Labelling Theory Flashcards
What did Cicourel find out about labelling?
Found that officers’ typify actions - their commonsense theories or stereotypes of what the typical delinquent is like - led them to concentrate on certain ‘types’.
What two effects did Becker identify due to the new las invariably?
- the creation of a new group of ‘outsiders’ - outlaws or deviants who break the new rule.
- the creation or expansion of a social control agency (such as the police) to enforce the rule and impose labels on offenders.
What does Cicourel argue about topic versus resource?
He argues that these statistics do not give us a valid picture of the patterns of crime and cannot be used as a resource - that is, as facts about crime. Instead we should treat them as a topic for sociologists to investigate.
What types of deviance does Lemert distinguish between?
Primary and secondary
What is primary deviance?
Primary deviance refers to deviant acts that have not been publicly labelled. These acts are not part of an organised deviant way of life, so offenders can easily rationalise them away, for example as a ‘moment of madness’.
What is secondary deviance?
Is the result of societal reaction - that is, of labelling. Being caught and publicly labelled as a criminal can involve being stigmatised, shamed, humiliated, shunned or excluded from normal society. Once an individual is labelled, others may come to see him only in terms of the label. This becomes his master status.
What does Lemert argue can happen once the master status has been applied to an individual?
This can provoke a crisis for the individual’s self-concept or sense of identity. One way to resolve this crisis is for the individual to accept the deviant label and see themselves as the world sees them. In turn, this may lead to a self-fulfilling deviant label, thereby becoming what the label says they are.
What does Downes and Rock note?
We cannot predict whether someone who has been labelled will follow a deviant career, because they are always free to choose not to deviate further.
What is deviance amplification?
The deviance amplification spiral is a term labelling theorists use to describe a process in which the attempt to control deviance leads to an increase in the level of deviance. This leads to greater attempts to control it and, in turn, this produces yet higher levels of deviance. More and more control produces more and more deviance, in an escalating spiral or snowballing feedback process.
What two types of negative labelling does Braithwaite identify?
Disintegrative shaming
Reintegrative shaming
What is disintegrative shaming?
Where not only the crime, but also the criminal, is labelled as bad and the offender is excluded from society.
What is reintegrative shaming?
Labels the act but not the actor - as if to say, ‘he had done a bad thing’, rather than ‘he is a bad person’.
What does Braithwaite argue about societies with reintegrative shaming?
As society forgives the offender and accepts them back into society, the wrongdoer is less likely to be pushed into secondary deviance. As a result crime rates tend to be lower in these societies.
How do Marxists criticise the labelling theory?
Argue that it fails to examine the links between the labelling process and capitalism. As a result, it focuses on ‘middle range officials’ such as policemen who apply the labels, rather than on the capitalist class who make the rules in the first place. It also fails to explain the origins of the labels, or why they are applied to certain groups, such as the working class.
Lost the several ways the labelling theory can be criticised?
- it tends to be deterministic, implying that once someone is labelled, a deviant career is inevitable
- it’s emphasis on the negative effects of labelling gives the offender a kind of victim status. Realist sociologists argue that this ignored the real victim.
- by assuming that offenders are passive victims of labelling, it ignores the fact that individuals may actively choose deviance
- it fails to explain why people commit primary deviance in the first place, before they are labelled
