The rule in sociology of deviance is CHAOS: there is no real order to the sociology of deviance
Competing models of human behavior (Kuhn:Structure of Scientific Revolutions)
Many claims not falsifiable (Popper): propositions are grounded in larger belief structures
Evolutionary fallacy like Morson’s Chronocentric fallacy
Schools to know the names of: radical, control theory, functionalism
James Wilson: theory must be politically useful to be valid
Read academic writers with skepticism
: each professor is an entrepreneur (pushing for tenure and promotion): petty efforts at novelty/making extreme statements to get published: once tenured, must defend point of view of subject matter.
We often think of deviance starting somewhere else (HIV always began somewhere else): link to ideas of otherness.
Sociologist v. criminologist
as reflecting the dichotomy between academics and practitioners, between pure and applied science.
BIG IDEA: Studying deviance allows us to read books that would otherwise make US deviant, ask the questions that are typically surrounded with inhibitions, and to make unusual associations.
CHAPTER TWO
Definition of deviance
: "Banned or controlled behavior which is likely to attract punishment or disapproval."
Deviance is usually a concealed phenomenon: little for most subjects to gain in cooperating with sociologists; camoflage behaviors and deny and destort conduct when somehow detected; deviants seldom have a well-developed sense of group membership (lack self-awareness as participant in a class) (only know their own idiosyncratic experience).
Access is tough
: Varies by which population one is trying to study.
Mention made of a few key methods: participant observation, self-report surveys, victim surveys.
Indirect sources: literary criticism, media studies, passive observation.
Statistics are actually compressed summaries of social processes
(they are constructions): cite Kitsuse & Cicourel (in the reader).
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Some say that deviance is a dead area in sociology: irrelevant in post-modern world: All cultures equally valid.
Some attempt to synthesize old schools of deviance into a larger model: tie Left realist, labelling, control, and radical theories into one approach.
Some adhere to critical criminology: links liberalism (universal human rights) and democratic socialism (a just society).
Some advocate constitutive criminology: links phenomenology (experience based social science) and critical criminology (similar to Left Realism, but with strong element of abolitionism): Propose concept of transpraxis (examination of consequences to determine current policies: much like the ideas of harm reduction used in some policy centers).
Overfocus on nominalism
: Too many names without real need for them.
Keynes: No theory is ever dead.
Post-modern living with many good things (emancipation of gender, ethnicity, sexuality) and many bad (global havoc, schism, self-extinction by pollution, deforestation, global warming, and other side-effects of overpopulation and overconsumption): Could self-correct via ecological controls.
Strain theory: used anomie (disintegration theory) and subcultural transmission: predicted that growing inequality and increasing consumer expectations would lead to greater crime: relationship not linear, however (c.f., 1930s and 1960s): not explain crime of the affluent.
Labelling theory
: moral careers, moral entrepreneurship: reduction of label application (diversity instead of deviance) and increase in decarceration did not reduce rates of crime: Cohen’s punitive city: social exclusion (Charles Murray’s underclass theory: socially constructed concept, little evidence for concept, justify increased punitive steps).
Control theory
: Modernity itself damages social bonds: Gated communities as a consequence of control theory?: Culture concepts more important than national bonds: Stigma and shaming as linked here to control theory.
Situational control theories
: problem that the rational criminal is a pure calculating agent without history or personality?: crime reduction focus is popular because it has immediate consequences (but are they the best consequences?).
Critical criminology
: restorative justice are secondary to those of retribution (and this is a serious flaw in the social fabric): Marxist liberal thinking is stronger and more pragmatic in Continental Europe than in US/UK (didn’t suffer the factional debates): modern critical theorists claiming that capitalism is out of control (and now without communist counterbalance): increasingly punitive methods of policing and punishment.
Some argue that because theories haven’t worked, no theory will ever work
: this, however, reduces criminology to a frightening kind of administration of crime control (factors out the human element).