Interactionism

• Becker - Moral Entrepreneurs

  • “Social groups create deviance by creating the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance and by applying those rules to particular people and labelling them as outsiders“
  • Moral Entrepreneurs - How and why rules and laws get made.
  • Creation of outsiders - outlaws or deviants who break the new rule.
  • Expansion of social control agencies - such as the police to enforce the rule and impose labels on offenders.
• Labelling theory

  Whether a person is arrested, charged or convicted depends on:

  • Their interactions with agencies of social control such as courts.
  • Their appearance, backgrounds and personal biography
  • The situation and circumstance of the offence
• Cicourel - Negotiation of Justice

  • Found typifications (their common sense theories or stereotypes of what the typical delinquent is like)
  • Law enforcement showing a class bias towards working class
  • Police patrolling working class areas more intensively, ore arrests and confirming their stereotypes
  • Youths from such backgrounds as likely to offend in the future.
  • Justice is not fixed but negotiable
• Lemert - Primary and Secondary deviance, effects of labelling

  • Primary and secondary deviance
  • Primary: Deviant acts that have not been publicly labelled “moments of madness“
  • Secondary: Result of societal reaction, being caught and publicly labelled as criminal.
  • Master status — Deviant career
• Jock Young - Hippies in Nottingham

  • Drugs were peripheral to hippies lifestyle
  • Labelling by the police led hippies to increasingly see themselves as outsiders
  • Retreated into closed groups where they became deviant subcultures
  • Not the act itself, but the reaction of society that creates deviance
  • Criticism: People have the choice whether to be deviant or not.
• Stan Cohen - Folk Devils and Moral Panic

  • Look at the reaction to ‘mods and rockers’ disturbances
  • Press exaggeration / distorted reporting = moral panic
  • Led to deviance amplification - deviance amplification spiral
• Labelling view of crime

  • Interested in how and why acts are defined as criminal
  • The reaction to an act that labels the person as criminal or act as deviant
  • Depending on the time and context