Changing Deviance Designations

Designations of deviance are framed in processes of meaning generation. Influenced by both professional and wider sociocultural currents, such designations change over time and are juxtaposed with images of conformity. In short, deviance designations are the continuous outcome of social definition, labeling, and political context.

The simplest definitions of deviance have been metaphors, linking behavior and categories of people to commonsense, everyday concerns. Thus, the earliest designations, dominant through the first decades of the 20th century, posited deviance as pathology or sickness (the medical model) or as statistical abnormality and represented largely unsophisticated constructions of the scientific narrative so dominant in popular and intellectual culture at the time.

The institutional development of deviance as a specialty in American sociology evolved from these metaphors of sickness and statistical rarity. Most notably in the history of the Chicago school, these designations gradually gave way to sociological definitions of deviance as normative violation (social disorganization), subcultural conflict (differential association), and interactionist scenarios (labeling).

Social disorganization treated normative violation as both an individual behavioral and a societal characteristic. Conformity was ensured by value and normative consensus, so deviance could only be explained as either normative conflict or aberrant individual behavior. This widely accepted if contradictory nature of normative deviance designations was challenged by Edwin Lemert (1912–1996). His distinction between primary (initial, isolated acts) and secondary (role based, commencing from societal reaction) deviation critiqued the distinction of deviant behavior as pathology simultaneously linked to absolute normative standards. Similarly, Frank Tannenbaum (1893–1969) advanced the concept of dramatization of evil to describe the onset of a self-fulfilling prophecy, turning primary maladaptive juvenile misbehavior into secondary delinquency.

Slowly, then, normative designations moved away from an absolutist normative consensus. Edwin Sutherland's theory of differential association, first stated in 1939, placed social learning in the context of subcultural conflict, and interactionist concerns suggested that norms are only one aspect of a social definition of deviance (including also enforcers, the deviant actor(s) and possible audience, as well as the social reaction itself). In his 1973, expanded edition of Outsiders, Howard S. Becker outlined a more balanced interactional approach, suggesting that the cause of deviance was never the intended focus and that deviance is most fruitfully described as collective action. Finally, David Matza used three metaphors to describe this obvious transformation from normative and causal to interactional designations in Chicago-school theorizing: affinity, affiliation, and signification.

Whether formal or informal, labeling as signification presents Erving Goffman's (1922–1982) concept of stigma as the necessary evaluative component in the meaning production process. A figurative and [Page 90]literal mark or label, stigma describes designations applying to both behavior and categories of people; most often there is a presumptive link between discredited/discreditable behavior and social identity. Signification involves not only the authority to label but resistance and disavowal on the part of those labeled. Official signification occurring within the confines of total institutions (e.g., prisons, mental hospitals) involves a process of self-mortification: The adjudged individual's moral career is systematically recast, especially through degradation ceremonies, to facilitate the control strategies of the institution.

Edwin M. Schur extends the social construction of deviance into a stigma contest. More narrow designations of deviance—especially those framed in legal or medical terms—are politicized in the wider popular media. Images of deviance are commodities, conveying information and entertainment for corporate financial profit and presenting visual, and increasingly virtual, narratives of meaning generation. Deviance labeling becomes part of a more complicated narrative; signification moves beyond criminal and medical contexts to broad sociocultural designations of stigma (those associated with class, race, gender, age, etc.).

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