Week 5: Deviance Flashcards
Deviance
behaviours that violate social norms or common expectations for behaviour
Norms
rules and expectations that guide behaviour
Folkways
informal, less serious norms (eg smoking outside; customs, etiquette
Mores
very important norms; strongly tied to values (eg drinking and driving)
Laws
codified norms (mostly mores)
Taboos
extremely important mores, never acceptable to break
Stigma
when a characteristic of an indv. or group is deemed as undesirable & they face negative sanctions for it
Social Control
when the society is in control of social behaviour
Labelling Theory
Becker’s theory that people who are labelled as deviant will become that (self-fulfilling prophecy)
Necessary Conditions for Deviance:
- A norm or rule exists
- Someone violates it (or is thought to)
- People collectively judge the norm violation to be wrong
Moral Panics
short-lived, intense periods of concern about a moral social issue that is perceived as a major problem, combined with hostility at those suspected to be the cause
- fear is out of proportion to the threat
- eg tide pod challenge, anti-Asian hate crime during Covid, satanic panic 1980s
Moral entrepreneuers
indv or groups who raise concerns & help to create a moral panic
Functionalist theories of deviance
Durkheim: deviance is a social fact & stabilizing element of social life, serves a purpose in society. -affirming society’s ideas of right & wrong
Anomie
a situation where we don’t have morals/social expectations to guide our behaviour
Merton: Strain Theory
not having access to the means necessary to achieving goals can cause someone to resort to deviance
-call it strain
Opportunity Theory
-we don’t all have the same opportunity to act in deviant ways–some more likely exposed
Conflict Theories of Deviance:
C. Wright Mills: power in the hands of a select few sharing a worldview-elites assume their interests are also society’s best interests
- elites can define and police deviance with the intent of maintaining their class status–creates collectively understood ideology that supports the dominant group’s hegemony
- deviance and crime are a function of wealth and power
Theory of Differential Association: (sutherland)
-deviance is a learned behaviour , we learn to imitate & the motivations for acting in deviant ways
Control Theory
focuses on how our ties to mainstream social groups and institutions makes us less likely to be deviant
