DEVIANCE &

SOCIAL
CONTROL

DEVIANCE
In

a sociological context, DEVIANCE describes actions or

behaviors that violate social norms, including formallyenacted rules, as well as informal violations of social norms.

It

is the purview of sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists,

and criminologists to study how these norms are created,
how they change over time and how they are enforced.

DEVIANCE AS A VIOLATION OF
SOCIAL NORMS
Norms

are rules and expectations by which

members of society are guided. . They are not
necessarily moral, or even grounded in morality;
in fact, they are just as often pragmatic and,
paradoxically, irrational.

great many of what we call manners, having

no logical grounds, would make for good
examples here.

 Norms

are rules of conduct, not neutral

or universal, but ever changing; shifting
as society shifts; mutable, emergent,
loose, reflective of inherent biases and
interests, and highly selfish and onesided.

They

vary from class to class, and in the

generational "gap." They are, in other
words, contextual.

 Deviance

can be described as a violation of these

norms.
Deviance is a failure to conform to culturally
reinforced norms. This definition can be
interpreted in many different ways. Social norms
are different in one culture as opposed to another.
For

example, a deviant act can be committed in

one society or culture that breaks a social norm
there, but may be considered normal for another
culture and society. Some acts of deviance may be
criminal acts, but also, according to the society or
culture, deviance can be strictly breaking social
norms that are intact.

 Viewing

deviance as a violation of social norms,

sociologists have characterized it as "any thought, feeling
or action that members of a social group judge to be a
violation of their values or rules";"violation of the norms
of a society or group"; "conduct that violates definitions
of appropriate and inappropriate conduct shared by the
members of a social system"; "the departure of certain
types of behavior from the norms of a particular society at
a particular time"; and "violation of certain types of group
norms [... where] behavior is in a disapproved direction
and of sufficient degree to exceed the tolerance limit of
the community."

DEVIANCE AS REACTIVE
CONSTRUCTION
Deviance is concerned with the process whereby actions,
beliefs or conditions (ABC) come to be viewed as deviant
by others.
Deviance

can be observed by the negative, stigmatizing

social reaction of others towards these phenomena.
Criminal behavior, such as theft, can be deviant, but other
crimes attract little or no social reaction, and cannot be
considered deviant. Some beliefs in society will attract
negative reaction, such as racism and homonegativity or
alternatively even race-mixing or homosexuality, but that
depends on the society.

 People

may have aconditionordiseasewhich

causes others to treat them badly, such as having
HIV, dwarfism, facial deformities, orobesity.
Deviance isrelative to time and place because
what is considered deviant in one social context
may be non-deviant in another.
Killing

another human is considered wrong except

when governments permit it during warfare or for
self-defense.
The issue ofsocial power cannot be divorced from
a definition of deviance because some groups in
society can criminalize the actions of another
group by using their influence on legislators.

THEORIES

There are three broad sociological

describing deviant behavior, namely

a]

structural functionalism,
b] symbolic interactionand
c]conflict theory.

classes

STRUCTURAL-FUNCTIONALISM
Social

integration is the attachment to groups and

institutions, while social regulation is the adherence
to the norms and values of the society. Those who are
very integrated fall under the category of "altruism"
and those who are not very integrated fall under
"egoism."

Similarly,

those who are very regulated fall under

"fatalism" and those who are very unregulated fall
under "anomie". Durkheim's strain theory attributes
social deviance to extremes of the dimensions of the
social bond.

 Altruisticsuicide

(death for the good of the

group), egoistic suicide (death for the removal of
the self-due to or justified by the lack of ties to
others), andanomicsuicide (death due to the
confounding of self-interest and societal norms)
are the three forms of suicide that can happen
due to extremes.

Likewise, individuals may commit crimes for

the good of an individual's group, for the selfdue to or justified by lack of ties, or because the
societal norms that place the individual in check
no longer have power due to society's corruption.

DURKHEIM'S BASIC INSIGHT

Durkheim(1858-1915) claimed that deviance was in fact

a normal and necessary part of social organization. When
he studied deviance he stated there are

four
important functions of deviance.
1."Deviance affirms cultural values and norms. Any
definition of virtue rests on an opposing idea of vice:
There can be no good without evil and no justice without
crime"[11] .

2. Deviance defines moral boundaries, people

learn right from wrong by defining people as
deviant.
3. A serious form of deviance forces people to
come together and react in the same way against
it.
4. Deviance pushes society's moral boundaries
which, in turn leads to social change.

ROLE
DIVIDE

PLAYING

INTO GROUPS OF FIVE

MEMBERS..
PUT UP A ROLE PLAY POINTING OUT
DEVIANT BEHAVIOR IN DIFFERENT
SETTINGS:
SCHOOL,
BUSINESS,
CHURCH,
COMMUNITY
ORGANIZATION AND OTHER GROUP
SETTNGS.

MERTON'S STRAIN THEORY

Robert

K. Merton discussed deviance in terms of goals

and means as part of his strain/anomie theory.
Where Durkheim states that anomie is the confounding
of social norms,
goes further and states that anomie is the state
in which social goals and the legitimate means to
achieve them do not correspond. He postulated that an
individual's response to societal expectations and the
means by which the individual pursued those goals
were useful in understanding deviance.

Merton

. Specifically, he viewed collective action as motivated by

strain, stress, or frustration in a body of individuals that
arises from a disconnection between the society'sgoals and
the popularly usedmeansto achieve those goals. Often,
non-routine collective behavior (rioting, rebellion, etc.) is
said to map onto economic explanations and causes by way
of strain.
These two dimensions determine the adaptation to
society according to the cultural goals, which are

a]

society's perceptions about the ideal life,

and

b] to bthe institutionalized means, which are the

legitimate means through which an individual may aspire
to the cultural goals.

 Merton

described Five [5] types of deviance

in terms of the acceptance or rejection of social goals

and the institutionalized means of achieving them:
1. Innovation is a response due to the strain generated
by our culture's emphasis on wealth and the lack of
opportunities to get rich, which causes people to be
"innovators" by engaging in stealing and selling drugs.
Innovators accept society's goals, but reject socially
acceptable means of achieving them. (e.g.: monetary
success is gained through crime).

 Merton

claims that innovators are mostly

those who have been socialized with
similar world views to conformists, but
who have been denied the opportunities
they need to be able to legitimately
achieve society's goals.

Conformity- . Conformistsaccept
society's goals and the socially acceptable
means of achieving them (e.g.: monetary
success is gained through hard work).

2.

Merton

claims that conformists are mostly

middle class people in middle class jobs
who have been able to access the
opportunities in society such as a better
education to achieve monetary success
through hard work.

3. Ritualismrefers to the inability to reach a

cultural goal thus embracing the rules to the
point where they lose sight of their larger goals
in order to feel respectable.
Ritualists reject society's goals, but accept
society's institutionalized means.
Ritualists are most commonly found in dead-end,
repetitive jobs, where they are unable to
achieve society's goals but still adhere to
society's means of achievement and social
norms.

Retreatismis a response that shows the

inability of a person to reject both the cultural
goals and means letting the person "drop out".

4.

Retreatists

reject the society's goals and the

legitimate means to achieve them. Merton
sees them as true deviants, as they commit
acts of deviance to achieve things that do not
always go along with society's values.

 5.

Rebellionis somehow similar to retreatism,

because rebellions also reject both the cultural
goals and means but they go one step further
and a "counterculture" that supports other
social orders that already exist (rule breaking).

Rebels

reject society's goals and legitimate

means to achieve them, and instead create new
goals and means to replace those of society,
creating not only new goals to achieve but also
new ways to achieve these goals that other
rebels will find acceptable.

SYMBOLIC INTERACTION
As

political movements come to terms with their

"terror of adolescence," the debates seem to coalesce
around the suffering of those who are victims of
violent crime. The fear of crime that seems to be
forever increasing is a powerful personal and political
emotion.

Ironically,

the fear of kids in Canada has been fuelled

by two phenomena that are largely the result of
business as usual.

 First,

part of the problem has been the

increased visibility of young people in
public places.

As

industry "rationalizes" production by

reducing employment costs, youth
unemployment rises, as high as 30% in
some areas in Canada.

 Simply

put, more youth have increasingly more

idle time and the work that is available is poorly
paid, bereft of benefits and offers little in terms
of meaningful apprenticeship.

The

typical employee at fast food chains is the

adolescent, the typical wage is at or just above
minimum wage, the work is typically hard and
quite dangerous, and the typical benefits package
is nonexistent.

 Furthermore,

the building of centralized

shopping centers is not done with community
solidarity in mind, but is merely the result of
profit considerations.

That adolescents gather in such places is

neither anathema to profit, nor is it discouraged
by private interests. Yet the presence of youth
in places such as shopping malls fuels the panic
that kids are loitering with intent.

 Second,

people gain their images and opinions

about the nature and extent of crime through the
media.

In

Canada, much of our vicarious experience

with youth crime is filtered through television.
Television news, much of which teeters on the
edge between fact and fiction, is highly
sensational, selective to time and place, and
focuses primarily on the bad.

argue below that such depictions are not

based on reality, but rather on the wants
of a presumed audience.

All

forms of news accounts, though they

are mandated to be based on an objective
reality, are largely based on consumer
demand.

 What

we are left with, then, is a gulf between

reality and perception. The reality is that youth
are mostly disenfranchised from the democratic
process at all levels of governance.

They

are disadvantaged in the labor market and

have few services available to them unlike the
adult world. When they do break the law, they
victimize other youth who are like them.
Furthermore, youth crime has not increased
significantly, although the prosecution of youth
crime has.

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY

DEVIATION
Edwin

Lemert developed the idea of primary and

secondary deviation as a way to explain the
process of labeling. Primary deviance is any
general deviance before the deviant is labeled as
such.

Secondary

deviance is any action that takes

place after primary deviance as a reaction to the
institutional identification of the person as a
deviant

 When

an actor commits a crime (primary

deviance), however mild, the institution will bring
social penalties down on the actor.

However, punishment does not necessarily stop

crime, so the actor might commit the same
primary deviance again, bringing even harsher
reactions from the institutions.

 At

this point, the actor will start to resent the

institution, while the institution brings
harsher and harsher repression.

Eventually, the whole community will

stigmatize the actor as a deviant and the actor
will not be able to tolerate this, but will
ultimately accept his or her role as a criminal,
and will commit criminal acts that fit the role
of a criminal.

 Primary

and Secondary Deviation is what causes people to

become harder criminals. Primary deviance is the time
when the person is labeled deviant through confession or
reporting. Secondary deviance is deviance before and after
the primary deviance.

Retrospective

labeling happens when the deviant

recognizes his acts as deviant prior to the primary
deviance, while prospective labeling is when the deviant
recognizes future acts as deviant. The steps to becoming a
criminal are:

 The

steps to becoming a criminal are:

Primary deviation.
Social penalties.
Secondary deviation.
Stronger penalties.
Further deviation with resentment and hostility towards
punishers.
Community stigmatizes the deviant as a criminal.
Tolerance threshold passed.
Strengthening of deviant conduct because of
stigmatizing penalties.
Acceptance as role of deviant or criminal actor.

FUNCTIONS OF DEVIANCE

Deviant acts can be assertions of individuality and identity, and

thus as rebellions against group norms of the dominant culture
and in favor of a sub-culture.

Deviance affirms cultural values and norms. It also clarifies

moral boundaries, promotes social unity by creating an us/them
dichotomy, encourages social change, and provides jobs to
control deviance. "Certain factors of personality are
theoretically and empirically related to workplace deviance,
such as work environment, and individual differences."Situated
in the masculinity and deviance literature, this article examines
a "deviant" masculinity, that of the male sex worker, and
presents the ways men who engage in sex work cope with the
job."

CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION
AS DEVIANCE
Cross-cultural

communication is a field of study that

looks at how people from different cultural
backgrounds endeavor to communicate. All cultures
make use of nonverbal communication but its meaning
varies across cultures.

In

one particular country, a non-verbal sign may stand

for one thing, and mean something else in another
culture or country. The relation of cross-cultural
communication with deviance is that a sign may be
offensive to one in one culture and mean something
completely appropriate in another.

 This

is an important field of study because as

educators, business employees, or any other
form of career that consists of communicating
with ones from other cultures you; need to
understand non-verbal signs and their
meanings, so you avoid offensive conversation, or
misleading conversation.

Below

is a list of non-verbal gestures that are

appropriate in one country, and that would be
considered deviant in another.

Asian

Canada

United States

United States

Avoiding eye
The O.K. signal
contact is
expresses
considered polite approval

Thumbs up-used
for hitch hiking,
or approving of
something

Someone may
whistle when
happy.

Whistling can
express approval,
as in cheering at a
public event.

United States

Japan

United States

Nigeria

Europe

The O.K. signal

means that you
are asking for
money.

Using your
middle finger is
very offensive.
Used in place of
inappropriate
language.

Whistling may be
This is a rude
a sign of
gesture in Nigeria. disapproval at
public events.

When saying
hello or talking to
someone it is
impolite to not
look directly at
the person.

United States

These are just a few non-verbal cross-cultural communication

signs of which one should be aware. Cross-Cultural
communication can make or break a business deal, or even
prevent an educator from offending a student. Different cultures
have different methods of communication, so it is important to
understand the cultures of others.

Shaving of heads after death of a family member is more

common in some African cultures.

Proponents of the theory of a Southern culture of honor hold

that violent behavior which would be considered criminal in
most of the United States, may be considered a justifiable
response to insult in a Southern culture of honor.

TYPES OF DEVIANCE

Taboo is a strong social form of behavior considered

deviant by a majority. To speak of it publicly is
condemned, and therefore, almost entirely avoided. The
term taboo comes from the Tongan word tapu
meaning "under prohibition", "not allowed", or
"forbidden".

Some forms of taboo are prohibited under law and

transgressions may lead to severe penalties. Other forms
of taboo result in shame, disrespect and humiliation.
Taboo is not universal but does occur in the majority of
societies. Some of the examples include murder, rape,
incest, or child molestation.

Howard Becker, a labeling theorist, touched basis with different

types of deviant behaviors. There are four different types of
deviant behaviors falling into different categories. One of the
four is falsely accusing an individual which falls under others
perceiving you to be obtaining obedient or deviant behaviors.

Pure deviance, which falls under perceiving one to participate in

deviant and rule-breaking behavior, is also a part of the four
types of deviant behaviors listed above. Conforming, which falls
under not being perceived as deviant, but merely participating in
the social norms that are distributed within societies, can also be
placed into the category with pure deviance and falsely accused.

Lastly is secret deviance which is when the individual is not

perceived as deviant or participating in any rule-breaking
behaviors.

Slide presented by:

Jean Kevin L. Tubello

Jason Gozun
Lara May Lumawag