week 10

• deviance: any action, human condition, or belief that violates the norms of the society within which it ocurs and for which that violator is likely to be punished
• crime: any action that violates the criminal laws of a given society and that is punishable with sanctions such as fines and/or jail time
• deviences serves to:

  1. heighten collective sentiments
  2. sharpen perceptions of moral imperatives
  3. more tightly intergrate the community against the transgressor
• functionalism: theory based on the premise that all aspects of a society serve a purpose and that all are indispensable for the long term survival of the society
• anomie (robert merton): a starting point for fresh theorizing
• strain: the discrepancies between culturally defined goals and the institutionalized means available to acheive these goals
• conformists: accepting both goals and means
• innovators: accepting the goals but rejecting the mean
• ritualists: rejecting both goals and means
• rebels: rejecting both goals and means and substituting new versions of both
• Agnew's theory of strain, climate change and crime


  argued that certain strains or stressors lead to an increase in criminal behaviour (temperature increases, extreme weather effects)
• conflict perspective: social inequalities at the root of who and what gets labelled as deviant
• corporate crime: any conduct of a corporation, or its representatives/employees acting on the corporation's behalf, that is criminal, a civil, or an administrative violation
• coleman (2005) suggested that white collar crime can be attributed to the coming together of 3 factors:


  1. motivation, which is often conditioned by a sense of competition in business, professions, and politics
  2. culturally learned neutralization
  3. the opportunity to commit crimes
• primary deviance: little effect on a person's self-concept
• secondary deviance: a deeper deviant identity
• labelling theory: the idea that deviance and conformity result not so much from what people do as from how other respond to those actions
• stigma: a powerfully negative label that greatly changes a person's self-concept and social identity
• retrospective labelling: interpreting someone's past in light of some present deviance
• projective labelling: using a person's deviant identity to predict future actions
• medicalization: happens when moral and-or legal deviance is turned into a medical condition
• Edwin Sutherland's differential association theory: a person's tendency toward conformity or deviance depends on the amount of contact with other who encourage or reject conventional behaviour
• Travis Hirschi's control theory: social control depends on people anticipating the consquences of their behaviour
• Hirschi links conformity to 4 different types of social control


  1. attachment
  2. opportunity
  3. involvement
  4. belief
• interactionism: the various symbolic-interaction theories all see deviance as a reality that may emerge within the process of interaction