3. What is Deviance?
• Deviance describes actions or behaviors that violate
social norms, including formally-enacted rules
(e.g., crime), as well as informal violations of social norms
(e.g., rejecting custom, traditions and mores). 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.
4.
5. 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”.
6. Types of Deviant
• 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
meaning is "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.
7. • 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.
• Conforming, which falls under not being perceived as
deviant, but merely participating in the social norms that
are distributed within societies.
• Lastly is secret deviance which is when the individual is
not perceived as deviant or participating in any rule-
breaking behaviors.
8. Deviance as a violation of social norms
• Norms are rules and expectations by which members of society
are conventionally guided. Deviance is a failure to conform to
these norms. Social norms are different in one culture as
opposed to another. For example, a deviant act can be
committed in one society that breaks a social norm there, but
may be normal for another society.
• 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"; "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."
9. • 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 (e.g., violating
copyright laws by downloading music on the internet).
• 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 a condition or disease which causes others to treat them
badly, such as having HIV, dwarfism, facial deformities, or obesity.
• Deviance is relative to time and place because what is considered
deviant in one social context may be non-deviant in another
(e.g., fighting during a hockey game vs. fighting in a nursing home).
Killing another human is considered wrong except when governments
permit it during warfare or for self-defence. The issue of social 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.
10. Merton's strain theory
• Merton described 5 types of deviance in terms of the
acceptance or rejection of social goals and the institutionalised
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).
• 2. Conformists accept society's goals and the socially
acceptable means of achieving them (e.g.: monetary success
is gained through hard work). 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.
11. • 3. Ritualism refers 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
institutionalised means.
• 4. Retreatism is a response that shows the inability of a
person to reject both the cultural goals and means letting
the person "drop out". Retreatists reject the society's
goals and the legitimate means to achieve them.
• 5. Rebellion is 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).
12.
13. Mechanism of social control
• a way of directing or influencing members’
behavior to conform to the group’s values and
norms.
