Crime : AO3 Interactionist

• +Interactionism overcomes the shortcomings of functionalism which could not explain why some people were labelled and others were not. Interactionists have drawn attention here to the power one has in interaction situations to make the label stick (or to avoid being labelled).
• +It challenges the idea that deviants are different from 'normal‘ people.
• +The work of Becker has shown that deviance is not a simple process of finding and punishing but is in fact quite complicated. The legal authorities attach the label selectively at certain times and in certain places to certain groups who tend to be the least able to defend themselves in society.
• +It shows the importance of the reactions to others and their stereotyping in defining and creating deviance.
• +It shows the power of the moral entrepreneurs in creating deviance and moral panics.
• +It shows how the deviant label can affect the self-concept of the deviant and lead to a deviant career.
• +Interactionists have shown that there are important consequences, which stem from the labelling as can be seen vividly in Becker's four-stage model.
• +Interactionism showed that what we understand by deviance has to be questioned and indeed that identifying crime is by no means a straightforward process.
• -It fails to explain the origin of deviant acts - what made a person actually commit an act, which others saw as deviant in the first place? This is particularly the case in Becker's work.
• -Interactionism makes the deviant appear innocent - as Akers states:"One sometimes gets the impression that people go about minding their own business and then, "WHAM!" - bad society comes along and stops them with a stigmatised label." This is obviously inaccurate, as people know if their acts are deviant. They make decisions to break the law and are often proud of it.
• -Interactionists give the impression that members of society don't see their behaviour as deviant until it is labelled as such. This again is inaccurate - an individual who breaks social norms will be labelled as a deviant whether or not he/she has been "officially" labelled as such.
• -Marxists such as Gouldner argue that although interactionism raises the question of power, it fails to locate the precise source of such power, which the Marxists see as residing with the ruling class - not the police, courts or local media. Marxists believe that one must go beyond the local and examine the issues on a macro scale - a typical structuralist position.
• -Functionalists would reject a great number of these ideas about deviance, suggesting that all interactionism has done is complicate what is essentially a simple picture. Deviants choose to break society's norms and must therefore anticipate some form of reaction. In Cohen's case of the 'mods' and 'rockers', for instance, the youths concerned knew what they were doing was wrong; they were punished by the media and courts so that order could be maintained.
• -Gouldner feels that interactionism reflects too much of a sociology of the underdog, instead of writing objectively about what is there, we are instead being openly invited by Becker and others to take sides - often with the deviant against the forces of law and order.
• -It has little to say about the victims of crime.