Understanding Culture, Society and Politics

1. Conformity and Deviance
Conformity and deviance (Macionis 2012: 194)
Every society is a system of social control or attempts by society to regulate people’s
thoughts and behavior. Social control encourages conformity to certain norms and
discourages deviance or norm breaking. Deviance range from minor infractions, such as
bad manners, to major infractions, such as serious violence.
Norms that become specified and institutionalized are called laws. Crime refers to the
violation of the law.
There is a lack of consensus in society regarding which behaviors or traits are deviant.
What is considered as deviance will vary across time, places, and social groups. How a
society defines deviance, who is branded as deviant, and what people decide to do about
deviance all have to do with the way society is organized.
The functions of deviance (Macionis 2012: 197). According to Emile Durkheim (1858–
1917), deviance performs the following functions:
 Affirms cultural norms and values. Deviance is needed to define and support
morality. There can be no good without evil and no justice without crime.
 Clarifies moral boundaries. By defining some individuals as deviant, people draw
a boundary between right and wrong.
 Brings people together. People typically react to serious deviance with shared
outrage, and in doing so reaffirm the moral ties that bind them.
 Encourages social change. Deviant people suggest alternatives to the status quo
and encouraging change.
Merton’s strain theory (Macionis 2012: 197–198). Robert Merton (1910–2003) argued
that the extent and type of deviance people engage in depend on whether a society
provides the means (such as schooling and job opportunities) to achieve cultural goals
(such as financial success). Conformity means achieving cultural goals through
approved means. However, the strain between the cultural goal and the lack of
opportunities to achieve these goals using approved means may result in deviance.
Merton identifies four types of deviance: innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion.
Innovation involves using unconventional means (for example, Steve Jobs, the founder
of the Apple computer company, and his colleagues who, without support from big
corporations, worked in a garage to invent personal computers) rather than conventional
means (working for an established computer company) to achieve a culturally approved
goal (wealth). In ritualism, people do not care much about the goal (getting rich) but stick
to the rules (the conventional means) anyway in order to feel “respectable.” A third
response to the strain between the cultural goal and the approved means is retreatism,
rejecting both cultural goals and conventional means so that a person in effect “drops
out.” The fourth response is rebellion. Like retreatists, rebels reject both the cultural
definition of success and the conventional means of achieving it, but they provide
alternatives to the existing social order.