labelling Flashcards
labelling (4)
- the social construction of deviance (becker)
- differential enforcement (pilliavin & briar)
- typificarions (cicourel)
effects of labelling (lemert, young, cohen)
the social construction of deviance
- deviance is a social construct
-becker= people labelled as ‘outsiders’ , ‘deviance in the eye of the beholder’= person only becomes deviant once labelled
ao3: marxists criticise for failing to locate the origin of such labels in the structure of capitalism
differential enforcement
- not everyone who commits an offence is punished for it
-pilliavin & briar= decisions to arrest based on stereotypical ideas about manner, dress, gender, class, ethnicity
ao3= marxists would support, arguing that the RC selectively punish crimes of WC
typifications
-cicourel= police use stereotypes of ‘typical deviant’, more likely to stopped, arrested, charged (eg. wc/ethnic minorities)
- wc fit these typifications, so police patrol wc areas= more wc arrests= crime stats aren’t reliable
ao3= left realists argue that crime stats do reflects wc high rates of offending as a result of marginalisation leading to more crime
the effects of labelling
-lemert= societal reactions causes ‘secondary deviance’
- primary dev. = acts that haven’t been publicly labelled, mostly uncaught eg. 32mph in 30mph zone
- sec. dev. = results from societal reaction/ labelling which becomes a master status/ controlling identity
- sfp leads to deviant sc
eg. young= police perception of hippies smoking weed was junkies= sc where drug use became central activity
- deviance amplification spiral= attempt to control deviance leads to it increasing instead
cohen= study of mods and rockers, media exaggeration= moral panic= arrested more youths= m&rs labelled ‘folk devils’, resulting in more deviance
ao3= fails to explain why people commit primary dev. in the first place
also ignores rejection of labels eg. fuller’s study
