceptable ways.

Question 30

What is the conflict perspective on crime and deviance?

Answer 30

1. Competing class interests cause it.
2. The power elite invest in the economy and social fabric in a way designed to minimize the risk of “social junk” turning into “social dynamite”.
3. Emphasis on the crimes of the poor being more harmful that the crimes of the rich.

Question 31

What is “social junk”?

Answer 31

People who have a marginalized economic position in society.
ex: The elderly.

Question 32

What is “social dynamite”?

Answer 32

People who do not accept current economic arrangements and thus pose a threat to society.

Question 33

What does deviance reflect according to the conflict perspective? Norms and laws?

Answer 33

1. Social inequalities.
2. The interests of the economic elite and socially powerful.

Question 34

True or False: All laws and social rules are fair and good for the majority.

Answer 34

Rarely.

Question 35

What did Quiney point out?

Answer 35

1. The criminal justice system serves the interests of the elite in society.
2. Criminal laws do not reflect a consistent application of social values.

Question 36

What is differential justice?

Answer 36

The variation in how social control is exercised over different groups.

Question 37

What are the key assumptions interactionists make about deviance?

Answer 37

1. The way others see us shapes our behavior.
2. Conformity, deviance, and criminality involve the same mechanisms within the learning process.

Question 38

What are the four key concepts of the interactions theories of deviance?

Answer 38

1. Labeling theory has a clear ‘value’ position that aims to promote policies to prevent labeling minor actions as deviant.
2. Not everyone who is deviant gets labeled as such; the labels are often placed on the powerless by the powerful.
3. Labeling has real consequences, such as deviancy amplification.
4. Crime is sociology constructed. Something is only a crime if those in power label it as such.

Question 39

What is cultural transmission?

Answer 39

When crime and deviant behavior are learned from those around us (primary group).

Question 40

What are differential associations?

Answer 40

The proposal is that our associations vary in frequency, priority, intensity, and duration and lead to deviance when we encounter an excess of definitions favorable to breaking the law over definitions unfavorable to breaking the law.
*Proposed by Edwin Sutherland.

Question 41

What are the three steps of a social label being created?

Answer 41

1. Primary deviance.
2. Secondary deviance.
3. Stigma.

Question 42

What are the characteristics of primary deviance?

Answer 42

1. Initial acts of transgression that are situational or occasional.
2. Behaviors that may be rationalized or otherwise dealt with as functions of a socially acceptable rule.
3. Acts that have not been publicly labeled, and are thus of little consequence.
4. The act is bad, not the person.

Question 43

What are the characteristics of secondary deviance?

Answer 43

1. The individual accepts a label and sees themselves as deviant.

Question 44

What is retrospective interpretation?

Answer 44

The process of reassessing the labeled individual as a whole person, searching for other characteristics or behaviors that seem compatible with the rule(s) violation(s).

Question 45

What is a stigma?

Answer 45

The types of labels given to people whose “primary status” is devalued and negative.
ex: Using a cane or walker.

Question 46

What are the applied values of the different theoretical perspectives?

Answer 46

1. They identify causal factors that affect the levels/rates of crime.
2. They influence social policy decisions about what to do with people engaged in crime/deviance. Minimizes the harm caused by deviance.
3. They highlight shifts in things that influence crime levels/rates.