Subcultures and Deviance

Question 1

When did “deviant subculture” first become visible?

Answer 1

In the mid-16th century via a genre called rogue literature

Question 2

Where does subculture research say that subcultures emerged from?

Answer 2

20th Century consumer society

Question 3

Who were rogues manifested similarly to?

Answer 3

Strangers, members of society who were understood foremost in terms of their difference from normal society

Question 4

What are some examples of rogues?

Answer 4

Card sharps, pimps and prostitutes, thieves

Question 5

Who was Henry Mayhew?

Answer 5

• He was a newspaper journalist for a London paper called The Morning Chronicle
• He engaged in what would today be called “field work” by observing the behaviours of those in society he saw as deviant and collecting their stories through interview like conversations with them

Question 6

What did Andrew Tolson argue about Mayhew’s work?

Answer 6

He argued that while Mayhew’s work was liberal and reformist in nature, opened up a range of approaches to the classification, supervision and policing of urban populations

Question 7

Who was Robert Park?

Answer 7

• He was a sociologist at the University of Chicago and developed the Chicago school of sociology

Question 8

What did Robert Park write about transportation and communication?

Answer 8

• He wrote that the rapid improvements in modes of transportations and communication had changed the social organization of modern cities
• All sorts of people meet and mingle who never fully comprehend one another
• This leads to a breakdown in social cohesion smaller group culture rather than a homogenous urban culture

Question 9

According to studies, when are criminal behaviour patterns mostly acquired?

Answer 9

During the youthful days of criminals’ lives

Question 10

According to Fredric Thrasher’s 1927 study, how did gangs form?

Answer 10

• They formed through casual interaction but were subsequently integrated through conflict, presumably with people in other areas of the city
• Gangs were not formed by psychological abnormality, but rather sociability and a shared sense of adventure and excitement

Question 11

How did Fredric Thrasher characterize gangs?

Answer 11

He characterized them in terms of behaviour including “meeting face to face, milling, moving through space as a unit, conflict and planning”

Question 12

What was the Taxi-Dance Hall?

Answer 12

• A study by Paul Cressey in 1932 about the social worlds of private clubs were women were employed to dance with men
• A young woman who worked as a “taxi dancer” was called so because “like a taxi driver with his cab, she is for hire and is paid in proportion to the time spent and the services rendered”

Question 13

Describe the findings of the Taxi-Dance Hall Study?

Answer 13

1. One of Cressey’s concerns was how young women regressed through a text dancing career, from dancing to some eventual form of prostitution before returning to normal society
2. Dancers tended to come from eastern European immigrant families whose career choices were relatively limited
3. Rather than surrender to a dead-end marriage or job, these women chose an alternative means of satisfaction and increased prestige that accompanied a job earning more money than their peers

Question 14

What was the strain theory?

Answer 14

A functionalist theory that suggested society’s structure provided both cultural goals – aspirations that society’s members share – and institutionalized means of achieving those goals and that a society in a perfect equilibrium would provide everyone with goals as well as the means to achieve them

Question 15

What is the problem with the strain theory?

Answer 15

Modern societies were not in equilibrium and their social structures provide unequal access to the institutionalized means of achieving those goals

Question 16

What is an example of the strain theory?

Answer 16

• Working class youths who were socialized via mainstream culture to recognize the value and prestige associated with driving a new car
• They don’t see legitimate opportunities to own one by conforming to traditional roles (ex: get a good job)
• Therefore were likely to engage in delinquent behaviours that would enable them to satisfy the cultural goal, such as auto theft

Question 17

What was Merton’s theory of culture and deviance?

Answer 17

Marginalized groups would seek ways of overcoming strain in order to fit into larger societies during the 1940s

Question 18

Define “hegemony”

Answer 18

Hegemony is the idea that the ruling class in any society seeks to maintain its power by gaining consent of the subjugated classes through cultural means

Question 19

What was Althusser’s argument of hegemony?

Answer 19

He argued that it was hardly possible for people not to be socialized to accept power as a natural, common sense structure that shaped their everyday lives because the most basic institutions in society – family, religion, education and work – functioned as sites of power and control

Question 20

What are the 3 reasons little literature uses the term “deviance”?

Answer 20

1. There are few assumptions among researchers about the relative good or bad cultures being studied so it is rarely assumed that certain cultures are or are not deviant
2. Because the CCCS explicitly rejected a deviance approach to the study of working-class youth culture, many studies no longer rely on that older literature for insight
3. The research on marginal cultures tends to rely on political-economic discourses where deviance is a tangential concept; and for those studies that frame subcultures in terms of non-normativity, concepts like resistance are preferred since the emphasis is more likely to be on insiders who rarely use a term like “deviant except as a badge of honour