The Differential Perceptions of Male and Female Deviants

Abstract

Hepburn (1975) stated that the definition of the audience determines whether deviance exists so that societal reaction can take place. However, the audience has not received systematic attention in the literature of the sociology of deviance. The existing literature examines mostly the reactions of official social control agents. Consequently, the purpose of this research is to determine the stereotypes held by a group besides social control agents. Further, the research explores whether the sex of the deviant affects the stereotypes associated with deviant behaviors. The data were gathered from a sample of college students attending a small liberal arts college. Twelve types of deviants representing a wide variety of behavior patterns were evaluated using an Osgood semantic differential scale. The data show that the respondents perceived each type of deviant as having a different stereotype and that the stereotypes did not overlap. Furthermore, the stereotypes were not complex ones, nor all negative. The data further indicate that the sex of the deviant was influential in how people responded to that deviant.     

USING AN INTEGRATED TYPOLOGY OF DEVIANCE TO ANALYZE TEN COMMON NORMS OF THE U.S. MIDDLE CLASS

In a recent article we presented an integrated typology in which we categorized deviance based on both norms and evaluations. Cross-classifying normative expectations and societal evaluations identifies four types of deviance. Negative deviance implies negatively evaluated underconformity (or nonconformity); rate busting depicts negatively appraised overconformity; deviance admiration designates positively reacted to underconformity (or nonconformity); and positive deviance signifies positively sanctioned overconformity. To assess the efficacy of this typology in relation to a system of norms, ten middle-class norms—previously defined as the predominant ones in the United States by Tittle and Paternoster (2000)—were evaluated in relation to our integrated typology. Those norms are: loyalty, privacy, prudence, conventionality, responsibility, participation, moderation, honesty, peacefulness, and courtesy. Each potentiality is identified; for example, regarding the norm of loyalty, apostasy is the negative deviance form (negative deviance has already been outlined in relation to all ten norms); rebellion is the deviance admiration type; fanaticism is the rate busting scenario; and altruism is the positive deviance kind.     

The Social Marketability of Self: Toward a New Theory of Social Deviance

Abstract

Deviance theory has problems in accounting for. (a) the form deviance takes within and between social groups, and (b) why individuals continue or discontinue deviant careers and responses. This paper deals with these problems by providing a new conceptualization of social deviance. Essentially, the theory is a combination of two ideas. First, we can all be thought of as social commodities; our commodity value (marketability) is based on the qualities we possess that others desire. Second, we all desire certain identities (ideas of who we are or would like to be) validated by others through their actions. Deviance is viewed as a response to strains involving this marketability-identity nexus that is in a continuous process of change.     

Understanding Latino Family Attitudes in Relation to Latino Gang Members' Substance Abuse

Abstract

This paper presents a content analysis of ethnographic interviews from long-term Latino gang members whose families have recently immigrated to the United States. Positive relationships within the family, parental support, a consistent and constructive parental discipline style and adult supervision tend to be related negatively to adolescents' deviant behaviors and their association with deviant peers. An expected positive relationship between the parent-child constructs, adolescents' deviant behaviors, and association with deviant peers was not found. Positive family attitudes toward deviance were associated with the number of drug type transactions and greater levels of drug use. This association has been overlooked in previous research.

Our study expands the examination of the influence a family's positive attitudes toward deviance has on the apparent progression of drug use in a sample of Latino gang members with histories of drug use. An analysis of structured interview content differentiated family attitudes toward deviance as: encouragement and tolerance, imitation, and defining norms.     

Legitimating the First Tattoo: Moral Passage through Informal Interaction

Once considered low class or dangerous symbols, tattoos began to be defined as hip, trendy, and glamorous in the 1990s. Using the increasing popularity of tattoos among nineties youth as an example of moral passage, this article examines some of the interpretive processes at work in the destigmatization of deviance. Whereas researchers have positioned political action or population shifts as the main forces influencing moral passage, this article posits a new route toward social change. It builds on participant observation data with a population of middle‐class tattooees and examines how individuals attempted to legitimate their tattoos during interactions with others. First‐time tattooees in the 1990s are seen as agents caught between multiple symbolic orders—symbolic orders that generated conflicting images of tattoos. Relying on a set of legitimation techniques, middle‐class tattooees worked to overcome the negative meanings associated with tattoos by getting body art that conformed to core mainstream norms and values. By examining the creation and use of these legitimation maneuvers, this article reveals the way in which definitions of deviance are negotiated in everyday contexts. In addition, the process of legitimation identified in this article points to one way in which everyday interactions can contribute to larger cultural shifts.     

DISINHERITANCE AND WILL CONTESTS AS RECIPROCITY AND DEVIANCE: An Empirical Extension of Gouldner and Rosenfeld Based on the Wills of Providence, 1985

Traditional content analysis of the 319 last wills probated in Providence, RI, 1985, was used to test eight of Rosenfeld's empirical generalizations about the social characteristics of disinheritances and will contests and his explanation of them in terms of Gouldner's concept of the norm of reciprocity. Many of Rosenfeld's generalizations are applicable to the Providence data, although disinheritance might be "drifting down" into the middle and lower classes and seems to take at least five forms: positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, positive deviance, negative deviance, and wastage avoidance. Disinheritance might become much more frequent but also multiform, sophisticated, consequential, and controversial in the decades ahead.     

Norm formation in social influence networks

I propose a mechanism of norm formation and maintenance that combines classical theory in social psychology on attitudes and social comparisons with a formal network theory of social influence. Underlying the formation of norms is the ubiquitous belief that there is a correct response for every situation and an abiding interest for persons to base their responses on these correct foundations. Given such a belief, a normative evaluation of a feeling, thought or action is likely to arise when persons perceive that their positive or negative attitudinal evaluation is shared by one or more influential others. If interpersonal agreements validate attitudes and transform attitudes into norms, then the development of a theory of norm formation may draw on extant “combinatorial” theories of consensus production that describe how shared attitudes are produced and maintained in groups. The network theory of social influence that I employ is one such combinatorial approach. An important sociological implication of this network theory is that the content of norms must be consistent with the social stratification (or more general pattern of inequality) of interpersonal influences in a group. I illustrate the theory with an analysis of Roethlisberger and Dickson’s (1939) classic observations on the Bank Wiring Observation Room.     

Bad Sports: Explaining Sport Related Deviance

While sometimes dismissed as an unimportant subject for analysis, the study of sport has offered important insights into our social world. Yet the academic study of sport‐related deviance has not kept pace with the explosion of popular media products regarding deviance in sport over the past four decades. This can be explained in part by the sheer diversity of sport related deviance which defies applying a singular theoretical explanation. A number of approaches from the sociology of sport and other social sciences offer useful ways of making sense of sport related rule‐breaking while also providing valuable insights into larger questions regarding crime and deviance. This paper reviews three contemporary perspectives used in the study of sport deviance: deviant overconformity, moral panics and consumptive deviance. Drawing from exemplary studies of performance‐enhancing drug use, hooligan violence, and sport celebrity scandals, I highlight the ways in which these perspectives offer a “sociological corrective” to media misrepresentations as well as insights that extend beyond sport and into contemporary social issues including race and gender relations, economic inequalities, crime, youth violence, and celebrity culture. I conclude by addressing new developments and avenues for future research.     

Deviant Acts by Complex Organizations: Deviance and Social Control at the Organizational Level of Analysis1

The study of deviance and social control can be expanded to recognize that (1) organizations, not just individuals, commit deviant acts, and (2) other organizations have responsibilities for preventing or controlling that deviance. This paper focuses on these phenomena. It defines organizational deviance, applies Blau and Scot?s cui bono taxonomy to suggest types of organizational deviance, provides a categorization of controller organizations by the types of deviance they control, and considers the social control of organizational deviance. The paper concludes by suggesting that organizational deviance should be among the theoretical, empirical, and methodological interests of an increasing number of contemporary sociologists.     

The Cyber Worlds of Self‐Injurers: Deviant Communities,Relationships, and Selves

We explore how self‐injurers, a group of deviants who primarily were loners, now use the Internet to form subcultural and collegial relations. Drawing on virtual participant‐observation in cyber self‐injury groups, over eighty face‐to‐face and telephone in‐depth interviews, and over ten thousand e‐mail postings to groups and bulletin boards, we describe and analyze the online subcultures of self‐injurers. Via the Web, they have become cyber “colleagues,” simultaneously enacting two deviant organizational forms and challenging the idea that deviant loners can exist in a cyber society. We further analyze these individuals and their interactions to compare and contrast the venues that they use, the communities and relationships that they form, and their relation to real life. We contribute to symbolic interactionism through our social constructionist stance toward the creation of virtual communities and relationships, our focus on identity and stigma, our view of social organization as grounded in the panoply of human interpersonal relationships, our contrast of the competing reality claims posed by virtual as opposed to the solid world, and our discussion of the modern versus postmodern self.     

Norms of Filial Responsibility for Aging Parents Across Time and Generations

This investigation examined the normative expectation that adult children should be responsible for the care of their aging parents, and how this norm changes over the adult life span, across several decades of historical time, in relation to generational position in families, and between successive generations. Analyses were performed using 4 waves of data from the University of Southern California (USC) Longitudinal Study of Generations between 1985 and 2000. A multilevel latent growth model was estimated using 4,527 observations from 1,627 individuals nested within 333 families. Results revealed that filial norms weakened after midlife, in response to parental death, and over historical time, yet strengthened in later‐born generations. Findings are discussed in terms of the malleability of filial responsibility over the life course.     

The Network Structure of Crime

From theoretical physics to field‐driven anthropology, researchers are increasingly exploring how the connections among individuals, amoebas, brain cells, organizations, and institutions affect what we feel, think, and do. However, the application of social network analysis to the study of crime, deviance, and violence has arrived a bit late to this network turn in the social and behavioral science. I argue that this network turn in the social sciences be an important turning point in the study of crime and deviance, but only if taken as an opportunity to evaluate our core theoretical principles and consider new ways to understand and measure them. The goal of this essay is to take stock of the state of the field, while also providing a moment of pause to consider some fruitful ways of advancing this line of inquiry.     

Caught Between Love and Money: The Experiences of Paid Family Caregivers

This paper considers the experiences of family home care providers, paid an hourly wage by California’s In Home Supportive Services program to care for disabled or elderly relatives. These caregivers are unique in that they provide care in what Arlie Hochschild calls the “third sector” of social life, where norms and responsibilities tied to work and family intersect. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations of family home care providers, we find that providers perceive their paid caregiving as deviant behavior that violates social norms surrounding family care, i.e. that people should not be paid for the care of kin. Family caregivers manage the norm violation associated with their carework by offering “accounts” that 1) emphasize the tasks and skill associated with caregiving and 2) by framing their carework as a public good that benefits the larger community. These accounts allow family providers to distance themselves from the norm violation of receiving a wage for care and to reconstruct their actions in a positive light.     

UNTIMELY ACTS

Interactionists and labelling theorists have made actors central to a jointly constructed process of deviance. This article extends their arguments to the deviant act itself and suggests how uses and conceptions of time and temporality distinguish deviant acts from routine or other unconventional acts. It treats time systematically in relation to designations of deviance by, first, correlating timing with temporal structures; second, comparing and contrasting deviant acts with untoward and anomalous acts; third, discussing nine temporal dimensions involved in the construction of deviant acts by illustrating how diagnosticians identify problematic drinking; fourth, elaborating the use of these dimensions to deviance in general and to issues of legal and "universal wrongs" which imply a negotiated moral order in modern society.     

Issues in the Study of Deviance*

Several issues in the study of deviance are discussed: the definition of deviance; the significance of the deviant act; cultural relativism; the influence of social structures and causation. By using departures from rules to define deviance, sociologists may repeat fallacies of formalistic jurisprudence. Deviance is best left undefined, and preferably delimited ontologically in terms of middle range theory. Spector and Kitsuse's revisionist theory is judged insufficient for macro-analysis of deviance because they fail to reconcile the influence of objective and subjective factors. Cottrell's choice and feedback model is advocated as a means to study the dynamic process wherein values are aggregated in the social definition of deviance. The problem of bringing objective factors into this analysis is solved by showing how changing costs alter the order in which values are satisfied and thus change the overt pattern of societal reaction.     

A psychosocial view of social deviancy

By offering negative sanctions for certain types of behavior, a society preserves its stability and reaffirms its norms. What is labeled as deviant varies from social context to social context. The social worker should not be preoccupied with deviant behavior per se, but with the individual, himself. He should treat the deviant within the same metapsychological perspective that he utilizes for the treatment of any patient. He studies the patient's wishes, conflicts, and life story, and particularly focuses on where psychosexual maturation has been halted. Treatment of the deviant patient or client within a solid social work perspective seeks to offer a maturational experience.Address to New York State Society of Clinical Social Workers, May 5, 1974.     

On the edge: Balancing health, participation, and autonomy to maintain active independent living in two retirement facilities

This study examines how independent living residents in Continuing Care Retirement Communities (CCRCs) work to maintain a healthy, active community. Specifically, this paper elucidates how independent living residents, who have high status in CCRCs but also face transitions to more advanced care, manage their daily lives to build a positive sense of community against the backdrop of potential health and social declines. The researcher supplemented four years of observation in one CCRC and two years of observation in another with qualitative interviews with thirty residents from both facilities. Results indicated that shared sentiments contrasting the active social world in independent living with other living units, norms of mutual support balanced with autonomy, social participation as a source of belonging (or isolation), and definitions of deviance surrounding functional health and manners framed residents' understandings of daily life by reaffirming independent living residents' privileged status in each facility.