Topic 4a: Interactionist explanations: Flashcards
Becker - the deviant career
Deviancy is not a quality of the act a person commits but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’. The deviant is the one to whom that label has been successfully applied: deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label.
Becker - the deviant career - process to becoming defined as deviant
Primary deviation or committing the act itself
Secondary deviation or getting caught – the label is applied by moral entrepreneurs (individuals or a group which tries to create or enforce a rule)
If the label is successfully applied, a master status will ensue and a self-fulfilling prophecy will occur
The individual has the power to reject the label and can negotiate his/her identity
Becker - the deviant career eval
Akers criticised labelling theorists for the way he claims they present deviants as being perfectly normal people who are no different from anyone else. Akers argues that there must be some reason why the label is applied to certain groups/individual and not others. As long as labelling fails to explain this, then it is an incomplete theory.
Lemert (Primary and secondary deviance)
distinguished between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ deviance. Primary deviance is rule breaking and secondary deviance the consequence of the responses of others.
To illustrate this, Lemert studied the coastal Inuits of Canada who had a long-rooted problem of chronic stuttering. Lemert suggested that the problem was ‘caused’ by the great importance attached to ceremonial speech-making. Failure to speak well was a great humiliation. Children with the slightest speech difficulty were so conscious of their parents’ desire to have well-speaking children that they became too anxious about their own abilities. It was this very anxiety, that led to chronic stuttering.
Becker - master status (Primary and secondary deviance)
The person labelled as ‘deviant’ will eventually come to see themselves as being bad Becker used the term master status to describe this process - and points out that once a label has successfully been applied to a person, then all other qualities become unimportant and they are responded to solely in terms of this master status.
(Maybe add Malinowski)
primary and secondary deviance eval
Marxist writers argue that Labelling does not address the issue of differences in power between groups, which makes some more able than others to get laws passed and enforced which are beneficial to them.
Liazos criticises labelling theorists for simply exploring marginally deviant activities. Even by claiming to speak for the underdog, labelling theorists hardly present any challenge to the status quo because they don’t appear to investigate the crimes of the rich and powerful
Gouldner, a Marxist, supports Liazos. He argued that all they did in their studies was to criticise doctors, psychiatrists and police officers for their role in labelling - and they failed ever to look beyond this at more powerful groups who benefit from this focus on marginal groups.
Becker (Creating rules: moral entrepreneurs) 1
labelling theorists argue that laws are a reflection of the activities of people (moral entrepreneurs) who actively seek to create and enforce laws. Becker’s most famous example is his study of the outlawing of cannabis use in the USA in the 1937. Cannabis had been widely used in the southern states of the USA, and its outlawing was the result of a successful campaign waged by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
Becker (Creating rules: moral entrepreneurs) 2
However, Becker points out that the campaign was only successful because it ‘plugged in’ to values commonly held in the USA which included:
the belief that people ought to be in control of their actions and decisions;
that pleasure for its own sake was wrong;
that drugs were seen as addictive and as such ‘enslaved’ people.
See moral panics
Becker (Creating rules: moral entrepreneurs) eval
Some sociologists accuse labelling theorists of overstating and generalising the impact of the media on shaping social responses to behaviour. McRobbie. See the criticisms of the ‘moral panic’ idea in Topic 4c.
Intro
Interactionists argue that definitions of normality and deviance are a social construction. This means that the same thing or act can be interpreted in different ways. Deviance is therefore relative and will depend on a person’s individual point of view, the place in which they live, the culture in which they are brought up, the time-period in which they live and the social context in which the activity occurs.
Conclusion
Becker - Deviancy is not a quality of the act a person commits but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an ‘offender’. The deviant is the one to whom that label has been successfully applied: deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label. (use cicourel for a point)
