Social Deviance

Lecture 1
 Deviance
Deviance refers to rule-breaking behavior of some kind which fails to
conform to the norms and expectations of a particular society or social
group.   
Deviance is closely related to the concept of crime, which is law
breaking behavior. Criminal behavior is usually deviant, but not all
deviant behavior is criminal.
The concept of deviance is more difficult to define than crime.
Deviance includes both criminal and non-criminal acts, but it is quite
difficult to pin down what members of any society or groups actually
regard as deviant behavior.
 Aspects of Deviance
Plummer (1979) discusses two aspects of defining deviance, using the
concepts of societal deviance and situational deviance.
Societal deviance refers to forms of deviance that most members of a
society regard as deviant because they share similar ideas about
approved and unapproved behavior.
Situational deviance refers to the way in which an act being seen as
deviant or not depends on the context or location in which it takes
place.
 Dependency of Deviance
1. Historical Period
2. Place or Context
3. Social group.
 Nature of Deviance
• Positive Deviance: is when someone will over conforms the social
norms.
• Negative Deviance: involves behavior that fails to meet accepted
norms.
Deviance can be good or bad or Deviance can be positive or negative.
• Anomie: According to Emile Durkheim, “when a society is missing,
weak, or unclear norms anomie has occurred”.
 Relative Phenomena of Deviance
• Deviance is relative means that there is no absolute way of defining a
deviant act. Deviance can be defined in relation to a particular
standard and no standards are fixed or absolute.
• As such deviance varies from time to time and place to place. In a
particular society an act that is considered deviant today may be
detained as normal in future.
• No act is inherently deviant. It becomes deviant only when it is
socially defined as such and definitions vary greatly from time to time,
place to place and group to group.
 Crime
• Crime has also been defined in social or non-legal terms. The social definition of
crime is that it is behavior or an activity that offends the social code of a particular
community.
• Caldwell has explained it as “an act or a failure to act that is considered to be so
detrimental to the well-being of a society, as judged by its prevailing standards, that
action against it cannot be entrusted to private initiative or to haphazard methods but
must be taken by an organized society in accordance with tested procedures.”
• Thorsten Sellin, has described crime as “violation of conduct norms of the
normative groups”.
• The sociological discipline that concerns itself with criminal studies is termed
criminology.
Difference Between Deviance and Crime
Discussion
• Try to come up with your own examples which illustrate the Context
Dependency of Deviance.
• Is there any act which is inherently deviant (deviant in every context)?