There are three broad sociological classes describing deviant behaviour, namely structural functionalism, symbolic interactionism and conflict theory.
Structural-Functionalism
Social integration is the attachment to groups and institutions, while social regulation is the adherence to the norms and values of the society. Those who are very integrated fall under the category of "altruism" and those who are very unintegrated fall under "egoism." Similarly, those who are very regulated fall under "fatalism" and those who are very unregulated fall under "anomie". Durkheim's strain theory attributes social deviance to extremes of the dimensions of the social bond. Altruistic suicide (death for the good of the group), egoistic suicide (death for the removal of the self due to or justified by the lack of ties to others), and anomic suicide (death due to the confounding of self-interest and societal norms) are the three forms of suicide that can happen due to extremes. Likewise, individuals may commit crimes for the good of an individual's group, for the self due to or justified by lack of ties, or because the societal norms that place the individual in check no longer have power due to society's corruption.
Merton's strain theory
Robert K. Merton discussed deviance in terms of goals and means as part of his strain/anomie theory. Where Durkheim states that anomie is the confounding of social norms, Merton goes further and states that anomie is the state in which social goals and the legitimate means to achieve them do not correspond. He postulated that an individual's response to societal expectations and the means by which the individual pursued those goals were useful in understanding deviance. Specifically, he viewed collective action as motivated by strain, stress, or frustration in a body of individuals that arises from a disconnection between the society's goals and the popularly used means to achieve those goals. Often, non-routine collective behavior (rioting, rebellion, etc.) is said to map onto economic explanations and causes by way of strain. These two dimensions determine the adaptation to society according to the cultural goals, which are the society's perceptions about the ideal life, and to the institutionalized means, which are the legitimate means through which an individual may aspire to the cultural goals.
Merton expanded on the idea that anomie is the alienation of the self from society due to conflicting norms and interests by describing five different types of actions that occur when personal goals and legitimate means come into conflict with each other.
- When an individual accepts the goals and means together, he is working under conformity. (Example: White collar employee who holds a job to support a family.)
- When an individual accepts the goals but uses illegitimate means in order to achieve them, he commits crimes in order to emulate the values of those who conform; in other words, they must use innovation in order to achieve cultural goals. (Example: Drug dealer who sells drugs to support a family.)
- An individual may lose faith in cultural goals but still feel obligated to work under the routines of legitimate daily life. This person is practicing ritualism. (Example: A white collar employee who holds a job, but has become completely discontent with the American Dream.)
A young waif steals a pair of boots.
- Individuals may also reject both goals and means and fall under retreatism, when they ignore the goals and the means of the society. (Example: Drug addicts who have stopped caring about the social goals and choose a drug induced reality in favour of the socially accepted lifestyle.)
- Finally, there is a fifth type of adaptation which is that of rebellion, where the individual rejects the cultural goals and the institutionalized means, but seeks to redefine new values for society. (Example: Radicals who want to repair or even destroy the capitalist system in order to build a new social structure.)
Symbolic interactionism
Deviance, according to this view, comes from the individual, who learns his deviant behaviour. The deviant may grow up alongside other deviants or may learn to give excuses for deviance.Through their interactions, individuals create the symbolic structures that make life meaningful. Reality does not impose the names and definitions of things, but rather people must define things and make them meaningful in order to make them socially real. The focus is upon the consciousness and the mind of the individual as opposed to the institutions from where the norms come. Symbolic interactionism allows researchers to understand how individuals negotiate, manipulate, and change the structure and reality to a certain extent. Individuals are already born into a society which has symbolic structures. "Emotion processing is pivotal during development and deficient processing of certain emotions disrupts normal socialization increasing risk for violent behavior later in life. Psychopathy has been linked to both of these phenomena in men; however, the study of such relations has been relatively neglected in women. In the present study, 88 collegiate women completed measures of psychopathy, aggression, and a lexical-decision-task (LDT) assessing the processing of affective words". [9] "Research has demonstrated that (in)effective parenting influences whether a child/adolescent engages in deviant behaviors; however, research is mixed regarding whether that influence is direct."
Sutherland's differential association
In his differential association theory, Edwin Sutherland posited that criminals learn criminal and deviant behaviors and that deviance is not inherently a part of a particular individual's nature. Also, he argues that criminal behavior is learned in the same way that all other behaviors are learned, meaning that the acquisition of criminal knowledge is not unique compared to the learning of other behaviors.
Sutherland outlined some very basic points in his theory, such as the idea that the learning comes from the interactions between individuals and groups, using communication of symbols and ideas. When the symbols and ideas about deviation are much more favorable than unfavorable, the individual tends to take a favorable view upon deviance and will resort to more of these behaviors.
Criminal behavior (motivations and technical knowledge), as with any other sort of behavior, is learned. Some basic assumptions include:
- Learning in interaction using communication within intimate personal groups.
- Techniques, motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes are all learned.
- Excess of definitions favorable to deviation.
- Legitimate and illegitimate behavior both express the same general needs and values.
Neutralization theory
John Sykes and David Matza's neutralization theory explains how deviants justify their deviant behaviors by providing alternative definitions of their actions and by providing explanations, to themselves and others, for the lack of guilt for actions in particular situations.
There are five major types of neutralization:
- Denial Of Responsibility: the deviant believes s/he was helplessly propelled into the deviance, and that under the same circumstances, any other person would resort to similar actions
- Denial Of Injury: the deviant believes that the action caused no harm to other individuals or to the society, and thus the deviance is not morally wrong
- Denial Of The Victim: the deviant believes that individuals on the receiving end of the deviance were deserving of the results due to the victim's lack of virtue or morals
- Condemnation Of The Condemners: the deviant believes enforcement figures or victims have the tendency to be equally deviant or otherwise corrupt, and as a result, are hypocrites to stand against
- Appeal To Higher Loyalties: the deviant believes that there are loyalties and values that go beyond the confines of the law; morality, friendships, or traditions may be more important to the deviant than legal boundaries
Labeling theory
Frank Tannenbaum and Howard S. Becker created and developed labelling theory, which is a core facet of symbolic interactionism, and often referred to as Tannenbaum's "dramatisation of evil." Becker believed that "social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance."
Labeling is a process of social reaction by the "social audience," the people in society exposed to, judging and accordingly defining (labeling) someone's behaviour as deviant or otherwise. It has been characterized as the "invention, selection, manipulation of beliefs which define conduct in a negative way and the selection of people into these categories [....]"
Labeling theory, consequently, suggests that deviance is caused by the deviant's being labeled as morally inferior, the deviant's internalizing the label and finally the deviant's acting according to that label. As time goes by, the "deviant" takes on traits that constitute deviance by committing such deviations as conform to the label. Individual and societal preoccupation with the label, in other words, leads the deviant individual to follow a self-fulfilling prophecy of abidance to the ascribed label.
This theory, while very much symbolically-interactionist, also has elements of conflict theory, as the dominant group has the power to decide what is deviant and acceptable, and enjoys the power behind the labeling process. An example of this is a prison system that labels people convicted of theft, and because of this they start to view themselves as by definition thieves, incapable of changing. "From this point of view," as Howard S. Becker has written,
deviance is not a quality of the act the person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an "offender." The deviant is one to whom the label has successfully been applied; deviant behavior is behavior that people so label.
In other words, "Behaviour only becomes deviant or criminal if defined and interfered as such by specific people in [a] specific situation." It is important to note the salient fact that society is not always correct in its labeling, often falsely identifying and misrepresenting people as deviants, or attributing to them characteristics which they do not have. In legal terms, people are often wrongly accused, yet many of them must live with the ensuant stigma (or conviction) for the rest of their lives.
On a similar note, society often employs double standards, with some sectors of society enjoying favouritism. Certain behaviours in one group are seen to be perfectly acceptable, or can be easily overlooked, but in another are seen, by the same audiences, as abominable.
Primary and secondary deviation
Edwin Lemert developed the idea of primary and secondary deviation as a way to explain the process of labeling. Primary deviance is any general deviance before the deviant is labeled as such. Secondary deviance is any action that takes place after primary deviance as a reaction to the institutions.
When an actor commits a crime (primary deviance), however mild, the institution will bring social penalties down on the actor. However, punishment does not necessarily stop crime, so the actor might commit the same primary deviance again, bringing even harsher reactions from the institutions. At this point, the actor will start to resent the institution, while the institution brings harsher and harsher repression. Eventually, the whole community will stigmatize the actor as a deviant and the actor will not be able to tolerate this, but will ultimately accept his or her role as a criminal, and will commit criminal acts that fit the role of a criminal.
Primary And Secondary Deviation is what causes people to become harder criminals. Primary deviance is the time when the person is labeled deviant through confession or reporting. Secondary deviance is deviance before and after the primary deviance. Retrospective labeling happens when the deviant recognizes his acts as deviant prior to the primary deviance, while prospective labeling is when the deviant recognizes future acts as deviant. The steps to becoming a criminal are:
- Primary deviation.
- Social penalties.
- Secondary deviation.
- Stronger penalties.
- Further deviation with resentment and hostility towards punishers.
- Community stigmatizes the deviant as a criminal. Tolerance threshold passed.
- Strengthening of deviant conduct because of stigmatizing penalties.
- Acceptance as role of deviant or criminal actor.
Control Theory
A theory that stresses how weak bonds between the individual and society free people to deviate. By contrast, strong bonds make deviance costly. This theory asks why do people refrain from criminal behavior, instead of why people commit criminal behavior, according to Travis Hirschi. The control theory developed when norms emerge to deter deviant behavior. Without this "control" deviant behavior would happen more often. This leads to conformity and groups. People will conform to a group when they believe they have more to gain from conformity than by deviance. If a strong bond is achieved there will be less chance of deviance than if a weak bond has occurred. Hirschi argued a person follows the norms because they have a bond to society. The bond consists of four positively correlated factors: commitment, attachment, belief, and involvement. When any of these bonds are weakened or broken one is more likely to act in defiance. Hirschi worked with this idea of a General Theory of Crime with his partner Michael R. Gottfredson. Gottfredson and Hirschi in 1990 founded their Self-Control Theory. It stated that acts of force and fraud are undertaken in the pursuit of self interest and self control. A deviant act is based on a criminals own self control of themselves. Gottfredson and Hirschi's General Theory of Crime
More contemporary control theorists such as Michael Jordan take the theory into a new light, suggesting labor market experiences not only affect the attitudes and the "stakes" of individual workers, but can also affect the development of their children's views toward conformity and cause involvement in delinquency. This is still an ongoing study as he has found a significant relationship between parental labor market involvement and children's delinquency, but has not empirically demonstrated the mediating role of parents' or children's attitude. The research will try to show a correlation between labor market stratification and individual behavior (juvenile behavior).
Conflict theory
In sociology, conflict theory states that society or an organization functions so that each individual participant and its groups struggle to maximize their benefits, which inevitably contributes to social change such as political changes and revolutions. Deviant behavior is actions that do not go along with the socially institutions as what cause deviance. The institution's ability to change norms, wealth or status come into conflict with the individual.The legal rights of poor folks might be ignored, middle class are also accept; they side with the elites rather the poor, thinking they might rise to the top by supporting the status quo.Conflict theory is based upon the view that the fundamental causes of crime are the social and economic forces operating within society.However, it explains white-collar crime less well.
This theory also states that the powerful define crime. This raises the question: for whom is this theory functional? In this theory, laws are instruments of oppression: tough on the powerless and less tough on the powerful.
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