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1 The Dynamic Nature of Deviance

Kids, Crocodiles, and Social Control On January 2, 2004, Steve Irwin, crocodile hunter, snake wrangler, television personality, and naturalist, brought his 1-month-old son with him into a crocodile pen at Australia Zoo in Brisbane. He held his son in his left arm and a dead chicken in his right hand. While his wife, visitors to the zoo, and a camera crew looked on, Irwin extended the chicken to a 13-foot crocodile. The reptile lunged forward, snapping its massive jaws shut on the chicken and swallowing it. At the same time, Irwin jumped safely away from the animal with his son held tightly in his arm. While the Irwins looked at the stunt as inconsequential, nothing more than a crocodile-feeding debut by the youngest member of a reptile-loving family, some other people were mightily upset by what happened. A film of the incident was shown several times on U.S. television, Steve Irwin was quizzed by various U.S. newscasters, and family services officials in Australia reprimanded the Irwins. Legal charges could have been filed against them for child abuse.

Steve Irwin was astonished that anyone could think he would put his infant son in harm’s way. The child was in no danger, Irwin insisted, and getting up close and personal with dangerous reptiles is what it means to be a member of the Irwin family. Steve Irwin’s 30 years of experience, tracking and capturing highly dangerous creatures, gave him the confidence that his son would be perfectly safe. His surprise gave way to defiance and eventually to a modicum of public remorse, an apology, and a pledge that nothing like it would ever happen again. (Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray in September 2006 when the sea creature pierced the man’s heart with a poisonous barb.)

This incident involving kids, crocodiles, and social control illustrates central elements in the human social construction of deviance, especially showing that fundamental disagreements do exist over proper ways of acting, thinking, feeling, and being. Whose definition of the “crocodile stunt” is the “right” one? Were the Irwins bad parents, or were they carefully (and safely) exposing their child to a new and valuable experience? How different is this from what other parents do when they take their child for a ride in an airplane, for a trip by car, for a swim in an ocean, or for a horseback ride, any of which could end disastrously? Some parents would be inclined to do with their child exactly what Irwin did with his, just as some parents would not do it with their child under any circumstances. Likewise, some individuals, while they would not actually do what Irwin did, would still think (and feel) that what he did was perfectly okay; other

individuals would think (and feel) just as strongly that it most certainly was not okay. The elements we find in this social event—expectations, human interactions (and the associated thoughts and emotions), social evaluations and judgments—are the social “stuff” from which any social deviance originates. This incident involving kids and crocs has much to teach us about all social deviance.

Relationships and Rule Breaking The study of social deviance must involve an understanding of the origination of human attitudes, behaviors, and conditions—the ABCs of deviance (Adler & Adler, 2009)—it is true, but it must also involve an understanding of socially constructed viewpoints on human attitudes, behaviors, and conditions.

Deviance is not a self-evident category. It does not just float down from the skies applying itself to people who quite obviously are deviant. Deviance is a historical term and its application and/or adoption can create a status which dwarfs all others in its consequences for the individual’s existence. Even the most deviant of all deviants does not just “happen”; someone has to pass judgement, to portray, to stigmatize, to insult, to heap abuse, to exclude or to reject. (C. Sumner, 1994, p. 223)

Social reactions and cultural meanings strongly affect the type of deviance that exists in society, and patterns of deviance constantly evolve and change over time. What’s more, human attitudes, behaviors, and conditions don’t always line up in uniform ways with characterizations of them. At one time or place, for certain kinds of people (i.e., those of a certain age or sex), drinking alcohol is perfectly proper, while at another time or place, it is forbidden. At one time or place, smoking cigarettes is a sign of maturity and sophistication, while at some other, it is a sign of immaturity and irresponsibility. The deviancy of some attitude, behavior, or condition cannot be determined simply by examining it closely.

Very few, if any, human experiences exist in a social vacuum, and very few, if any, can be understood separately from social context.

Plainly, people throughout the ages have worried over—told tales about, made laws for, designed rituals around—situations that disturb the peace or threaten the communal fabric. Equally plainly, the coming to group attention of a

specific threat has largely depended upon how that threat is publicly named, shaped, cast, categorized, and put in context. (Schwartz, 1997, p. 289)

Human beings are simply too inventive in assigning positive and negative labels to the many things that they do for us to ignore in our explanations of social deviance how groups judge and evaluate what other groups and the people in them are doing, thinking, feeling, and being (O’Brien, 2006; Spector & Kitsuse, 1977). Because we seek to understand deviance as a social relationship, we cannot stop with an explanation of human diversity. We must also examine the diversity of claims, labels, narratives, constructions, or characterizations of it.

During the New Orleans Mardi Gras, certain forms of creative deviance that might normally be forbidden become customary (Douglas, Rasmussen, & Flanagan, 1977, p. 238). One of these is “parade stripping,” in which women expose their naked breasts to people on parade floats so that they will be thrown glass beads and trinkets. People who are not so accepting of the practice refer to these women as “beadwhores,” and they tend to view parade stripping as unbridled exhibitionism. Those individuals who are caught up in the playful atmosphere of Mardi Gras, however, view things differently (Forsyth, 1992, p. 395). Parade stripping represents a ritualized exchange of things of value. The float rider gets to see naked breasts, and the woman receives beads, trinkets, and confirmation that her breasts are grand enough to warrant a bestowing of gifts (Shrum & Kilburn, 1996, p. 444). In 1935, police officers in Atlantic City, New Jersey, arrested 42 men on the beach because they wore swimsuits without tops. Imagine what these officers would have done at Mardi Gras (or on a nude beach)!

Societies, Cultures, Groups, and SubculturesSocieties, Cultures, Groups, and Subcultures

Each society contains a culture, along with a multitude of groups, each of which has its own subculture (J. P. Williams, 2011). The word culture was first used in 1877 by the anthropologist Edward Tylor to describe the totality of humans’ behavioral, material, intellectual, and spiritual products. It now refers to designs for living or shared understandings that members of a society use as they act together. A subculture is a culture within a culture, identifiable by its distinctive constellation of information (Kluckhohn, 1949). Poker players are a subculture, as are attorneys, guitar players, and stamp collectors. In these small groups and countless others, knowledge is created, enacted, and institutionalized (Fine, 2012). A focus on culture and subculture is one of the best ways to explain why people are the same in some ways but different in others (Blackman, 2014; Demerath, 2014).

Subcultures can be, and usually are, in conflict with one another. When you follow the rules and expectations of one subculture, it almost always means that you are violating the rules and expectations of a lot of other subcultures (Sellin, 1938). For example, youth culture contradicts other parts of U.S. culture in many ways, as it gives young people an outlet for some of the insecurities and anxieties that characterize adolescence (Danesi, 2010). When adolescents follow the rules of youth subculture—a reasonable thing for them to do—it can bring them into conflict with other subcultures that encourage different behaviors from their members (Haenfler, 2013). A strong motivation exists for individuals who are similar to bond together (Jung, King, & Soule, 2014). Birds of a feather flock together, and so do humans. This promotes group solidarity and collective identification (Enriquez, 2014; Irwin & Simpson, 2013; Whittier, 2014).

A number of communities exist that provide alternate identities to their members, giving them a sense of pride and significance even while they may be considered deviant from the standpoint of other communities (Cross & Hernández, 2011). A study of “catchout camp” (Wasserman & Clair, 2010), a locale in Birmingham, Alabama, populated by the homeless, shows how marginal people may display a creative resistance to what they see as a social system that is really not for them. The residents of this camp realized that their way of life was going to be criticized or condemned by many different groups of people—police, social workers, religious zealots, shopkeepers, politicians, ordinary citizens—under the cloak of care and concern. They concluded, therefore, that they lived in a hostile social environment. Residents did what they could to resist the imposition of labels attached to them and their lifestyle by others. Catchout camp inhabitants made their own world as best they could, one characterized by resilience, pride, independence, humor, and lively conversation (often about sports or sex). Variations can and usually do exist within any one group in its members’ allegiances to its values, norms, and meaning systems (Hunt, 2010, p. 526).

Humans formulate cultural rules about “proper” and “improper” ways of thinking, acting, feeling, and being. These rules are called norms. The directive to “chew your food with your lips closed” is the statement of a norm, as is the sign found in many restaurants informing customers, “No shoes, no shirt, no service.” These standards help to determine what is important, what fits where, and what is deviant (Busch, 2011, p. 10). Norms are usually coupled with sanctions. A positive sanction (e.g., a promotion at work or an award at college) conveys approval and encourages norm-following activities; a negative sanction (e.g., a ticket for speeding) conveys disapproval and is designed to discourage norm-breaking activities. Norms are an important part of culture and subculture, helping us to better understand regularities in human behavior (Becker, 1982). Modern societies work to eliminate as many uncertainties as possible. They try to accomplish this by formulating and applying extensive systems of rules and regulations

to practically everything they can (Bauman, 1991, 2006, 2011).

Ferrell’s (1993) study in Denver of graffiti and graffiti writers (i.e., the individuals who paint on public structures, such as walls, viaducts, buildings, trains, or fences) shows how subcultural dynamics, group processes, and social control coalesce to make social deviance. Graffiti writing requires an individual who paints well enough to be able to do it in the dark and with enough speed and daring to evade detection. This demands both technology (e.g., spray paint) and sufficient knowledge and skill to be able to paint a design. Graffiti writing, however, is almost always a group event with members of the graffiti underground learning from one another as they see each other’s artistic products. Groups or crews develop, and their members work together on a graffiti project.

At one time, Denver police took a generally tolerant and disinterested approach to graffiti. However, by the end of the 1980s and into the next decade, this all changed. Local politicians and business leaders worked together to generate a sense of urgency and moral outrage about the dangers that graffiti posed to society and social order. These anti-graffiti crusaders portrayed it as a growing menace that could only be stopped by extreme measures. Instead of defining it as a form of adolescent fun, an outcome of boredom, or an alternate art form, crusaders against graffiti branded it as a form of violence, crime, ruthlessness, irresponsibility, and vandalism of the worst kind. Graffiti writers were portrayed as immoral, uncaring, disrespectful, untrustworthy, and selfish. Both graffiti and graffiti writers were depicted as the source of ecological destruction and anarchy with the potential to destroy the entire city of Denver. Negative images and catch phrases were used as often as possible to condemn both the writers and the graffiti: “graffitidiots,” “graffiti creeps,” “gauche graffiti goons,” “graffiti vandals,” and “spray- can cretins” (Ferrell, 1993, p. 137). The campaign against graffiti, though instigated principally in the interests of local politicians and business elites, was never widely understood by the general public to be the biased moral enterprise it was. They understood it more generally as acts of vandalism, crime, and deviance rather than as another way for business leaders and politicians to further their own interests, according to Ferrell.

The graffiti writer as vandal was a recurring theme in Ferrell’s (1993) study. Just to be clear, it is not Ferrell who is treating these writers as vandals. Far from it. This was the objective of the moral enterprise initiated against them, which placed graffiti writers in the same category as people who paint obscenities on bridges, who wantonly break windows, and who damage cemeteries. Instead of using the more neutral verb “to paint” to describe graffiti writing, opponents and critics opted for the more inflammatory words “attack,” “rob,” or “destroy.” The word “suicide” was even used to make it appear that graffiti writers were self-destructive because they were destroying the neighborhoods

within which they lived and so, ultimately, themselves (p. 139). As if the branding of graffiti as a type of assault, robbery, suicide, or murder of the urban environment was not enough, the anti-graffiti campaigners had another inflammatory word at their disposal: They equated graffiti writing with rape (“We feel like we’ve been raped” [p. 142]). As Ferrell puts it, “It is difficult to say whether such tactics are more offensive to rape victims or graffiti writers; it is not difficult to see that such tactics are designed to locate graffiti in the worst possible context” (p. 142). The core objective of the anti- graffiti crusaders was to generate enough fear and outrage in the general public that any political response, no matter how excessive, seemed justified.

The relationship between graffiti writers and the forces amassed against them shows not only the relativity of deviance, but also its political nature. Graffiti writing in Denver was a form of primitive rebellion and resistance against cultural domination and the monotony, insecurity, and incivility of public life. It was issued as a challenge to the hegemony of corporate ads and governmental intrusion into public space.

Graffiti provides a sort of public art outside political or corporate control, and by its presence reclaims public space from city planners, corporate developers, and their aesthetic of authority. In the railyards and the alleys, under viaducts and on back walls, graffiti signifies public life and community creativity amidst the prefabricated imagery of the city. With its sweeping scale and sudden visibility, it comes closer to engaging the public in the process of art than do the pieces tastefully arranged around courthouse lawns and bank lobbies. (Ferrell, 1993, pp. 185–186)

The deviancy of what these graffiti writers produced is principally a result of the challenges it offered to governmental and economic elites, who wanted to have exclusive rights to determine how public space is used and who is allowed to use it. The real deviance of graffiti writers, according to Ferrell (1993), had little to do with their artistic creations. It mostly had to do with the fact that they refused to do what they were told to do, thereby resisting constituted authority.

Another example of how rules and relationships work together to make social deviance is the saga of Edward Snowden. At one time, he was a computer technician with the National Security Agency (NSA) of the U.S. government, and prior to that he was a system administrator with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 2013, thinking that he had to go beyond the law to do what was right for the country, Snowden divulged details about the U.S. government’s extensive surveillance program in which government employees had collected information on American citizens’ phone calls,

emails, and texts (Harding, 2014). Snowden leaked thousands of classified documents that he had illegally obtained to a number of media outlets. These documents showed that the U.S. surveillance activities were extensive, involving other countries (e.g., Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom), as well as telecommunications companies (e.g., AT&T and Verizon).

The reactions to Snowden’s whistle-blowing, and to Snowden himself, were mixed. Some people branded him a traitor. No doubt exists that what Snowden did was illegal. He divulged information about a program that few were even aware of, and he fled the country to avoid arrest and prosecution for his crimes. Other people, while acknowledging the illegality of his actions, believed that the ends justified the means and that Snowden therefore should be celebrated, not condemned, for acts of patriotism and courage. The constitutional abuses illuminated by the leaks, these supporters asserted, were far more serious than anything that Snowden did. They concluded that what he did may have been illegal, but it was not criminal. Former Vice President Al Gore insists that Snowden is closer to being a whistle-blower than a traitor (MacAskill, 2014). On June 14, 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Snowden with violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property, which carry a sentence of up to 30 years in prison if he were ever to be arrested, tried, and convicted. (As of this writing, he lives in a secret location in Russia.) Is Snowden, like the graffiti writers, a criminal because he resisted constituted authority, or is something else operating?

Being CenteredBeing Centered

As newborns, we humans are egocentric, meaning we are wrapped up in our own viewpoint (Piaget, 1948). We look out on the world and respond to the people in it, it is true, but early in life we have no external or outside position from which to view ourselves or to evaluate what we are and do. As we become more aware of others and participate in meaningful relationships with them, we start looking at our society and ourselves in new ways. We eventually come to think, feel, and act in anticipation of the impact we can have on others. It becomes less likely that we will intentionally hurt someone else, but it does not automatically guarantee that we won’t. People—some more than others—will maintain some of their egocentricity throughout their lives (Kumbasar, Romney, & Batchelder, 1994, p. 499). They will continue to do what is good for them as individuals, even if it is contrary to the wishes and interests of others or even if contrary to cultural rules.

Another kind of centeredness is ethnocentrism, which exists when members of some society or group come to believe that their culture or subculture—the system of values, norms, and customs—is better than everyone else’s. If Americans were to decide that

they were better than, say, Italians, because Americans play baseball better, this could easily be a reflection of ethnocentrism. A custom in one culture (i.e., baseball) is being used to evaluate and then belittle members of some other culture who have little or no knowledge of the sport. Using the values, norms, or customs of one culture to evaluate people of some other culture will usually produce a great deal of distortion and misunderstanding. Ethnocentrism makes it more likely that some people will define as inferior other people who are merely different from them or who do things differently. Difference is easily transformed into deviance, and deviance is easily transformed into abnormality or degeneracy.

Too much ethnocentrism or egocentrism makes it less likely that people will be able to —or willing to—look at the world through others’ eyes. Empathy (or role taking) is encouraged by interactive processes as we each mentally project ourselves into the positions of others and incorporate others’ viewpoints into our selves (Mead, 1934). Some research exists, both thought provoking and controversial, that humans have mirror neurons in their brains, which seem to play a role in the ability to empathize successfully with others (Iacoboni, 2009). We must be cautious not to make too much of this research. Empathy is not identical to sympathy. Just because we can identify with others, and maybe even understand their viewpoints, it does not mean we necessarily can feel their pain or that we care at all about what happens to them (Cronk & Leech, 2013).

The opposite of ethnocentrism is cultural relativity, which is anchored on the idea that human experiences and conditions must always be viewed and understood in the particular social and cultural contexts within which they originate and develop. Cultural relativists usually use the concept of culture only to describe and explain relationships and regularities in human experience. They refuse to use culture to judge people or to compare people in different lands to one another. Franz Boas, for example, would not rank cultures from good to bad no matter how primitive some cultures might have appeared to outsiders (cited in Mintz, 1982, p. 501). He insisted that no universal standard or rule exists that can be used to decide exactly which attitudes, behaviors, or conditions are best. Boas’s students, especially Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Melville Herskovits, carried on his legacy, believing that cultures had to be understood as both separate and equal to one another.

Although Boas and his students did reaffirm the importance and value of cultural relativity, their exaggerated devotion to it blinded them to its fundamental error: Just because all cultures are proclaimed to be equivalent doesn’t mean that they actually are.

Many would surely be troubled by the idea that the political systems of Iraq,

Hitler’s Germany, or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia were, or are, as good as those in, say, Norway, Japan, or Switzerland. And they would probably react with disbelief to the assertion that there is no scientific basis for evaluating another society’s practice of genocide, judicial torture or human sacrifice, for example, except as the people in that society themselves evaluate these practices. (Edgerton, 1992, p. 2)

As systems of power, knowledge, morality, and surveillance change, so do patterns of deviance (Ben-Yehuda, 2006; Foucault, 2003, pp. 55–75; Mills, 1943; Staples, 2000, pp. 15–39). This does not mean, however, that all human customs are equivalent to one another and identical in all ways (as Edgerton notes in the above quote). Norms forbidding slavery are different from norms that forbid nose picking or shoplifting. Some deviance is harmful and dangerous—or “hard”—while other deviance is “soft,” meaning it is unique and original and poses little threat to a society or the people in it (Raybeck, 1991, p. 54).

Sociological Relativity Peter Berger, in his @@@Invitation to Sociology (1963), showed the value of a relativizing motif. This demands that we keep foremost in our explanations of human experience the fact that identities, ideas, and customs are specific to a particular time and place.

The sociological frame of reference, with its built-in procedure of looking for levels of reality other than those given in the official interpretations of society, carries with it a logical imperative to unmask the pretensions and the propaganda by which men cloak their actions with each other. (p. 38)

To fully explain—and therefore to fully understand—we must develop and then nourish whatever capacity we have to alternate from one perspective to another and to take account of meaning systems that stand in opposition to one another. This leads neither automatically nor inevitably to a greater tolerance of group or cultural differences. What it does lead to, however, is the willingness to scrutinize and then call into question what most other people take for granted (Bauman & May, 2001; Portes, 2000).

Practically anything that can be done with the human body has been done, either as a source of individual pleasure or as a matter of group custom, by somebody (or

somebodies), somewhere, sometime. This means an incredible diversity exists in human attitudes, behaviors, and conditions. An even greater diversity exists in the judgments and evaluations humans make of attitudes, behaviors, and conditions that they find (Cohen, 1974). Definitions of deviance change over time and as we move from one group to another at one point in time (Adler & Adler, 2006, p. 132). In other words, deviance is defined up and down all the time (Krauthammer, 1993; Moynihan, 1993). Things that were mightily upsetting to one generation are trivial to the next (i.e., defining deviancy down) and vice versa (i.e., defining deviancy up). Serious deviances in one group are routine and regular happenings in some other group. Goffman (1963) asserted that “normal” and “stigmatized” are not inherent qualities of individuals but perspectives on individuals (p. 138). If anything intrinsically real or objective may be found in the human condition, it is the intrinsically situational nature of both rules and reactions, producing a dynamic, negotiated social order (Becker, 1973, p. 196).

Deviance is not a quality of the act a person commits, Becker (1963, p. 9) instructs. It is a function of the application of rules and sanctions to a suspect individual. Those traits individuals possess that are objects of reverence to their friends are—or can be—objects of disgust to their enemies. The traits have not changed, but the meanings of them have. Such assessments depend as much or more on who is doing the evaluating than they do on what is being evaluated. “No trait is normal or pathological in itself but only acquires the quality of normality (or deviance) with regard to the environment in which it arises” (Horwitz, 2008, p. 366). How things look and get defined depends a lot on where you’re standing. If any human universal has relevance for our understanding of social deviance, then it must surely be the human inclination to construct social differences and then to persecute anyone who seems to be out of step with everybody else (Moore, 1987).

Sociological relativity demands that social scientists who want to understand groups of people, even ones that are very different from their own, must suspend their moral judgments and look at the world through the eyes of the people they wish to understand. This requires the “practice of putting yourself in your adversary’s shoes, not in order to wear them as your own but in order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why someone else might wear them” (Fish, 2001, p. A23). Relativists may be less inclined to be ethnocentric or egocentric because by looking through the eyes of people in a multitude of situations, it may increase their tolerance for practices different from their own. Goffman (1961) shows how this can work in the following:

[T]he awesomeness, distastefulness, and barbarity of a foreign culture can decrease to the degree that the student becomes familiar with the point of view to life that is taken by his subjects. (p. 130)

Goffman’s assertion is true, but it’s not the whole truth. Although some things that initially seemed foreign or strange may become less so with greater familiarity, it is also possible for things that once seemed ordinary to look strange as an observer’s familiarity with them increases.

A powerful tension exists between wanting to understand people and wanting to help them (Riesman, 1963), a tension that is at the core of a paradox that afflicts any relativistic approach. Sociologists and anthropologists must use tenets of relativism to understand and explain human experience, but by using the tenets of relativism, they put themselves in a contradictory moral position. The decrease in ethnocentrism and the increase in tolerance that can come from a relativistic approach must be tempered by the knowledge that some of the things that an individual may find in the groups he or she is studying may be too maladaptive or damaging for them to be overlooked. Relativity is difficult to defend if it demands acceptance of things such as murder, slavery, mutilation, or assassinations, all under the banner of a doctrinaire acceptance of cultural equivalency and celebration of diversity. If relativity becomes too relativistic, it invites criticism and rejection from non-relativists for its moral indifference (Gibbs, 1966).

Contrary to the cultural relativity of Boas and his students, all outcomes are not equivalent. A well-played basketball game is different from a poorly played one; a well- run company is not identical to one that is inefficient; stealing other people’s money is not the same as earning it; a badly written novel is not the same as a well-written one; getting a ship safely to port is not the same as smashing it into an iceberg; dishonesty is different from honesty; an interesting lecture is different from a dull one; and a silk purse is not the same as a sow’s ear. Meanings are not necessarily randomly or capriciously attached to human attitudes, behaviors, and conditions (Lemert, 1972). A sociological relativist is unlikely to believe that anything goes and is acceptable just because a majority of people says it does and is. However, he or she is likely to believe that a wide range of things could go. It is the belief in human potentialities, coupled with a determination to explain correctly, that characterizes sociological relativity. What if Steve Irwin had for some reason (e.g., confusion, insanity, or wickedness) held the chicken in his left arm and actually fed his son to the crocodile? Can anyone seriously believe that relativists would view this as no different from what actually happened?

The Social Construction of Reality

Making Sense of Common SenseMaking Sense of Common Sense

Some human activities can exist independently from a socially constructed system of

rules. Eating, drinking, sleeping, and waste elimination are regulated in all places and at all times by rules and shared expectations, but these activities would occur even without rules. For example, humans cough due to an involuntary muscular spasm in the throat that clears air passages. We get things stuck in our throats and we cough. The expulsion of air from the body that makes a cough, however, is regulated by cultural rules. Years ago (in the United States), the “correct” or “proper” way to cough was to expel air into an open hand that covered the mouth. The H1N1 (swine flu) virus, which first appeared in 2009, was an impetus to change how we cough (or, more correctly, how we regulate how we cough). Now, it is the elbow that is the “correct” or “proper” target of the expelled air. However, some kinds of human activity are constituted by rules, not merely regulated by them. If the rules were nonexistent, the activity in question would be as well. For example, if you refuse to follow the rules of chess, then you are not playing the game (Searle, 1995).

Although all cultural rules—both regulative and constitutive—have a provisional quality (Troyer, 1992), their conventional nature is sometimes easy to miss. The social world (or parts of it) can reach the point where it “thickens” and “hardens” so much that its members think and feel it is natural and inevitable, no longer amenable to change (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Kraaykamp & van Eijck, 2010). Some cultural ideas endure so long that they attain the enviable status of “common sense,” something that seems to be true beyond dispute. If these ideas weren’t true, conventional wisdom instructs, why do so many of us believe them?

Common sense is actually a constellation of inconsistent, incoherent ideas, each of which seems right at a given time but that carries no guarantee of being right at any other time. Common sense makes us think we know and understand more than we do (Watts, 2011, 2014).

Bad things happen not because we forget to use our common sense, but rather because the incredible effectiveness of common sense in solving the problems of everyday life prompts us to put more faith in it than it can bear. (Watts, 2011, p. 23)

Berger (1963) concludes that the commonsense view is nothing more than the grown-up view taken for granted. We must not confuse commonsense notions with empirically correct descriptions and understandings.

Benjamin Franklin wrote that honesty is the best policy, and individuals of all ages are encouraged to “always tell the truth.” Even a bit of fortune cookie philosophy for the

wayward reaffirms honesty’s importance: “Never forget that a half truth is a whole lie.” However, the cultural encouragement of honesty may be mostly rhetoric. Ruane and Cerulo (2015) emphasize the following: “Clearly, we would be lying to say that our culture firmly endorses honesty as the best policy” (p. 197). As we learn that lying is wrong (and give lip service to honesty’s importance), we also probably learn how to lie, when to lie, how to excuse and justify the lies we’ve told, and who deserves to hear the truth and who does not.

Social context has a substantial impact on the whole process of lying: whether lies are told and even what qualifies as a lie in the first place. While honesty is one way to achieve life’s goals, dishonesty may be an easier, more effective, or less stressful way to achieve them. Whenever greater emphasis is placed on achieving goals than on how they are achieved—“winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing”—deviances of all types become more likely (Merton, 1938). The Josephson Institute (2012) surveyed 23,000 high school students in 2012 and reported that 76% of the sample had lied to a parent about something significant, while 55% had lied to a teacher. Some lies and lying are normal or at least expected, while others are both deviant and criminal (Ruane, Cerulo, & Gerson, 1994). Ruane and Cerulo (2015) conclude that the normal lie is a crucial mechanism for maintaining the flow of social interaction. It practically goes without saying that what qualifies as normal is open to interpretation.

Creating DevianceCreating Deviance

The existence of social deviance in human societies cannot be separated from the human ability to create and internalize symbols. A symbol is a physical gesture or sound (i.e., a word) that represents something else because of group agreement. Humans do not live only in a physical world of smells, sights, sounds, tastes, and touches. We live in a world of “hot and humid”; “felonies and misdemeanors”; “pepperoni pizzas”; “governments by the people and for the people”; and many other things, material and nonmaterial, that are identified and represented in a culture or subculture. Symbols make it possible for individuals to become active and interactive members of a society or group.

A parent may ask the younger child, “Why can’t you be more like your older brother?” The parent has an understanding made possible by his or her ability to organize experiences symbolically and to recognize that the younger child acts differently from the older child and from how the younger child could and should act. Humans are able to recognize the difference between what is, what was, and what should be. The human communication process is a powerful force, having the capacity to encourage both prosocial behaviors (e.g., healthy eating habits) and antisocial behaviors (e.g., crime or delinquency) (Gladwell, 2000; Rosenberg, 2011). Groups will symbolize risks—

identifying them and then offering their claims about how to eliminate them—in ways that further their own interests (Mohun, 2013).

Deviants can be symbolized in ways that prevent their deviances from posing any serious threats to the dominant construction of reality and the shared understandings on which it is based. If anything, the existence of deviance is used by supporters of the status quo to encourage an allegiance to conformity and conventionality (Reiman & Leighton, 2010). Deviance is branded as sick, evil, or abnormal, rather than as a cultural alternative or functional group difference. The definition of alternate realities as inauthentic, pathological, or just plain nuts reinforces the dominant view of reality and makes the status quo appear more immutable, concrete, and common-sensical than it actually is. The construction of deviant labels and their assignment to particular individuals serves to mask social conflicts, making labelers more confident that their way is the only right way (Parsons, 1951).

Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) was formed in Topeka, Kansas, in 1955, by Fred Phelps (who died in March 2014). He had a strict and fundamental view of God and Christianity, and he attracted people to his congregation who held beliefs as rigid and fundamental as his own. Members of WBC are fervently convinced that God is hell bent on punishing anyone who commits sexual trespasses. They believe that God’s distaste for sexual deviances knows no bounds and so transgressors should be punished, both in this life and in the hereafter for all eternity (Baker, Bader, & Hirsch, 2015). Church members view homosexuality as the baddest of the bad, being both unnatural and immoral.

Had members of the congregation been content merely to condemn homosexuality and homosexuals, they could have been dismissed as bigots, bullies, or zealots. Their condemnation of homosexuality does not make them much different from other fundamentally conservative religious groups, but their political activities do. Phelps and his followers were continually “upping the bar” in their public protests to garner more and more attention for their denunciation and condemnation of homosexuality and homosexuals. They showed their contempt by protesting at funerals of AIDS victims; at lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) pride events; and at funerals of prominent supporters of LGBT rights. They even protested at the funeral of Matthew Shepard (in 1998), a victim of a homophobic hate crime. However, what put them on the radar screen of so many people who wanted to end their campaign of hate and damnation was that members of the church protested at funerals of U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. The parishioners’ rationale was that the U.S. military itself was a sinful abomination and affront to God, deserving nothing other than damnation because it was allowing openly gay men and women to serve (Baker et al., 2015).

The protest activities of the church grew increasingly—or were defined that way— irritating and objectionable to more and more people. Their protests at soldiers’ funerals, which regularly involved burnings of U.S. flags, were more than an affront to the memory of the deceased soldier and his or her mortal remains. They were a desecration of both the American identity and the entire U.S. social fabric (Baker et al., 2015, pp. 46–47). WBC and its members were increasingly defined as the problem, not what they were protesting, and fewer and fewer people had any sympathy for the protestors and their activities.

Though the actions and claims of WBC may have been offensive, if not thoroughly contemptible, one problem remained: They were entirely legal. Members of WBC know the law—Phelps had been a prominent civil rights attorney until he was disbarred for being too outspoken and vindictive—and they are meticulous in refusing to do anything even slightly against it. Their protest activities are legally protected as forms of free speech and free action. WBC always followed local ordinances in regard to when and where they could protest, and they always acted in a peaceful manner. However, as they became increasingly mean-spirited—or were defined that way—they reached a point where they could no longer be overlooked and ignored. They generated enough adverse publicity and hostility that politicians at several levels of government moved to regulate and restrict them and what they were doing (Baker et al., pp. 56–57).

In 2006, the Respect for America’s Fallen Heroes Act (H.R. 5037) was introduced and was overwhelmingly supported by both the House and the Senate. It was signed into law by then-President George W. Bush on Memorial Day. It gave each state the power to restrict demonstrations at any military funeral. Within 2 years, most states had passed laws that defined funeral protests as forms of disorderly conduct, making it possible for protesters to be contained and their protests to be neutralized. However, laws, even harsh ones, can do nothing more than restrict Westboro’s protest activities. They cannot completely eliminate them.

Theoretical Views: The Old and the Not-So-Old

Bad Actors and Bad ActsBad Actors and Bad Acts

One of the earliest conceptions of deviance and deviant was founded on a belief that deviants could be separated from nondeviants on the basis of inherent or intrinsic characteristics of the individual rule breaker (Devroye, 2010; Rafter, 1997). Usually, some biological or psychological factor, such as body chemistry, intelligence, or brain dysfunction, was identified and then blamed for the trespass (Bernard, Snipes, &

Gerould, 2010; Lilly, Cullen, & Ball, 2015; F. P. Williams & McShane, 2014). Because the deviance was almost always viewed as unacceptable, correctible, and unnecessary, the temptation to see defect, abnormality, or degeneracy in the biology or psychology of deviants was too great to resist. Simply put, deviants were viewed as both distinct (identifiable and all alike) and inferior, so deviance was anything that abnormal people did (or were). This claim, however, of uniform and universal inferiority was based on both bad logic and bad science (Merton & Ashley-Montagu, 1940).

The belief developed that with certain kinds of deviance (e.g., crime), the deviant had inherited physical traits or markers of his or her degeneracy that could be recognized by dispassionate observers (e.g., asymmetry of the face, too-large jaws or cheekbones, too- large or too-small ears, abnormal teeth, too-long arms, extra fingers or toes). This kind of marginal thinking that deviance was inherited was not restricted to marginal thinkers. Former U.S. Supreme Court Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in a 1927 case (Buck v. Bell), upheld the forced sterilization of an adolescent female. She had been deemed by the state of Virginia to be both retarded and a deficient mother. Holmes reasoned that

it is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. … Three generations of imbeciles are enough. (Schnakenberg, 2009, pp. 46–47)

Some theorists focused on deviant acts instead of deviant individuals, classifying these acts as inherently or intrinsically deviant. For example, Parsons (1951) insisted that deviance produces a disturbance in the equilibrium of interactive systems, and Schwendinger and Schwendinger (1975) asserted that deviance is behavior that is harmful. As sociologists and anthropologists demonstrated the great array that exists in human customs and conditions, the meaning of deviance changed. Attention was less on deviants and what they did and more on the relativity of reactions and relationships (Best, 2004).

Relativity is found in the works of both Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim. Marx (1846/1978) was inclined to believe that the economic forms within which humans produce, consume, and exchange are transitory and historical. No final conclusion, theory, or premise exists that applies universally to all times, places, and circumstances. However, the first thorough-going application of relativity to an understanding of deviance is found in Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method (1895/1938), where he contrasts the “normal” with the “pathological.” Durkheim asks us to imagine a society of saints where each individual is exemplary, so crimes such as murder, rape, or

assault will not exist (pp. 68–69). This does not mean, however, that crime will be unknown. Offenses that might seem trivial and ordinary to us would appear quite scandalous in this saintly society. Durkheim was indicating that it is the attitude about, and reaction to, some social arrangement that is responsible for its categorization as criminal.

Relativity also appears in his The Division of Labor in Society (1893/1933), where Durkheim asserts that many acts are regarded as criminal even though they are not intrinsically harmful, such as touching a forbidden object, allowing a sacred fire to die out, or failing to make a required sacrifice (p. 72). Although we might now refuse to classify normative violations like these as crimes, Durkheim’s point stands. Crime is whatever people say it is, and it is social reaction that establishes what is harmful, not the other way around. Deviance as an analytical and empirical category may be nearly universal, but the particular form that deviance takes is not (Ben-Yehuda, 1990, 2006).

The Chicago SchoolThe Chicago School

In the United States, a group of sociologists in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago were the first to use a relativistic approach to deviance. Known as the Chicago School, they were to exert a tremendous amount of influence on practically all subsequent approaches to deviance and crime that had any sociological leanings (Lanier, Henry, & Anastasia, 2015). Bernard et al. (2010) declare that the Chicago School is a gold mine that continues to enrich the study of crime even today. For representatives of the Chicago School, neither absolutes nor universal rules of human behavior existed (F. P. Williams & McShane, 2014).

The Chicago School emphasized the powerful role played by context and social setting in the creation of deviance and crime by showing that coexisting and yet incompatible subcultures could encourage different ways of acting, thinking, and feeling. The Chicago School also showed that different groups could evaluate the same conduct or social arrangement in different ways. As these Chicago sociologists moved from one area to another in the urban milieu, they found different group customs and subcultural meanings. They concluded that deviance and crime were highest in zones or natural areas with the highest levels of deregulation and social disorganization. Research does indicate that rapid social and political change, as well as changes in the distribution of scarce resources, can produce confusion and deregulation, which can lead to deviance and crime (Zhao & Cao, 2010).

The Chicago School, embodied particularly in the works of Edwin Hardin Sutherland (1947), clarified how differential association makes it possible for some individuals to

learn things that other individuals do not. By focusing on symbolic interaction and learned behavior, Sutherland developed a social and interactive understanding of the development of crime, while he offered a contextual understanding of shared rules and subcultural values. This transformed the meaning of social disorganization into something closer to what actually exists in the real world: differential social organization. Moreover, this helped to erode even further the idea that deviants were degenerate and that deviance was inherently abnormal.

The principal factor in understanding why some people break the law, Sutherland (1947) insisted, is to be found in the meanings or definitions they give to events in the social world. Most juvenile delinquency, for example, is learned from others with whom the juvenile has meaningful and rewarding contacts. It is rarely an outcome of fractured interpersonal relationships or a response to isolation and despair (Smångs, 2010). Having delinquent companions is one of the best and most consistent predictors of a teenager’s own delinquent activity (Chapple, Vaske, & Worthen, 2014; Menard & Johnson, 2015; Warr, 1993, 2002). Delinquent acts may be an expression of subterranean values, such as autonomy, daring, street smartness, avenging masculinity, and conspicuous consumption (Matza & Sykes, 1961).

Sutherland (1947) believed that face-to-face interaction was the only way that definitions favorable to violating the law could be learned. However, in this day and age, where the information superhighway is so wide and long, television, movies, and cell phones play a prominent role in our lives. Many of us are now part of portable communities (Chayko, 2008, p. 8), networks of interactants who are connected through online and mobile technologies, regardless of whether we meet face-to-face frequently, infrequently, or never (Ling, 2012). The chance that an individual will engage in deviant behavior is an outcome of learning favorable definitions about such behavior, the reinforcement one receives for it, and the chances that exist to observe and copy the deviance of others (Alleyne & Wood, 2014). Deviance is more likely when an individual’s friends engage in deviance (Tedor, 2015).

With the passage of time, Sutherland’s view of learning was fleshed out by adding newly developed (and still developing) ideas from psychology and social psychology about how humans learn (Tibbetts & Hemmens, 2010). One of the more important reformulations of Sutherland’s differential association theory has been done by Burgess and Akers (1966), which itself was expanded by Akers (1985). These theorists contributed additional (and valuable) information about how humans acquire deviant behaviors through imitation and vicarious learning (F. P. Williams & McShane, 2014).

Norms and NaughtinessNorms and Naughtiness

By the middle of the twentieth century, more and more sociologists had reached the conclusion that deviance was never going to be suitably understood by looking at intrinsic or essential qualities of deviants that distinguished them from nondeviants. Attitudes, behaviors, and conditions are simply too relative and dynamic to be pigeonholed into two mutually exclusive categories of normality and abnormality. The concept of norm was adopted as a better way—or so it seemed—to explain and understand the nature of social deviance than any account based on the notion of degeneracy or abnormality.

William Graham Sumner’s (1906) discussion of folkways, a type of norm, had indicated that they are inherited from the past and that they direct human behavior almost automatically. When rules are followed, they facilitate the adjustment of individuals to life conditions and to the particular demands of time and place. It was an easy leap to the view that deviance is a normative departure and that norms could make anything right or wrong, depending on the case (Gibbs, 1966; W. G. Sumner, 1906). Becker (1963) retained the idea of norm but changed the thinking about responsibility. It was no longer the rule breaker who was at fault. Becker reasoned that it is the group itself that creates deviance by making rules whose violation qualifies as deviance, identifying rule breakers, and treating them as outsiders.

We must see deviance as an outcome of a process of interaction between people, some of whom in their own interests make and enforce rules that catch others who are doing (or being) something that gets them labeled as deviants and treated accordingly.

A successful, and enforceable, social construction of a particular label of deviance depends on the ability of one, or more, groups to use (or generate) enough power so as to enforce their definition and version of morality on others. … Deviance … always results from negotiations about morality and the configuration of power relationships. (Ben-Yehuda, 1990, pp. 6–7)

Some of these moral crusades are very successful, having enduring effects, while others are short-lived, dying quickly and with little fanfare.

No longer were norms necessarily viewed as reflective of a society-wide consensus or a universal morality. C. Wright Mills (1943), one of the most influential sociologists in the history of the discipline (Oakes, 2011), showed that the prevailing norms always reflect some specific group’s biased view of what is proper or improper; norms reflect the power, interests, and outlooks of the groups that create them. Under Mills’s gaze, not only did norms produce efficiency and predictability in human behavior but they also

served as smokescreens to hide the wellspring of power and class interests. Norms are “propaganda for conformity,” embodying and demanding adherence to standards that are biased, reflecting a confluence of class, status, and power (p. 179).

The Labeling or Social Reactions PerspectiveThe Labeling or Social Reactions Perspective

Once theoretical explanations of deviance were sensitive to the role played by the “other” in the construction of deviance, a whole new world of possibilities was opened. It could be maintained with credibility and confidence that social control itself has the ironic effect of actually creating deviance and channeling the direction that it takes (Lemert, 1972). Tannenbaum (1938) insisted that social labels (and other social reactions) actually create deviance: “The process of making the criminal, therefore, is a process of tagging, defining, identifying, segregating, describing, emphasizing, making conscious and self-conscious; it becomes a way of stimulating, suggesting, emphasizing, and evoking the very traits that are complained of” (pp. 19–20). A new wrinkle had been added: The understanding of social deviance required an analysis of the processes by which persons are defined and treated as deviant by others. The definition of deviance changed to reflect this new understanding: “Deviance is not a property inherent in certain forms of behavior; it is a property conferred upon these forms by the audiences which directly or indirectly witness them” (Erikson, 1962, p. 308).

How can social control create deviance? One way is by naming, labeling, or categorizing some attitudes, behaviors, or conditions as types of deviance, separating them from other attitudes, behaviors, or conditions that are considered to be proper or even desirable.

Deviance may be conceived as a process by which the members of a group, community, or society (1) interpret behavior as deviant, (2) define persons who so behave as a certain kind of deviant, and (3) accord them the treatment considered appropriate to such deviants. (Kitsuse, 1962, p. 248)

A second possibility is that the reactions of other people to an individual’s initial or primary deviance—what these others say, do, or believe—can powerfully impact the nature and form of all subsequent deviant behavior of the labeled individual.

[W]e start with the idea that persons and groups are differentiated in various ways, some of which result in social penalties, rejection and segregation.

These penalties and segregative reactions of society or the community are dynamic factors which increase, decrease, and condition the form which the initial differentiation or deviation takes. (Lemert, 1951, p. 22)

According to Lemert’s (1951, 1972) secondary deviance proposition, an individual’s deviant behavior evolves to the point where it is constructed principally as a means of defense, attack, or adaptation to the problems created by the real or anticipated disapproving, degradational, or isolating reactions of others.

About the same time that Lemert was exploring the role of secondary processes in human deviance, Merton was exploring how collective events (i.e., human actions, decisions, or beliefs) can have unanticipated consequences. One possibility, which Merton (1948) called the “self-fulfilling prophecy” (p. 195), is that a false or incorrect definition of a situation changes subsequent events sufficiently that it actually becomes true. Students, for example, convinced that they are destined to fail an exam, become so nervous and anxious that they worry more than they study, and they do fail. Merton (1968) also acknowledged—though he spent no time developing the idea—that beliefs (and reactions based on them) can be self-destroying, an idea he credited to John Venn, a nineteenth-century logician. Merton (1948) called this a “suicidal prophecy” (p. 196). The suicidal prophecy prevents or “kills off” the fulfillment of an outcome that would otherwise have developed. The hare in the famous fable about its race against the tortoise demonstrates a suicidal prophecy. The rabbit was so certain that it would beat the slow-moving reptile that it behaved imprudently, and it did not win the race. Another example is found in the situation where a teacher tells a student that he or she will never amount to anything, which results in the pupil working hard to prove the teacher wrong.

These two prophecies have not been treated equally in subsequent analyses of deviance. Becker (1963), for example, only felt obliged to use a self-fulfilling prophecy in his analysis of deviant careers (failing to credit Merton when he did). This gave the false or at least distorted impression that the only situations of importance to an analysis of deviance are when social mechanisms work together to shape individuals into the images that people have of them. Although it is true that sometimes an individual’s deviance is amplified by the reactions of others, this is not the only possibility.

The Normality of DevianceThe Normality of Deviance

Deviance came to be viewed as an inevitable and rather ordinary feature of life in a pluralistic society, and deviants came to be viewed as more sinned against than sinning. In fact, siding with deviants became as defensible as siding with representatives of

conventional society, such as police, judges, or psychiatrists. The deviant’s right to be different and to be free from stigma and harassment was actively defended. Deviance was defined increasingly in political terms. Power—the power to label and the power to legitimate one’s own view of proper and improper—emerged as a central explanatory variable in understanding deviance (Young, 2011). Deviance was conceptualized more than ever before as a name, label, category, definition, vocabulary, discourse, typification, or narrative that was applied to individuals and what they think, do, and are (Dellwing, 2011). One conclusion from the relativistic approaches, especially conflict- oriented ones, was that state intervention created crime more often than it eliminated it (Lilly et al., 2015).

The emergence of a radical view of deviance meant that some theorists took the side of deviants with a vengeance. Not only did these theorists defend the right of deviants to be different, but they also condemned representatives of conventional society and branded them as the dangerous, odd, or misguided ones. Life in an unequal, competitive, insecure, acquisitive society, they believed, was brutalizing for some people, and brutal conditions generate brutal behaviors. Radicals viewed deviance as one of the choices that people consciously make in order to manage some of the difficulties posed for them by life in a contradictory society (Taylor, Walton, & Young, 1973). These theorists focused more on the process of law making than on law breaking. The principal reason is that they were inclined to view official definitions of crime as one of the tools that privileged and powerful groups use to maintain their own positions while restricting the social mobility and power of the less privileged (Miller, Schreck, Tewksbury, & Barnes, 2015; Tibbetts, 2012).

Radicals insist that the control of deviants and the suppression of deviance are principal ways that threats to the economic and political systems are counteracted so that the status quo is preserved for the benefit of the privileged and powerful (Quinney, 1970, 1974; Reiman & Leighton, 2010). Quinney (1973) went so far as to claim that the really bad people in a society are those who make laws to protect their own interests and to legitimate the suppression of threatening or disliked groups. Radical deviance theorists, as well as other theorists who consider power and social conflict to be central variables in any understanding of social deviance, now are inclined to use the term “postmodern” to identify their work (Cote, 2002; F. P. Williams & McShane, 2014). (Arrigo and Bernard [1997], however, concluded that postmodern criminology is an independent orientation despite having some areas of agreement with conflict criminology and radical criminology.) An important contribution to the postmodern approach is known as cultural criminology, whose representatives work to understand how culture and crime interpenetrate one another in a world that is unequal, exclusionary, ambiguous, and constantly changing (Ferrell, Hayward, & Young, 2015).

Postmodernists (Arrigo & Bernard, 1997; Ferrell, 1999; Henry & Milovanovic, 1991, 1996; Katz, 1988; Milovanovic, 1997) conceptualize deviance as a joint construction of social actors, and a core theme is postmodernists’ refusal to reduce social deviance down to the concrete and discrete action of any one individual (Henry & Milovanovic, 1991). Postmodernists assert that the meanings, definitions, discourses, and narratives used to describe and understand both deviance and its control are always problematic and contentious, just like the social world itself (Henry & Milovanovic, 1996; Lyman & Scott, 1989). Postmodern theorists, especially when they study crime, look at the linguistic constructions (i.e., words, statements, or narratives) made about it by influential representatives of official institutions (Lilly et al., 2015).

Postmodernists focus on how humans jointly produce social deviance (crime in particular) through modes of discourse that they conveniently forget they have jointly produced. Structures of control, as well as that which is being controlled (i.e., deviance), are shaped by human collective actions, interactions, and the discourses that are such essential parts of the reproduction of what is being described. Postmodernists give great importance to the means of linguistic production because of their view that human knowledge—human thoughts and emotions particularly—is inseparable from language and shared systems of discourse. We must always know who the individuals are that are deciding that something is deviant, why they are making their claims about it, and their level of success in convincing others that what they claim is true (Best, 1990; Spector & Kitsuse, 1977). We must also have a clear understanding of how these discourses or narratives change those individuals who make them, as well as how they change the individuals about whom they are made (Meyer & Rohlinger, 2012).

Language itself is far from neutral, privileging some points of view while invalidating others (Bernard et al., 2010; Coyle, 2013; Foucault, 2003). Agents of social control try to make what they do to control others appear to be the only reasonable way for them to proceed, a way for them to be able to help the people being controlled to lead better, more productive lives. This is a fiction, according to postmodernists, who believe that the principal objective of control agents is to regulate and manage any troublesome population wherever and whenever it is found. This is an enterprise in which a constellation of interlocking agencies from different institutions work together to maintain the status quo (Foucault, 1977; Henry & Milovanovic, 1991).

It may be the functionality of both deviance and the deviant that is a central reason for their existence. Conventional groups do many things, both intentionally and unintentionally, to ensure that deviance exists because, despite surface appearances or public proclamations, deviance actually contributes in many ways to preservation of the status quo. The war on crime, for example, justifies the existence of police, courts, and

prisons (Reiman & Leighton, 2010). It is the same for other kinds of deviance. Groups and organizations that have the mandate to eliminate deviance usually benefit too much from its existence to do the job well enough to make much of a difference. Deviants can be used as scapegoats to explain away continuing or worsening social problems (Gamson, 1995). Both under-conformity (being too “bad”) to norms and over- conformity (being too “good”) can evoke negative reactions from powerful individuals when these reactors conclude that their interests are being threatened (Heckert & Heckert, 2002) (though being too bad is more likely to be defined as a problem than is being too good).

Relativity and Social Deviance

Pathology, Harm, and Human RightsPathology, Harm, and Human Rights

To describe some culture, society, social arrangement, group, or individual as degenerate, pathological, or abnormal may be convenient, but none of these terms adds very much to our understanding of social deviance. “If persons are miserable, they may be so designated, and the quality of that misery described. Nothing but confusion is added by rendering that misery a pathology” (Matza, 1969, p. 43). We do not need to categorize something as degenerate, pathological, or abnormal in order to recognize that it is something that humans would be better off without. A society’s structures and existing institutions can be the reason for much of the suffering of its citizens (Wright, 2012). Nothing is to be gained of lasting value from portraying social contradictions as individual pathologies.

Preservation of basic human rights emerged as a global concern, mainly in response to the Holocaust and World War II. These rights were formalized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) of the United Nations (1948). This document is premised on the idea that all human beings should have the same fundamental rights no matter where they live (Turner, 1997; Zechenter, 1997). The UDHR was ratified by each member country of the United Nations in 1948, and it continues to be an important standard against which human decency is measured (Nagengast & Turner, 1997).

Provisions of the UDHR prohibit murder, torture, and slavery, while they guarantee freedom of conscience, speech, and dissent. Specific sections provide guarantees to employment and fair working conditions; to health, food, and social security; to education; and to participation in the cultural life of the community (United Nations, 1948). The history of a global concern with human rights has been uneven, precarious, and difficult. A “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine has been evolving in spurts and fits

(Moyn, 2010). This doctrine is founded on the idea that human rights are universal, so every state or government should do what it can to protect them. If a political entity drags its feet or fails to protect its citizens altogether, other political entities (e.g., the United Nations) should step in to do the job.

Indigenous populations have been thrown off of their lands, legally and illegally; women have been denied equal access to food, health care, and other medical necessities; individuals (especially women and children) have been forced to perform slave labor; people across the planet have been deprived of both property and liberty without due process; and people have been tortured and killed merely because they were defined as political threats by powerful elites (Hagan & Rymond-Richmond, 2009; Levy & Sznaider, 2010; Totten, 2013). Some nations further their economic, political, and cultural interests in ways that are destructive to the sanctity and well-being of people worldwide (Ritzer, 2008; Turner, 1997). In addition, the actions of some groups within a given society threaten fundamental human rights of other groups in that same society (Gross, 2010; Lovell, 2012).

We must be able to identify how and when human rights are being violated, by whom, for what reasons, and with what consequences. Attention to the existence of harm is a valuable contribution to our understanding of deviance (Costello, 2006, 2009). It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that a harm-based conception of deviance invalidates sociological relativity. A government, because of its monopolization of power, can blame individuals for harms that are really no different from the harms imposed by the government itself (Kennedy, 1976). It can also blame individuals for harms that are really not their fault. Decisions about what qualifies as harm and who is responsible for it are subject to a great deal of relativity (Ghatak, 2011; Presser, 2013; Savelsberg & King, 2011). It is no easy task to develop a concept of universal human rights in the face of such profound and enduring conflicts and disagreements all across the world in regard to moral and ethical norms (Agier, 2011; Brunsma, Smith, & Gran, 2013; Findlay & Henham, 2010; Glenn, 2011; Zechenter, 1997).

Being a relativist does not inevitably dull one’s moral sensibilities, and relativists can be as passionately committed as anyone else to ending human suffering. As Berger (1963) notes, a use of relativity to better understand human experience frees no one from finding his or her own way morally. For example, even though we might be able to understand that one nation’s terrorist is another nation’s freedom fighter or martyr, it certainly does not mean that we must cast an approving eye toward the attacks on the U.S. World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Likewise, even though we can understand that laws against theft are culturally specific and historically based, reflecting some groups’ interests and power more than others’, it does not mean that we have to

grin and bear it when our homes are burglarized and our possessions taken. We can still commit to the intellectual position of sociological relativity and yet be passionately committed to one course of action instead of another. For instance, it is “possible to be fully aware of the relativity and the precariousness of the way by which men organize their sexuality, and yet commit oneself absolutely to one’s own marriage” (p. 159). We do the “right” thing because we can, justifying it on the basis of neither nature nor necessity.

Relativity does not require moral indifference, and it does not mean that we can never be upset or horrified by what we see or experience in a group or society (Goode & Ben- Yehuda, 1994). Relativity just reminds us that our personal beliefs or our cultural understandings are not necessarily found everywhere. If we condemn some practice, we must be certain that we are doing it for reasons other than our own particular ethnocentric or egocentric biases. Our biases cannot be avoided completely, it is true, but relativity allows us the best chance to recognize them for the partialities that they are.

The Serious Implications of Taking Relativity SeriouslyThe Serious Implications of Taking Relativity Seriously

According to Matza (1969), the sociology of deviance encourages an appreciation of human diversity and a rejection of the simplistic notion that deviants are inherently pathological.

The growth of a sociological view of deviant phenomena involved, as major phases, the replacement of a correctional stance by an appreciation of the deviant subject, the tacit purging of a conception of pathology by new stress on human diversity, and the erosion of a simple distinction between deviant and conventional phenomena, resulting from more intimate familiarity with the world as it is, which yielded a more sophisticated view stressing complexity. (p. 10)

Social scientists, just like the humans they study, must be able to deal with—and construct theories that make sense of—the ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity of social life (Crewe, 2013). Sociology itself, Goode (2003) asserts, is “wedded” to the concept of deviance (pp. 519–520). If the marriage works, it is due in no small part to the relativity that is at the core of both.

Humans have a remarkable capacity to make practically anything proper or improper, as

the case may be. The world is constantly in flux, and people have done, are doing, and will continue to do a multitude of things that will lead to the delight, indifference, or dismay of others (Gibbs, 1994). A colleague of mine once observed that the ties that bind—traditions and customs, ways of doing things, standard notions of proper and improper—also qualify as the ties that blind (Winther, 1994, personal communication). Human beings assign meaning to practically everything that can be seen, felt, smelled, tasted, or heard. Once this is done, it tends to blind them to other possibilities and to alternate ways of thinking, feeling, acting, or being. One individual’s object of outrage or disgust might be, and probably is, another individual’s object of reverence, worship, or desire; one individual’s revulsion might be another individual’s attraction; and the object or objects of hatred for members of one human society just might be, and probably are, the objects of adoration for members of another society.

Culture shock is the feeling of disorientation or uneasiness that one might experience when traveling to a different place and being forced to accommodate to new ways of thinking, feeling, or acting. Sometimes the culture shock is mild. If you went from a hot climate, such as one finds in Southern California or Florida, to a much colder climate, such as one finds in Illinois or New York, you might experience things in the winter to which you were unaccustomed. People would seem to be dressing in unusual ways and doing unusual things, such as buying snow blowers and snow shovels, but it would be easy to adjust to these changes. They would be only temporarily disorienting. What if you were told, however, that the stew you had just eaten was made with dog meat, horse meat, sheep eyes, or the flesh of recently killed rattlesnakes? How would you feel if you were told that the crunchy snack you had just eaten was not a party mix but baked locusts and termites? In these cases, culture shock may be acute and quite unsettling. Sometimes it is an experience an individual will never forget.

Berger (1963) observed that sociological discovery is culture shock without geographical displacement. Just as travelers to another land may experience a sense of uneasiness, disorientation, or surprise when faced with people whose customs are different from their own, so can we be shocked by seeing familiar happenings in our own society in a new and disturbing way. This culture shock may propel us in the direction of greater ethnocentrism. No way, we tell ourselves, would we ever do that; we would have to be sick, crazy, or out of our heads. Yet we must make every effort to understand the context of action. We must understand that if we had been raised in a culture where people eat dogs, horses, sheep eyes, rattlesnakes, locusts, or termites, we would, in all likelihood, be eating and enjoying them, too.

Viewing deviance as something that can produce culture shock but that is not intrinsically bad or inherently sick is valuable. Just as we might study any form of

behavior in a foreign land, we can study deviance “at home”—even in our own homes— as part of changing social relationships and alternating cultural or subcultural meaning systems. Because our goal is to understand social context and how and why behavior is defined and evaluated the way it is, we will not spend much time trying to decide if deviance is abnormal or sick, in need of cure or correction. Just as it would be too ethnocentric to conclude that eating dog meat instead of cow meat is abnormal or sick, it is too ethnocentric to conclude that people who inhale certain kinds of substances (e.g., marijuana) are more abnormal or sicker than people who inhale other kinds of substances (e.g., tobacco). Deviance in practically all its forms is a normal feature of human societies, and we must fight the temptation to equate deviance with disease or abnormality. Some deviance is unsettling or shocking to people who are unfamiliar with it, but this does not mean that deviance is essentially or necessarily abnormal or sick everywhere and at all times.

Whose Side Are We On? The concept of sentimentality (Becker, 1963, 1964, 1967) offers a powerful reminder that sides exist in deciding who or what is deviant, and it matters greatly whose side is taken. Becker (1964) defined sentimentality as a disposition on the part of a researcher to leave certain variables in a research problem unexamined or to refuse to consider alternate views of some social happening or distasteful possibilities. Becker borrowed the term from Freidson’s (1961) study of physicians and their patients. Freidson was willing to give credibility and authority to patients’ views of their physicians even when those views were at odds with what physicians thought of themselves. Sides exist even in the seemingly straightforward relationship between physician and patient, and it is possible that a patient’s view is more credible and correct than is the physician’s.

Sometimes, a researcher’s bias is to side with representatives of the official world (e.g., police, judges, or psychiatrists), in which case he or she is adopting conventional sentimentality; at other times, a researcher’s bias is to side with representatives of deviant worlds (e.g., criminals or the mentally ill), in which case he or she is adopting unconventional sentimentality (Becker, 1964, p. 5). Researchers are sentimental when they overidentify with either conventional or unconventional human beings only because they do not want to face the possibility that some cherished sympathy of theirs could be shown to be untrue (Becker, 1967). Alternation between these two different sides will increase the chances of developing an actor-relevant, empirically correct understanding of both rule breakers and rule makers.

Social scientists are required by the demands of their disciplines to understand as fully as possible the social systems they are studying. This means that they will almost always

have to uncover and critically evaluate the myths, ideologies, and verbal smoke screens that humans use to hide, distort, or legitimate whatever they are doing (Berger, 1963). Carried to extremes, romanticizing or glorifying diversity will have the unfortunate outcome of making it more difficult to see and deal with the extreme suffering that deviance can cause in the lives of people who are adversely affected by it (Matza, 1969). We must not be relativistic in the extreme, because it would hamper our ability to understand social deviance (Goode, 2015; Rafter, 1992).

The social construction of values and norms is often accidental and arbitrary, it is true, but it is also (or can be) rational and reasonable (Bloom, 1987). By restricting ourselves to one particular group and time, the acts, attributes, ideas, and identities can be ranked in some rough fashion from good to bad, appropriate to inappropriate, or injurious to benign. To act as if it is unimportant exactly what attitudes, behaviors, and conditions individuals profess, display, or have would be a mistake. Feeding a dead chicken to a crocodile is identifiably different from, and morally superior to, feeding your infant son to the reptile. The issue gets murky, however, when you try to compare customs from different cultures and subcultures or time periods to one another along some universal dimension of goodness and badness. What one group calls a “freedom fighter” or “martyr,” another group calls a “terrorist,” and it does little good to try to figure out who is right, independent from a consideration of who exactly is making the determination and why.

The concept of relativity, which was developed partly to encourage an awareness of, and respect for, human variability and diversity, has returned to haunt us. Relativity has been used to justify the differential treatment of indigenous groups, women, and minorities, as well as to excuse human rights abuses (Moyn, 2010; Nagengast, 1997). Countries that violate the human rights of their populations most often are the ones that justify their actions in the international arena by appealing to sovereignty and cultural relativity (Nagengast & Turner, 1997). Their rulers defend practices such as corporal or capital punishment, the abuse of women (including genital mutilation), sexism and racism, and violence by claiming that their critics are ethnocentric or indifferent to the integrity of local customs.

Self-interest can be masked as the common good, and socially constructed roles can serve as alibis for acts of personal cruelty or cowardice (Berger, 1963). It is quite proper —and not at all inconsistent with sociological relativity—to be critical of sovereign nations whenever they have institutionalized practices that interfere with human rights for reasons unrelated to community survival or the safety and security of their citizens. Customs that are a product of ideological thinking (e.g., male dominance) or stark economic inequalities are the ones that are most in need of a relativist analysis.

Conclusions Understandings of deviance have evolved over time. Early views were based on a belief that intrinsic characteristics separated both deviants and deviance from their opposites. They assumed that deviance is what abnormal people do. Attention ultimately shifted to norms and then to labels and social reactions. Social deviance came to be viewed as a regular feature of life in a pluralistic society that could be caused by social control itself. Deviance emerges from social differentiation, social conflict, and social disagreement; the meanings of deviance are always problematic and contentious.

A great deal of diversity can be found as we move from society to society or group to group. Relativity is a way of examining standards and customs by understanding their context. Deviance, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It exists because some groups decide that other groups ought not to be doing and being what they are, in fact, doing and being. Deviance results from dynamic relationships among many people; it is not an unchanging or immutable condition with intrinsic or inherent qualities. We must remember that all things are transitory and impermanent, including human understandings about proper and improper ways of acting, thinking, feeling, and being.

The author Victor Hugo claimed that nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. This is certainly true for sociological relativity. Sometimes, examples of deviance will be found—glaring examples of inhumanity and incivility—that will shock our sensibilities so much that we will be inclined toward intolerance and a quest for harsher and swifter penalties for deviants. Some individuals or groups will do things that are so harmful or outlandish that they push practically everyone else into a strong defense of the status quo and conventional morality. However, it is relativity that offers social scientists—especially sociologists—the best hope for understanding the social construction of both reality and social deviance.

Sociological relativity is just too powerful an idea and too much a part of what makes the sociological imagination important and valuable for it to be dumped in the intellectual waste bin. A relativistic approach to social deviance will enrich us in countless ways. Sociological relativity’s vision of society (socially constructed), vision of human nature (broad and flexible), scientific methodology (actor-relevant and empathic), and moral stance (unsentimental) all offer great power and potential to anyone who wants to understand and explain social deviance.

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